Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. In the fall of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, the musician Randy Newman released an album
Speaker 1: called Good Old Boys. The most beautiful song on the
Speaker 1: record is the third song on the first side, Wait
Speaker 1: Can I prevail on? You did just do a little
Speaker 1: bit of Marie So I love that song so much.
Speaker 1: Thank you look like a princess made with your hair Parloa.
Speaker 1: I Will never My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This episode is about Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, one
Speaker 1: of the most remarkable albums of its era. I listened
Speaker 1: to it for the first time years ago, but then
Speaker 1: I happened to listen to it again very recently and
Speaker 1: realize that Good Old Boys is not an album you
Speaker 1: can hear just once and hope to do it justice,
Speaker 1: because it's not just remarkable, it's unsettling. I don't think
Speaker 1: an album like this could be made today, and by
Speaker 1: the end of this episode, I suspect you'll agree with me. Away,
Speaker 1: I decided to go to California, sit down with Randy Newman,
Speaker 1: and create a listener's guide to one of the most
Speaker 1: perplexing works of music that I have ever encountered. Love
Speaker 1: got to be at what you Mello You first, soul,
Speaker 1: you Always. Newman is in his seventies, still writing music,
Speaker 1: Tall and slightly intimidating. He's Hollywood Royalty. His uncle, Alfred,
Speaker 1: was a composer who was nominated for an Academy Award
Speaker 1: forty four times, one nine times. Newman has had a
Speaker 1: second career writing for the movies as well, like You've
Speaker 1: Got a Friend in Me for Toy Story. Newman is
Speaker 1: unusual among songwriters because he writes in character, and the
Speaker 1: narrator of Good Old Boys is a creation of Newman's.
Speaker 1: He's called Johnny Cutler, a steelworker from Birmingham, Alabama, thirty
Speaker 1: years old. The song Marie is about Johnny Cutler coming
Speaker 1: home late after a night out with the boys and
Speaker 1: gazing love struck at his sleeping wife. I like the
Speaker 1: idea very much about being inarticulate without that's not the
Speaker 1: right word, inarticulate, but being unable to have the words
Speaker 1: unless you drink something. You know, I can't say this
Speaker 1: to you, and maybe to lack the ability to say
Speaker 1: those kind of words, but he's the fact that he
Speaker 1: has been drinking and he and you realize he can
Speaker 1: only say what he's saying because he's drunk and because
Speaker 1: she's asleep. Yeah right, yeah, but that even that makes
Speaker 1: me humanizes him and even more I sort of feels
Speaker 1: so surri you love sir. I mean, it would seem
Speaker 1: that that isn't drink, but it might be. Is this
Speaker 1: a good guy? And my answer to that is I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, I'm suspicious of this. I'm drunk right, no, baby,
Speaker 1: but maybe when I'm awake I might knock this shit
Speaker 1: out of you sometime. Randy Newman wrote, Marie, he created
Speaker 1: Johnny Cutler. He dreamt up a beautiful love song for him,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't know if he understands him or even
Speaker 1: if he likes him. As if Johnny Cutler came from
Speaker 1: his imagination but is now somehow independent of it, it
Speaker 1: makes you wonder who's in charge of this song. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm crazy, but I guess you know a week it
Speaker 1: a lazy, it ah hurts, So I never listen to
Speaker 1: a word you say when you came to me in
Speaker 1: trouble down and I just turn awake. But I love
Speaker 1: you and I love you first time side and oh
Speaker 1: we lovemy The story behind Good Old Boys begins with
Speaker 1: a man named Lester Maddox. Maddox was governor of Georgia
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy one. Now he's
Speaker 1: mostly forgotten, but in his day he was notorious. I
Speaker 1: think he's full to act for real. I don't look
Speaker 1: at myself as one of the very smart people, so
Speaker 1: I try to act like Lester Maddox like inside I
Speaker 1: feel and think and believe. Maddox grew up in the
Speaker 1: depression in Atlanta. His father was an alcoholic. My dad
Speaker 1: never maiden or any money. We times we didn't need
Speaker 1: mad a bathroom in the house. We had four rooms
Speaker 1: in a path rather than four rooms in a bathroom.
Speaker 1: We didn't have electricity. Maddox dropped out of high school,
Speaker 1: got a job as a steel worker that helps toward
Speaker 1: his five younger siblings, married his childhood sweetheart, Virginia, and
Speaker 1: after the war he started a diner near Georgia Tech.
Speaker 1: The house specialty was skillet fried chicken. He called his
Speaker 1: place the pick Wreck. So I wanted to name no
Speaker 1: one else had, and I came on the name upon
Speaker 1: the name Pickwick, and I found out it really Wick
Speaker 1: doesn't meaning thing, so what you know it to be Wick?
Speaker 1: That's what web true. I'll even tell you that Wick
Speaker 1: and someone had already used the name Pickwick in England,
Speaker 1: so I couldn't use that. So it was about two
Speaker 1: o'clock one morning. I've been working on it for weeks.
Speaker 1: Maddox was one of those people who you can't do
Speaker 1: a cartoon version of because he already looks like a
Speaker 1: cartoon version of himself. He's skinny, with an oversized head,
Speaker 1: bald dome, black plastic glasses, always in a black suit,
Speaker 1: moves with a kind of loose, slimmed floppiness, like a clown.
Speaker 1: There are so many oral history interviews with less dramatics
Speaker 1: floating around the State of Georgia that he must have
Speaker 1: spent as many hours reminiscing about his time as governor
Speaker 1: as he actually spent serving as governor. The man liked
Speaker 1: to talk. See to pick me and stiff ascidios lead
Speaker 1: to pick out, to choose a salic, and Rick needs
Speaker 1: to pile up to heat or damas. So I name
Speaker 1: a restaurant, picked Rick and said if you'd picnic to
Speaker 1: pick Rick and pick it out. We would rick it up,
Speaker 1: and we would we did, and that's why it was
Speaker 1: named pick Rick. I've never heard anything that should be
Speaker 1: a named pick Rick. Maddox advertised the pick Rick in
Speaker 1: the Saturday edition of the Atlanta Journal in a column
Speaker 1: with the title pick Rick says, lots of one liners
Speaker 1: and Madoxisms, like the nineteen fifties version of tweets. Oh
Speaker 1: I talked about Christmas, I talked about marriage. I talked
Speaker 1: about the monkey house at Grant Park. I talked about whether.
Speaker 1: I talked about fishing in my edge. But soon his column,
Speaker 1: pick Rick says, becomes more and more political because this
Speaker 1: is Atlanta in the mid nineteen fifties, one of the
Speaker 1: birthplaces of the civil rights movement, and Pickcrick is a
Speaker 1: ten minute drive from Auburn Avenue, where Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: and Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan and everyone else are
Speaker 1: starting to stir things up and less Dramatics is not
Speaker 1: at all happy with that. He's a segregationist. And the
Speaker 1: more strident Maddox gets in his weekly ads, the more
Speaker 1: popular Pickrick says becomes. People start buying the Atlanta Journal
Speaker 1: on Saturday just to read what Maddox is up to
Speaker 1: Maddox decides to run for mayor of Atlanta. He is
Speaker 1: no organization, no money. He drives himself around and he loses.
Speaker 1: But the race is closer than you'd think, so he
Speaker 1: runs again and loses, and runs a third time and loses.
Speaker 1: But then the wave of dissegregation protests hits Atlanta in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties. The public schools are integrated first,
Speaker 1: then the lunch counters, then the restaurants, and since the
Speaker 1: Pickrick restaurant does not admit black people, the civil rights
Speaker 1: protesters come knocking. Well, the first time, I was about
Speaker 1: poor whites, and three blacks came in and Virginia and
Speaker 1: hour about to eat our luncheon sird the afternoon. They
Speaker 1: told them what they're going to do, and I told me,
Speaker 1: you're not going to do and such things. What they
Speaker 1: were going to do was eat a Pickrick with the
Speaker 1: television cameras as witness. I said, you never been here before.
Speaker 1: You just want to fuss and fight. So I grabbed
Speaker 1: two of them. I think one of them was John
Speaker 1: Lewis or Brown or somebody, and I just about had
Speaker 1: them out the door when they happen to remember they're
Speaker 1: supposed to lay down on the floor. If they hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about that, I'd had them both out and they
Speaker 1: got on the floor, and because I couldn't drag them,
Speaker 1: so I called them black employees. I had the kitchen
Speaker 1: and I said, these people trying to destroy our business.
Speaker 1: They don't want to eat with us. They just want
Speaker 1: to create a problem. They got the television, radio and
Speaker 1: everyone with them, and I said, I'm going to give
Speaker 1: you ten dollars for each one of them you throw
Speaker 1: out in the next thirty secon Maddox's employees threw them out,
Speaker 1: but the protesters came back. This time Maddox met them
Speaker 1: at the door, with the television cameras rolling and a
Speaker 1: crowd starting to gather. Every idea. Now there's Maddox in
Speaker 1: front of the pickrec with his black suit and bald head,
Speaker 1: protesters shouting cameras all around. He's in heaven. I'll use
Speaker 1: a channels, I'll use guns, i use paint, I'll use
Speaker 1: my fits, I'll use my customers, I'll use my employees,
Speaker 1: I'll use anything if my dis bolt. This property belongs
Speaker 1: to me, my wife, and my children. It doesn't belong
Speaker 1: to anybody else. I'll go wild a white one or
Speaker 1: a black one, or a red headed one, or boat
Speaker 1: when it doesn't make any difference. Maddox gets hauled in
Speaker 1: the court because the Civil Rights Act has been passed
Speaker 1: and what he's doing is illegal. He's given a choice
Speaker 1: integrate or shut his doors, and he decides to shut
Speaker 1: to pick Rick, one of the most popular and successful
Speaker 1: restaurants in Atlanta, the business that he has spent his
Speaker 1: lifetime building that made him famous and to every Southerner
Speaker 1: angry at the way the world is turning, he becomes
Speaker 1: a hero. A friend says to him, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you should run for governor, and Maddox says, okay. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, he wins a white nationalist in the
Speaker 1: hospitality business who came to public attention running pithy, politically
Speaker 1: charged statements in a widely read media forum, runs against
Speaker 1: the political establishment and pulls off an upset victory. And
Speaker 1: by the way, it's a very close race. Maddox doesn't
Speaker 1: actually get as many votes as his opponent, but he
Speaker 1: wins when the election is thrown to the legislature. Oh
Speaker 1: and a huge part of Maddox's rhetoric is how the
Speaker 1: media can't be trusted. He's constantly accusing newspapers of lying
Speaker 1: about him. In fact, in the corner of his official
Speaker 1: governor's portrait, there's a little table with a dead fish
Speaker 1: on it, wrapped in a copy of the Atlanta Journal.
Speaker 1: A white nationalist in the hospitality business who wrote pithy
Speaker 1: statements on a media platform, runs against the political establishment,
Speaker 1: accuses the news media of running fake news about him,
Speaker 1: doesn't get as many votes as his opponent, and nonetheless
Speaker 1: takes over the highest executive office. I mean, when does
Speaker 1: that ever happen? Maddox serves four years, has to step
Speaker 1: down because of term limits. Jimmy Carter takes over as
Speaker 1: governor of Georgia as the state, he might say, returns
Speaker 1: to its senses, and Maddox consoles himself with running for
Speaker 1: and winning the job of lieutenant governor. He is well
Speaker 1: on his way to obscurity. And then he gets a
Speaker 1: call from New York from the Dick Cavot Show, the
Speaker 1: great late night talk show of the nineteen seventies. They
Speaker 1: want him as a guest. That's when we return in
Speaker 1: a miracle. You get food, Deep won't have to run
Speaker 1: through the jungle scuff up your feel. The first Randy
Speaker 1: Newman's song I ever heard was sail Away, just sing
Speaker 1: about Jesus and drink wine all day. It's great to
Speaker 1: be an American Sailorway is the title track of the
Speaker 1: album Randy Newman made right before he wrote Good Old Boys.
Speaker 1: I was a kid when I first heard it, and
Speaker 1: I had the same experience I would later have with
Speaker 1: Newman's other songs. I didn't get it at first. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I even paid attention to the words. I
Speaker 1: just loved how grand it was. Ain't no lamer tiger at,
Speaker 1: no mama's name. Just a sweet wallamelon in the book
Speaker 1: week You, everybody in its happiness and make and melab
Speaker 1: a board little Wogs. They'd way with me. But then
Speaker 1: I got a little older, and as I heard sail Away,
Speaker 1: I said, wait a minute, everybody is as happy as
Speaker 1: a man can be. Climb aboard little wog, sail away
Speaker 1: with me. Wog really offensive British colonial slang for someone
Speaker 1: who's not white. It's the N word. Basically, I noticed
Speaker 1: some interesting story behind sail Away. The song. Oh it
Speaker 1: was a guy was gonna make a movie and he
Speaker 1: was going to give ten minutes to five or six
Speaker 1: pop people. Van Morrison. I remembering Hendrickson to do ten
Speaker 1: minute thing, and I came up with this thing. It
Speaker 1: had a sort of a Sea shanny before it, you know,
Speaker 1: very irish kind of yoho, you know there, and then
Speaker 1: this guy be standing in a clearing in the jungle
Speaker 1: and singing this song, and that was what I was
Speaker 1: going to do with my ten minutes. Randy Newman wrote
Speaker 1: a song about an American slave trader standing somewhere in
Speaker 1: West Africa giving his sales pitch to potential recruits. Come
Speaker 1: to America. You're gonna love this little cotton plantation that
Speaker 1: I've lined up for you as just a sweet watermelon
Speaker 1: in the it's a nose laugh. Yeah, the character is
Speaker 1: so kind of outrageous. Yeah, but we're not laughing along
Speaker 1: with him. We're horrified by him. I mean it's yeah,
Speaker 1: but people laugh at that in a nervous way, at
Speaker 1: the watermelon joke and sit around think about Jesus Drake
Speaker 1: Wine all day. Now, there's a way to do that
Speaker 1: song so that it's not so shocking americ, like the
Speaker 1: cover version done later the same year by Bobby Darren,
Speaker 1: who was one of the biggest pop stars of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties won't have the wrong Throughout the jungle, Darren
Speaker 1: is happy. Yeah, yeah, come to America, little One. You
Speaker 1: know they get rid of the ward. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: But nope, that's that's like blasphemy. I'm a little sail
Speaker 1: away with me. In Bobby Darren's version, the line climb
Speaker 1: aboard little Wog sail away with me, which is crucial
Speaker 1: in establishing how vile the narrator is, becomes climb aboard
Speaker 1: little One, sail away with me. But I'm sorry, I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't get past this so quickly. That's unbelievable that
Speaker 1: he did a happy version. Yes, it's this, It isn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there, it is. The thing is Newman
Speaker 1: liked Bobby Darren, he knew him, and he didn't know
Speaker 1: what to think. I mean, there is a world of
Speaker 1: difference between wog and one. Also, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: Bobby Darren substitutes the words mamba snake with mama snake.
Speaker 1: Ain't no lions and tigers and no nurturing mama snake.
Speaker 1: Do you know he was I'll do I'd like to
Speaker 1: do that. And it's like, come to America, you know,
Speaker 1: but this is this this song is like a dumb guy.
Speaker 1: You know, this is this song is like eight. It
Speaker 1: is a wallop, It is emotional wallop, is searing song
Speaker 1: about this the darkest moment in America's springtime for Hitler
Speaker 1: and Away a little one little wad like I'm away
Speaker 1: with me. You know, it just was so right his
Speaker 1: showbus instincts couldn't restrain himself. How did you feel when
Speaker 1: you first heard that version? I felt, you know, oh
Speaker 1: my Jesus Christ. The original intention of sail Away was
Speaker 1: to make the listener uncomfortable. Newman takes a familiar figure,
Speaker 1: a salesman, an entrepreneur, a patriot, and gives him a
Speaker 1: rollicking sea shanty. But then he forces you to acknowledge
Speaker 1: that underneath all that there looks a monster. Bobby Darren
Speaker 1: chickened out. He couldn't do it. He didn't want us
Speaker 1: to be uncomfortable, and so Wog became one and sail
Speaker 1: Away became a glorified nursery rhyme. I don't mean to
Speaker 1: single Bobby Darren out, because I think that most of
Speaker 1: us take the easy path in these situations too. But
Speaker 1: the particular genius of Randy Newman is that he won't
Speaker 1: do that. He can't. I don't have So it's nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Lester Maddox gets a call from Dick Cabot, come on
Speaker 1: our show. He flies to New York and who tunes
Speaker 1: in that night Randy Newman, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dick Cabot.
Speaker 1: Dick Cavit is a year into his legendary late night
Speaker 1: show on ABC, up against Johnny Carson's Tonight show. Cavats
Speaker 1: show was like a highlight reel of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: He did the greatest ever interview with Jimmie Hendrix. Droutchow
Speaker 1: Marx was a regular, so was Muhammad Ali. He once
Speaker 1: had salvad Or Dally on the same show as a
Speaker 1: legendary pitching great Satchel Page. The famous debate between Gorbdale
Speaker 1: and Norman Mailer that was on Dick Cavitt. Listen, we
Speaker 1: have a very good show tonight, and I want to
Speaker 1: move right into it. An excellent show. I think, I
Speaker 1: don't know, how do I know? I haven't seen it. It
Speaker 1: It might be a big dead bro Why do people
Speaker 1: say that? At the beginning of his show, Cavat looks
Speaker 1: like Paul Newman's baby brother no more than five foot six, impish,
Speaker 1: big polka dotted tie. His first guest is a woman
Speaker 1: named Alice Gray, an entomologist from the American Museum of
Speaker 1: Natural History cat eyeglasses here in a bun, who brings
Speaker 1: a box full of cockroaches to the set. What can
Speaker 1: we do about them? What can we learn about them?
Speaker 1: Are they our friends? No, they're not exactly our friends,
Speaker 1: but there are certainly our companions all our doings, and
Speaker 1: I'm rather fond of them. They have a distinguished liege.
Speaker 1: How many of us could meet our ancestors of three
Speaker 1: hundred million years ago and recognize them the cockroaches? Can
Speaker 1: they go back that far? They go back that's older
Speaker 1: than the dinosaurs, twice as old as the dinosaurs. All
Speaker 1: the way back to the coal age, they were already
Speaker 1: recognizably cockroaches. It's always the people who don't like We're
Speaker 1: the last to leave, isn't it. They'll be here long
Speaker 1: after we have quitted this earth. I'm sure Kevin does
Speaker 1: a good ten minutes. I'm cockroaches. Are these your cockroaches?
Speaker 1: Are some of ours? The cockroach lady finally leaves the
Speaker 1: stage and then my next guest tonight is Governor Lestra Madox.
Speaker 1: How comes Maddox, the gleaming bald head, the black suit governmdics,
Speaker 1: I still call you governor call him most of the time.
Speaker 1: You won't do. Everybody else does say have you ever
Speaker 1: followed bugs before? Yes, a few moments ago. On your problem,
Speaker 1: say that's the only time. That's the only time. God,
Speaker 1: I love Dick cavet. They shake hands, they take their
Speaker 1: seats rust colored swivel loungers atop of gray shag carpet.
Speaker 1: Cavit shows the audience a photograph of Maddox holding his
Speaker 1: axe handle outside the Pickrick restaurant, and Maddox then corrects
Speaker 1: him and says, no, it's not an axe handle, it's
Speaker 1: a pick handle, and goes off on one of his long,
Speaker 1: endless digressions about the meaning of the pick rick pickaw
Speaker 1: hard work. And we had in the restaurant some of
Speaker 1: these pick handles, two cakes of them by a big
Speaker 1: old fireplace where we burned hickory wood. And there was
Speaker 1: six of them in each of the cakes, and they
Speaker 1: were dark red, because that was the look something similar
Speaker 1: to a chicken leg or pick handle does not like
Speaker 1: the axe handlets to news media talks about, and Cavit,
Speaker 1: who must be wondering what on earth, simply says, well,
Speaker 1: I've certainly learned a lot. Cavit brings on his next guest,
Speaker 1: the football player Jim Brown, then one of the most
Speaker 1: famous professional black athletes in the country. Brown settles down
Speaker 1: next to Maddox, who is literally half his size, and
Speaker 1: gives him a polite smile, and Cavit says to the
Speaker 1: two of them, do you feel separate but equal? I
Speaker 1: realized that's staneteen sixties civil rights humor, but I still
Speaker 1: think it's hilarious. Maddox turns to Brown and says, I
Speaker 1: thought you was the singer. He thought Jim Brown was
Speaker 1: James Brown. He then volunteers his personal definition of what
Speaker 1: being a segregationist really means. Of segregation is a person
Speaker 1: that loves his race enough, all the races enough, has
Speaker 1: enough for racial pride and integrit did to want to
Speaker 1: reserve them. And I think a racist is one that
Speaker 1: doesn't care enough for his race or another race to
Speaker 1: where they would don't care whether they are malcolmate it
Speaker 1: as a strayed or not amalgamated. Good lord, now think
Speaker 1: about this for a moment. Maddox is no longer governor.
Speaker 1: Georgia has come to its senses and elected nice, safe, modern,
Speaker 1: non racist Jimmy Carter. Maddox is a footnote, So what
Speaker 1: point is there in having him on a mainstream talk
Speaker 1: show like Dick cavit The magazine where I work, The
Speaker 1: New Yorker, had a case like this recently. Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: Bengali Steve Bannon was invited to speak at the magazine's
Speaker 1: annual literary festival, and everyone flipped out. The New Yorkers
Speaker 1: writers took to Twitter. A bunch of high profile celebrity
Speaker 1: in its to the festival dropped out, and the argument
Speaker 1: that was made about Bannon is an argument that could
Speaker 1: as easily have been applied to Maddox years ago. What's
Speaker 1: the point of giving someone like that a platform? I mean,
Speaker 1: what could possibly be learned from listening to them talk?
Speaker 1: And sure enough, what happens over the course of the
Speaker 1: next hour of the Dick Cavitio exactly what you would think.
Speaker 1: I think, what we're really talking about in this country's
Speaker 1: economic development of black people. At one point, Jim Brown
Speaker 1: says something thoughtful and reasonable that he thinks the priority
Speaker 1: for black people ought to be economic development, and Maddox
Speaker 1: jumps on him economic development all people. Well, we're talking
Speaker 1: about people. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you do
Speaker 1: for everybody? Can I give you an answer? I think
Speaker 1: I can. I give you an answer. Do you mind?
Speaker 1: I'll go ahead, be ready, I give you Okay, What
Speaker 1: I'm really saying is that there are some people that
Speaker 1: have suffered in this country. Four people generated. But let's
Speaker 1: say that we have various ethnic groups in this country
Speaker 1: that have attained a certain kind of equality. Black people
Speaker 1: are more or less along with the Indians on the
Speaker 1: last wrong of the ladder. Can I finishing? Boy? Can
Speaker 1: I finish? Do you mind? Now? What I'm really saying
Speaker 1: is that I feel that the way to bring about
Speaker 1: equality of black people in this system is to quality
Speaker 1: white people. Now I'm gonna interrupt you up, tie are
Speaker 1: and black people. If you're interrupt me, I'm not can't
Speaker 1: talk to you. Then Maddox starts going on and on
Speaker 1: about all the things he's done for black people in
Speaker 1: the state of Georgia, and Jim Brown turns to him
Speaker 1: with genuine curiosity and asks if he's had any blowback
Speaker 1: from white bigots the biggots have any problems with that
Speaker 1: from the white biggest because you did so much for
Speaker 1: the black man. Which is kind of a great question,
Speaker 1: because if Maddox has in fact been this great friend
Speaker 1: of black people, then you'd think he would have angered
Speaker 1: all the hardcore segregationists and everyone else who was opposed
Speaker 1: to the civil rights movement. Right. Mister Brown asked your governor, Maddox,
Speaker 1: if you'd had any trouble from your white admirers for
Speaker 1: the fact that you have as no, he said, biggots,
Speaker 1: did you say it? Why he's faith you have? Why
Speaker 1: didn't you say it? And I say that what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about, Dick, I do see it. Take words or
Speaker 1: push him around, and you mislead the people in your audience.
Speaker 1: Know you ought to start being honest, all of you
Speaker 1: with your words and what you're saying. The people you
Speaker 1: said admires and he said Vegas A lot of deaf
Speaker 1: was his name. The last half of the show is
Speaker 1: just Maddox getting more and more agitated, Dick Cavott trying
Speaker 1: to calm him down, and Jim Brown looking over at
Speaker 1: Maddox like he's a misbehaving child. Maddox asks Cavitt to apologize.
Speaker 1: Cavot refuses. The audience makes astonished noises. Maddox stands up
Speaker 1: and starts to walk off the stage. Cavit says, come on,
Speaker 1: sit down. Maddox says, I'll sit down when you apologize.
Speaker 1: So It says, if I called any of your admirers biggots,
Speaker 1: we're not biggots. I apologize. This is insane. What was
Speaker 1: Dick Cabot thinking inviting this guy in his show? Why
Speaker 1: don't you apologize, big George? You have those friends of
Speaker 1: mindful calling him biggots? I think I mean, I won't
Speaker 1: leave down, Dick, which which your wife? Wait a minute, wait,
Speaker 1: please don't please, I'd like that George, you and he
Speaker 1: owes him apologies too, the only biggest So I'm wait now, wait, wait.
Speaker 1: Maddox gives Cavn an ultimatum one minute to take it
Speaker 1: back or he'll walk out for good, at which point
Speaker 1: Jim Brown pipes up, Wait, what about me? How much
Speaker 1: time do I have? It's a circus. I would say
Speaker 1: that I phrased the question in a way that was
Speaker 1: not exactly accurate, in the sense that he did say biggots.
Speaker 1: Have any white biggots been upset because you have done
Speaker 1: certain things because your black back and said mid Mars,
Speaker 1: you haven't apologized yet, and you got fifteen sick all right, now,
Speaker 1: let me use those fifteen seconds. I apologize for suggesting
Speaker 1: that a bigot would be the way of characterizing all
Speaker 1: of your admirers. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, there's
Speaker 1: more time and less dramatic storms off the set. Oh oh,
Speaker 1: and I haven't even mentioned that the writer Truman Capode
Speaker 1: then shows up. He's then at the height of his celebrity, tiny, fastidious,
Speaker 1: wearing purple tinted round sunglasses. You know. Curiously enough. I
Speaker 1: had a cousin who lived in Atlanta that I once
Speaker 1: went to visit, and who took me to this restaurant
Speaker 1: that he ran. It was called pick a rev or
Speaker 1: something like that. Well it was a na rev sound wimier.
Speaker 1: And he was always at the door with guns, you know,
Speaker 1: to keep any any food of negroes out of the restaurant.
Speaker 1: But I went there with this cousin and mind because
Speaker 1: he was near the campus, the college campus, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't bad, but it wasn't finger licking good. The whole
Speaker 1: thing is so bananas. The cabot feels a need to
Speaker 1: apologize to his audience. I'm sorry the governor has left.
Speaker 1: I went outside just during the break and he's out
Speaker 1: there with his hat and coat on, and I asked
Speaker 1: him if he would please come back and use the
Speaker 1: last pinnace to say whatever he would like to say,
Speaker 1: because he felt that I guess that he was insulted.
Speaker 1: I did not mean to insult him at that moment.
Speaker 1: I have to say this, and I hope I don't
Speaker 1: feel it doesn't come off sounding I don't know what,
Speaker 1: but I found him in spite of the fact that
Speaker 1: I would probably despise his feelings about segregation if I
Speaker 1: were actually clearing with the r a likable man. Would
Speaker 1: anyone go along with this? Would you agree? The audience
Speaker 1: is not having it? Why is it? Why I'm not
Speaker 1: backing down. Shut up, I'll tell you when I'm backing down.
Speaker 1: We'll get back after this. It was a farce. What
Speaker 1: was the point except to allow a segregationist to play
Speaker 1: the victim. What good is there in getting someone like
Speaker 1: that a platform? Except Randy Newman was watching whose imagination
Speaker 1: as a mind of its own? So you were you
Speaker 1: a regular Dick Cabot watcher? In those years, not that
Speaker 1: I recall I was, but I would watch, you know,
Speaker 1: if I was up, i'd watch it. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think I was usually up in those days. And stereotypically
Speaker 1: you are the Dick Cavett audience, right I am. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It seemed like half an hour you know where they
Speaker 1: were just yelling and yelling and yelling. It was Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was so alien. I felt sorry for him. He
Speaker 1: didn't dismiss that whole exchange or shrug or change the channel.
Speaker 1: He reacted to it. He imagines what a supporter of
Speaker 1: less dramatics would think watching less dramatics storm off the stage. Dick,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you one minute,
Speaker 1: the foul jadas big where you called big Saint jar Jo.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you show. Now, you do whatever you
Speaker 1: want to back. He gives that imaginary supporter a name,
Speaker 1: Johnny Cutler, a home Birmingham, Alabama, a job steelworker. He
Speaker 1: imagines Johnny Cutler coming home one night drunk, gazing at
Speaker 1: his sleeping wife, and then he imagines him turning on
Speaker 1: the television Less Night Us All Less Tomatics on the
Speaker 1: TV show with some smart ass New York jew and
Speaker 1: the jew laughed less Tomatics and the uists laughed less
Speaker 1: Tomatics too. Will it maybematical? Two? So smart ass New
Speaker 1: York too? That's good, Less, that's pretty good. Click clicker,
Speaker 1: click up. That became the first song on Good Old Boys.
Speaker 1: It's called Rednecks. When I first heard that, I didn't
Speaker 1: know Lister Max was, or I didn't even know that
Speaker 1: it was. But that idea of the Southerner going to
Speaker 1: New York and sitting down thinist Jewish too, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Will it? Maybe a fool, but it's awful to think
Speaker 1: the better than him? Never wrong. So when I came
Speaker 1: to this park, I took so you want to sing along,
Speaker 1: don't you? It's like sail Away all over again. Well
Speaker 1: I made this song, but then comes this. We're talk
Speaker 1: queer funded down here, drank too much and we laugh
Speaker 1: to laugh too dumbed. Make it in no northern town,
Speaker 1: keeping niggers down. It's nineteen seventy. The South is in upheaval.
Speaker 1: Leicstermatics has just been humiliated by some smartass New York jew.
Speaker 1: What do you think Johnny Cup is gonna say? College man?
Speaker 1: How it is you? When in dumb come out dumb
Speaker 1: to hustling round in lanning in the alligator shoes. They
Speaker 1: getting drunk every weekend into barbecues, keeping the nails. How
Speaker 1: how did people respond to that song at the time?
Speaker 1: I played it in Lafayette, uh, Louisiana, and they loved it.
Speaker 1: I got a letter, the only one I ever got
Speaker 1: on this song from from somebody and he said, there, sir,
Speaker 1: I was in the audience in Lafayette when you played
Speaker 1: this song. He's a black kid, and he said, I
Speaker 1: don't know where you're coming from, but there I was,
Speaker 1: and I was enjoying the concert up to them, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I'm sitting in the middle of
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred white guys yelling red next. We're red next,
Speaker 1: you know? And he said it made him very uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to let me know. We're reads, we're
Speaker 1: read it, and we don't know. I ask from beholding
Speaker 1: the ground we were read? Southern audiences started yelling for
Speaker 1: it so they could sing along with the chorus. Did
Speaker 1: it become was it taken over by? Didn't become a
Speaker 1: kind of Southern anthem for a certain kind of who
Speaker 1: did When I thought that that was happening. I stopped
Speaker 1: playing it, you know, in the in the South, he
Speaker 1: had to stop singing it. Many radio stations wouldn't play it,
Speaker 1: and you definitely wouldn't hear that song on the radio.
Speaker 1: To day. It even feels strange to play it here.
Speaker 1: We've become appropriately uncomfortable with the N word in almost
Speaker 1: any context. You can only play Rednecks now if you
Speaker 1: explain where it came from and who Johnny Cutler was.
Speaker 1: But you can't not play it just because it makes
Speaker 1: you feel uncomfortable. Because Johnny Cutler in Birmingham, Alabama, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy absolutely wanted to keep the niggers down, and
Speaker 1: we can't gloss over that fact if we're being honest.
Speaker 1: Oh and by the way, Johnny Cutler wasn't done down here.
Speaker 1: We twigger to re alive the North, to set a
Speaker 1: nilga free. He then names every slum in every northern city,
Speaker 1: putting a cage in Halem, New York City, it's free
Speaker 1: to be puttin a cage. On the South side of Chicago,
Speaker 1: in the West Side, it's free to be put in
Speaker 1: a cage. And he say, Louis, they put him in
Speaker 1: a cage, and huffing, please in the put him in
Speaker 1: a cage, Philmont, say Francisco, and they put him in
Speaker 1: a cage Lennox here in Ballston the gall he says
Speaker 1: to all those smug Northerners, when you drive with your
Speaker 1: windows up and your door is locked through the projects
Speaker 1: of your own inner cities, are you still sure you're
Speaker 1: better than me? Now you have to play that too,
Speaker 1: because if you're going to be honest about who Less
Speaker 1: Dramatics really was, you have to be honest about his
Speaker 1: critics too. Did you ever hear from Les Dramatics? He
Speaker 1: sent me an axe and didn't really. Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: From his store he sold the axe handles. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: pick pick handles. Less Dramatics listen to a song about
Speaker 1: racial hatred, and he sent the man who wrote it
Speaker 1: a pickhandle as a token of his gratitude. Revisionist History
Speaker 1: is produced by mel Lavelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya
Speaker 1: Kanig and Jacob Iceberg. Revisionist history is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladbow. By the way, there's
Speaker 1: a great essay on this subject in the twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: book let The Devil Speak by Stephen Hart. Heart writes
Speaker 1: that in sail Away, Randy Newman showed one of America's
Speaker 1: greatest lies being crafted. In his next album, Newman would
Speaker 1: show how the lie soaked into America's bones come aboard
Speaker 1: a little one instead of good what you can I
Speaker 1: think this is sort of happy. I mean, certainly the
Speaker 1: voices make it that way. You can't do it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's lost all of its if you know, I like that,
Speaker 1: like it's something of delcacy. You're getting a bakery.