TBT: The Candymen, "Georgia Pines," featuring Rodney Justo

February 19, 2015

Like last week’s TBT, this is a memory from my law school years; this one from the spring of 1968, when I was a first year law student and, as a transplant from Florida to Massachusetts, experiencing my first real spring since I was a child. I had spring fever bad, which wasn’t helping me concentrate on my studies. Many nights I stayed up late, trying to catch up on assignments and prepare for exams, and would always have WBCN, Boston’s first “underground” FM rock station, playing.

Probably because of my emotional state at the time, music I heard often got engraved on my memory. One night the DJ announced what he said was an example of “Southern white soul,” a song called “Georgia Pines” by a group I’d never heard of called the Candymen. He also mentioned that the singer’s name was Rodney Justo. The video clip below shows the Candymen performing “Georgia Pines” at Greenwich Village’s famous, and still extant, music venue The Bitter End in 1967:

Despite “Candymen” and “Rodney Justo” sticking in my memory, I didn’t follow them at the time. WBCN didn’t play the song again, at least not when I was listening, and no Candymen albums showed up in the record bins at the Harvard Coop. My principal musical interests at the time were the harder edged British Invasion groups–the Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds–along with Dylan and the country-tinged rock of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. From the last two I developed passions for, respectively, the “Cosmic American Music” of Gram Parsons and the protean Neil Young.

A few years ago I became Facebook friends with someone I had known in Tampa during my youth, and saw that one of that person’s other friends was a “Rodney Justo.” “Could it be?” I thought. I went to Rodney’s Facebook page and–sho’ nuff! It turned out we had both lived in Tampa and went to rival, though not arch-rival, high schools (I to Robinson; he to Chamberlain). Although I had never met him. I sent a friend request, which he graciously accepted. I learned that, before the Candymen, he had led a group called Rodney and the Mystics, which triggered a vague memory, as I’d probably heard of them during my Tampa years (they shouldn’t be confused with the Mystics who had the 1959 hit “Hushabye; those Mystics came from what is now my adopted home, Brooklyn). What I didn’t know was that Rodney and the Mystics became the go-to backup band for many established rock stars. Roy Orbison asked Justo to join his backup group, called the Candymen as a reference to Orbison’s song “Candy Man”. Although their principal commitment was to Orbison, the Candymen also recorded and performed on their own; witness “Georgia Pines.”

After the Candymen, Justo became a founding member of Atlanta Rhythm Section; the photo at the top of this post is of him while he was with ARS. The video clip below is of a reunited ARS performing “Doraville” live sometime in the not-too-distant past; Justo is the lead singer.

Some years ago Justo left the full time music world and took a job with a beverage distributor because he decided it was more important to be a successful father than a successful musician. Nevertheless, he still does gigs with Coo Coo Ca Choo, a ’60s-’70s revival band, in the Tampa area.