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 disteal a little bit
Speaker 1: of Marie Sure So. I love that song so much.
Speaker 2: We thank you very much. Look like a princess night
Speaker 2: with your hair part of that.
Speaker 3: I will know.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Well. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, one of the most
Speaker 1: remarkable albums of its era. I listened to it for
Speaker 1: the first time years ago, but then I happened to
Speaker 1: listen to it again very recently and realized that Good
Speaker 1: Old Boys is not an album you can hear just
Speaker 1: once and hope to do it justice, because it's not
Speaker 1: just remarkable, it's unsettling. I don't think an album like
Speaker 1: this could be made today, and by the end of
Speaker 1: this episode, I suspect you'll agree with me. I decided
Speaker 1: to go to California, sit down with Randy Newman, and
Speaker 1: create a listener's guide to one of the most perplexing
Speaker 1: works of music that I have ever encountered.
Speaker 2: Drug Well, I've got to be a little bit.
Speaker 4: What you mean me?
Speaker 5: He lo you the first time, so you.
Speaker 2: Always love you.
Speaker 1: Newman is in his seventies, still writing music, Tall and
Speaker 1: slightly intimidating. He's Hollywood Royalty. His uncle, Alfred, was a
Speaker 1: composer who was nominated for an Academy Award forty four times,
Speaker 1: won nine times. Newman has had a second career writing
Speaker 1: for the movies as well, like You've Got a Friend
Speaker 1: in Me for Toy Story. Newman is unusual among songwriters
Speaker 1: because he writes in character, and the narrator of Good
Speaker 1: Old Boys is a creation of Newman's. He's called Johnny Cutler,
Speaker 1: a steel worker from Birmingham, Alabama, thirty years old. The
Speaker 1: song Marie is about Johnny Cutler coming home late after
Speaker 1: a night out with the boys and gazing love struck
Speaker 1: at his sleeping wife.
Speaker 2: I like the idea very much about being inarticulate without
Speaker 2: that's not the right word, in articulate, but being unable
Speaker 2: to have the words unless you drink something. You know,
Speaker 2: I can't say this to you and maybe to lack
Speaker 2: the ability to say those kind of words.
Speaker 1: But he's the fact that he has been drinking and
Speaker 1: he and you realize he can only say what he's
Speaker 1: saying because he's and because she's asleep. Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that even that makes me humanizes him and even
Speaker 1: more I sort of feel so love her.
Speaker 2: I mean, it would seem that that isn't drink, but
Speaker 2: it might be. Is this a good guy? And my
Speaker 2: answer to that is I don't know. I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: suspicious of.
Speaker 3: This.
Speaker 2: I'm drunk right now, baby, but maybe when I'm awake,
Speaker 2: I might knock this shit out of you.
Speaker 1: Sometimes, Randy Newman wrote, Marie, he created Johnny Cutler. He
Speaker 1: dreamt up a beautiful love song for him, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't know if he understands him or even if he
Speaker 1: likes him. As if Johnny Cutler came from his imagination
Speaker 1: but is now somehow independent of it, it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder who's in charge of this song.
Speaker 4: Sometimes I'm crazy, but I guess you know, in a
Speaker 4: week it all Liz.
Speaker 5: And a hurt so and I never listen to the
Speaker 5: world you say when you calmed me in trouble doll,
Speaker 5: and I just try awake, but I love you, and
Speaker 5: I love you the first time my sign.
Speaker 4: And oh we love.
Speaker 1: The story behind Good Old Boys begins with a man
Speaker 1: named Lester Maddox. Maddox was governor of Georgia from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven to nineteen seventy one. Now he's mostly forgotten,
Speaker 1: but in his day he was notorious.
Speaker 6: I thank his full to act for real. I don't
Speaker 6: look at myself as one of the very smart people,
Speaker 6: so I try to act like Lester Maddox like inside
Speaker 6: I feel and think and believe.
Speaker 1: Maddox grew up in the Depression in Atlanta. His father
Speaker 1: was an alcoholic.
Speaker 6: My dad never made hardly any money. We times we
Speaker 6: didn't even have a bathroom in the house. We had
Speaker 6: four rooms in a path rather than four rooms in
Speaker 6: a bathroom. We didn't have electricity.
Speaker 1: Maddox dropped out of high school, got a job as
Speaker 1: a steel worker to help his five younger siblings, married
Speaker 1: his childhood sweetheart Virginia, and after the war he started
Speaker 1: a diner near Georgia Tech. The house specialty was skillip
Speaker 1: fried chicken. He called his place the Pickrick.
Speaker 6: So I wanted to name no one else had. Now
Speaker 6: I came on the name upon the name Pickwick, and
Speaker 6: I found out it really wick doesn't meaning thing except
Speaker 6: what you know it to be wick. That's what Webster
Speaker 6: will even tell you that Wick and someone had already
Speaker 6: used the name Pickwick in England, so I couldn't use that.
Speaker 6: So it was about three o'clock one morning. I'd been
Speaker 6: 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 Lester Maddox
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.
Speaker 6: See the pick means to fastidiously, to pick out, to
Speaker 6: choose a select, and rick means to pile up to
Speaker 6: heap or damas. So I named my restaurant Pickrick and said,
Speaker 6: if you'd picnic at the Pickrick and pick it out.
Speaker 6: We would rick it up, and we would we did,
Speaker 6: and that's why it was named Pickrick. I've never heard
Speaker 6: anything else being named Pickrick.
Speaker 1: Maddix advertised the Pickrick in the Saturday edition of the
Speaker 1: Atlanta Journal in a column with the title Pickrick says.
Speaker 1: Lots of one liners in Matoxisms, like the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: version of tweets well.
Speaker 6: I talked about Christmas, I talked about marriage. I talked
Speaker 6: about the monkey house at Grant Park. I talked about whether.
Speaker 6: I talked about fishing in my edge.
Speaker 1: But soon his column, Pickrick says becomes more and more
Speaker 1: political because this is Atlanta in the mid nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement, and
Speaker 1: Pickcrick is a ten minute drive from Auburn Avenue, where
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King, and Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan and
Speaker 1: everyone else are starting to stir things up and less
Speaker 1: Dramattox is not at all happy with that. He's a segregationist.
Speaker 1: And the more strident Maddox gets in his weekly ads,
Speaker 1: the more popular Pickwrick says becomes. People start buying the
Speaker 1: Atlanta Journal on Saturday just to read what Maddox is
Speaker 1: up to. Maddox decides to run for mayor of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: He is no organization, no money. He drives himself around
Speaker 1: and he loses. But the race is closer than you'd think,
Speaker 1: so he runs again and loses, and runs a third
Speaker 1: time and loses. But then the wave of desegregation protests
Speaker 1: hits Atlanta in the early nineteen sixties. The public schools
Speaker 1: are integrated first, then the lunch counters than the restaurants,
Speaker 1: and since the Pickcrick restaurant does not admit black people,
Speaker 1: the civil rights protesters come knocking.
Speaker 6: Well, the first time, I was about four wives and
Speaker 6: tree blacks came in in Virginia and I were about
Speaker 6: to eat our luncheon Saturday afternoon. They told me what
Speaker 6: they're gonna do, and I told them, You're not gonna
Speaker 6: do any such things.
Speaker 1: What they were gonna do was eat a pickrick with
Speaker 1: the television cameras as witness.
Speaker 6: I said, you never been here before. You just wanna
Speaker 6: fuss and fight. So I grabbed two of them. I
Speaker 6: think on them was John Lewis or Brown or somebody,
Speaker 6: and I just had him out the door. When they
Speaker 6: happen to remember they were supposed to lay down on
Speaker 6: the floor. If you hadn't thought about that, I'd had
Speaker 6: them both out and they got on the floor because
Speaker 6: I couldn't drag them. So I called my black employees.
Speaker 6: I hat the kitchen and I said, these people trying
Speaker 6: to destroy our business. They don't want to eat with us.
Speaker 6: They just want to create a problem. They got the
Speaker 6: television and radio and everyone with them, and I said,
Speaker 6: I'm going to give you ten dollars for each one
Speaker 6: of them threw out. In the next thirty second.
Speaker 1: Them Maddox's employees through them out, but the protesters came back.
Speaker 1: This time Maddox met them at the door, with the
Speaker 1: television cameras rolling and a crowd starting to gather.
Speaker 6: India, now you want.
Speaker 1: There's Maddox in front of the pickrick with his black
Speaker 1: suit and bald head, protesters shouting cameras all around. He's
Speaker 1: in heaven.
Speaker 6: I'll use a channels, I'll use guns, I'll use pain,
Speaker 6: I'll use my fist, I'll use my customers, I'll use
Speaker 6: my employees, I'll use anything. It's mind as bold. This
Speaker 6: property belongs to me, my wife and my children.
Speaker 7: It doesn't belong to anybody.
Speaker 2: Else, I'll throw out a white one or black one.
Speaker 6: Or a red headed one, or ball when it doesn't
Speaker 6: make any difference.
Speaker 1: Maddox gets hauled into court because the Civil Rights Act
Speaker 1: has been passed and what he's doing is illegal. He's
Speaker 1: given a choice integrate or shut his doors, and he
Speaker 1: decides to shut to Pickwrick, one of the most popular
Speaker 1: and successful restaurants in Atlanta, the business that he has
Speaker 1: spent his lifetime building that made him famous, and to
Speaker 1: every Southern er angry at the way the world is turning,
Speaker 1: he becomes a hero. A friend says to him, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you should run for governor, and Maddox says, okay.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty six, he wins. A white nationalist
Speaker 1: in the hospitality business who came to public attention writing pithy,
Speaker 1: politically charged statements in a widely read media forum, runs
Speaker 1: against the political establishment and pulls off an upset victory.
Speaker 1: And by the way, it's a very close race. Maddox
Speaker 1: doesn't actually get as many votes as his opponent, but
Speaker 1: he wins when the election is thrown to the legislature.
Speaker 1: Oh and a huge part of Maddox's rhetoric is how
Speaker 1: the media can't be trusted. He's constantly accusing newspapers of
Speaker 1: lying about him. In fact, in the corner of his
Speaker 1: official governor's portrait, there's a little table with a dead
Speaker 1: fish 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: stakes over the highest executive office. I mean, when has
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 America.
Speaker 2: You get foody.
Speaker 4: Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up
Speaker 4: your feet.
Speaker 1: The first Randy Newman song I ever heard was sail Away.
Speaker 8: You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.
Speaker 2: It's great to be an American.
Speaker 1: Sail Away is the title track of the album Randy
Speaker 1: Newman made right before he wrote Good Old Boys. I
Speaker 1: was a kid when I first heard it, and I
Speaker 1: had the same experience I would later have with Newman's
Speaker 1: other songs. I didn't get it at first. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I even paid attention to the words. I just
Speaker 1: loved how grand it was.
Speaker 8: Ain't no lie side of me, no mama snake, just
Speaker 8: a sweet wall amelon the bug wheat.
Speaker 9: Everybody is happy as make it be.
Speaker 2: Climb a ball, little wog.
Speaker 5: Stay the way within.
Speaker 1: But then I got a little older, and as I
Speaker 1: heard sail Away, I said, wait a minute. Everybody is
Speaker 1: as happy as a man can be. Climb aboard little wog,
Speaker 1: sail away with me. Wog really offensive British colonial slang
Speaker 1: for someone who's not white. It's the N word. Basically,
Speaker 1: I noticed some interesting story at behind sail Away.
Speaker 2: The song, Oh it was a A guy was going
Speaker 2: to make a movie and he was going to give
Speaker 2: ten minutes to five or six pop people, Van Morrison,
Speaker 2: I remember, and Hendrickson to do ten minute thing, and
Speaker 2: I came up with this thing. It had a sort
Speaker 2: of a sea shanny before it, you know, very irish
Speaker 2: kind of yo hoo, you know there and then this
Speaker 2: guy be standing in a clearing in the jungle and
Speaker 2: singing this song, and that was what I was going
Speaker 2: to do with my ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Randy Newman wrote a song about an American slave trader
Speaker 1: standing somewhere in West Africa giving his sales pitch to
Speaker 1: potential recruits come to America. You're gonna love this little
Speaker 1: cotton plantation that I've lined up for you.
Speaker 2: Oh no, lion, no moms sleep. It's a sweet watermelon
Speaker 2: and a book. So those laugh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the character is so kind of outrageous. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: we're not laughing along with him. We're horrified by him.
Speaker 2: I mean it's yeah, but people laugh at that in
Speaker 2: a nervous way, at the watermelon joke, and sit around
Speaker 2: to think about Jesus drink wine all day.
Speaker 1: Now, there's a way to do that song so that
Speaker 1: it's not so shocking. In like the cover version done
Speaker 1: later the same year by Bobby Darren who was one
Speaker 1: of the biggest pop stars of the nineteen sixties, won't
Speaker 1: have the wrong through the jungle.
Speaker 2: Bobby Darren is happy, Yeah, come to America, little one,
Speaker 2: when we get rid of the wog. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: But no, that's that's like blasphemy. I'm a born Little
Speaker 1: one sail.
Speaker 2: Away with me.
Speaker 1: In Bobby Darren's version, the line climb a board, little
Speaker 1: Wog sail away with me, which is crucial in establishing
Speaker 1: how vile the narrator is, becomes climber board, little one
Speaker 1: sail away with me. I'm sorry, I can't get I
Speaker 1: can't get pass it so quickly. That's unbelievable that.
Speaker 2: He did a happy version.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's this, It isn't.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there it is.
Speaker 1: The thing is Newman liked Bobby Darren. He knew him,
Speaker 1: and he didn't know what to think. I mean, there
Speaker 1: is a world of difference between wog and one. Also,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, Bobby Darren substitutes the words mamba
Speaker 1: snake with mama snake eight no lions and tigers and
Speaker 1: no nurturing mama snake.
Speaker 2: You know, he was all, do I like to do that?
Speaker 2: And it's like come to America, you know, become.
Speaker 1: But this is this, this song is like this.
Speaker 2: Is not a dumb guy either.
Speaker 1: This is this song is like a It is a wallop.
Speaker 1: It is emotional wallop. He searing song about this the
Speaker 1: darkest moment in America's past.
Speaker 2: It's a jaw dress like springtime for Hitler, a little one,
Speaker 2: little wall like come away with me. You know, he
Speaker 2: just was so right, his Shulvia's instincts couldn't restrain himself.
Speaker 1: How did you feel when you first heard that version?
Speaker 2: I felt, you know, oh, my Jesus Christ. And that
Speaker 2: was it.
Speaker 1: The original intention of sail Away was to make the
Speaker 1: listener uncomfortable. Newman takes a familiar figure, a salesman, an entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: a patriot, and gives him a rollicking sea shanty. But
Speaker 1: then he forces you to acknowledge that underneath all that
Speaker 1: there looks a monster. Bobby Darren chickened out. He couldn't
Speaker 1: do it. He didn't want us to be uncomfortable, and
Speaker 1: so Wog became one and sail Away became a glorified
Speaker 1: nursery rhyme. I don't mean to single Bobby Darren out,
Speaker 1: because I think that most of us take the easy
Speaker 1: path in these situations too. But the particular genius of
Speaker 1: Randy Newman is that he won't do that. He can't.
Speaker 2: Dick have a troll.
Speaker 1: So it's nineteen seventy. Lester Maddox gets a call from
Speaker 1: Dick Caviot, come on our show. He flies to New
Speaker 1: York and who tunes in that night Randy Newman, Ladies
Speaker 1: and gentlemen, Dick Cabot. Dick Caviott is a year into
Speaker 1: his legendary late night show on ABC, up against Johnny
Speaker 1: Carson's Tonight show. Cavit show was like a highlight reel
Speaker 1: of the nineteen seventies. He did the greatest ever interview
Speaker 1: with Jimmy Hendrix. Groucho Marx was a regular, so was
Speaker 1: Muhammad Ali. He once had Salvador Dally on the same
Speaker 1: show as a legendary pitching great Satchel Page. The famous
Speaker 1: debate between Gorvadal and Norman Mailer that was on Dick Caviot. Listen,
Speaker 1: we have a.
Speaker 7: Very good show tonight, and I want to move right
Speaker 7: into it. Excellent show. I think I don't know, how
Speaker 7: do I know? I haven't seen it. It might be a
Speaker 7: big dead brow Why do people say that at the
Speaker 7: beginning of his show.
Speaker 1: Cavot looks like Paul Newman's baby brother, no more than
Speaker 1: five or six, impish, big polka dotted tie. His first
Speaker 1: guest is a woman named Alice Gray, an entomologist from
Speaker 1: the American Museum of Natural History, cat eye, glasses, hair,
Speaker 1: and a bun who brings a box full of cockroaches
Speaker 1: to the set.
Speaker 7: What can we do about then? What can we learn
Speaker 7: about them? Are they our friends?
Speaker 6: No, they're not exactly our friends, but there are certainly
Speaker 6: our companions.
Speaker 7: And all our.
Speaker 1: All our doings, and I'm rather fond of them.
Speaker 6: They have a distinguished linage.
Speaker 8: How many of us could meet our ancestors of three
Speaker 8: hundred million years ago and recognize them the cockroaches?
Speaker 7: Can they go back that far?
Speaker 1: They go back that far.
Speaker 7: It's older than the dinosaurs.
Speaker 6: Twice as old as the dinosaurs. All the way back
Speaker 6: to the coald Age, they were already recognizably cockroaches.
Speaker 7: That's it's always the people who don't like We're the
Speaker 7: last to leave, isn't it.
Speaker 6: They'll be here long after we have quitted this earth.
Speaker 1: I'm sure Cavit does a good ten minutes. I'm cockroaches
Speaker 1: are these?
Speaker 7: Your cockroaches are some of ours?
Speaker 1: The cockroach lady finally leaves the stage.
Speaker 7: And then my next guest tonight is Governor Lester Maddox.
Speaker 1: How comes Maddox, the gleaming bald head, the black suit Governorm.
Speaker 7: Maddics, I still call you, Governor, dont.
Speaker 6: Call me mostly anything you won't do everybody else?
Speaker 2: Does?
Speaker 7: Have you ever followed bugs before?
Speaker 6: Yes, a few moments ago on your problem.
Speaker 7: That's the only time.
Speaker 1: That's the only time. God, I love Dick Cavit. They
Speaker 1: shake hands, they take their seats rust colored swivel loungers
Speaker 1: atop a gray shag carpet. Kavit shows the audience a
Speaker 1: photograph of Maddox holding his axe handle outside the Pickrick restaurant,
Speaker 1: and Maddox then corrects him and says, no, it's not
Speaker 1: an axe handle, it's a pickhandle, and goes off on
Speaker 1: one of his long, endless digressions about the meaning of the.
Speaker 6: Pickrick hard work. And we had in the restaurant some
Speaker 6: of these pick candles, two cakes of them, by a
Speaker 6: big old fireplace where we burned hickory wood, And there
Speaker 6: were six of them in each of the cakes. And
Speaker 6: they were dark red because that was the look something
Speaker 6: similar to a chicken leg or pit. Candle does not
Speaker 6: like the axe handle. It's the news me he talks about.
Speaker 1: And Kaviot, who must be wondering what on earth, simply.
Speaker 7: Says, well, I've certainly learned a lot.
Speaker 1: Kaviot brings on his next guest, the football player Jim Brown,
Speaker 1: then one of the most famous professional black athletes in
Speaker 1: the country. Brown settles down next to Maddox, who is
Speaker 1: literally half his size, and gives him a polite smile,
Speaker 1: and Kavit says to the two of them, do you
Speaker 1: feel separate but equal? I realized that's nineteen sixties civil
Speaker 1: rights humor, but I still think it's hilarious. Maddox turns
Speaker 1: to Brown and says, I thought you was the singer
Speaker 1: he thought Jim Brown was James Brown. He then volunteers
Speaker 1: his personal definition of what being a segregationist really means.
Speaker 6: A segregation is a person that loves his race enough
Speaker 6: or all the racers enough, has enough for racial pride
Speaker 6: and integrity to want to preserve them. And I think
Speaker 6: a racist is one that doesn't care enough for his
Speaker 6: race or another race to where they would don't care
Speaker 6: whether they are malcolmated or destroyed.
Speaker 1: Or not amalgamated. Good lord, Now think about this for
Speaker 1: a moment. Maddox is no longer governor Georgia has come
Speaker 1: to its sinces an elected nice, safe, modern, non racist
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter. Maddox is a footnote. So what point is
Speaker 1: there in having him on a mainstream talk show like
Speaker 1: Dick Cavot. The magazine where I work, The New Yorker,
Speaker 1: had a case like this recently. Donald Trump's Bengali Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon was invited to speak at the magazine's annual literary festival,
Speaker 1: and everyone flipped out. The New Yorkers writers took to Twitter.
Speaker 1: A bunch of high profile celebrity in teas to the
Speaker 1: festival dropped out. And the argument that was made about
Speaker 1: Bennon is an argument that could as easily have been
Speaker 1: applied to Maddox years ago. What's the point of giving
Speaker 1: someone like that a platform? I mean, what could possibly
Speaker 1: be learned from listening to them talk? And sure enough,
Speaker 1: what happens over the course of the next hour of
Speaker 1: the Dick Cavit Show exactly what you would think.
Speaker 10: I think, what we're really talking about in this country's
Speaker 10: economic development of black people.
Speaker 1: At one point, Jim Brown says something thoughtful and reasonable
Speaker 1: that he thinks the priority for black people ought to
Speaker 1: be economic development, and Maddox jumps on.
Speaker 6: Him economic development.
Speaker 3: All people, Well, we're talking about I'll tell you what
Speaker 3: I'll tell you everybody? Can I Can I give you
Speaker 3: an answer?
Speaker 2: Can I give you an answer?
Speaker 6: Do you mind? I'll go ahead, be ready, I'll give
Speaker 6: you fat.
Speaker 10: What I'm really saying is that there are some people
Speaker 10: that have suffered in this country, poor people generally. But
Speaker 10: let's say that we have various ethnic groups in this
Speaker 10: country that have attained a certain kind of equality. Black
Speaker 10: people are more or less along with the Indians on
Speaker 10: the last wrong of the ladder. Can I finish together?
Speaker 10: Can I finish? I?
Speaker 1: Do you mind?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 10: What I'm really saying is that I feel that the
Speaker 10: way to bring about equality of black people in the
Speaker 10: system is three.
Speaker 1: Quality white people.
Speaker 6: Now I'm gonna interrupt.
Speaker 1: You have time and black people.
Speaker 3: If you interrupt me, I can't talk to you.
Speaker 1: Then Maddox starts going on and on about all the
Speaker 1: things he's done for black people in the State of Georgia,
Speaker 1: and Jim Brown turns to him with genuine curiosity and
Speaker 1: asks if he's had any blowback from white bigots the.
Speaker 3: Bigots, have any problems with that from the white biggots
Speaker 3: because you did so.
Speaker 10: Much for the black man.
Speaker 1: Which is kind of a great question, because if Maddox
Speaker 1: has in fact been this great friend of black people,
Speaker 1: then you'd think he would have angered all the hard
Speaker 1: core segregationists and everyone else who was opposed to the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement. Right.
Speaker 7: Mister Brown asked your Governor Maddix, if you'd had any
Speaker 7: trouble from your white admirers for the fact that you
Speaker 7: have said no, he said, biggots, Well, what did you
Speaker 7: say it?
Speaker 6: Like he's said.
Speaker 9: You have?
Speaker 6: Why didn't you say and I say that while I'm
Speaker 6: talking about Dick, take words, push them around, and you
Speaker 6: mislead the people in your audience, and all you ought
Speaker 6: to start being honest, all of you with your words
Speaker 6: and what you're saying to people. You said admirers, and
Speaker 6: he said, biggats a lot of difference his name.
Speaker 1: The last half of the show is just Maddox getting
Speaker 1: more and more agitated, Dick Cavot trying to calm him down,
Speaker 1: and Jim Brown looking over at Maddox like he's a
Speaker 1: misbehaving child. Maddox asks Kavot to apologize. Kavot refuses. The
Speaker 1: audience makes astonished noises. Maddox stands up and starts to
Speaker 1: walk off the stage. Kavot says, come on, sit down.
Speaker 1: Maddix says, I'll sit down when you apologize.
Speaker 7: So it says, if I called any of your admirers
Speaker 7: bigots who were not biggots, I apologize.
Speaker 1: This is insane. What was Dick Cavot thinking inviting this
Speaker 1: guy in a show?
Speaker 6: Why don't you, Georgia have those friends of mine for
Speaker 6: calling him biggots? I think I may lay down, Dick.
Speaker 7: I wait a minute, Please don't laise, I'd like that
Speaker 7: with Georgia.
Speaker 6: And he also apology to the only biggest.
Speaker 7: So I'm wait, oh wait, wait wait.
Speaker 1: Maddox gives Cabot 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.
Speaker 7: I would say that I phrased the question in a
Speaker 7: way that was not exactly accurate, in the sense that
Speaker 7: he did say biggots have any white bigots been upset
Speaker 7: because you have done certain things about your.
Speaker 6: Boy back and said my admirs. You haven't apologized yet,
Speaker 6: and you got fifteen six.
Speaker 7: All right, now, let me use those fifteen seconds. I
Speaker 7: apologize for suggesting that a bigot would be the way
Speaker 7: of characterizing all of your admirers. Wait a minute, Wait
Speaker 7: a minute, there's more time.
Speaker 1: And less dramatic storms off the set. Oh oh, and
Speaker 1: I haven't even mentioned that the writer Truman Capodi then
Speaker 1: shows up. He's then at the height of his celebrity, tiny, fastidious,
Speaker 1: wearing purple tinted round sunglasses.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 11: Curiously enough, I had a cousin who lived in Atlanta
Speaker 11: that I went to visit and who took me to
Speaker 11: this restaurant that he ran. It was called Picareb or
Speaker 11: something like that, you know, well mar and he was
Speaker 11: always at the door with guns, you know, to keep
Speaker 11: any any food of negroes out of the restaurant. But
Speaker 11: I went there with this cousin because he was near
Speaker 11: the campus, the college campus. And he wasn't bad, but
Speaker 11: it wasn't finger lick him good.
Speaker 1: The whole thing is so Banana's the Cavit feels the
Speaker 1: need to apologize to his audience.
Speaker 7: I'm sorry the governor has left. I went outside just
Speaker 7: during the break and he's out there with his hat
Speaker 7: and coat on, and asked him if he would please
Speaker 7: come back and use the last minutes to say whatever
Speaker 7: he I would like to say, because he felt that
Speaker 7: I guess that he was insulted. I did not mean
Speaker 7: to insult him at that moment. I have to say this,
Speaker 7: and I hope I don't feel it doesn't come off
Speaker 7: sounding I don't know what, but I found him in
Speaker 7: spite of the fact that I would probably despise his
Speaker 7: feelings about segregation if I were actually clear and what
Speaker 7: they are a likable man. Would anyone go along with this?
Speaker 2: Would you agree?
Speaker 1: The audience is not having it?
Speaker 7: Why is it what? I'm not backing down. Shut up,
Speaker 7: I'll tell you what. I'm backing down.
Speaker 2: We'll be back after this.
Speaker 1: It was a farce. What was the point except to
Speaker 1: allow a segregationist to play the victim. What good is
Speaker 1: there in getting someone like that a platform? Except Randy
Speaker 1: Newman was watching whose imagination has a mind of its own?
Speaker 1: So were you a regular Dick Cavot watcher in those years?
Speaker 2: Not that I recall I was, but I would watch
Speaker 2: and if I was up, i'd watch it. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I think I was usually up in those days.
Speaker 1: And stereotypically, you are the Dick Caviot audience, right.
Speaker 2: I am. Yeah. It seemed like half an hour, you
Speaker 2: know where they were just yelling and yelling and yelling.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was so alien that I felt sorry for him.
Speaker 1: He didn't dismiss that whole exchange or shrug or change
Speaker 1: the channel. He reacted to it. He imagines what a
Speaker 1: supporter of Lester Maddocks would think watching Lesterra Mattocks storm
Speaker 1: off the stage.
Speaker 6: Dick, I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you one minute,
Speaker 6: so cle Jacksons be for you. Call big, I said, George,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna Aavey show.
Speaker 1: Now you do whatever you won't do back. He gives
Speaker 1: that imaginary supporter a name, Johnny Cutler, a home Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 1: a job steel worker. He imagines Johnny Cutler coming home
Speaker 1: one night drunk, gazing at his sleeping wife, and then
Speaker 1: he imagines him turning on the television.
Speaker 4: Last night I saw less Domatics on the TV show
Speaker 4: with some smart ass New York jew and the jew
Speaker 4: laugh less dematics, and the autist laughed less dematics too.
Speaker 5: Will it may.
Speaker 2: So smart at New York too. That's good last, that's
Speaker 2: the man. That's pretty good. Click a clicker, clicker.
Speaker 1: That became the first song on Good Old Boys. It's
Speaker 1: called Rednecks. When I first heard that, I didn't know
Speaker 1: listra Max was. I didn't even know that it was.
Speaker 1: But that idea of the Southerner going to New York
Speaker 1: and sitting down.
Speaker 2: Thinking as Jewish too fantastic.
Speaker 5: Well, it may be.
Speaker 9: A fool, but it's awfool.
Speaker 12: Have to think the better than him.
Speaker 4: They're wrong.
Speaker 2: So when I came to this.
Speaker 1: Park, I took you want to sing along, don't you?
Speaker 1: It's like sail Away all over again. He well, I
Speaker 1: made this song, but then comes this we talk.
Speaker 12: We are all funded down here, drake too much and
Speaker 12: we laughed too loud too. Dun't make it in no,
Speaker 12: all them town keeping nails down.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen seventy. The South is in upheaval. Lester Mattis
Speaker 1: has just been humiliated by some smartass New York jew.
Speaker 1: What do you think Johnny Cupp is gonna say?
Speaker 13: College man?
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 13: When in dumb, come out dumpty, hustling around a lenner
Speaker 13: in the alligator shoes, they getting drupped every weekend at
Speaker 13: the barbecues and keeping the nails down.
Speaker 1: How did people respond to that song at the time.
Speaker 2: I played it in Lafayette? Uh, it was young and
Speaker 2: they loved it. I got a letter, the only one
Speaker 2: I ever got on this song from somebody, and he said,
Speaker 2: dear sir, I was in the audience in Lafayette when
Speaker 2: you played this song. He's a black kid, And he said,
Speaker 2: I don't know where you're coming from, but there I was,
Speaker 2: and I was enjoying the concert up to then, and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, I'm sitting in the middle of
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred white guys yelling red next. We're red next,
Speaker 2: you know? And he said it made him very uncomfortable,
Speaker 2: and he wanted to let me know.
Speaker 12: Weir read, weard, we don't know.
Speaker 9: I ask normal, holding the ground, we read.
Speaker 1: Southern audiences started yelling for it so they could sing
Speaker 1: along with the chorus. Did it become was it taken
Speaker 1: over by didn't become a kind of Southern anthem for
Speaker 1: a certain kind of.
Speaker 2: Or did When I thought that that was happening. I
Speaker 2: stopped playing it.
Speaker 1: You know, in the South, he had to stop singing it.
Speaker 1: Many radio stations wouldn't play it, and you definitely wouldn't
Speaker 1: hear that song on the radio today. It even feels
Speaker 1: strange to play it here. We've become appropriately uncomfortable with
Speaker 1: the N word in almost any context. You can only
Speaker 1: play Rednecks now if you explain where it came from
Speaker 1: and who Johnny Cutler was. But you can't not play
Speaker 1: it just because it makes you feel uncomfortable, because Johnny
Speaker 1: Cutler in Birmingham, Alabama, in nineteen seventy absolutely wanted to
Speaker 1: keep the niggers down, and we can't gloss over that
Speaker 1: fact if we're being honest. Oh and by the way,
Speaker 1: Johnny Cutler wasn't done.
Speaker 9: Down here, we twigger were to realize at the North
Speaker 9: sent the niaga free.
Speaker 1: He then names every slum in every northern city.
Speaker 9: Put in a cage in Harlem, in New York City,
Speaker 9: it's free to be put in a cage. In the south.
Speaker 9: Out of Chicago, on the West Side, he's free to
Speaker 9: be putt in a cage. And he Saint Louis and
Speaker 9: then put a minute cage and Houghing please, and then
Speaker 9: put a minutic cage filmont Sian Francisco, and then put
Speaker 9: him in the cage Lenox here.
Speaker 2: And Boston they gathered.
Speaker 1: He says to all those smug Northerners, when you drive
Speaker 1: with your windows up and your door is locked through
Speaker 1: the projects of your own inner cities, are you still
Speaker 1: sure you're better than me? Now you have to play
Speaker 1: that too, because if you're going to be honest about
Speaker 1: who Lester Maddox really was, you have to be honest
Speaker 1: about his critics too. Did you ever hear from Lester Maddox?
Speaker 2: He sent me an axe and didn't really know.
Speaker 1: Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 2: From his store he sold the axe handles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, pickhandless. Lester Maddox listened 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 me LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Flonn Williams is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gierra.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Carle Migliori, Heather Fein Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanigg,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg. Revision's history is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. By the way, there's a
Speaker 1: great essay on this subject in the twenty fourteen book
Speaker 1: let The Devil Speak by Stephen Hart. Heart writes that
Speaker 1: in sail Away, Randy Newman showed one of America's greatest
Speaker 1: lies being crafted. In his next album, Newman would show
Speaker 1: how the lie soaked into America's bones. Com aboard Little One.
Speaker 2: And Yeah, then what you can't I think this is
Speaker 2: sort of happy. I mean, certainly the voices make it
Speaker 2: that way. You can't do it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's lost all of it's you know. I like that,
Speaker 1: Like it's something of delicacy you're getting at this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: artisanal bakery.