JACKSONVILLE BLUES
By Michael Fitzgerald
When I was ten, my family lived on an immense Naval Air Station in dusty central California, close to a tiny farm town on the edge of the desert. In the winter, neighbors spray-painted tumbleweeds, piled them on top of each other, and made them into ersatz snowmen. There was only one radio station in town, but you could hear everything from Buck Owens to the Beach Boys to James Brown on the same station. That was where I got bitten by the music bug.
A school chum and I would take the shades off of his mother’s floor lamps, turn them into makeshift microphone stands; then we’d get out tennis rackets for guitars and mime to Beach Boys records. We would perform for the mirror as if we were watching ourselves on TV.
Like many boys on my block, I had to have an electric guitar. One Christmas, my father brought home a cheapo along with a tiny amp he picked up during a tour of duty in Japan. It was a “Splendor,” with flat-wound strings a quarter-inch off the neck and nearly impossible to play. Still, I loved it.
For a kid obsessed with music, Lemoore was Dullsville. The local high school had only one rock band — The Leftovers, a ratty five-piece that played school dances. Oh, but they were cool. After the lead singer got killed in a car crash, there wasn’t much going on, music-wise. Once in a while, a band from the East Bay named The Golliwogs came through Hanford or Visalia. The Golliwogs wore funny, three-corner hats like the old guy on the Quaker Oats package (in 1967, the band would change its name to Creedence Clearwater Revival).
After seven years in Lemoore, my father got orders to NAS Jacksonville, Florida. I had a high school friend who had come to Lemoore from Jacksonville. He told me I would love Jacksonville — it was “really happening.” Man, was he right.
The six of us — my mom and dad, two brothers and a sister, plus the family Dachshund — crammed ourselves into a Ford Falcon station wagon for four miserable days. Texas was interminable. The dog was on tranquilizers — and my mother should have been. When we finally arrived in Jacksonville, we could smell the ocean — or was it the Glidden paint plant? My father kept missing the turnoff and went over the same toll bridge two or three times before finally asking a toll-taker for directions to the base.
It was a heady time for a Northern Navy brat to be arriving in cracker country. Jacksonville was then — and pretty much still is — the capital of South Georgia. This was the Deep South. Talk about culture shock. The bus station still had the corrugated fiberglass partitions that had not long before had separated whites from blacks.
We arrived on April 4, the day Martin Luther King got shot. I was sitting in the bathtub in the base hotel when the news from Memphis came over the radio. Uh-oh, I thought.
My folks had gone to Orange Park to look for a house. They wound up buying a cheap, cinderblock house exactly like thousands of other cheap cinderblock houses in Jacksonville. The total price was $12,900. Thanks to the V.A. Bill, they only had to put $10 down.
Duly ensconced at Orange Park High School, I was surprised to discover there were young bands all over the place. There were half a dozen rock groups at Orange Park Senior High alone: The Daybreakers, The Nu-Sounds, The Six Teens, The Sound Vibrations and others. The Daybreakers even had a local hit single. I lost no time making friends with these dudes.
Something was going on here, but none of it made any sense to me. Middle-class, white kids in penny-loafers — with no socks — were in love with soul music. At the same time, blacks downtown were rioting. I overheard a group of “rednecks” excitedly entertaining the idea of forming a vigilante gang to head downtown and “teach ‘em rioters a lesson.”
Nevertheless, Jacksonville in the late Sixties was a great place to be. My friends and I didn’t know it, but the music scene was hitting critical mass and was set to explode.
A year before I made the move, a band of Northside boys had made good with the sax-laden, white-soul hit, “Spooky.” I’d heard it on the radio a million times. It still sounds great. Coincidentally, The Classics had started their careers at the same Edgewood Avenue recording studio as my new friends in The Daybreakers.
Being a rock musician in Jacksonville had its dangers. Remember the final scene in Easy Rider? That was North Florida in 1968. Having long hair in those days was an open invitation to getting your ass kicked. Packs of rednecks — apparently with nothing better to do — cruised around town in “muscle cars,” looking for longhairs to terrorize. If you were hitchhiking and spotted a car with the rear end jacked up, the best thing to do was make yourself scarce — immediately.
There was only one area of town where you could be left alone: Jacksonville’s answer to Greenwich Village, the traditionally-bohemian Riverside district, where rents were low and people were open-minded. Thank God I discovered Riverside. I loathed Orange Park. Still do.
My dad had taken me downtown to Paulus Music and co-signed for my first professional guitar, a Gibson SG Standard, which we bought for the princely sum of $348.40 — I‘d wanted a Les Paul, like my buddy, Page, in the Daybreakers had, but it was out of my price range. I was supposed to make the $22 monthly payments with wages I earned at the Navy base, busing tables at the enlisted men’s cafeteria for $1.65 an hour. I hated that job because the goddamn jarheads constantly hassled me about my hair, which was an inch — maybe — over the tops of my ears.
Even after setting me up with the new guitar, things got progressively worse between me and my military dad. He thought music was a hobby. He thought I was an ignoramus to even dare to think I could make a living at it. He was also a bit jealous: He had to work his ass off all his life — what made me think I was any better?
He didn’t object when I moved in with my grandmother, who had come down from Boston to get away from the gray slush and the cold. She bought a trailer and rented a lot in a nice, little trailer park close to school. She wound up making most of the payments on my guitar — God bless her — when I quit my job to take another stab at school, this time at Central Adult High School, downtown.
Central Adult was a long drive from Orange Park. But I met a lot of cool, hippie types there, like Riverside denizen “Coconut Harley.” Harley was one of the first hippies in Jacksonville — you could tell, because he had the longest hair. Harley was mostly known for his pet coconut. He talked to it and carried it with him everywhere he went.
In the trailer park where my grandmother and I lived, there was another local legend, Paul Glass. His black, stringy hair was already fairly long. He had quit school a year before to become a rock musician with a band called Marshmellow [sic] Steamshovel. But he spent most of his days at home, with the shades drawn, practicing his Epiphone ES-335 replica.
Skipping school, I brought my new SG by one day, hoping for some pointers. Glass was openly envious: “You don’t deserve this guitar,” he sneered as he lovingly fondled it. He wanted to borrow it, but of course I wouldn’t let it out of my sight. So we struck a deal: He brought me along on his gigs. I would let him use the guitar and, in return, I would get to meet his band mates and other musicians (like Jeff Carlisi, later of .38 Special, and Leon Wilkeson of Skynyrd). I might even get to “sit in” once in a while.
Glass became my teacher and mentor. As part of my instruction in guitar lore, he took me to see a Riverside band called The Second Coming, which featured a virtuoso picker from Bradenton by the name of Dickey Betts. If Clapton was God, as the saying went, then Betts was Jesus — he could play Clapton’s solo on “Crossroads” note-for-note.
For us, Betts’ guitar playing was like a drug. Glass and I would go almost anywhere to get it. We hitchhiked all over Northeast Florida — as far as Ravine Gardens in Palatka — to hear Betts at every possible opportunity. One night, the two of us set out on a hitchhiking excursion into one of Jacksonville’s toughest blue-collar neighborhoods. This was indeed a risky proposition for semi-longhairs, but we braved our way to the Woodstock Teen Center on Beaver Street to get our regular dose of Betts’ magic.
On that night, The Second Coming had a mystery guest: Betts deferred most of the solos to a diffident young man who looked like the Cowardly Lion and spent most of the show staring down at his unfashionable Fender, with his stringy hair draped over his face.
We were up in arms. We couldn’t understand why Betts was letting this guy hog all the solos. “We came to hear Dickey!” we shouted. “Dickey can play circles around this dude!” It would be months before we found out that “this dude” was Duane Allman, and that he was already famous.
Adding his younger brother, Gregg, to the lineup, Allman incorporated the foundations, the format and the fan base of The Second Coming. The new version of the band played a previously scheduled show at the Jacksonville Beach Coliseum. Second Coming fans had no inkling that this was actually the debut of The Allman Brothers Band — and of course all my friends and I were there. We had been hearing rumors that the band was leaving town and that this might be its goodbye performance.
Then they were gone.
Later that year, Glass and I were browsing at Hoyt Hi-Fi in Roosevelt Mall (right next to site of the old Scene, where the Second Coming had been the house band). On prominent display, in a spot you couldn’t miss, was an album featuring a figure that looked a lot like Second Coming bassist Berry Oakley doing his best Jesus imitation. Here he was in a dark robe, standing with both arms outstretched, as if he were blessing a group of sinners below him — most of whom looked familiar.
“Is that — ?” I stammered as I pointed to the album. The store clerk, who had obviously been asked this question many times, interjected, “It sure is!”
The way we saw it, The Second Coming had added some new members and changed its name to The Allman Brothers Band. The biggest surprise, though, was that the group had an album out on a major label.
Our necks snapped as my friend and I shot looks at each other. A light went on: Suddenly anything was possible. Success in the music biz for local dudes was a reality, not just a pipe dream — as our parents had declared. As usual, the parents were wrong. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blackfoot, .38 Special, and others would follow in the ABB’s wake.
My pal, Leon Wilkeson of Lynyrd Skynyrd [who died of a heart attack last year] said he’d had the same experience. “The Allman Brothers showed us that it would work, that it was worth pursuing — you know, putting your head on the chopping block.”
This band of Westsiders called One Percent were able to pick up a lot of loose fans as the Second Coming and its spin-offs left town. But being a big fish in small pond was never enough for Lynyrd Skynyrd, either.
To be successful, musicians must be nomads — ready to travel whenever and wherever the siren of success beckons. Betts and his compadres had bolted Tampa for Jacksonville and had just as quickly left Jacksonville for Macon. Glass and I chose to stay in Jacksonville, where the living is easy. We’re still here.
I often wonder why I still live here. I did a three-month stint in Los Angeles once and hated it so much I thought I might go postal. I hated Atlanta, too. What is it about Jacksonville?
The main thing, I guess, is my family. Even though it’s not “cool” for musicians to be close to their parents, apparently, I’m more domestic and sentimental than I care to admit — I still see my mother every week. Also, musicians tend to live hand-to-mouth, so it was nice to know there was a couch or two available to sleep on if things go badly.
I’m guessing that pure laziness — the hallmark of any musician worth his salt — has a lot to do with it. Jacksonville is a nice place to live — and it’s cheap. In fact, it’s probably the best deal on the East Coast, from Maine to Miami. Housing is inexpensive, so I don’t have to work that hard to pay my rent. Anywhere else, I’d have to get a real job to live half this well.
This city’s forgiveness of my intrinsic laziness has been a trap of sorts. A trap in which I’m apparently quite comfortable.
END
Michael Fitzgerald
has been a freelance writer for Jacksonville's Folio Weekly, The
Business Journal, The First Coast Entertainer, Orlando's JAM
Magazine, and The Musician's Trade Journal. He was also an
editor and writer at Florida Community College's Campus Voice and
Jacksonville University¹s Navigator, and is the creator and editor of
Cowford magazine.
