Good Old Boys

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. In the fall of nineteen seventy four, the musician Randy Newman released an album called Good Old Boys. The most beautiful song on the record is the third song on the first side, Wait Can I Prevail on? You did disteal a little bit of Marie Sure So. I love that song so much.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: We thank you very much. Look like a princess night with your hair part of that.

00:01:04
Speaker 3: I will know.

00:01:08
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Well. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, one of the most remarkable albums of its era. I listened to it for the first time years ago, but then I happened to listen to it again very recently and realized that Good Old Boys is not an album you can hear just once and hope to do it justice, because it's not just remarkable, it's unsettling. I don't think an album like this could be made today, and by the end of this episode, I suspect you'll agree with me. I decided to go to California, sit down with Randy Newman, and create a listener's guide to one of the most perplexing works of music that I have ever encountered.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: Drug Well, I've got to be a little bit.

00:02:06
Speaker 4: What you mean me?

00:02:10
Speaker 5: He lo you the first time, so you.

00:02:17
Speaker 2: Always love you.

00:02:23
Speaker 1: Newman is in his seventies, still writing music, Tall and slightly intimidating. He's Hollywood Royalty. His uncle, Alfred, was a composer who was nominated for an Academy Award forty four times, won nine times. Newman has had a second career writing for the movies as well, like You've Got a Friend in Me for Toy Story. Newman is unusual among songwriters because he writes in character, and the narrator of Good Old Boys is a creation of Newman's. He's called Johnny Cutler, a steel worker from Birmingham, Alabama, thirty years old. The song Marie is about Johnny Cutler coming home late after a night out with the boys and gazing love struck at his sleeping wife.

00:03:06
Speaker 2: I like the idea very much about being inarticulate without that's not the right word, in articulate, but being unable to have the words unless you drink something. You know, I can't say this to you and maybe to lack the ability to say those kind of words.

00:03:28
Speaker 1: But he's the fact that he has been drinking and he and you realize he can only say what he's saying because he's and because she's asleep. Yeah right, yeah, but that even that makes me humanizes him and even more I sort of feel so love her.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: I mean, it would seem that that isn't drink, but it might be. Is this a good guy? And my answer to that is I don't know. I mean, I'm suspicious of.

00:04:02
Speaker 3: This.

00:04:02
Speaker 2: I'm drunk right now, baby, but maybe when I'm awake, I might knock this shit out of you.

00:04:06
Speaker 1: Sometimes, Randy Newman wrote, Marie, he created Johnny Cutler. He dreamt up a beautiful love song for him, but he doesn't know if he understands him or even if he likes him. As if Johnny Cutler came from his imagination but is now somehow independent of it, it makes you wonder who's in charge of this song.

00:04:28
Speaker 4: Sometimes I'm crazy, but I guess you know, in a week it all Liz.

00:04:43
Speaker 5: And a hurt so and I never listen to the world you say when you calmed me in trouble doll, and I just try awake, but I love you, and I love you the first time my sign.

00:05:15
Speaker 4: And oh we love.

00:05:23
Speaker 1: The story behind Good Old Boys begins with a man named Lester Maddox. Maddox was governor of Georgia from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy one. Now he's mostly forgotten, but in his day he was notorious.

00:05:37
Speaker 6: I thank his full to act for real. I don't look at myself as one of the very smart people, so I try to act like Lester Maddox like inside I feel and think and believe.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Maddox grew up in the Depression in Atlanta. His father was an alcoholic.

00:05:54
Speaker 6: My dad never made hardly any money. We times we didn't even have a bathroom in the house. We had four rooms in a path rather than four rooms in a bathroom. We didn't have electricity.

00:06:05
Speaker 1: Maddox dropped out of high school, got a job as a steel worker to help his five younger siblings, married his childhood sweetheart Virginia, and after the war he started a diner near Georgia Tech. The house specialty was skillip fried chicken. He called his place the Pickrick.

00:06:23
Speaker 6: So I wanted to name no one else had. Now I came on the name upon the name Pickwick, and I found out it really wick doesn't meaning thing except what you know it to be wick. That's what Webster will even tell you that Wick and someone had already used the name Pickwick in England, so I couldn't use that. So it was about three o'clock one morning. I'd been working on it for weeks.

00:06:44
Speaker 1: Maddox was one of those people who you can't do a cartoon version of because he already looks like a cartoon version of himself. He's skinny, with an oversized head, bald dome, black plastic glasses, always in a black suit, moves with a kind of loose, slimmed floppiness, like a clown. There are so many oral history interviews with Lester Maddox floating around the State of Georgia that he must have spent as many hours reminiscing about his time as governor as he actually spent serving as governor. The man liked to talk.

00:07:19
Speaker 6: See the pick means to fastidiously, to pick out, to choose a select, and rick means to pile up to heap or damas. So I named my restaurant Pickrick and said, if you'd picnic at the Pickrick and pick it out. We would rick it up, and we would we did, and that's why it was named Pickrick. I've never heard anything else being named Pickrick.

00:07:38
Speaker 1: Maddix advertised the Pickrick in the Saturday edition of the Atlanta Journal in a column with the title Pickrick says. Lots of one liners in Matoxisms, like the nineteen fifties version of tweets well.

00:07:50
Speaker 6: I talked about Christmas, I talked about marriage. I talked about the monkey house at Grant Park. I talked about whether. I talked about fishing in my edge.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: But soon his column, Pickrick says becomes more and more political because this is Atlanta in the mid nineteen fifties, one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement, and Pickcrick is a ten minute drive from Auburn Avenue, where Martin Luther King, and Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan and everyone else are starting to stir things up and less Dramattox is not at all happy with that. He's a segregationist. And the more strident Maddox gets in his weekly ads, the more popular Pickwrick says becomes. People start buying the Atlanta Journal on Saturday just to read what Maddox is up to. Maddox decides to run for mayor of Atlanta. He is no organization, no money. He drives himself around and he loses. But the race is closer than you'd think, so he runs again and loses, and runs a third time and loses. But then the wave of desegregation protests hits Atlanta in the early nineteen sixties. The public schools are integrated first, then the lunch counters than the restaurants, and since the Pickcrick restaurant does not admit black people, the civil rights protesters come knocking.

00:09:11
Speaker 6: Well, the first time, I was about four wives and tree blacks came in in Virginia and I were about to eat our luncheon Saturday afternoon. They told me what they're gonna do, and I told them, You're not gonna do any such things.

00:09:25
Speaker 1: What they were gonna do was eat a pickrick with the television cameras as witness.

00:09:30
Speaker 6: I said, you never been here before. You just wanna fuss and fight. So I grabbed two of them. I think on them was John Lewis or Brown or somebody, and I just had him out the door. When they happen to remember they were supposed to lay down on the floor. If you hadn't thought about that, I'd had them both out and they got on the floor because I couldn't drag them. So I called my black employees. I hat the kitchen and I said, these people trying to destroy our business. They don't want to eat with us. They just want to create a problem. They got the television and radio and everyone with them, and I said, I'm going to give you ten dollars for each one of them threw out. In the next thirty second.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: Them Maddox's employees through them out, but the protesters came back. This time Maddox met them at the door, with the television cameras rolling and a crowd starting to gather.

00:10:24
Speaker 6: India, now you want.

00:10:29
Speaker 1: There's Maddox in front of the pickrick with his black suit and bald head, protesters shouting cameras all around. He's in heaven.

00:10:37
Speaker 6: I'll use a channels, I'll use guns, I'll use pain, I'll use my fist, I'll use my customers, I'll use my employees, I'll use anything. It's mind as bold. This property belongs to me, my wife and my children.

00:10:51
Speaker 7: It doesn't belong to anybody.

00:10:52
Speaker 2: Else, I'll throw out a white one or black one.

00:10:54
Speaker 6: Or a red headed one, or ball when it doesn't make any difference.

00:10:58
Speaker 1: Maddox gets hauled into court because the Civil Rights Act has been passed and what he's doing is illegal. He's given a choice integrate or shut his doors, and he decides to shut to Pickwrick, one of the most popular and successful restaurants in Atlanta, the business that he has spent his lifetime building that made him famous, and to every Southern er angry at the way the world is turning, he becomes a hero. A friend says to him, you know, maybe you should run for governor, and Maddox says, okay. And in nineteen sixty six, he wins. A white nationalist in the hospitality business who came to public attention writing pithy, politically charged statements in a widely read media forum, runs against the political establishment and pulls off an upset victory. And by the way, it's a very close race. Maddox doesn't actually get as many votes as his opponent, but he wins when the election is thrown to the legislature. Oh and a huge part of Maddox's rhetoric is how the media can't be trusted. He's constantly accusing newspapers of lying about him. In fact, in the corner of his official governor's portrait, there's a little table with a dead fish on it, wrapped in a copy of the Atlanta Journal. A white nationalist in the hospitality business who wrote pithy statements on a media platform, runs against the political establishment, accuses the news media of running fake news about him, doesn't get as many votes as his opponent, and nonetheless stakes over the highest executive office. I mean, when has that ever happen? Maddox serves four years, has to step down because of term limits. Jimmy Carter takes over as governor of Georgia, as the state, he might say, returns to its senses, and Maddox consoles himself with running for and winning the job of lieutenant governor. He is well on his way to obscurity. And then he gets a call from New York from the Dick Cavot Show, the great late night talk show of the nineteen seventies. They want him as a guest. That's when we return in America.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: You get foody.

00:13:19
Speaker 4: Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: The first Randy Newman song I ever heard was sail Away.

00:13:28
Speaker 8: You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.

00:13:35
Speaker 2: It's great to be an American.

00:13:38
Speaker 1: Sail Away is the title track of the album Randy Newman made right before he wrote Good Old Boys. I was a kid when I first heard it, and I had the same experience I would later have with Newman's other songs. I didn't get it at first. I'm not sure I even paid attention to the words. I just loved how grand it was.

00:13:59
Speaker 8: Ain't no lie side of me, no mama snake, just a sweet wall amelon the bug wheat.

00:14:14
Speaker 9: Everybody is happy as make it be.

00:14:21
Speaker 2: Climb a ball, little wog.

00:14:23
Speaker 5: Stay the way within.

00:14:26
Speaker 1: But then I got a little older, and as I heard sail Away, I said, wait a minute. Everybody is as happy as a man can be. Climb aboard little wog, sail away with me. Wog really offensive British colonial slang for someone who's not white. It's the N word. Basically, I noticed some interesting story at behind sail Away.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: The song, Oh it was a A guy was going to make a movie and he was going to give ten minutes to five or six pop people, Van Morrison, I remember, and Hendrickson to do ten minute thing, and I came up with this thing. It had a sort of a sea shanny before it, you know, very irish kind of yo hoo, you know there and then this guy be standing in a clearing in the jungle and singing this song, and that was what I was going to do with my ten minutes.

00:15:25
Speaker 1: Randy Newman wrote a song about an American slave trader standing somewhere in West Africa giving his sales pitch to potential recruits come to America. You're gonna love this little cotton plantation that I've lined up for you.

00:15:42
Speaker 2: Oh no, lion, no moms sleep. It's a sweet watermelon and a book. So those laugh.

00:15:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, the character is so kind of outrageous. Yeah, but we're not laughing along with him. We're horrified by him.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: I mean it's yeah, but people laugh at that in a nervous way, at the watermelon joke, and sit around to think about Jesus drink wine all day.

00:16:11
Speaker 1: Now, there's a way to do that song so that it's not so shocking. In like the cover version done later the same year by Bobby Darren who was one of the biggest pop stars of the nineteen sixties, won't have the wrong through the jungle.

00:16:28
Speaker 2: Bobby Darren is happy, Yeah, come to America, little one, when we get rid of the wog. Oh my god.

00:16:36
Speaker 1: But no, that's that's like blasphemy. I'm a born Little one sail.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: Away with me.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: In Bobby Darren's version, the line climb a board, little Wog sail away with me, which is crucial in establishing how vile the narrator is, becomes climber board, little one sail away with me. I'm sorry, I can't get I can't get pass it so quickly. That's unbelievable that.

00:17:03
Speaker 2: He did a happy version.

00:17:04
Speaker 1: Yes, it's this, It isn't.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there it is.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: The thing is Newman liked Bobby Darren. He knew him, and he didn't know what to think. I mean, there is a world of difference between wog and one. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Bobby Darren substitutes the words mamba snake with mama snake eight no lions and tigers and no nurturing mama snake.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: You know, he was all, do I like to do that? And it's like come to America, you know, become.

00:17:39
Speaker 1: But this is this, this song is like this.

00:17:42
Speaker 2: Is not a dumb guy either.

00:17:43
Speaker 1: This is this song is like a It is a wallop. It is emotional wallop. He searing song about this the darkest moment in America's past.

00:17:53
Speaker 2: It's a jaw dress like springtime for Hitler, a little one, little wall like come away with me. You know, he just was so right, his Shulvia's instincts couldn't restrain himself.

00:18:09
Speaker 1: How did you feel when you first heard that version?

00:18:12
Speaker 2: I felt, you know, oh, my Jesus Christ. And that was it.

00:18:17
Speaker 1: The original intention of sail Away was to make the listener uncomfortable. Newman takes a familiar figure, a salesman, an entrepreneur, a patriot, and gives him a rollicking sea shanty. But then he forces you to acknowledge that underneath all that there looks a monster. Bobby Darren chickened out. He couldn't do it. He didn't want us to be uncomfortable, and so Wog became one and sail Away became a glorified nursery rhyme. I don't mean to single Bobby Darren out, because I think that most of us take the easy path in these situations too. But the particular genius of Randy Newman is that he won't do that. He can't.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: Dick have a troll.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: So it's nineteen seventy. Lester Maddox gets a call from Dick Caviot, come on our show. He flies to New York and who tunes in that night Randy Newman, Ladies and gentlemen, Dick Cabot. Dick Caviott is a year into his legendary late night show on ABC, up against Johnny Carson's Tonight show. Cavit show was like a highlight reel of the nineteen seventies. He did the greatest ever interview with Jimmy Hendrix. Groucho Marx was a regular, so was Muhammad Ali. He once had Salvador Dally on the same show as a legendary pitching great Satchel Page. The famous debate between Gorvadal and Norman Mailer that was on Dick Caviot. Listen, we have a.

00:19:55
Speaker 7: Very good show tonight, and I want to move right into it. Excellent show. I think I don't know, how do I know? I haven't seen it. It might be a big dead brow Why do people say that at the beginning of his show.

00:20:06
Speaker 1: Cavot looks like Paul Newman's baby brother, no more than five or six, impish, big polka dotted tie. His first guest is a woman named Alice Gray, an entomologist from the American Museum of Natural History, cat eye, glasses, hair, and a bun who brings a box full of cockroaches to the set.

00:20:25
Speaker 7: What can we do about then? What can we learn about them? Are they our friends?

00:20:29
Speaker 6: No, they're not exactly our friends, but there are certainly our companions.

00:20:34
Speaker 7: And all our.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: All our doings, and I'm rather fond of them.

00:20:39
Speaker 6: They have a distinguished linage.

00:20:41
Speaker 8: How many of us could meet our ancestors of three hundred million years ago and recognize them the cockroaches?

00:20:47
Speaker 7: Can they go back that far?

00:20:48
Speaker 1: They go back that far.

00:20:49
Speaker 7: It's older than the dinosaurs.

00:20:51
Speaker 6: Twice as old as the dinosaurs. All the way back to the coald Age, they were already recognizably cockroaches.

00:20:57
Speaker 7: That's it's always the people who don't like We're the last to leave, isn't it.

00:21:03
Speaker 6: They'll be here long after we have quitted this earth.

00:21:06
Speaker 1: I'm sure Cavit does a good ten minutes. I'm cockroaches are these?

00:21:10
Speaker 7: Your cockroaches are some of ours?

00:21:13
Speaker 1: The cockroach lady finally leaves the stage.

00:21:16
Speaker 7: And then my next guest tonight is Governor Lester Maddox.

00:21:23
Speaker 1: How comes Maddox, the gleaming bald head, the black suit Governorm.

00:21:27
Speaker 7: Maddics, I still call you, Governor, dont.

00:21:30
Speaker 6: Call me mostly anything you won't do everybody else?

00:21:32
Speaker 2: Does?

00:21:34
Speaker 7: Have you ever followed bugs before?

00:21:37
Speaker 6: Yes, a few moments ago on your problem.

00:21:39
Speaker 7: That's the only time.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: That's the only time. God, I love Dick Cavit. They shake hands, they take their seats rust colored swivel loungers atop a gray shag carpet. Kavit shows the audience a photograph of Maddox holding his axe handle outside the Pickrick restaurant, and Maddox then corrects him and says, no, it's not an axe handle, it's a pickhandle, and goes off on one of his long, endless digressions about the meaning of the.

00:22:06
Speaker 6: Pickrick hard work. And we had in the restaurant some of these pick candles, two cakes of them, by a big old fireplace where we burned hickory wood, And there were six of them in each of the cakes. And they were dark red because that was the look something similar to a chicken leg or pit. Candle does not like the axe handle. It's the news me he talks about.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: And Kaviot, who must be wondering what on earth, simply.

00:22:31
Speaker 7: Says, well, I've certainly learned a lot.

00:22:36
Speaker 1: Kaviot brings on his next guest, the football player Jim Brown, then one of the most famous professional black athletes in the country. Brown settles down next to Maddox, who is literally half his size, and gives him a polite smile, and Kavit says to the two of them, do you feel separate but equal? I realized that's nineteen sixties civil rights humor, but I still think it's hilarious. Maddox turns to Brown and says, I thought you was the singer he thought Jim Brown was James Brown. He then volunteers his personal definition of what being a segregationist really means.

00:23:16
Speaker 6: A segregation is a person that loves his race enough or all the racers enough, has enough for racial pride and integrity to want to preserve them. And I think a racist is one that doesn't care enough for his race or another race to where they would don't care whether they are malcolmated or destroyed.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: Or not amalgamated. Good lord, Now think about this for a moment. Maddox is no longer governor Georgia has come to its sinces an elected nice, safe, modern, non racist Jimmy Carter. Maddox is a footnote. So what point is there in having him on a mainstream talk show like Dick Cavot. The magazine where I work, The New Yorker, had a case like this recently. Donald Trump's Bengali Steve Bannon was invited to speak at the magazine's annual literary festival, and everyone flipped out. The New Yorkers writers took to Twitter. A bunch of high profile celebrity in teas to the festival dropped out. And the argument that was made about Bennon is an argument that could as easily have been applied to Maddox years ago. What's the point of giving someone like that a platform? I mean, what could possibly be learned from listening to them talk? And sure enough, what happens over the course of the next hour of the Dick Cavit Show exactly what you would think.

00:24:34
Speaker 10: I think, what we're really talking about in this country's economic development of black people.

00:24:38
Speaker 1: At one point, Jim Brown says something thoughtful and reasonable that he thinks the priority for black people ought to be economic development, and Maddox jumps on.

00:24:48
Speaker 6: Him economic development.

00:24:49
Speaker 3: All people, Well, we're talking about I'll tell you what I'll tell you everybody? Can I Can I give you an answer?

00:25:03
Speaker 2: Can I give you an answer?

00:25:04
Speaker 6: Do you mind? I'll go ahead, be ready, I'll give you fat.

00:25:09
Speaker 10: What I'm really saying is that there are some people that have suffered in this country, poor people generally. But let's say that we have various ethnic groups in this country that have attained a certain kind of equality. Black people are more or less along with the Indians on the last wrong of the ladder. Can I finish together? Can I finish? I?

00:25:29
Speaker 1: Do you mind?

00:25:30
Speaker 2: Now?

00:25:30
Speaker 10: What I'm really saying is that I feel that the way to bring about equality of black people in the system is three.

00:25:36
Speaker 1: Quality white people.

00:25:37
Speaker 6: Now I'm gonna interrupt.

00:25:38
Speaker 1: You have time and black people.

00:25:41
Speaker 3: If you interrupt me, I can't talk to you.

00:25:43
Speaker 1: Then Maddox starts going on and on about all the things he's done for black people in the State of Georgia, and Jim Brown turns to him with genuine curiosity and asks if he's had any blowback from white bigots the.

00:25:57
Speaker 3: Bigots, have any problems with that from the white biggots because you did so.

00:26:01
Speaker 10: Much for the black man.

00:26:03
Speaker 1: Which is kind of a great question, because if Maddox has in fact been this great friend of black people, then you'd think he would have angered all the hard core segregationists and everyone else who was opposed to the civil rights movement. Right.

00:26:17
Speaker 7: Mister Brown asked your Governor Maddix, if you'd had any trouble from your white admirers for the fact that you have said no, he said, biggots, Well, what did you say it?

00:26:26
Speaker 6: Like he's said.

00:26:28
Speaker 9: You have?

00:26:29
Speaker 6: Why didn't you say and I say that while I'm talking about Dick, take words, push them around, and you mislead the people in your audience, and all you ought to start being honest, all of you with your words and what you're saying to people. You said admirers, and he said, biggats a lot of difference his name.

00:26:43
Speaker 1: The last half of the show is just Maddox getting more and more agitated, Dick Cavot trying to calm him down, and Jim Brown looking over at Maddox like he's a misbehaving child. Maddox asks Kavot to apologize. Kavot refuses. The audience makes astonished noises. Maddox stands up and starts to walk off the stage. Kavot says, come on, sit down. Maddix says, I'll sit down when you apologize.

00:27:08
Speaker 7: So it says, if I called any of your admirers bigots who were not biggots, I apologize.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: This is insane. What was Dick Cavot thinking inviting this guy in a show?

00:27:21
Speaker 6: Why don't you, Georgia have those friends of mine for calling him biggots? I think I may lay down, Dick.

00:27:30
Speaker 7: I wait a minute, Please don't laise, I'd like that with Georgia.

00:27:37
Speaker 6: And he also apology to the only biggest.

00:27:39
Speaker 7: So I'm wait, oh wait, wait wait.

00:27:41
Speaker 1: Maddox gives Cabot an ultimatum one minute to take it back or he'll walk out for good, at which point Jim Brown pipes up, Wait, what about me? How much time do I have? It's a circus.

00:27:53
Speaker 7: I would say that I phrased the question in a way that was not exactly accurate, in the sense that he did say biggots have any white bigots been upset because you have done certain things about your.

00:28:04
Speaker 6: Boy back and said my admirs. You haven't apologized yet, and you got fifteen six.

00:28:11
Speaker 7: All right, now, let me use those fifteen seconds. I apologize for suggesting that a bigot would be the way of characterizing all of your admirers. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, there's more time.

00:28:26
Speaker 1: And less dramatic storms off the set. Oh oh, and I haven't even mentioned that the writer Truman Capodi then shows up. He's then at the height of his celebrity, tiny, fastidious, wearing purple tinted round sunglasses.

00:28:42
Speaker 9: You know.

00:28:43
Speaker 11: Curiously enough, I had a cousin who lived in Atlanta that I went to visit and who took me to this restaurant that he ran. It was called Picareb or something like that, you know, well mar and he was always at the door with guns, you know, to keep any any food of negroes out of the restaurant. But I went there with this cousin because he was near the campus, the college campus. And he wasn't bad, but it wasn't finger lick him good.

00:29:21
Speaker 1: The whole thing is so Banana's the Cavit feels the need to apologize to his audience.

00:29:26
Speaker 7: I'm sorry the governor has left. I went outside just during the break and he's out there with his hat and coat on, and asked him if he would please come back and use the last minutes to say whatever he I would like to say, because he felt that I guess that he was insulted. I did not mean to insult him at that moment. I have to say this, and I hope I don't feel it doesn't come off sounding I don't know what, but I found him in spite of the fact that I would probably despise his feelings about segregation if I were actually clear and what they are a likable man. Would anyone go along with this?

00:30:04
Speaker 2: Would you agree?

00:30:05
Speaker 1: The audience is not having it?

00:30:07
Speaker 7: Why is it what? I'm not backing down. Shut up, I'll tell you what. I'm backing down.

00:30:13
Speaker 2: We'll be back after this.

00:30:17
Speaker 1: It was a farce. What was the point except to allow a segregationist to play the victim. What good is there in getting someone like that a platform? Except Randy Newman was watching whose imagination has a mind of its own? So were you a regular Dick Cavot watcher in those years?

00:30:39
Speaker 2: Not that I recall I was, but I would watch and if I was up, i'd watch it. Yeah, And I think I was usually up in those days.

00:30:48
Speaker 1: And stereotypically, you are the Dick Caviot audience, right.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: I am. Yeah. It seemed like half an hour, you know where they were just yelling and yelling and yelling.

00:30:59
Speaker 1: It was.

00:30:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was so alien that I felt sorry for him.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: He didn't dismiss that whole exchange or shrug or change the channel. He reacted to it. He imagines what a supporter of Lester Maddocks would think watching Lesterra Mattocks storm off the stage.

00:31:17
Speaker 6: Dick, I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you one minute, so cle Jacksons be for you. Call big, I said, George, I'm gonna Aavey show.

00:31:23
Speaker 1: Now you do whatever you won't do back. He gives that imaginary supporter a name, Johnny Cutler, a home Birmingham, Alabama, a job steel worker. He imagines Johnny Cutler coming home one night drunk, gazing at his sleeping wife, and then he imagines him turning on the television.

00:31:42
Speaker 4: Last night I saw less Domatics on the TV show with some smart ass New York jew and the jew laugh less dematics, and the autist laughed less dematics too.

00:32:02
Speaker 5: Will it may.

00:32:04
Speaker 2: So smart at New York too. That's good last, that's the man. That's pretty good. Click a clicker, clicker.

00:32:15
Speaker 1: That became the first song on Good Old Boys. It's called Rednecks. When I first heard that, I didn't know listra Max was. I didn't even know that it was. But that idea of the Southerner going to New York and sitting down.

00:32:27
Speaker 2: Thinking as Jewish too fantastic.

00:32:31
Speaker 5: Well, it may be.

00:32:32
Speaker 9: A fool, but it's awfool.

00:32:36
Speaker 12: Have to think the better than him.

00:32:38
Speaker 4: They're wrong.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: So when I came to this.

00:32:43
Speaker 1: Park, I took you want to sing along, don't you? It's like sail Away all over again. He well, I made this song, but then comes this we talk.

00:32:57
Speaker 12: We are all funded down here, drake too much and we laughed too loud too. Dun't make it in no, all them town keeping nails down.

00:33:15
Speaker 1: It's nineteen seventy. The South is in upheaval. Lester Mattis has just been humiliated by some smartass New York jew. What do you think Johnny Cupp is gonna say?

00:33:25
Speaker 13: College man?

00:33:27
Speaker 2: It is.

00:33:30
Speaker 13: When in dumb, come out dumpty, hustling around a lenner in the alligator shoes, they getting drupped every weekend at the barbecues and keeping the nails down.

00:33:46
Speaker 1: How did people respond to that song at the time.

00:33:50
Speaker 2: I played it in Lafayette? Uh, it was young and they loved it. I got a letter, the only one I ever got on this song from somebody, and he said, dear sir, I was in the audience in Lafayette when you played this song. He's a black kid, And he said, I don't know where you're coming from, but there I was, and I was enjoying the concert up to then, and all of a sudden, I'm sitting in the middle of fifteen hundred white guys yelling red next. We're red next, you know? And he said it made him very uncomfortable, and he wanted to let me know.

00:34:39
Speaker 12: Weir read, weard, we don't know.

00:34:45
Speaker 9: I ask normal, holding the ground, we read.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: Southern audiences started yelling for it so they could sing along with the chorus. Did it become was it taken over by didn't become a kind of Southern anthem for a certain kind of.

00:35:02
Speaker 2: Or did When I thought that that was happening. I stopped playing it.

00:35:06
Speaker 1: You know, in the South, he had to stop singing it. Many radio stations wouldn't play it, and you definitely wouldn't hear that song on the radio today. It even feels strange to play it here. We've become appropriately uncomfortable with the N word in almost any context. You can only play Rednecks now if you explain where it came from and who Johnny Cutler was. But you can't not play it just because it makes you feel uncomfortable, because Johnny Cutler in Birmingham, Alabama, in nineteen seventy absolutely wanted to keep the niggers down, and we can't gloss over that fact if we're being honest. Oh and by the way, Johnny Cutler wasn't done.

00:35:52
Speaker 9: Down here, we twigger were to realize at the North sent the niaga free.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: He then names every slum in every northern city.

00:36:02
Speaker 9: Put in a cage in Harlem, in New York City, it's free to be put in a cage. In the south. Out of Chicago, on the West Side, he's free to be putt in a cage. And he Saint Louis and then put a minute cage and Houghing please, and then put a minutic cage filmont Sian Francisco, and then put him in the cage Lenox here.

00:36:26
Speaker 2: And Boston they gathered.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: He says to all those smug Northerners, when you drive with your windows up and your door is locked through the projects of your own inner cities, are you still sure you're better than me? Now you have to play that too, because if you're going to be honest about who Lester Maddox really was, you have to be honest about his critics too. Did you ever hear from Lester Maddox?

00:36:55
Speaker 2: He sent me an axe and didn't really know.

00:36:59
Speaker 1: Oh that's fantastic.

00:37:01
Speaker 2: From his store he sold the axe handles.

00:37:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, pickhandless. Lester Maddox listened to a song about racial hatred, and he sent the man who wrote it a pickhandle as a token of his gratitude. Revisionist History is produced by me LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flonn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gierra. Special thanks to Carle Migliori, Heather Fein Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanigg, and Jacob Weisberg. Revision's history is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. By the way, there's a great essay on this subject in the twenty fourteen book let The Devil Speak by Stephen Hart. Heart writes that in sail Away, Randy Newman showed one of America's greatest lies being crafted. In his next album, Newman would show how the lie soaked into America's bones. Com aboard Little One.

00:38:24
Speaker 2: And Yeah, then what you can't I think this is sort of happy. I mean, certainly the voices make it that way. You can't do it?

00:38:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's lost all of it's you know. I like that, Like it's something of delicacy you're getting at this. Yeah, artisanal bakery.