Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (6 page)

Read Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles Online

Authors: Don Felder,Wendy Holden

Tags: #Arts & Photography, #Music, #Musical Genres, #Popular, #Rock, #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainers, #Memoirs, #Humor & Entertainment, #Theory; Composition & Performance, #Pop Culture

BOOK: Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles
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“Quick! Start the car!” I yelled at the girl. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
 
“We can’t just leave him there,” she whined. “He’s lying right in the middle of the road. Someone’s gonna hit him. We’ve gotta pull him to the side.”
 
With severe doubts about my sanity, I climbed out of the car and helped her get her boyfriend to his feet. As we pulled him up, he belched foul beer breath. Reluctantly, I placed one of his arms around my shoulders and one around hers, and we started dragging him back toward his car. We were only a few feet from safety when he came to.
 
“Get your filthy hands off me,” he said, throwing back his arms with a violent jerk, completely dislocating my left shoulder. Letting out a primal scream, I grabbed my arm and jammed it back into its socket.
 
“Take me back to the gig,” I gasped at the girl. She took one look at her boyfriend, now slumped over the hood of his car, and another look at me, doubled up in pain, and agreed.
 
I staggered back into the Moose lodge, halfway through the second set, holding my shoulder, which hurt real bad, and tried to make my way up to the stage to ask one of the guys to take me to a hospital. A few steps behind me was the drunken boyfriend, who’d regained consciousness and followed me back. “Hey, you little jerk!” he yelled, shoving me hard in the back. “What the hell are you doing with my girl?” I couldn’t defend myself. My shoulder was all swollen, and I was in so much pain, I could have cried. The Rucker brothers, though, were big, bad, mean, tough-ass Florida rednecks whose father owned a garage. They saw me being harassed, threw down their instruments, jumped down off the stage, grabbed this guy, and dragged him outside, where they gave him a good whupping. That was probably one of the most memorable Tom Petty gigs I can recall. Even today, if I pull my shoulder back a little too far, I get a painful reminder of that night.
 
My schoolwork undoubtedly suffered from all the extracurricular activities I was involved in. In addition to my weekend jobs selling shoes, tuning guitars, and trying to teach tearful little kids how to play “King Creole,” I also started doing solo gigs, just me, my Fender, and my little amp, playing in town and at venues farther afield, which I rode to on a Greyhound bus.
 
“Don Felder, Guitarist,” I billed myself, taking lowly paid jobs at women’s social clubs and kids’ parties, playing anything from movie themes to Elvis. I also played drums at a bar called Gatorland, which was right across the street from the University of Florida, and lead guitar in a band at Dubs Steer Room, a smoke-filled steakhouse that served meat and beer. You could shoot pool, dance the “Gator,” or just watch the wet T-shirt contest every Friday and Saturday night. Man, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
 
Jerry didn’t like me playing in such places, and when he found out, he threatened to tell our folks. “It ain’t right,” he’d tell me. “You’re underage and shouldn’t even be in those dives. Besides, it’s embarrassing having my kid brother on the stage.” But I didn’t care. I was happy playing music and having fun. Ever since I’d stepped on the stage of the State Theater, this was what I’d wanted.
 
 
 
 
I still loved black music,
after my early contact with the church soul singers and my love affair with late-night radio stations, but during the late fifties and early sixties, there weren’t any concert halls for black artists. Racism was rife in the Deep South, and that’s just how it was. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t understand it. My father worked with “coloreds” and got on well with them. One of Dad’s friends, known to all as “Pig,” had a sugarcane farm outside town. We’d sometimes go there on weekends and work alongside his men cutting the cane. Pig’s mule would pull the grindstone, and the coloreds would cook up some of the sugarcane to make syrup for our pancakes. Dad lent money to one man in particular, who was a regular visitor at our home. I was always mystified as to why, when he came to call, he had to use the back door instead of the front.
 
There was a part of Gainesville that everybody called Colored Town. Whites didn’t go there, but I did. I’d sneak out as a young teenager and run down to the bars to jam with the musicians. My parents would have had a fit if ever they knew. My father was still taking his belt to me, and I dread to think what he’d have done if he’d ever found out I wasn’t sleeping over at a friend’s house, after all, but hanging out with the coloreds.
 
One of the musicians I played with down there, a drummer called John, told me that B.B. King was coming to town as part of what was known as the “Chitlin Circuit” for black performers. He’d be playing in an illegal bar in a barn out on somebody’s farm. Back then, promoters would find a building in the middle of cow pastures and simply move the haystacks out of the way for the gig. They’d set up tables and chairs made out of crates and put down a few kegs, sell beer, and charge five dollars admission. Five bucks to see B.B. King. It was a small fortune.
 
I was completely starstruck about B.B., whom I’d heard on WLAC a hundred times, and I badgered John to take me with him. “Please can I go, please, please, please?” He eventually agreed, much to my delight, and so, one night I sneaked out of my house, ran to his Jeep, and drove off with him to the barn.
 
The place was steaming. I was the only white person for miles. I couldn’t afford to go in, so I stood outside, peering through the window. B.B. absolutely blew me away. Men were hollering and women were crying, just listening to him play. I watched him, wide-eyed, and knew that I wanted to be like him more than anything else in the world—standing at the front of the stage, eyes pressed shut, making women weep with my guitar.
 
When he was done, he set down his guitar in a horse stall and took a seat on a hay bale, along with everyone else, to drink some of the illegal booze. My heart pounding, I burst in through the door and rushed across the crowded barn to where he was sitting.
 
“Mr. King,” I said breathlessly, “I just wanna shake your hand.”
 
His face lit up like a candle, and he flashed me a mouth filled with dazzlingly white teeth. “Well, OK, boy,” he replied, his eyes bright, “here it is.” He extended his huge hand and I took it in mine. His fingers were the size of sausages, and his breath smelled faintly of whiskey. Unable to say another word, dumbstruck as his gaze cut straight through me, I backed away and walked home that night in a daze. I don’t think I washed for a week.
 
For the next few months, I saved every penny until, finally, I could afford what I wanted. The first album I ever bought was
Live at the Regal
, by B.B. King. I bought it mail-order from Randy’s Record Shop in Gal-latin, Tennessee, advertised on WLAC in Nashville as “the world’s largest phonographic record shop.” The album cost $2.98, which I painstakingly saved and sent off in the mail. It was one of the greatest blues recordings ever made. I learned every note.
 
 
 
 
World events largely seemed to pass Gainesville by,
but some, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy, were unavoidable. I was in high school when JFK and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev faced off over nuclear warheads being located in Cuba in the fall of 1962. The name Castro became as synonymous with evil as Osama bin Laden is today. There was a small speaker on the wall in the corner of each classroom, through which we’d hear the latest news reports on the radio. During daily air raid drills, we’d hide under our desks when a siren went off. The announcement would say, “This is a test. This is just a test. In case of a real emergency, go to your designated area,” and it would be followed by a series of loud blasts on a horn.
 
The teacher would say, “OK now, children, remember the procedure. Hats on, heads down, eyes shut.” As if our plywood desks and tin hats would have saved us from a nuclear holocaust. I remember wondering how long it would take me to run home if a missile hit Florida. It was a time of national fear, and the first casualty was logic. Some people in our neighborhood tried to build bomb shelters, but with the water table just three feet under the soil, they quickly realized they’d drown before they’d be nuked. The threat of war seemed unreal and almost fun, as though we were being involved in something fantastical, not about to disappear under a giant mushroom cloud.
 
The following year, JFK was shot. That felt entirely different. The news was so unbelievable and earth-shattering, I remember our teacher broke down as she told us in the schoolyard. Everyone seemed suddenly afraid, paranoid even. Adults cried openly on the street, something I’d never seen before. It was as if the whole of Gainesville had suddenly been jerked awake from its rose-tinted dream by the firing of that bullet. Nothing felt safe or sure any more. The apple-pie sweetness had gone sour.
 
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.

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