Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  “You gotta come back west with me. That’s where it’s all happening, man,” Bernie would say every time I saw him. We’d meet backstage at whichever gig he was playing, jam a little, and have a few beers. “I’ve made some great contacts, and I’m sure I can get you work.”

  “Thanks, Bernie,” I’d say stoically, “but I’m gonna hang around here first and see what happens with Flow. We have a record deal now, and I’d be crazy not to see it through. Besides, I don’t have any money, or even a car. How am I supposed to get around in L.A. without wheels?”

  When it finally came time for Flow to go into the recording studio and cut its first album, we were all pretty scared. Creed Taylor used a studio over in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The room we used was round and was supposed to have a natural ambience. It was owned and run by Rudy Van Gelder, a German optometrist by trade, who’d become a recording engineer with impeccable credentials. He’d worked with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk, and was said to be responsible for the Blue Note sound. He had top-notch Neumann microphones and state-of-the-art eight-track recording equipment with mixing consoles and equalizers. He sat in his recording booth manning the controls like some mad scientist. He literally wore white gloves to make his very antiseptic, high-fidelity recordings.

  One day, Andy and John took us into Atlantic Studios and allowed us to listen in while the Young Rascals were cutting their latest single. We knew them well, and the atmosphere was relaxed. They were on the last take by the time we arrived, and we stood at the edges of the studio and listened to them record “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” I liked it immediately. It had bongos and sounded really cool. I wondered if it would be a hit.

  When it was our turn to set up, in the Englewood Cliffs studio, we were very edgy. It was our first real recording, and we felt under immense pressure in this clinical environment with a man in a white lab coat and the latest high-tech equipment all around us. Creed came in, sat down in the control room, looking for all the world as though he were going to pull out a pipe and smoke it, but he didn’t say a word. There was no musical direction, nothing.

  I realized suddenly, and with considerable discomfort, that it wasn’t Creed Taylor or Rudy Van Gelder who made all those legendary recordings, it was the artists themselves. I wasn’t the only one with butterflies in my stomach. We began to play, but you could hear and feel that it was a very forced performance. In fact, it was a train wreck, and there was nothing any of us could do to pull it back from the abyss.

  The album was called Flow and the cover featured a stencil of the band’s name with soapsuds dripping from it. We hated it. We thought it looked like an ad for laundry detergent. I was proud of the album because it was my first, but I was also hugely disappointed. I’d expected to take it out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable, and be blown away like I was with Quincy Jones’s record. I’d used the same recording techniques, engineer, and producer. I just couldn’t understand why my record didn’t affect me in the same spine-tingling way. There was further disappointment. We had a fair amount of airplay around New York, but we weren’t “AM-ORIENTED,” and a lot of radio stations wouldn’t play us because of our long jazz solos. Word came back that we were all right, but we weren’t the Young Rascals. We might have looked and sounded a bit like them, but we were a marketing nightmare because there was no obvious slot for us. We picked up an eclectic following of jazz buffs instead of the mainstream fans that were going to the clubs and buying records.

  There was no talk of a follow-up album, and suddenly there were longer and longer periods without work. Even though we’d had some success, drugs, not music, had motivated it. Our managers were frustrated. They’d pretty much explored all the limited avenues they had access to. When we did get some gigs, we wound up having to do mostly cover versions of other people’s songs to pay the bills. We tried to slip a few of our original numbers into the set, hoping that people would understand what we were about, and some seemed to like it, but most just wanted to dance.

  I realized we had to get out of New York and into an environment that would be more conducive to songwriting and taking the band to the next level. Mike had driven to Poughkeepsie to see a friend the week before and had spotted a For Rent sign at the side of the road in a little town called Dover Plains. He scrawled down the telephone number. After speaking to the owner and realizing that we could afford the rental, we piled onto packing quilts in the back of our Dodge van and drove north. Bob Dylan’s backup group, the Band, had relocated to a modern pink house in West Saugerties in the Catskills and recorded their first album, Music from the Big Pink. The house we found wasn’t pink. It was white, stood on three hundred fifty acres, and looked like something out of Gone with the Wind. It cost us $150 a month—far less than the price of our crummy New York apartment.

  The house was huge. It had four white-painted Doric columns at the door, which opened onto an impressive hallway and grand staircase. There were a library, five fireplaces, and a butler’s pantry. The attic had been converted into a ballroom, complete with bandstand, for parties. Much of the land had been left wild, although some must have been used to grow market produce at one time, because all that grew on it now, in great abundance, was zucchini. Impoverished and permanently hungry, we had scrambled zucchini for breakfast, zucchini sandwiches for lunch, and baked zucchini with cheese for supper.

  We lived in that house for eighteen months, becoming poorer and poorer by the month. Our gigs in New York declined sharply, and half the time the rest of the band couldn’t be bothered to make the three-hour round trip to the city for a lousy hundred bucks. We were often without transportation. If someone took the van to go and score some drugs or see a girlfriend, the rest of us would be stranded.

  One day, Chuck Newcomb and I were in the house when the van was gone, and we ran out of tobacco. Both heavy smokers, we had no choice but to walk into town to buy some. We set off for Dover Plains, not even bothering to hitchhike, because we knew from experience that few people in the neighborhood would pick up a couple of long-haired hippies with beards. The local sheriff drove past Chuck and me as we strolled into town, stopped his patrol car, reversed, and picked us up. We were arrested and charged with walking on the wrong side of the road. The fine was twenty-five dollars.

  The sheriff eventually drove us back to the house, where our surprised fellow band members saw the patrol car pull up in the driveway and quickly ran round and hid all the drugs. John Winter came wandering out of the house with a flute in his hand. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The sheriff gave little explanation before he and his officers undertook a painstaking search of the house. It took some time, and when he emerged, his face was a picture of disappointment that he hadn’t found bathtubs full of LSD. Trying to defuse the situation, which was now uncomfortably tense, I turned to John and said, “Hey, why don’t you play something for the officer to send him on his way.”

  “Huh?” John asked, looking decidedly nonplussed.

  “Your flute,” I said, pointing to the instrument in his hand. “Why don’t you play something to show there are no hard feelings?”

  John shook his head. “No, not now. My lips don’t feel right, man. I can’t play a thing.”

  “Oh, come on,” I urged, sensing his reluctance and the sheriff’s unhappiness. “Just a few notes.”

  “Yeah, come on,” the sheriff encouraged him. “You claim you’re musicians. Let’s hear you play.”

  John stood his ground. “No,” he said, firmly. “I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood.”

  By the time the sheriff and his men left, Chuck and I were exhausted and upset from our day’s exertions. All we had to look forward to was a zucchini omelet and a miserable night emptying the ashtrays for butts. Irritable, I bumped into John in the hallway and turned on him. “If you’d played your damn flute for the sheriff, none of this might have happened,” I said.

  John shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t, man,” he explained, po
inting to a wad of something in the end of it. “That’s where we shoved all the dope.”

  SIX

  In August 1969, we heard through the hippie network that a big music festival was being held on a six-hundred-acre dairy farm not far from Dover Plains. Billed as “Three days of peace and love,” it was to be held at a place called Bethel, near Woodstock.

  “Hey, we should go to this,” I suggested to my roommates one morning, after reading about it in a pamphlet someone had stuck under the windshield wiper of the van. “Just about everyone we know will be there. There’s bound to be some guys coming up from New York and maybe even Florida. The lineup’s incredible—Janis Joplin, the Band, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, the Grateful Dead. Even Hendrix is playing.”

  “Awesome,” replied Mike. “OK. You organize it.”

  Buried in the list of bands, I spotted Crosby, Stills & Nash, whose debut album, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, was fast climbing the charts. Something told me that the life path of young Stephen Stills was going to keep crossing mine.

  I was right about everybody coming to Bethel—half a million people, actually. When we arrived, in an old Chevy Suburban with a gang of friends from New York, it seemed like everyone was trying to get through the same six-foot-wide gate we were aiming for. Among those in our convoy was Season Hubley, the cute girl I’d fallen for when she came to Gainesville two years earlier. Sadly for me, she was with someone else, and wanting her to be with me instead of him marred my entire experience of the three-day festival.

  I do remember that it rained a lot. There was an incredible storm, which came rolling in from the east in great billowing clouds. The high winds nearly blew down the precarious speaker towers. We slept in sleeping bags in the Chevy, listening to the torrential rain drumming on the roof. Apart from when the storm was at its height, and all the electronics onstage had to be covered in plastic to keep them from shorting out, the music was nonstop. We’d lie in the back of the car, stoned out of our heads, waiting for the announcements for who was on next.

  “Oh, man, I gotta see this,” I’d say and drag myself up, out of the car, into the rain. Sliding down the slippery hill toward the stage, I’d listen to Santana, Hendrix, or Alvin Lee playing until my ears felt like they were bleeding.

  It was a mudfest, absolutely horrible, cold and wet. The sticky clay squelched up between your toes and found its way into every pore and crevice, but nobody seemed to care. Along with thousands of other people, I’d stand in the driving rain, swaying in time to the music, before coming back to towel myself off and steam up the car windows until the caked mud finally dried. Woodstock was certainly an experience.

  Back in Dover Plains after the festival, life seemed somehow harder to bear. I’d known Stephen Stills as a kid, and there he’d been at four in the morning, on the same stage as some of the rock-and-roll greats, banging it out with the likes of Graham Nash, who I’d been so in awe of when he came to Gainesville with the Hollies. It was only the second time Crosby, Stills & Nash had played live together, and they were steaming. Stephen sat up on a stool in a blue-and-white poncho and sang with that distinctively gravelly voice of his. It was so groovy. I wanted to be up there alongside him more than anything in the world.

  Instead, I was bumming around some big old house in the sticks with a bunch of potheads, trying to salvage a situation I knew was fast becoming untenable. I felt completely isolated, physically and musically. We were miles from anywhere and there were no girls or friends outside the band. Winter was coming and we were broke. Nobody seemed to understand that we were going to freeze to death in that huge, heatless house unless we did something about it.

  Winter came and, with it, the snow. It was like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. We’d had sprinklings in Boston and New York, but this was so deep it banked up against the front door, soft and fine like powder. It smelled of steel. To begin with, it was fun, having snowball fights and fooling around. Once the novelty had worn off, however, the snow brought further isolation to an already strained situation. Unable to escape, we were trapped inside together, day in, day out, and the tensions between us became less easy to hide. Those bitter few months reminded me of my final year in my parents’ home, and I was sorry for the bad feeling I’d created. One day that winter I sat down at a desk I’d built out of old lumber that was lying around in the yard. Taking a pen and paper, I wrote my mother a letter, telling her where I was and that I was OK. “Thank you for all the years you raised me under harsh conditions,” I said, “and for all you taught me. Only now am I beginning to appreciate what a good mother you were.” I even thanked her for dragging me to church by my ear. I sent the letter off, with my address on the envelope. It was my first contact with my parents in two years, and a letter came back by return mail.

  “Dear Don,” she wrote. “How wonderful to hear from you. I’ve been worried sick. . . .” Thus began a correspondence that continued with her for many years. My father never wrote a word.

  I began to realize that my dreams of musical stardom were probably pie in the sky. It was the post-Vietnam “Me Decade,” but things certainly weren’t happening for me.

  Our only regular gig was at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, a progressive liberal arts place, a few hundred miles north. We saw Carlos Santana playing “Black Magic Woman” there, a big hit at the time. Arlo Guthrie was a music student at the college and they had a gamelan band, an Indonesian percussion orchestra. Driving up to Goddard one day on the way to another gig, I succumbed to a sudden compelling urge. Pulling the van over at a pay phone, I fumbled for some change and dialed the number of Susan’s family home in Boston, memorized for all time.

  “Hey, Mrs. Pickersgill, it’s Don, Don Felder from Gainesville. Is Susan there?”

  “Hello, Don. My, it’s been a while. No, dear, she doesn’t live here anymore. She’s found a place of her own. Would you like her number?”

  Susan was very surprised to hear from me. It had been eighteen months since we’d last seen each other. She’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend, a singer/guitarist, and was working as a secretary at the Harvard History Research Center. We chatted until my money ran out, and I told her I’d call again. A week later, I did, then again the week after that. It felt good to talk to someone who wasn’t stoned out of their mind all the time. She had a good job and her own apartment, something I couldn’t possibly have afforded. I was impressed.

  A couple of weeks later, Susan told me she’d be staying at her sister’s house in Scituate, on Cape Cod, babysitting. “Do you wanna come out?” she asked. “We could get to know each other again.” Looking around me at the mess of a life I was living in, I jumped at the chance. By the end of the weekend on that beautiful Atlantic shore, she and I realized how much we still loved each other. It felt like coming home.

  For the next couple of months, Susan and I commuted back and forth between Boston and Dover Plains every weekend, making up for lost time. To begin with, she was enamored of the bohemian life I was leading, living in this old colonial mansion with a band that had just cut a record, existing on a diet of zucchini sandwiches. But after a while, the veneer wore off, and she could see all the ugliness underneath, especially with the drug abuse. When Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died separate drug-related deaths that fall, I felt as I had when JFK had been killed—shocked and a little afraid. I’d seen both of them perform at Woodstock less than a year earlier. Now they were gone, cold in their graves, and their future promise had died with them. Through Susan’s eyes, I came to have a new and even unhappier appreciation of where my life was heading unless I broke away from these influences. I knew it was only a matter of time before Flow and I parted company.

  “Come to Boston,” Susan urged. “You can move into my apartment and look for a job. There’s bound to be some session work or a band that needs a guitarist.”

  I knew she was right, but it took me a couple of weeks to get up the courage. After all, wasn’t I leaving our Woodstock dream behi
nd? Hadn’t I told Bernie this was probably the best chance we had at success? Where had it all gone wrong? When the dirt, apathy, and lethargy finally became too much, I called up Creed Taylor.

  “Hey, Creed, it’s Don Felder, of Flow,” I said. “I just want to tell you that I’ve decided to quit the band. It’s not really working for me, and I need to leave.”

  Creed didn’t seem at all surprised and said he understood. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “Boston,” I said. “My girlfriend works at Harvard.”

  “Great,” he replied. “Well, listen, I know some people in Boston. In fact, I’m on the board at the Berklee College of Music. If you want, I’ll call them and see if I can get you in.”

  I was both surprised by and grateful for his kindness. “Oh, OK,” I said. “Only I hadn’t thought about going back to studying right now. I really need to make some money.”