Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  FIVE

  Summer ended, and with it my dream—Susan had to return to Boston. We were still madly in love, but part of her desperately wanted to go home. She missed the northern weather, the myriad colors of fall, and the long, cold winters. She’d also enrolled at a respected girls’ college and was looking forward to starting her next academic phase. In that respect, we couldn’t have been more different.

  When she left town, in the front seat of her brother Bill’s car, I thought I’d die, it hurt so bad. In the space of a couple of months, I’d lost my first true love and my best friend, and I had cut off all communication with my parents. I was barely able to grasp that so much bad stuff was happening to me at once.

  I’d rarely been out of Florida—only a few childhood car trips to Oklahoma and Washington and to a couple of gigs in New York—but now I traveled to Boston whenever I could, catching a bus or hitching a ride with Bill whenever he was going home. Once, I even scraped together enough money to fly there. It was my first time in an airplane, a DC-3 tail-dragger, and it seemed like a miracle to be flying over America instead of driving. Susan and I had a great time in Massachusetts, picking up where we’d left off, until I had to fly home again. This time, the parting seemed even harder.

  Alone again in Gainesville, everything changed. I was eighteen years old and I felt bereft. The Maundy Quintet disbanded when Tom Long went off to college, leaving me with a drummer and Barry, the bass player. For the first time in many years, I had no band and was, for a while, completely without direction.

  My relationship with Susan was under incredible strain because of the distance between us, and—after several months of commuting back and forth, trying to keep it going—I realized it was impossible.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I told her, long distance. “Not unless one of us is prepared to move to where the other one lives, and that ain’t gonna happen.” I think I broke her heart and mine too, but I knew it couldn’t last. When I hung up the phone, I didn’t think I’d ever see or hear from her again.

  I was still teaching kids how to play guitar, and I had a couple of other jobs, but I couldn’t decide if I should go back to school or not. My parents and Jerry were pushing me to go to college and learn a profession, but I felt that would be a betrayal of all I’d tried to achieve. Whatever I decided, I knew I desperately needed to play music, which was the only thing I felt remotely good at.

  A guy named Paul Hillis, who’d also worked at Lipham’s as a music teacher, had just returned from two years in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. He was six years older than me, an excellent guitar player fluent in jazz techniques. When he came back, I couldn’t wait to hear him play, and see what he’d learned, but, to my surprise, he’d switched instruments. “Guitar is so limiting,” he told me, dismissively. He claimed it was easier to compose, harmonize, and understand theory on a piano.

  He opened up the Paul Hillis School of Music in Gainesville, and I signed up to learn jazz theory and composition from him, in exchange for teaching his incoming guitar students. For each hour I’d do for him, he’d give me an hour of his time. In less than six months I learned what Berklee College of Music had taught him in two and a half years. I soaked up every scrap of information.

  Through the fraternity circuit and friends in the music business, a young band called Flow, based in Ocala, approached me. “Join us,” they said. “We’ve heard the Maundy Quintet and we know your work. We need a strong lead guitarist.” There were three in the band—Mike Barnett, the drummer, John Winter, who played keyboards and soprano sax, and Chuck Newcomb, who sang and played bass.

  Flow was, without doubt, what my father would have called a hippie band. They specialized in free-form jazz-rock and were heavily into pot. I had to travel down to Ocala to practice with them, and at two in the afternoon they’d still be in bed, stoned, or recovering from the night before. Their rental house was filthy, with a sink full of dirty dishes that no one ever seemed to wash. They were complete stoners, but they were good musicians, too, and when we were together, we played really well. They had a genuine commitment to music, not to great songwriting or marketing like the Beatles, but a dedication to writing songs in a pop-rock genre using the framework of improvisation that jazz players use—a free flow of creative energy, they called it.

  We’d start off singing a couple of verses and a chorus and then have a free-form solo section in the middle that could be anywhere from a minute to five minutes long, depending on how well it was going. Winding down, we’d sing a verse and a chorus, and that would be that. It was perfect tripping music but with a more modern sound than a jazz band. It was really quite innovative for its time, and the best part was that every time you played, you were thrown naked out onto the floor, figuratively speaking.

  Two of their friends were the road managers for a successful band called the Young Rascals, who had a big hit with a song called “Good Lovin’ ” and had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. They’d promised to come down from New York and listen to Flow play once we felt we were ready. I was brought in to help sharpen up their act. In return, I got to latch on to this incredible spark of creativity: Every night, every time I played, I was given a chance to improvise. Using all that Paul Hillis had been teaching me about melodic phrasing, I learned how to play spontaneously and think freely, without inhibitions or fear. At first it was very scary, but when I’d been thrown out there often enough, I began to become comfortable with the tools I had. Somebody would play a groove and I’d just start playing stuff, some of which would be OK and some of which would be great. There was a constant creative stream. The freer I became, the more confidence I gained. It helped me amazingly in my ability to write and come up with parts for songs later in life.

  With Susan and Bernie gone and nobody else to take their place, I could easily have gone off the rails, especially with the band smoking so much pot. Fortunately, for some reason I never fully understood, I didn’t have an addictive personality. I enjoyed the occasional joint, of course, but I’d always stop myself at the point where I felt like I was losing control. I’d had a couple of paranoid experiences, and I’d seen heroin addicts lying on the streets in New York. As far as I could see, pot smoking just made my fellow band members unmotivated and lethargic. I don’t think any of them ever held a steady job. Worse than that, the whole drug thing still scared the shit out of me. Some rock and roller I was cut out to be!

  I spent a lot of time moping around, missing Susan and feeling sorry for myself. I dated a couple of girls, but nothing ever sparked like Susan and me. One girl, who went by the unusual name of Season Hubley, came from New York to Gainesville to visit friends on the campus. She was the first girl since Susan that I really liked, and I thought we might have had something going, but she didn’t seem very interested in me. She was just passing through. Then Susan’s brother Bill introduced me to Jan Booty, his girlfriend’s roommate. Jan, the daughter of a diplomat, was more permanent, studying art in Gainesville. She was very creative, and I liked that about her. We ended up living together for a while, sharing a house with a couple, Barry and Patti, and Jan’s two pet dogs, Rhythm and Blues.

  It was while I was living with Jan that my brother, Jerry, came to call. I’d had little contact with him since he’d gotten married. He was working in a small law firm in Gainesville, and we didn’t have much in common. Now that I was living immorally, however, he felt obliged to come and tell me what he thought of me. I always suspected that Dad put him up to it.

  “What the hell are you doing with your life, Don?” he asked me, his face pinched. In his suit and tie, he seemed far older than his twenty-five years. “Because it looks to me like you’re just wasting it.” Before I could respond, he let rip about how everything I was doing was wrong: My views on the Vietnam War were unpatriotic; my associations with protestors, musicians, and drug users were questionable; my morals and values were all screwed up; and I was headed for disaster. He thought I was a lost cause, and he let me
know it.

  We got into an intense argument, and I said many things I knew I was going to regret. “You’re worse than Dad,” I berated him. “You’ve been toeing the line for so long, you have no idea what real life’s all about. What are you gonna do next, Jerry, take your belt off and whip me?”

  He eventually walked away in disgust, but not before we’d both said our piece. As I watched him go, I doubted if we’d ever speak again. Everyone I loved, it seemed, eventually walked away from me.

  Music lifted me from the sadness that was my life. With the dual influences of Flow and Barry, the husband of the couple Jan and I shared a house with, I became interested in jazz for the first time. Barry came from New York and was addicted to jazz, which he seemed to play endlessly. Because of him, I began listening to it more closely, studying jazz guitar, learning specific solos and acquiring a taste for people like Sonny Rollins and Django Reinhardt. I soon began to view the guitar differently. Country, rock and roll, and bluegrass sounded pretty archaic compared with something much more sophisticated and intellectual. Having been exposed to so much theory with Paul, jazz suddenly made sense.

  One Friday morning, I was listening to Mel Bay while Barry read aloud from the Village Voice, which he got by mail from New York, as it was next to impossible to buy in Gainesville.

  “Oh, my God,” Barry said, sitting up suddenly. “Miles Davis is playing at the Village Gate tomorrow night.”

  I’d heard of Miles Davis, but I’d never heard anyone play live jazz except at the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge, and then just movie themes. “Miles Davis?” I asked, innocently.

  “Only one of the best jazz musicians in the world!” Barry cried incredulously. Staring at me in silence for a moment, he added authoritatively: “Pack a bag. We’re going.”

  There was no arguing with him, so we grabbed some clean T-shirts and a toothbrush each, filled up his VW with gas, and took off. We drove nonstop, taking turns sleeping. The journey took more than sixteen hours. We arrived in Manhattan, found some seedy little nineteen-dollar-a-night hotel, took a shower, put on clean T-shirts, and hopped a cab to Greenwich Village. We walked into the Village Gate and sat down near the front. About twenty minutes later, the band we’d been reading about the morning before in Gainesville was standing right in front of us on the stage.

  Those musicians proceeded to shred me. The finesse and the improvisation and the freedom in their art was unbelievable, with numbers like “Bitches Brew.” It was one of the most incredible lineups Miles Davis ever had—him on horn, seventeen-year-old Tony Williams on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, and Ron Carter on bass.

  Halfway through their second set, Miles Davis took a break and sat down at a table by the restrooms to have a beer. There were no dressing rooms and nowhere else for him to escape to. Determined to go over and tell him how much I liked the way he played, I started walking toward him with that intention. When I was just a few paces away, he looked up at me with these intense eyes, as if to say, “Come near me, boy, and I’ll eat you alive,” so I just kept walking right past him and into the men’s room.

  Inside, I stared at myself in the cracked mirror and whipped up my courage. “I gotta go say it, I gotta go say it,” I repeated like a mantra, and out I came, determined to shake his hand like I had with B.B. King, but of course, by then, he was gone.

  That gig was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. B.B. King had blown me away with his rhythm and blues, but this was undoubtedly my strongest jazz influence, an event that showed me what real musicians could do. The dexterity, ability, and dynamics were from another, altogether more sophisticated, genre. This was yet another level for me, a challenge to confront at a time when I was already into jazz in a big way and playing it with Flow. I hardly slept a wink that night in the hotel for replaying the gig over and over in my head, and Barry and I drove home in reverential silence the following morning.

  Not long afterward, I was lying in bed with Jan one sunny summer afternoon, watching the curtains billowing in the breeze, when a song came on the radio. Sitting up, straining to listen, I recognized the voice instantly. The presenter announced the number as “For What It’s Worth,” by Buffalo Springfield, but I knew better. The voice I’d heard belonged to Stephen Stills, the runaway kid with the military haircut who’d played in the Continentals.

  “Wow!” I thought, lying back on the pillow with a smile. “He struck oil after all! That’s really cool. Maybe I could do something like that one day.”

  Every time I heard that song, which became an anthem for the country’s most turbulent decade of young people railing against the establishment, I thought of Stephen and smiled. However, unlike him and Bernie, I wasn’t yet driven enough about my music to pursue it at the expense of everything else.

  By the fall of 1968, Flow was ready for its showcase concert in New York. John Calagna and Andy Leo, the road managers, had come down to Florida to hear us and liked what they heard. They felt they’d “discovered” the band, through their friendship with Mike and John, and could promote us through their relationship with the Young Rascals. They were right, and they were certainly the best access we’d had since the Cyrkle to someone famous.

  The gig was to be at a small club in Manhattan called the Fillmore East. The Allman brothers had played there just before us. They were steaming ahead of us in terms of success. Duane had been doing some impressive session work, they’d recorded an album in L.A., abandoning the name the Allman Joys in favor of the Hourglass, but they still kept in contact through friends in Daytona and Gainesville and we wished each other well.

  We drove up from Florida in a van, with borrowed equipment from the Young Rascals, and set up on the stage. The road managers had invited some record company executives along to hear us play. Among them was Creed Taylor, a legend in the business, who’d worked with Stan Getz and had just produced the Quincy Jones album Walking in Space, a phenomenal creation. He was the man.

  We were one of three bands playing to around five hundred people that night, in a club that was relatively new and unheard of. I knew Hendrix had once played there, and I’d seen Paul Butterfield and a monster blues-guitar player named Buzzy Feiten in the past, so I was impressed enough to know this was for real. Fortunately, we played really well that night, and when the gig was over, Creed Taylor came backstage to see us.

  Creed was middle-aged, wore a suede jacket with patches on the sleeves, and exuded calm. “Okay, guys, I liked what I heard tonight. You were great,” he told us. “I’m prepared to offer you a recording contract worth five thousand dollars. What do you say?”

  It was the most money we’d ever made. We couldn’t believe our luck. After a hasty band meeting with the road managers, we accepted immediately and signed on the line the next day. Despite all my reservations about leaving Gainesville, here I was, a few months later, in the Big Apple with a record deal. New York was somehow less scary than California. I’d been here a couple of times before. I could drive home in less than twenty-four hours if I wanted to, and anyway, I was too excited about the future to be frightened anymore.

  Our five-thousand-dollar advance lasted less than a month. We put a deposit on a Dodge delivery van—I was the only one with a good enough credit rating to take on the payments—a warm coat each, and a couple of microphones for our PA system. The rest went on grass, food, rolled cigarettes, and Jack Daniel’s.

  Signed up with Creed Taylor Incorporated (CTI), we found a small apartment on Horatio Street on the Lower West Side. It was in the meat-packing district and not a particularly good place to be in those days. I was nearly mugged at knifepoint, and a friend who came to stay was hit in the back of the head with a wooden plank by another robber.

  The road managers helped us with our writing and rehearsing, and they organized a few gigs around town to keep us working. The Young Rascals became our sponsors. They’d had another couple of hits after “Groovin’ ” and “A Girl Like You,” and they gave
us some of their old instruments and loaned us a PA so we could play clubs. There was a set of drums from Dino Danelli and a Hammond B3 keyboard from Felix Cavaliere, and Gene Cornish gave me one of his guitars, a big Gibson electric.

  Living in New York as part of a band with a record deal was all very well, but my excitement was tempered by the fact that my fellow musicians were lethargic and excessively drug-oriented.

  I’d always been the motivator before, booking the gigs and making the contacts; I was as much a manager as a player. But this band’s contact was through Mike and John, not me, and the rest of the guys had the idea that they didn’t have to do very much, because the road managers were going to make them stars. I felt kind of helpless, unable to do anything about the situation. We were living in a crappy apartment with no money, and none of them ever did anything except play music. Jan and I had split up, because of the distance, and I felt increasingly lonely and miserable.

  My frustration was only highlighted whenever Bernie came to town. He and I had stayed in touch, and he was doing very well for himself. When he’d first moved back to California, he’d joined a folk-rock band called Hearts & Flowers as a banjo and guitar player and performed on their second album. Through his old friend Chris Hillman, he met Gene Clark from the Byrds and the legendary banjo player Doug Dillard. Bernie also had helped found the band Dillard & Clark, until he joined the Corvettes, Linda Ronstadt’s backup band for the tour to promote her debut solo album after leaving the Stone Poneys, Hand Sown . . . Home Grown.