by Don Felder
We were given the day off from school to watch the funeral on television with our families, and I remember sitting on the floor in front of our black-and-white set and watching little John John standing silently by his mother’s side at Arlington National Cemetery, while my own mother sat sniffling on the couch. Even my father looked wild-eyed. Man, that was strange.
Everyone remembers where he was when he heard that JFK was shot. I know I always will. Nineteen sixty-three is indelibly marked in the American psyche. But it was momentous for another reason for me. It was the year I met the man who was to become one of the most pivotal to my whole life. His name was Bernie Leadon.
FOUR
Bernie was kinda different. He came from the West Coast—San Diego, California, to be precise—and had this cool-dude air about him. With impossibly curly sandy blond hair, and bell-bottom jeans covered in patches, he looked as if he’d just stepped off a surfboard. The first time I met him, I’d just stepped off a Greyhound bus from Palatka in a button-down shirt, my straight hair slicked to one side, after playing some small gig at a women’s club in the swampy flats of eastern Florida. I wasn’t yet sixteen years old.
“Are you Don?” he asked, strolling toward me. “Don Felder?”
“Yeah,” I replied, a little warily, holding my guitar case to my chest. I’d been expecting my mother to pick me up from the bus station.
“I’m Bernie Leadon,” he said with a smile that lit up his whole face. “Your mom said I’d find you here. Do you need a ride?”
He pointed over to a ’63 Ford Falcon, brand-new, in light baby blue. Open-mouthed, I nodded.
“I’m new in town,” he explained as we pulled away. Looking around, I noticed an acoustic flattop Martin on the back seat. “I went into the music store and asked them for the name of the best guitarist in Gainesville. Someone named Buster gave me yours. I went to your house, but your mom said you were on your way back from a gig. So here I am.” Again that grin.
“Oh, OK,” I said.
“I’m hoping to put together a band and thought maybe you and I could jam together for a bit,” he went on, as I sat silently next to him. “What do you play?”
“Fender Stratocaster,” I replied, proudly.
“Anything else?” he asked.
My face fell. “No . . . , not really. Drums, a little. How ’bout you?”
“Acoustic, banjo, mandolin, flattop bluegrass, that sort of thing.”
Back at my parents’ house, all thoughts of embarrassment temporarily forgotten, I led Bernie up to my room and watched as he pulled out his guitar. I didn’t even own an acoustic guitar; I felt I’d sort of graduated past that. If I couldn’t plug it in and turn it up, I didn’t want it. You didn’t see B.B. King playing acoustic, after all. But Bernie just blew me away that afternoon with his amazing flat-picking music. I was dazzled that someone so young could be so unbelievably well versed.
Almost shyly, I pulled out my Fender and played the best I could for him. I think I cobbled together a medley of Chet Atkins, Elvis, and Ventures hits.
“Wow, man, that’s great,” he said, grinning from ear to ear in open appreciation. “Buster was right. You’re good, real good.”
Within a week, we’d walked into Lipham Music together and ordered two new guitars—an electric Gretsch for him and an acoustic for me—determined to teach each other everything we knew. Over the next few months, he taught me the finer nuances of country-and-western music, and I taught him rock and roll. Before long, we started putting some songs together, and I felt I’d found a completely new level to rise to. Meeting Bernie was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Bernie’s father was a nuclear physicist who’d been relocated from San Diego. He was to put together one of the largest of all nuclear development research centers, at the University of Florida. Bernie was the oldest of ten children, one of whom was a young guitarist called Tom, who ended up playing with Tommy Petty’s new band, Mudcrutch, which was right behind us on the fraternity circuit. Every time I went over to see Bernie, there seemed to be another new baby brother or one on the way, but it didn’t seem to matter, because their house was four times the size of mine, with air-conditioning and every modern convenience.
Bernie had already played in several different bluegrass bands in San Diego, including one called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers with a singer/songwriter and mandolin player named Chris Hillman, who later helped form the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The Squirrel Barkers had even had an album released. As well as the talents I already knew about, Bernie was an amazing five-string banjo player—the best I’ve ever heard. He’d have given Earl Scruggs a run for his money. He’d been playing since he was a kid and was proficient since the age of thirteen. He knew all the best Smoky Mountain songs, and before I knew it, we wound up forming a bluegrass band together, in which I played acoustic guitar and he played banjo, while a friend who worked for the Florida Fish and Game Commission played mandolin.
Inspired, we pieced together another band called the Maundy Quintet, to play the sort of music I was into. We found a singer named Tom Laughon, whose father was a local minister, and a drummer named Wayne “Boomer” Hough. We came up with the name Maundy Quintet because it sounded so English at a time when there was a passion for all things British, especially the Beatles. Boomer’s mother bought him an old van to travel to gigs in, on the side of which was painted: PLAYS FOR QUILTING BEES, FUNERALS, AND WILD PARTIES, the same motto as on our business card. We thought we were so cool.
As the Maundy Quintet increased in stature, so the bookings became more and more frequent. I could make us two hundred dollars for a Friday or Saturday night fraternity party or a high school prom, which was probably more than my dad was making in a week. He’d have been really hurt if he’d known, or put it down as a flash in the pan. At least I was keeping busy—and what else was I going to do? Get a job working at Koppers? That wasn’t going to happen.
Those frat parties were wild. It was just like Animal House, with everyone drunk out of their minds. Near-lethal cocktails of hard liquor were guzzled in alarming quantities and ever more outrageous dares dreamed up. My brother had been in a fraternity briefly, but had stepped out because it was too crazy for him. These boys knew how to party, and we were more than happy to provide the soundtrack to their madness.
Personally, I never had much taste for alcohol. If I did drink, my poison of choice was pop-top beer. I went to a party once where everyone was drinking gin and I tried it, but it tasted like aftershave lotion. I excused myself and went outside to retch violently.
My first attempt at smoking pot was similar. I didn’t know anything about marijuana, but someone took me to see a guy who grew his own. In those days, you could buy a quarter of an ounce for five dollars—hence the term “nickel bag.”
“What is that?” I asked, looking at the mound of green grass on his kitchen table.
“Try some,” my friend said, smiling, and handed me my first joint. I’d never laughed so long or so loud in my life. When the laughter finally subsided, leaving my ribs aching, I was suddenly incredibly hungry. The dealer fetched a jar of peanut butter, and we took a spoonful each, but when it stuck to the roofs of our mouths, we laughed even harder, spitting globules of it all over his kitchen. After that, we listened to some music, and everything sounded really great. I thought, “Oh my God, these guys are geniuses, absolutely brilliant,” and it was someone perfectly ordinary, like the Kingston Trio.
Once the fun was over and I was by myself, though, I became paranoid. There was a great deal of propaganda in those days about drug abuse, especially in a university town full of kids. The ads said that marijuana automatically led to heroin and that you’d grow hair on the palms of your hands, go blind, and die. My father would have killed me if he’d known what I was up to, and if he hadn’t, my brother—the law student—would have gladly prosecuted me. I didn’t get overly involved in drugs for fear of their wrath and of turning my brain to
mush.
That summer we managed to book some gigs in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, which seemed real grown-up. There were dozens of openings for musicians in Daytona during the high season, and we were prepared to do anything for cash, in or out of the Maundy Quintet. I played solo with house bands for people like Tommy Roe and the Romans, and in a band on the Pier for a visiting black singer called Rufus Thomas, who dubbed himself the “world’s oldest teenager” and had a big hit at the time called “Walking the Dog.”
Nineteen sixty-four was the height of the Beatles’ success with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the top of the charts. The Fab Four arrived to a hysterical reception in New York and, after appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, took America by storm. The look and sound of the Maundy Quintet remained very English. We mainly performed covers of pop songs like “Louie Louie,” by the Kingsmen, the old soul instrumental “Green Onions,” or the latest from John, Paul, George, and Ringo. During each set, we’d play at least one of our original numbers, which the audience had to suffer through.
We made many new friends, mostly other musicians also working the Strip in bands like the Nightcrawlers or the Houserockers. Among our new buddies were two brothers named Duane and Gregg Allman, who were about the same age as us and who’d moved to Daytona with their mother from Nashville. Duane was an unbelievably gifted lead guitarist and Gregg had a great soulful voice and played keyboards. They had a killer band, including a bass player and a drummer named Maynard, who was missing two front teeth. They wore their hair really long, all the way down their backs, and Duane had big sideburns, which was a very modern look for the time. They were true hippies, heavily into pot, as was Bernie, although I still didn’t care for it much. Their band was initially called the Spotlights and then later the Allman Joys, after the candy.
Bernie and I would play a gig at a teenage bar called the Wedge, where they didn’t serve booze, and when we’d finished, we’d go over to the bar on the Pier or to the Martinique on Main Street, where the Allman brothers were playing until 2 A.M., to sink a few beers. On afternoons off, we’d hang out at their mother’s house and smoke pot, because our only alternative was to stay in our fleabag hotel on our own. She never seemed to mind her house being filled with her sons’ friends and would often cook us all breakfast.
Duane was the first guy I ever saw play slide guitar. I remember watching him placing the smoothed-off neck of a bottle of Budweiser on his finger and sliding it up and down the frets in his mom’s living room and being as amazed by what he could do as I had been with Bernie’s flattop and banjo. It was yet another level opening up to me. Until then, Bernie had been the most talented musician I knew. Now Duane was surpassing even his high standards. He inspired me to play slide and that summer showed me my first couple of tunings. “Close your eyes and listen to the music, man,” Duane told me, as I slid my own longneck Bud top along the strings. “Feel it in your heart, and when your spine tingles, you’ll know it’s right.” I felt like I was getting the best tutorial anyone could have, because he was quite simply a phenomenon.
With my musical maturity came a newfound desire for better and better instruments. I knew that I’d outgrown my Fender by then, and I really wanted a Gibson. When a second-hand Les Paul Custom came into Lipham’s, I knew I had to have it. The finish was cracked and the gold was fading, but it was a beautiful guitar. Even Mr. Lipham could see that.
“I’m gonna send this back to Gibson and have them refinish it,” he told me, “and when it comes back, I’ll sell it for a good price.”
“Well, when that guitar comes back, I wanna buy it,” I told him. “I’ll trade in my Stratocaster, so just put it on my account and I’ll pay it off.” It was going to cost in the region of $250, which was a huge upgrade.
That summer I worked over at Daytona Beach real hard to earn the money, and when I returned, I asked Mr. Lipham if the Les Paul had come back yet.
“Yes, son,” he said, sadly, “it did, and it looked mighty fine. I took it out of its case and put it on the wall and some guy from New York walked right in and offered me a wad of cash. I’m sorry, Don.”
I was really upset, especially as I’d waited so long. Mr. Lipham took the charge off my account, but then I ordered a new, red Gibson 355 that looked just like the guitar that Chuck Berry played.
Chuck was totally cool. He’d had a string of hits in 1964 with songs like “Nadine,” “You Never Can Tell,” and “No Particular Place to Go,” and he had already made music industry history by being the first black man singing to a white audience and achieving mainstream success, with songs like “Maybelline” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Every red-blooded guitar player in the country wanted to be like Chuck.
That thin-line, hollow-body Gibson took over a year to be built in the factory. I loved it from the moment it arrived. It was the best three hundred dollars I ever spent. You know you’ve got yourself a good guitar when you pick it up, tune it, and after you’ve played it for a while, it’s still in tune. No matter how good the sound and the action are, if the intonation isn’t good, the guitar isn’t good. I’d only had it a couple of months when the Maundy Quintet was invited to Miami for an audition at a huge new club called the World, which had two stages. With our matching red guitars, we drove all the way down there from Gainesville in our van. The gig went really well and we thought the World was the best club we’d ever played in. However, when we arrived home and unloaded our stuff, my guitar was missing. Someone must have stolen it from the back of the van while we were loading up. I hadn’t even paid for it yet and I didn’t have any insurance. I was heartbroken. Worse than that, I was guitarless. Needless to say I had to go back to Lipham’s and buy another guitar, a Les Paul off the wall, so I wasn’t only paying for the one that was stolen but the new one too.
My life took an upturn when my parents finally bought me a car. Up until then, my friends were all driving around in hot rods, while I still had my bicycle. Dad presented me with a baby blue Simca Aronde P60 as the perfect vehicle for me. It was an old French car, a make I’d never even heard of before. He must have done a deal with someone at work and bought it cheap. It was tremendously ugly and turned heads for all the wrong reasons, but it had four wheels and a running engine, and I was in no position to complain.
Better even than the car, I had a new girlfriend, Sue McVeigh, my first true love. She was sixteen, a freshman in high school, and I was her first real boyfriend. My relationship with Sue came to an abrupt end after a road accident we had on our way to Georgia to get married. Her parents discovered that we were planning to elope and banned her from seeing me again. Either way, I always thought it was divine intervention: I wasn’t ready to be married at seventeen. Someone was telling me they had other plans for me, and, with hindsight, I guess they were right.
Teenage entertainment in Florida revolved around music, girls, and the spectacular scenery all around us, which we’d pretty much taken for granted during our blinkered youth. In the summers of the mid-sixties, however, there was more fun to be had than ever before, taking advantage of all three.
Bernie and I were making reasonable money with our bands, almost enough for me to replace the Simca with a ’62 Volkswagen Beetle. Dad helped me pay for it, something he felt he ought to do. He was still after me to concentrate on my schoolwork and get a real job, but I felt I was doing all right. I was working, and I had a car and a couple of girlfriends. Life was sweet.
I spent most of my time hanging out with Bernie, Barry Scurran, Tom Laughon, or the Rucker brothers, and I often stayed over with them when Dad and I had one of our frequent fights. Gainesville had its limitations, though, so whenever we could spare the time, we’d drive out to the lake for a change of scene where several of our wealthier friends’ families owned second homes. Tom’s father had a boat and a house there, and the father of a boy in my class at school owned the local Mercury dealership. Their family house was on the edge of Blue Run, one of the underground springs that feed the river systems i
n that part of the state. Beautiful fresh water bubbles up and runs off into crystal clear rivers thirty feet deep. They were far too tempting for teenage boys to ignore.
We’d spend whole days swimming or just lying on the dock in the sun. Tom taught me how to water-ski with the added incentive that the lake waters were infested with snakes, alligators, and snapping turtles. If I lost my footing, I had to tread water as calmly as possible and hope the boat would turn around soon to pick me up. The best fun of all, though, was hydroplaning. We’d cram into a low, small boat with a seven-and-a-half-horsepower engine on it and a ski rope attached to the back. Onto that we’d hook up a little wooden board, about two and a half feet long and twelve inches wide. One of us would get into the water and float along behind the boat, wearing a face mask while holding onto the board.
As the boat gathered speed and towed you along with the board, you could put pressure on it to take you down under the water. If you tilted it to one side, you’d literally soar through the water like a bird. When you couldn’t hold your breath anymore, you’d aim the board upward and emerge spluttering and gasping for air before going back down again. The water was full of wildlife and you could see as clear as day. There were even manatees down in that part of the Blue Run, gentle seal-like creatures that sailors once mistook for mermaids. The risk with hydroplaning was that at any time you could have been slammed up against a hidden tree root or some other underwater obstacle, but we were young and idiotic and we didn’t care.
