Jim Jones and the People's Temple

Pinole is a small suburban town in the San Francisco Bay area, the sort of place that Goffin and King wrote "Another Pleasant Valley Sunday" to celebrate. Back in the 1970s, the town held an annual "Summer Fun Fair" in a park near the town center, where there would be activities for kids, food stalls, and live music concerts. At some point circa 1978, the organizers promised an up-and-coming local rock band that if they played for free, the city would at least guarantee advance publicity, etc., to make it worth their while. But the city didn't live up to their promise - or so the story goes. And that stuck in the craw of some of their friends. For the 1980 edition of the Pinole Summer Fun Fair, as an act of vengeance, they signed up an imaginary band called "Sweetwater", which they claimed was a mellow, "contemporary FM" act, to play the Fun Fair early on Sunday morning. But "Sweetwater" was just a tongue-in-cheek code name for the real band, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, which was anything but a mellow acoustic act.

The recording that was made of the performance does not do justice to the sonic assault that was launched on the unsuspecting citizens of Pinole that morning. I was not part of the lineup for the opening number, Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My" (click the song titles to download/listen to the MP3s), and I happened to be in the middle of the Fair when the opening, out-of-tune chords came crashing across the park.  Every head turned as one toward the stage as one, slack-jawed. The fair organizers ran up to the guy running the PA board, asking him to turn down the band. But he was in on the joke, and swore that it was all the stage amp mix, and there was nothing he could do - which wasn't quite true.

Hey Hey, My My was followed by a Chuck Fisher original, whose exact title I don't recall, so I've given it the working title "Turn On My TV". This was followed by a Sex Pistols cover, "Pretty Vacant", then a really atrocious reggae jam I've called "Rough'n'Reggae".  Then came the closest thing to real quality rock'n'roll in the set, a Chuck Berry parody, "Johnny B. Rotten".

Chuck Fisher was an electronics technician who built his own synths as a hobby.  His "E-machine" can be heard on most of the tracks, albeit buried under the stage amp mix most of the time.  He also built a cheezy keyboard circuit laid out on a hunk of plywood for the explicit purpose of destroying it on stage with a hatchet.  If you listen carefully, you can hear the axe falling repeatedly during "Gotta Fix It". Further axe-wielding mayhem can then be heard during the final number, another Fisher original, "David's Snapping Out".

The Lineup (in approximate order of appearance):
Vocals: Shalom Aberle, Chuck "David Turdowski" Fisher
Guitars: Tom Mackey, Steve Shattuck, Roger Allen
Keyboards: Al "Anus Reems" del Simone, Chuck Fisher
Bass: Steve Shattuck, Kevin "Sid Fang" Kissell
Drums: Some cheezy homemade drum machine.

Musically, this is far from the best thing I've been involved in, but I'm still very proud to have been a part of it.  As I put it to one of the Pinole guys who couldn't figure out why I was so motivated to participate, it's not every day you get the chance to terrorize a small American town with rock'n'roll.