Culture – Page 27 – PowerPop… An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture

Jonestown … 44 years ago

November 18, 1978…A man who was a complete waste of oxygen started one of the most terrible tragedies in history. What I hate is that some of the media described it as a mass suicide which it was not.

When I think of evil human beings…Jim Jones checks off every box. When people think of Jonestown or the Peoples Temple they probably remember the horrible images and disbelief that blanketed the news from Guyana. Interviews with people who happened to be out of Jonestown that afternoon or one of the very few who escaped (36) who started their day there.

The death toll kept rising daily on the news…200, 400, and then 800 or more. The reason was that the bodies were on top of each other and the more they were moved the more they realized some were 3 deep. There seems to be a misconception that all of these people committed suicide which is not true.

918 children and adults died on November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, and most were murdered not suicide. It was either drink the poisoned Flavor-Aid or get shot by the guards or injected right after watching the kids poisoned. According to the Guyanese court which had jurisdiction in the matter, all but three of the deaths in Jonestown were ruled to be the result of murder, not suicide. Source: The New York Times, 12/12/78

The Peoples Temple was a microcosm of society. Some people joined for socialism, religion (ironic since Jones was a non-believer), or just to belong somewhere. There were young naive members, elderly vulnerable members, drug addicts, drunks, lawyers, doctors, rich, middle class, poor, black and white. Like many organizations…it started off good in the 50s but soon he got too much power. They did good things for people but it soon fell off a cliff. It started before the move to Guyana.

They were kept hungry with no sleep with Jones waking the entire compound in the middle of the night. He had everyone’s passport locked up so if they escaped it would be hard to get out anywhere.

I always wanted to know more about what happened. There are some good books on this. The best one I’ve read is Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman (I just provided the link…I get no money if you buy it). Tim was there for two days including the last day when Congressman Leo Ryan was killed…Reiterman was also shot but survived.

The event, of course, inspired the phrase “Don’t Drink The Kool-Aid”…although it was really a cheap knockoff…Flavor-Aid.

The more I read the more I was imagining being held prisoner in that jungle under his totalitarian rule…what a helpless feeling…and I was wanting the impossible to happen…a different ending. It’s so puzzling that today with all the info we have there are still cult leaders out there playing by the Jim Jones playbook.

If Jones would have allowed the people to come and go they could have made a good go of it in Guyana. The people developed a town that had a post office, daycare, a cafeteria, and everyone had a job. When it started Jones wasn’t down there all of the time and people were working hard and for the most part happy. When he settled in…that was over. He took control and it all went to hell.

Jones didn’t drink the flavor aid… he had one of his helpers shoot him…something I wish would have happened a day earlier.

A good abbreviated version of Jonestown and Jim Jones can be found here on the History Channel website. https://www.history.com/topics/jonestown

A documentary of Jonestown and Peoples Temple.

YOU WILL HAVE TO CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW BECAUSE IT’S AGE-RESTRICTED.

Chuck Berry – Nadine

Any Chuck Berry song is a good song. This one is from the sixties and you can tell with the smoother production.

Berry was in jail between October 1961 and October 1963 for bringing a 14-year-old Apache waitress across a state line. During his time in jail he wrote some future hits. You Never Can Tell, Promised Land, No Particular Place To Go, and this song. Nadine was released in February of 1964, the month the Beatles hit America. The Rolling Stones would follow soon after. Both bands would cover Berry’s songs and boost his catalog.

In the UK, his popularity was helped by two compilation albums released in 1962 and 1963 that peaked in the top 10 there to keep his music alive when Berry couldn’t record or tour.

Marshall Chess, who was the son of Chess founder Leonard Chess was Chuck’s road manager when he got out of jail. Marshall said that Berry looked rough when he got out and Leonard gave Marshall $100 and told him to buy Chuck some clothes. When they got back from that, Berry recorded Nadine.

The lyrics to this song and most of Chuck’s songs flow so easily. If you want to know what American teenage culture was like in the 50s and early sixties…listen to Chuck Berry.

I remember Bruce Springsteen commenting about Chuck Berry. He said Chuck influenced him because Bruce started to write songs like he was really talking to people and the words flowed naturally like Chuck’s did. He mentioned the lyric:

I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin’ toward a coffee-colored Cadillac

Springsteen had said he never had seen a coffee-colored Cadillac but he knows what one looks like now because of Chuck’s description. The song peaked at #23 on the Billboard 100, #23 in the R&B Charts, and #23 in Canada in 1964.

Nadine

I got on a city bus and found a vacant seat,
I thought I saw my future bride walking up the street,
I shouted to the driver hey conductor, you must slow down
I think I see her please let me off this bus

Nadine, honey is that you?
Oh, Nadine
Honey, is that you?
Seems like every time I see you
Darling you got something else to do

I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin’ toward a coffee colored Cadillac
I was pushin’ through the crowd to get to where she’s at
And I was campaign shouting like a southern diplomat

Downtown searching for her, looking all around
Saw her getting in a yellow cab heading up town
I caught a loaded taxi, paid up everybody’s tab
With a twenty dollar bill, told him ‘catch that yellow cab

She move around like a wave of summer breeze,
Go, driver, go, go, catch her balmy breeze
Moving through the traffic like a mounted cavalier
Leaning out the taxi window trying to make her hear

Rolling Stones – Midnight Rambler

Sorry if you have seen this already today but it vanished in the reader so I’m republishing it. it…thank you.

Today we look at a song that is best known by the live version. Midnight Rambler is up there with Sympathy For The Devil for setting an eerie atmosphere. I’ve always liked this one…partly because it’s not worn out like many other Stones songs of this era.

The Boston Strangler was the likely inspiration for this song. As for the song, while the lyrics do not directly relate to the case, Jagger implies it when he sings, “Well you heard about the Boston…” before an instrumental stab cuts him off.

n 1965, Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), who was serving time in a mental institution on rape charges, confessed to the murders and was later sentenced to life in prison. There was no clear physical evidence that DeSalvo committed the crimes, however, and his confession has been questioned, with some forensic experts stating that there may have been multiple killers. DeSalvo died in prison in 1973; new evidence has come up in the case from time to time.

This song was on their great Let It Bleed album released in 1969. But the version that is more known is the version on what I think is their best live album… Get Your Ya Ya’s Out…it was released in 1970. They recorded the version in Madison Square Gardens on their 1969 tour. The sound they had with Mick Taylor was fantastic. His guitar tone was raw and fat and it is instantly recognizable. When he joined the Stones onstage recently…the Stones had that great sound again. Since Mick Taylor left they sound really thin live…to me.

Brian Jones is credited with percussion on the studio version. Even though he died before this album was released, a few of the songs were recorded during the Beggar’s Banquet sessions in 1968.

Keith Richards: “When we did Midnight Rambler, nobody went in there with the idea of doing a blues opera, basically. Or a blues in four parts. That’s just the way it turned out. I think that’s the strength of the Stones or any good band. You can give them a song half raw and they’ll cook it.”

Mick Jagger: “That’s a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know. We wrote everything there – the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafés, and there’s Keith with the guitar.”

Studio Album Version

Midnight Rambler

Did you hear about the midnight rambler
Everybody got to go
Did you hear about the midnight rambler
The one that shut the kitchen door
He don’t give a hoot of warning
Wrapped up in a black cat cloak
He don’t go in the light of the morning
He split the time the cock’rel crows

Talkin’ about the midnight gambler
The one you never seen before
Talkin’ about the midnight gambler
Did you see him jump the garden wall
Sighin’ down the wind so sadly
Listen and you’ll hear him moan
Talkin’ about the midnight gambler
Everybody got to go

Did you hear about the midnight rambler
Well, honey, it’s no rock ‘n’ roll show
Well, I’m talkin’ about the midnight gambler
Yeah, everybody got to go

Well did ya hear about the midnight gambler?
Well honey its no rock-in’ roll show
Well I’m talking about the midnight gambler
The one you never seen before

Oh don’t do that, oh don’t do that, oh don’t do that
Don’t you do that, don’t you do that (repeat)
Oh don’t do that, oh don’t do that

Well you heard about the Boston…
It’s not one of those
Well, talkin’ ’bout the midnight… sh…
The one that closed the bedroom door
I’m called the hit-and-run raper in anger
The knife-sharpened tippie-toe…
Or just the shoot ’em dead, brainbell jangler
You know, the one you never seen before

So if you ever meet the midnight rambler
Coming down your marble hall
Well he’s pouncing like proud black panther
Well, you can say I, I told you so
Well, don’t you listen for the midnight rambler
Play it easy, as you go
I’m gonna smash down all your plate glass windows
Put a fist, put a fist through your steel-plated door

Did you hear about the midnight rambler
He’ll leave his footprints up and down your hall
And did you hear about the midnight gambler
And did you see me make my midnight call

And if you ever catch the midnight rambler
I’ll steal your mistress from under your nose
I’ll go easy with your cold fanged anger
I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby
And it hurts!

Hank Williams – Jambalaya (On the Bayou)

Hank Williams only lived to be 29 years old. It’s hard to believe because he wrote so many classic songs during his short recording career. “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” was one of his nicknames.

He had not been in a studio for 6 months but this song brought him back. He recorded it on June 13, 1952, in Nashville. There was speculation that Hank Williams co-wrote the song with a gentleman named Moon Mullican. Williams had the sole credit but it has been said that Williams’s publishing agent Fred Rose stepped in and wanted William’s publishing company to get the credit and the money. It has been said that Rose possibly paid Mullican so he wouldn’t have to split the publishing with Moon’s label King Records. Williams got the inspiration for the song while listening to Cajuns talk on a bus trip.

The melody is based on the Cajun song “Grand Texas.” The song peaked #1 on the Country Charts for fourteen, non-consecutive weeks. The song also peaked at #20 on the US Billboard Most Played By Jukeboxes. Hank Williams was born with spina bifida occulta, a disorder of the spinal column and he killed the pain with narcotics and alcohol. If you look at pictures of Williams he looks much older than in his twenties, especially in the last year of his 29 on earth.

Before his death, he had been known to take morphine and drink heavily. On New Year’s Day 1953, he took his seat in the back of his 1952 powder blue Cadillac. As his driver, college student Charles Carr, headed toward a New Years show in Canton, Ohio, Williams’ health took a turn for the worse. Finally, after not hearing from the singer for two solid hours, the driver pulled the car over in Oak Hill, West Virginia, at 5:30 in the morning. Williams was pronounced dead a short while later.

Hank Williams was a genius when it came to songwriting. He influenced so many genres of music from Johnny Cash, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and many more. He left a huge mark on the world in such a short time.

Williams was among the first class of artists inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961, and in 2010, the Pulitzer Board awarded him a special citation for songwriting.

Charles Carr, the teenager who was driving Williams to his concert:

“Hank’s song ‘Jambalaya’ was just out on the radio and he asked me what I thought of it, I told him I didn’t care for it, that it didn’t make a bit of sense to me. Hank laughed and said, ‘You son of a bitch, you just understand the French like I do.

“We were just a couple of young guys on a car trip having fun.”

My favorite version of this song was by John Fogerty.

Jambalaya (On the Bayou)

Goodbye Joe me gotta go me oh my oh
Me gotta go pole the pirogue down the bayou
My Yvonne the sweetest one me oh my oh
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
Cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio
Pick guitar fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou

Thibodaux Fontaineaux the place is buzzin’
Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozen
Dress in style and go hog wild me oh my oh
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou
Settle down far from town get me a pirogue
And I’ll catch all the fish in the bayou

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
Cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio
Pick guitar fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou

Later on, swap my mon, get me a pirogue
And I’ll catch all the fish on the bayou
Swap my mon, to buy Yvonne what she need-oh
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
Cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio
Pick guitar fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou

Little Richard – Ready Teddy

Ready, set, go man go, I got a girl that I love so.

What else do we need to have a great rock and roll song? Not exactly Shakespeare but Shakespeare couldn’t write Gonna kick off my shoes, roll up my faded jeans, Grab my rock ‘n’ roll baby, pour on the steam. The song was written by John Marascalco and Robert Blackwell with probable help from Little Richard. Most Little Richard songs are like a shot of adrenaline…this one is no different.

This was originally a B-side to Rip It Up. Little Richard claimed to have helped write this song but he said he didn’t have the business sense at that time to demand credit. He said: “They brought me the words and I made up the melody, and at the time I didn’t have sense enough to claim so much money, because I really made them hits. I didn’t get the money, but I still have the freedom.”

The song peaked at #44 on the Billboard 100 and #8 on the R&B charts.

The song is about a girl who wants sex… a ready teddy. Like most of Little Richard’s songs, this contains a lot of innuendoes but most people were too busy listening to the music to notice or didn’t get the reference. If sex had a voice…it would be Little Richard.

This song was covered by a lot of artists including Buddy Holly, The Tornados, Elvis Presley, Tony Sheridan, and others. Elvis did this song on one of his Ed Sullivan appearances.

My dad told me about Little Richard before I ever heard him. He said he had the biggest voice he ever heard. He talked about a song called Long Tall Sally. I first heard it…it blew me away. Such a raw emotional power in that voice. He would take us to the edge of the cliff and then at the last minute pull us back.

His voice was one of a kind…