Tuesday, August 09, 2005


Hey, Roberto. Here's an old photo that was on my wife's computer that I thought you might be interested in having. It's a picture of the James Gang in one of our more sober moments, obviously. That is me in the lower left corner, most certainly holding a Bud which you can't see. That is Fred Guarino, our drummer, holding a cheap picture he removed from the wall of this motel, wherever it was. Under him is Johnny Mulkey, guitarist, Bubba Lathem (piano player) pretending to talk on the phone, and that is Wilbur Jr holding a lamp on his head. Yes, a lamp on his head. As you can see, our primary interest from the beginning was elevating the standards of Southern Rock and Roll. Well, that and rendering motel rooms unoccupiable for some time after we went to the next town. Don't give Holiday Inn, Inc., my address.
Jimmy Dean

And this comes from Capn Skyp [a.k.a. Ken Babbs] who was at the La Honda party attended by Hell's Angels on August 7, 1965:


Date:
Mon, 8 Aug 2005 18:02:18 -0700
To:
"robert register"
From:
"capn skyp"
Subject:
Re: Babbs, Forgot To Mention August 7 Was The 40th Anniversary of Kesey's '65 Hell's Angels Party

you know that hells angels party has taken on a lot of clutter,
seeing how's kesey never had a hells angels party but the hells
angles swung in to meet him and get together with him for at that
time the Frisco chapter and the oakland chapter had done some acid
and that was the connection; not the fact kesey was a writer of
renown. The angels had some great guys, smart guys. these were the
ones we got to know.
kb
http://www.skypilotclub.com
skypilotclub
81774 Lost Creek Road
Dexter OR 97431

This comes from a book on the Internet which has a chapter about The Merry Pranksters
http://sunrisedancer.com/radicalreader/library/stormingheaven/stormingheaven19.asp

Thompson met Kesey in early August 1965 at WQEVD, San Francisco's educational television station. After repairing to a nearby bar for some drinks, he invited Ken to tag along to a nearby bike shop and meet a few of his research subjects. Kesey was an instant hit, and "after several hours of eating, drinking and the symbolic sharing of herbs," he suggested that the San Francisco chapter of the Angels come down to La Honda for a weekend?long party.

On the day of the party a huge sign, fifteen feet by three feet, was displayed near the gate: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELLS ANGELS. The sign had, as Thompson, who attended, observed, "a bad effect on the neighbors." Stopping at Baw's General Store, he overheard the following conversation:

"That goddamn dope addict," said a middle-aged farmer.
"First its marywanna, now it's Hell's Angels. Christ alive, he's just pushin our faces in the dirt."

"Beatniks!" said somebody else. "Not worth a pound of piss."

There was talk of divvying up the ax handles in the store and "going up there to clean the place out."
But somebody said the cops were already on the job: "Gonna put 'em in jail for good this time, every damn one of 'em … " So the ax handles stayed in the rack.[7]

The San Mateo police had four cars on the scene, their lights revolving in the dusk. Each new arrival was stopped and questioned, while his license and registration was checked for outstanding traffic violations. At least one was handcuffed and driven off to jail. But otherwise the police were powerless to interfere in the weird scene that was developing across the stream. It was a scene, Thompson wrote, "that must have tortured the very roots of their understanding. Here were all these people running wild, bellowing and dancing half naked to rock 'n' roll sounds piped out through the trees from massive amplifiers, reeling and stumbling in a maze of psychedelic lights …. WILD, by god, and with no law to stop them."[8] Girls in scarlet tights and long soft hair danced with a "steady stream of college professors, vagrants, lawyers, students, psychologists and high style hippies." Kesey was dressed like a druid priest in a hooded white robe. Cassady was in a corner rapping. Allen Ginsberg was sitting on the living room floor, tapping his finger cymbals and chanting.

The Angels never had a chance. From the moment they roared en masse across the bridge, their Harleys momentarily competing with the thundering rock 'n' roll, they were firmly within the Prankster movie. Far from being fawned upon, the Pranksters treated them with the same calculated rudeness that all new arrivals received. No sooner had they killed their bikes than one of the Pranksters began serenading them over the sound system with a kind of talking blues about Angel life, punctuating each stanza with

Oh, but it's great to be an Angel
And be dirty all the time!

Beer was pressed upon them—the Pranksters had laid in a prodigious supply—and LSD, which most of the Angels swallowed under the impression that it was a kind of superamphetamine. It wasn't, of course, and within the hour strange explosions were occurring within their frames of reference. An Angel named Freewheeling Frank, for example, suddenly discovered that he could read the thoughts of all his brother Angels. Watching Ginsberg tap his finger cymbals, he felt like he was "in the land of Oz."[9] Someone said, "Allen Ginsberg is a fruit," but Freewheeling's once potent homophobia had vanished. Like Albert Hofmann, twenty years before him. Freewheeling Frank was feeling like he had been reborn.

"The real Hell's Angels are the ones who've taken LSD and had the carpet jerked out from under them," he later said. "I never really became a Hell's Angels until I took LSD. Not to speak of becoming a man and finding myself … LSD is a medicine not a drug. I only hope it gets in the right hands, and is used for Love rather than Fortune and Fame."

According to Hunter Thompson: "Contrary to all expectations most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid. With a few exceptions, it made them much easier to get along with. The acid dissolved many of their conditioned reflexes. There was little of the sullen craftiness or the readiness to fight that usually pervades their attitude toward strangers. The aggressiveness went out of them; they lost the bristling, suspicious quality of wild animals sensing a snare. It was a strange thing, and I still don't quite understand it."[10]

Monday, August 08, 2005

HEY YA'LL:
EVAHTHANG IS SUPERB!
EVAHTHANG IS GONNA BE ALL RIGHT!
Hey Bill J., ya ole padnuh from Wetumpka, Bazemo', stopped in Possum Den North this evening and wanted me to say hello to his old Wetumpka buddy. Like Buddy says, "KEEP ON ROCKIN' !"
BEST,
robert http://snakedoctor.blogspot.com
http://cottonkingdom.blogspot.com

Aug 07, 1965 (Saturday) Merry Pranksters Party With Hell's Angels.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters throws a huge party at their La Honda cabin and invite the San Francisco chapter of the Hell's Angels.


SEE IF YOU CAN FIND FOUR GREATER LEGENDS OF DOTHAN ROCK 'N ROLL!!!!

Muchas gracias, Robin and the crew at Dothan Magazine http://www.dothanmagazine.com/ & The Image Agency http://theimageagency.com/
L to R: Jimmy Dean[Dean's website http://www.ircusa.com/jdean/], Buddy Buie, Bill J. Moody & Wilbur Walton, Jr.

David Atkins on the right, John Rainey's younger brother

Buddy signing autographs

Ya'll should like this http://www.florida-cracker.org/archives/001981.html. The following exchange at FLORIDA CRACKER mentions me because I took this dipshit Kemp who wrote the retarded book DIXIE LULLABY to task and if any of ya'll can forward this to Kemp, I'd appreciate it because I don't think the little Yankee loving piece of shit has had his ass whipped lately.
April 29, 2005 [my 55th birthday and they're talking about me on the Internet- roberto]

On Your Bookshelf [concerning DIXIE LULLABY]
I finally got a copy of the book I'm in. As everything was positive, it was fun seeing my name in the index and having two pages concerning my thoughts on the South and Southern music.
Did I like the book? No, I did not. Looking at the reviews, I see I'm not the only one.
My mini-review: It's more of the same "Evil Southerners" crap- only this time it comes with a soundtrack.

Posted by floridacracker at April 29, 2005 08:45 PM

Comments
What a shame.

I'll have to check it out, though.

Does it ever go into how implausible it would be for Southern Rock to be racist, seeing as how, by and large, they were just working off the music of old Black bluesmen?

I always have to explain that part to people who ask about Skyrnyrd, when they see the huge flag flying behind them on stage, and just can't figure out how there could be no racism involved. When your idols are guys like Robert Johnson and Leadbelly, it doesn't really make sense to discriminate.

Posted by: ArklahomBoy at April 30, 2005 01:42 PM
He's a nice fellow, but he has issues. Life didn't give him any real problems, so he's like the kids whose immune systems never got a workout- they become allergic to their own hair, and other weird shit- he had to make up his own problems. So he has to work through being from the South.
I told him what my father told me when I was little girl: the only correct response to someone insulting you for being American or Southern is "Kiss my ass." That's all slander against an entire people rates.

He headed up north and absorbed all that hatred and can't even hardly stand his own self.

Posted by: Donnah at April 30, 2005 02:01 PM
Trying to begin the evolution of Southern rock in 1968 is foolishness.

In about 1960-61, Phil Walden was my older cousin's boyfriend. I watched him build a career with black musicians - first Otis Redding, who auditioned in my cousin's living room, Sam & Dave, and all the rest.

I was a few years younger - all of us white kids wanted black bands for our dances - The Tams, Joe Tex, The Miracles, Percy Sledge, even The Pinetoppers featuring Johnny Jenkins (teacher of Hendrix). While we listened to California surf music and the British Invasion, we also listened to the local black radio stations in the day time (many were daylight hours only) and to John R. on WLAC at night. We were steeped in soul music, and I've always thought that's one reason school integration was fairly easy for the kids - we had something in common - the cross cultural language of music.

By 1968, the idea of an integrated rock band in the South was not unusual at all. By 1970 when the Allman Brothers gained national fame, they were fairly common. I have not read the book, but it appears he's another Southerner taught to be ashamed of it - and is ashamed because he does not understand what happened. Beginning in 1968 simply cannot present a true picture.

Posted by: Juan Paxety at April 30, 2005 04:57 PM
This may interest you, Juan. I edited it a bit. It's by a guy who's working on a book about Duane.

----Original Message-----
From: Randy Poe [mailto:bongorandy@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 4:05 AM
To: MightyFieldOfVision@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [MFV] Dr. King/"DL"


A while back the book "DL" came up,
and I believe it was Robert Register who asked about
the premise posed in that book about Dr. King's
assassination prompting the rise of Southern rock due
to black artists turning to fellow black musicians to
play on their albums (rather than using the studio
musicians in Muscle Shoals, etc.) Pete Carr pointed
to the incident that took place with Jerry Wexler et
al at the black radio convention as being a turning
point. A couple of days ago I interviewed Alan Walden
for the Duane book and he brought up the book "DL" in our conversation. I asked him what he
thought of the book's premise. Here's his response:

"Let me say this about the whole thing, the Dr. King
assassination. I don’t think that Dr. King’s
assassination played a great influence on what went on
musically. I can remember being at the black radio
disc jockey convention in Miami, Florida and having to
hide in a room for several days because the black
mafia there was trying to run everyone white out of
R&B music , and beating up several of my friends. So
many people like Jerry Wexler and myself and my
brother , a lot of the people who had been true
pioneers in black music all of a sudden said, ‘Hey,
we’ve had it with this shit. We know how it should
be, and it’s not like that anymore.’ It’s like you go
into a radio station, it’s no longer, ‘Hey, there’s
Alan’ and ‘Hey, there’s Jerry.’ It’s like, ‘Hey,
What’s that white motherfucker doing in here?’ Some
of us got tired of it and we started looking in other
directions. And that’s when Southern rock started to
emerge. When R&B lost my brother and me, they lost
two of the real pioneers of it. Black artists did not
get paid before my brother and I got in the business.
I mean, we were the leaders of that whole thing of
getting black artists to get paid."

I haven't read "DL" because, in all
honesty, I don't want it to have any affect -
consciously or subconsciously - on the book I'm
writing. So, I don't really know precisely what the
author's premise is. I only know what I've read about
the book here and in reviews of it in various
newspapers. If the guy is saying King's assassination
caused the black artists to stop using white
musicians, thus prompting the rise of Southern rock,
I'm now thinking he's not particularly accurate. When
I pointed out to Alan that Aretha started using Donny
Hathaway, Jerry Jemmott, and Bernard Purdie, he
countered with, "I think in a lot of ways [Dr. King's]
assassination brought a lot of us even stronger
together to make the dream work. The man had a hell
of a vision. He did something like Duane Allman and
Otis Redding and all other true leaders of our time
period did. He had the right idea. But I don’t think
his assassination affected the music. Look at Wilson
Pickett. He came to Muscle Shoals after that."

So, there you have it from one of the guys who
was in the middle of both the soul music world and the
Southern rock world. I suspect he knows of what he
speaks.

-- Randy

Posted by: Donnah at April 30, 2005 08:27 PM
That's interesting - I wonder when Alan said it. I understand he's cleaned up his act a lot in the past few years, but the last time I tried to interview him, he was sitting in a huge chair, like something in a British palace, drinking large amounts of beer, holding a very attractive 18-year old woman on his knee, and wearing a bright green t-shirt bearing the yellow logo - FILSBRO (Phil's bro).

It was my impression at the time (I was a music major in college and playing in bands in the late 60s and early 70s) that white musicians in the South were turning from simply copying the soul music they had grown up with and were incorporating elements they picked up from the British invasion, Phil Spectre, The Beach Boys and all that was going on in San Francisco. I always thought it was a time that white and integrated groups grew while the old soul black groups continued to do what they had always done. This kind of thing happens all the time in music - one group pioneers a sound, another group learns from it and departs from it. I think it's more of an age thing - the younger musician builds on what has gone before. Unfortunately, in the South everything eventually gets blamed on race, and in this case, the previous popular sound was performed by mostly black musicians, while the new Southern rock that departed from it was played by mostly white musicians. People looking at it saw only a black/white division - not what it really was - a new generation making its own music.

Posted by: Juan Paxety at May 1, 2005 12:00 PM
Snorted up a whole freaking empire, didn't they? Dipshits.

I couldn't eat a bowl of cornflakes without it somehow being about race to some people. It's like the DU fools who think Bush is to blame for earthquakes in Iran. It's a mindset.

I hope the new book on Duane answers the questions I have, such as: Why in the name of everything holy was that man kept on ice for a year after he died? Could NO ONE get their shit together enough to bury him in all that time?

Questions, questions.
The only interesting bit I saw in "DL" (besides my own stuff!) was this line about how after Duane died "there were questions about Phil Walden and the mother" (Duane's mom). That gave me pause indeed.
Oh, and it also mentioned a couple more of Duane's drunken antics that I hadn't heard before. That was from an interview with Dr. John.

Posted by: Donnah at May 1, 2005 12:31 PM
It was my impression, although I don't know for sure that the problem with Duane's burial came with where they wanted to bury him - Rose Hill Cemetery. It had not been an "active" cemetery in decades, although a few people continued to be buried in family plots there. Then there was the cultural issue - Rose Hill is filled with prominent Maconites and Georgians - some of the la-dee-dah crowd didn't want someone who was not from the "right crowd" buried there. Phil Walden couldn't get in the local country club, despite his millions, because he came from the wrong side of Napier Avenue. It will be interesting to see what the book has to say.

Posted by: Juan Paxety at May 1, 2005 02:48 PM
Come on, Juan. A *year*. That is beyond abnormal. Nobody can spin that as anything but weird.
The closed Rose Hill story is a new one to me, but, honestly, we bury our dead, ya know?

Posted by: Donnah at May 1, 2005 02:55 PM
Yes, it's strange, I'll agree. As for burying the dead, in the 1940s, Riverside Cemetery, just to the north of Rose Hill, became Macon's major cemetery. By 1970, there were others in other parts of town. Rose Hill was simply almost full.

The significance of Rose Hill, for folks who may not know, is that the kids in town, including the Allmans, went to the cemetery to smoke dope. "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" was written about the headstone of Elizabeth Reed Napier in the cemetery.


Posted by: Juan Paxety at May 2, 2005 08:45 AM
And don't forget Little Martha!

How come when Berry died a year later, they both got into Rose Hill immediately? I was under the impression the people involved just decided to kill two birds with one stone. They had to do something then.

Posted by: Donnah at May 2, 2005 11:58 PM

Sunday, August 07, 2005

From: Buddy Buie
Subject: Re: Memories Of The Rockin' Gibraltar's First Audition at Bill J. Moody's Patio Club Apartment & mo'
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 11:23:15 -0500
To: "robert register"


Robert:
This Side UP, Kelso Hurston, and the Rockin Gibraltars are names my old
mind still remembers. Did you know that Bill Moody is living in Dothan?
I was thrilled to see him at the reception Dothan Magazine had for
Gloria and me. J.R. and I thought Book A Trip was a very hip song. Of
course we had been up for two days taking diet pills and drinking
gallons of black coffey. Please inform Frank Freidman that he has a
twin brother in Nashville.
regards
Buddy Buie

Plus we have more on what happened to Tippy...
Before Tippy went into the Army he was the most beautiful person
you ever met. But, his experience in the Army changed him forever.
I think if he had been able to get out of the draft he would still
be alive today. After Eddie Hinton quit his job at Muscle Shoals
sound studio to work on my record, he picked Tippy as his replacement
and everything was going fine until Tippy was drafted.
Eddie and I had moved to Atlanta and were working on getting
a record deal for our album. Then, some strange things happened.
Tippy got drafted and Eddie got strung out on speed and weed.
Eddie blew our deal with Atlantic Records and also with Island
and Warner Brothers. So, after 2 years of waiting for him
to
get a deal I gave it up and went back to college and then
onto medical school. The last time I saw Tippy was in June
of 1979 when I left Alabama to move to San Diego and begin
my internship. He and I and Joe Rudd all played together
at a VFW club. I believe it was only about a month later
that I got a call telling me Tippy had shot himself.
Tippy's mother was a patient of mine when I moved back to
Tuscaloosa in 1986.