Places for Songplaces!!

[bazooka]

• Johannesburg is a 1976 track by Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson that brought attention to the resistance of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
  [smaller]Tell me brother, have you heard from Johannesburg?
  They tell me that our brothers over there refuse to work in the mines,
  They may not get the news but they need to know we're on their side.[/smaller]
  
  
  
  
• And Gil Scott-Heron was one of forty-nine artists who collaborated on the song Sun City.
  Sun City is a casino resort located in the North West Province of South Africa. It became the subject of controversy in 1985 when guitarist Steven Van Zandt made it the focus of the music-industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid.

[Farin]

[*] Johannesburg is a 1976 track by Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson that brought attention to the resistance of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

[smaller]Tell me brother, have you heard from Johannesburg?

They tell me that our brothers over there refuse to work in the mines,

They may not get the news but they need to know we're on their side.[/smaller]

same theme and city with Eddy Grant's Gimme Hope Jo'anna

[bazooka]

• Dead Man's Curve - Jan & Dean
  The wikipedia article is painstaking about its location, and even includes a Google Map of the route described in the song .
  
  
  
  
  
• Wolverton Mountain was a country crossover hit for Claude King in 1962.
  Wolverton Mountain is an actual place in Conway County Arkansas and the song (co-written with Merle Kilgore) was based on a real character, Clifton Clowers.
  
  

[Dappled]

"Carey" is a song from the 1971 Joni Mitchell album Blue. It was inspired by her time with a cave-dwelling hippie community in the village of Matala, on the Greek island of Crete.

The song is sometimes rumoured to be about fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor, who plays guitar on some Blue tracks (although not on "Carey" itself) and with whom Mitchell had a brief affair. However, Mitchell has stated publicly that the "Carey" in question was a memorable character named Carey Raditz (or "Carrot" Raditz), a cane-carrying chef with bright red hair that she met in Matala during her European odyssey of 1970. Other references to the village and the al fresco hippie lifestyle abound in the song lyrics, most notably to Matala's now-defunct Dolphin Café (called The Mermaid Café in the song). Mitchell frequently introduced live performances of "Carey" by recounting anecdotes about Raditz and their Cretan adventures.

[RonJonSurfer]

Speaking of Joni, I believe Graham Nash (who was livng with Joni) wrote "Our House" about the house they shared in California.

[bluesboy]

The Laurel Canyon house

[RonJonSurfer]

Nice pics, thanks.

[phil]

Shawna, hope this helps.

My City Was Gone - Pretenders

Written by Chrisie Hynde. It's about her return to her hometown of Akron, Ohio, and being dismayed by the over development and pollution she found.

Alabama - Neil Young

This is Neil's take on racial injustice in Alabama and The South at that time.

Sweet Home Alabama- Lynryd Skynyrd

This is their "answer" song to Neil Young's, Southern Man and Alabama.

Sin City- Flying Burrito Brothers- 1969

Written by Gram Parsons & Chris Hillman. It's their take on living in L.A.

Shattered - Rolling Stones

Stones not so flattering view of New York City.

Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2

Written about British troops killing Civil Rights Marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Dirty Water - The Standells

A funny song about walking the banks of the Charles River in Boston. The song was written by their Producer, who was actually mugged on The Charles. The Standells are from L.A.

Blue Jay Way - Beatles

Blue Jay Way is a street up in the Hollywood Hills. George Harrison was staying in a house on the street. He wrote the song when his friend, got lost trying to find the house.

[Shawna]

you guys are keeping me busy for a long time! Love it!

BTW, if any of yous kids feels like writing up some info on songplaces and submitting it directly to the site, that would be awesome, as well.

[bluesboy]

On Broadway - The Drifters

No Woman, No Cry - Bob Marley growing up in poverty in the Kingston ghetto called Trenchtown.

[bazooka]

• 
  
  
• Baltimore - Randy Newman
  The song was written before downtown Baltimore was redeveloped. Baltimore was terribly depressed through the 70s following the riot in 1968 aroused by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
  

[bazooka]

• Nutbush City Limits - (Ike &) Tina Turner
  
  Nutbush, Tennessee is best known as the childhood home of Tina Turner who described the town in her 1973 song.
  
  [smaller]from wikipedia: " The town does not have 'city limits', per se; however, 'Nutbush - Unincorporated' signs are posted on the adjoining roads."[/smaller]

[bazooka]

• Kansas City
  The best known version of this song, written by Leiber & Stoller, is Wilbert Harrison's 1959 hit, but it was first recorded seven years earlier by Little Willie Littlefield under the title, K. C. Loving.
  
  [smaller]from wikipedia:[/smaller]
  "The lyrics of the song mention the intersection of '12th Street and Vine '. This intersection no longer exists, due to further development, but a park with a path in the shape of a treble clef exists at the former location."
  

[RonJonSurfer]

Blue Jay Way - Beatles

Blue Jay Way is a street up in the Hollywood Hills. George Harrison was staying in a house on the street. He wrote the song when his friend, got lost trying to find the house.

His friend that got lost was Eric Clapton BTW.

[Carl]

A long time ago, I had my picture taken on a corner in Winslow Arizona with a Songfacts T-shirt on. That photo vanished in a hard drive crash and is now only a memory.

I had Zhivko make the text bigger in the SongPlaces entries, and he cleaned up a few HTML errors as well.

Can't believe we don't have Nutbush on there yet.

[RonJonSurfer]

I've mentioned this on SF before, but packed away somewhere are photos of me visiting a variety of Rock and Roll landmarks such as:

The corner of Haight and Ashbury, San Francisco.

I snuck on the grounds of Eric Clapton's house at 461 Ocean Blvd (note album of same name) and had my photo taken. Miami

In front of the Dakota. NYC

In the town of China Grove, Texas..Doobie Bros song of the same name.

In front of Madame Maries Fortune Teller shop on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, NJ

On many of the surfing beaches that the Beach Boys sing about...So. Cal

There are more that I can't remember right now.

[bazooka]

• El Paso - Marty Robbins
  
  'Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl '
  
  [smaller]from [/smaller] wikipedia[smaller]:[/smaller]
  Robbins wrote two songs that are explicit sequels to El Paso ...
  In 1966, Robbins recorded Feleena (From El Paso), telling the life story of Feleena, the "Mexican girl" from El Paso ...
  In 1976 Robbins released another reworking, El Paso City, in which the narrator is on an airplane over El Paso and remembers a song he had heard "long ago", proceeding to summarize the original El Paso story. "I don't recall who sang the song", he sings, but he feels a supernatural connection to the story: "could it be that I could be the cowboy in this mystery", he asks, suggesting a past life.
  

[Shawna]

I walked out in the streets of Laredo one day. In the pouring rain. Just so I could say I walked out in the streets of Laredo.

[Dappled]

"Oxford Town" is a song written by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 1962. It was recorded in Columbia's Studio A on 6 December 1962 for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

The song was composed in response to an open invitation from Broadside magazine for songs about one of the top news events of 1962: the enrollment of a black student, James Meredith, in the University of Mississippi on October 1.[1] Among other submissions was Phil Ochs' song "Ballad of Oxford, Mississippi".[2] The lyrics and music from Dylan's song were printed December 1962 in Broadside's issue #17.[3]

"Oxford Town" does not mention either Meredith or the university by name, but later, in an interview with Studs Terkel, Dylan said, "It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn't... I wrote that when it happened, and I could have written that yesterday. It's still the same. 'Why doesn't somebody investigate soon' that's a verse in the song." /Wikipedia

[bazooka]

• Smokey Joe's Cafe - The Robins
  
  [smaller]from The[/smaller] Songfacts
  " This song was inspired by a real cafe, a beanery called 'Smokey Joe's' which was right next to an oil well at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega ... Los Angeles "

[bazooka]

• Tijuana Jail - The Kingston Trio
  
  [big]Notorious Tijuana jail to be just a dark memory[/big]
  October 05, 2010
  By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
  Reporting from Tijuana -
  ... "Here we'll stay cause we can't pay. Just send our mail to the Tijuana jail"
  They won't be writing ditties about this stinky place anymore. Tijuana will soon close the jail and adjoining police headquarters, eager to slam the door on a dark chapter in the city's history.
  Known for years as "La Ocho," because of its downtown location on 8th Street, detainees were greeted with a cacophony of shouts and clanging metal. The smell of urine and vomit was overpowering. Some inmates walked around freely. The top tier was reserved for drug kingpins and others who were allowed television sets that blared all night . . .
  The closure of the jail, scheduled for this month, is largely symbolic. American detainees and other minor offenders have for years been taken to a lower-security facility elsewhere and the jail has recently been used mainly as an armory and a holding center.
  

[edna]

"Bleeker Street" - Simon&Garfunkel

[Jenny]

All I can contribute is that the band "Fountains of Wayne" was named after a store on Route 46 in Wayne, NJ. It closed last year.

We got our Christmas tree there a few years ago.

[bazooka]

• Lodi - Creedence Clearwater Revival
  
  [smaller] from Songfacts: [/smaller]
  Lodi is a city in California located in the central valley, about 30 miles south of Sacramento and 75 or 100 miles east of San Francisco/Oakland. Fogerty and his earlier band often performed in "nowhere towns" like Lodi.
  
  [smaller] according to last.fm [/smaller]
  John Fogerty never actually visited the city before writing this song, and he simply picked it for the song because it had “the coolest sounding name".
  
  More than you'll ever want to know about Lodi, California.
  

[bazooka]

By the way, please check Songplaces itself to make sure your ideas don't already have write-ups. It's very possible they might! But if not, then they'll be there very soon...

I see this song is already in the database, but here's some additional minor tidbits, icing on the cake for completists.

• The Little Old Lady from Pasadena - Jan & Dean
  
  'She drives real fast and she drives real hard
  She's the terror of Colorado Boulevard '
  The corner of Orange Grove and Colorado Boulevards is the official start of the Rose Parade route.
  
  The premise of the song
  The phrase "little old lady from Pasadena" was part of the material of comedians based in Los Angeles, and because of television, became familiar to a national audience.