April 4, 1968, was the day Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. So much changed after that day. There were riots in the streets. The National Guard drove tanks through our city. Troops were everywhere. There was a lockdown curfew after dark. Many buildings were burned and looted in the parts of town where the recording studios were. Interestingly, Lewis Willis told us, the old family furniture store was not harmed in any way even though buildings on both sides of the street were ransacked and several set on fire. Lewis was a friend to many in the neighborhood as was his father before him. They sold furniture and allowed people to pay (or not) on credit for fifty years. He was passed over by the riot. Like the pelican on his front window promised, “A little down on a big bill.”
Later on, when I started dating Susan, my wife, I learned she marched with Dr. King and the Memphis Sanitation workers a few weeks before he was killed. She was only fourteen at the time. Most folks will tell you about the heightened tension felt everywhere in Memphis between the races after that horrible event. Even the music wasn’t above it.
Through our manager Lewis Willis, Globe signed a record and publishing deal with Hi Records and Willie Mitchell in 1970. I was fifteen at the time. We recorded a few singles at Allied Recording Studio, which grew to occupy the entire furniture store by then. The guys in the band helped Lewis build the new studio by working nights and weekends. We would do anything to record.
Lewis arranged for us to do a session at Royal on a Saturday soon after we signed. I was elated. They had a Hammond B-3 there and a Leslie speaker just like Booker T. played and I couldn’t wait to play it. When we unloaded our guitars and amps that day I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.
We walked into the cavernous old building on South Lauderdale Street goggle-eyed. It was an old movie theatre converted into a recording studio. Stax, just around the corner, was also an old movie house. It seemed the high ceilings really suited the recording process. It made everything sound big.
We didn’t really get to dive deep into any serious music that day. We did a few takes though. Mostly we just listened to Willie Mitchell tell stories of who recorded there and how much promise he saw in us. It couldn’t have been a better day. Over the next year or so, we recorded many times at Hi’s Royal Studios. We even recorded at Stax Studios some, as well as Allied, which was our home turf.
Allied bought a Scully eight-track recorder so they could compete with the bigger studios. I heard it was the same type of machine The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on. Many years later my wife and I met George Martin, the Beatles record producer, at the Grammy awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York and had a wonderful conversation. He was sitting alone in the foyer that day for some reason, and my wife simply struck up a conversation with him. She got his autograph. She reminds me I didn’t.
In August 1969, everything in the music stratosphere tilted. That was when the Woodstock Music and Art Fair happened in upstate New York. Woodstock was the largest music festival that had ever happened. It was three days long with back-to-back performances of every artist imaginable. There were four hundred thousand people there. I didn’t get to go. I was only fifteen, but the next summer in 1970 was when I became “experienced” as Jimi Hendrix would say. Woodstock the movie was released.
At that time, it was only being played at the outdoor drive-in movie theatres in Memphis because it was restricted by age to attend. You had to be eighteen to get in. Dana and I were dying to see the movie. Dana became a total Jimi Hendrix freak and just had to see him play the “Star Spangled Banner” on his guitar complete with simulated dive bombs on the guitar’s whammy bar. Not only did I want to see that, but I was just as much into Joe Cocker, Santana, and Sly and the Family Stone.
We had to come up with a way to get in. Dunk Carter’s big brother was eighteen, so we devised a plan for him to drive his parents’ Oldsmobile Delta 88 to the drive-in. That was a really big car. Dunk planned to lie down in the rear seat floorboard under a blanket and Dana and I could hide in the trunk. Off we went!
Woodstock changed everything. Our soul band transformed into a rock band with horns. We were doing some pretty original stuff for the day. We were definitely influenced by Santana, Hendrix, and Jethro Tull, as well as horn bands like Sly and the Family Stone, Chicago, and Tower of Power. We were getting somewhere musically and Hi and London Records, their distributor, loved the new hybrid sound. We started to record some originals, looking for that special first single. We were playing out all over the place in the mid-south and were fairly popular. My dream was coming true; the dream I first had when my school bus passed by Graceland every day. It seemed being a rock star was where it was at.
Later in high school, I became good friends with Elvis’s stepbrothers, Ricky, Billy, and David. Elvis’s dad, Vernon, married a girl named Dee when Elvis was in the Army. She had the three boys. Ricky and I hung out quite a bit for a year or two. He would take me to Graceland to mess around, but only when Elvis was gone. After I became a Christian I told Ricky about it. He kind of blew me off at the time, but many years later he told me he shared my story of finding Jesus with Elvis because it had such a big impact on him.
Ricky said Elvis looked at him and said, “You know Ricky, Eddie is right. We’re the ones that are wrong.”
But that was still a bit farther down the road. As Globe continued to develop I was on cloud nine. My dreams were all coming true.
FIVE
Livin’ on the Edge of Dyin’
The only time I saw my father cry while I was growing up was when my older brother Mike shipped out for Vietnam in 1968. We were all together at the Memphis airport when Mike was flown away. He recently graduated Officer Candidate School in the Army and was a second lieutenant. We fortunately didn’t hear the statistics until later just how long second lieutenants survived in combat in Vietnam. It wasn’t very long. Some only lived minutes. They were targets. A few months after Mike was in the country, he was severely burned on his legs and ended up in a hospital in the Mekong Delta. He spent several months recuperating there and eventually made it home safely, thank God. He was a proud veteran, but to his dying day the after-effects of that war tortured him. It was devastating.
Our oldest brother Shelton didn’t have to serve because he didn’t pass his physical, but my brother Larry volunteered for the draft when he was nineteen, shortly after Mike shipped out. He knew he was on the short list to be drafted. He learned that by volunteering, a recruit was offered some limited level of choices of where to go, what his job would be, and so on. Larry ended up being assigned to Germany. While he was stationed there, he sent me a poster bearing a large photo of a marijuana cigarette with a sign stuck in it that said, “Keep off the Grass.” Ironically, I immediately hung it on my bedroom wall. Much later when Larry came home, he told me the drug culture invaded the Army as well, and he had his own struggles with it in Germany. He sent me the poster hoping somehow his little brother wouldn’t go down the same path.
Mike and Larry were different people when they came home. Obviously they had grown into men, but they both seemed so unsettled. Wartime definitely took a toll on them and our family. A few years had passed since they were in the house and I guess they were trying to find their place in civilian life. I was in the twelfth grade playing in the band and doing pretty well. Globe was popular around the mid-south and we felt like we were about to make it. But both of my brothers were acting completely crazy and out of control. They went out together carousing all night on an endless party. I knew my parents were concerned. Heck, even I was concerned, though I was living in my own dark world of the same sort of thing.
Larry went out and bought a big motorcycle and began to ride around with a biker gang. That certainly didn’t sit too well with our family. We were just a normal, suburban, middle class family and not at all immersed in the motorcycle culture with its peculiar tribes and behaviors. Several nights I came home from a gig long past midnight on a Friday or
Saturday and found Larry passed out from drinking or taking drugs. Sometimes he’d be lying next to his motorcycle in our carport on the bare, cold, concrete. I helped him into the house and upstairs to bed. Occasionally, the next morning I attempted to talk to him about it, but he didn’t want any part of that. He told me to stay out of his business and leave him alone.
One night I got home in the wee hours of the morning from a gig we played about fifty miles north of town. I remember it was winter because frost was a problem on the windshield of my old Ford Econoline van. The defrosters didn’t work and I had to roll down the window and freeze to death to see where I was going. I remember being very high once driving around and my friend ripping his underwear off of himself in the passenger seat next to me without even undoing his pants. He proceeded to use his shredded underwear to clean the frost off my windshield. He just reached down grabbed and ripped! I couldn’t believe he did that. Gross!
This particular night when I pulled into our driveway at home I saw Larry’s motorcycle parked, but no Larry lying close by. I got out of my van quietly, closed the door, and walked into our house through the door entering the breakfast area. I saw a lone figure silhouetted in the dark at our table. It startled me. I reached over and grabbed for the light switch. As the light came on and my eyes adjusted I saw Larry sitting at the table. On one side of the table was our oversized family Bible and on the opposite side of the table stood a fifth of whiskey. Larry stared at one for a second, then turned his head and stared at the other. He was completely silent. It was like the Bible and whiskey were dueling it out over the control of his mind. He didn’t utter a sound. The sight was beyond bizarre.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Are you going crazy?”
He motioned for me to come over and said, “Take a seat. I need to tell you a story.”
Larry emotionally told me that while he was in Germany he fell in with the wrong crowd and found himself deeply involved with drugs and all that goes along with that lifestyle. He said over time he became quite despondent and disillusioned with just about everything he once held dear. “Things grew quite bleak for me,” he explained. Yes, he was homesick, but it was more than that.
One night he was invited by a fellow soldier to attend a small meeting made up of soldiers. They met to discuss and study the Bible together in the city of Heidelberg. He told me for the very first time, he heard he could have a relationship with God way deeper than just going to church or anything he ever experienced. It could be a personal relationship. He heard Jesus would forgive him of his sins if he simply asked, and then Jesus would help him navigate this crazy life, not only on a daily basis, but on a moment-by-moment basis.
Larry then said, “Eddie, I dedicated my life to Jesus that night. That was just a few weeks before I was due to be shipped home. Things became very clear for me for the first time. I knew God loved me and had a plan for my existence far beyond random fate. Things made sense. Then I came home. I became intimidated and afraid to share with anyone about my encounter with Jesus in Germany for fear of being labeled a religious fanatic or ‘Jesus freak.’ I was especially afraid to tell you. I didn’t know what you would think of your big brother. So, I bought the motorcycle and tried everything possible to drink my life away and forget the promise I made to Christ that night in Heidelberg.”
Then Larry said the most remarkable thing to me. “Eddie,” he whispered, “God won’t let me go. No matter how hard and fast I try to run, God won’t let me go.”
That story is what I call experiencing my first epiphany. An epiphany is defined as a moment of sudden intuitive understanding; a flash of light, or a sudden and profound understanding of something; or an appearance or manifestation of God. Larry’s story was all three of those things to me. I understood and knew at once that something supernatural had dramatically taken hold of him. I just wasn’t completely sure what it was. It bothered me.
The next day Larry put his motorcycle up for sale and immediately stopped his carousing and partying. He began to attend church and told me daily he was praying for me and my soul. Over the next few months he actually drove me away from him with his continual preaching. He was driving me nuts. Our band was doing well. I certainly didn’t need the religious distraction. After all, I was born an American and grew up Southern Baptist. I even got baptized when I was eight years old. I would fist fight you if you said anything bad about Jesus. I didn’t need anything deeper.
Larry bugged me constantly about it, saying, “There is more to it, Eddie. Jesus can be real and walk alongside you every day.” I hated hearing that! Especially over and over, all day long.
Larry and I grew up sharing a bedroom. Our two older brothers roomed together down the hall. Larry and I were still rooming together after he came home from the Army. We had grown but the house was still the same size. I recall us getting ready to go to sleep one night and Larry started in on me with his Jesus preaching.
I screamed at him, “Shut up! Leave me alone. You are driving me insane.”
He did shut up that night. I also remember looking up from my bed in the darkness totally exasperated and praying, “God, he is either right or I am right. I want to know the answer.”
I found out later you need to be careful when you ask God things like that. He will surely tell you. “Seek and you shall find,” the Bible says.
Later that spring, in March 1972, the band was playing a dance in Ripley, Tennessee, at the town’s recreation center. It was on a Saturday night and before I left for the gig, I finally succumbed and promised Larry I would attend church with him the next morning. I hadn’t attended any church in several years and was rather skeptical about churches in general. There was a special guest speaker in town named David Wilkerson. Larry thought I would enjoy hearing him because he had a rough and tumble story of working with gang members in New York City. I didn’t get home from the dance until around 4:00 a.m. When Larry came to wake me in the morning, I told him I got in too late and that he should go away. I still recall hearing his footsteps as he turned to leave. Then a miraculous thing happened. I just sat straight up in bed and called out for him to wait. I knew I was going.
We drove across town to a church I wasn’t familiar with. That morning I heard David Wilkerson speak and a young guitar player/singer named Dallas Holm perform. I had never seen anyone play guitar at a church service before and was taken aback by it a little. Nothing remarkable happened that morning other than the guitar playing, really.
Larry asked if I would be willing to go see a movie made about the morning speaker’s life. It was called The Cross and the Switchblade. I agreed to go on one condition; that Larry would then accompany me to Overton Park later that afternoon to see some local bands play. The Overton Park Shell during that era hosted some of the best rock bands and performers in the world. I saw The Allman Brothers, Deep Purple, ZZ Top, Seals and Crofts, Grateful Dead, Poco, and many others in concert there through my high school years. Elvis even performed there in the fifties. Globe played there a few times on the stage with other local bands. The shell seemed to have a concert every weekend during the warmer months. Overton Park also became the place in Memphis the hippies would hang out during the sixties and early seventies. You could get into all kinds of mischief there, from strange religions to Frisbees to drugs. It was where we all gathered on weekends.
After seeing the movie, it was my turn for Larry to hang with me. We drove to Overton Park to hear the bands play. I had been with Larry all day, and now it was his turn to be with me and my people. It was a warm, beautiful, and sunny March afternoon in Memphis. The skies were blue, the trees were just beginning to bloom. The gray winter was passing by. Spring, flowers, music, and the smell of pot were everywhere in the air. There were several thousand people on the great lawn of the park. A stage was set up at one end and one of my friend’s bands was playing. The sound system suddenly squealed loudly with feedback and everyone held their ears.
My friend, the band’s singer, t
hen screamed over the mike “F-—k! Sorry about that!” I looked at my brother, embarrassed by what my friend said. Then my brother and I began to walk through the crowd. Right then, Dana Key walked right up and faced me. His eyes were very swollen and red. He was obviously really stoned, drunk, or both.
He asked “Where you been all day? We’ve been having a blast.”
About that time Dana turned to see my brother standing next to me and immediately turned and ran off. He probably didn’t want to get preached to. It was in that moment I had my second epiphany. The difference between my life and my brother’s life became immediately and vividly apparent to me. For the first time my eyes were completely opened to who I was and what I had become, juxtaposed with who my brother was, and what he had become. Also, for the first time in my life, I felt ashamed. I asked Larry if we could leave.
That evening we went back to hear David Wilkerson again. He spoke about something I never heard before. That one day Jesus would come back to this earth and take his children home. I realized I was deathly afraid of facing Jesus and that particular thought bothered me greatly. Why was I afraid if my life was so together with God? When the invitation came at the end of the service, I went forward and was ushered backstage to a room. I remember the guitar player, Dallas Holm, coming into that room. I immediately made a beeline over to him and asked if we could speak.
I explained to him about my band, success, and the dilemma I faced. “If I give my life to Jesus, will I have to quit my band?” I asked.
He gave me a very simple, honest and to the point response. “I don’t know that answer,” he softly said, “but you have to be willing to.”
As I have thought about what he said through the years, I’ve come to the conclusion it was divine truth. It hit me hard in my gut and gave me just enough strength to take the next step. I prayed with Dallas Holm that night and asked Jesus to forgive me. I dedicated my entire life to him.
Rebel for God Page 5
