"Five Minutes of Fire": Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
<v Speaker 2>Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link with the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today. Buddy Holly then her space monkey. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>do tell me about Buddy Holly.
<v Speaker 1>All right. Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holly, born
<v Speaker 1>in Lubbock, Texas. Grew up listening and playing gospel, country
<v Speaker 1>and R and B. His first appearance on local television
<v Speaker 1>happened in nineteen fifty two, and in nineteen fifty five
<v Speaker 1>he opened for Elvis and he decided he would like
<v Speaker 1>to pursue a career in music. Later that year, he
<v Speaker 1>opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, who we talked
<v Speaker 1>about in a previous episode, and at that show he
<v Speaker 1>was spotted by a Nashville scout who got him a
<v Speaker 1>contract with Decca Records. With Decca, he was assigned a producer.
<v Speaker 1>He didn't really get along with that producer, even though
<v Speaker 1>the producer had done several hits for Patsy Klein. He
<v Speaker 1>ended up going with a different producer that would ultimately
<v Speaker 1>become his manager and recorded several songs with him, including
<v Speaker 1>That'll Be the Day, which was his huge breakout success.
<v Speaker 1>They released it as a single by The Crickets, even
<v Speaker 1>though they weren't officially a band at that point. There
<v Speaker 1>was no The Crickets and it was just Buddy Holly
<v Speaker 1>and they had the studio musicians. But he got a
<v Speaker 1>band together, they toured, and by September of fifty seven
<v Speaker 1>it was topping the charts. He put a new band
<v Speaker 1>together in very early nineteen fifty nine with Tommy Alsup
<v Speaker 1>on guitar, Carl Bunch on drums, and Waylay Jennings on
<v Speaker 1>base Whoa And if you've seen any of the couple
<v Speaker 1>of movies that have come out about Buddy Holly, you'll
<v Speaker 1>know that Whylon Jennings was a part of the group
<v Speaker 1>that was there deciding who would have to stay in
<v Speaker 1>the cold and who would get to fly to their
<v Speaker 1>next location. And the story that I've heard is that
<v Speaker 1>Whalon Jennings, when he didn't get rid on the plane,
<v Speaker 1>said well, I hope that plane crashes. Unfortunately, that was
<v Speaker 1>exactly what happened. The bus had frozen up because it
<v Speaker 1>was so cold. They chartered a plane on a last
<v Speaker 1>minute decision, and the pilot they got was a young
<v Speaker 1>Robert Peterson, only twenty one years old. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Allens,
<v Speaker 1>and the Big Bopper, all on the same plane, all
<v Speaker 1>crashed just a few miles away from the airport. The
<v Speaker 1>authorities didn't even know that they had crashed until the
<v Speaker 1>next day, when the owner of the plane actually found
<v Speaker 1>the wreckage a few miles away. Buddy Holly is obviously
<v Speaker 1>an icon and rock and roll and is credited with
<v Speaker 1>putting together the two guitars, one bass, one drums line
<v Speaker 1>up that most rock bands have, and he recorded tons
<v Speaker 1>and tons of songs which were released after his death,
<v Speaker 1>and then in nineteen seventy one, Don McClain released American
<v Speaker 1>Pie all about the Day the Music Died. Okay, Jason
<v Speaker 1>tell Me about Ben Her Okay.
<v Speaker 2>Ben Her is a nineteen fifty nine epic religious film
<v Speaker 2>starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Stephen Boyd and directed.
<v Speaker 1>By William Wyler.
<v Speaker 2>It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won an
<v Speaker 2>unprecedented eleven, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director. Only
<v Speaker 2>Titanic and The Return of the King have matched that.
<v Speaker 2>Pretty impressive. It had the largest budget and largest sets
<v Speaker 2>for any film at that time, which is somewhere around
<v Speaker 2>fifteen million dollars. It was the fastest grossing and highest
<v Speaker 2>grossing film in nineteen fifty nine. It was the second
<v Speaker 2>highest grossing film of all time up to that point,
<v Speaker 2>behind It's the story of Judah ben Hur, a Jewish
<v Speaker 2>man and set around the time of Christ. I know
<v Speaker 2>it because of the famous chariot race scene. I've never
<v Speaker 2>seen this movie.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, it's a good one.
<v Speaker 2>It's classic.
<v Speaker 1>Yep.
<v Speaker 2>All right, dee, what can you tell me about space monkey?
<v Speaker 1>All right? The US, starting in nineteen forty eight, began
<v Speaker 1>a program where they were looking to put monkeys into
<v Speaker 1>space in various rockets, and they did so. Unfortunately, all
<v Speaker 1>of them died during their flights. It wasn't until nineteen
<v Speaker 1>fifty nine that a young reis monkey named Abel appropriately enough,
<v Speaker 1>and Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, became the first monkeys
<v Speaker 1>to successfully travel into space and successfully return to Earth. Now,
<v Speaker 1>you may have an image in your head of space monkey,
<v Speaker 1>but if you do, you're probably not actually thinking of
<v Speaker 1>a monkey, probably thinking of a chimpanzee in a little
<v Speaker 1>silver suit. Am I right? That's true? Yeah. The most
<v Speaker 1>famous quote unquote space monkey was Ham, who was sent
<v Speaker 1>up as an American space satellite for suborbital flight as
<v Speaker 1>a prelude to sending a man into space. Ham was
<v Speaker 1>not really a monkey, but a chimpanzee. The actual year
<v Speaker 1>he went to space was nineteen sixty one. Apparently, was
<v Speaker 1>also a mean little bastard who would often bite the
<v Speaker 1>workers who tried to put him in the space capsule
<v Speaker 1>and rugged poo on the wall. Can't really blame him either,
<v Speaker 1>all right, Okay, guys, that does it for today's episode.
<v Speaker 1>Join us next time for five minutes of fire.