image of THE JAMES GANG at THE NATIONAL PEANUT FESTIVAL
courtesy of FRANK MOSS GAINES

SO SAD TO WORK ON THIS STUFF & HAVE IT ALL CRASH &
WHAT AM I TELLING YOU?!!!

Hi Robert,
I came across your site after days of trying to find out about the James Gang. Hope you don't mind me e-mailing you and maybe you can help. On limewire they only have Georgia Pines by the Candymen. No one seems to remember the James gang. I'm thinking the song came out in the mid 60's.

Another question about a song I thought the James Gang did but no luck with it either.

I'm thinking the title is " Everybody Knows" but if not here are some of the lyrics.

Everybody knows, she's my baby

Everybody knows, she's my girl

Everybody knows, Everybody but her

Reckon I ought to tell her, that I really love her

And then she'll know what everybody knows

She's no Hedda Hopper, she's no Natalie Wood............... I'm lost from there. Do you know who did this song? It was also done about the mid 60's.

One more question if you don't mind...... Do you remember the Distortions and what ever happened to them. I was wondering about on person in particular. His name was Eddie Rice. If memory serves he had just joined the group when I met him. They were playing at the Molton Hotel in B'ham.

I hope you don't mind all these questions but hope you might be able to help me.

Thanks,

Debbie

Hey Debbie:
Say a prayer for Rockin' Rodney THE ROCKER Justo
because he provided the citizens of Zero, West Florida wid a mp3 of
EVERYBODY KNOWS by Steve Alaimo.
Unfortunately, I'm not the computer genius I pose to be on the Internet so I can't shoot you the mp3.

Like we sayzzzzzzzzz in Tuskeeelooseee:
IT BEEZE DAT WAY SOMETIME!

EVERYBODY KNOWS

Everybody knows.[OH!]
She's my baby.[OH!]
Everybody knows. [OH!]
She's my girl.
EVERYBODY KNOWS!
Everybody but heRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I done told my poppa.
He lives in Hollywood.
He told Hedda Hopper and she told Natalie Wood.

EVERYBODY KNOWS!
EVERYBODY BUT HERRRRRRRRRRRRRR!


When I get around her,
I don't let my feelings show
If I asked her did love me
She might tell me "NO!"
No! No! No!
NO!
no, no



Everybody knows!

Done found out in Boston![OH!]

Kansas City, too![OH!]

Done found out in Cleveland![OH!]

Even in Kalamazoo!

EVERYBODY KNOWS!
EVERYBODY BUT HER!


I reckon I oughta tell her
That I really love her
then she'll know

good stuff keeps coming!

Best,
RR

Hi Robert,
I have Everybody Knows, and I can e-mail it to this persons address.

It was written by Buddy Buie and, I think, John Rainey Adkins.

It is a Steve Alaimo record, and the harmony part was sung by Ray Stevens ["OH!" ed.]

I done told my Doctor (maybe it was Poppa)

He lives in Hollywood

He told Hedda Hopper

She told Natalie Wood

Everybody knows, Everybody but her....

RODNEY

Roberto----
Tell Deb "Everybody Knows" was our first release, right after we put the James Gang together in October of 1964.
It was written by Buddy Buie and John Rainey Adkins.

It hit big around the south, especially in Birmingham.

I don't think anybody else ever released it.

Right after that we cut "Georgia Pines" at Fred Foster Studio in Nashville, along with several other songs.

The Candymen recorded "Georgia Pines" a few years later and it scored bigger than our version nationally, but ours is the one most remembered around the South.

Attached is a photo Frank Gaines just found of us playing the National Peanut Festival in Dothan about this time.

I remember the group Distortions by name only, but don't recall anything else about them.

JIMMY DEAN

ROBERTO:
"Everybody Knows" was done by the James Gang on the Ascot label (1965). It was also recorded by Steve Alaimo for ABC.

I was just spinning "Baby Take Me Back" by the James Gang yesterday!

Jeff Limlich
http://http://limestonerecords.com

Robert,

"Everybody Knows (But Her)" was the James Gang's first
record. It's a great song. Has a Jimmy Reed sound to
it. I believe it was written by John Rainey and maybe
Buddy Buie. I have a copy of it packed up somewhere.

Jim H

Robert,

Alison won the Rock 103 Great Unsigned contest! She's playing Saturday 14th at 2:30p.m. Overton Square Memphis! She will kick ass! Thanks for all of your help! Tell the world about the Crawfish Festival on Sat.
Thanks,
Robert Nix...........

Robert,

"Everybody Knows (But Her)" was the James Gang's first
record. It's a great song. Has a Jimmy Reed sound to
it. I believe it was written by John Rainey and maybe
Buddy Buie. I have a copy of it packed up somewhere.

Jim H

Hey y'all:

Lots of nice things happened this weekend.

I started a myspace tribute page for John Rainey Adkins, Dothan's legendery & idolized guitar hero. http://myspace.com/johnraineyadkins

The main thing I did was post some pictures but eventually I want to put up some music. I've got two excellent CDs of the Candymen so we have access to John Rainey's superb fuzzy blues guitar and with the permission of some artists we ought to get some great music up on the Web. Check it out & help out!

& while you're at it check out John Rainey's guitar licks on the jukebox at the end of The Fabulous Candymen page put up by Frenchman Paul Vidal http://perso.orange.fr/rockin.paul/CANDYMEN.htm

This weekend I watched CAST AWAY a couple of times on WTBS and for the first time realized how much I had in common with Tom Hanks' character, Chuck Noland.
Get this:

Chuck's most important line comes at the end of the movie-

"I've got to keep breathing.
Because tomorrow, the sun will rise.
WHO KNOWS WHAT THE TIDE CAN BRING?!!!! "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away

On the darker side of my life as a maintenance man, Saturday morning I had to face a crying, hysterical mother who hadn't had power in two days, who was afraid her house was about to burn down and who blamed all her problems ON ME!
After she calmed down a little, I handed her a $100 bill, reminded her of everything I'd done for her since she called me Thursday morning and said,"Isn't it sad that other people can stand around with their thumbs up their butts and ignore the suffering of other people." Thank goodness she understood my meaning and now everything is fixed and she's back in her house.

After work, I stopped by the library and did a little browsing in the stacks. I was so excited to find Humberto Fontova's FIDEL: HOLLYWOOD'S FAVORITE TYRANT. This masterful examination of Fidel's homicidal psychopathology and American/European liberal hypocrisy had been on the shelf of the University of Alabama library for two years and I was the second person to check it out. Typical behavior in the Land of The Academic Shitheads http://academicshithead.blogspot.com

Fontova's epilogue for his book entitled COMING TO AMERICA brought tears to my eyes:

When Cubans landed in America's lap by the hundreds of thousands, the potential for trouble was enormous. Cubans landed in the South as excitable, foreign- tongued, octopus-eating strangers. They applied for jobs, worked and sometimes lived right next door, and filled the pews of Catholic churches.

My family landed in New Orleans- deepest, darkest Dixie, red-state America with a vengeance. The city then hosted a huge NASA project that attracted blue-collar workers from surrounding Southern states: Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

We know what liberals think of these people. They're the backwoods haters and bigots who gunned down Peter Fonda in the film EASY RIDER and hatched the plot to assassinate the president in Oliver Stone's ludicrous movie JFK. The South, liberals like to think, is a racist place.

My father was a political prisoner in La Cabana's dungeons when we arrived in Louisiana. He listened to the gallant Che's firing squads every dawn, wondering when his turn would come. My mother wondered too. They had two nephews- Bay of Pigs veterans- who were under a death sentence. But my mother didn't have to indulge in despair (and most residents of Little Havana can relate stories ten times as hair-raising and heartbreaking). She was alone in a strange country. She was penniless, friendless and had three kids to somehow feed, shelter, and school.

A knock on the door in those early days- as we settled into our humble apartment- wasn't exactly comforting. But the knock came from Mrs. Jeffrey, our new next-door neighbor. She had a bleached blonde bouffant and big smile, and she was carrying a basket of fried chicken. Mr. Jeffrey was there too. He offered to help translate a job application my mother had.

The Jeffreys were originally from Texas. They did everything they could to help us. A few days later, she took my mother shopping. The next day she consoled her when my mother broke down crying. Mr. Jeffrey was a World War II and Korea veteran. He knew some Spanish, and I'll never forget him sitting next to my grandfather. He apologized, in his heavy Texas twang, for what had happened at the Bay of Pigs- as if it were his doing, as if he hadn't done enough for others' freedom already.

The next day, there was another knock on the door. It was our upstairs neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Simpson. They invited us over- in their hilarious (to us) Southern drawl- to share in that mountain of chicken and burgers they were scorching on the barbeque. The Simpsons hailed from Birmingham, Alabama. To Hollywood and PBS, that's the land of Bull Connor and fire hoses and nothing more. But the next day Mrs. Simpson knocked again and offered to drive us to school (we all spoke Spanish, but we learned English in two months because there was no bilingual education in those days). She'd turn up holding a shopping bag full of clothes outgrown by the Simpson children. They were for us.

The next day, here came Mrs. Boudreaux from across the street. She was a native Louisianan, perpetually cheerful. She brought a big pot of gumbo and a phone number of a friend who might have a job for Granddad and - gracias a Dios!- speaks a little Spanish.

Here we were in the very gizzard of the "bigoted" and "hate-filled" South, and our Southern neighbors turned up every day to help us out. Later, when we moved to the suburbs, another family became even more special. Years before, the lady of the house had worked at a local plant riveting hulls on the famous Higgins boats. Eisenhower called them "the boats that won World War II." One such boat carried her fiance to shore at Casablanca, another took him to Salerno, and yet another took him to Omaha Beach, where a burst from a German machine gun riddled his legs. Almost forty years later, I watched him limping up the aisle, grimacing slightly with each step. Then he broke into a huge smile while handing me his daughter as a bride.

As one whose family was almost suffocated by their generosity, I'm here to tell you that the arms of Dixie opened damn wide for these foreigners. My family landed in the South, but I've heard compatriots relate similar stories about everywhere in America, literally "from sea to shining sea."

Nobody called the Americans who welcomed us "the greatest generation" back then. But thousands of destitute Cubans knew them (and still remember them) as "el pueblo que nos abrio los brazos" (the people who opened their arms to us). We love America, and we look forward to the day when Cuba can enjoy freedom that we've found from Miami to New Orleans to Los Angeles to New York. VIVA AMERICA! VIVA CUBA LIBRE!
HUMBERTO FONTOVA http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18033
http://www.lewrockwell.com/fontova/fontova-arch.html

Hey take a few moments to help me out with some tips on tuning up John Rainey's site http://myspace.com/johnraineyadkins
so we can pay tribute to the man who Jimmy Page chose to bring the fuzz box to America!

& one mo' thang:
Muchas go out to Kathy for turning us on to the brand spanking newly premiered documentary The Apalachicola River: An American Treasure
http://www.apalachicolaamericantreasure.com




Best,

RR http://robertoreg.blogspot.com



image by JOHN EARL

"NO NEW TABS"
Sign in the Chukker, October 25th, 1971

When the stranger swung into this dark
butt-littered bar, draped his white
weird toga, or whatever, over a stool,
and ordered Miller's Malt, no one was
perturbed (it being late, and most of us dead
drunk). But when he said "No bread,"
a hush fell like a flatiron. "No new tabs,"
Mark said, and gestured. The stranger
scratched his beard, his blue eyes slow
and casual as swimming pools.
"Lookee here," said the stranger, "I don't know
how long it takes you necks to get the papers,
but I'm the son of God, and I could turn
this Miller into wine; but I'm inclined
to turn you and your buddies into Ovaltine.
What do you say? I'm kind of in a hurry."
One skinny arm reached out of Mark's white shirt,
shaking, and tore the sign down.
A row of white teeth chattered and chattered, and
said,
"Here at the Chukker,
if nothing else, we believe. More to the point,
you gotta make exceptions. What about another?"
Brushing the sticky halo from his hair,
he went to fetch it.

by Rette Maddox http://everettemaddox.org