Latest / Stuff You Should Know / What is a shotgun house?
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
- 0:03Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to you Stuff you Should
- 0:07Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
- 0:16Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant
- 0:19Speaker 1: with me as always, Um, which makes this stuff you
- 0:24Speaker 1: should know? The stuff you should Yeah, that's what thinks
- 0:30Speaker 1: on it. Nice Joff, Thank you. Um, what are you doing?
- 0:34Speaker 1: I'm doing great. I feel like we just do this.
- 0:36Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to the show, are you Yeah? Because
- 0:39Speaker 1: it touches on parts of Atlanta in their in its history,
- 0:42Speaker 1: which I always loved, and that's this Atlanta man all
- 0:45Speaker 1: over the States, all over the States, Chuck as Uh,
- 0:50Speaker 1: the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself
- 0:55Speaker 1: living in a shotgun check, and you may find yourself
- 0:58Speaker 1: in another part of the world. Mm hmm. I think
- 1:02Speaker 1: even David Byrne didn't realize what he was saying when
- 1:06Speaker 1: he put those two lines together. I think he meant
- 1:09Speaker 1: them to contrast with one another. But really, if you
- 1:13Speaker 1: found yourself in a shotgun check and say the beginning
- 1:17Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, you probably were experiencing both. Yeah, yeah,
- 1:24Speaker 1: but he doesn't tip so now he doesn't care what
- 1:26Speaker 1: he said. That's crazy. Um So Chuck. You remember Hurricane Katrina,
- 1:32Speaker 1: Um I killed I believe people. There is a lot
- 1:37Speaker 1: of people. Um. And one of the things in addition
- 1:41Speaker 1: to all the loss of life and property was a
- 1:43Speaker 1: real worry about loss of very um specific type of architecture,
- 1:50Speaker 1: the shotgun house. And the reason even though you can
- 1:53Speaker 1: find it everywhere from Key West to Chicago to San Francisco,
- 1:56Speaker 1: all over the place. You can find shotgun houses Atlanta, UM.
- 2:01Speaker 1: The reason why people were worried about losing it in
- 2:03Speaker 1: New Orleans because as far as the United States goes,
- 2:06Speaker 1: that is where it was born. That's right. And the
- 2:10Speaker 1: whole reason anybody would even worry about a shotgun house,
- 2:13Speaker 1: if you've ever seen one, you might think, why would
- 2:16Speaker 1: anyone care about losing old chalk gun houses is because
- 2:19Speaker 1: they are routinely cited as the great possibly greatest contribution
- 2:25Speaker 1: by African Americans to American specific architecture and design, and
- 2:32Speaker 1: not only that, responsible for the bringing together, in many
- 2:37Speaker 1: ways of the African American communities due to their things
- 2:42Speaker 1: that we're going to talk about, I was going to
- 2:44Speaker 1: ruin it. I thank you for saving it. That was
- 2:46Speaker 1: good man. Um, you've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah,
- 2:51Speaker 1: let's talk about some of the features people. We should. Yeah,
- 2:54Speaker 1: because there's probably plenty of people out there and people
- 2:57Speaker 1: who have seen them and don't know what we're talking about.
- 2:59Speaker 1: You're about to go. Oh, if you haven't seen him,
- 3:03Speaker 1: then go onto how stuff works dot com and type
- 3:05Speaker 1: in what's the shotgun house and you will find some
- 3:08Speaker 1: images of shotgun houses in this article that I wrote.
- 3:11Speaker 1: That's true. You wrote this years and years ago. I
- 3:13Speaker 1: don't think I knew that. Nice job. Shotgun house is
- 3:17Speaker 1: long and narrow. A lot of times they won't have
- 3:20Speaker 1: windows on the side of the house, although in researching
- 3:22Speaker 1: this I saw plenty that do so that sometimes they don't. Yes,
- 3:27Speaker 1: And the reason why it's because they're often really close together,
- 3:32Speaker 1: like I mean, like a foot a couple of feet
- 3:35Speaker 1: you can maybe walk without turning between two houses. But
- 3:39Speaker 1: that's it exactly. Um. They well you just said they
- 3:43Speaker 1: were close to one another. Um, they have high ceilings.
- 3:47Speaker 1: They very few of them had indoor plumbing at first.
- 3:51Speaker 1: That was usually brought on later, um and tacked onto
- 3:55Speaker 1: the rear of the house. Sometimes crudely. Uh. Typically what
- 3:58Speaker 1: you have is living room, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen, all in
- 4:02Speaker 1: a row, all in a straight line, all the doors
- 4:06Speaker 1: lining up, interior doors lining up right. So when the
- 4:09Speaker 1: front and back doors open, you can see clear through
- 4:11Speaker 1: the house, which is one of the reasons why a
- 4:13Speaker 1: lot of people think it got its name. You could
- 4:16Speaker 1: shoot a gun or a shotgun through the front door
- 4:19Speaker 1: and it would exit out the back door without hitting
- 4:22Speaker 1: a single wall, and that would hit the house behind
- 4:24Speaker 1: it or some in And like you point out, Josh,
- 4:29Speaker 1: it's a cute story, and it's all over the place.
- 4:32Speaker 1: I bet you there are many many tours of New
- 4:34Speaker 1: Orleans that'd say that story is true. May or may
- 4:37Speaker 1: not be. It probably isn't. Um. What else is? What
- 4:42Speaker 1: else is specific about shotgun houses? Chuck? Uh? They aside
- 4:46Speaker 1: from being a modest homes, they have certain architectural flourishes
- 4:53Speaker 1: that make them distinctive. Um. I think the idea was
- 4:57Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, we may be or and
- 5:00Speaker 1: not have the biggest house, but we can certainly adorn
- 5:03Speaker 1: the the vent venting greats and what the the arbor
- 5:09Speaker 1: that held up the not the arbor brackets, brackets held
- 5:11Speaker 1: up the roof they would be intricately carved, usually in
- 5:15Speaker 1: a gingerbread design, um, which a lot of people kind
- 5:18Speaker 1: of criticize her pooh pooed that addition, um as uh
- 5:24Speaker 1: poor blacks or even before that slave's just trying to
- 5:28Speaker 1: emulate whites um, which is not the case because if
- 5:32Speaker 1: you trace so, the shotgun house finds its origins in
- 5:36Speaker 1: the US and New Orleans, but if you go even
- 5:38Speaker 1: further back, you'll find older ones on Haiti, and then
- 5:41Speaker 1: even further back you will find something that looks started
- 5:44Speaker 1: startlingly similar. Um. In West Africa and in the Yoruba tongue,
- 5:50Speaker 1: these houses are called to gun, which means house in Yoruba,
- 5:55Speaker 1: or showgun, which means God's house. So probably that's where
- 5:58Speaker 1: the name comes from. By ways, to gun or showgun
- 6:01Speaker 1: from the Oruba dialect, right, which I love. UM. But
- 6:05Speaker 1: in these houses they also had like intricate details, but
- 6:08Speaker 1: they were more of an African motif. Over time here
- 6:10Speaker 1: in the United States they adopted gingerbreadin or Um Victorian. Yeah,
- 6:15Speaker 1: different kinds of carvings, but it is very cool. It's
- 6:19Speaker 1: kind of like this is a very modest, straightforward house,
- 6:22Speaker 1: but there's also pretty neat little details we can still
- 6:26Speaker 1: have like great pride in it. Um. They were usually
- 6:30Speaker 1: New Orleans. They were typically if you feed off the
- 6:31Speaker 1: ground because of the obvious flooding problems there. Um. And
- 6:37Speaker 1: this I found and it seems believable to me, but
- 6:41Speaker 1: I didn't have time to triple check it um. At
- 6:44Speaker 1: the time, property taxes were based on frontage still are man,
- 6:48Speaker 1: are they in New Orleans? If you have a house,
- 6:52Speaker 1: you're paying by them. The frontage, which is the width
- 6:56Speaker 1: of your house. Yes, and if you are looking at
- 6:58Speaker 1: a shotgun house is very nar but it's long, right um.
- 7:02Speaker 1: And the number of rooms and in New Orleans, I
- 7:05Speaker 1: thought they changed it to the number of rooms. They
- 7:07Speaker 1: added that on. Yeah, it's both okay uh. And in
- 7:10Speaker 1: New Orleans rooms include hallways and closets and you're not
- 7:15Speaker 1: going to find a hallway or a closet in a
- 7:17Speaker 1: shotgun house. So it's also another way to um, I
- 7:21Speaker 1: guess keep your property taxes low as well well. And
- 7:25Speaker 1: I found that they originally it was just frontage, and
- 7:27Speaker 1: then so they started building the camelbacks, which is a
- 7:31Speaker 1: shotgun house with the second story on the rear of
- 7:34Speaker 1: the house only. And then that's when the city said, oh, well,
- 7:37Speaker 1: we should tack rooms onto this as well, because these
- 7:40Speaker 1: smart people have found a way around paying, as you know,
- 7:43Speaker 1: property tax. Pretty smart. Yeah, it does, it makes it
- 7:47Speaker 1: makes sense. And I also found that the first mentioned
- 7:50Speaker 1: in print calling them shotgun houses was in our very
- 7:53Speaker 1: own Atlanta Journal Constitution in nineteen o three, a classified
- 7:57Speaker 1: ad may have been the first time that it was
- 8:00Speaker 1: actually named that in print, and it was like shotgun
- 8:04Speaker 1: house twelve dollars a month rent. Yeah, twelve bucks. That's
- 8:08Speaker 1: not too bad. But you could get a shotgun house
- 8:10Speaker 1: about that time a kit for a hundred bucks. Um.
- 8:13Speaker 1: They also allowed for good air flow too, I want
- 8:15Speaker 1: to mention, yeah, because you can open up the front
- 8:18Speaker 1: and back doors and you got a straight shot. Well,
- 8:19Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons why they were adopted in Haiti.
- 8:22Speaker 1: Not everybody in Haiti was from West Africa, but that
- 8:25Speaker 1: became the predominant style, this West African design house, because
- 8:29Speaker 1: it fit in really well with the tropics, all right.
- 8:33Speaker 1: So well, it made its way from Haitia to New
- 8:35Speaker 1: Orleans because of the well in indirectly because of the
- 8:40Speaker 1: French Revolution. Right, So French Revolution takes place and you've
- 8:45Speaker 1: got um, liberty, legality, fraternity to all people. That put
- 8:51Speaker 1: French planners in Haiti in kind of a pickle because
- 8:56Speaker 1: they couldn't grant liberty to their slaves because wouldn't have
- 9:00Speaker 1: any profits any longer. So as they're figuring this out,
- 9:03Speaker 1: they're trying to figure out what to do, a guy
- 9:05Speaker 1: named Toussaint low Mature makes the decision for him and
- 9:09Speaker 1: leads a slave uprising that lasts for many years and
- 9:12Speaker 1: basically drives all of the white plantation owners from the
- 9:16Speaker 1: island of Haiti, one of the places that they went.
- 9:19Speaker 1: And then Haiti became the first UM recognized sovereign maroon
- 9:25Speaker 1: nation of freed slaves revolting slaves UM, which is pretty cool.
- 9:32Speaker 1: But that also led to, if you go back and
- 9:34Speaker 1: listen to our voodoo podcast, a deep and abiding suspicion
- 9:38Speaker 1: by whites of Haiti all things Haiti from that point
- 9:41Speaker 1: on UM. But so that this slave uprising that led
- 9:46Speaker 1: to the UM. The freeing of Haiti also led to
- 9:50Speaker 1: the white populating of New Orleans. So about that time,
- 9:54Speaker 1: if you went to New Orleans, there about twelve thousand people,
- 9:57Speaker 1: and the third of them were slaves. The third of
- 9:59Speaker 1: them were white, and then a third of them were
- 10:01Speaker 1: free blacks, so it's it's real melting pot UM and
- 10:05Speaker 1: one of the place one of the things that came
- 10:07Speaker 1: about from that was people fleeing Haiti bringing the shotgun
- 10:10Speaker 1: houses with them, and then it just kind of it
- 10:13Speaker 1: was always African American UM and it was always associated
- 10:17Speaker 1: with African Americans, and it just kind of spread from
- 10:19Speaker 1: there to where if you if you came across the
- 10:23Speaker 1: working class African American neighborhood like in Chicago or something
- 10:27Speaker 1: like that, you're going to see shotgun houses or Atlanta,
- 10:31Speaker 1: like I've mentioned many times. Uh, if if you are local,
- 10:35Speaker 1: then you can see these kinds of houses in like
- 10:37Speaker 1: the Sweet Auburn district, Cabbage Down and I think Cabbage
- 10:41Speaker 1: Town where they were houses for factory workers for the
- 10:44Speaker 1: nearby cotton mill offt and uh factories. Yeah, it changed hands. UM. Also,
- 10:49Speaker 1: you're gonna find them directly across the street from Martin
- 10:51Speaker 1: Luther King's birthplace UM in the King Memorial area. The
- 10:56Speaker 1: whole park is UM. There's still people that live in
- 10:59Speaker 1: them and they been pretty well preserved over there. Yeah,
- 11:01Speaker 1: it's very cool, but those were like late nineteenth century built,
- 11:05Speaker 1: but it did kind of transition from African American only
- 11:09Speaker 1: to working class of all colors. The shotgun house became
- 11:13Speaker 1: kind of an emblem of the working class as much
- 11:17Speaker 1: as African Americans now. Is a is a row house
- 11:20Speaker 1: the same thing? Or is a row house? Just know
- 11:22Speaker 1: those are side by side, like touching, sometimes all forming
- 11:26Speaker 1: one large building, but then maybe different gables differentiating them.
- 11:32Speaker 1: A shotgun a shotgun house could be a rowhouse, but
- 11:36Speaker 1: a rowhouse can't be a shotgun house, because then row
- 11:39Speaker 1: house indicate like the proximity to one another more than
- 11:42Speaker 1: the style of the house. Or no, I think it's both, yeah,
- 11:46Speaker 1: And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be
- 11:49Speaker 1: confused with the railroad house either, which is you enter
- 11:54Speaker 1: and there's a long hallway from front to back. In
- 11:56Speaker 1: the off of the hallway are rooms apart mints. My
- 12:00Speaker 1: friend Mereth in New York, in Brooklyn, lives in a
- 12:02Speaker 1: railroad department, which was always a little weird because like,
- 12:06Speaker 1: in order for like when I would stay there, I
- 12:08Speaker 1: would stay in the living room, and when someone had
- 12:10Speaker 1: to go to the bathroom, they would have to walk
- 12:11Speaker 1: through the living room to get to the bath It's
- 12:14Speaker 1: always awkward. Or she could go outside through the hallway
- 12:18Speaker 1: and then come back in because she had two doors
- 12:20Speaker 1: to her apartment. It still does. I So, Chuck, we
- 12:27Speaker 1: were talking about where else they spread. There's UM also
- 12:29Speaker 1: a lot of them in Oklahoma, especially southern Oklahoma. Yeah.
- 12:33Speaker 1: And one of the reasons why is because southern Oklahoma,
- 12:36Speaker 1: the Oklahoma Territory Um before it became a state, was
- 12:40Speaker 1: a free black area and a lot of blacks traveled
- 12:44Speaker 1: to Oklahoma to moved to Oklahoma to be free, and
- 12:47Speaker 1: a lot of runaway slaves maroons is what they're called,
- 12:52Speaker 1: formed and integrated with um Native American tribes like the Seminoles.
- 12:58Speaker 1: And when these five civilized tribes and making air quotes
- 13:01Speaker 1: like furiously um were moved to the Oklahoma Territory Um,
- 13:07Speaker 1: a lot of blacks went with them, and shotgun houses
- 13:09Speaker 1: showed up alongside. The whole thing awesome, And there's like
- 13:13Speaker 1: all black towns are formerly all black towns in southern
- 13:16Speaker 1: Oklahoma where it's like shotgun houses everywhere. Yeah. So, Chuck,
- 13:21Speaker 1: if you ask me, I feel like, now we've reached
- 13:24Speaker 1: the point where this is the fact of the show.
- 13:28Speaker 1: And I know you're excited about this one. Well, it's
- 13:31Speaker 1: cool they um. It's one of the reasons I talked
- 13:33Speaker 1: about why the cultural legacy of the shotgun home had
- 13:36Speaker 1: a lot to do with bringing together the African American
- 13:39Speaker 1: community is because of a little something called the front porch. Yeah,
- 13:43Speaker 1: they didn't exist in the United States before the shotgun
- 13:46Speaker 1: house brought it along. So shotgun houses are typically I
- 13:48Speaker 1: mean a lot of them actually were so far forward
- 13:52Speaker 1: that they were on the sidewalk, But the ones that
- 13:54Speaker 1: weren't had a few feet of grass and then a
- 13:57Speaker 1: front porch to hang out on. And in a small house,
- 14:01Speaker 1: you're going to congregate on the front porch. And in
- 14:03Speaker 1: the evenings, if your neighbors on our front porch five
- 14:06Speaker 1: ft from you and there are five feet from another one,
- 14:09Speaker 1: then what you have is a big, old, friendly cultural
- 14:13Speaker 1: block party going on every evening, and the porch is
- 14:17Speaker 1: made it's a spandrel I guess of the overhanging roof.
- 14:22Speaker 1: And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans,
- 14:24Speaker 1: like you said, they were built off of the ground.
- 14:26Speaker 1: Some you have to build step to go up to it,
- 14:29Speaker 1: and then you have just buy you have a de
- 14:32Speaker 1: facto porch. And then yeah, you add a bunch of
- 14:33Speaker 1: them together and there you go. So we didn't have porchs.
- 14:36Speaker 1: So like these huge wraparound porches on old like plantation
- 14:40Speaker 1: mansions stoops in New York, like all of this stuff
- 14:44Speaker 1: can be traced back to the shotgun house. Really, yeah,
- 14:47Speaker 1: that's crazy, And thank you for that, shotgun house builders,
- 14:52Speaker 1: because one of my favorite things is the front porch
- 14:55Speaker 1: or porch. Good good ports. It's very important. Yeah, you know,
- 15:00Speaker 1: shotgun houses started to wane in the twenties, and it
- 15:04Speaker 1: wasn't It wasn't until fairly recently that we knew the
- 15:08Speaker 1: history of shotgun houses. That architects um went back and
- 15:12Speaker 1: and art historians went back and figured out where this
- 15:16Speaker 1: all came from and traced it step by step. I
- 15:18Speaker 1: mean it was within the last like a couple of
- 15:20Speaker 1: decades um. And they were like, okay, we found some
- 15:24Speaker 1: shotgun houses and these are really old, and they date
- 15:27Speaker 1: them and they'd be like, okay, New Orleans is the birthplace.
- 15:29Speaker 1: And then somebody be like, have you been to Port
- 15:31Speaker 1: of Prince Like they got some they're really really old there,
- 15:33Speaker 1: and then they traced them back and then somebody figured
- 15:36Speaker 1: out that they were from West Africa. But the new
- 15:39Speaker 1: construction in the United States waned in the twenties, and
- 15:43Speaker 1: like I said about the turn of the last century,
- 15:46Speaker 1: you could get a kit for about a hundred bucks,
- 15:48Speaker 1: which also made them really good cheap housing for labor.
- 15:52Speaker 1: Um if you had like a work camp, you probably
- 15:55Speaker 1: shotgun house. Yeah, exactly. Um, And they were all a
- 16:00Speaker 1: really good for disaster release. Specifically, they made a big
- 16:03Speaker 1: appearance in the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen o six. Well, yeah,
- 16:07Speaker 1: they needed to put up displaced people. And when you
- 16:10Speaker 1: can build a house for a hundred bucks, then you
- 16:13Speaker 1: do so exactly. And when it can be pre fabricated
- 16:16Speaker 1: and then taking apart in like six large parts, put
- 16:21Speaker 1: on a train and sent somewhere and then put back
- 16:24Speaker 1: together within like a couple of hours, it's like a
- 16:26Speaker 1: waffle house. Yeah, it's exactly like a waffle house. As
- 16:30Speaker 1: a matter of fact, I think you can go out
- 16:31Speaker 1: on a limb and say, we wouldn't have the waffle
- 16:33Speaker 1: house without the shotgun house. I think you're right. Uh.
- 16:36Speaker 1: Little pop culture, Yeah, you already mentioned David Byrne uh Coogs.
- 16:41Speaker 1: John Mellencamp my boy Coogs. Pink Houses was about a
- 16:45Speaker 1: shotgun house. Apparently his legend has it. He was driving
- 16:49Speaker 1: on a busy main road and he saw this little
- 16:52Speaker 1: black guy sitting on the front porch of his little
- 16:53Speaker 1: pink shotgun house. Gave him, gave him a wave, and
- 16:56Speaker 1: he said he just looked like he was as happy
- 16:58Speaker 1: as could be sitting out on his porch. And uh,
- 17:01Speaker 1: I wrote a song about it. That's nice, and and
- 17:03Speaker 1: that the album that I was on too, Yeah, I
- 17:05Speaker 1: think so great song. Elvis Presley was born in the
- 17:09Speaker 1: shotgun house, Oh yeah, in uh yeah, Mississippi, which is
- 17:13Speaker 1: where I have family actually, And Aaron Neville grew up
- 17:17Speaker 1: in a shotgun house, the incomparable and muscly Man and Moley.
- 17:26Speaker 1: But boy man that I can sing, yeah like a bird,
- 17:32Speaker 1: pretty good, Aaron Neville as me. Um, shotgun houses are
- 17:36Speaker 1: making a resurgence too, by the way, are they building
- 17:39Speaker 1: them again? Yes, there's this thing called the tiny house movement.
- 17:42Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that and the whole idea of living modestly
- 17:45Speaker 1: in the house you can afford that um grants a
- 17:48Speaker 1: very small carbon footprint. Ye, shotgun houses fit that. Bill.
- 17:52Speaker 1: I like the tiny house thing. I think I think
- 17:55Speaker 1: actually Emily might have written an article about that. Is
- 17:57Speaker 1: that right? If I'm not mistaken or maybe it was me.
- 18:00Speaker 1: Somebody did somebody in our family? Did I remember I
- 18:03Speaker 1: remember it happening? Was it Buckley a few years ago? Yeah?
- 18:06Speaker 1: Buckley wrote it. Um, you got anything else, no go,
- 18:10Speaker 1: you know, seek out local historic landmarks that might be
- 18:14Speaker 1: easily overlooked when you're angry in traffic. Yeah. And when
- 18:18Speaker 1: next time you pass the shotgun house, like, stop and
- 18:20Speaker 1: look at it, and you'll see some pretty cool little
- 18:22Speaker 1: details to it. Ask him to open the door so
- 18:24Speaker 1: you can shoot a gun through it. Let do that.
- 18:27Speaker 1: Don't do that, man, that was a reversal. I was like, no,
- 18:30Speaker 1: don't do it, Chuck said normally around Uh. And if
- 18:34Speaker 1: you're ever in Atlanta, Chuck and I always recommend going
- 18:37Speaker 1: to the King Memorial Center, the place where he's buried,
- 18:41Speaker 1: where the eternal flame is in all of the surrounding area.
- 18:45Speaker 1: Um is like a living museum. Preserved house is just awesome.
- 18:48Speaker 1: One of my favorite parts in Atlanta for sure. Um. So,
- 18:51Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about shotgun houses and
- 18:53Speaker 1: see pictures of shotgun houses, you can type the words
- 18:56Speaker 1: shotgun house two words into the sir to bar at
- 19:00Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com and that'll bring up this
- 19:02Speaker 1: article that I wrote, and I said search bar, which
- 19:06Speaker 1: means it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna
- 19:10Speaker 1: call this beast email. Hey, guys, did you did you
- 19:14Speaker 1: read this one? Um? I just listened to the Music
- 19:17Speaker 1: Sampling Podcast. We got a lot of good feedback on that.
- 19:19Speaker 1: But man, everybody loved that. It was a good and
- 19:22Speaker 1: a lot of people offered up like people that know
- 19:25Speaker 1: way more than us offered up a lot of cool insight. Yeah,
- 19:27Speaker 1: we get getting called out for not mentioning girl talk.
- 19:30Speaker 1: I've never heard girl talk, so I don't feel bad.
- 19:33Speaker 1: But everyone we know about girl talk. Now, Okay, guys
- 19:37Speaker 1: that just listened to the Music Sampling Podcast wanted to
- 19:39Speaker 1: say how great it was that you featured the Beastie
- 19:41Speaker 1: Boys so prominently in the show. But I share a
- 19:43Speaker 1: little story when I met them during your nineteen seven
- 19:46Speaker 1: Licensed Build tour in Las Vegas when I was fifteen.
- 19:50Speaker 1: So this girl must be my age because I saw
- 19:51Speaker 1: that tour and I was about to wow. All right.
- 19:56Speaker 1: They performed in a concert hall on the un l
- 19:58Speaker 1: V campus, so it was easy to get to the
- 20:00Speaker 1: area where their tour bus was because I lived in
- 20:02Speaker 1: the bleachers. They were inviting every female they saw back
- 20:05Speaker 1: to their hotel for a party, including fifteen year olds.
- 20:09Speaker 1: Well they were only like eighteen nineteen. Still, well, I know,
- 20:13Speaker 1: but you get to be forty and you're like, what's
- 20:17Speaker 1: the big difference of five years? Man, that's back then.
- 20:22Speaker 1: I'm just saying, it's not like they were like years older,
- 20:26Speaker 1: all right, I'm defending their pedophilia. Uh. By the time
- 20:32Speaker 1: we got there, the party had taken over the ninth
- 20:34Speaker 1: floor and had already been shut down. We got to
- 20:36Speaker 1: say hi to m c A before being escorted away
- 20:39Speaker 1: by security for curfew violation. But I was determined. I
- 20:42Speaker 1: skipped school the next day went back to the hotel,
- 20:45Speaker 1: basically casing the joint. I ended up finding m c A,
- 20:47Speaker 1: who remembered me from the night before. I said, how
- 20:49Speaker 1: did he said? Hi? Very nice? What you heard waiting
- 20:54Speaker 1: on that one? I ended up spending the whole day
- 20:57Speaker 1: with the guys, chatting, playing arcade games, while king over
- 21:00Speaker 1: to a seven eleven with a very hungover ad Rock,
- 21:03Speaker 1: and even helping load their bags onto the tour bus.
- 21:05Speaker 1: They were only nineteen twenty and twenty one at the time,
- 21:08Speaker 1: very unassuming, so they weren't getting much attention. I felt
- 21:11Speaker 1: like a little sister tagging along with their super cool
- 21:14Speaker 1: older brothers. That is very cool. At one point m
- 21:17Speaker 1: c A offered me a tour of the bus. We
- 21:19Speaker 1: got on and he closed the door and said, now
- 21:21Speaker 1: we cannot do all sorts of things that you're going
- 21:24Speaker 1: to tell all your friends. We did anyway, he was
- 21:26Speaker 1: really hysterical, so he was like he was still a gentleman, unfortunately,
- 21:31Speaker 1: and he's like a Buddhist now and he unfortunately I
- 21:34Speaker 1: had not thought to bring a camera with me, so
- 21:36Speaker 1: I have no picks. I did get her auto document
- 21:40Speaker 1: any of this happened. Now she does um. I did
- 21:42Speaker 1: get their autographs, but the only paper I had in
- 21:44Speaker 1: my jacket was old school snoopy Valentines. I had thought
- 21:48Speaker 1: could give up friends. I still treasured my three snoopy Valentines,
- 21:52Speaker 1: each one with their autographs, and she sent pictures of them.
- 21:55Speaker 1: That's cool. I stayed until they left around six at night.
- 21:59Speaker 1: I naively asked m c A if he would write
- 22:01Speaker 1: to me. He answered with an honest no, and gave
- 22:04Speaker 1: me a very sweet kiss on the cheek. I loved
- 22:07Speaker 1: it that they have continued to rise on popularity and
- 22:09Speaker 1: her given the respect of being true innovators in the
- 22:11Speaker 1: field first year, that is Ali Smith and she got
- 22:15Speaker 1: kissed on the cheek by a very sweet sounding m
- 22:17Speaker 1: C And all your fifteen year olds out there, you
- 22:20Speaker 1: better be at home sleeping. Yeah, don't be hanging out
- 22:24Speaker 1: with twenty one year old dudes, especially not the girl
- 22:27Speaker 1: talk people. Those guys are girls. I think girl talks
- 22:31Speaker 1: a guy's dear clear that girl talked to um. Let's see,
- 22:36Speaker 1: what do you want to call out for? Mm hmm.
- 22:39Speaker 1: Do you live in a shotgun house? No? I guess yeah,
- 22:43Speaker 1: if you have like a house with an interesting history,
- 22:45Speaker 1: we did that one, but let's do it again that boy. Um,
- 22:49Speaker 1: if you live in a house with an interesting history,
- 22:52Speaker 1: or you flung out with the beastie boys, we want
- 22:54Speaker 1: to hear those. You can write to us at uh
- 22:58Speaker 1: let's see. You can tweet to us at s y
- 23:00Speaker 1: s K podcast. That's our handled Facebook dot com. Slash
- 23:03Speaker 1: Stuff you should Know is us on Facebook and you
- 23:06Speaker 1: can send us an email at Stuff Podcast at Discovery
- 23:09Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
- 23:18Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com h Brought to
- 23:27Speaker 1: you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera, it's ready.
- 23:30Speaker 1: Are you