ANTHEM, Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy, publishes on October 1. Each of the book’s 47 chapters begins with a song from the Sixties to set the tone, mood, and scene. Every day between now and October 1, come have a listen and read a snippet from each chapter. On October 1, these posts will be archived with a link at ANTHEM’s webpage for #teachingAnthem1969
This is Chapter 17 (day 31):
COLD SWEAT Written by James Brown and Alfred “PeeWee” Ellis Performed by James Brown and the James Brown Orchestra Recorded at King Studios, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1967 Drummer: Clyde Stubblefield
“A night drive through the North Alabama mountains is inadvisable.” Molly used a flashlight to read the warning in An Adventurer’s Guide to Travel across America. “They’re just hills,” said Norman, although he was already white-knuckling the steering wheel in the dark.
An unfortunate encounter awaits them in Alabama (talk about a cold sweat), along with a very fortunate (for them) new character showing up, the first of many to ride in the bus with Norman and Molly.
Norman’s newly-installed radio keeps him company into the night, as this chapter flirts with the “race records” that Duane Allman listened to on Nashville’s WLAC 1530AM, “the Nighttime Station for Half the Nation” as disc jockey John R. sells chickens, Bibles, hair pomade, and everything in between while he plays Sonny Boy Williamson, Aretha, and Muddy Waters, all of whom are mentioned in this chapter, as well as B.B. King’s “Lucille,” Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia,” and Sister Rosetta Tharp’s “Didn’t it Rain?”
But when “Cold Sweat” comes on the radio, Norman has to pull over. He’s never heard anything like it.
“It was the beat, he told himself. What was that beat? He tried to tap it out on the steering wheel. The drummer was hitting the snare on the two and four, but missing that fourth beat by an eighth note and playing between the beats — or was it instead of the beat?”
All very thrilling for a budding drummer who is on his way to the heart of the South’s musical beats, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He just has to survive his stop for gas in Anniston in the middle of the night.
ANTHEM, Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy, publishes on October 1. Each of the book’s 47 chapters begins with a song from the Sixties to set the tone, mood, and scene. Every day between now and October 1, come have a listen and read a snippet from each chapter. On October 1, these posts will be archived with a link at ANTHEM’s webpage for #teachingAnthem1969
This is Chapter 16 (day 32):
THERE IS A MOUNTAIN Written by Donovan Leitch Performed by Donovan Recorded at CBS Studios, London, England 1967 Percussion: Tony Carr
MOLLY:
I shake him and call out “Norman!” but he doesn’t budge. The band is so loud and the guitars are screaming at each other and the drummers are trying to see who can be the loudest and there is no song!
“He’s okay!” shouts Marvin Gardens, who is standing there over Norman, weaving and bopping like a lunatic. “He’s diggin’ it. He’ll be back.”
“Where are his shoes?”
Marvin Gardens shrugs. “Somewhere.”
I cover my ears. “I’m going to the house!” I shout. Marvin Gardens waves a loopy hand in acknowledgement and I pick my way around all the hippies and find my way out of there. I see a short kid in blue jeans wearing Norman’s shoes — they are way too big for this kid. But I keep walking. I am not the keeper of my cousin’s shoes.
If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand this music.
It definitely helped me with coming to love “Mountain Jam” to know it was a riff on this Donovan song that I listened to on my record player dozens of times in the Sixties.
British musicians were a fascination to American girls (this one, anyway). We fell readily in love with them, including the Beatles, of course. The whole British Invasion beginning in the early sixties was heady and exciting, and composed of not just music, but fashion and make-up and movies and television (“The Avengers,” “The Saint,” “Secret Agent,” and we got David McCallum in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”).
We were growing up against the necessary noise in our own country, the confusion of the Cold War, and the backdrop of the Vietnam War and everything that bewildered and scared us. We hung on to Donovan, and the Troggs (“Wild Thing” and “Love is All Around“), Peter and Gordon (“Nobody I Know” — my favorite), Herman’s Hermits (“Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat?“), Gerry and the Pacemakers (“Ferry ‘Cross the Mersey“), and the Nashville Teens (“Tobacco Road” which was so risque :>).
It was fun and it was pop, and it was all very “white” music in the early-to-mid sixties, very straight-ahead, something most of us didn’t register at the time — or I didn’t, anyway. It would be years before 1969 showed me that there was so much more richness to American music than I had realized, that it had blossomed into soul, R&B, funk, folk-rock, almost heavy-metal, and it was there for me as I began to navigate the end of the Sixties.
ANTHEM, Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy, publishes on October 1. Each of the book’s 47 chapters begins with a song from the Sixties to set the tone, mood, and scene. Every day between now and October 1, come have a listen and read a snippet from each chapter. On October 1, these posts will be archived with a link at ANTHEM’s webpage for #teachingAnthem1969
This is Chapter 15 (day 33):
MOUNTAIN JAM Performed by the Allman Brothers Band Live at Piedmont Park, Atlanta, GA 1969 Recorded at Fillmore East, NY, NY 1971 Drummers: Butch Trucks and Jai Johany Johansen (Jaimoe)
NORMAN:
When they’ve hinted at the melody just enough, the fans start screaming for it — screaming like they’re on fire. They clap in time, one-one-one-one, every single note, until Duane breaks into the full melody and the whole band follows. A cheer rises up like Moses has just parted the Red Sea. The organ wails and the Allman Brothers Band takes us to the Promised Land.
It’s Donovan’s song “There is a Mountain” — I recognize it. But it’s theirs, too, their own interpretation, a mountain jam. It’s tight. It’s in the pocket. They are locked into one another like they share one nervous system, communicating like they’re all part of the same body, like nothing I’ve ever imagined was possible.
“It’s all about listening,” Mr. McCauley always tells us in band. “You can’t jam if you can’t listen.”
We’ve left the Association far behind, eh? They were definitely not a jam band, and the ABB definitely was. And therein lies the difference between Molly and Norman. She likes order. He likes jam.
But there IS order in the jam. I just had to learn to listen for it. My jazzcat husband has helped me learn to listen, and I wanted Molly to come to appreciate the jam, too — life is jam, after all, there is precious little predictable order, even though we may think there is or wish for it.
But right now, Molly isn’t having this jam, as you’ll see in Chapter 16, when we hear the Donovan original song.
I love “Mountain Jam,” all 33:41 minutes of it. It’s got a killer (double) drum solo (at 13:00), which was important to me for Norman, since Norman is a drummer. I’ve listened to “Mountain Jam” dozens of times since I started researching ANTHEM. It helps (me, anyway) to know the history of the band, the story of Duane and Greg and Berry and Butch and Jaimoe and Dickey.
And it helps to go there. I went to Macon a couple of years ago, to research, and to pay my respects at the Rose Hill Cemetery. Greg had just died. They laid him next to Duane and Berry. People left tributes all along the path. There is such power in the music that has moved us, and in the memory of those who created it.
I have a 22-second clip of driving past “the Big House” in Macon two years ago, while researching ANTHEM and blasting the ABB’s “Ramblin’ Man,” but it won’t load today. Bummer. You can listen to “Ramblin’ Man,” though, and that’s even better.
MFA in Writing, Vermont College, I have taught teachers at Towson University (“Writing Techniques for Teachers,” ECED 422), and have taught in the MFA programs at Lesley University and Vermont College.
Pioneer of the Documentary Novel containing scrapbooks with primary source documents — photographs, song lyrics, newspaper clippings, etc., and opinionated biographies alongside the story/narrative, mixing fiction, non-fiction, and biography in one book/story in a trilogy about the 1960s. COUNTDOWN 1962; REVOLUTION 1964; and ANTHEM 1969 (to be published fall 2019)
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I’m a Southerner born in Mobile, Alabama, where I lived until I was five years old. My parents were Mississippi born and bred, and I spent most of my childhood summers there and grew up in Mississippi and all around the world as an Air Force dependent.
I’ve lived in:
Mobile, Alabama Jasper County, Mississippi Honolulu, Hawaii Washington, D.C. Prince Georges County, Maryland Charleston, South Carolina Clark Air Base, Philippines Northern Virginia Cherry Point, North Carolina Millington, Tennessee Frederick, Maryland Atlanta, Georgia
After living in the Washington, D.C. area (Frederick, MD) for 25 years, where I raised a family, I moved to Atlanta 14 years ago, and now live in a little house with a purple door in a little woods. I married musician/composer Jim Pearce 12 years ago. You can hear Jim profiled by Susan Stamberg at NPR right here.
Where to find me online:
I use Pinterest as a visual resource for my books. You’ll find primary source material for my books archived here, including playlists for COUNTDOWN and REVOLUTION.
