Ingrained in the many football traditions of the University of Alabama are these odd words: “Rammer Jammer, Yellow Hammer. Give ‘em Hell, Alabama!” coined by the once-respected university literary and humor magazine of the same name. Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Harper Lee (“To Kill A Mockingbird”), served as editor of the Rammer Jammer during her stay at the university. By the time I arrived on campus with an attitude, a twisted sense of humor and a pen, the bloom was long off the fonts for the old publication. By then, it had turned into an embarrassing concoction of sharp-edged cartoons and smash-mouth journalism squeezed between ads for college bars and local restaurants. Actually, “journalism” is a stretch. Imagine “The Simpsons”, Dave Chapelle, Howard Stern and Jon Stewart captured by law school students and held in a small cage until they squirted out a filthy, eight-page tabloid diatribe aimed at verbally smiting every living thing on a college campus including the old and the helpless. That was the Rammer Jammer – pulp nonfiction.
No longer an official or respected publication of the university, the black-sheeped Rammer Jammer I worked for in the late 1970s was more deeply underground than the original, defiantly outrageous Rolling Stone on a bad day. Along with the work of several aforementioned law school students, my tasteless writing and callously rude cartoons were a shock to the system for an oak-shaded, tradition-bound Southern university and I was under constant threat from one group or another for saying almost anything that could possibly offend nearly everyone. And I did my job with a passion.
The “weekly wiper,” as one administrator disgustedly called it, skewered everyone and everything in its blurry path, and although I was a regular on the president’s list for grades, my pushing of the boundaries of free speech put me on another president’s list as well – a list not unlike Nixon’s enemies list. The school administration eyed me warily and I was threatened by every watchdog group of the era and a few groups who needed watching themselves. I remember a particularly terse conversation one night with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK that caused me to deeply consider another profession, but only until the next edition of the Jammer came out. I needed the money.
Ms. Harper Lee and other influential, old-time Rammer Jammer editors and writers would not have been amused. Few people were. The Rammer Jammer was hardly literature by then and the humor we cranked out was not of the ilk spoken of in polite society. Even so, the nasty rag was scooped up the minute it hit the streets every Wednesday night, and we’d deliver it under cover of darkness sometimes wearing clothes that would hide our identities. Making fun of people who have power and no sense of humor is a dangerous business. This, no doubt, explains why the Rammer Jammer is now defunct. I suppose we defuncted it.
The University of Alabama’s official newspaper, The Crimson White, was the Washington Post-ish, journalistic standard of excellence at the time and still is. The Rammer Jammer was the South Park-ish, bastard stepchild of hellions and is now only a memory. The South was changing faster than any of us even knew and we were too idealistic and ignorant to know that freedom of speech could be short-leashed by politicians and Pollyannas with agendas that didn’t exactly feel like Ben Franklinism. Maybe Lorne Michaels would have appreciated our attempts at humor but this wasn’t Saturday night in NYC. This was Wednesday night in Tuscaloosa. Big difference.
The reason this tale has some nebulous bearing on advertising is this: Since there were no ad schools at the time, places like the Rammer Jammer were where creative people with few outlets and no speed limit got a taste of the business. Granted, the taste was a bit like a rank Swisher Sweet cigar butt picked up off a wet curb and resmoked by people who couldn’t afford new Swisher Sweets, but it was a taste nonetheless, and many people ended up in advertising from experiences like that. Of course, a few people ended up in jail from experiences like that. But that’s another blog.
