{"id":33137,"date":"2013-07-25T15:53:47","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T15:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=33137"},"modified":"2026-02-20T16:52:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T00:52:32","slug":"artkevin","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=33137","title":{"rendered":"Of Thumbtacks and Timelines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\""Of<\/a>Here\u2019s something I do when I\u2019m working on a story: Timelines. I find them useful, particularly when the topic I\u2019m writing about has a complex chronology, a number of important characters, parallel storylines, etc. Sometimes I do it pretty sloppily, scrawling half-readable notes across multiple pages in a pocket-sized moleskin, linking them up with a tangled polychrome of lines and arrows. Other times I go about it more formally, tearing massive sheets from an easel pad and taping them to the walls, drawing thick lines in permanent marker that stretch from the window near my desk to the bookshelf on the far side of the room. When I go this route, the office acquires the feel of a war room or a madman\u2019s cell. I enjoy scribbling my notes and conjectures directly onto the walls \u2013 it makes me think of Russell Crowe\u2019s mathematics savant character in A Beautiful Mind \u2013 and when I stand back to admire the resulting tapestry of information. . . well, it\u2019s easy to imagine that I\u2019m really getting something done.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been scribbling on the walls quite a bit recently, working on a story that traces the history and significance of the record album He\u2019s Able, recorded by the Peoples Temple Choir in 1973. I\u2019ve got three timelines going. The first one traces broadly the chronology of Peoples Temple, beginning with the establishment of the church in 1955 and running through the San Francisco public auction of Peoples Temple assets in 1979. I\u2019ve liberally copped most of the dates and events from secondary Peoples Temple literature. The second timeline is the real work-in-progress, a list of important dates in the development and epilogue of the He\u2019s Able record itself. It begins in November of 1963, with a young man traveling from Indiana to California to play in a band. It ends (for now) in the mid-1990s, with the underground CD re-release of He\u2019s Able by a shadowy industrial-music bootlegger called Grey Matter. In between, I\u2019m gradually filling in details and dates as I search through old materials and have the pleasure of speaking with former Temple members, recording studio staff, and others who were involved with the record over the years.<\/p>\n

The third timeline documents exactly that process, tracing the course of my research. It begins where my interest in the music of the People Temple begins, on a snowy night in January of 2006, when I scramble into the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis with two minutes to curtain, clutching a press pass and wondering whether I\u2019ll make it out of Leigh Fondakowski\u2019s The Peoples Temple with enough time to swing by the liquor store. By intermission, the liquor store is forgotten, and I am swept up in the phenomenal staging of a story I thought I knew. It\u2019s during this intermission that I first take notice of the music, as the play\u2019s first act ends, as I recall, following an upbeat gospel number. I don\u2019t know which one \u2013 getting a hold of a script from the Guthrie is on my to-do list \u2013 but I think it may have been \u201cSomething Got a Hold on Me.\u201d If you\u2019re reading this, chances are you know the song, an old spiritual about a nonbeliever at a revival meeting, and catchy as hell. And what\u2019s amazing is that the audience at the Guthrie, knowing full well how the final scenes are going to play out, nonetheless gets totally swept up in the thing. They float into the lobby afterwards, heads bobbing and humming merrily to themselves, as if it were intermission at a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.<\/p>\n

The next hash mark on my timeline is a full year later, an afternoon this last February when I buy a ticket to see Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in my current home of Missoula, Montana. There, in the background of several of the film\u2019s montage segments, I hear the same music that had impressed me a year earlier. Except that these tunes aren\u2019t being performed by actors or a contemporary choir \u2013 they\u2019re wrapped in the soft, warm hiss of vintage vinyl. Hot damn, I think, they\u2019ve got this stuff on wax!<\/p>\n

Seven days and sixty (eBay) dollars later, I\u2019m listening to this far-out record in the comfort of my apartment. It\u2019s got a great blue-eyed soul feel to it, a full choir backed by an earnest funk-rock band and some sharp, minimalist brass. The sound is sort of Harlem-Gospel-Choir-meets-early-Doobie-Brothers \u2013 particularly if maybe the Harlem Gospel Choir had more white people in it. And the super intriguing thing about it is the immediacy with which it conveys what the three-hour play, the hour-and-a-half-long movie, and god knows how many books and articles and papers have tried to convey with less success \u2013 that is, the sincerity and positivity and dynamism of those people right there, right then, in Peoples Temple in California in the spring of 1973.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Here is something I\u2019m having a hard time not doing while working on this essay: Giving away too much, too soon. It\u2019s immensely tempting to include thoughts, scenes, and details here that I really ought to save for the work-in-progress. So I beg your pardon for devoting my remaining space to a small point about the items that comprise the last six months on my research timeline.<\/p>\n

The timeline begins in earnest not long after I hear the album. A long Greyhound trip to San Francisco in late March. Three days in the capable hands of research librarians at the California Historical Society. Another day visiting Peoples Temple and He\u2019s Able landmarks on a rented and hopelessly unreliable bike \u2013 the monument in Golden Gate Park where the cover photo was shot, the address where the record jacket suggests the album was recorded (though, in fact, it wasn\u2019t).<\/p>\n

Then, throughout the summer, a meandering chain of phone and email conversations with key characters from the album\u2019s history. These include some fairly predictable contacts: several former Temple choir members, a former musician from the Temple band, the editor of this journal.<\/p>\n

But there are others: a washed-up disco magnate who once haunted the studio where the album He\u2019s Able was cut, a then-lowly recording engineer who worked the night shift to mix and record the album, an itinerant British performance artist with a Jonestown fetish and ties to the Grey Matter re-release, multiple former bandmates of a Temple member central to the album\u2019s production. And on and on, a series of contacts, each of whom seem at first blush to live distinctly outside the Peoples Temple narrative, but each of whom, in fact, possesses some very significant connection to it. Each conversation leads to still more, until I\u2019ve eventually spoken with nearly everyone on my \u201cwish list.\u201d<\/p>\n

If there is one thing that has struck me thus far in my He\u2019s Able research \u2013 other than the remarkably gracious manner in which I\u2019ve been treated by everyone with whom I\u2019ve spoken \u2013 it is the varied and limitless nature of this web of contacts. There is an undeniable mark that the Temple has left on, not only its members and their families, but scores of tangential characters in the Peoples Temple story. I find it telling that I\u2019ve had not one conversation on this topic in the last six months that hasn\u2019t ended with a comment along the lines of, \u201cWhile I can only tell you such-and-such, you really must speak with So-and-So . . . .\u201d The human networks that support our shared stories are vast beyond our imagining.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Here is something I like to use on my timelines that illustrates the point nicely: Thumbtacks. And string. When two events on two separate timelines strike me as having some important relationship to one another, I insert a thumbtack near each of the relevant hash marks and tie a piece of string between them. Say the recording engineer who worked on He\u2019s Able is hired at roughly the same time as the church relocates to Redwood Valley. Each event gets a thumbtack, conjoined by a piece of string. Say I speak with a He\u2019s Able bootlegger next month and would like to link the date of the interview to the year he first acquires the record. Two more thumbtacks, another length of string.<\/p>\n

But the thumbtacks and the strings are only temporary \u2013 I add and remove them at will, depending on where I need to remind myself of some connection. All that is permanent are the myriad pinprick holes left behind like paint flecks on the white plaster wall. When I take down the paper timelines \u2013 as I sometimes do \u2013 I see the scatter of tiny punctures, a record of the infinite disordered moments that make up a history. I see a complex matrix of people and relationships and events that coalesce to tell the story of Peoples Temple. It\u2019s a confusion of black dots against a white field, and it looks for all the world like an inverted galaxy.<\/p>\n

(Brian Kevin is a graduate student studying Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana. His work has appeared in a number of disparate\u00a0publications, including <\/em>The Humanist, Paste, and <\/em>The\u00a0High Country News. Brian would like to offer sincere thanks to the\u00a0folks who have spoken with him about <\/em>He\u2019s Able over the\u00a0last year. He can be contacted at brikevin@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

(A special section on <\/em>He\u2019s Able, including articles, music and lyrics of the album, appears here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s something I do when I\u2019m working on a story: Timelines. I find them useful, particularly when the topic I\u2019m writing about has a complex chronology, a number of important characters, parallel storylines, etc. Sometimes I do it pretty sloppily, scrawling half-readable notes across multiple pages in a pocket-sized moleskin, linking them up with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":33247,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-33137","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33137"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133886,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33137\/revisions\/133886"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}