by Don Felder
At night, we’d go frog-gigging in the swamps. With one of us carrying a flashlight, we’d row out on a pole boat to where the frogs were floating on top of the water, croaking their affection to each other for all they were worth. When we shone the high-powered light across the surface of the swamp, all we could see were yellow and red eyes—yellow for frogs, red for alligators. Creeping up on the floating, half-blinded frogs, one of us would yell, “Gig!” and we’d “gig” (spear) the creature with a long pole at the end of which was fixed a three-pronged barb, lifting it, still wriggling, into a basket. Once our basket was full, we’d head back to the shore, pick off the legs and dip them in batter before frying them up on a campfire. They tasted kinda like fried chicken and were mighty good washed down with a couple of cold beers.
Bernie was dating a girl named Judy Lee, whose family owned a house out at Micanopy, which was on one of our favorite lakes. Bernie and Judy were getting quite serious at a time when I was between girlfriends and was more than a little jealous. One night, after a teen dance gig we played at a local Holiday Inn, Bernie arranged to meet Judy outside the Howard Johnson motel in Gainesville, and she brought her best friend along.
“Hi,” she said, waving at me shyly, “I’m Susan Pickersgill. I’ve heard a lot about you.” She smelled of almonds.
“Hi,” was all I could manage in reply. I took one look at this sweet little baby-faced angel with straight blonde hair, and I was smitten. Fortunately, she looked at me, with my greased-back hair and cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of my T-shirt, and felt the same way.
Susan came from the right side of the tracks. She was from a long line of Pickersgills, far superior to the Teutonic Felders who rode down the tracks on mules. She was a direct descendant of Mary Pickersgill, who made the original Star-Spangled Banner for Fort McHenry in 1813, which now hangs in the Smithsonian. Best of all, her mother liked me. I was clean-cut and my parents had taught me manners. I was courteous and showed a lot of respect, with my “Yes, ma’am’s” and “Thank you, sir’s.” They were pleased that Susan had found someone like that. If they only knew how few courtesies I showed their daughter in their absence.
Mr. Pickersgill was a well-regarded civil engineer from the Northeast, on a short-term contract to build a veterans’ hospital in Gainesville. The project was six months from completion, after which Susan would be returning home to Boston with him and the rest of her family. The clock was ticking against us, but we fell madly, crazily in love.
Susan was a student at P. K. Young, a private high school for the children of the professors and other professionals involved with the university. She and Judy were in the same class. Before long, we became a regular foursome, two couples who went to gigs and hung out together. Bernie and I would drop the girls off and then go smoke pot together in the back of his car in the high school parking lot. I was always terrified one of my teachers would come out and catch us inside his smoke-billowing Ford Falcon. Worse, I feared my father might drive by.
Dad and I were not getting along at all well. We argued at almost every encounter, usually about where my life was heading.
“How long are you gonna go on bumming around, playing guitar, and getting high with your friends?” he’d ask.
“As long as I damn well choose,” I’d reply, slamming the screen door behind me in anger. Music had once been the glue that bonded us together, and now it was tearing us apart.
Whenever the atmosphere became too intense, I’d slip away for a couple of days and stay with friends—especially Jim, the DJ at the local radio station, who still lived above the funeral home.
I’d come home after a couple of days and spend my time avoiding Dad. It wasn’t any better when Jerry left. He and Marnie married when he turned twenty-one and graduated from law school. I helped him pack his few belongings in the room we’d shared for so many years, and drove them over to the second-story apartment they’d rented in an old house in the next neighborhood.
“Thanks, Don,” Jerry said, patting me on the back as I finished unloading the last of his stuff. “Maybe you could try to get along a bit better with Dad now that I’m gone. OK?”
I shook his hand and nodded silently, still in awe of him, even more so now that that he was married and leaving home. I drove straight back to our house, rearranged the bedroom to my liking, and moved in Dad’s Voice of Music machine. Standing on a chair, I removed the hundred-watt light bulb from the overhead lamp. Reaching into my pocket, I replaced it with a low-wattage red one I’d bought specially. This was my room now, and I could play my guitar when I liked, as loud as I liked, in a scarlet spotlight just like Jimi Hendrix.
With my brother sorely missed at home as both a steadying influence and a companion, Dad became increasingly frustrated with me. Jerry was respectable. He’d been the model son, and his morals and lifestyle only highlighted my shortcomings ever more sharply. By contrast, I’d taken part in several anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and political rallies, I’d let my hair grow even longer to fit in with the rest of the guys, and my father quite rightly suspected me of being involved with drugs.
My final bust-up with Dad was a long time coming. It had been such an adversarial relationship for so long, something had to give. One day, I was supposed to come home and do some mundane task, like wash the dishes or mow the lawn or take the laundry out and hang it on the line. For some stupid reason, probably because I was too busy playing guitar or smoking dope, I didn’t do it. When I eventually came home, my mother gave me flak about it and, peeved, I gave her a bunch of sass right back.
“I don’t have to do your damn dishes,” I told her. “I’m not your slave.”
She stopped and looked at me for a moment, her eyes narrowing. “You just wait till your father comes home,” she said, through thin lips.
I went up to my room to sulk and heard Dad arrive home a few hours later. Within minutes, he was at my bedroom door.
“You’ll never speak to your mother like that again, you lazy, no-good, long-haired hippie,” he yelled as he pulled off his belt. “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
I remember sitting on the bed, trying to protect myself with my hands while he started beating me on the back with the strap of his belt. I’d put up with that goddamn belt my whole life, but for some reason, I suddenly decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore.
Jumping up, I clenched my fist and struck Dad as hard as I could across the chin. He staggered back with the force of the blow, hands and belt flailing, and crashed to the floor, landing awkwardly against a bookshelf and a pile of long-playing records. I’ll never forget the look on his face. I think he was more stunned than anything. I literally ran out of the bedroom, jumped into my car, and took off before he could grab me. I could hear him all the way through the house as I fled, but I don’t know if he was yelling at me or screaming for Mom to help him get to his feet. I left home, vowing never to speak to him again. It was six years before I did.
I moved in with Barry Scurran, the bass player with the Maundy Quintet, who was a sophomore at the university with an apartment in an off-campus housing area. He put me up on his couch for a few days but eventually gave me his spare bedroom, for which I began paying rent. I went back to my parents’ house a couple of times when they were at work to retrieve some clothes and some LPs I simply couldn’t live without. I didn’t leave a note and they had no idea where I was staying.
I finally picked up the phone and called Mom to let her know I was all right.
“Please come home, Don,” she pleaded. “I’m . . . , we’re . . . , worried about you.”
“No, Mom,” I replied, flatly. “I’m just not going to come back and do that anymore.”
My father made no direct contact but told me, through my mother, that if I wasn’t going to live in his house, I was to bring back the car he’d helped me buy. Furious, I drove the Volkswagen home and parked it outside, leaving the keys in the ignition. He knew how much being without a car would cramp my lifestyl
e. Even more gallingly, he took to driving it himself. I’d see it around town and curse him under my breath.
At least I still had Susan, and the Maundy Quintet was doing well. Bernie, Tom, and I continued to write songs together, although our repertoire mainly featured covers of popular numbers to keep the kids happy. There was never any conflict between us. We got along fine and were guided by what Tom was able to sing. Bernie and Tom were pretty much the driving force, musically, and they wrote the bulk of our original numbers, although I have to admit now that they weren’t very good. We thought they were at the time, but they weren’t classics. Still, you have to start somewhere.
What I’d always most admired about Bernie was his single-minded determination. If he decided that he was going to learn pedal steel guitar, he’d go and buy one, sit down and learn it so that, within a month or so, he could play it to his satisfaction. He taught me such flexibility and adaptability, to rise to the musical challenge of taking on a completely new instrument and genre. I never mastered pedal steel or mandolin like he did, but I was OK, and without him I’d never even have tried.
Bernie was seriously into the Beatles and English music. George Harrison was his hero. He even wore a Beatles wig at one time and adopted a kind of English accent. He dressed “English” and tried straightening his impossibly curly hair. Then he bought a brown Gretsch Tennessean guitar, the same model Harrison played. Man, he loved that instrument. I admired the Beatles enormously and appreciated how gifted they were, but for me, rhythm and blues had so much more soul. There was a big difference between women crying over B.B. King and girls screaming hysterically at the Beatles at Shea Stadium. I was also smart enough to realize that what the Beatles lacked in emotional drive, they made up for in cool.
When the Hollies came to Gainesville and played a gig at the university, I jumped at the chance to go see them. Distinctive and well respected, the group from Manchester, England, had enjoyed a string of chart hits with songs like “Searchin’,” “Just One Look,” and “I’m Alive.” I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and watched Allan Clarke and Graham Nash singing their latest hit, “Bus Stop,” and I was mightily impressed. They looked so different. I took mental notes on their clothes and how they wore their hair. And there was something about Graham Nash’s voice that really appealed to me. He not only played well; he looked like he was having fun. When he smiled down at me in the front row, while singing, I couldn’t help but smile back.
While Bernie struggled to straighten his hair, I favored the classic pageboy cut, long but curled under at the sides. Still white-blond, I looked more like Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. As a band, we fully embraced the “flower power” era with its big, blousy sleeves and flared pants. We had some publicity photographs taken of the Maundy Quintet in which we look risible now, especially Boomer Hough, the drummer, with his perfect hair and English-gent double-breasted jacket, his arms folded across his chest. Lord knows what people made of us.
We cut two singles and began a regular circuit tour of Daytona, Tallahassee, Atlanta, New York, Miami, and Lauderdale, often with Susan and Judy in tow, acting as our personal groupies. Susan ferried me everywhere in her MG TD, which her father had bought her. It was a stick shift, and once she got it into fourth gear, she’d put her left foot up on the walnut dash and cruise us around Florida, tired of using the clutch.
That spring, her parents returned to Boston, leaving Susan and her brother Bill behind. Bill was staying on in Gainesville for a few years as a student, and his presence gave Susan and me a few months’ respite, until the end of the summer. The family had sold their house, so Susan moved out to Judy Lee’s house at Micanopy, about ten miles south of Gainesville. To get there, I had to cross part of Paynes Prairie, a vast area of marsh, wet prairie, and open water, which is now a state reserve and national park. Back in the sixties it was just another unmarked bog.
There was a road called Savannah Boulevard running right through the middle of the bog, with deep culverts on either side. The smart reptiles—the frogs, lizards, snakes, and alligators—climbed up onto the asphalt each night to soak up the warmth from the heat of the day. Every time I visited Susan, on Barry’s motorcycle, I’d have to ride for about three miles with my feet up on the handlebars, in case I ran over a snake and it hit the wheel and rode up my leg. It felt like a medieval test—“Make it through this, young knight, and you can win the fair damsel.”
That summer, we opened for a band called the Cyrkle, who had a number-two hit by Paul Simon called “Red Rubber Ball.” They even gained a coveted spot on the Beatles’ final U.S. tour. Their manager liked us and took us to New York to play a few club gigs, but a couple of the guys grew homesick and nothing more came of it, so Bernie and I went back to Daytona Beach, gigging around. Susan and Judy joined us when they could. One night, I had a big fight with Susan over something stupid and she stormed off. I think she wanted me to pay more attention to her and I was far too busy having fun and getting high. When we finished our gig, Bernie and I went over and watched The Allman Joys as usual, and afterward we smoked some pot.
“Hey, I’m starving, man,” I told Duane and Gregg, with a sudden pang of the munchies. “Let’s go get something to eat.” We found a diner that was open at 4 A.M., and the four of us sat in a booth by the window, drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, smoking cigarettes, and feeling pretty mellow with the sun coming up on the horizon.
Unbeknownst to me, Susan had been hunting for me all over Daytona Beach with Judy, hoping to patch things up. The two of them finally walked into this diner and saw us sitting there. All they could see of Duane and Gregg was the back of their heads, each with beautiful, long, silky hair. Assuming the worst, Susan ran out, crying.
Judy, furious, marched up to confront us. “Hey,” she yelled at Bernie, “what the hell do you think you’re doing with these two girls?”
Gregg and Duane looked up at her in surprise. As soon as she saw their beards and moustaches, she realized their mistake. Man, we laughed till we cried.
Just when things seemed to be going so well with the band, my personal life, and my musical ambitions, Bernie dropped a bombshell. He’d been dissatisfied for a while, wishing for greater success, and still wasn’t getting along with his family. Like my parents, they were often nagging him about what he was planning to do with his life, and wanted him to pursue an academic career. Bernie was upset that they weren’t more supportive.
“There’s nothing here, musically, man,” he’d complain. “New York or California’s where it’s at, and I’m never gonna live in New York. I hate it. One of these days I’m gonna blow, and just go back to California and make some real music.”
He’d been saying it for so long, I’d almost come to ignore it. Then, one day, he announced that he was leaving.
“Come with me, Don,” he urged, his eyes bright. “California has great weather, great women, and everything’s really happening there. It’s where my roots are. We could start up a band together and get something good going.”
I shook my head. “Gainesville might have little to offer, but it’s all I’ve ever known,” I told him. Truth was, I was scared to leave. I’d hated New York too. By contrast, California seemed faraway, alien, and frightening, like moving to the other side of the world. All the magazine articles and television program I’d seen implied it was a sin state, where people “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.” Drug abuse was rife, and not just pot. LSD and other hallucinogens were all the rage, and anything went, sexually. I was still a naïve young teenager with a rather old-fashioned set of moral values, despite what my father thought. I knew the West Coast wasn’t for me. Not yet, anyway.
Coming from poverty had also made me inherently cautious. I needed certainty, a surefire scheme to make money and pay the rent. It felt so scary to head off somewhere unknown with no offers of work and no solid opportunities identified. Bernie didn’t really know anyone in Los Angeles and had few music contacts there anymore. In my worst nightma
res, I imagined him falling in with drug dealers and pimps and never playing banjo again. However, he was determined to make a go of it, and there was nothing I could say to make him change his mind.
The day he left, I went over to his parents’ house and helped him load up his car.
“I wish you were coming with me, buddy,” he said, giving me a hug.
“I know,” I said, feeling unnervingly close to tears.
He flashed me that huge grin of his and patted me warmly on the back. “I’ll call you just as soon as I’m settled. If things work out, then maybe you could come out and join me?”
“Sure,” I lied. “As soon as you’re settled.”
He climbed into the driver’s seat of his Ford Falcon and turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired up into life with a big blue cloud of smoke from the exhaust. The car was loaded to the roof with instruments and clothes and equipment. Only the front passenger seat was empty. Bernie was leaving. He was driving to California to follow his musical dream. As I waved him off and watched his car disappear down the dusty trail west, it took all my nerve not to chase after him and jump into that empty seat.
