Why infamous Hoosier Jim Jones shows up on the new Foo Fighters album

One of the year's most buzzed-about rock albums arrived Friday, and the recording includes a surprise reference to Indiana native and infamous cult leader Jim Jones.

The Foo Fighters' "Concrete and Gold" album includes a song titled "La Dee Da," in which vocalist-guitarist Dave Grohl sings the line, "Jim Jones painting in a blue bedroom," three different times.

Jones is known for his leadership role in a 1978 mass suicide in South America, where 900 people consumed a cyanide-laced drink on his orders. The "Jonestown" tragedy happened 25 years after Jones worked as a student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church in Indianapolis.

Jones was born in Crete, Ind., a community of 1,200 residents 82 miles east of Indianapolis. He started college at Indiana University, graduated from Butler and was ordained by the Disciples of Christ.

Although Grohl's reference to Jones could be interpreted as the cult leader actively using a paintbrush, a 1997 interview provides solid clues to the song's origin.

"As a teenager, I was obsessed with Charlie Manson and Jim Jones," Grohl told English music magazine NME. "I was in a band called Dain Bramage, and I wanted to make a banner to place behind us so I did a graph drawing of Jim Jones on this white sheet. When I went to take it off the wall, the paint had gone through so for about seven years I had this huge painting of Jim Jones above my bed."

(Yes, Indiana has ties to Manson's early days, as well).

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Other lyrics in "La Dee Da" point toward Grohl's time as a teenage musician.

The song mentions three U.K. industrial-rock bands from the 1980s that influenced Grohl before he joined Nirvana in 1990: Whitehouse, Psychic TV and Death in June.

Jones' early newspaper notices in Indianapolis included a 1954 report involving imported monkeys. He apparently imported monkeys from India and South America to sell as a fundraiser for his church.

Call IndyStar reporter David Lindquist at (317) 444-6404. Follow him on Twitter: @317Lindquist.