“My husband has a lot of friends,” Cher called to them. “Friends that can kill you.”
The three men started laughing. Sonny walked to the other side of the restaurant where two of his friends were sitting. They often told Sonny that “We make our living with brass-knuckles.”
“Would you please get those jerks out of here?” Sonny asked them. Sonny walked back to the jerks' table. They stood up ready to hit him, when Sonny’s two friends came over and laid a pair of brass knuckles on the table with a thud. “You’re not hungry,” Sonny’s friend said. “Time to leave.”
The three jerks left. But the manager told Sonny not to come back to his restaurant because they always caused trouble the way they dressed in hippie-style clothes.
Angered, Sonny and Cher left the restaurant they had been patronizing for years. That night Sonny wrote the song, Laugh at Me. He recorded it by himself the next day. The day after that it was on the air.
That month, Sonny and Cher had five songs in the top-twenty: I Got You Babe, Baby Don’t Go, Just You, All I Really Want to Do, and Laugh at Me. Only Elvis and the Beatles had done that. Sonny wrote and produced all five.
“But I don’t care. Let them laugh at me. And maybe the next guy will say ‘hi’, instead of ‘why?’."
**** This story came from Sonny's auto-biography And the Beat Goes On
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I skied once on the same intermediate slope at the top of the mountain at Heavenly Valley in 1968. I skied with no poles and no ability to slalom, going too fast and falling down many times. Sonny died there. I had no idea that would happen when I skied there.
Ron