Speaker 1: I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
Speaker 2: Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
at a time, which is about to link with the song,
so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
Speaker 2: All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
going to be covering today. Buddy Holly then her space monkey. Okay,
do tell me about Buddy Holly.
Speaker 1: All right. Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holly, born
in Lubbock, Texas. Grew up listening and playing gospel, country
and R and B. His first appearance on local television
happened in nineteen fifty two, and in nineteen fifty five
he opened for Elvis and he decided he would like
to pursue a career in music. Later that year, he
opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, who we talked
about in a previous episode, and at that show he
was spotted by a Nashville scout who got him a
contract with Decca Records. With Decca, he was assigned a producer.
He didn't really get along with that producer, even though
the producer had done several hits for Patsy Klein. He
ended up going with a different producer that would ultimately
become his manager and recorded several songs with him, including
That'll Be the Day, which was his huge breakout success.
They released it as a single by The Crickets, even
though they weren't officially a band at that point. There
was no The Crickets and it was just Buddy Holly
and they had the studio musicians. But he got a
band together, they toured, and by September of fifty seven
it was topping the charts. He put a new band
together in very early nineteen fifty nine with Tommy Alsup
on guitar, Carl Bunch on drums, and Waylay Jennings on
base Whoa And if you've seen any of the couple
of movies that have come out about Buddy Holly, you'll
know that Whylon Jennings was a part of the group
that was there deciding who would have to stay in
the cold and who would get to fly to their
next location. And the story that I've heard is that
Whalon Jennings, when he didn't get rid on the plane,
said well, I hope that plane crashes. Unfortunately, that was
exactly what happened. The bus had frozen up because it
was so cold. They chartered a plane on a last
minute decision, and the pilot they got was a young
Robert Peterson, only twenty one years old. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Allens,
and the Big Bopper, all on the same plane, all
crashed just a few miles away from the airport. The
authorities didn't even know that they had crashed until the
next day, when the owner of the plane actually found
the wreckage a few miles away. Buddy Holly is obviously
an icon and rock and roll and is credited with
putting together the two guitars, one bass, one drums line
up that most rock bands have, and he recorded tons
and tons of songs which were released after his death,
and then in nineteen seventy one, Don McClain released American
Pie all about the Day the Music Died. Okay, Jason
tell Me about Ben Her Okay.
Speaker 2: Ben Her is a nineteen fifty nine epic religious film
starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Stephen Boyd and directed.
Speaker 1: By William Wyler.
Speaker 2: It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won an
unprecedented eleven, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director. Only
Titanic and The Return of the King have matched that.
Pretty impressive. It had the largest budget and largest sets
for any film at that time, which is somewhere around
fifteen million dollars. It was the fastest grossing and highest
grossing film in nineteen fifty nine. It was the second
highest grossing film of all time up to that point,
behind It's the story of Judah ben Hur, a Jewish
man and set around the time of Christ. I know
it because of the famous chariot race scene. I've never
seen this movie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 2: It's classic.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: All right, dee, what can you tell me about space monkey?
Speaker 1: All right? The US, starting in nineteen forty eight, began
a program where they were looking to put monkeys into
space in various rockets, and they did so. Unfortunately, all
of them died during their flights. It wasn't until nineteen
fifty nine that a young reis monkey named Abel appropriately enough,
and Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, became the first monkeys
to successfully travel into space and successfully return to Earth. Now,
you may have an image in your head of space monkey,
but if you do, you're probably not actually thinking of
a monkey, probably thinking of a chimpanzee in a little
silver suit. Am I right? That's true? Yeah. The most
famous quote unquote space monkey was Ham, who was sent
up as an American space satellite for suborbital flight as
a prelude to sending a man into space. Ham was
not really a monkey, but a chimpanzee. The actual year
he went to space was nineteen sixty one. Apparently, was
also a mean little bastard who would often bite the
workers who tried to put him in the space capsule
and rugged poo on the wall. Can't really blame him either,
all right, Okay, guys, that does it for today's episode.
Join us next time for five minutes of fire.