I remember in a story about people's temple. So what do people see on the film? If you do it right now, you know what's going to happen in person. Right now, I'm representing almost representing Jim.
You ever been a principal? He's love and brother. Every now and then, I treat myself by spending the rarest record in my vinyl collection. An old gospel funk album printed in 1973 called He's Able by the People's Temple.
It was the only commercially released album by the People's Temple, and apparently hard to find. I received it as a gift, and much to the dismay and shock of my friend, I could not wait to unwrap it. I was holding history in my hands, a snapshot in wax, etched nearly 50 years ago, as I lowered the stylus and listened. I felt as though I was hearing these songs for the first time.
The warmth of the bass, those deep analog tones, the gloriously designed stereo image, finally free and in high fidelity. Music is an emotional language that can transport the listener to another time or place. Conveying ideas and feelings, words simply cannot. Welcome back to Transmissions from Jonestown.
You're listening to Episode 17. He's Able. Listening to He's Able, you can easily imagine visiting a temple service for the first time. The funky mix of spirituals, original songs, and 60s hits creates a diverse listening experience that is remarkably inclusive and inviting.
The album opens with the children's choir. Their voices proclaiming their hearts are filled with song, because he is always near. The song welcomes you and sets the tone for the rest of the album. What follows is a variety of songs representing just a fraction of the talent and creativity possessed by temple members.
The song choices themselves, designed to showcase the temple's talents and the social message, flow as if to tell the story of a movement. If you listen carefully, you can feel the hope and optimism in the voices on the album, as the lyrics express their struggles to free the oppressed and find purpose in this life. There are references to the Father, but the significance and meaning differ slightly from other Christian music, giving the old standards new meaning. The album ends with a question, will you?
A song about sharing, brotherhood, and changing the world. Maybe more than anything else the temple left behind. He's able reflects the way the people's temple saw themselves. The altruistic message of equality expressed on the album.
The optimism and high energy of the singers juxtaposes what we know will be their eventual fate. Yet in that moment in 1973, now etched in vinyl. The temple's future is not yet set, and the dreamers still believe. And you can hear it.
This is the story behind the making of He's Able. One day, not so long ago, Mike Wood found himself on Hollywood Boulevard taking a stroll down memory lane. He'd spent hours recording tracks for He's Able at the producer's workshop nearly 50 years ago when the temple was his life. I had an office in Beverly Hills in San Francisco.
I recorded Beverly Hills every other week for a couple of days. In the evenings, I really enjoyed walking around the town. I fell in love with West LA. And one evening, I decided it might be kind of fun to walk over to Hollywood Boulevard and see if the old producers' studio was still there.
The concert studio, of course, was where we recorded He's Able. And that was a memorable experience in and out of itself. So I walked over to the old location, and sure enough, the building is still there, but it's now called the Hollywood Museum of Death. And for those of you interested in Hollywood, you'll want to know that the Hollywood Museum of Death is just around the corner from the Hollywood Museum of Broken Relationships.
Anyway, back to the Museum of Death. So I thought, well, I wonder if they have any connection to the producer's workshop. And it was greeted by exactly the kind of young, heavily tattooed, heavy metal, dead black-air kids who were essentially there as corridors and docents ushering people around the Museum of Death. I did not at that time think that the Museum of Death would have anything related to people's temple at all.
I was curious about the Museum's connection to the producer's workshop. So I introduced myself to one of the young staff people. And explained that by connection that people's temple was, and then I recorded that He's Able album as one of the musicians. And he really jumped at it.
And he said, oh my God, we have a whole segment devoted to people's temple. And we are very interested in anyone who is connected to He's Able because we talked a lot about it. We've been told a lot about it. Because producers' workshops still exist.
It's just in the back of the building, not in the front of the building anymore. And as we were talking a number of the other staff people came over to chat and asked me questions. It must have been quite amusing to other people who were attending the Museum of Justice Visitors because here I am. This older white male who has enthralled all these young, gothic kids.
And I was really amused by that. But they were very sincere and very polite. And one of them said, oh my gosh, we have the album. Would you sign it for us?
Would you autograph it for us? I said, look, I was just a band, I think the tenor sax. I wasn't the choir director. He said, we don't care.
You're on it. We really would like you to sign it for us. And I said, well, if you insist, I'll sign it. And so I did.
And they escorted me around the Museum and showed me the wall devoted to He's Able and people's temple and asked me all the questions you might expect that someone would have. It was interesting. But didn't really know much about it. And it was a really kind of a fun experience.
And they were so polite. I was just shocked because I was expecting, I guess, that people who dressed in the goth back would be angry young people. But in no way, they were just incredible kids. And it was a wonderful experience.
I so enjoyed it. Long before He's Able hung on the walls in the suicide hall of the Museum of Death, it was sold at merchandise stands during temple services. Displayed among pictures of Jim Jones, anointed prayer cloths and handmade crafts. He's able sold thousands of copies, wherever temple buses carried them throughout the United States.
It was the soundtrack of the movement, a movement that depended heavily on music to convey its culture and message to the public. Music for the temple was like a soul for the body. Without it, temple services would have been lifeless, cold affairs. But like a soul, you cannot separate the music from the temple's body or its history, no matter how positive the funky vibes.
Even as we hum along, or tap our toes, subtle nuances in the lyrics raise the hairs on the back of our necks, reminding us that most of the people who made the album died in Jonestown. For Mike Wood, the time he spent at the producers workshop, moonlighting as a sax player, was a welcome break from his hectic schedule and stresses of everyday temple life. Music played an important role in both Mike's life and the temple's history. If you never knew, you could live in the heavenly day.
Then we'd call you the body, those roots break, how do you sway? Jim was a good singer, a good boy, smart son, and a good boy. And they came from a Pentecostal tradition. And there's always a lot of singing in the Pentecostal churches.
Plus, they were appealing to the black community. And if you know anything about black spirituality, it is at its core, a musical testimony and a musical experience. You name the artist and they started out in their church wide. And it was really kind of an emotional thing.
So it was just part of our experience. I'm glad we have each other. When trials come, you know how much you need each other. You know how much you need the body of Christ.
That's why I sing, nobody knows. I never sung that publicly, but it kind of rang in my heart because I love you. So we'll sing to each other and be glad no matter how much trouble we have at the end we'll sing glory. Hallelujah.
Sing it again. Nobody knows. And I love you to sing it with a child. And it's poor and cold, you know?
No. Many of our members, particularly members of our members, had come from the black spiritual experience and had developed their musical talents there and then brought it to the temple. And our choir was given a reflection of that. They gave it a real added dimension in terms of musicality.
And in terms of recruitment, the choir was of course invited to sing all over the state. And Jim, of course, conditioned our appearing on his being able to speak. And that was fine with me. But we were traveling the line on our own independent of the church meetings.
It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I'm a hard man, but a good father. Because I'm not going to take care of anybody before I take care of you.
Come on, they came up to me and they said, our choir is supposed to sing in a Baptist church. They said, your choir didn't even have two o'clock. I said, who in the hell did we? I don't need it.
I'm going to be here two o'clock tomorrow. And all this choir is going to decide to go to some Baptist church. And I'm sitting here trying to get a message. No, there's only one way.
There's only one way that you will go sing anywhere. If you do other than us, you'll be out of your choir. And you'll be able to sing in a choir. You'll be able to go to some of the mall.
The only way you can go is that it takes me to reconfers. Then I won't take you better know some funeral anthem because when I get ready and finish, you'll have to bury it. I'm going to get all of it. And I tell me that I'm going to get this musclin.
I'm going to have that musclin. I thought, where are you going? I said, the choir is going to go to my office. I said, the hell are going to be singing on this.
Oh, no. You think I'm going to get my singing? And you'll be, you know how these churches, my two awarenesses. They don't know how they work it.
They get all these choirs in. And then the pictures collect it. And I'll bet you there's some pastor. I'm cheering up when I got behind it.
The pastor's line. And sweat the building, the audience, for you to go to sing for some bad ass preacher to make money off you. No, you're a sing. They're letting come over here.
They're lying in the wall. And if you were singing, we got the most beautiful cholores. And the most beautiful choir. So they want to hear them sing.
Let them first come over and hear the rock of the nation. Former temple member Laura Johnston Cole was in the choir and also recorded tracks for the album. Before she passed away, she recounted that her memories with the choir were amongst her most dear. She said, the music became the heart of the meetings and set the tone for the entire service, introducing the dynamic of people's temple.
Music univide. It's a universal language. So music univide. Also having people through their kids enthusiastically singing music and everything like that.
It makes parents, peers in their eyes and stuff. I mean, it's just heartwarming to see children involved in music and being enthusiastic. And also really brought some of our greatest, most creative musicians and writers and authors. It gave them a venue that they could really express themselves way beyond the constraints of most churches.
And so we had people who were just multi-talented musicians who were drawn in to perform and then could share their expertise around. So I mean, in just many ways, music was a very important part of what was going on in the people's temple. And it was created because once Jim changed the words of this old slave melodies and different things, somehow it had its own meeting within people's temple because it changed the words to work for us. My own white companion was spit on with our black son and she's been attempting to be driven off the road.
And I suppose she's a typical prototypal blondness. And certainly she has a black heart. Please. Please.
See, black heart's good here. We're changing some of that. That's why some of the other day heard us singing song. What can make us black are black to glow?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus. I said, well, I never heard it that way. Well, we're changing it because black isn't bad, darling. Black is mutable.
I said, oh, no racist church. No racist church I want to talk about. White is snow. Well, we want our black to glow.
It's alright to be white is snow. If you want to be, we want our black to glow. So we change it in words like that because we've got to re-educate. There's been a lot of this fear of darkness back to primitive man that's caused black bad.
Dark, evil. This type of imagery of black being bad and white being good. We've got to change that around. Because we found black to be very, very good and very, very beautiful.
The lyrics to the songs, like the temple's beliefs, evolved and changed to fit the times. By updating old spirituals and augmenting popular hits, the temple's playlists had something for everyone regardless of age. From the moment you walked into a temple service, the music created a certain atmosphere. The voices of the choir lifted the spirits of the congregants, electrifying the audience.
Loretta Cordell with her Hammond B-3 organ accompanied Jim Jones often long sermons and set the tempo during faith feelings. Without musical accompaniment, Jones' performances would have been far less effective and memorable. They were on their feet wanting Jesus to come. They all hit the floor and were down under the benches.
They hit on the floor. They had the Holy Ghost. They'd been baptized in Jesus saying they spoke in tongues. But they all were crawling on the floor.
And I looked around and I was the only one sitting. Because I knew I didn't have to be afraid. I love the truth. I don't care if I have to die.
I'd rather preach the truth than eat apple pie. I'd rather preach the truth than to have silver and gold when I die. I'd rather preach the truth. Say they're going to come for you.
I know they will. But when they come, they better get ready. Because there's going to be 10,000 crimes! Loretta just basically played the organ or piano.
And Jim really, Jim Jones, I think it really helped him phrase his sermons. Do the work that he felt he needed to do. And I recall she would play very softly. Basically just kind of copying somebody in a banda when they're backing up a singer.
There's not a real tune there. There's just an interesting chord, if you will. And she was very good at that. So it gave a depth to Jim's paranormal ministry that made it even more impressive.
Without it, it was a little flat. So that was my experience with Loretta. As a person, she was very quiet. When I knew where she had had five children with Harold, she was never a vocal person in the church.
And her role was really as the organist. And Harold was one of Jim's closest associates in those days. And they were just a very nice manly, I thought. My family has a history in music.
For example, my grandfather, that is, say my mother's father, was a professional musician and swing-air bandleader in Central Ohio. And my grandmother was, as a young woman, was a pianist and organist as company in silent movies in one of the major theaters in downtown Columbus. In fact, my grandfather and grandmother met each other in front of that theater. Both were waiting for their dates and their dates stood them up.
And they began talking with each other. And six weeks later, they were married. My grandfather had been a doe boy in the First World War in the American Army as a musician and served in France immediately after the war, entertaining the troops were still there and trying to get home. So my grandparents and musicians and my mother, Patty, was a great singer.
In fact, she fronted her father's band as a singer. And she was only 11 or 12 years old. She had a great voice, something like Kate Smith. She had a huge talent, actually, and could really knock out a tune whenever she wanted and loved being on the stage.
That was my background. In fact, I inherited my grandfather's instruments. He was a sax and clarinet player, and I inherited them. And when I was nine years old, my mother date went to me and sent me off to music lessons.
And I had music lessons from someone, just an older man at that time, who had known my grandfather and in fact had himself been a very famous musician, now 100 years ago or so. But so that was my introduction to music. And my mother had a great talent as a parent for making her goals for her children, their goals, without their even thinking about it. So my mother never really pushed me to be a musician, but she inspired me to be one.
And it wasn't long before I actually kicked up the ball with respect to becoming a musician and ran with it myself. And so I had music lessons, clarinet lessons, sax lessons, and piano lessons from the time I was nine years old until I was, oh my gosh, I totally moved to California. I even taught music when I came to California. I gave bright lessons to a couple of folks.
Growing up in Ohio, Mike's family was always on the move, rarely settling anywhere for more than a year at a time. His mother, Patty, a devout evangelical, encouraged and supported Mike's talents with what meager means his family had. Mike showed talent and played well, but still dreamed of being a musician and playing with a band. When Mike's family joined the temple, he was 12.
Early on, he became close to Jim Jones and Jack Beam. Mike once said, like so many other temple families, the beams were a photo op for anyone wishing to depict the typical values oriented Midwestern family. They had been in the temple since its founding. Mike's earliest memories of anyone in the church apart from Jim Jones is Jack Beam Sr.
One of my cherished friends in the church was Jack Beam, and I mean Jack Elbeam, Jack Sr. Jack was one of the great, great characters of the People's Temple. And when I first became a participant in the People's Temple, Jack Sr. was one of the guys who was I was close to.
Jack Sr. was really just a natural comedian. He was funny and could make anyone laugh and really lighten up his situation. And he had a great personality.
He always reminded me of Nikita Khrushchev because they were about the same size and shape and they were both both headed. And as you may recall, Nikita Khrushchev was the chairman of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, act during the Eisenhower Kennedy administration. When I was just a little boy, that was my first impression of Jack, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he was transformed because he had such a great persona and just the funniest jokes that you can imagine. And he could turn any situation into a comedy.
He was part of our skit crew, as you may know, as I was. And we would often act in the same skit and act across from each other. And the problem I got with Jack was that he would never study his lines. Everything was ad-lib.
And when you're somebody like me who pays very close attention to the script and works to memorize my lines and get the part right, it takes some doing to get used to somebody who is ad-libbing all the time. Because all of a sudden, you're carefully remembered and composed lines. Just go out the window and you've got to stay with them because the show goes on. And that was a challenge.
Because once he started to ad-lib, he became the center of attention and you were a side-life. So his son, Jack Jr., Jack A., was no longer in the church back then. He wasn't an adversary. He wanted to be a professional museum, a musician rather, excuse me, and went out to do so.
So he actually created a band called Stark Naked in the Carthes and they played quite successfully in California and Hawaii and other western venues. He returned to the church in 1968. Before he came back, his father loved to regale me with tales of his son. And to me, an aspiring musician at that point, they were like tales of the gold rush.
So when Jack Jr., if you will, returned to the church, I was a little intimidated. But he became a fast friend. Even when he first came back, he was clearly head and shoulders above everybody in terms of his musical talent. So we would get together four or five of us who had some interest in music and had some ability as instrumentalists.
And we would just play as if we were just a garage band. So Jim finally realized that Jack Jr. had a hell of a talent and appointed him to be the choir director. And Jack just took off.
And when I say that, he really created the church choir. Of course we had a church choir before that. But it was just your standard issue, church choir. You're singing the old hymns and you sing the old hymns in the same old way.
But Jack brought a level of musical talent and inventiveness that just hadn't been there before. And so he really deserves all the credit you can give him for the album. He's the one who made contact with the people at the producers' workshop, scheduled all the appointments, put together the music, and made sure we were there to record as he wanted to record. And he was a real dumb, very demanding and perfectionistic choir director, which is one of the reasons why the album, to this day, is memorabilia in itself.
The Beam family joined the temple in 1954 in Indiana when Jack Arnold was just a kid. His father Jack Sr. and his mom, Ravina, were loyal members. But Jack Arnold, a rebellious teenager, did his own thing, devoting himself to music.
He wouldn't join the temple until more than a decade later, in 1969. Yeah, my grandmother was the one who introduced us to him. The way my family met kid, my grandmother and grandfather went to about this young guy, Native American, I'm not sure. Him and he was more of a needy people that were having a hard time.
The Meryl Streep, Tablemackle, he started People's Temple, and it was at 15th of New Jersey in Indianapolis. Over a period of time it just started expanding. But he built his, you know, feeding hungry, helping people and getting people messy. Even early days was more about social issues rather than just bibles.
He would throw a little Bible verse in there, but it helped him make a point on a certain thing. It wasn't religion, he was on social issues. I had an uncle that was like a year older than I did, and he used to sing in the meetings and stuff, and I thought, hey man, he can do that. So can I.
So everyone's going to get a chance to sing. You know, they have a thing, you know, that kind of thing. They were a lot more subdued in terms of before, like, when I did the album and in that time frame, those were more, a lot more music oriented for the church service. Mainly in the early days, there'd be, you know, a few congregational songs and then Jim would talk and then everybody would go home, you know.
That's a lovely song. I like that melody right now anyway. Sing it. You need more costs?
Hold your hand up high. Four. Three. Three.
Three. I've been blessed. We on time for the buses because they will depart starting at 5pm. It's very important.
Don't delay, you'll be standing here without a ride. I never was attending these traditional type of Bible and that sort of thing, having been exposed. It never resonated with me. There was too many make sense to me.
My own church over there on New Jersey. I was more interested in the music aspect of what they were doing because at that particular time, I, as a young person growing up, I was into, you know, like a gospel reveal and rhythm and blues and that sort of thing. At that time, there was a young, a ham and organ is what they use as a church music in there. You know, she did play, you know, more gospel, feeling music and that sort of thing.
And that's what kind of like caught my ear because when I was a, you know, younger, I was like in piano lessons and all of that because my dad also played piano and that he didn't play a lot, but he played, you know, at that time he was playing like Boogie Boogie music and that. That was, was popular. So that's what kind of gotten me interested in what they were associating with. It wasn't the, uh, Turkin up on the music and being interested in that part of it.
Music has always been a driving force in Jack's life. His grandfather played piano with the Paul Weitman band in the 20s and his father Jack Sr. carried on the family tradition playing Boogie Boogie tunes for the family. Jack Arnold started learning piano at age nine and thanks to the temple, fell in love with the sounds of the Ham and B3 organ and gospel choirs.
He devoured all the R&B he could get his hands on with favorites like Ray Charles, Sam Cook and Mahalia Jackson. Jack was determined to follow his dreams of becoming a professional musician. When Jim Jones moved to Brazil and Jack's parents decided to follow, Jack opted to stay behind and pursue his musical career. While they were gone, I basically was on my own at 17.
I didn't want to go down there. It had no European appeal to me. Whatever Jim was doing, I'm she followed in it. I don't know whether he particularly was with CIA, but he was assisting Jim in doing whatever needed to be done.
They never talked about any of it. Well, the thing of it is, is to me it sounded boring because I didn't believe in religion anyway. I was a believer of her story. It didn't seem appealing to me and I told him, you know, hey, I'll stay.
We had an apartment house at that time and was like trying to keep an eye on that aspect of it a little bit for him. So I ended up going with him. I had graduated from high school and I was out of high school a few weeks before they took off. So I had gotten a job and after they were gone about two weeks, I got fired and I was trying to kill the manager.
I didn't be in a kid. I didn't at that point. But I'd gone again, got a job and I had a really good friend that I had known through high school who was a guitar player and all of that. And I got an old guitar and it was in two pieces and I got him to teach me how to play some chords and that and that's how I got going.
Now it was during that time that there was a pretty interest in what Russia was doing in this and that, that there might be a war. And at that time, Jones was more interested in moving to California. There was a place called the mountains and all of that were laid out there. So anyway, they went there.
Well, my buddy, like I said, his name was Jerry Mills and he and I wanted to be in the real music business and you either went to New York or you went to LA. And since my parents had moved to California, we thought, hey, why don't we go out there and see if we can get something going. Over the next several years, Jack toured the country, honing his musical skills playing nightclubs in California, Hawaii and Vegas. Jack loved R&B Funk and Soul.
Growing up in the temple had trained his ears to the sounds of gospel and spiritual hymns. The time Jack spent performing with rock bands in the 60s expanded his creative abilities and taught him the ways of the stage. I was with a group called Start N and we had some guys at a band in town because we moved to Hayward, California. I left GM and we started playing a nightclub in the Hayward area.
From there, another friend of mine from Indiana had come out to California. Three guys, he knew who were singers that had bands in Indiana. You know, I had some guys in Indiana. They came out here and they got going and to make a long story short, there were six of us.
We went on the road. We're playing places in Southern California and in like Vegas and that kind of stuff. While I was in Vegas with them, one of the guys got drafted and he got out of the draft, but we had hired a guy from the casinos, which was a hit group out of Cincinnati. It was Glen Hughes and he was singing in the band when this guy who had gotten drafted, you know, out of our group came back.
Well, we got in a big blowout because a couple of the guys wanted him back in the group and, you know, da da da. So I quit the band there, gave my notice. And then I ran into a guy named Chuck Gerard who had had the hit records and stuff, who was working with a group called the Castelles, and then he had left them and started a group called Chuck and Joe. And Joe was also in the casinos and stuff.
And so we locally picked up a guitar player, a drummer that they knew who was in LA who we got together with. And there was six of us because it started out as a Vegas group. They were calling it six the hard way, which is like there was three singers in front and three guys playing in back, which is two threes of six the hard way. And I talked.
These guys had houses and apartments in LA and we went back to put a whole thing together for that group. Okay, when I met them in Vegas, we didn't start playing in Vegas with them. We went back to LA to regroup and we played places, outlying areas in LA, you know, kind of smaller clubs and whatnot in order to get tightened up as a group. Then once we got tight, I was able to get a hold of a manager that I had met in Vegas, you know, who wanted to work with us because most of the guys that were in that six the hard way were all from hit groups, pretty much.
Then he started booking us everywhere. We played all over the West Coast and we were recording. That's what I loved about originally when I started out to get into music before anything is I wanted to be in the recording business and stuff, not playing bars and casinos and all of that, you know, playing the drums. But I wanted to write in the range and, you know, create.
Well, Sunrise was at the time when the mamas and papas were with style of music that was happening then. And the guy singing leads that kid called Chuck Gerard. Now he left six the hard way. We were in Hawaii and him and Ernie, the drummer, while we were over there, everybody dropped acid and he got religion.
For Jack, the 60s had been an exciting and productive time. While audiences flocked to his shows searching for a good time and consciousness expansion, Jack was discovering his higher purpose. Up till now, being a rock star had been Jack's dream. And for nearly a decade, he lived the dream playing in clubs like the factory in LA during a legendary time for rock bands.
Music was a language Jack spoke fluently, but the stage no longer inspired him. As the 60s wound down and Jack tired of touring, he turned his attention to new pursuits, becoming a music producer. Around 69 as when I went back with the temple and the reason why I did it, I got tired of playing night clubs, playing the drums. I wanted to be in production.
You know, I wanted to be making the music. And so I wanted to get off the road. And what had happened while I was still on the road, my mom, I had mentioned on a phone call to her because they were living in Ucaya then, which is right by Redwood Valley. Anyway, I had mentioned to her that I'd like to go back to college and study music and all of that, writing and arranging all the different aspects of music.
So she had mentioned, hey, you know, we got a program going on here at People's Temple because I knew he had Jones and everybody in that. She said, you know, if you come here, they'll pay for your education and you'll get a chance to do that. So that's how I got into the whole idea of going there in 69. Jack Arnold Beam officially joined the temple in 1969 with the understanding that the temple would pay for his college education.
The temple immediately made use of Jack's talents and put him to work with the temple choir. After I got there and was there for a while, they asked me to work with the choir. So I got to give a lot of credit to Loretta Cordell, who was the organist. She and I had to try to find out, first of all, we started out singing some of the songs that the congregation had sang, but doing arrangements of them and whatnot, you know.
And at that time he was still doing trips like, or he had started doing trips to San Francisco and LA and whatnot during that time. So we would drive buses down there and have meetings doing that. As they started out, it wasn't as much music as it was like traveling to these places and him doing mainly talking Loretta with a couple of congregational songs because it was a mixed audience of people of color and white people and whatnot. It was kind of a variety of a mixture.
More people started coming up to Redwood Valley because I was like going to college. I started college at Santa Rosa Junior College and I ended up graduating from San Francisco State studying music and I had a degree in social work. What happened was we were gathering younger people who were really into music and whatnot and then we were able to take some traditional songs that might have been sung in black churches and not that they sang, that were traditional kinds of things. We started mixing those and then I started writing stuff, but that's how we did it was with the new people coming in and picking up from their backgrounds, you know, songs, traditional songs and whatnot that they were doing, making arrangements out of them.
And also we had to leave the situation open that if you want to sing in the choir, you know, you can do it. Now there was another young lady named Anita Iams. She was helping also she and I and Loretta would get together and we would work out the song harmonies and this and that together with that. And then Anita, while I was working with the band, while we were playing and putting that together, helped teach the new people the parts to the songs, you know, it was the random parts.
And then we were able to get it down. After a couple of years, we were really getting pretty good at that point. I thought, you know, be neat if we had a record, you know, or something like that because at that time everybody was in kind of a leadership position of some sort. We were thinking about how to make money for the temple so that we could travel a little bit with them and, you know, to have some income on it, you know, to help pay expenses and whatnot for the church.
The idea of making an album came up and I told him that, you know, that would be in my opinion since I was already in that to be a good way to help not only spread your message idea, but also making some income to help support. So that's how that all got lined up. For Mike Wood, Jack Arnold's rival was like the return of the mysterious Projectal Son. In the years Jack was playing professionally, Jack Sr.
would often speak admiringly of his son and relate stories of the young rockers' adventures. When Mike finally met Jack Arnold, he described him as every inch of blonde Paul McCartney, complete with a Fu Manchu mustache, hip floral shirt, and red on black bell bottoms. I was totally impressed with Jack in return because he was my image of the bad ass rock star. He came in with his, you know, Fu Manchu mustache, long blonde hair and red and black bell bottoms and several leaguer boots and he was just the image.
Jack himself recounted in an article he wrote entitled Sing the Song of Life, Follow Your Dreams, that when he went to his first temple meeting, he felt like a duck out of water. With his long hair and big bell bottoms, he was the only hippie in the place. When he walked in and sat down, he could feel everyone's eyes on him, as if they were thinking, how the hell did he get in here? At this point, Jack wasn't sure if he would stay in Yukaya or not, even if the college was free.
Jack was used to doing his own thing, which at that time included smoking weed and having fun. Temple Life would be structured with limitations, but for Jack, the opportunity to change the world through music and produce works of his own was worth the sacrifices. Jack committed himself to the movement and its humanitarian causes. The temple was getting people off drugs and helping the downtrodden of the world.
Later, when we see Jack on the album cover of He's Able or performing with the Temple Band during faith healings, he's clean shaven with short hair, wearing a light blue dress shirt, as was the style of the choir. Though his appearance became more conservative after joining the Temple, his musical progressions remained as funky and far out as his rocker persona had been. I really believed in trying to help people that needed a break, you know, and most of them were black, not all but most made sense to me at that time in my life to try to help, and the only way I could have helped at that time was music. As choir director, Jack found himself surrounded by incredible talent, with a head full of fresh ideas and songs.
Jack knew with a lot of work and a little polish, he could produce something unique that sounded professional and reach more people with his music than ever before. It's more remarkable even than you might think because he had to take what he was given in the church. Fortunately, there were a lot of talented people. They weren't under any kind of administration.
They were just, you know, exercising their talent on their own. So someone might get up and sing a song and it'd be a beautiful song, but it wasn't organized, it wasn't arranged, it wasn't charted, nothing like that. They just sang, you know, hey, they're inspired to sing and they sang. So Jack would basically had a good idea who had what talent he would put them together.
You know, he wrote most of the songs on the album and even though he didn't write, he arranged it. He had a great way of doing it. We were a headband. We didn't have anything written down at all.
Jack would basically figure out whatever part he was interested in in developing and play it on the guitar and then he would hum it to whomever was going to be playing or singing that part. So they really learned it in their heads. Fortunately, we had a hell of a lot of great, many talented people. Deanna Wilkerson, of course, comes to mind, or Shirley Smith, you know, even Jack himself or his sister, Joyce, people who had come from musical traditions in their own communities or in their own spiritual practices.
And he was able to meld them together and put together a heck of a music experience. And he gets all the credit in the world for his able. Jack has an organic approach to writing music that he's evolved over the years as technology has changed. It cannot be overstated the complexity of producing an album before the modern age of digital recording.
Jack spent hours working songs out in his head before humming and playing the individual parts of songs to his musicians and vocalists. I've written three of them. Sometimes I'll get, you know, a track that I like, a feel that I like and I'll work with that and then I'll put lyrics to it or I'll start out with just lyrics and then, you know, put tracks to it. When I started out recording, it was two track recording.
You put 30 people in a studio and you do it down until everybody gets it right one time. And if you're right at the end of a song and you screw it up, you gotta start over again. How did the idea of doing the album come about? Well, I had memories about that.
It was kind of like back at... Located next to a porno theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the producers workshop, though a bit small and minimalistic, housed some of the best modern recording equipment of the era. Classic albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall and Fleetwood Max Rumors were recorded and engineered there. I had producers workshop do it.
We got it together. It was all done on 16 track recording at that time, which was the best you could get. 24 track hadn't come out yet. Then we had to get to the fourth.
We had to go to the church and say, well, how much will cost? I think the total cost was about six grand. So we went to a house and made that money back. So we'll sell the albums at the church after the meetings for ten bucks an album.
It's a great idea. Everybody went out to go to the park one day to have their ticket for the album. I wasn't there for that. We had all these albums and we were selling at the church meetings.
In all of our temples, we would have... And I think the animirdos wanted to restarted this. You would have trinkets, you know, Jim's pictures and keychains with Jim on them and Jim in various poses to protect you from different ailments or accidents or whatnot. And so this became one of the items for sale at the tables that were right there in the church.
So it was just another item of merchandise and waiting at more money to the church. On the albums cover, we see the choir posing in Golden Gate Park. They're standing in front of the portals of the past. The white columns of the monument once marked the entrance to the Knob Hill Mansion, a garish palace built by a wealthy railroad tycoon.
Those pillars are all that remain of San Francisco's gilded air mansions after the 1906 earthquake. I didn't come into the mertils. I think that Deanna might have thought about doing that. I think they mentioned it to us, you know, that that might be a good idea to shoot it that way since we were in San Francisco a lot, you know, at the other building.
So good that way that day. How were the songs chosen for the album? I took what I thought at that time were the ones that had our best arrangements at that time. There was other songs that we could have done, but I thought at that time based on what I had to work with, that those particular ones would probably be enough of a cross-send for listeners who, you know, like one thing or another, some like gospel, some like pop, this and that.
I tried to like get that feeling and, you know, along with what was being said in the songs, you know, to try to be a balance. No, there was a lot of stuff we could. I had more songs written and stuff. At that time, I'd already got the country doing all these performances and stuff.
It just never got to the point. We were selling that one. So many of them that had never got to a point. We thought about, you know, got another one.
And by the time I initially thought maybe it would be good to cut it, it got to a point where I was going to leave. Jack was given a lot of creative control over the album, but recording sessions had to be organized around the temple's busy schedule. The album was kind of like when we get a chance to do something, we'll go do it. You know what I mean?
Because we were so busy trying. What I had to do was kind of lay out a whole idea to myself and kind of make lists of how I'm going to organize. First of all, you have to get the band in and lay the tracks and put those arrangements together and record them. And then once we got to that point, because what I'd have to do is I'd have to figure, when we go to LA, we couldn't get out of there until about, you know, maybe 11, 12 o'clock at night, maybe sometimes later than that, to get into the studio.
So I had to like book time ahead of time. And then after the meeting in LA, get the guys together, we'd get in the bus and not drive the bus over to produce a workshop there on Hollywood Boulevard. And we had to lay tracks. And so we did all the tracks over a period of a few weeks to get all of the band tracks together.
Then, you know, lay out what we were going to do in terms of the vocals of the choir background singing and take them in and to background tracks of the vocals. And then I had to organize everyone who was singing lead on each one of those songs. We had organized them, take them in, and record the vocals last. It was just a matter of, you know, getting it organized after those meetings and all that.
That's what I had. That was the real hard part. For several weekends, from midnight to early in the morning, Temple members crowded into the producers workshop, fascinated by the professional recording equipment and excited to be a part of the album. They patiently awaited their turn in the booth, taking maps between takes.
You would lay down tracks in the original section of the guys who were in the mastering lab, but you would lay down the bass track version, the guitar track, the rhythm track. And then from there, Jack was instrumental in every single second of all that. So, I mean, you know, all those songs so well that I remember with the technician, we were trying to redo something and we didn't want to go back and redo it in songs, but they wanted to take their technologically. So they had to find this one note and just make whatever the adjustment was I forgot.
Now, and Jack picked out the songs. It was just one single note. So the, and the teacher said, damn man, how'd you do that? Jack said, well, I wrote most of these songs.
It was kind of funny. I mean, most of this time I wasn't playing because, you know, I would be laying down a track at one point and then that's pretty what all I needed to do. But I, you know, it's a great way to get out of the planning commission's meeting. So I would always go and it's always fun to kind of walk around Hollywood when I wasn't needed.
And the way it works is, you know, you get into it with me. I was alone. You know, you got your earphones on, these padded earphones and you're in a recording booth and, you know, bang. But that's how the solos were recorded.
And then Rick and I would, Rick and I think it was the rhythm section would record our bits together and then Jack would add in, choir or the other way around, something like that. But you could really manage the recording because you had all these different tracks. You know, wasn't a whole bunch of people singing at any one time. And Jack would use very few people and only the best people.
So it came out as pretty damn good. Jack, he was a hardass. I mean, I've got to tell you, he was a real hardass as a director. He knew exactly what he wanted and the way it sound and would not tolerate any deviation.
And he knew if you weren't playing your part exactly as you've been told to play it, you know, he would give you a glance to let you know you had certain anything by him and you're going to have to answer for it. So he was demanding and perfectionistic as he had to be. And that's why the album is as good as it is. That's why it has a kind of integrity to it.
You know, all the songs of course are different and you're soloists, but it has a sound and a style. And that is down to Jack, period. I have spilled from the heat, we sound so sturdy, but we are to know not to know not to know not. Jack was the architect behind the aesthetic and sound of the album with his uncompromising ear and commitment to his vision, track by track the album came together.
You know something? I was happy at the time that fidelity-wise it came out good. When I heard the whole thing completely finish, there were some things that I wish I had mixed. In all of them, I wish that it had just a little bit more bass bottom, not a lot, but just a little bit more bass bottom on them.
For a little more punch on some of them. Before I decided that I tried to get them was, you know, I'm talking about this and that. None of them had ever been in attention, you know, to what's going on. Jack wrote several original songs for the album, including Because of Him, Set Them Free, Will You, and Hold On Brother.
His contemporary compositions complemented more traditional pieces, adapted for the album. Every walk of life that filled the pews and temple services was represented on the album. Don Beck, the director of the Junior Choir, worked diligently to get the children ready for their recording sessions at the studio. The Junior Choir originally created to keep the temple's children occupied and engaged during services had become a feather in the temple's musical cap.
Thank you, dear ones. It was written a bowl if there's anything lovely or anything of good report to think on that, and I can't think of anything more lovely than you, so I can think on that. I look at these beautiful young people. I want to wear on Friday night, could you find a group of young people so vivacious and so outgoing and so beautiful.
And up there the balcony of Little Fellows that very Nick's service, they need to be down where they can sing to us here because they always sing so faithfully up there in the balcony. Whole balcony of Little Fellows, we're so grateful for them too. Wonderful, wonderful. I was teaching a Sunday school class for the kids.
Now I could be wrong on this. What I was thinking was that he did it for a little while. Somehow the junior, he wanted to have them sing. He came up with that song, Welcome.
I don't know where that came from. Well again, what we had done was we had already recorded all the tracks and everything, and so thinking he brought in maybe 15 or 20 kids, track down, and he would stand in front of them and kind of like choir director. We give them all headphones and put it on them and they all, nothing happened in that studio probably. We go between 11 and 3 o'clock or 12 and 3 o'clock in the morning.
In fact, as I recall, some of them were kind of like nodding out in between doing stuff. The children, between the ages of 5 and 12, slept anywhere they could between takes at the producers workshop, spread out on the floor and under tables. They rested until it was their turn, then wiping the sleep from their eyes. They donned headphones and delivering the same enthusiasm they would Sunday mornings, belted out a giant welcome.
Musically, Welcome is the most light-hearted, carefree song on the album. Personally, it has always reminded me of the theme to Sesame Street, but for many former members who knew the little personalities behind the voices, the song is a brutal reminder of just how much potential was wasted on November 18, 1978. Walking with you, Father, with Shirley Smith and Deanna Wilkinson, hold on, Brother, was the whole choir, and Deanna Wilkinson saying, he's able, is Shirley Smith. I played guitar and bass on different ones on there.
Now, the guys that played regular bass was Bob Houston. The drummers, they were kids. One of the drummers was Danny Pietla, and one of them was Lou Jones played on a couple of things, and Danny Curtin played on some, and Loretta played Oregon, Hammond B3, and Deanna played piano. I went to a meeting last night, but my heart wasn't right.
Something's got a hold of me, sung by Ruth Coleman, is probably the most well-known song on the album. The lyrics tell the story of the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. The music plays to the adulation of the crowd, a high energy tune that represents the temple's earthly connection to God and Jones' miracle of laying hands. Now, horn players, Mike played tenor saxophone, Rick Cordell played trombone.
Rick was the tromboneist in our band, and one heck of a good tromboneist. He was a great talent, and I was always inspired by his playing, and we're tired to keep up with him. And we had a pretty good brass section. In his article, he wrote that Melvin Johnson was 25 when he joined the temple.
He had spent most of his life in and out of prison for sex trafficking and drug charges. After Melvin joined the temple in San Francisco, he turned his life around and became a temple bus driver and joined the choir. Melvin's vocals have an authenticity, like someone who believes everywhere he's singing. Melvin never went to Jonestown, but legend hasn't, after leaving the temple, he returned to street crime and passed away in the 90s.
Well, Melvin was a member of the choir, and he came to us out of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was very comfortable with a musical tradition and had a beautiful voice on his own. It was a little bit gritty, but that made it even more attractive. And he was one of our soloists, and back was the soloist on Walk on My Land My Shoes.
Melvin and I were, we were never a buss of buddies because I was a college student, and my buss of buddies were all my fellow college students. But we were good friends. I enjoyed talking with the melon, writing a bus with him occasionally. And of course, once I left the church in early 1977, all my contacts with temple members were essentially cut off.
So I hadn't seen Mel for a long time. After that, I didn't see Mel at all until after the massacre. I was walking home from work. I worked in Bank of America building in Montgomery Street, San Francisco.
I lived in a little apartment in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, just off the Gary Street. So I would walk home to my job at the job at home on Gary Street, just like anybody working, just think my thoughts and just walk until I got there. So I'm walking home one afternoon up Gary Street, and this cab just jerks to us, shriaches to a halt. And this big guy gets out and starts running for me.
I thought, did I not pay a cab fare? Am I going to get my butt beat here? What's happening? And I was getting ready to run away, and I looked as he got closer.
I said, oh my God, it's Melvin Johnson. So I ran out into the middle of the street to meet him, and we just grabbed each other and hugged each other and cried. And he said, Mike, I thought you were dead. I said, Mel, I thought you were dead.
And we just continued to hug each other and cry. And to bring ourselves up to date with where we were, it was just an amazing experience. Of course, as you can imagine, all the cars, Gary is a very busy street, particularly a commute hours. And so here we are in this situation, and the cars, the horns were blaring and the drivers were flipping us off and telling us to get down on the road.
So Mel had to go park his car and come back and we had a nice chat after that. It was a great story. I don't think I saw Mel again after that. I understand that he had a troubled life, and I'm sorry to hear that.
And that he's no longer with us, and I'm sorry to hear that. I really thought he was a great, great director. It was my heart whenever I think about it. But we were both shocked that each other was not that we each were alive.
You know, it's hard to start with someone who doesn't have that experience to understand, but to see somebody like that is as if they come back to life. Set them free was like talking about working with people that are having trouble with their lives in terms of making it either to get or trying to go and also being discriminated. And also being discriminated against and all the things that work in terms of our societal values against people. It was kind of like, you know, if we show them love, that could be like the first helping them to see that there might be a gland in that regard.
Set them free, you know, in terms of emotion. Mike play in thinner, and we had a record. I play on that song. I'm playing bass.
Mike Wood counts as saxophone solo for Set Them Free as the high point of his musical career. When he left the temple, he was forced to leave everything behind, his family, his friends, and his beloved sax. My saxophone was, you know, like the stratovariest saxophone. You know, you name all the famous sax players you've ever heard of, and they were playing that horn.
So, Summer Mark 6, my mother paid $150 for that horn. This was back at a time when my dad didn't make much more than that monthly. And the reason she did it, she bought it from me, she wanted me to be a musician. I wanted to be a musician.
You know, I had this one key little horn from her dad, and she knew that I wanted to sell her because it's best for the world. So, she made a dream with me. I went through so many instruction books that she would buy with the horn. And I did.
I created my end of the bargain. I put me down the Lazarus and I got to be about to day horn. It was so beautiful. The summers were, the lacquer rings, perfect, and you know, it had these fine cave mother of pearl buttons that, you know, depress.
It was just magnificent. And it came in this fabulous case. It was very modern, very styled. I used to sleep with the horn in the case right next to my bed so I could have my hand on it.
So, and I love my horn. So, anyway, when I was leaving, I mean, I tried to find a goddamn thing, but I think somehow somebody had just ended up with it with the instruments, right? Because at that point I didn't have a place in my own. And I wasn't too interested in this series.
I wasn't getting out. And I went down to look for it. I couldn't find it. So, I soon was on the bus on the way to Los Angeles and came back and I was gone.
And it was there. Stephen played it from time to time, but he never did anything with it. There's another guy, though. Tenor Pfeit was named with Brian Duque, I think.
And Brian was a very talented musician. He actually went to Guyana and died down there. And I seen a couple of pictures of him in the band down there playing tenor saxophone. And I was like, I'm not sure why I'm playing tenor saxophone, but I'm sure my horn went to Guyana.
And I had no idea what happened to it after that. I assumed that my horn was down there and got stolen by whoever came in and maybe sold on a black marker or something. I hope it's being played today, but I don't know. The only thing I really would say would take.
Not because of the monastery value, just because it's in my life. And of course, I wish I could have done myself for not trying to talk to Trisha or even Harriet to leave me. I think that's a good sense of working out, but who knew everybody was going to die? I know that we had the suicide drills, but I thought those were just oiled tests.
And everybody else did too. I thought I could come back and just get my sister out. Anyway, it didn't happen. You know, people, we couldn't make sure people were caught up in our own cultishness because that was part of what was required of us.
But I always had said, and I truly believed that we were betrayed by the good intentions. We had scheduled it for the Oregon within the rest of the Black with their little rays and what the heck is this, dude? Jim Jones insisted against Jack's vision for the album on performing his reworking of O'Solomeo. The 20-year-old sound engineer Bob Schaper assigned to work the booth after hours.
Recalls Jones' dramatic entrance to the producers workshop. Jim Jones was likely more threatened by the talent of the choir members than he was the studio, but as always, wherever he went, he was sure to leave an impression. As over the top, as the armed entourage may have been, the tension in the air likely added to the recording. As it is without a doubt the most cumbersome, least-cruvy tune on the album.
Jim Jones was likely more threatened by the talent of the choir members than he was the studio, but as always, wherever he went, he was sure to leave an impression. As it is without a doubt the most cumbersome, least-cruvy tune on the album. Jim has a nice voice, but his delivery sounds somewhat self-conscious and overly contrived. Mike Wood once said in an interview that there was a hidden subtext to why Jim Jones recorded this particular song, as if Jim is really saying, I'm God, and I came down for my glory.
This song, more than any of the others, is a throwback to the early days of the Temple before Jack Arnold, when the Temple was more traditional and a whole lot wider. It's a bit of a square peg in an otherwise circular flow, and Jones compared to the energy of the rest of the performers is just kind of square. You know the churches down from his glory in terms of a relative congregational song that other churches have sang too. He was in part of the functioning, pushing ideas about him, and that was part of getting that started over the people that believed what they thought they saw, of his healings and his metaphysical acts and whatnot.
So that was all about for him, and I didn't want to put it on the album, but at time there was a man who had to have the focus on who the focus was supposed to be about. His love has no limit. That's the thing to remember his love has no limit. Father, socialism, yes, he thank you.
Oh, what? You've done. If you have the best kind of, you've been singing a louder. Father, we thank you.
Possibly my favorite and certainly the most hauntingly beautiful track on the album is Black Baby performed by Marcelyn Jones, accompanied by Loretta Cordell and Richard Trop. Not unlike down from his glory, the song has a different feel from the rest of the album. The recording is a bit raw, the musical influences more European, but the themes speak the message of the album, and Marcelyn's delivery of the vocals is anything but contrived. Loretta's organ swells against the soft chimes of ethereal bells, as Richard's cello hums a somber melody.
Marcelyn's voice begins with a whispering vibrato, the melody becoming increasingly haunting, as the song builds to a crescendo. That was Nina Simone's record of Brown Baby that Marcelyn had changed the word to me junior. She was singing it in one of the meetings, and she would say every once in a while, but they changed the lyrics of it so it made more sense. She came in and I think she did it in one or many times.
Dick, Tia, Chello, and the organ together. The organ melts into the abyss as Marcelyn's falsetto, raw and emotional, transforms the soft lullaby into a mournful dirge. Marcelyn's performance of Black Baby speaks to a promise she made to her adopted Black child, as well as a promise she and her husband made to all the children of the temple. Mommy and Daddy will protect you and keep you safe from harm.
Judging by the emotion in Marcelyn's voice, it was a promise she felt passionately about, the tragic beauty of Richard's cello, ominously transforms the piece with soulful phrases, like tears caught in your throat. I don't know if there were years back, I opened my album. I just made copies of it. I had the first album in the town, but it's open now.
In 1993, we had what was called the Live Right on a Big River. It's a big one. It was in the middle of the night about four o'clock in the morning, it had been storming all night long, thundering and storming and carrying on. I woke up about five o'clock in the morning and I heard water.
Outside my bedroom window is my swimming pool and I thought, well maybe because it's been raining and thundering and carrying on all this time, the swimming pool is overrunning, and I didn't know it. I got up to look out the window to see what's happening with this swimming pool and when I put my feet on the ground, it was in about five inches of water. I looked out my other window there in the bedroom at the river and the river was in my house. In a period of about 30 to 40 minutes or so, it was way steep in my house and went past my house a block or so.
I had all my stuff out in the garage of all those originals and the flood wiped them out. I had fish in my garage. So that was an exciting part. But yeah, I lost a lot that I wrote and had the stuff we do.