by Don Felder
Creed laughed. “I didn’t mean as a student, Don. I meant as a teacher. You have a great deal you could offer, you know.”
Despite his apparent confidence in me, I wasn’t quite ready to shave off my beard, cut my hair, and become part of the Boston teaching establishment. “Thanks anyway,” I said, smiling inwardly at the thought of wearing corduroy and tweeds and telling kids how to play guitar. “I’ll keep your offer in mind, but first I think I want to try and find another band.”
My fellow musicians were not at all happy with my decision to leave. They saw it as a sellout. “What do you mean, you’re leaving?” Mike gasped, when I told him. “We’re just about to make it to the big time.”
“You think so?” I asked, scathingly, looking around at the mess of a house we shared. Nobody had done any serious playing or songwriting in months. “Or are we just on the brink of almost getting ready to start thinking about maybe writing some songs for possibly another album? Get real, Mike, this ain’t gonna happen.”
The band’s unhappiness quickly became focused around their only means of transport. “If you go, you’re leaving that damn van here,” John told me. “We’re not going to be stuck out here without any wheels.”
“Yeah,” said Chuck, turning on me in the kitchen, “and you can leave that guitar Gene gave you as well.”
“I’m not leaving the van if it’s still registered in my name,” I told him adamantly, backing away. “If you guys default on the payments, I’ll have a bad credit rating for the rest of my life.”
To my horror, Chuck lunged at me, but Mike pulled him off. “Hey, man, let’s not get crazy here,” he yelled. “We can work this out.”
With far more rancor than was necessary, the paperwork for the van was eventually signed over to Andy Leo, and I was permitted to leave. I packed my things and walked out of that house, past the rest of the band standing silently on the front porch watching me. They’d agreed I could drive the van as far as Boston to offload my stuff, but Chuck, accompanying me as insurance, would drive it home. I looked back as we pulled out of the sweeping gravel drive and wished the ending could have been happier.
“Where did all the peace, love, and happiness go?” I asked Chuck.
He was too high and angry to answer.
Boston was another world. Susan and I were very happy living in her little basement apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, but at first I found it hard being back in a city, without a band to play in. It was 1970—the year the Beatles broke up—and no matter how relieved I was to be away from Flow, I couldn’t help but feel as if I, too, had lost my way. I took on any musical job to make ends meet, even playing movie themes on a nylon-string guitar during the six-to-nine dinner gig at the Holiday Inn in Harvard Square. Mostly, I didn’t even know the songs I was asked to play.
Some guy would come up and say, “Hey, it’s our anniversary. Can you play my wife’s favorite song? It’s ‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ She just loves it.”
“Sure,” I’d reply, grinning inanely. “After my next break.”
My “break” would then be spent in my “dressing room” (a grubby corner of the hotel kitchen, right next to where they peeled potatoes), poring over a fakebook of songs and movie themes, learning the chords and practicing them so that when I emerged, twenty minutes later, I’d be able to play it as if I knew it perfectly—and earn my five-dollar tip.
Painfully aware that this was not what I’d planned as a career, I tried to get in touch with as many other musicians as I could, but Boston was hardly the hub of the musical universe, and there wasn’t much work around. I did meet up with some interesting people, though. One was an eccentric Englishman named Peter Green, who’d recently given away most of his money and left the band that had made him famous—Fleetwood Mac. I met him while jamming at a free concert in the park. We got to chatting, and I discovered that he’d just arrived in town and had nowhere to stay.
“You can stay at my place for a while, if you like,” I told him. There was something about his eyes that made me trust him. He came home and slept on our couch for a few days. We jammed together quite a bit—he was a great blues guitarist. He had a broad Cockney accent and a wicked sense of humor. We even discovered that we shared a passion for B.B. King, but he took far too many mind-altering substances for my liking, and then, one day, he just disappeared, so nothing ever came of our collaboration. I heard later that he’d got religion in a big way and given the rest of his money to charity.
I found a job for fifty dollars a week at a cut-rate recording studio called Triple A. My job was to hire the session musicians for recordings, many of them students at the Berklee College of Music. One was Abraham “Abe” Laboriel, who has since become one of the most noted session bass players in jazz and pop. As soon as he started playing, everyone perked up. His feel for rhythm was unbelievable. Abe and I became friends, and I hired him as often as I could.
Joe, the owner of the studio, ran it like clockwork. He was a master at persuading people they could have a singing career, even though he knew a dog might sing better. He placed ads in the newspaper looking for new singers, and anyone would respond, from bored housewives to the man who drove the downtown bus. He’d convince every one of them that they were the new Streisand or Sinatra and that their best chance of success was to make a solo album with him. They’d walk out of there floating on the dream that he was going to make them a star.
I had two other jobs, on evenings and weekends, in separate studios, writing jingles for car dealers and clothing outlets. I’d play guitar and a little bit of piano or drums, and a jingle singer would make up a lyric for my track. One of the studios was called Ace, and the owner’s son, a kid named Shelly Yakus, used to come in and sweep up, roll the cables, and watch what I did. Now he’s one of the premier engineers in the business, making Bruce Springsteen and U2 records, no less. I bumped into him years later and we recognized each other right away.
I worked day and night but made practically no money. I did session work all day and played rhythm and blues in a club from nine till two. It wasn’t much of a life, not least because I was never home with Susan. I was seriously beginning to wonder about resurrecting my first job as a music teacher or even doing something completely different. I don’t know where the idea came from, maybe from my difficult relationship with my father, but I started taking night classes in child psychology at Boston University. It wasn’t easy going back to school, but my brother, Jerry—with whom I’d had little or no contact—heard from my mother what I was doing and, out of the blue, sent me a check for five hundred dollars.
“Thought you might need this to help you through the next few months,” he wrote. “I know how tough it can be as a student.” I will never forget this loving gesture. I called and thanked him with all the grace I could muster, and promised I would repay him one day. (I did, many years later, having worked out the interest he’d have earned on the money he lent me, but he sent the check back with a note saying he was proud to have invested in my career.)
Bernie came into town every now and again, and I was always pleased to see him. He’d been in Linda Ronstadt’s backup band for a while, but his biggest break was joining a group called the Flying Burrito Brothers, headed by Gram Parsons. They had already recorded one successful album and were on the East Coast as part of a nationwide tour. Susan and I went to see them in concert and they were great.
“You gotta get out of here, man,” Bernie told me, when we went back to his hotel after the show. “You can do better than writing car jingles. You’re a great guitar player, Don. You gotta come west.” Susan’s face told me all I needed to know. She was from Boston, she loved being near her family, and if I wanted to stay with her, then Boston was where I’d have to remain.
“I found this great little duplex in a house in Hingham, honey,” she told me one wintry night in January 1971. “It’s right near where I grew up.”
“I dunno,” I said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep o
n working at this pace, and I don’t really want to move away from central Boston and take on any extra rent.”
She looked up at me with those big blue eyes of hers, and I couldn’t resist. “OK,” I agreed. “If that’s what you want.”
Susan’s mother, who’d always liked me and had been nothing but friendly, suddenly decided that this was a step too far. Hingham was a smart suburb of Boston, fifteen miles south on the coast, and—more important—she still lived there.
“You’re not moving back to your hometown to live in sin!” she told Susan in horror when we gave her the news. “Either you get married and live respectably, or you can find somewhere else to live.”
We’d already seen the duplex and agreed to take it. We’d also given notice on our old apartment. It was bitterly cold and snowing outside, and I knew it was unlikely that we’d find anywhere as nice for the money at that time of year.
Saying nothing, I borrowed five dollars from Susan and went to a jewelry store near Harvard. When she came home from work later that night, I pulled a small engagement ring from my pocket and blurted out, “Will you marry me?”
“Yes, of course I will, you dope,” was her laughing reply. It was very unromantic, not at all what she, or I, had expected. It felt like we were just pleasing her mother. To this day, I’m not sure if Susan and Mrs. Pickersgill cooked up the whole thing as part of a double conspiracy to get me to do the decent thing. Either way, it worked, and I never regretted it.
The wedding was planned for April 23, 1971. My parents, whom I hadn’t seen since I’d left home, were going to drive up from Gainesville with my brother, Jerry, whom I’d invited to be my best man. They would be just about the only people on my side of the church—Bernie couldn’t make it, because he was on tour, and I’d lost touch with most of my old friends from Gainesville—whereas Susan would have almost a hundred guests.
My father pulled up outside our old apartment in a white four-door Oldsmobile, for which he’d traded the green Pontiac. I stood there, with shoulder-length hair, muttonchops, and a moustache, feeling like a bashful kid, as he came around to the sidewalk to greet me. At that exact moment, two of the most overt homosexuals I’d ever seen—one in red hot pants and high heels, with his arm around the other’s waist—walked between the two of us. I’d never seen them before in my life, and I thought my father’s jaw was going to hit the curb.
I started to say, “Welcome to Boston, Dad. . . . Dad?” I could see his mind was reeling. All his worst nightmares were coming true. To his credit, he chose not to comment, although I noted that he didn’t take my outstretched hand.
We ushered them into our studio apartment, with the bed in the corner, a rickety table and two chairs in the little bay window, a shabby couch, a small kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom. Susan put on a pot of coffee. Mom made all the right noises and was very excited about the wedding and helping Susan and her mother prepare for it. Dad wasn’t hostile, just indifferent, and we certainly never discussed what had happened the last time we’d seen each other.
“You making enough?” he asked, looking around our home as if he had an unpleasant smell under his nose.
“Yup,” I replied, uneasily.
“Good.”
He seemed happy for me in his own way, but I could sense that, while he wholeheartedly approved of Susan and this marriage, he still thoroughly disapproved of me.
The wedding was to be in a historic church north of Boston that Susan’s mother wanted us to get married in. My parents stayed in a cheap hotel somewhere nearby. Susan was going to wear her grandmother’s wedding gown, which was a hundred years old and which her mother had worn. Her ensemble was to be topped by a large, white, lacy hat. Since I didn’t own a suit, and jeans and T-shirts were apparently not permitted, I was dragged off by Jerry and Susan’s brother Bill to a discount store to buy a double-breasted gray pinstripe suit and some decent shoes. I never wore either again.
At the ceremony itself, I was far less nervous. We even managed to recite our own vows; we thought that was pretty cool. The reception was in a nearby country club, with a half-decent high school band banging away in the corner. “Just don’t play ‘Louie Louie,’ ” I’d told them. Hearing the song I’d played a hundred times on Daytona Beach would have been too depressing. The women of the Pickersgill family made all the food and the wedding cake, which we ceremonially cut before fleeing in our car, a rusty white 1965 Volvo with 120,000 miles on the odometer. Susan’s brother-in-law, Bobby, had decorated it with shaving cream and tied cans and streams of paper to the rear bumper.
Dad shook my hand just before I left. “Well, you’ve got responsibilities now, Don,” he told me sternly. “Make sure you live up to them.” Mom cried as we hugged good-bye, and she made me promise to come visit. Jerry wished me all the best, and I thanked them for coming.
We went back to our new home in Hingham, and I carried Susan over the threshold. “Where’s the wedding certificate?” I asked her, once we were inside.
“Why?” she asked, handing it to me from her purse.
Before she could say anything, I pulled a hammer and a nail from my toolbox and pinned that damn certificate to the bedroom door so that nobody could question us further.
“It’s official,” I told her. “We’re respectable enough to live here.”
At the age of twenty-three, I was somebody’s husband. The responsibility seemed awesome.
We didn’t have very much money, but we were young, in love, and living in half a house next to a graveyard. Life suddenly seemed sweet. From the local dog pound, we rescued a white German shepherd mix, with huge, floppy ears. We called him Kilo, after a kilo of weed. He guarded the apartment while we went out to work each day, and he kept Susan company when I played the clubs at night.
Susan never minded having to be the main breadwinner, bringing home a steady wage while I bummed around town, doing session work and running in and out of studios looking for more employment. With Bernie’s amazing versatility in mind, I was constantly trying to improve my musical skills to increase my commercial worth. Using the equipment available to me, I taught myself rudimentary drums, keyboards, and bass guitar, and I learned how to mix tracks and overdub them. I couldn’t give up my day job to play any of my new instruments, but I could get by. I just wished I could find something worthwhile to do with my new skills.
“You’re a musician, Don,” Susan would tell me matter-of-factly, making me coffee when I got in late and tired from a club. “What else can you do?”
Despite my intense personal happiness, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d somehow missed the boat. That feeling was compounded when John Winter, the former keyboard player and saxophonist from Flow, called up and asked if he could come and stay. He’d just been released from a mental institution in New York State after suffering some drug-related emotional problems, and he needed a place to crash until his mother and sister could take care of him. I was shocked by his appearance. He seemed like a shell of the gifted young man he’d once been. I called up his family to let them know he was safe, and we looked after him and gave him some money.
“Do you hear anything of the other guys?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said, glumly. “All I know is that Mike Burnett moved to Woodstock and spends his time drawing and taking drugs. Andy Leo’s living in a hippie commune in Hawaii.” There but for the grace of God, I thought.
Bernie, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength with the Flying Burrito Brothers; Stephen Stills was an established rock star, with a million-selling solo album featuring Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Ringo Starr; and the Allman brothers were flying incredibly high. Then, that fall, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in Georgia. The band had just recorded its classic album At Fillmore East and was halfway through the next, Eat a Peach.
The news came as a terrible blow to those of us who’d known and loved Duane. Ripples of shock passed through the music community. Eric Clapton announced that, like me, he�
��d been inspired to play slide guitar after listening to Duane Allman play. Duane had been a huge part of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominoes and was on fire during that whole album. He played slide live with every note in tune, which is really hard to do. When I first heard it, I thought, “Oh, my Lord, Clapton is God, but Duane is the second God, and this is too much!” Every time I hear that distinctive guitar sound, I still think of him.
Duane was the same age as me. I felt like we’d grown up together. He’d taught me so much. “Close your eyes and listen to the music, man,” he’d once told me. “Feel it in your heart, and when your spine tingles, you’ll know it’s right.” It hurt like a physical pain to think I’d never hear him play again.
The following summer, Stephen Stills came to Boston. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had split for a while as part of their ongoing development, and Stephen had set up a new band called Manassas, with a great pedal steel guitarist named Al Perkins, and Bernie’s friend Chris Hillman from the Flying Burrito Brothers. I was very excited at the prospect of seeing Stephen again and went along to the gig to hear him play. He was great. He still had that distinctive voice and the ability to bang it out with great gusto. The band was really tight and the show impressive.
