CAT TALES FROM SAILCAT  JOHN D. WYKER ERIC BURDON AND THE ANIMALS:   In about 1966 The RUBBER BAND went to see The ANIMALS at Boutwell Auditorium.....and after the show some teenie boppers thought that I WAS ERIC BURDON....and this swarm of sweaty little girls descended on us …and I say unto you I WAS SCARED FOR MY LIFE...they wanted anythang....your glasses...a finger...a hand full of hair...a lung....maybe an eyeball...   We all made it to my car and got in and locked all the doors and these little clawin' boppers jumped on the car...on top of the hood…and truck...   So I decided the only thang I could do was to start drivin' and slang em' off he car.......I had to be careful not to hurt anybody ...but some of these girls road halfway across B'Ham before I slung em' all off my car !   It scared the hell out of me...! And I never looked at girls this age in the same way after that..   God Love them little savages..!     RUBBER BAND   I think the RUBBER BAND was considered too much of an R&B or Soul band to be included on that "PSYCHEDELIC STATES ALABAMA" compilation you mentioned....however after about 3 years of playin' straight R&B and Soul music we did finally decide to add some psychedelic type songs to our show and I switched from playing trumpet to playing bass guitar.Like so many other bands of that era in the mid to late 60's we had started to smoke alot of grass and experiment with a few other thangs...all in the name of "ART"....the reason being that we had heard through the grapevine that Bob Dylan smoked a lot of weed and that's where he got a bunch of the ideas for some of his unique songs and lyrics....then when The Beatles came out with Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band it was a well know fact that they were dropping LSD and doin' some heavy trippin'....SOOOOOOO we thought that these substances just might improve our ablitity to become better songwriters and musicians.....I think the grass and the uppers may have helped a little but the acid open a few doors that maybe should have stayed shut....that's a whole nuther can of worms...back in thise days there was real LSD-25 and it was some mighty powerful stuff....and a totally unknown force.... Anyway when The RUBBER BAND started to get stoned we were all wearing matching uniforms and our Ford Bus was painted a nice neat light blue and on the sides we had a professional sign painter hand letter our name and logo in silver shaded with black....it simply said; The RUBBER BAND "The Hardest Working Band In Show Business !" Of course we modified James Browns logo which was JAMES BROWN The Hardest Workin MAN in Show Business....but few of our fans ever saw the similarity...or if they did they did not mention it.....as I said after about 3 years we were heavy into smoking mass quantities of grass and listening to The Byrds and other groups like that ....plus we were also playing shows with them and other hit acts that were big potheads at THE W-VOK SHOWER of STARS Shows,etc.... So one day we all showed up at the gig without our matching uniforms......we had switched from Beatle Boots to sandels that were made in India out of Water Buffalo Hide and of course the faded Levis' and whatever the strangest lookin' threads we could find.After that gig we took our nice neat light blue Ford touring truck and someone handed out a bunch of cans of bright Day-Glo spray paint of all different colors and we all smoked as much grass as we could hold and went to work on the transformation of that Ford truck...we painted it alll over ...wheeels and all....in fact it looked a lot like the truck that Louie drives these days where he has let everyone go wild on the paint job... we really made a mess out of that truck...but it gave us a since of freedom to do it....and folks could see us comin' for a mile away ! Anyway The Rubber Band did go through a pretty heavy PSYCHEDELIC period and when the Army drafted Joe Sobotka and then later Tippy go drafted we really went off the deep end...I hired a very young Jim Coleman to play keyboards and guitar and Lou Mulleniex on drums and for a while Tippy still played guitar and sometimes Ronnie Brown and Frank Freidman and I played bass with my back to the audience because I was so busy watching the pictures come out of the bass amp speakers...trippin' my arse off....by this time Johnny Townsend had long left the band and moved to LA to form The Sanford Townsend Band with Ed Sanford from that great old Mongomery,Alabama band The Rockin' Gibraltors.....that was about the time that The James Gang from Atlanta also broke up....they had the hit GEORGIA PINES so for a while Wilbur Walton who was The James Gang singer joined us on some gigs...it was a crazy mess ....but it was a hell of a lot of fun... To make a long story a little shorter... I do not think the RUBBER BAND's version of LET LOVE COME BETWEEN US ever made it to a CD release...not that I'm aware of anyway.It is available by Delbert McClinton and James & Bobby Purify on CD and also Mavis Staples on an album titled "OH WHAT A FEELING"... I'm really not sure if the Mavis' album was ever released on CD but it is really fine version recorded in The Shoals at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios down by the river and co-produced by Jerry Wexler & Barry Beckett and it features most of The Swampers.Seems like it was recorded in about the early 80's. Well Barn and everyone...I'm sorry to ramble on like this... but by now.... ya'll know it's my nature....some day soon I hope to be able to hook all these ramblings and Cat Tales up together and spice them up with some good old pictures and turn em' lose on the unsuspecting world.... The tribe has been kinda of laid back in the last few days but when you have beautiful weather outside like we have been havin' in Bama'Lama Land it makes a body want to get some yard work done that's been piling up all winter....I think we will have quit a bit of rain this comin' week cause I can feel it in my bones and I can hear the thunder rollin' in the distance right now...sounds like it's comin' from up around the Tennesee Line... I would also like to take this opportunity to WELCOME all of the new MFV Tribe members and say "please make yourself feel right at home and just jump in the middle of it all when ever you feel like it....you will make some good friends and contacts here and all in all we are a pretty good bunch of nuts ! Man ! It's rainin' like pourin' piss out of a boot on a flat rock right now !   How's thangs in Tulsa......I'll try to find that file with the photo of The Rubber Band for you...You listed all of the people that recorded "Let Love Come Between Us" except for one that I'm aware of and that is MAVIS STAPLES.....it's on her solo titled "OH WHAT A FEELING" When the the US ARMY drafted Joe Sobotka (Keyboards with The Rubber Band) that was the beginning of the end for that group......I hired Jim Coleman to take his place on keyboards...and our drummer Jackie Sims got married and dropped out so I hired Jackie's new brother in law LOU MULLENIX...I hope I spelled that right.....Lou and Jim were a lot younger than most of the other members but they were very extremely talented.... About the same time that the Rubber Band was on it's last leg the same thang was happening to The James Gang...the Southern James Gang...which featured Wilbur Walton as their singer...the other members also doubled as The Candymen when they backed up Roy Orbison....most of those cats later formed The Atlanta Rhythm Section...Buddy Buie from Dothan produced both The James Gang and ARS...I used to go to Hotlanta back in the 60's and stay with Buddy and Robert Nix...Nix was the drummer for these groups in those days...and now all of a sudden I just remembered where I lost my first wedding ring...and that was at Nix's apartment..damn I'm firing some old memory cells tonight...amazing how the old human mind can be inspired to recall events in the long lost past ..... Anyway...when the Rubber Band finally snapped and broke up I still had a bunch of gigs lined up to play and no band to do it....the Christmas party session was about to happen and Wilbur Walton was also left with all of the gigs that James Gang had contacted to play....I had know Wilbur for years...when I was in high school I used to go down to Tuscaloosa and attend all of the fraternity rush parties and Wilbur was in college then and he was a member of The Sex Above Everythang Frat...in laymen's' terms that would be The SAE's......anyway Wilbur called me one day and said that he was holding a bunch of James Gang gigs and that he would pay me to put a band together...I think he offered me some pretty good money too...so I told him that I had the same problem...gigs and no band...so the best way to solve the problem was to put one band together to cover ALL the gigs...... One night we were The Rubber Band and maybe the next night we were The James Gang......I played bass and I hired Court Pickett to sing....and Lou Mullenix on drums...and I think Jim Coleman was on keyboards...and Tippy Armstrong played guitar on some of the gigs and Ronnie Brown played guitar...and on some gigs Frank Freidman played a second guitar....Frank was a founding member of THIS SIDE UP.... Court sang lead when we were The Rubber Band...and Wilbur sang lead when we were The James Gang.......this worked out pretty well at first when the gigs were far a apart....and in different towns.....we were all making great money and having a ball doin' it.....except when Wilbur had to do the singin'.....by this time he was a real big drunk...and would not sing until he was totally juiced up...it took us a while to get his M. O. down...he would say the PA was broken and tell us to stall with more instrumentals....we finally figured out what he was up to...and we just played a bunch of freeform jams...remind me to tell the cat tale of how we brain washed a crowd in Auburn with a one chord groove that put the whole place in a trance dance..... Anyhow......thangs were going fine until about the middle of the Christmas session and we played a gig in Mobile as The Rubber Band....then the next night in the very same building we came in as The James Gang...we got away with it until the third night when we played the same place for a different girls club as The Rubber band again.......it was really scary to be on the bandstand and to watch people in the crowd whispering to each other...you could read their lips..."Was'nt that the same guy that played with..so and so band.the other night......well.... I don't know how we ever got out of there alive that last night...but we did......I'm sure their was some fast talkin' involved and some fast cars too.....! THE LAND DOWN UNDER I'm at the Bigun's pad ..worked up 3 strong song starts using the E -Bee- Be tuning on my black Willie T Fogtar...produced powerful lifting Fog that will make the Ethion's suspension stable and out of sight high above the Chinaberry Tree in John Mudflapum's Shaw, Mississippi backyard....Blim and several other mad Ethion's came down from the sky ridin' a green carpet of Fog...their Fogtar's grew quieter as they lightly touched down in the alley behind a large grocery store located near the banks of The Mighty Tennessee River...Cable and local news reporters were there with their hungry digital video camera's......they were completely unaware of this unplanned contagious action on the part of Blim and his artist friend's....The news media was mainly there to capture the sale and interview the person that was about to buy the one millionth can of Beenie Beenie's that is grocery store had sold that particular day.....the self that contained the continental canned beans and weeners was located right across from all the gondolas that held the fruits and vegetables....which is exactly where Big Blim and his squad of Ethion's best Brainstormers were headed....they were on their way to make a statement in order to satisfy their need to be different and to make people wonder...and ultimately think...not just to think but to think for themselves....and the news crew was about to queue the announcer....he was a very large dark skinned man almost the same shade of brown paper bag tan just like the invading Ethion's.... The news crew brought spots and cameras and pencils and pads and they all seemed so serious about what they were doing...and a big bunch of local people gathered around and as the news was about to be broadcast LIVE and in living color to homes and huts and shacks and mansions and government building and corporate meeting rooms as well as trains and boats and planes located all over world and even beyond to space stations and shuttles that were secretly and seriously working to prepare and escape route for those that were responsible for devising a plan to convert and direct all the earth's great abundance of natural resources in to massive landfills that rise high up in to the polluted sky like the great pyramids of ancient Egypt...these mountains of trash were not just one or two here or there and   limited to rural areas outside the cities and towns...there were no more real rustic rural areas in this era and age of man made trash and consumption.. Soon there would be no place left to hide the unsightly mass of mess made mostly of packaging..this was also long after the Czar of manufacturing was commuted to the insane asylum and his governmental office and presidential authority had long been voted and vetoed out of existence....except in the memories of all reasonable people trying to live with unreasonable circumstances....the chain had to be broken at some point ...the cycle was not working and the markets were all taking note but not able to offer anything but false hopes that things would ever be the same...that is before the system was exposed...   and the exposed were systematically selected to  be imprisoned on islands of deserts dedicated for that specific purpose in The Land Down Under. THE ALLMAN JOYS   Thank You for that great information on Dr. Feelgood...I was pretty sure it was a young Jimi Hendricks that was playin' in Dr.Feelgood's band..I've seen a lot of cats do crazy thangs with a guitar ...but that was the first time I ever saw anyone play it with his teeth and behind his back and also behind his back......years later those kind of moves became a popular gimmick with many guitar players......   In the mid 60's my band The RUBBER BAND used to hire The ALLMAN JOYS as our opening act...we really did not need an opening act but we thought we could help promote Gregg and Duane's band...and they needed the money...I went to military school with the cat that was playin' bass with the ALLMAN JOYS at the time..his name was Mike Alexander..from Memphis..he later committed suicide......anyway the crowds in Tuscaloosa would boo The Allman Joys and they were giving them a hard time ...so Duane pulled out all the stops and played his guitar behind his head and with his teeth and he even got down on his knees and did a back flip while he played...I thought it was a gas...but the crowd would not give them a chance...Gregg was playin' a little Vox organ..I think it was...it was red with chrome legs...and after Duane did his flip and all that stuff Gregg laid down on his back and pulled the organ over on top of him while he played...they were all dressed up in some crazy clothes that they had gotten in The Village in New York....wild patterns of hip hugging bellbottoms...I think Duane's were black & white hound's-tooth...and the shirts were what we called Tom Jones shirts...the movie not the singer...the sleeves were big and baggy...and we called the type of collars the shirts had ..airplane collars...the collars were so long and wide...and everyone wore those big wide belts with buckles the size of a horse shoe.....man they were a bunch of cool dudes !     DAN PENN    Conway Twitty's version of "Is A Bluebird Blue" was real important to Dan Penn...or should I say Wallace Pennington..It was the first real money he made as a songwriter !   I was lucky enough to have been at Spar Music above City Drug Store in Florence,Alabama the day that young Dan Penn got his first check from that recording...it was also the first time that I ever laid eyes on Penn...I was writing songs for Spar and Tom Stafford was giving me some positive criticism on some of my lyrics..and then he started telling me about this great new songwriter and singer that he was workin' with..he said he had just come up from Vernon,Alabama...and his real name was Wallace Pennington ..but he was using the pen name..Dan Penn...I believe Dan was 16 years old at the time...Stafford was going on about what a cool cat Penn was....it was about that time that I heard footsteps climbing the inside stair well...and the door flew open and BAM ! In walked young Dan Penn..   He was dressed in a brown leather jacket..I call them bomber jackets ..but without a fur collar...he had a white T-Shirt on and blue denim jeans.probably Levis..and a pair of brown leather house shoes..Penn was famous for years later for wearing house shoes instead of regular footwear...Somebody once asked Dan what his definition of funky was  and he said "Funky is anythang that you ain't supposed to do... but you can get a way with "...For me those house shoes were the beginning of FUNKY ! I hungout with Dan and Spooner a lot back in The Time and I'd drive up to visit them years later when they both moved to Memphis and the house shoes were still apart of his dress code and Penn's funky cool thang...    Back to that first sighting a at Spar...we were formally introduced later that same night...Dan was also wearing a hat..it was what we called a black stingy brim hat ..much like The blues Brothers would make famous many years later...Penn wore sunglasses at night..and it inspired me to do the same thang for the next 40 years ! In his mouth he had a tooth pick in one side...a cigarette in the other and he was also chewing gum at the same time...now he was a very talented cat ...to be able to juggle all that stuff in one mouthful...I was amazed...Penn's right hand was all bandaged up...gauze covered 2 or 3 fingers and wrapped up around his wrist...He was walkin' down the hall of Spar..which was a real small place and somebody...I think it was Norbert or Briggs or Carrigan yelled at Dan and asked him "What happened to your hand Dan ?...Penn replied " KNIFE FIGHT !..and never missed a beat as he spit his gum like a bullet from the barrel of a pistol into a waiting metal garbage can...PING ! The gum hit the can !   Tom Stafford picked an envelope up off of his desk and looked at Dan and said "Come here Dan..I 've got your first check for Conway's cut on "Is A Bluebird Blue"...again Dan never broke stride as he fired back.."Good I need to buy me a new car cause that old used car I'm drivin' just blew an engine ! " Tom ask him how that happened and Dan fired back..Draggin' for pink slips !"   Dan Penn was one of the original inventors of cool ! He had an attitude that made him stand out from the rest of the pack ...and back then he seemed to be much older and wiser than his years !   A DUANE ALLMAN CAT TALE: Here’s a Cat Tale about Duane Allman that took place back in the late 1960's at Rick Hall's FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama: Rick Hall was famous for intimidating musicians that were playin' on his sessions. There are many stories about how Rick would book musicians "3 or 4 deep" for some of his sessions....3 drummers....3 bass players, etc. If the first picker didn’t come up with a great part in a certain amount of time Rick would throw him off the session right there on the spot and call in the next person to see what they could come up with.  Meanwhile the cats on the bench would sit out in the lobby and play cards waiting on their chance to shine.  I'd say Rick had kind of a Bear Bryant type of attitude. Well ole Duane Allman turned the tables on Rick....that was back in the early days of over dubbing or multi -tracking and sometimes quite a bit of work and set up time was involved in getting the tape and the machines set up to over dub a lead guitar part or somethang like that.  They would get the main basic track recorded on tape and then maybe the next day come back in and overdub Duane's lead guitar part. I remember one time....I think it was on a Wilson Pickett session, when Duane was asked to come in record his guitar part and I drove him in to town that day.  I think Jimmy Johnson was running the board and he already had everythang set up and ready to record when we got there. The track sounded great and he had all of his levels set.  After Duane made sure his guitar was in tune and he had the settings on his amp just like he wanted it and his headphone level was satisfactory...he asked for a short break before actually recording his part.  Duane and I disappeared to one of our many secret places out behind FAME and he began to "get his head right".  That's all I can say about that but ya'll know what I mean.  After all Duane had a motto that he lived by ..."Whatever it takes TO HIT THE NOTE !" Anyway when he was finally ready Duane strolled back into the studio with that sure footed cocky attitude that was so famous for....shook back his long flamin' reddish hair slipped his headphones on and picked up his magic guitar and slung the wide leather strap across his shoulder closed his eyes and nodded to the engineer in the control room that he was ready! A voice came from the playback speakers, "OK WE ARE ROLLING"...and the red recording light flickered to like indicating the seriousness of the moment. The track was came on strong.  It was a funky hot piece of music although I'm not sure exactly which title it was but as the track began to play it was cookin' so much that the walls in the studio seemed to be breathing in and out of time with the pounding rhythm of this masterful Muscle Shoals track. Duane still had his eyes closed, but his feet and his body were moving in perfect time with the music he was hearin' in his headphones...he was in total concentration almost like a Buddhist monk meditating on this pulsating moment that he was now living and recording in.  As the place in the song that required his talent for lead guitar approached the tension began to grow....after all this was what this day was all about....those few magic moments  of recorded sound on magnetic tape where Duane Allman knew that he could forever become immortal...and unforgettable...simply by playing his heart out for a few seconds on this guitar ride. When the moment came to play, Duane's eyes were still tightly closed but his face looked totally released as if he knew exactly what his fingers would do to steal the spotlight and he began to play...or should I say burn with an intensity that bordered on recklessness.  It was like watchin' someone attempt a high dive that they had never done before...maybe a quadruple triple back flip with 2 and half turns of sideways twist before the diver finally cleanly entered the water with his toes perfectly pointed towards the sky.  It was the kind of action that everyone holds their breath for and silently prays to be allowed to witness this kind of unique and rare perfection. Duane was totally playin' his ass off and it was obvious not only to me but by the look on Duane's face that he was even surprising himself with his own extension of his guitar genius.  I call it playin' over your head...where someone really does not have a cut and dried plan for what there are goin' to play.  That would be too dull for someone like Duane...too boring and predictable.  Duane was goin' for the kind of solo that would not only surprise all of the listeners but it would also be a surprise to him as well....the kind of thang that when you listen to it back...you go...."How the Hell did I do that"  You know that you may only be able to do it once but as long as you get it on tape that it will live forever.  That's one of the beauties of recorded sound and also what makes some people legends! That's not the end of this story.... or the end of that solo that Duane was smokin' his way through at FAME Studio that day. Everythang was goin' totally fantastic and right then he blew a line...and everythang just stopped.  The tape came to a halt and Duane was not only mad at himself but you could also see the hurt and disappointment in his face...and then he did somethang I had never seen any other musician do at that time.  He the just stripped the guitar strap off of his back and yanked his cord out of the amp and then he slammed his guitar down and said "OK THAT'S IT !...I"LL COME BACK and TRY IT AGAIN TOMORROW...I AIN"T FEELIN' IT ANYMORE!" And then he strolled out of the studio....as everyone looked on in amazement! I had never seen anyone do anythang like that in my life and I thought it was pretty cool!   THE SEACAMPER: The day I bought the Seacamper - I was comin' back from Huntsville and a boat dealer in Rogersville...I think his name was Lynn Greer...he later ran for somethang government in MonkeyTown. Anyway...Eddie was livin' with me then...this would have been the end of 1972 or around 1973 and I was livin' in my Grandparent's house in North Florence...my grandfather had gotten real sick and they moved him to Decatur for better care. Anyway...the house was filled with antiques and 40 or 50 years of livin' and raisin' kids and grandkids....the house had several magic attics...filled with hunting gear and stuff from the wars and a bugle...you never knew what you'd find next. And Eddie was like the Top Sgt. or Mess Sgt. in charge of the kitchen.  He always wore white pants and a white T-shirt and a pair of Brown Wing Tip Shoes...he loved to challenge people to a foot race if they had on athletic shoes and he never changed - run in those Wing-Tips...won in those Wing-Tips! And Eddie would always have a white apron on and he'd hang all kinds of roots and mushrooms and strange lookin' skulls and turtle shells all around my grandmama's kitchen.....looked more like a Witch Doctor lived there and he had some pretty powerful medicine too. Back in those days when I had just come off of a summer of tourin' with SAILCAT, I dressed real shabbily I guess you could say.  My Levis always were full of holes and my Levi Jacket and my jeans had my sweet grandmother's old costume jewelry sewed on the sleeves and shoulders and the bottoms of the bell bottoms... Back then I always had 5 or 10 grand on me...it was right after BMI certified Motorcycle Mama with a Million radio airplays... So I figured if I looked broke...folks would leave me alone. Well this day I wanted to buy that SEACAMPER I saw on the side of the road.  It was the same one I had seen at the Birmingham Boat Show and I had almost bought it then. So I drove home and picked up Hinton...all dressed in white with a big cigar...a Tampa Sublime or Nugget stickin' out of his mouth. We drove my old white 1965 4 door hard top Cadillac Sedan Deville back to Rogersville and the boatyard of Lynn Greer.  He was out on his boat yard busily writin' in a book and talkin' to potential victims. Every time he'd walk past me...I'd say somethang like "Man...I'd love to have this boat!" and he'd give me this look like "I'll bet you would... you poor ass hippie...I'll just bet you would !" So I did that for a little while....let him think I was a fool that is...and then the game started gettin' old so I adjusted my nuts and went and found Eddie and I said "Eddie give me a couple of those big cigars and you light up a couple...and we found Lynn Greer's office and we went in and sat down... And I told Eddie to make as much smoke as he could and that was a lot...’cause he had about 5 of them lit up and I was puffin' on a couple myself.  I said "I want him to think his office is on fire!" I the meantime I kicked back and propped my feet up on his desk....I'd always heard these stories about the first cars that The EVERLY BROTHERS bought. I heard that they also paid for the glass in the store front window and they just drove right through the glass ! So this was the rock n' roll frame of mind I was in.  So I'm sittin' there in his office with my feet propped up puffin' on a couple of cigars...and I took a wad of hundreds out of one of my pockets and I started waddin' these nice crisp hundred dollar bills up and lobbin' them into a big pile on The Bossman's desk ! Lynn finally saw the smoke but found out that there was more money than fire to be found in his office. Then he came runnin' in all "Yes Sir" this and "No Sir" that... I was in the Catbird's Seat! And damn it felt good! But not as good as puttin' that 24 foot twin engine Lear Jet of a boat in the Tennnessee River THAT day and drivin' it down river...home to The Shoals!   LITTLE EGYPT PLANTATION: I grew up listening to John R. and Hoss Allen on WLAC's powerful 50,000 watt station.  John R and Hoss were white cats with black voices and they blasted black music all night long to every dark and remote little crevise in that magic land we call The South.  The music that they played was soulful and full of rhythm.  The songs that they released out into the night air were about love and lost love and good times and hard times and the music doctored those feelings we had that we called "the blues".  These white cats with their black voices at WLAC knew how to spread the news and it was the soundtrack to my young life.  It was a time in my life when it seemed that history was made at night and all a man needed was a fast car with a loud radio.  My friends and I would drive around the back roads of Alabama and listen to that station and the soulful music would make us feel things that we were too young to really know about.  It helped us in our quest to become men.  We would follow the broken white lines of the two lane blacktop road and go to "Little Egypt Plantation" outside of Courtland, Alabama and buy wildcat whiskey from an old black man named "Curlee" that lived on the plantation.  "Curlee" was famous for makin' his wildcat whiskey.  His "cat" was considered to be the best THE prefered drink of the local gentry.  After pullin' off of the hard road and bumpin' down some little narrow rutted out dusty dirt roads you finally came up on "Curlee's" little sharecropper shack.  We always went at night and it was kind of spooky cause ole "Curlee" had a pack of real mean dogs that kept a watch out for him.  He would have to calm those "dogs from Hell" down before I could get out of the car.  I'd usually take the money up to old Curlee and say “Mr.Curlee I need a jar of yo' famous cat".  And even though I was barely a teenager Curlee would say "Yes Sir mister John you knows I makes da bess cat dat they is !  "We respected each other.  It did not matter about our age or our color difference, we both knew we were good people and we both appreciated good wildcat whiskey and real music.  Anyway the old man would take his lantern and I'd follow him over to a Chinaberry tree that stood out to the side of his shack.  As we got closer to the tree chickens that were roosting in the branches would be startled and start squawkin' and flyin' out in all directions of the night.  Old Curlee would whip out his knife and reach up into the darkness at the center of the tree and just like magic a quart jar of clear wildcat whiskey that was tired to a branch with a string would drop down out of the tree and into his waiting hand.  He'd take his blade and cut the string with loose with one swift slash and hold the jar up to his lantern and eyeball it.  Then he'd shake it up good so you could see how it beaded up.  He'd smile his old broken toothed smile and we would observe an almost religious moment of silence as we watched the thousands of tiny little beads swirlin' around inside that Mason jar.  That's one way you can judge good "cat".  By the amount of beads and how long they last.  Anyway I'd thank old Curlee and shake his tough leathered hand and crawl back in the car.  We'd turn the radio back up and pass the jar around and get high as a kite ! And we'd even put some "cat" in our Zippo lighters so we could take it to school the next day and suck on it in class to keep the buzz goin'.  Real quality wildcat is some powerful high octane stuff.It'll light your cigarette and if you run out of gas in your car you just can pour a little "cat" in the tank and keep on sailin' down the highway.  We'd just drive around all night long listenin' to John R and Hoss Allen and sometimes Wolfman Jack who was broadcasting out of Texas but the station was so powerful that the actual broadcasting tower had to be located in Mexico. Man, those were the days ! I don't drink anymore because it slows me down too much, but that's about all that has changed over the years.  I still love that old soulful music and the way it makes me feel way deep down inside and I'm gonna keep on writin' and playin' that sweet soul music as long as there are stars in the southern sky !   RHYMIN' SIMON'S LAST JOINT: Back when the Rubber Band was recordin' in NYC, Paul Simon asked us to hire him to play guitar on a session.  We really did not need Paul Simon's guitar part...he and Garfunkel had only had one hit at that time so he was no big deal to us....but I'd had been tryin' to find some grass for over a year with no luck.  I had read somewhere that Bob Dylan smoked pot and came up with all these great songs so naturally I wanted to try some.  I had looked for over a year in The South and never found anythang at all to try. So when Paul Simon came in he had a button on his Navy P coat that said "Legalize Grass"...so I thought that if I hired him to be on the session it might give me an in with him and he might help me find somethang to try.  So, I told Calleo to hire him....and we gave him a little while to tune up and work up a guitar part...which turned out great....but as soon as I felt comfortable I ask him if he knew where I could get any grass and he said "I just smoked my last joint before I came over here !"  I felt like he was not tellin' me the truth and I wanted to fire him on the spot...but I let it ride....this was in about 1966. The next morning I was still in bed at the hotel and all of a sudden Johnny Townsend and Tippy Armstrong came runnin' into my room all excited and they told me that they had spent the night in The Village and they found some grass.  Well I sat straight up in bed with excitement as Townsend pitched the cigarette to me....I caught it and didn't even look at it good as I lit it up and took a long deep drag.  And then I started coughing like I had the Whopping Cough...the sound of my coughing was only surpassed in volume by the sound of Townsend and the rest of the band rollin' in the floor laughin' themselves silly! The joke was on me! I found out later that they had taken a cigarette called a Turkish Oval and put after shave lotion and some other thangs on the cigarette and then dried it out with a hair drier.  It was almost another year of searchin' before I ever got to try grass and it was given to me by Gregg Allman in Tuscaloosa the night that Bill Connell joined up to play drums with The Allman Joys. Years later after Paul Simon got to be a big star and dropped Garfunkel he came to Muscle Shoals Sound to record the LP's KODACHROME and THERE GOES RHYMIN' SIMON and he asked me if I had any grass.  Well I reminded him of that night long ago in NYC...so I told him that "I had just smoked my last joint" and reminded him that what goes around comes around!  We had a good laugh and then I pointed him in the right direction.   SAM THE SHAM AND LAWYERS: That reminds me of some advice I got on an elevator in downtown LA in the summer time of SAILCAT...and I was lookin' for  lawyer because the record company said it's the thang to do... Well I had met Sam (the Sham) many years ago on those WVOK and all their sister stations SHOWER OF STARS SHOWS and also at The Old Dutch even before they had a hit record...Sam ain't no sham he's a riverboat pilot and a Cajun free spirit.... But that day on that elevator I needed some advice bad...I was tired of talkin' to all these old fools about how to shelter this money and invest that money.  Screw a bunch of meetings, I just wanted to go somewhere and get as drunk as I could ! The LA Sky Scraper elevator door opened and there in the flesh stood funky Sam The Sham...lookin' as funky as he wanted to with his pants legs rolled up like pedal pushers and a pair of Flip Flops for footwear and a white tank top or really an under wear shirt....and a rag tied round his head ! And he had that bid ass Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Ridin' Hood look on his face with his shape shinny white teeth....and he was smilin' ear to ear when he saw me... And I told Sam that the record company told me to hire a lawyer to take care of certain details in my career...I did not really look at it like a career as much as I did a way to get money to buy stuff for my head...and when it was fixed all it wanted to do was to create...music, art,my movie ideas and makin' thangs that have never existed before.... And Sam's advice to me about a lawyer...this is all he said...and it was enough...Sam The Sham said "It's hard enough to get down river without draggin' snakes in the boat with you !"   THE REPLACEMENT: I went  to low school and high school in Decatur Alabama  which is 45 miles east of Muscle Shoals. The high school girls had sororities or girls clubs with names like Sub Deb and The J.U.G. Club (that stood for JUST US GIRLS and not what it sounds like!) Several times a year that held dances called "Lead Outs" and great bands were always a major part of these events. A few of the acts that played these dances included Bowlegs Miller, Rufus Thomas, an albino cat named Dr. Feelgood and The Interns, The Tams, Dann Penn and The Mark V (Five), Hollis Dixon and The Keynotes, The Delrays, Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs and many many more great bands of that time. One year, a bunch of my friends and I decided to form a high school fraternity so WE could rent the Country Club and have a dance. We collected membership dues from everybody and bought a keg of beer and we were in business! I was voted social chairman and I set out to book a band for our dance. I had heard that there was a new bookin' agent in Macon Georgia that booked a lot of bands from The Carolina's and a bunch of other great black bands. I got on he phone and booked a band and mailed in a  25% depot. I  can't remember who the act was now but I had everything set for the night of our dance. On the morning of the date of our dance I got a phone call from the office of the fledgling company  Phil Walden and Associates. I was informed that the bus that was carrying the band that I had booked had broken down and we would have to accept a replacement. I was told that the replacement band would arrive by car in time for the dance and that  I was to go and meet the afternoon Southern Airways flight  and pick up the singer whose name I was told but immediately forgot. I was assured that we would love this new singer and the problem was all worked out. That afternoon a couple of car loads of us drove across The Tennessee River to the small airport called Pryor Field. We sat on the hoods of our cars and listened to the radio in the lazy hot Alabama sun while we scanned the skies for the airplane. Finally someone picked out a tiny little silver speck in the immense blue sky and we all watched it grow larger until it made it the final approach and touched down and taxied to the edge of the tarmac. The flight attendants rolled the tall metal steps up to the side plane and we watched as the door of this shiny silver winged tube opened up and the travelers began to deplane. One by one we watched them all. The Businessmen in their business suits with their briefcases and buttoned down collars and neck ties and the women in their bubble hairdoes. Just about the time we thought that the plane was empty we saw him standing in the doorway! The Replacement! BEHOLD! The Replacement had arrived!The Replacement had been delivered to us from way out of the clear blue Alabama sky by this shiny silver  tube with the  propellers still spinnin' in the center of each silver wing. The Replacement had arrived to save our day and turn our dance that night into a magic event that none of us would ever forget. The Replacement appeared  to be ten feet tall and he was dark and he was handsome. The Replacement wore a blue shark skin and he had a quiet strong countenance about him. Our savior for the night had arrived and we all felt safe. I finally made my way over to The Replacement and in my usual manner I extended my right hand and said "Hey Man! It's good to see you! My name is Johnny Wyker". The Replacement tried his best not to smile but he did anyway as he shook my hand and said "I'm Otis Redding and I'm gonna sing for ya'll tonight!" Later that night on a break between sets Otis and I sat on a stainless steel table in the kitchen of the country club and we talked. I remember tellin' him how much I liked his singing style and Otis was very humble and he thanked me he said  that all he wanted to do was to be respected and be as good as his idols were. I asked him who his favorite singers were and he named a bunch of them but the name that I remember most was Jackie Wilson! I was lucky enough to hangout with Otis on several other occasions after he became a star and he was the same gentleman that I met that night except he had  a lot more confidence about him and he seemed to be a lot happier.   THE STONING: Injun Don's  band was openin' for Bachman Overdrive or somebody at the fair grounds in Muscle Shoals and I somehow talked my way into playin' that borrowed guitar..  That was back when the word "boogie" used to drive me crazy...it was so over used...don't bother me at all now that I have a song titled The HOOKER BOOGIE..or as it says on SOUTHERN LIGHTS HOOKER's BOOGIE.. Either way I like the word boogie now days ...but back then someone... one too many rednecks yelled "Lets' Boooooooooooooogie"....when are we gonna hear some BOOOOGIE....   Sometimes back then due to the booze I had a major attitude problem on stage, between me and the crowd. I used to like to see how far I could push them....it's that playin' with fire thang.....pokin' the Brama Bull in the balls with a sharp stick at the sale barn when he's in a pen that he could run through like Popsicle sticks if he wanted to.   But the main thang that was my pet peeve back the was... I was not gonna be ignored.  I'd rather have every chair in the place thrown on stage rather than be mistaken for wall paper or a picture on the wall....and often I'd curse the audience.  I kind of understand where Andy Kaufman was comin' from sometimes......I had a mic....I had the power.   Anyway this was durin' a period when Folk Rock and Country Rock and that stuff was what I was listenin' too and writin' and playin' and the crowd kept on yellin' "when are ya''ll gonna play some BOOOGIE ."   And I stepped up to the mic and said "BTO will be here to Boggy for you all right after we finish.  But before we finish we are gonna play you rednecks some stuff that might do you some good to listen to and then you can have your Boogie !"   That's when a shy and slight sprinkling of small rocks or more like little pea sized pebbles pelted the personal in the band.  It would have been easy enough to ignore and go right on with our show but that old Al K. Hall had a grip on me back then so I threw my hands up in the air... skywards  towards the Heavens and I grabbed the mic that was closest to me and in my best Biblical voice I delivered that famous line in the sand from the BIBLE ..."LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE !"   There was a short silence ....while the people or semi-drunk rednecks in the crowd considered this challenge and inspected the language contained in this verbal gauntlet that I had just thrown down before hundreds if not thousands of all these gooneded clowns.who just happened to be sittin' on the perfect ammo dump for a real worldclass and old fashioned by the book biblical stoning !   Most of the folks in the crowd were blessed with the average amount of sin... which would allow them to be free from be obligated into castin' the first stone.   But the vast majority of this crowd seemed to be totally without sin....this crowd most have been one of the most righteous and perfect groups of souls that have ever been gathered together in one place at one time.  I'm surprised that a team of The Pope's Miracle and Saint Squad did not appear to certify and verify the amount of totally sin free people that were gathered at this particular musical concert and religious stoning !   The concert was being held on a gravel parking lot so a body did not have to look too far to find some ammo for this sanctified religious stoning that me and the band where about to receive !   The next day there was a review of the concert in The Shoals paper that said "More than just the band got stoned at last night's BTO concert...people sittin' in the first dozen rows near the stage also got hit in the back of the heads !"   I remember hidin' under a baby grand piano with Injun Don and a few others makin' the statement "Man this is the most righteous bunch I've ever seen in my life !"  "DUCK !"     THE STORY OF BABY RUTH:   Yeap, BABY RUTH is ONE Chord....   I remember thinkin' while I was writin' it that I wanted to write a good and easy to play Jam song that anybody could sit in on and Jam without havin' to worry about chord changes....   I wrote the song in Open E...and I did not know how I manged to get the guitar tuned in this weird (at the time.tunin') tunin'.    I was very stoned at the time in 1969...takin' the famous songwriting pill "SPECKLED BIRDS "   And I got this groove  goin' on the guitar and with the sound of my bare foot keepin' time on the hardwood floor of The Wyker Lake House.....BECKY ROBBINS and her little daughter KATRINA were there.,..I don’t know if we were married then or not...   KATRINA was at that magic age of about 6 and I was always tryn' to entertain this wonderful little girl....I've found that if a young child will start dancin' to one of your songs ....then it's a sign that the song is goin' in the right direction !   Anyway...I had this one chord groove goin' and I knew that if I stopped I would never be able to find it again....about that time SMITH, PERKINS, & SMITH and CHARLIE FELDMAN  walked in The back Door....Charlie was playin' with them at the time...Charlie later  went on to work for BMI's NEW YORK office...He's still there...   And Tim SMITH and Wayne PERKINS and STEVE SMITH and Charlie came in  the back door of my lake house and since the last time I had seen them they had all let their hair grow longer...so I just started makin' up words that would fit the moment...and acknowledge the fact that my friends had just walked in the door and still keep my groove goin' on the guitar...   So I opened my mouth and out jumped the words to BABY RUTH...   "It's sure good to see you But my how you've changed since the last time I saw you You've been rearranged   I always said yo' people was just like my kin when ever I was down and out They would always take me in !   I'm glad I kept on with that song because it's been one of my most recorded songs and has been recorded by the likes of DELBERT McCLINTON and  BONNIE BRAMLETT, JOHN PRINE, ALEX TAYLOR, DICK'S HAT BAND, The WALL BANGERS, DENNIS CLIFTON, FOSTERMON and others   That is just a few of the people that have recorded it....it has been recorded and made it to wax or disc about 100 times...but it has made less money than any other song...but their could be reasons for that…like publishers never payin'   Other of my Heroes that mastered The Art of using One Chord on a song are JOHN LEE HOOKER…BO DIDDLEY…JAMES BROWN and RUFUS  THOMAS...   Like LITTLE DAVID said "All them other Cats are lookin' for it...I've found it !"       THE 50 MILE PLUS BEER WALK A TRUE EDDIE HINTON CAT TALE PART ONE:   The main facts in this true story were personally told to me by Eddie Hinton in about 1984 or 85' after I had borrowed a thousand bucks from an old high school friend to buy Hinton a little 15 foot RV Scotty Camper Trailer to live in because winter was settin' in and he had no other place to go. He later accidentally (I think) burned the trailer down to the ground out behind my families Hardware Store...everyone thought Eddie was still in it at the time but thankfully he was' not...the only important and hard to replace thang that was lost in that fire that day was my favorite Fender Telecaster that I played on Dick Clark's AMERICAN BANDSTAND and also at our Carnage Hall performance.    Once in 1985 after Eddie Hinton had fallen on real hard times he walked the 50 miles from Decatur to Muscle Shoals, Alabama in the middle of July...I'll bet it was 110 degrees in the shade....he told me that it took him 12 hours to make the walk...he said mean dogs started chasin' him and he was attacked by those big birds that lived back when the Dinosaurs did.....I think he called them Terodactyls....he said they were swoopin' down out of the sky and chasin' him.....    Eddie saw and heard many strange thangs that others luckily never have to see or hear...   To paraphrase a line from a DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS song off of their first CD titled SANDWICHES FOR THE ROAD ......."He had visions in his head ....mighty fields of visions... and sometimes his visions could be a little unkind from time to time"...and then another line says "But I've got friends in DECATUR AAAAALLLL----AAAAHHHH-BAAAAAMMMM--MAAAAAA....   It's a great tribute song to Hinton's musical genius by another generation of musical genius... Patterson Hood and The DBT's....That DBT CD is titled GANGSTBILLY and when Patterson first sent me a promo copy I was totally in the dark about that song...and when I played the CD and heard those lines I almost fell out of my chair in a state of surprise and happy shock!   Eddie told me that while he was makin' the first part of this 50 mile shoe leather express walk that the cops in Town Creek gave him a ride from one side of their city limits to the other...just to move him along" and get him out of their territory ! In the shape he was in that's quite understandable....   The Perpetually Walking Man Shoe Leather Express is how he traveled most places after about 1978....and when he walked he was not silent....most of the time.... he would talk to himself and sing at the top of his voice as he walked...and when he was really out there he would wildly swing his arms...and make dramatic gestures.....he said that sometimes when he felt that he was a little was too high and he was afraid that the cops mighty pick him up for Public Drunkenness he would walk with a slight limp...like he had a gimp leg or something I've seen him do it many times.......in fact I can do it almost just like him when I'm in the right mood ....he once told me that he thought that the cops might show him a little pity if they thought he was a poor cripple...     And sometimes while he was walkin' he might just stop and freeze up... like a squirrel does... for not apparent reason...and he'd just stand there...stone still... like a statue... for no reason....and sometimes he'd just stand there like that for what would seemed like a half an hour...and then as if he had received some invisible green light he'd go again and start walkin’ and return to what he referred to as his "gate". He once signed a vinyl LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI album cover with these words "I'm glad you got to catch me in this "GATE"! And then he drew some weird alien lookin' symbols across the bottom of the album cover....some of those old autographs will someday be priceless on eBay ...and each one was as strange and different as the other.  They are really rare but out of the 1000 Swedish Vinyl copies of LETTERS that I talked the record company in to sendin' me.... a whole bunch of them got personally signed by Eddie...   Eddie did not seem to care much about hearin' from his fans or gettin' fan mail....I would always have to open it and I'd pick a time to read it to him when I thought it might register with him or he would at least remember it....those fan letters might have   meant the world to him but if they did he would not let on like he cared...or was interested...but I guess to show any joy would have been a little out of character....I know feedback from people that like what I do means everythang to me ...to hear from someone that has taken the time to write you and tell you what you are doin' right is so important...with everythang I do...it's my fuel...and I keep tellin' myself that as long as their is just one person that believes..... then I'll keep tryin' to go that extra sundown mile to make it all mo' better !    Near the end of his short life.... after he had finally gotten a little recognition...I took him to Italy to do a little tour... including The San Remo Blues Festival on The Italian Rivera ..and also we played The SWEET SOUL MUSIC FESTIVAL up the southern foothills of The Alps...   At both shows he was treated like a real Soul Music Star helpin' to headline a line up including Rufus and Carla Thomas, Jay Blackfoot, Ruby Wilson and The Memphis All Star Blues Band lead by Marvell Thomas...Hinton would try to be nice and sign somethang most of the time if someone ask him in the right way and he was in the mood for it....   I have some video footage of him signing autographs at The SWEET SOUL MUSIC FESTIVAL in Italy in 1991....and looks so uncomfortable...like he really rather be somewhere else...but there was a long-long line of people for all over Europe waitin' patiently to get his autograph on somethang...the most heard phase of the day from his European fans was " man I thought you were black and blind until a few months ago!"  I'm sure that really pleased Eddie as much as anythang anybody could say to him as a compliment.....   I remember back when we both had barely started playin' music and a bunch of use were sittin' around after a small gig at a club on Pensacola Beach and we were havin' a few beers and we were all talkin' about what we wanted to do in life and in the music biz....what we wanted to accomplish and Eddie was real quiet and looked like he was deep in thought and after everyone else told what their dreams were somebody said "Hey Eddie Bear...what about you man ?....What is your goal ?" And the young almost cuddly Eddie Bear very seriously stated that his ambition was to make music and records "that a black man would like and buy and not know that it was a white man makin' the music".     BEER WALK - HINTON CAT TALE PART 2:   With the 1978 release of his first solo album VERY EXTREMELY DANGEROUS I think that Hinton  achieved his goal of wanting to sound as black as possible. It must have seemed like a dream to Eddie because he was signed to Capricorn which was the record label that was built on the back of his idol Otis Redding.    But when Eddie's album came out they were goin' into bankruptcy at the time.....Eddie was a very bad risk at the time anyway and damn near impossible to manage even if The Walden's and their label had of been in their best prime workin' condition it would have been a nightmare if that record had of caught on ..Eddie or Sandra would have found away to drive everybody crazy at the label and someone would have probably killed them both before it was over.....   The VED album purposely did not have a picture of Eddie on the album cover...it had a vague image of a what appeared to be a black man hidin' in an alley...while you see the lights of a Police Cruiser speed past his hidin' place....on the other side it's daybreak and all the garbage cans are turned over in that alley and there is a stray dog in place of where the black man was hidin' from the cops....the record did get played on some all black music stations...and few people had any idea that Hinton was a white cat.   The Walden's only took Eddie on because they believed in him and wanted to try and help him....he was hired to sweep out the studio....that was his gig...but I never saw him sweep anythang in his life....workin' like that was not in his nature.  By the time of this first album everyone that knew Hinton was sure that he had completely lost his mind....He would go months without bathing....he would eat dog food from the dogs bowl.....I've seen it happen...Eddie and Sandra kept these 2 big shaggy Sheep Dogs....these thangs were big as Volkswagen's and always slobbering...they had hair hanging completely over their eyes and were always knockin' stuff over and they always acted hyper and excited...just like Crazy Sandra. She was always squeallin' and sayin' "OH EDDIE !"....like a little teenage groupie and then she'd do one of her high pitched squeals.....Eddie was always tryin' to impress Sandra with some manly feat...and then she'd do her "Oh Eddie thang"...suppertime and Sandra would pour out some dog food and Eddie would get down and eat with them....   When it came to most thangs if anythang was a little too hard to do it wasn't for Eddie... I remember Eddie would take a few pokes at it and he'd say in a soft voice to himself "It ain't worth it!" and then he'd give up on whatever it was he was tryin' to do....except some thangs like this 50 plus mile walk he made....to me that would be hard but at the time I guess Eddie thought it was worth it.  Ya'll can be the judge of that when you hear the sad ending to this Cat Tale...     BEER WALK - HINTON CAT TALE PART 3:   The reason Hinton made that 50 mile plus walk from Decatur to The Shoals was simple ......in his mind at least....he wanted a beer.... or some money to buy some beer ....and what we call The Whip Whiskey.   It was the summer of 1984 and Eddie had just arrived in Decatur by bus a few weeks earlier.  He ended up in Decatur because he had a disagreement with his mother in Birmingham ...he was stayin' at her house and when he was livin' there she had him workin' for a day laborer company and sometimes they found him some work unloadin' tractor trailer trucks that were loaded to the brim with cans of Dog Food....in the summer heat I can imagine what he thought about that job.....same thang all day...for almost no pay...but when he'd get off from work and get a little pay check he'd slip into a liquor store and get himself a pint or a half pint of PGA -190 proof - pure grain alcohol it’d burn a blue flame and remove fingernail polish.   Now there are always two sides to every story.....but the only side that's been told to me came from Eddie.   He told me that his mother had a rule about no drinkin' in her house... but she was makin' him pay part of the rent and also part of the grocery bill with part of his little pay check.  He said that he felt like the room that he was stayin' in was "his private space"...especially since he was payin' for it.  Eddie told me that he'd get him a little bottle of "booze" and he'd have to hide it.  So he would smuggle it into his room at his mother's house...he did this by tying the bottle to his leg...down by his ankle... using the laces from one of his high top brown brogan shoes....   He said that he thought that he had an agreement that his room was "his space" and no one had the right to "invade" that space....he told me that on the day he finally left for Decatur that his mother came into that room he was "stayin'" in and she found some empty alcohol bottles...and that caused the big fight that resulted in him spendin' the last of the little money he had to catch a bus to Decatur which is almost 100 miles away...It was summertime in Bama-Lama Land....and hot and humid....make you sweat so bad you fell like you are livin' underwater...   Eddie said that a few weeks earlier he had run into Johnny Sandlin at Boutwell's Studio in Birmingham and Sandlin had told him that if he ever needed a place to stay to come see him in Decatur.  We all make offers like this from time to time, but most of the time you don't think anybody will take you up... and actually show up on your doorsteps.  The story goes that Sandlin told Eddie that he was sorry....that he did not have room for him or whatever and he'd have to find some place else to stay.  No one could blame Sandlin for that ...I'll bet even Mother Teresa would have turned him away in the shape he was in.  Eddie was a wild man at that time and he never took a shower...and he always had that wild look in his eyes...the only other place I've seen that look is in the eyes of a wild animal that's been hurt or wounded...and he could scare you to death with his tone of voice ...and some of the thangs that he'd say or do were just too strange and weird to make any sense.     BEER WALK - HINTON CAT TALE PART 4:   In The Long Hot Stinking SUMMER of 1984 Eddie Hinton caught a Greyhound Bus back into my Hardware Store Hammer Swingin' Life...This was Hinton at his worst...No Nothin'...but a mean and bad attitude...and a bad body odor that was a mixture of human sweat built up in layers until their was almost a fine crust on him...fruit flies had built a few nests in his long unwashed hair and were continuing to live and breed in his hair right before your very eyes....I said somethang about we needed to get somethang to kill the fruit flies once and Eddie seemed to get so upset...he said "Even kill the little baby Ones Too ?" They were the only friends that Eddie had left at that time.....he looked so damned sad about it that I never brought the subject up again... HINTON'S smell or body odor was unique undo him...and it was the mixture of various types and proofs and percentages of Whiskey and Beer and Wine and Tequlia....and Gin...Did I mention Scotch...how about Bourbon ? PGA ? And I don't mean the Golf Tour either....you get the idea .....and mix all that with the pungent smell of cigar smoke...the Sweet Stink of a Big TAMPA NUGGET or TAMPA SUBLIME mixed with various brands of non filtered cigarettes Eddie was all about Old School Pabst Blue Ribbon would do but he preferred FALSTAFF because that's what his singin' idol DAN PENN drank...and of course the old Baseball player turned radio announcer...DIZZY DEAN was also a FALSTAFF Fan ! But HINTON knew what he wanted on that long hot smelly Summer day in 1984...he wanted a drink...well that's not exactly The Truth he really wanted a WHOLE Damned Ocean of Whiskey and Long Tall Waterfalls of Wine and Shooting, PEWIN',SPRAYIN" Fountains or GEYSERS of BEER and Bubblin' Baths made out of the only the best of beads of Chilly Clear French Champagne...to paraphrase a quote of one of Eddie's songs from his first solo album "he did not want just a little bit ....Eddie wanted it ALL ! But on that seemly never ending Cat On A Hot Tin type Roof Day back in 84' HINTON found himself in The RIVER CITY with nothin'.....but a bad NEED for an illegal drink in Decatur...OK many drinks...he did not tell me about this adventure that I'm about to pass on to all of ya;ll until after he had been through the whole odyssey,,, or maybe he thought he had already tapped me for assistance one to many times.... So instead he did the next logical thang in his highly imaginative and creative mind.....He set out walkin' to Florence, Alabama...which is 50 miles away by hard road....he later told me that it took him 12 hours to walk that distance...he said that the small one horse town of Town Creek, Bama-lama gave him a free ride from one side of town to the other....just to get him out of their the City Limits....I don't blame them a bit,,,he would scare a Ghost back in those days...long side burns...looked like this Super Hero cat I think his name is The WOLVERINE or somethang like that...HINTON was a scary lookin' dude back in The Day...and scary actin' as well ! So after walkin' for 12 straight hours he shows up at DONNIE FRITZ'S HOUSE and asked him if he would lend him 38 Dollars and some odd cents....He told Donnie it was to pay for a weeks rent in a boarding House....So Donnie put Eddie in his car and drove him back to Decatur and gave him the money he asked for...at that time Decatur was Dry...which meant that you had to know a bootlegger if you wanted a drink or you had to drive 15 miles to Madison, Bama-lama and buy it and turn around and drive back another 15 miles and there was always a Sheriff that ran the County in between Decatur and Madison that tired to bust as many folks as he could for havin' booze in their car as they drove through his Dry County... So FRITZ drops Eddie off after givin' him the money he asked for and drives off into The Sunset....and Eddie immediately goes to where he has all of his stuff stashed away and he gets his small worn-out handless Brown Samsonite Suitcase and dumps out all the contents and closes the old suitcase back up and then he tucks it up under his arm like he was carrrying a football across the goal line for his all time favorite football team ....The Univeristy Of Alabama's CRIMSON TIDE ! One of Hinton's favorite fantasies was to own a football team like The ATLANTA FALCONS....it would be like Eddie was the teams Owner/Coach/and Player in critical times...like when his team NEEDED that big play EDDIE would hussle into The Big Game runnin' onto The Field still wearin' his Wing Tipped Sreet Shoes ! And he'd call and execute The Big Play of The Game and then he'd run off in Victory and go back to doin' more important thangs like havin' another Beer and another until the team needed him to save their asses again ! Anyhow Eddie out The siutcase up under one arm and adjusted his nuts with his other hand and then he sets out AGAIN WALKIN' ....destination MADISON COUNTY ALABAMA....and he never even missed a step...no tellin' how long that Cat had been up without any sleep at all at this point... He made the 15 miles that he needed in The burnin' Hot Steamin' Alabama Hell for Sunshine...Hinton had finally arrived at his Ultimate Destination and Goal The ALABAMA STATE LIQUOR STORE.....that was just about all there was in Madison back then...just a long row of Beer Stores on both sides of the highway and one big GREEN FRONT STORE...that is what both of my granddaddy's called it way, way back in The TIME.... And FINALLY after all of this endless walkin' and walkin' and sangin' and talkin' to himself outloud and walkin' some more and it gets light and then it gets dark and he's still walkin' ....FINALLY HINTON gets the Big Chance that he's been walkin' and workin' so hard to get to this point ...to be able to purchases all the Whiskey and as much Beer as either he had the money for or how much room he had in that little old brown suitcase. ? I never though about that small detail until just now...but Hinton had to make a hard choice ...maybe The Hardest Choice of his whole life at that moment....and he had to be practical as well because he could only buy what he could carry back on his long 15 mile walk back to The River City....and like I said it was even harder on EDDIE because the old suitcase did not have a handle to carry it with...truth is there was no easy way to carry that suitcase... it would make your underarms so sore and raw...and weighted down with whiskey it would have had to weight at least a Metric TON on that long hot endless Self induced Summer Death March in The Summer of 1984 ! Eddie did tell me later that he wanted a drink so bad ...anybody would if they had gone though all that Eddie did and when he finally got somethang to drink he went out behind The State Liquor Store...there was a little clump of trees out behind The State Store and he was able to find a safe place to sit for a little while and open maybe a bottle of 190 Proof Pure Grain Alcohol....but he couldn't get as "high" as he wanted too because he still had 15 miles to walk...before he could allow himself to really get DRUNK ASYOU WANNA BE...which is why he started all this walkin'' in the first place... The part of this Cat Tale that really broke my heart is that when Eddie was about halfway back to The River City...in fact he was right where I-65 crosses Highway 20 by The race Track Gas station right down the road...Eddie thought he saw a STATE TROOPER CAR comin' up from behind him to check him out so he quickly tossed the suitcase over in the high weeds beside the road....and Hinton kept on walkin' with a slight limp this time...he told me one time that he thought that The Cops would have a little pity or show a little more mercy for a crippled man...so he had developed a great little limp... Turns out The State Trooper did not even look Eddie's way much less even slow down...and Eddie said that when he got back to the suitcase and checked that there was not a drop of anythang left...it ALL broke when the suitcase hit the ground beside the highway ! All of this was goin' on when The Beer advertisements were all about stuff like "You've been shoveling miles of piles of pigmy shit all day long and now you deserve to get so totally wasted that you puke on your new cowboy boots tonight ! This Bud's for YOU and all that you do ! When Hinton told me that incredible story I knew what I HAD to do....I had to take him shoppin'....where? in Madison of course...30 more mile over there and back...but we were in The Hardware Store truck this time rolling on Rubber tires filled with air....not Shoe Leather Express.  We were headed to get Eddie some groceries ....as I said earlier ...you could not get the kind of groceries Eddie needed in The River City because it was still a dry town and also a dry county !   TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE:   The song TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE was originally a track for The ROGER PLEMONS session that I produced at BIRDLAND STUDIOS... That session produced BUZZ HUNT (Just Say NO! and DON'T LET GO!) The words for TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE were written after Roger passed out from too much Vodka...we were originally cuttin' this track of Roger's version of my song LADY CONNIVER. Stevie of The Stealers was on the session... as was Owen Brown and Drummer Dave Allen.  Everybody got kind of mad because we were in The Zone except foe Roger. So I said "Stevie I'm kind of tired of these old lyrics....why don't you see if you can put some to this track and we'll get two for the price of one !" About 2 cups of coffee, Stevie Davis came in with the lyrics for TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE and sang it in one take! My art is part plan and part accident! For those that like to know! Another CAT TALE!     DAN PENN CAT TALE: Conway Twitty's version of "Is A Bluebird Blue" was real important to Dan Penn...or should I say Wallace Pennington. It was the first real money he made as a songwriter! I was lucky enough to have been at Spar Music above City Drug Store in Florence, Alabama the day that young Dan Penn got his first check from that recording...it was also the first time that I ever laid eyes on Penn.  I was writing songs for Spar and Tom Stafford was giving me some positive criticism on some of my lyrics and then he started telling me about this great new songwriter and singer that he was workin' with.  He said he had just come up from Vernon, Alabama...and his real name was Wallace Pennington but he was using the pen name...Dan Penn. I believe Dan was 16 years old at the time. Stafford was going on about what a cool cat Penn was. It was about that time that I heard footsteps climbing the inside stair well and the door flew open and BAM! In walked young Dan Penn. He was dressed in a brown leather jacket...I call them bomber jackets ...but without a fur collar. He had a white T-Shirt on and blue denim jeans...probably Levis and a pair of brown leather house shoes. Penn was famous for years later for wearing house shoes instead of regular footwear.  Somebody once asked Dan what his definition of funky was and he said "Funky is anythang that you ain't supposed to do... but you can get a way with."  For me those house shoes were the beginning of FUNKY! I hung out with Dan and Spooner a lot back in “The Time” and I'd drive up to visit them years later when they both moved to Memphis and the house shoes were still apart of his dress code and Penn's funky cool thang. Back to that first sighting at Spar...we were formally introduced later that same night.  Dan was also wearing a hat...it was what we called a black stingy brim hat...much like The blues Brothers would make famous many years later.  Penn wore sunglasses at night and it inspired me to do the same thang for the next 40 years!   In his mouth he had a tooth pick in one side...a cigarette in the other and he was also chewing gum at the same time.  Now he was a very talented cat ...to be able to juggle all that stuff in one mouthful.  I was amazed.    Penn's right hand was all bandaged up...gauze covered 2 or 3 fingers and wrapped up around his wrist.  He was walkin' down the hall of Spar..which was a real small place and somebody...I think it was Norbert or Briggs or Carrigan yelled at Dan and asked him "What happened to your hand Dan?...Penn replied " KNIFE FIGHT! and never missed a beat as he spit his gum like a bullet from the barrel of a pistol into a waiting metal garbage can...PING! The gum hit the can! Tom Stafford picked an envelope up off of his desk and looked at Dan and said "Come here Dan, I've got your first check for Conway's cut on "Is A Bluebird Blue".  Again, Dan never broke stride as he fired back. "Good I need to buy me a new car cause that old used car I'm drivin' just blew an engine!" Tom ask him how that happened and Dan fired back...”Draggin' for pink slips!" Dan Penn was one of the original inventors of cool! He had an attitude that made him stand out from the rest of the pack ...and back then he seemed to be much older and wiser than his years! WALKING CANE:   Man you make me feel like a relic...but I know I've still got it! Remember the Trail of Tears Show...when it was time for me come on and do Hooker Boogie I asked Lil Wing and Melissa who were dresses in black leather to lead me on stage like Ray Charles.... And Mick was walkin' behind me with a fold up chair...and I was using my Hickory Root walkin’ cane and walkin’ like and old man.. Buffalo was introducing me so when I reached me spot on stage Mick unfolded the chair and I sat down.... We started the song and my mic would not work and Buffalo's did and nobody was fixin' mine and I'm featured on that song so I slide over next to The Buffalo and slung a hip into him and he acted like I had almost knocked him down as I grabbed the mic and started the first verse... When the song first started I made like I could barely walk...as the song got goin' soon I threw the walkin' cane down and was slidin' across the stage on one foot like James Brown and dancin' with all the girl back up singers while Ray Brand was burnin' a lead part where it went in the song...and as soon as the song ended I started the crippled act again and walkin' real slow with my cane... I thought it was funny as hell....I had a blast doin' it.     THE HOUNDS FROM HELL:   This is part of what happened to me... It was the summer of 1969 in Macon and I had just taken a hit of purple micro-dot acid.....then Donna ....who had just given birth to Duane Allman's daughter and Johnny Sandlin's girl friend came by my apartment and ask me if I wanted to go to a party/band rehearsal for The Allman Brothers that was to start at midnight outside of Macon in the country at Warner Robbins.... The little house where the band was gonna rehearse was located on a little lake... On the way there Donna asked me if I wanted a hit of acid....I told her that I had just taken one but "sure I can handle that". We got to the rehearsal house and it was not long before before the effects of the acid kicked in.... at that time I did not know any of the other members of The Allman Brothers Band or their roadies all that well.  I only knew Duane and Gregg....we had met in 1965 when they had the Allman Joys...but they were not there yet. I started to feel a little uncomfortable and paranoid. So to make a REAL LONG STORY short I noticed a large Magnum bottle of wine sittin' on the table in the next room... I was talkin' to Red Dog at the time and he was askin' me if I wanted to smoke some grass with him.  I took a couple of hits and then I knew I had had enough. The acid was really starting to come on strong and I wanted somethang to counter act the effect.  All that was available was that big bottle of wine...which I grabbed and drank almost all of it. It was about that time that Gregg walked in and said "Who drank the all of that wine....I put enough acid in there to get about 75 people off!" I thought....."oh shit....I've done it now !" I started walkin' away from the cabin.  I was determined to walk all the way back to Macon...and there was no moon that night. On the path between the cabin and the road I saw what appeared to be 2 hooded figures.  As I got closer I realized that it was the long hair of Butch Trucks and Barry Oakley that made it look like hoods against the night sky. I said "How far is it to the road?” and Barry said "Not far...but there are some dogs up thee that will eat you alive!" I did not care and kept on walkin'. I’ll tell more of this Cat Tale and my walk of 25 miles back to Macon on dirt road with hounds from Hell chasin' me ... It's almost still too painful talk about today....and I still feel the effects of it all ! THE PALLBEARERS:   The Pallbearers was basically Dan Penn on  vocals...David Briggs on piano, Norbert Putman on  Bass,Jerry Carrigan on Drums,Marlin Greene on guitar and they had several people in and out of  the band that played horns.  Jerry Carrigan's father Larry managed and booked them.  I learned allot from Mr. Carrigan. After Dan left...I think to move to Texas and get religion, Jerry Saylor took over the vocals and played sax...he was from Decatur.  Charlie Campbell, also from Decatur, was also hired to play sax and sing...and a trumpet player who is the band director at Athens High School...Dan Haverly.. The Pall Bearers were not really around for that long...as I recall....most of the time the band was called The Mark V.  Dan Penn came back and sang with them for a while as The Mark V.  Also Johnny Sandlin also from Decatur and the cat that got me into the music biz also played guitar after Marlin Greene left the band. Jerry Saylor shot himself or some think that his girl friend killed him about 20 years ago. Charlie Campbell became a commercial pilot for one of the major airlines and then became the personal pilot for some famous race car driver....their plane crashed and both were killed.  Jerry Saylor was my best friend during The Mark V days so I went to literally every show they played for a couple of years....they would get me up on stage to dance every once in a while...I was called The Action Man !  As many of ya'll know most of the cats in The Mark V later became Rick Hall's main FAME rhythm section...that is until Chet Atkins heard them and made them a deal they could not refuse to move to Nashville and be the backbone for many country hits by artists like Porter Wagoner and other hard core country artists...all of these musicians passionately loved R & B and Soul music and Blues but the money was too good to turn down.. I've got a great Cat Tale about a weekend I spent in Nashville with Jerry Carrigan and his first wife...it was during what was called The Country Music DJ Convention...now it's called Fan Fair....but Carrigan and I were both pretty heavy drinkers back then...I'd say it was 1968 or 1969...we all went to Printers Alley where all the labels had hired the clubs out to use as hospitably places....first time I saw Tony Joe White live was during that weekend. Carrigan was always a sharp dresser...and after he  moved to Nashville he traded in his kaki pants and Madras Gant shirts for a custom made Western Suit...complete with the boots and the little bow low tie....we went back to his apartment and turned on the record played and Jerry played me ALL of the country cuts he had been playin' on...we got drunker and drunker and as the night got longer I started to notice that Carrigan was tryin' to convince me and himself how great these country cuts were...he would point out little places in the arrangements and smile proudly.... This went on until the early hours of the morning....and the booze was about to set us free....I remember it just like it was yesterday....Jerry walked over to the record played and picked it up and stuffed it...while it was still playin' in the nearest garbage can....and then he took all of the country records and smashed them into the can with his foot.... And then he did one of the funniest thangs I've ever seen...Jerry Carrigan dressed in his custom made Country and Western suit stood in the middle of the room...drunk as hell and he ripped every piece of clothes off of his back...until he was just standing there in a pair of expensive Cowboy boots....he looked down and took another drink and took the boots off and threw them out the window....after that he had a smile of satisfaction on his face like I have rarely seen in my life ! Over the years I've heard the question asked about how the Muscle Shoals musicians that Chet moved to Nashville felt about playin' country music instead of the soul music that they all loved so much.....I think this Cat Tale about Carrigan really says it better than anythang else ! A few years ago The Alabama Music Hall of Fame put out a compilation CD that featured some of the old bands and they got most all of The Mark V back together and cut several excellent songs....the CD is available at the gift shop at The Alabama Music Hall of Fame... When I was talkin' to Ripete Records President Marion Carter I told him about this CD and he said they were already makin' arrangements to get at least one Mark V song on the twin CD that will come with the book Heeeey Baby Beach Music. I think that this twin CD and book will really be worth having !   THE OUT TO LUNCH BUNCH:    I was one of those cats back in The 70's in The Shoals that lived on the infamous TUCKER'S Corner....and the folks that lived there placed bet most mornin's as to whether I lived through the night or not...   Others that lived in that magical little area where that garage apartment was that me and Suzy Storm shared was bassists Butch Ledford and Bob Wray, guitarist Mike Lawley,Sax and Flute Guy "In The Sky" Higginbotham,...Guybo was just learnin' to play and before long he was touring with Little Richard's Band for many years...but he got his chops up on Tucker's Corner.   We also had some great friends that lived there that worked for southern Railroad...like the late B.J. Malone & Carrie Taylor.....Cooper lived across the street and for a while so did Pete Carr and the white Freddie King and his wife Leslie, who later married Butch McDade, the late drummer for The Amazing Rhythm Aces,,she was also a sound engineer..   And there were many others that lived around Tucker's Corner that I'm sure I'm leaving out...   But one day our land ladies son Bill Tucker came by on his paper route riding a 185 Suzuki dirt bike...I begged him to let me ride it around the block and I was hooked before the day was over I went down to the local motorcycle shop and bought me one of those great little dirt diggin' motorcycles.  At that time a new one was only about 400 bucks...Cooper found a couple of old Yamaha's that he could always seem to keep runnin' with bailing wire and sheer will power..   Cooper coined a couple of phases that I still use today...one is "There is nothin' like lookin' at the world through and open throttle !" and "Who needs brakes...they just slow you down !".   We all started ridin' and learnin' to ride and "do it in the dirt" at the closet place we could find...which happened to be The Sheffield City Dump which we gave the name Maybellene.Much blood was spilled...bones were broken  there and many motorcycle parts or whole motorcycles were destroyed...it was a great place to ride because it backed up to The Tennessee River ...   WE later discovered a place up around Savannah Tennessee that had a free campground right on Pickwick Lake called Burton Branch.This place had a hill that looked like "The Great Wall"...a hill that looked like it went straight up like a 10 story building....every weekend and sometimes for weeks in a row we'd pitch tents or gather the Vans in a circle ...build a giant bonfire in the middle and camp out at Burton Branch and do a race we called "the hounds and the hare"   On weekends people came from everywhere to watch these motorcycle hill climbs... Somebody started callin' us "The Out To Lunch Bunch" because we were all so crazy....like a bunch of dare devils and stuntmen with death wishes..   At one point almost every musician and half the Southern Railroad boys in The Shoals bought similar motorcycles and went on these great adventures with us .   Back then I drank allot and had a death wish...mainly because I did not know the degree of severity of my Sleep Apnea and also clinical depression which I now have a handle on...and wanna live now..   But I always used to say that "I would never commit suicide" but if I was ridin' my motorcycle as fast as I could and went over the high side and splattered my brains all over the place...that that was not suicide...that was an accident in search of the perfection of winning the race "...I rode as hard and fast as I could and rarely got a scratch on me....same way with Cooper...we didn't give a shit and had fun and took chances and always remained intact....while other that tried to be so careful broke legs and arms and all kinds of thangs..   One time I did hurt my leg too bad to ride for a couple of weeks and we had all set up our tents by the river and were plannin' to stay at least a month....I had to sit around camp all day while the rest of The Out To Lunch Bunch was ridin' the powerline right of ways....what a great place to ride...it was like a free Disney World for dirt bikers complete with a little beer store that sold almost everythang we needed.Or like the old COWBOY song said "A Patch and a Pain Killer".   Anyway I had to find somethang to do while my leg was hurt so I bought a Whamo Wrist Rocket Sling Shot....it was hard to find enough of the right size and shaped rocks to shoot with so I sent Suzy Storm to the nearest town with a hundred dollar bill and told her to buy me some marbles to shoot with my sling shot....when she came back the truck of my old white Cadillac was filled with big boxes.When I opened one of the boxes I saw hundreds of individual packs of marbles....each had about 20 or 30 in a plastic sack....but all in all their were proabaly a million marbles in that trunk....so while the others rode like the wind I stayed at the campsite and got pretty good with a sling shot.   This all happened 30 or 40 years ago but people still say you can find glass marbles in certain areas of the camping area....someday it will probably puzzle the hell out of Archeological students...tryin' to figure out where all the damned marbles came from !   Those times of those motorcycles ridin' and racin' your best friends were some of the best times I've ever had !   I am very Thankful to be alive and reasonably sane after all these years ....actually I"ve never felt more creative and organized as I do these days...I'm lookin' forward to a great year with many interesting deveopments and twists,,,, I hope all ya'll are too !   Thanks for bein' here around our MFV Digital Tribe virtual campfire ! And Thanks again for all of the kind Birthday Wishes !     MOTORCYCLE MAMA TOUR:   It was a good time had by all....all in all...when the show was about to start the packed house was stacked with folks that Bowie's record company and management had put in those seats to make sure he got a great response from the crowd...   The crowd kept yellin' "DAVIE" WE WANT DAVIE !" And I was mumblin' somethang into the mic like "IT" will be out here to entertain ya'll soon" or "she'll be right with you...she's just got to put on a little more lipstick, on and maybe change into a new pair of panty hose...and remarks like that... Actin' like a real dumb ass from Alabama...it comes natural !   We also used to rehearse at Studio Instrument Rentals in LA...and there as always a lot of wheelin' and dealin' goin' on to get a practice room when you needed one....Alice Cooper had just hit the scene and his crew as goin' around tryin' to make deals with other bands to trade their time for theirs...they had a Hollywood Bowl Show or somethang comin' up...and again I had a ball actin' like I did not know that Alice Cooper was a dude...so I'd tell his roadies "You tell Miss Alice that we are Southern Gentlemen and we would be more than happy to help a lady out in her time of need....and his roadie's would get red in the face tryin' to make me understand that Alice was indeed just another hard ankle dude like me!   I just kept playin' stupid and acting like I knew that Alice was really a lady but that she was just so mud ugly they had to bill her as a man...   Back then being from Alabama had it's advantages.....it was amazing what a distorted picture of Alabama and it's citizens most folks in LA and New York had about us.....I guess the Fort Payne Alabama cleared all that up....I liked it when the folks at Columbia Records in New York in 1965 were afraid to invite us over to their houses for supper because they though people in Alabama did not wear shoes...I guess they got all their info from Al Capp and Lil' Abner...and I played that part whenever I could !   When SAILCAT played live shows we opened the show just like the album...we would have a complete Blackout wherever we were appearing...I wanted total darkness for a few minutes before our show started...or as a Buck Wilkin would say,,,, so we could " approach the threshold of entertainment".   For those of ya'll that have heard the SAILCAT album you know that it starts off with the sounds of Bluegrass fiddles played by Scott Boyer and Al Lester...and a little Banjo played by Tom Russell...we even recorded the sound of a dude's feet as he buck danced....Pete had a mic down around is feet so he could get a good sound...we had another cat playin' the spoons...this little intro only lasts about a minute or so...the concept of the album was to be a Southern Rock Opera...complete with sound effects like rain and thunderstorms and crickets and even a bullet shot in between songs...   When we played live an interesting thang happened...it was like a study in human nature...as I said we blacked out the whole auditorium...we even removed the little red lights on the amps or covered them up with black tape....I wanted and usually got a total blackout on stage to open the show....when all the lights went out we would play the little Bluegrass intro theme music though our PA system...and EVERYTIME we did it the crowds would get real relaxed real quick and start yellin'....and doin cat calls and "YEHAW"  and all those sounds you think about when you hear a Country music band or see a show like Hee Haw...   The crowd would all start clappin' their hands and stompin' their feet to the goodtime Bluegrass music that was comin' out of our sound system...and right at a certain point... just like on the opening of the MOTORCYCLE MAMA album...then all of a sudden the Bluegrass  music ended in this pitch black auditorium and the you immediately heard the unmistakable sound of a big Harley Davidson motorcycle crankin' up...we always maxed out the volume on our sound system to make the Harley sound as loud and as powerful as possible...we turned it up to eleven ! And it was an amazing thang to witness how fast the crowd in those dark rooms went from feelin' safe and happy to bein' transformed into a room full of folks with a lot of collective anxiety....   It's strange but when that motorcycle cranks up you could hear a pin drop and you could almost feel the lumps comin' up in their throats...just the sound of that motorcycle through our PA system at that loud volume could really cause the whole audience to become a little more than up tight !   When you hear the motorcycle run through it's gears that's when the red spot lights first hit the stage...and catches all five of us in mid air in the middle of a collective group jump with all guitar playin' arms doin' full rotation Pete Townsend roundhouse windmill licks....and we were all 3 feet off the ground ! It was a great way to start a show...the opening song was always RAINBOW ROAD and it was powerful !     LET LOVE COME BETWEEN US:   This is an email from Greg Haynes....he's the cat that's writin' the book "Heeey Baby Days of Beach Music that will come with the twin CD Ripete Records compilation that will feature 40 songs from the mostly white bands in The 60's that played R&B and Soul Music like our band The RUBBER BAND did...   He wants to know the story of how Papa Don Schroeder came to cut my song LET LOVE COME BETWEEN US on James and Bobby Purify...which came out about 2 or 3 songs after "I"M YOUR PUPPET".   I do not have a clue how this came about except for the fact that The RUBBERS had a BIG regional hit on our Columbia 45 and it was so popular that I guess Papa Don figured it would be easy enough to sell it to a worldwide audience with a major/minor label and well known artists doin' it....makes perfect sense...   Dan Penn,Spooner or Rick Hall or some of the folks that were around those Papa Don sessions would know more...maybe our new member Biggie can ask around down at FAME.   I do know that Papa Don tried to pull a fast one on me....he sent me a letter in 1967 sayin' that he was interested in recording my song on The Purifys IF I would sign over half writers credit to him.....this did not happen that much...but it did happen back in those days...   I needed $ bad and I knew that if the record got released... whether it was a hit or not... I would still be able to get a $500 advance from BMI...that was back when BMI was worth somethang to a struggling songwriter..   I absolutely did not want to give Papa Don a piece of a song that he did not write...Hell I had never even met him...but I agonized for several months about his offer...and then I finally decided HELL NO...NO WAY !   My first wife Hilton and I were livin' out on Shoals Creek at Bailey Springs and we did not have a telephone so I cranked up that red 67' fast back vette and drove the beautiful long and winding roads that lead from the cabins on the creek back to Florence and The Quad City Area...   I was so glad to have finally made up my mind about this issue and I could not wait to get Papa Don on the phone and tell him that it wasn't worth it to me to sell out in order to get one of my songs released on record.....and Hilton and I were cruising along listenin' to the car radio....and out of the blue we heard a new song on the radio....but it was also my song !   While I was about to lose my mind all those months tryin' to decide what to do about Papa Don's offer...he had recorded the song anyway and now he it was playin' on my car radio....that's one of those times when you have to yell HALLUCINATION VERIFICATION ! Is this really happening ! And when you realize that it is and it's real...you also realize how magic life can be ! Believe in your dreams !     WEDDING RING CAT TALE / ROBERT NIX:   I left my first wedding ring on Robert Nix's coffee table in Hotlanta..I was over visiting Nix and Buddy Buie back in the mid 60's and I took off my ring because it was rattlin' on the neck of the guitar.....   My first wife and childhood sweetheart Hilton Hagler thought I was lying about what happened to my wedding ring...She died of Cancer a few years ago....she had had BOTH of her kidneys replaced...not related to the Big C...   We were only legally married for about a year...she used to travel with The Rubber Band and before the shows we would all smoke a bunch of 60's weed and she would come up on stage and just sit in the middle of the band while we played....smilin'...with a great big stoned smile on her face...   We wrote one song together in 1967 or 69 titled "NO ONE LEFT TO COME HOME TO" ...it became a regional hit by an R & B Duo called "George and Gwen"   I did not even know this old song we wrote ever got any further than the demo tape Marlin Greene did at FAME....I had heard that Mel & Tim had cut it but that was all just rumor..   A year or 2 ago I met Jeff Lemlich online...he's written a couple of books...I may not have spelled Jeff's last name right but he told me that NO ONE LEFT TO COME HOME TO had indeed been released on a 45 and was a big hit in the Miami area...I believe I have the facts right...Jeff used to be a Mighty Field Hand...so if you are hearin' these tribal drums Jeff PLEASE holler at us !   Anyway Jeff made me a cassette copy of the record and it's damned good....even by today's standards..it's really strange to be hit by somethang from the past like that...   I had totally forgot about writing the song...but when I listened to the tape that Jeff sent me a whole phase of my life that I had forgotten flashed across my mind like one of those thangs you hear about when someone is fixin' to die...back then Hilton and I lived at Bailey Springs, which is on Shoals Creek very near Scott and Dick's place at Spring Cove.   Muscle Shoals Sound was still just a dream at this time but an old dude named Fred Bevis owned the 3614 Jackson Highway building and had a 4 track recording studio set up there....Fred took a likin' to me and believed in some of my ideas so he let me use the studio anytime that he did not have a payin' session goin' on...so I used the studio all of the time..    Since I was writing the songs and producing them on some spec artists...I even leased a couple of acts to companies in Cashvillle..I needed help so Hilton got tapped for the job of sound engineer...she had an amazing memory and Fred could show her how to do a patch to get a certain mic workin' or somethang and once it was showed to her she had it down....she turned out to be a damned good engineer...   We had an idyllic life at the time...layin' out in the sun and swimming and water-skiing all day and goin' to do our experiments at the studio on Jackson Highway in the late afternoons and sometimes all night long...had a red vette...but Hilton was an only child and her mother ran her life...and she wanted a grandson and she wanted Hilton to be married to a Doctor instead of a starving artist and dreamer with a head full of wild ideas...   Strange thang...Mrs. Hagler (mother-in -law ) worked her magic and the next thang you know we are divorced and Hilton is married to Doctor Jimmy Wiley here Decatur...Hilton had been to The Mayo Clinic and they told her that she could not have children without endangering both their lives...but Elizabeth Hagler wanted a grandchild and she always got what she wanted...Hilton almost died and so did the baby but they made it and they had to borrow a kidney from her father...almost killed him too....but old Elizabeth Hagler was feelin' no pain...and now many years later Hilton is long gone....her Dad Joe Hagler that sold tires here for a million years is dead...but ole Elizabeth married a richer man after Joe died and she has that grandson she wanted so bad...and I'll bet she's pullin' his strings like a fancy store bought puppet like Howdy Doody !   Sorry to get off into the past so much...but It's part of a chapter I needed to write for the book of my life story...may never be a book...but maybe my daughter or someone else might be interested years after I've kicked the bucket.   BTW...A bunch of folks have told me that they tried to listen to the cut of HOOKER BOOGIE that's up on the MIll Kids Studio website and they said that it did not work....I went back and checked the link I had listed and I had the last few letters of the URL wrong...so you can click it now and it should work...if not please let me know..     THE STOKES CABIN:   The cabin that Duane and all the other famous guitar players lived in was The Stokes Cottage owned by Bill Stoke's mama and now by Bill..I think he lives in Florida now...but the cabin is a few houses down from where your bass player Bob Wray lives...on The Sheffield side of Wilson Lake.   This was back in the poor days of Shoals...around the late 60's....it was a humble little cabin but it had a lot of soul !    Duane did not have a car back then...in fact I can never remember a time when he did have a car...so I had to drive out there and bring him into the sessions at FAME and give him a ride home afterwards...I had a red 1966 fastback Corvette at the time and Duane and I used to spend alot of time just cruising the back roads all around Shoals Creek....I later sold that Vette to Roger Hawkins and a few years later he sold it to Terry Woodford and then he sold it to Clayton Ivey...that was the last I heard of it.   Others that also lived there after Do-wang Allman were, Pete Carr, Wayne Perkins, The Late Tippy Armstrong..and when the cabin was on it's last leg Eddie Hinton lived there without power,heat or water...Bob Wray and Capt. Don Jefferies and others would go by when it got real cold and give Eddie some firewood so he would not freeze to death....I just posted a pic of Tippy yesterday... I believe that there were a few other musicians that lived in The Stokes Cabin at one time or another...if anyone can add to my list please do!   I used to have Bill Stokes email addy...I'll see if I can locate it...Bob Wray probably knows how to get in touch with him....I'd love to ask him some questions...I think he let Hinton live there for free because he was on such hard times.     OLD JOE WALK:   About a month ago I drove out the old Moulton Highway to Old Joe Walk's house or shack....it was a very pretty sunny day and I had been thinkin' about Old Joe for a while and thinkin' I should call him to see how he was doin'...and then I thought I could do a better job by just drivin' the 13 miles to his shack...   Every year with winter comin' on I try to check with Joe to see how he is fixed for the bad weather that needs to be prepared for...any of ya'll that have seen where Joe's been livin' for the last decade or so will know what I'm talkin' about.....he usually puts plastic over all the windows and doors and fixes it where he can heat one room with a kerosene heater...   It's a trip just walkin' in his old shack because it's like goin' back in time..there's dust on tables out there that's older than I am...and old half finished wooden model airplanes circa 1940's or 50's....I'd love to buy one and have offered him 10 times what they are worth but he will not part with them..   Anyway...the day I went out there last month I did not see a car in front of his shack...so I thought either he moved...was not home...or no longer has a car...or maybe he had hidden his ride out behind the shack....the ground was nice a dry and I had 4 wheel drive anyway so I drove up in the field beside the house and made my way around to the back of his shack....and it is a shack...   When I got around back I saw an old car...it was not the same one he was drivin' when we cut the 2 WILL THOMAS Albums but it looked like somethang Old Joe would drive...I stopped my truck and got out and yelled "ANYBODY HOME ?" A minute or 2 passed and I heard Old Joe say "John D...is that you ?" Come on in...if I get out there I might not be able to get back in here !"   I went in the house and there was old Joe...lookin' pretty much like he did the last time I saw him ...which was a couple of years ago....he did not have a shirt on and you could really see that terrible curve in his spine....he was born like that...with that sway back..but it looks like it hurts all the time even though it might not even bother him...I can;t see why it would not be very painful....Old Joe was barefooted and had on a pair of jeans.....we walked into his bedroom...which besides his kitchen are the only rooms he uses...   WE got to talkin' and I told him I had heard that he had finally got some disability payments and some Medicare or somethang...he said money wise he was gettin' by OK...   I asked him if he was ready for winter...and if I needed to pick up some rolls of plastic and some kerosene or anythang like that and he said he had it all covered...   He looked good...well as good as he did the last time I saw him anyway..we talked a while and tried to do a little laughin'...but when you can remember way back when old Joe had a 57' Ford Pink drop top with black accents and a Harley and was playin' the shit out of the piano or sax 20 hours a day it's hard to laugh about what TIME has done to both of us....   Maybe if we had of gotten drunk or somethang it would have seemed funny for a while....but Joe had told me that his blood pressure was real high and a few day earlier he either had to go to the hospital or though he was gonna have to go...I forget which...he seemed alright while I was there...which was less than an hour...   Anyway the afternoon sun was startin' to fall from the sky and I don't see as well at night as I used to so I said my farewells and told Old Joe that I had the same phone # and for him to please call me if he needed anythang at all...he said he would...but I know he probably won't.   As I walked out to my truck which was parked about 50 feet behind his shack I could hear old Joe just a talkin' to himself...in fact he was havin' a damned heated argument with himself...I could not tell what the argument was about ...but I was sure old Joe was winning !   Hinton was tryin' to write a short story titled "The Man Who Lived With Ghosts" which I think was loosely based on Old Joe....he never finished it...Eddie was much better at writin' songs than stories or books...he had heard that you got paid by the amount of words you used in writing a book so most of what he wrote was rather wordy and redundant,,,,   There are a few thangs that I've dome in my life that I'm glad I did...of course one was capturing Hinton's second album on tape and all the video I shot on him over the years and the other thang is that I recorded Old Joe Walk's amazing piano playing on 2 of WILL THOMAS' 2 CD"s...nobody plays piano like Old Joe Walk NOBODY ....   another thang I'm glad I did was to use a local guitar player named ED "Ruffy" Canada" on guitar on both of Will's CD's.Canada is as good as it's possible to get on guitar in about 40 years but he does not have the personality to sell his ability or get the jobs he needs to move up the ladder...maybe it's not important to him...he's got a couple of young kids that he spends most of his time with and that's probably enough for him.   But listen to the the piano and organ on Will Thomas' first to CD';s and the guitar work...Perkin' plays with Ed Canada on one CD and with Kelvin "Muddy" Holly on the other CD...I have yet to find anybody that does not love Will's CD's...especially the second one ALABAMA DAY.     THE CHICKEN SHACK:   I took Gregg and Duane Allman to The Chicken Shack over by the river back in about 1965...nobody had long hair back them and when we walked in the club you could have heard a pin drop...in was really tense as Hell for a while until Gregg got on the electric piano and started playin' and singin' the Ray Charles song ":What'd I Say"   Gregg won the rednecks over with that one song and we did not have anymore trouble the rest of the night.....music soothes the savage redneck !     COCKER ON WATER-SKIS CAT TALE:   Right after The Maddogs and Englishmen Tour Leon Russell brought The Shelter People to Muscle Shoals Sound to do an album on himself and Joe Cocker was with the group.   I was livin' on Shoals Creek at The Wyker Camp and  Hinton had bought the lake house next door....the two houses were right on the main bend in the creek on a point...hard to miss... Each mornin' before the sunrise most of the cast and crew of Mad Dogs and Englishmen would claim a fishin' spot by the emerald green waters of Shoals Creek...this would not unusual if it were not for the time period that it happened and the way this people were dressed...   The site of all these strangely dressed people standing in the early mornin' fog by the creek probably made many a local fisherman think that his wife had slipped some LSD into his coffee thermos or maybe they were thought they were losing their minds...   Cocker came over to my cabin and asked if he could stay we me...and as he put it in his thick accent "I just wanna do what you do...eat what you eat...drink what you drink...you know....dig through your drawers...had I been female I might have run at the thought of that possibility..or not..   Anyway me and Don Nix got my runabout fishing/skiing boat out of the boat house and strapped a couple of water-skis to Cocker's big feet and tightened up the bright yellow ski rope....   And when Cocker hollered "HIT IT" which is the universal sign & term in Water-skiing lingo that says to the driver of the boat to "Haul Ass !   And even though it was Cocker's first attempt a the sport of Water-skiing I'll have to say he was certainly game...if not down right funny lookin'.....he moves on Water-skis just like he does on stage...like a werewolf that Dr. Frankenstein made from spare parts and then fueled his strange creation on Ludes and Speed and Acid and all manner of stuff that will make a persons muscles and limbs contort and spasm out !   I'm just joking of course  and Joe Cocker is a fine fellow and he was the perfect house guest !     FLY BACK FAT:   An outrageously funny tall tale & black comedy about what happens when a group of Americans that weigh over 600 pounds take over the US government by capturing The White House in a fair election!   But that's only the beginning... a backlash grassroots political movement formed by people who weigh less than 120 pounds come into power and when their time comes they throw all of The Fat Cats out and create a different kind of America..a Leaner & Meaner America..where one of the first new laws assigns a "personal weight limit" to each American and they must not weigh more than their own assigned weight number.This causes all types of wild and crazy thangs to happen...so be  prepared to learn about the dreaded "One Arm Syndrome" and other changes in this fantasy future...and a time when all of these things could somehow become strangely possible and probably probable!   One of the main and central characters in FLY BACK FAT is a man in his late 40's....his nickname is "Bones" or Slim" or "Stick Figure" ...his last name is Fraley...as in the word "frail",,,nobody can really remember Mr. Frailey's real first name because he has been called by some nickname ALL of his life...sometimes close friends will just shorten his family name and call him "Frail" or "Frailer" Or "The Frailman"or The Frailster....and if you've ever had a nickname you can fill in the rest...   If I could hire any actor for his appearance for the role of Mr. Bonedog Frailey it would be the actor/comedian RICHARD BELCHER.He's got the look Frailey should have...that New York Subway rat look...like a lean and mean ruthless Madision Avenue advertising CEO/boardroom New York Subway Rat in a 3  piece pin stripped suit...but even the pin strips of his suit would have to be scaled down or reduced or be made more narrow because Frailey is so skinny that even his pin strips have to be thinned down to match his thin frame and body proportions ......   And of course Frailey would always sport a pencil thin moustche...and wear the old 60's narrow string ties and one of those narrow little thin Ivy League belts...he even carries a thin breifcase and of course he has his shoes custom made because no one..not even in New York City sells a shoe in a size AAAA extra narrow width in a size 14 shoe....and his shoes must be handmade and they  have to be made with a sharp rat stabbing needle point toe....out of Alligator hide in the style of a "Wing Tip"... that's the shoe Frailey prefers for his normal formal dress footware.   Bones Frailey may have looked and acted just like a real New York City street rat...but he damed sure was a sharp dressed rat of a man ! Sometimes is his secret thoughts he would picture himself as RATMAN....who of course was BATMAN's best friends and CAT WOMAN's worst nightmare...    Everythang about Frailey was thin...he had a thin little tiny narrow needle dick that his wife always teased him about.. when she was mad she would call her under weight husband " A Needle Dicked Bug Fucker !"....this really used to piss ole Frailey off ! But ole Needle Dick never let his wife know that of all the many cruel nick names he had ever had or all of the thangs that he had ever been called.... he hated and despised the term "Neddle Dick Bug Fucker" more than any other one term that he could imagine being called...and if he let his control freak, flaming tougned wife or anybody else know how much he hated the term NEDDLE DICK BUG FUCKER  then he was sure that the name he hated most would suddenly become the one that stuck and would even be on his tomb stone "Here Lies Needle Dick Frailey...The Bug Fucker ! The only man that ever lived that had a penis so thin that he could actually fuck a small bug ....if you could hold it for him ! "   Frailey's wife was an attractive elegantly slim woman in her 40's that was constantly fighting the battle of the bulge...or the fight against becoming fat...some people have surmised that she had been so obsessed about keepin' her weight down to that "professional runway Fashion Model image" that the real reason she married Frailey was because he was The King of The Fad Diets....he had made millions over the years sellin' all kinds of pills,potions,and powers that would guarantee anyone that they could lose weight...   The success of each if these diet schemes fed on the ignorance of the average American and for their ability to fall for the right type of sales pitch and advertising magic..no matter how far fetched and unbelievable the idea was.   Frailey knew people...he knew just which button to push to make millions of dollars worth of sales every year selling pills that were basically the same thang... where the main ingredient... was always just 100% pure and natural NOTHING !   Frailey knows that people have no will power...and he also knows that they are lazy and when he offers a 100% money back guarantee if the consumer wants their money back ..he can offer this money back deal because he knows how lazy people are....very few ,if any, of people will actually go through the hassle of packing the pills back up and payin' the postage and go to all that trouble over a $29.95 sale !   You could say that ole Needle Dick was no fool.....he felt supiuer to his fellow man...he could predict the future....his business would always grow because if there was one thang that he was 100% sure about it was that people are always gonna wanna be thin...he based his whole life on that one premise..There would always be a need for his diet pills...even if they were useless...in his own twisted mind he viewed what he did as a service to his fellow man....he offered them a much needed hope...even if it was a false hope..he still offer them some kind of hope they could hang their dreams on...even if the fanatsy of possible sucess only lasted for a few days....in this sometimes seemingly hopeless world $29.99 plus tax was a damned great bargain...in fact $29.99 is a real bargin these days for a few days or minutes of any kind of hope...even false hope !   At times Frailey even saw himself as a messenger from God...an Angel of mercy and hope...the last thin line that kept the people of the world from loosing all hope of loosing the terrible battle against the domination of world fat...free fat...swinging fat...   But sometimes late at night when Frailey was dreaming he would start dreaming about when he was an unhappy child...tormented for being so skinny by all of the bullies who were always those fat little butterball types that forgot about their problems as long as they were makin' fun of little skinny Frailey..   Frailey's worse reoccurring nightmare as a child and a nightmare he had even as a successful adult was that when all these hated little fat bullies grew up they would take over the country...that a grass roots political movement would grow from seeds planted when television comedians and cartoons and such made makin' fun out of fat people a standard part of their humor routines...it was simple...fat people were the butt of most jokes and for a while the world laughed at all of the fat people...and considered then fair game for insults and jokes.   Finally one day an event triggered the sparks of a grass roots movement that would catch fire and have so many supporters that the movement became a bonified political party and now America finally had a real 3 party system.The Dimmercats,The Repulsives and The Free & Unfettered Swing Fat Party !   In his adult life these reoccurring fat nightmares played a major part in Frailey's personal make up and daily habits....deep down in his gut feelin' he was terrified that the nightmare was more than just a bad dream...he was terribly afraid that it was a prediction of the shapes of thangs to come in the future...a world where extremely fat people controlled everythang.....and then there would be no need for his diet business and since that's all he knew he would starve to death and become homeless and blend in with all of the other rats and rat looking creatures that live in big cities like New York.   Frailey and the people at his Fat Fighters company's head office in NYC were always on the lookout for clues,indications,trends,signs, signals or anythang that would give him and his million dollar Diet Business an advanced warning about any kind of change that might signal that fads or fashion might be changing in a way that might negatively impact their company and therefore them and their families and the plush and comfortable lives these hustlers and sellers of false hope had grown accustomed to !   Frailey's Fat Fighting Company even spent millions of dollars analizing every piece of news..magazine articles,Television shows,they consulted the stars and fortune tellers, they prayed to their lean and mean god that all would stay as it is and that The Fat would be kept in their place and away from their Whitehouse and Government positions of policy and power !     Each morning at the Frailey Fat Fighters Office Complex on Madison Avenue they would hold a meetin where the entire staff would get together over coffee and they would casually have a group meeting about anythang that anyone had noticed on the last nights news or other television shows...or anythang relevant that anybody ran across on the Net..or in movies..or radio...books...magazines...the music scene...every morning before the daily work began for about an hour these sessions took place usually with the same conclusion as the day before and the day before going back for at least 30 years....the status Quo remains the same meaning the diet companies were safe and secure that there would ALWAYS be a market for products for people who dream  of losing weight !   But Needle Dick Frailey was still paranoid...and worried about the future because of a few thangs a wise man had said when the AIDS thang first broke out,...Frailey could not remember the exact words but it was somethang like "When Slim starts catchin' more and more folks nobody will want to look like Slim got em'..and people will want to look healthy and maybe even FAT to prove that they don't have AIDS and they beat Slim.   And the other thang that the old wise man said was.."Once people realize how easy it is to eat such great food without havin' to cook it and they get used to havin' their food delivered to their door...and that coupled with all of the great thangs we have in our homes to entertain ourselves with...and add to that the fact that nowadays sex can kill you...   And why do folks wanna stay thin ? So they will be attractive ?....and why do they want to be attractive...so they might meet somebody and have sex...but since sex will kill you why bother...food to many is much better than sex ...you never hear a box of donuts bitchin' at you because you haven't cut the yard so it's and easy choice...Mo' FOOD Mo' FOOD damn the scales FULL FAT ahead ! LOOK OUT ! WIDE LOAD ON THE ROAD BABY !     Bones Frailey was born thin...it's his inherited body style...comes from a long line of skinny folks that married other skinny folks and the final product of millions of years of this thin begating thin begating thin the final result and latest modification in the long evolution of the family FRAILEY....the final result in millions of years of natural selection Ladies and Gentleman alike WE GIVE YOU the latest and leanest Frailey yet....could he be the chosen one...The Great Lean & Mean Messiah ? Could Bones Frailey save the world from it's fear of fat ?         FASHION AND CEREMONY:   Exposure is worth everythang....that's what radio used to be all about..that was the true value of a hit single.....and a move like throwin' 1000's of free CD's into the streets might be unusual enough to make the national news...and free publicity via The News is about the best exposure you can get !   These days there are so many artists making music that it's almost unreal....   I think the biggest mistake someone can make these days is to think that just because a piece of music is great or fantastic or the artist is incredible...that it naturally follows that it will "make it" because it or they are so fantastic ...it don't work that way anymore...( if it ever did )   Even Jerry Wexler in his book talks about all the DJ's Atlantic had in their pockets...I like to use the phase " first there was Pay-olla, then Coke-olla (Cocaine) and then there was and maybe still is Pistol-olla !"   I remember back in the very early days of the evolution of the music buisness in Muscle Shoals when Rick Hall had a 45 he wanted to get radio airplay on...I forget which artist and song it was...but Rick was just startin' to build what would later become The FAME empire and his father in law owned a used car lot....so he borrowed a station wagon from the used car lot and Rick and Dan Penn filled the back of the car up with bottles of Vodka and records and hit the road visiting DJ's where ever they could find them...and after a few drinks...a lot of Southern Charm...and a great song and production in those good old days when most DJ's had a mind of their own it was possible to get some airplay....   Of course all the radio airplay in the world ain't worth diddley if the folks don't have a way to buy the record after they hear it on the radio....and that was one of the hardest thangs to coordinatate back in the old days...   When I got involved by Hinton again in 1984 and we released LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI in 1986 people would call and ask to do a story or a review on this album and I would tell them all the same thang...and that was "we'd be honored for this attention an exposure but there is one problem...the only place you can buy the record is from (at that time) Post Office Box Drawer A, Decatur.Alabama "...we got great reviews in The Village Voice and many other well know publications and they all did what I asked them to do and that was to include the information as to how people could purchase a copy of LETTERS..   Even Ken Tucker from National Public Radio called and said he wanted to do a 15 minute show on "FRESH AIR" or "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED ( I forget which) but I told Ken Tucker the same thang and at the end of his show he gave the information on how to get the record..   This was in about 1986 or 87' and for a couple of months after the radio show aired I got basically the same type of phone calls from all over AMERICA from people and they were all sayin' almost the same thang ..   The usual caller would say "I hate to bother you but I heard Ken Tucker's NPR show on Hinton when I was driving back from wherever and I loved what I heard and so when Tucker told how to buy the record I tried to write it in the dust on my dash board or on the fog on my windshield and later I could not read it...and I have called NPR until they are all mad at me...but I want LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI !"   A little know fact is that the fine folks at NPR felt so strongly about the quality of Hinton's recordings that over the years FRESH AIR and/or ALL THINGS CONSIDERED did a total of 3 separate radio shows on Hinton's music... reviews on 3 separate albums...I think that's a record for any artist that NPR has covered....   Before The Net came along I wanted to re-name my band 1-800-SAILCAT.in my opinion at that time I think that concept might have worked...if not for my act...maybe for others.....now with The Net the opportunities are unlimited...the sky's not even the limit anymore...we have only seen the tip of the iceberg....this is indeed a great time to be in the music bizzzz  !    When Madonna first hit the scene and took the world by storm I was very perplexed by it all...and then one night I was watchin' the NBC nightly News and John Chancellor had a segment where he would read a statement about his views on different thangs...   And this news man said basically "If any of ya'll are wonderin' what this whole Madonna phenomenon is all about....it's very simple ...this is just further proof that the NEW art form is Marketing and Merchandising !".    No truer words were ever spoken about the this NEW era of the music business !   A frozen dog turd can be sold to an Eskimo if it's done right !   For many years now the competition for these top spots has gotten more and more intense...about 10 years ago I thought that if I were a younger man I would employ similar tactics that DR. Martin Luther King used to draw attention to his Civil Rights movement..   I'm too old to spend a night in jail...but for all those young cats out there that are tryin' to make it... they are gonna have to be as creative about their marketing as they are about makin' their music...or at least have someone that is obsessed or driven to do it for them...   I've got almost a book I've been compiling over the years of Guerrilla Marketing ideas that I'd like to employ or see some young act that had the balls to use to take the bull by the horns and do some thangs very differently than has been done in past to make enough waves to draw attention to themselves....   If you look at the history of the world and almost every great and powerful culture such as The Incas, Egyptians, Maya, Aztecs...and Elvis and The Beatles and now even Rap...they all have a couple of thangs in common..."Fashion and Ceremony"   In less than 100 years The Incas won over almost half of the world with very little blood shed...they used a lot of gifts and fashion and ceremony !      CHAINSAW GUITARS:   To me a chainsaw is a motorcycle without wheels....me and Cooper used to have to cut serious amounts of wood to keep his house warm when I talked him into quitting his job in the newspaper business so some one would take him seriously that he wanted to have a job in the music biz....next thang you know after about 2 or 3 years of starving and freezin' to death Pete hired him for the Leblanc Carr Tour and they went on tour as the opening act for Lynard Skyward and he was almost killed on that crash....but he missed the plane !   I love me some chainsaws....I want to build me a guitar that has one mounted in the neck...where it’s hidden behind the guitar...and at a certain point in the show a roadie would walk out on stage and yank the rope and then I'd start sawin' up all kinds of shit on stage...before the show we would issue safety glasses to the first few rows....   and I want to build another guitar that will have a flame thrower guitar and it would have long ribbons of fire shootin' the end of it ....and after I 've sawed me enough stuff up I'd change guitars and start shootin' long streams of fire at all that wood and sawdust that me and my chainsaw guitar had just masterfully produced...   Then I guess I'd have to build me a "fireman's model guitar" that would shoot long powerful streams of pressurized water out the end of the muthafucker...so I could out out all those fires I started...   You think Great White got in some hot water....shit my show would be on the world news every night...I'd make Galliger and his smashin' watermellons look like baby poot !     Some of ya'll have heard about my amazing Airbrush Guitar....I know it most be in the archives several times but I need to post it again because we have a lot of new members and I REALLY want to do this concept and video or film it....it's one of the best ideas I think I've ever had and it's very "doable"...if anyone has that airbrush guitar thang saved somewhere please post it so I don't have to re-write it !     CLIFF DEALIST:   I first met Cliff Dealist right after the first version of LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI came out on the Swedish label...Cliff wrote a fan letter that really caught my attention so much that I called him on the phone...this would have been the late 80's or early 90's.   After a little conversation Cliff told me that his father who originally came from Mississippi turned him on to Bobby Womack and Eddie Hinton..   Cliff told me that he also wrote and sang his own songs and played a little guitar as well....so after a few phone calls it was agreed that he would fly into Alabama from South Central LA and I would get the same musicians and studio where Hinton had recorded and we would cut some sides on Cliff...we gave him a great price on a whole package deal at BIRDLAND STUDIOS in Town Creek, Alabama...   Before he actually got to Bama-Lama Land Cliff was more worried about bein' attacked by the Ku Klux Clan than anythang else...there was a story floating around at the time where some black artist had gone to Nashville or Memphis to record and as a joke all the session players showed up at the studio in KKK sheets and pointed pillow cases..   After Cliff got to Alabama he stayed with my me and my little family which was my wife and 4 or 5 year old son and year old daughter....he stayed about 3 weeks or  a month and was a real gentleman...he was about 18 or 19 then...   After we got to the studio and got down to the real business of making a record I thought Cliff was gonna have a nervous breakdown because it was like he suddenly realized that he was not really ready to stand before the mic and deliver somethang for the whole world to hear.,...many times in my career I have made the same mistake by getting the cart before the horse and I was sympatric to his situation,.......   I told Cliff that no matter what his material was like or what his confidence level was and inspire of his level of ability at that time not to worry that we would make a good if not great record on him that he could be proud of...he was sayin' thangs like "I can never go back to LA if I do not get somethang good on tape while I'm here !" They will laugh me out of town !   Cliff was very easy to work with and we recorded about 6 songs on him...all that he wrote except one beautiful track that Cliff wrote and was unhappy with his words so I asked Stevie Davis of The Stealers if he could write some different words to Cliff's track and sing a demo of it ...The song turned out great ...it's titled "In The Garden of Delight"   One mornin' we were getting ready to record and gettin' tuned up and this fantastic spontaneous jam started happenin' so I told Owen to hit the "record" button and we just recorded what was goin' on....it was so fresh...kind of like FUNKY BROADWAY by Wilson Pickett....while the tape was rollin' I scribbled down some quick lyrics...Hinton and I had just returned from an Italian Tour that featured Rufus Thomas and my mind was still blown by that old man and what he could do with a crowd at 90 somethang years old !   So I turned the lyrics into a kind of a tribute to Rufus Thomas and his famous old trademark song "The Funky Chicken"   I titled our new thang THE MIGHTY FUNKY CHICKEN....   The whole purpose of this Cat Tale is to get at least part of this story down on paper ...and also to say that one of Cliff''s songs that we recorded on him a few decades ago is now under consideration for a new project that will help old poor Blues Artists...Cliff may not make any $ off of this...but with the people that are involved with this.... it can't hurt..folks like Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt and others....   Once again a song that someone wrote many years ago has come back to hit them upside the head again many years later ...that's one reason I get out of bed everyday....watchin' out for any boomerangs in the form of a long ago song that I wrote and tossed into the wind !!  I call these old songs my Bama-lama Boomerangs !   By the way for Owen,Jeff, BillyThe Bitch,Stingray Brand and others that need to know Cliff said that his publishing company is BOOMIE BOOM Music and it's affiliated with BMI     SUNDAY SERVICES !   We have been talkin' about The Great Taj Mahal on The Southrn Soul List...and I'm cross posting this to The MFV Tribe too !   I've heard from an informed friend that Taj Mahal is a Veterinarian by education....of course Taj Mahal is not his birth name...I forget what his given name  is...but he's the King of them all as far as I'm concerned...he has covered and kept alive Black sounds that would be lost forever soon if not for him...and he uses horn like nobody else....If I had to be stranded on a desert Island with one collection of someone's work it would be the total works of Taj Mahal.   Duane Allman started to learn to play slide guitar after watchin' a set in a small LA Club where Jesse Ed Davis and his Band were playin'...and Indian Ed was playin' slide...I think it was the first time Duane ever heard anybody play slide like that and it real touched him and changed his life...   This was all before The Allman Brothers Band was born.....After the show was over Duane met Jesse Ed and some of the others in the band and the next day or that same night he went and got a copy of Taj Mahal's Natch'L Blues and proceeded to learn all the harmonica licks on slide guitar.........I used hear Duane and Hinton talkin' about which came first the Blues harp or slide guitar....like the old chicken and the egg question.   IF you ain't into Taj Mahal...do yourself a favor and "getcha some"...after listenin' to him you will feel a Hell of  allot better..   One of the thangs that Taj does that I rarely hear by anyone else is that he plays Banjo...sure plenty of folks play the old Banjo but it's always that Earl Scruggs style that's been driven into the ground a little too much for my tastes .....   Taj plays what I call Blues Banjo..I bought and old beat up GIBSON J-40 acoustic guitar the other day that I'm settin' up to play slide on and I had to buy a 5 string Banjo in the deal in order to get The Gibson but I have been wearin' the Banjo out for about 2 weeks now...Blues style Banjo is my style of course and I love playin' it..it's brand new to me and these open tunings are so easy to pick up on....they say that Robert Johnson sold his soul to The Devil at The Crossroads so he could be a better guitar player....   The Real Truth is...Johnson left Mississippi for a while and lived on an old man's farm in Alabama where he learned The Vestapol guitar tuning...which is mainly Open D or Open E if tuned a step higher...and when he went back to Mississippi his playin' had improved so much that the only thang that folks could think of when they heard his new style was that he must have Sold his Soul to The Devil for the talent....   When I first heard Eddie Hinton's first LP VERY EXTREMELY DANGEROUS...I had the same thought...here is this white cat I've know since I was 17 and then did not see or hear from him from about 1974 to 1978 when he sent me a copy on The Capricorn label and it blew my mind.....I could not figure out how he had made such a transformation...there had to be some real Magic or Voodoo or somethang Super Natural involved to make this cat I'd known most of my life sound so totally BLACK and with more soul & heart than just about any record I had ever heard in my life !    You know that back in the 20's and 30's there were probably many black Banjo players... back in the time of Robert Johnson and that crowd from The Delta...but nowadays it seems like Country Music has totally appropriated the Banjo for it's genre..   Remind me to tell The Cat Tale about me and Bobby Whitlock and my 3 sting banjo...     THE BIZ:   The Bandstand show was in the summer of 72' and the time I spent with "Black Socks" Luther Ingram was before that but I never met or heard of Baylor....but like with so many performers that I like and have met I have not always heard everythang that they have recorded or met all of the people around them..   I guess I've usually been workin' on makin' records more than havin' much time to listen to all of the stuff ..there was a time in my life when I had some kind of music playin' in the background all the time...but nowadays I don't listen to that much music...in my truck I listen to the radio but it's usually on scan and never locates anythang I want to hear...   Lately I have been aware that I do not play enough music around the house...I want some of it to rub off on my kids...so now whenever I've got a project that I'm workin' on that does not have to do with the actual writing or recording of music I have started to put some good music on the jam box loud enough so the kids will hear it where ever they are in the house..   A little after Hinton's death in 95' I retired from the bizzzz....until about 1998 there was not a musical instrument or CD or anythang like that in the house...I had given all of my artwork away....   And then I decided that my kids were old enough to pick up on what was goin' on around them so I decided to come out of self imposed exile...because I wanted my kids to see what type of creative people I spent my life workin' with....and how we did our projects...how we put the egos aside and then it's "one for all and all for one" .   It wasn't long before I started gettin' back to full speed ahead back in the music bizzz or as I prefer to call it "the business of entertaining"   Now I feel so fortunate that my young kids can see and hear and witness my new MFV "indie" company doin' business with fine folks from all over The Planet....my kids are the first generation,in my family at least, that love their PC's and their connection with The Net...I just hope to be able to show them what is possible if you are "driven" and have a dream and you work your arse off to make it come true !   I am truly Thankful to have survived the wild and crazy life I've led and to be doin' somethang positive now that will I hope impact my kids in some good way down the road somewhere ! I've had a great and exciting life and it's still pretty damned unbelievable...but if it my life ended today I still would have lived about 20 more lives than most folks ever get a chance to...the future is for the children and almost everythang I do around them these days is designed to have some type of lesson or long lasting effect on them...   I tell people everyday that people who choose to be in the music biz...and especially Songwriters have more reason to be positive and get out of bed everyday with the thought of "what will happen today that will be good ? So many times in my life when I have been at one of my lowest points and felt like all I wanted to do was to give up and die and the phone would ring and someone would tell me the good news that "so and so" just recorded one of my songs...that can change everything in The Big Picture....   It's like these songs we write are some type of mystical boomerangs....and you may have given birth to one of them and then thrown that song into the wind back in the 60's and many years or decades later that thang comes back and slaps you up side the head with some great news...somebody is singin' it again ! I love it !   I gotta get back to work and finish making the CD covers for those 20 copies of Wild Water-Ski Weekend for that order that goes to Japan.Monday..and they are payin' $10 bucks each...I love that too !   The cat that is doin' my CD duplication over in The Shoals is bringin' me some CD copies Monday and I hope to send a package of MFV Products back with him...so he can drop some off at Pegasus Records in Florence and Max's Guitar Shop in Sheffield and maybe a couple of other places in The Shoals so if anyone wants to get a copy or 2 for Christmas & Holiday Gifts it will be as easy as droppin' by one of these fine businesses and gettin' what you need....they will also be available in Birmingham in 5 Points at that famous Charlemagne Records.   If anyone knows any Mom and Pop type record shops or book stores that are not connected to a major chain in your area that might be interested in any of these new MFV Products please let me know or put them in touch with me...and help in this area will be greatly appreciated!     MASTURBATORY GUITARS:   The recent comments about guitar players has struck a nerve with me....most guitars players you see now days play what I call "masturbatory guitar"...they close their eyes and see how many of the most difficult fast licks they can play.....   I've seen it so many times....they are so into their own trip..... and with their eyes closed the audience could be fixin' bayonets and about to charge the stage and stab their guitar playin' showboatin' arses..and they'd never know...these pitiful excuses for entertainers care little or nothin' about their audiences....if they can get a nut playin'...they don't care if the crowd gets off or not....kind of like bad sex....   A few years ago when I first torn up my right shoulder I was forced to learn to play guitar on my lap...and use a slide...as I was learnin' I realized that when someone would drop by and I wanted to impress them with what I had learned I would pick up my guitar and play the hardest thing or lick I could think of...I realized that I was doin' this and choosin' those hard licks to impress the listener...and then I realized one day that 99.9% of the listeners are NOT guitar players and have know idea what's easy and what's hard...they just know what sounds or feels good to them...so I started approaching my slide guitar playin' differently....tryin' now to get the emotion out of each lick and not given a damn about those that like to watch a finger acrobatics show !   My dear friend and Alabama boy/guitar genius WAYNE PERKINS tells about when Eddie Hinton made it known that he wanted to pursue his solo career and no longer wanted to be THE main guitar wizard for The Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section .   At the time Perkins was about 17 or 18 and already just an unreal guitar player....he later went on to play on several Rolling Stones albums and was asked to join the group...he played on Bob Marley's first hit and many others...Perkins was the first Bama boy The Head $tones tried to sign up...they finally made my old buddy Chuck Leavell a deal he could not refuse....Chuck has a plantation in Georgia that had been in his wife's family for generations...but Chucky Baby is from Bama-Lama Land...and got his thang together growin' up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.....there was a period of years when that college town produced so many top flight musicians that it hard to name them all here..there were cats on every corner that could blow Clapton away with one hand behind their backs..   But the story I'm tellin' here is about what happened when Perkins drove to The Shoals and found Eddie sittin' in the studio with a guitar...and Perkins plugged his guitar up and proceeded to play Eddie every lick imaginable....and with great speed and difficulty...and Hinton just sat their stone faced....I wish Perkins was tellin' this Cat Tale...but I've heard him tell it so many times I think I can capture the essence....   After Perkins had shown Eddie every trick and lick in his considerable guitar bag of guitar tricks...Eddie said somethang to the effect " You think you are such Hot Shit because you can play all that MESS...I can take one note and get more out of it and make people feel MORE from that lick  than you can with 5 truck loads of that fancy showboat horse crap you just played me !"   And the Perkins says that Hinton played a one note lick that contained some very tasteful and soulful bends and vibrato that gave Perkins goose bumps and he told me that he immediately understood exactly what Hinton was tellin' him and he changed his approach to guitar playin' from that day on....and it served him very well !   If you will listen to tracks that Hinton played guitar on you will NEVER hear him step out too far...to grab the spotlight...he was the master of the underplayed guitar....on most of his solo records he usually plays 2 guitar parts,...but it sounds like one or less than one guitar...He taught Glen Frey how to play his style and Bobby Womack also plays it well.... but we kind of refer to it as " Chinese Soul Guitar"   Again to all of ya'll that have are still not aware of Hinton and his life's body of powerful works in The R&B and Soul Music World and have resisted a chance to check a little bit of it out PLEASE take a few minutes and sample free ALL or some of the songs at www.CDBaby.com/Hinton   For those that would like to get into the Hinton thang...and need a place to start..I think it's best if possible to start with his first ablum released in 1978 titled VERY EXTREMELY DANGEROUS...then LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI...and then the 4 or 5 that were released in the next yaers up until an after his death in 1995 at 54 .........first 2 had a fire and passion and energy about them that's important.... to me anyway....everythang he put his name on his top drawer...but the first 2 will set your soul on fire...I promise !     BILLY PRICE:   You are right about Billy Price...I met him online a few years ago and there was some talk about maybe workin' together....Billy went on to do a fantastic CD with the one and only Swamp Dogg !   He sent me his entire set of CD's and those cats up there in Philly have got The Shoals thang done as good or better than the originators...the rhythm sections and productions blew me away from the get go...for those that are not familiar with Billy Price he's a white soul singer and songwriter from up around Philly if I recall right and he really does a fine job with the whole Southern Soul thang...he's a big Hinton fan and has recorded at least one song that Eddie wrote called DANGEROUS HIGHWAY...that I'd never even heard of until Billy called me...he said one of The Nighthawks gave him a copy of the song after Eddie had made it especially to pitch to The Nighthawks in hopes that they would record it....nobody knew any details about the song...when it was written or recorded or who published it nothing...there's no telling how many tapes like that are floating around out there....   Most folks are not aware of it but Hinton was quite a savvy businessman back before 1969.He was asked to join a company and become a partner with our guru Marlin Greene....the company was called RULER MUSIC.When Marlin got out of the music business he got out for good...it left such a bitter taste in his mouth about the whole WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN saga and other thangs that he saw while on the inside of The Gold Mine...that he just signed his third of the company he founded over to the 2 other owners that he invited in for equal thirds and trained them about the bizzz and taught them to run a studio and also how to write songs...the 3rd owner was The Old man we called him...Paul Ballenger...I think he thinks he's a seagull these days...   Anyway Marlin just gave Eddie and Paul millions and millions of dollars worth of intellectual properties and walked out ! What a Man !   Marlin and I were both employed by Elektra Records in 1972...me as a so called "rock star" and Marlin' as an artist and also and A&R man...we both lived in Hollywood at the same time and saw the same thangs about how corrupt the business was behind the scenes and the mafia involvement...Hell The Syndicate wanted to seriously back my jokin' attempt when I said "I'm only messin' around with this music business rock & roll star bullshit until I'm old enough to run for the Governor of Alabama ! They took me seriously and held a special meeting that I was invited to...in a nut shell they said that if I was serious that they could start the machine well in advance and I'd be a shoe in when the time came..   When I went off to college I pledged KAPPA ALPHA like my father and his father before him...founded by Robert E. Lee...on campus the whole politics thang is really a big thang...young Democrats and Young Republicans....gatherin' info on each other like spy versus spy...that's why I was not surprised by The Watergate Circus...they were teachin' us how to do that in colleges all across the nation...anyway I knew what a political machine was and still is....and the record bizzz was even worse than that....I split Hollywood at about the same time as Marlin split....I came home to Bama and disappeared on The River and Shoals Creek for a few years and Marlin...who is from Town Creek went to Seattle and lived on the streets for a while and got into computers....   Now Marlin's company is building and maintaining Bill Gates and his wife's personal websites that hold all of their treasures like letter from Napoleon and Josephine and Michael Angelo's sketchbooks....Marlin's company website is www.3hats.com In the same email marlin tells me that he remembers all my crazy ideas that have come to pass...like MTV and other concepts and he wanted to know where my sketch books were...and I'm thinkin'..."I must be trippin'...I'm on the same page with Napoleon,Gates,Michael Angelo...what next ?" Rehab?   I wrote an email to Marlin and in his reply he told me all about how he was in Bill Gates House everyday almost for 2 years...he's under contract with Gates not to talk about anythang or use him in the advertising of his company...Gates knows what a good man Marlin is....     I did not hear anythang from Marlin from 1972 up until about 3 years ago....it was not just me that did not know where he was NOBODY knew where he was....the great part about this Cat Tale is how I finally got back in touch with Marlin....it was from one of our first MFV members from South Africa...now livin' and workin' in Washington DC with Voice of America Radio.. Brother Idrissa Dia...   One night I received a long distance phone call from Brother Diamon and in his tick and low African tone of voice he told me about his love and devotion to Music made in Muscle Shoals and Memphis...and Soul music made him make a special trip to meet Jimmy Johnson and others that he admired...Now Brother Diamon is personal friends with all of these people down South and a regular posting member of The MFV...and we love him very much !   More later...the utility bill is due today...if I don't get there in time it'll be candles and cold showers ...   Oh by the way talkin' about hard times....I drove out to the country yesterday to see if Old Joe Walk needs any help gettin' his shack ready to fend of old man winter and the wolves that come to the door..Walk played organ on some of Hinton's cuts and all of Will Thomas songs that I produced .   It's like goin' back in a time machine at old Joe's shack....Eddie called him The Man That Lives With Ghosts and when I went back to my truck to leave I could hear him in there just a talkin' to himself...or maybe arguing with himself...could tell cause I was havin' quite a heated yellin' match with myself !     THE LETTERS:    I borrowed several guitars for Eddie to play....I'm sure he had probably sold all his guitars to get the thangs he needed...he had been on foot for years....no car....nowhere to live....for a while he lived out at The Stokes Cottage and when winter came he still had no electricity...Captain Don and Bob Wray and some others in The Shoals that knew Eddie before he "lost it all"  would stop by and cut firewood for him....they were afraid he would freeze to death in the wintertime...and Eddie damn sure was not gonna cut no damned firewood ! He always tried to keep warm from the inside out with his favorite version of human anti freeze !   When we recorded Letters From Mississippi I borrowed a real old Fender Telecaster that belonged to one of The Lowery Brothers from Decatur..we used that guitar on all the songs...we ran it through a Rockman and straight into the board...I don't think we ever used an amp on any of those cuts...and at the time BIRDLAND STUDIO was operating out of a 335 HUD house..on Sandlin Road in Decatur... Owen Brown and his wife and young daughter also lived in that house/studio.....   Owens' wife Gail was so afraid of Eddie at that time that we actually had to wait until she went into labor and went to the hospital to give birth to their second daughter before we could begin the LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI sessions...she later learned to love Eddie and understand his genius...but at that time all she knew was that his fisrt album was titled VERY EXREMELY DANGEROUS and at that time he would go for several months without bathing... And of couse there was that famous Hinton blood curdeling scream that could send chills up your spine ! When Eddie and I would write together at my house where I am posting this from now kids walkin' home from the high school down the street would hear that scream and think I was skining a back man alive or torturing someone inside !      BACK TO THE LETTERS SESSIONS...   I had eveyone on stand by for about a week..waiting for Gail's water to break....and then on the night of December 6,1984 Owen called me all excited and said "Gail gave birth to our new daughter and will be in the hospital for several days so get Hinton over here NOW and let's get this thang recorded before she comes back home ! I had offered the deal of recording Eddie to Owen a few months before and he passed on it ...and then after a gig he played at Brothers Bar in Jacksonville he was packin' up his gear and the house PA started playin' Hinton's first album VERY EXTREMELY DANDEROUS from 1978 and he said that it moved him so much that he knew that he HAD to be involved in this 2nd album attempt....he's really glad he did now because LETTERS led to several more albums that were recorded at BIRDLAND after they moved to their current location in the old Plantation and Estate on the out shirts of  Town Creek Alabama... which is located halfway between The Shoals and Decatur.Eddie really felt at home there.       The first BIRDLAND Studio was located in my old apartment above the drug store 3 doors down from my famlies hardware store...you could hear pidgeons roostin' overhead and that's why I started calling my apartment BIRDLAND...John Prine and many others came and visitred me for several days at a time up there....then the second version of BIRDLAND was in the 335 Hud house on Sandlin Road...and the Town Creek location is the 3rd location..      In the 335 house the garage had been converted into the studio area and the control room was in one of the 3 bedrooms...a small video camera was used to see the action in the studio...the board was a converted Peavey 12 channel PA broad and then feed into an 8 track analog recorder...A tech genius we call "Murf" put all this gear together and I'm not sure what modifications he did or how he had it al hooked up...but it all worked out great....you can see some pictures of the control room on the video...they had some kind of foam packing material on the walls...   On The Hinton Video on some of the songs I play a Fender P bass and Eddie plays a Telecaster that I borrowed from Bob Connors that owned Decatur Music at that time...if you look closely in the video you can see the price tag still hangin' off the end of the guitar that Eddie was playin'....like Minnie Pearl's famous hat....we left those tags on at live gigs too...    Eddie also played a Peavey on some live gigs that I borrowed from somebody...I forget who..   There is just so much to see in The Hinton Video that can not be described in words...we also included a series of some rare unreleased still photos that Dick Cooper and my wife Margaret took...I really believe that a The Great Spirit or a higher power had a hand in this video happening the way it did....I think as time goes by it will mean as much to Hinton fans as that famous photo of the great Robert Johnson...and like I say..this offer me not out there long...if any of ya'll really like to own somethang that every other kid on the block does not have and probably can not find anywhere in the world...then you better order this video ASAP !   When we were growin' up Eddie and some others always searched the record shops and other places for the rarest records we could find by any black artist....we had never heard of most of them or the labels they were on...but we found some great stuff that way...some of the stuff later caught on to a larger audience...maybe 30 years later....I have always valued rare and unique stuff....the real deal...the original item...and this video...is as rare as hen's teeth or tits on a bore hog ! And it comes with a money back guarantee ! Plus you will be helpin' a true indie label move to the next level.....the early supporters always will have a specail place in my heart ! And it will come back to you many many times !     FAME:   Which HOUR GLASS session was it that ya'll did at FAME ? One of the thangs I remember about it was one of ya'lls equipment managers used to work for The RUBBER BAND before he started workin' for ya'll...we all called him "The Ghoul" because he slept in a casket...his real name was Jim I think ?.....and at those HOUR GLASS sessions at FAME he wore Golf Shoes the whole time...the kind with the steel spikes on the bottom...   I remember that after every song durin' those sessions Gregg would call me aside and ask me if I liked what he was doin'..he was so unsure of the Soul direction that he was goin' in....I asked him if he liked what he was doin' and he said he did but he was so unsure how the rest of the world would feel about it it...He said that he was writing the kind of songs he wanted to and it felt right to sing them ...he was so young at that time...   AND at this time I think Gregg was so afraid of what all the record company people and the managers and everybody might think of this soul style music sung by a white boy...at that time he was a little unsure of himself and he though all those other folks in the bizzz might know more than him....after they lit the fire with The Allman Brothers their was little if any doubt that he was writing and singin' the right kind of stuff !   I enjoyed those old HOUR GLASS songs you put up Pete....it's been years since I've heard those songs !     ZANE:   I hope I did not give anyone the wrong impression that Peter or ZANE has done anythang wrong..not that I'm aware of anyway....since we are on the subject I will tell you the chain of events that started the relationship between me and Peter.   One mornin' in the late 80's durin' a period when I was wearin' feathers in my hair an Englishman appeared at my front door...he looked as if he could be Clint Eastwood's smaller and older brother..   Some of us here in Alabama are always thrilled when we get a chance to hear a real British accent in person....so I did not really care if he was sellin' Bible's or givin' away free samples of bird seed....I just like to hear a good British accent spoken with a stiff upper lip....Tally Hoe...and Jolly Good..and Bloodly well right ole chap...Eddie and I used to give Peter fits when we'd start talkin' lie that...     Actually here's the way the lease deal with Zane happened back in the late 80's...as I've said one mornin' Peter, Peter, Peter showed up on my door step with no advance warning...(I always try to say Peter, Peter, Peter like Betty Davis would in that old movie)...I think it was Betty Davis..it might have been Carey Grant !   Anyway he had a copy of his Zane version of LFM (Letters From Miss) in his hand...and after he introduced himself he showed it to me...I asked him where he got the rights to press my masters and he said that he made a deal with Almathea ..The Swedish record company...the only problem was that the Swedish company had no right to lease the product to Zane at that time...Peter thought he was doin' it the right way at the time...but The Swedish contract with me ,which allowed them to sub lease the record for a period of time after our initial signing had run out years ago....so it was a bogus deal...I told Peter that if I were not a nice cat I could really cause him some problems and stop the sale of his new product...   Of course I said that it would be much easier on both of us if I worked with him as opposed to workin' against him...I thought he would sell a bunch of product..I guess he did alright to be so new in the bizzness..and Hinton was allot more unknown to the world back then than he is now these many years later..plus this was only his second album...anyway we got the deal straightened out ....I have kind of been disappointed by all of the deals I've made with other labels...and up until this point I have not made a dime off of Eddie or anythang that I have the rights or written with him...   After the end of the first lease deal with Zane we extended for another three years ..Peter told me a few years ago that he was out of CD's but he still had a bunch of vinyl's left and at that time I told him in a phone conversation to just go ahead and sell all those that were left and not to press anymore.This was before my company started manufacturing our version of the album....which only has happened in the last month...   As far as lettin' another company run with the LFM ball at this time it would have to be the deal of a life time...a deal made in Heaven......I don't think the kind of deal I'd have to have exists ...as ya'll know I've been in the biz a long time and every deal I have ever made with a label has cost me tons of $ and that I never got paid a red cent..same goes with all of the lease deals I made for LETTERS...I've gottin' pretty tired of the way thangs have been done in the past...   Here's another example of how srewed up thangs are in The Bizzzz these days...I own half publishing and half songwriters on the song ONE MO' TIME on the HARD LUCK GUY CD by Hinton on Carpricorn...and I have not made a red cent....in fact I've gotten 2 statements from the company that handles the payment of the publishing on that album and I've never seen publishing statements like them in my life...they show a balance of MINUS such and such...on publishing ! That's freakin; nuts....like they are tryin' to charge my publishing company for promo copies or somethang....I spent a week on the phone tryin' to get to the bottom and I must have talked to every Mexican in California that claimed to work for the company that's names are on the statements...I never got any satisfaction....But Capricorn is not realy Capricorn anymore...it was lost in the bancruscy courts and Polgram or Polywhore or somebody maybe Mercury Records owned it a while back...who the fuck rally knows who owns what anymore.... it's insane...    AND IT'S TIME FOR A CHANGE...and I think we all know that due to all our new tools and technology the change is changing thangs...I want to be on the leading edge of this change...people takin' the reins away from Corporations...if it means selling less product to less people so damned be it...my ego does not need Gold or Platinum Records anymore for me to know that what I do is good....Some us have grown up quite a bit and we finally understand what is really important in life....there was a time when it was important to "hit" all around the world at relatively the same time in order to be considered a success....Hell now days I don't care if they know who I am outside of Alabama...if it means I have a nice lifestyle...   I'd rather put this album back in the can and put it back on the shelf that get screwed like most of us have had to put up with all these years just to get our music out to and heard by the public.   I think I will surprise some folks with what a real "indie" can do before it's all over...I've got some  unique ideas that I am plannin' to put into action soon....I'm open to listen to any deal...but the old way that the music biz did business is gone forever..... I know there are people and labels out there that are still doin' it like it has always been done....   but me and The MFV ...we are movin' on into the future and do not want to go back to the plantation mentality of the old ways...     MSS CAT TALE:   I was not at the sessions when The Purify's recorded LET LOVE COME BETWEEN US...but I was there at MSS in about 1982 when Mavis Staples recorded it with The Swampers and Wexler and Beckett were producing...I got to hang out a lot with Mavis...she said she wanted to put me on a gold chain and take me back to Chicago with her....I told I'd be honored to go home with her chain or no chain..   The album she did "Let Love" on was her last one for Warners I think...it is titled OH WHAT A FEELIN"...if you ever get a chance to pick it up please do it's GREAT !   I've got a Cat Tale around here somewhere that talks about how Papa Don tried to trick me into givin' him part of writers and publishers credits...the bottom line was that he said that he would not record my song on The Purifiy's unless I gave him a piece of the song (forever) I needed $ bad at that time in about 1967 and back then if you just had a legit record release you could ask BMI for a $500 advance and get it with no problem...that was back when I liked BMI..also in 1967 $500 bucks would go a long way...   I remember agonizing over the decision that Papa Don had me goin' over and over in my head...I was still married to my first wife Hilton and of course I wanted my song to come out by those cats on a major label,etc.but I sure did not like the idea of givin' Papa Don or anybody a free piece of my song to make the deal...thangs like that were done and are still done...but it did not happen very much and I thought that Papa Don's offer stunk....   I did not want to sell out...and that's what I'd be doin'...and none of my other songwritin' buddies were havin' to make deals like that to get their songs cut...so finally I made up my mind "Fuck Papa Don and his threat not to record it without his name as one of the writers....the little cabin I was livin' in on Shoals Creek did not have a phone so after I made up my mind I jumped in the car and started drivin' the 5 or 10 miles to get to a phone so I could call him and tell him I'd just have to pass on his offer/threat...   And what happened ? On the way to the telephone the car radio started playin' JAMES & BOBBY PURIFY doin' my song ! Papa Don had put it out anyway....and the credits were left the way they were supposed to be ! All of that agony for all those months was a waste of time ! Anyway I got on the phone and called my contact at BMI and got the $500 advance and had a real nice summer...with food and gas and a few luxuries....   Back then we all had a sayin' that we had to "pay our dues...until our number came up "...or our ship came in....all off us that wanted to be in the music bizz full time knew that we'd have to make some sacrifices and do without some thangs in order to be able to afford to do it full time...    That was before that first big OPEC OIL Thang...that I use a baseline for when the value of money changed in the US...It must have been in about 1973 or 74...because when I quit SAILCAT I bought a 24 foot Seacamper houseboat that had twin 6 cylinder Volvo engines...the boats gas tank would hold 100 gallons of gas....the year I bought the boat it cost about 25 bucks to top it off and fill it up...the next summer...it was more like 2 or 3 hundred or more dollars to fill up...the boat cost me $38 grand and that next year after the OPEC thang hit the fan the same exact boat sold for 138 thousand bucks...  the true value of money has been screwed up since that time !   I'm enjoyin' tellin' these Cat Tales and I thank ya'll for inspirin' me to recall old memories...I am keepin' all of the Cat Tales in hopes that someday they can be arranged into a book...I'll tell more soon...I love to get feedback from ya'll..   But right now I've got to run to the print shop and office supply and get some more MFV Orders ready to go to the Post Office...I want to thank all of ya'll that have ordered some of our new MFV Product...some of ya'll are aware of all of the medical bills I've had and the 2 extra kids we are helpin' to raise so it sure is great to makin' a few bucks here and there off our new MFV Products...The new LETTERS FROM MISS. CD and The Wyker/Hinton Video are goin' like hot cakes and I just got another batch of PAL Formatted videos in so order today....we also have a few new Swedish Vinyl copies of LETTERS FROM MISS available..     1969   Billy Sherrill is from a little farther south of The Shoals...I believe he's from Phil Campbell which is south of the Shoals and near the Mississippi State line....Sonny James is also from there...and Wallace Pennington aka Dan Penn's hometown of Vernon ,Alabama is in that same area..   In 1969 Dan was livin' in Memphis and was startin' to be a pretty big star in his own right as a producer...I used to go camp out in his office and Spooner and I would do a lot of shoppin' at store that was like what we have now called The Dollar Store ...good stuff but at reasonable prices...   One of Spooner's favorite pass times was to take one of the poor black nationhood kids on a shoppin' spree..AMERICAN Studios was in a poor black section of Memphis and there always seemed to be a bunch of little black kids hangin' around and doin' "go-fer jobs" go for coffee...go for donuts,etc...   I remember once that one of these young boys was workin' as hard as he could and he was also well mannered and he impressed me and Spoon so much that Spoon suggested that we take him on a shoppin' spree...as I recall it was about time for school to start...about this time of year...and we loaded this kid up in the car and took him to the clothing store...   and Spooner "Said somethang like...you get a head in life by workin' hard...and you have been workin' real hard so you go in there and buy anythang you want and I'll pay for it !" Nam that kids flipped out....he went wild and bought little 3 piece suits and stingy brimmed hats and shirts and ties...he was only 10 or 11 but he came out lookin' like a young executive....I'm sure Spooner's generosity had an effect on that kid....I'd like to know where he is now !   "There are some great people in this world...but Spooner Oldham is a Prince amoung all great men and stands out as such as a true Gentleman !" wwwwwwwyker     THE CAVE:   Donnie Fritts had a place out behind his house in the old days...it was a buildin' used just for songwritin'...painted all black inside...I think he called it The CAVE way back then....it was a mysterious place...there was an old upright piano in there and parts of drums from time to time and the occasional old beat up acoustic guitar....   and of course the walls were covered with the thought to be "acoustically magicical" cardboard egg cartoons...painted black also...and stuck on the walls and ceiling...at one time every single recording studio had egg cartoons on their walls...not sure how that got started or who the first one to use them were...but it sure caught on....and when I went to work for Capricorn in 1969 Johnny Sandlin who had preceded me by months had already installed then on key walls in the studio down there in Macon...   I went over there to Friits' songwriting room several times with Eddie and Marlin but never spent any time there to speak of  ..this may offend some folks in this so politically correct world that we live in today...but the real cats that hung around the cave and the studios and the coffee shops in The Shoals back in those olden days called each other "nigger"..I was an honor to be called that by one of your friends....That was the highest complement you could give a friend that was into writin' the kinds of songs we were tryin' to write at such a young age...and if you were real special or nailed somethang super hip down you had the honor of bein' called a Blue Gum by your trusted and respected peers...keepin' in mind of course that we were all a bunch of young white cats that wished they had been born black..what's that old sayin' we always heard growin' up "Be Black for One Saturday Night and you'll never want to be white again !" I got into a whole lot of trouble when Dick Cooper brought this black reporter chick by to meet me a couple of weeks ago...she was born and raised in New York and most of this stuff happened way before Cooper moved to The Shoals..but that's the way it was...I don't think it's so hard to understand or relate to...all of our idols were black...and that's what we were tryin' to write...some sounded more believable like Penn.... and Hinton got it down to a science...he crossed over....he transformed himself to where it was no longer an act or a case of being a wanna be black....Eddie became a Blackman !   Back in those old days in the late 50's and early 60's we did spend a whole lot of time at a restaurant or coffee house type place called The Dobbs House or Huddle House in Florence ....I can't remember the exact name right now...and later at The Biscuit Village in Muscle Shoals....but it had no atmosphere what so ever...big plate glass windows all around like sittin' in a fish bowl and bright Florissant lights ...of course the coolest of us like myself and Fritts and Penn always has sunglasses on 24/7 anyway...so the bright lights did not phase us.....but plenty of coffee and a dash of pie and allot of pills and millions of suggestions for song titles for hours and hours on end....back then we made up our own rules and stuck our own deals between songwriters and one of them was that whoever came up with the title got equal credits on the song.   So there were lots of cats around that did not play and instrument or sing...they were "song title specialist !" Some of them even made some money...I used to call Fritts "Flipside Fritts" because he would make weekly runs up to Nashville and he had the "art of hangin' out" down pat....and people liked him and just by politicking he got a lot of songs cut that ended up on the flip side of a what were called "hit records" or 45 rpm singles...   Many times I can remember bein' in the parkin' lot late at night at the first Muscle Shoals Sound on Jackson Highway or at Quinn's down on Broadway a few streets over and I'd watch Donnie roll in from Nashville....probably been awake for a couple of days...and he's be slumped down in the drivers seat...leanin' against the car door like he did not have the strength to sit up...and he adjust the rear view mirror so he could see to comb his hair and fix his shirt collar...and maybe he'd pop a couple of road aspirin to wake up a little...and as he sat there he would get taller in the seat and he'd adjust himself and as hey say "get his act together" and by the time he stepped out of that car and walked up to the back door of whatever studio he could become an imposing figure...so cool he was almost intimidating...but underneath it all the sweetest and nicest cat in the world and as honest as the day is long...   I first met Alabama's Elegant Leaning Man.. The Funky Donnie Fritts at Tome Stafford's Spar Music above City Drug Store in The Late 50's when we were both just barely teenagers...and I'm proud to say that we are still friends to this day !     SUMMER OF ‘72:   This is a photo of SAILCAT the mornin' after we played at Cranage Hall...summer of 1972 left to right Ronnie Brown ,guitars John Wyker,Guitars,Rodney Davis ,guitars,Court Pickett Bass guitar and Bill Connell Drums ...the Vice president of Elektra said that I reminded him of Jim Morrison and I was 27...I was probably drinkin' & druggin' as much as Morrsion and I did have an attitude problem...I was kinda gooned up on everythang...Qualudes,Coke,Hashish and few beers...but I usually never mixed...if I was takin' chemicals I was a Chem Hauler...I did not drink...but if I was drinkin' I'd burn weed but no mix pills...maybe one reason I've lived to be 58 when all around me they were droppin' like flies... ...    Two nights later I gave what I think was my most interesting and dramatic show...I was of the belief that people go to NASCAR Races to see who crashes and burns....not to see who wins...so my stage shows became like that...   Kristofferson told me that the part he played in A STAR IS BORN was patterned partly after some of the stunt's I pull in SAILCAT...like I kind of cussed out the whole room full of record excutives that were sittin' in their seats at Carnage Hall while I gave them Hell from the stage...after the alst song me and Jeniffer ran to the bathroom and locked ourselves in so we would not have to deal with any of the bastards...we finally passed out in there and about 5 in the mornin' the voice of an old black janitor woke us up and he was poundin' on the bathroom door sayin'..."Ya'll better get up and get on outta there...I'm goin' home for the weekend and I'm gonna cut the heat off and most likely you'll freeze to death in there...this ain't Alabama you is in...   Ya'll got me started now...next installment I'll have to tell you about my fall from grace...or my graceful fall..or falls from stage Q!     ANOTHER MSS CAT TALE:   Yes Noel still has the old studio on Jackson Highway....I have not heard any news about what's been goin' on there though....I think Noel does a solo gig at one of the local eatin' places here in The River City a couple of nights a week..   Here's the deal with the big Muscle Shoals Sound building that just went up for sale....can you imagine what the utilities bill on that place is for a month....and puttin' a new roof on the place would probably cost out the wazoo...   I'm afraid that big MSS building is dinosaur from another time....a relic of the past Golden Age of Muscle Shoals...     In this new age of digital recording gear in almost every serious musician's homes.....I can remember when there was only ONE place to record in the whole state of Bama-Lama..over City Drug Store Florence,,    MSS could be turned into somethang that would still be in the entertainment bizzz if the right people got hold of it....but that space would all have to be used...it would make a great place for a movie studio complex....I think whatever goes in there will have to do more than just record audio and house a publishing office....   I'd love to be able to house the whole MFV in that space....and come to work by boat or jet ski...   Late one afternoon me and Cooper docked my Seacamper Learjet houseboat at MS Sound and picked up Gary Rossington and Allen Collins....it was after the plane crash and Allen and Gary were both still really banged and bandaged up and wearing super sized Christian crosses around their necks.....The rest of the band was recording a radio commercial for Bill Baxley who was runnin' for governor of Bama Land....in those old analog studios they always kept a bottle of Pure Grain Alcohol  sittin' around to clean the tape heads on the recording machines....and this bottle had a couple of dead flies in it...I guess to let people know that it was not for drinkin' but for cleaning purposes.....well everybody was takin' big swigs of PGA out of that bottle and gettin' pretty lit up...so Cooper and me invited Rossington and Collins to go for a boat ride at sunset....   I don't think they knew what they were in for....as it got darker I was still pilotin' the boat with my darkest Ray Ban sunglasses on....back then all we wore was a pair of cut off Levis and a pair of flip flops...everybody that was a crew member on my boat always needed fire for somethang and matches get wet too easy....   so we all took to wearin' Bic Butane lighters on a string around out necks....I'd buy those rolls of colored plastic tape and we'd cut a piece of string and tape it to the lighter where it hung upside down like some abstract necklace....or Star Trek equipment....we used those little Bic lighters for everythang....as flash lights to dock the boat with...and we'd all be sittin' in a circle and somebody would need to light a cigarette or a pipe and they'd just grab the lighter around your neck and give it a quick jerk and the next thang you knew your head was upside somebody else's until they got their fire lit...   That was back in my really wild days and used to love to run that boat wide ass open...it had twin 6 cylinder Volvo engines.. 240 horse each...3 carbs per engine...the boat was only 24 feet long and would run like a scalded dog....and turn on a dime....   This night with Rossington & Collins on board I was doin' my usual dare devil stunts like tryin' to see how close I could shave a river bridge pylon.....I could make the gunwale on that boat almost touch those massive concrete bridge supports running at about 40 or 45 knots.....it was scarin' the shit out of Allen and Gary....they got on their knees and begged and pleaded with me to stop actin' like I was...an to straighten up and float right......lookin' back on it now I can see how it must have effected them....but that was a great thang about the studio bein' right there on The Mighty Tennessee River...you could walk out the door and step into your boat...   We continued on up river that night and had to lock through Wilson Dam in order to get to Shoals Creek and The infamous Wyker Camp....Cooper and Collins got in a fight cause Allen was tryin' to get Cooper to bait his fish hook with a grand daddy long legs spider...Cooper whupped his ass in the boat house that night ...    Rossington & Collins stayed at the Wyker Camp for about a week and we wrote a great song called BIG THUNDER....the sky was filled with rolling thunder that night...I've never heard anythang like it in my life....it was like a drum part so they worked up twin guitar parts to the drums that the thunder was makin''''I was doin' allot of stream on consienness lyrics stuff and was'nt too worried about remeberin' anythang because we had a cassette recorder runin' the whole time....   Woke up the next mornin' and nobody knew where the tape was....I'm pretty sure I know who walked off with it while we slept....I just wish it would surface sometime somewhere and I could hear what we did one mo' time....   Man that was a hell of a great week....there is more to this Cat Tale but I've gotta get busy if I'm gonna set in with The Crawlers tonight....it'll be late when I get there...    Damn I just started to write a reply about how much it would cost to pay the utilutes at MSS and I've written another short Cat Tale.......somethang about our magical MFV Tribe that just makes me want to tell the old stories...     TIPPY’S LINCOLN:   I sure do remember that old black Lincoln that Tippy drove...I did not know he traded it for the suicide weapon...there are still lots of folks that don't think Tippy offed himself.....I do not know many details at all..   I rode to Tuscaloosa with Tippy once from Muscle Shoals in that old black Lincoln...he was wearin' a big wide and straight brimmed light gray Stetson hat...and a pair of reflector aviators goggles...sunglasses....he had a quart ofbeer between his legs as he drove...may have been wine or The Whip or shine...but he did not seem to be impaired at all by it...    The movie EASY RIDER had been out for a while...and Tippy wanted me to help him write a movie titled HARD WALKER...the story of Hardin Walker...some imaginary character that he dreamed up...Tippy had a funny dry sense of humor and that titled started about as the punchline to one of his jokes....after he said  somethang funny or offbeat like that he'd look at you with this crazy almost smile...but his eyes would have a look that said it all....anyway as we were motivatin' along in that old black late 50's or early 60's Lincoln on a two lane black top at speeds around 70 or 80 miles and hour I saw a truck about to pull out into the road at a 90 degree angle....we would have hit it broadsided....I pointed to the truck and tried to remain calm...and said somethang like  "Watch out...a truck !"   Tippy never flinched or even looked like he thought about hittin' the breaks or slowin' down....at the very last moment as this movin' target was half way blockin' the road cool hand Tippy just whipped the wheel with one hand....looked like one finger on a suicide knob and we went around that truck like stunt driver in a  thriller movie.....it felt like the car bent to shape itself around the truck so we would not have to get all 4 wheels off the hardtop..... Tippy never flinched or said a damned thang afterwards...and I'm like boucin' up and down in my sit like a little kid beatin' on the dash board sayin' "Holy shit we almost got creamed good...death on the highway was almost our last scene....and TIppy seemed to allow the corners of his mouth to turn up in a little  smile...but his eyes were shielded by those reflector sunglasses glass so couldn't read his mood as well.....he was so cool under the pressure of that moment...and played that big Lincoln like a fine guitar lick !   Hard Walker...Tippy Armstrong...he looked like a movie star with his square jaw and blond hair and blues eyes....and was born to play the guitar....such a short life...if there is a heaven I hope he's playin' there if I make it !   YAMAHAMA:   I am glad to hear that Jeremy is doin' a better after that motorcycle crash....I was lookin' at ya'll's website and there is a picture of him on there singin' back up (I think)....he looks like a pretty good size dude....he must have been ridin' a big bike...   While I'm thinkin' about motorcycles I might as well ramble into a small Cat Tale..   I dearly love motorcycles...I have all of my life... but they can really bite a person in the butt sometimes...I owned a 1984 Yamahama 400cc Special when my first child was born in 1987...it was blue with chrome fenders and it had that classic look like an old Triumph or BSA from the 50's or 60's...I really loved it...it was great on the highway and still light enough that I could get it off the road and do it in the dirt if I had to..if someone was chashin' me..   I bought it a few years before my third marrige..which only lasted about 10 months.. I was 46 years old and I married a girl that was 18 that worked at the drugstore....Her named Bankhead Hotchkiss....what a name...she was from an old Southern Family from Courtland ,Alabama....she was related to that famous old Southern Actress Tallulah Bankhead and on the Hotchkiss side of her family, they were the ones that invented and built the Gatlin guns ...which were machine guns used in The Civil War....when we got married I bought her a matchin' 250cc Yamaha Rebel motorcycle...   A few years later I married for the fourth time...to my current wife Margaret... when our first child John D.The Fourth was born I parked my motorcycle for a while...I was still drinkin' a lot back in those days and I was afraid that I had used up all of my motorcycle luck.....when my son was about a year old I had the idea that I wanted to start ridin' it again....but I could not get it cranked so I rolled it up into the back of the pickup truck and hauled it off to the local Yamaha Shop....they said that it probably just need some minor tune up work so left it there for them to fix it.....   When it came time to pick it up I had a strange feelin' that if I went and got it that my son might grow up without a father....call it a premonition or whatever but I did not go pick up my motorcycle that day.....or the next...and so on....this went on for a long time...the repair shop would call and I would tell them that I was on my way but for some strange reason I just could never make myself follow through and go pick up my motorcycle....   This went on for months and then finally one day after a little too much beer I finally made it over to the shop and when I told them that I had come to pick up my motorcycle they looked at me like I had lost my mine.....I think about 2 and half years had gone by and finally after checkin' their records they told me that they had auctioned my motorcycle off....I did not even get pissed...I just laughed and thanked them and also thanked my lucky stars that I was still alive and in one piece and had the beginnings of a family life after all of my wild and crazy years on the road...   I also used to ride that motorcycle over to the local boat harbor and I'd get drunk or somethang and catch a ride home with someone else....sometimes I'd leave it over there for weeks and months at a time.........somebody told me once that they were at the boat harbor one day and the harbor master and a policeman were standin' there and lookin' at my bike and checkin' the license plates and another Policeman drove up and said "That blue motorcycle? That's Wyker's...one of these days he'll remember where he left it and come and get it!"   One of these days I hope to get another murdercycle but it'll probably be a dirt bike cause trees don't jump out in front of you like a drunk in a car can...     DELBERT & BONNIE:   I wish I could find my Cat Tale that I wrote about when Delbert and Bonnie recorded my song BABY RUTH...If anyone saved it please post it again...they surprised...I was at Muscle Shoals Sound shootin' pool and very depressed and I was not even aware that they were in town....and Cooper told me to go in the control room..so I go in and sit down...only Melton behind the board...the studio appeared to be empty....someone gave me somethang for my head and then Steve hit the play button...and all of a sudden I started hearin' a great track of what sounded like my song....   and then the vocals came in...and I realized that it was indeed my song...and then I realized that it was Delbert and Bonnie on vocals...and I thought I was dreamin'...or maybe I had died and gone to heaven...or more likely that someone had spiked me with somethang and I was trippin'.....and I was gettin' goose bumps over how great the track and vocals were.....and then at the and there was a short silence...and I'm just sittin' there with this mile wide shit eatin' grin on my face lookin' at Cooper and Melton....and then outta the speakers I hear Bonnie's sexy sultry voice sayin' "I think we can do a better vocal...lets take one more ! ".   Damn...I almost feel out because I realized that Bonnie might actually be live and in person in the studio out in one of the vocal booths out of sight....and then thought the speakers I hear another voice and it's Delbert sayin' "Hey John D. how do you like it? Why don't you come out hear in the vocal booth and sit with us while we nail this track...I'll get you some head phones ready! "   Talk about almost flippin' out....man my mind was bein' blown ...so I got up and walked into the big studio and Delbert and Bonnie pop out of the vocal booth with head phones on...and Delbert pitches me one of those little coke bullets with the one short twist top on it....that was back in the days when everyone was first startin' to do a lot of "Frank" as Glen Frey used to refer to coke...   And I take a couple of snorts as I'm walkin' across the floor to the vocal booth and we all get in a circle huggin' each other...and by this time I'm so happy that I'm cryin' big alligator tears ! So Delbert gives me a set of headphones and I sit down on the floor of the vocal booth and lean back against the wall and watch as two of my very favorite singers and heroes sing another perfect vocal track to my song...;ater that week...I think it was... Bonnie and I even got a little closer....well maybe a lot closer...or should I say as close as 2 people can get! That Lady is one Hell of a Woman!   I can tell you that it was all a totally mind blowin' experience... that whole episode was somethang that I will never ever forget..it was like I was living in a movie scene....I realized again that day at the studio that I am one of the luckiest people that has ever lived and I am very thankful for surprises like that and times like those and the many wonderful friends I have!       BE THANKFUL:   I did not know Leon as well as you did but he recorded one of my songs ....here's a Cat Tale about it !   Roger Hawkins was producing an album on Leon Sherrill at Muscle Shoals sound at about the time Leon was killed in that car wreck with Dumpy Joe...I think Dumpy Joe survived with a broken neck..   The album was about half finished and one of the songs Hawkins recorded on Leon was a song I wrote titled BE THANKFUL.Leon did a great job on my song...I had a cassette copy of the song somewhere....I wish I could find it...   Anyway...after Leon was so tragically killed some folks held a benefit for his wife and family at a Club in The Shoals...I was invited...and asked to play...all I wanted to do was to play Leon's version of BE THANKFUL through the house PA so everyone could hear what he was workin' on when his life ended...if Leon had lived and the album had been finished he might be a star today...it was a great half of an album..   So before the benefit I went to Muscle Shoals Sound and got Mitch McGee who was workin' in their publishin'' company at the time to make me a good cassette copy of Leon singin' BE THANKFUL...I told everyone at the studio that I wanted to play the song through the house PA at the club during the benefit...a few of the people at the studio said "man that's morbid" and stuff like that...I thought they were crazy and way off base....to me there was nothing at all wrong with playin' the music of a man who spent his life makin' music...and these tapes were the high point of his life when his life ended..   I was determined to play the tape of the song at The Benefit...Steve Melton was runnin' the PA at the club and he agreed with me that the song should definitely be played...so he cued it up and I told him to wait until I gave him a sign to play it...   Some guys in a band and I got back stage and I borrowed an acoustic guitar and we worked up a real fast and rough version of BE THANKFUL...we took the stage about half way through the benefit and before we started playin' the song I introduced it like this I said " I am just a songwriter...and not much of a singer...usually I only sing the songs I write so somebody that really knows how to sing can take my song and really take it to the next level....Leon Sherrill recorded this song of mind and I was really honored and proud when he did that...and it goes somethang like this " ...   And we started to play the song...we were only in about the second verse when one of the strings on the guitar I was playin' broke and popped "PING" with a snapping sound you could not help but notice !    I stopped the band immediately and told the crowd "There are spirits movin' here tonight....and I'm not even gonna try to finish this song...I'm goin' to let Leon do ! " and I pointed to Melton at the PA board and right on cue BE THANKFUL by Leon came blasting out of those big PA speakers ! It was a magic moment and the hair stood up on the back if my neck.I got goosebumps..or chicken skin...whatever you want to call it...   And the audience loved it...the whole place seemed to start floating in the air as Leon sang this song that I wrote one time that I was in the hospital....it's funny how you can be at one of the lowest points in your life and you can write the most positive song that you can imagine !   There was a big long table in front of the stage where Leon's widow and his Mother and Father and the rest of his family were sittin" ...I had been watchin' them all night...and they looked like they really appreciated everyone payin' tribute to Leon but I could tell by the looks on their faces and their body language that they had really rather be somewhere else.....most of the bands that were playin' were way too loud and playin' a bunch of Lynard Skynard and old Allman Brothers songs..(seems like after those 2 bands a few others busted onto the scene that it produced about 20 or 30 years of great musicians that only played those same old songs until they have driven them in the ground)   Sorry I served off the subject a little bit...but what I'm tryin' to say is that Leon's Family were doin' the best they could top sit through all of this music...and when my guitar string magically broke and Melton hit the play button and the room was filled with Leon's voice singin' a very positive song !   They all stood up and I went over and we all shook hands and shared a few bear hugs with his wife and family and this was like a cue that they could finally find away to put a proper end to their attendance at the benefit show...they looked relived as they started thankin' everyone that helped put on the show and slowly made their way out of that smokey night club !   It was a night that I will always remember ....sometimes thangs just happen like they were scripted and planned to happen...it make me think of how true that old sayin' is that goes.."The Lord moves in mysterious ways ."     Leon Sherrill was a great talent and it's so sad that he and so many others were cut down in their youth....I had always wanted to put a compilation together that features the music of people like Leon and Tim Henson and so many others that make such great music that will never be heard so see the light of day...it seems like such a waste that they died so young...seems like the lease someone could do would be to make sure that their music,that worked so hard to make, will live on forever !     SAN REMO:   Back in 91' when I took Hinton to Italy to play The San Remo Blues Festival and The Sweet Soul Music Festival Jay Blackfoot was on the tour with us...he is one funny cat and he puts his heart into his shows...   One night on the tour bus he was holdin' court and talkin' about how Thankful he is to be in the music bizzz and how lucky he has been in his life...he was almost preachin'...and he started to testify about what a bad person he was before his life changed because of music....he was lined up to do a safe crackin' job with some old x-convict and he was late and missed his ride or somethang and did not go on the robbery job...and the next day he picked up a newspaper and read where the police had caught the robbers who were tryin' to crack the safe....he would still be in prison if he had gone on that gig..   And then he started talkin' about the fact was that his job was to wake up in the mornin' and start tryin' to figure out what he was goin' to steal that day...he said his main gig was as a pick pocket...and he a another pick pocket made up some signs and posted them all around a street that they worked...and the signs said BEWARE OF PICK POCKETS...and he and his pick pocket friend would put the signs up and hide and watch...and he said that the first thang that every person that saw the sing did was to reach and check and feel for their wallets or their money...and then they knew exactly which pocket they kept their valuables in ! Pretty clever cats !   I really like Jay Blackfoot ! He's got soul !         CHAPTER ONE BUDDA KINGSNAKE WAS HERE    The old warehouse space that had long ago been my apartment was on the second floor of the brick building that had been standing tall and solid for more than a century...to enter the space you had to break a net of cobwebs and open a heavy door that was made of a silver medal with thick green glass panels that sepearted the two sections of the door....the entrance door faced the main street of the oldest part of the town...there was nothing special or very noticeable about that partuclar door except for the fact that it had the street numbers "711 Bank" painted in gold with black shading on the upper glass panel. The door looked pretty much like any of the other doors in those old buildings along the old main street...it was what was behind that particular door,and the things that had hapened there that made that space special.A body could be walkin' down the street of what seemed like this Anytown in The South,USA one minute...in the normal world... and the next minute,simply by pushin' through that door at 711,they could completely disappear from this world and to surface in a place that one might only find in The Twilight Zone !   Once the door was unlocked you could enter the space upstairs by way of an enclosed stairwell....there where exactly thirty three steps from the street level to the landing and the door at the top of the stairs and when someone climbed those stairs their footsteps echoed like the sound of someone climbing out from the bottom of a deep well with log chains wrapped around their ankles.   The electricity and water had been turned off five years earlier when I had last lived in this hiden away place.There were no windows anywhere up there except for 3 long tall ones on the street side so without electricity it was as dark as a tomb up there even in broad day light unless you were standing in the front room near one of those old dirty windows.   This day I had come prepared with a good flashlight with fresh batteries and anytime I am using a flashlight in a dark room I feel like I can see thangs better than if I merely had the regular room lights on...there is something about the clear bright beam of a flashlight that makes you focus directly on what is illuminated in that bright circle surrounded by all of the darkness...everything else is automatically shut out of my mind and my thoughts except for what is immediately in the spotlight...   After I once again counted the thirty three stairsteps in inserted the large sliver key into the big Yale double dead bolt locks in the solid steel door at the top of the stairwell and as soon as I turned the key and heard the click I threw my shoulder against the heavy door and pushed it open.....just a little crack at first and seeing that it met no resistance I pushed it open wide enough to make my entrance into the pitch black darkness...the space was so large and black.. and at this point I was still so far away from the front room windows that there was absolutely no light where I was standing except for the round ball of light at the end of the long shaft of illumination that was connected to the Eveready flashlight that I was holding tightly in my right hand...   Not only was everything around me black as the inside of a lump of coal...it was also very quiet up here in the darkness away from the daily noise of the main street below with all of the cars and traffic and sounds of the day...   I held my breath for a second so I could hear even better and the only thing I could barely hear was the cooing of some nesting Pigeons that lived somewhere in the space above the ceiling and beneath the old roof tiles that covered the building like a well worn cap.Somehow these Pigeons had found or made themselves a secret entrance to their own little private space above the town and they were safely nesting in a little world of their own...if I had never heard the sound that nesting Pigeons make I would have surely thought that the sound was that of ghosts or spooks or spirits or something unnatural and not of this world.....and it was hard to tell exactly where the sounds were coming from...   That whole place up there had an atmosphere and ambience like someplace from another world almost like a dream that was about to boarder on a full blown nightmare...it was too quiet and it was too dark and it was too lonely and too empty up here above the rest of the town...and a little voice inside my head was telling me that I must leave as soon as possible...it was saying that " I should get out of there while I still could !"...and even though I had been here many times and I knew that there was nothing to worry about... still the little voice told me that something was different this time...something had changed...and that this something was the reason that I had come to this hidden out of the way place today.   To be Continued.....     ANOTHER DUANE CAT TALE   You keep remindin' me of thangs I had forgotten about...like once in 1969 I rode with Duane and a couple of their roadies to a house in Atlanta where he was scorin' some "doogie"...or smack....it was a hosue in a very rich part of Atlanta that some junkie's parents owned...the parents were either dead or out of town....I never got into the herion scene...I snorted it a couple of times but I hated the part where you threw up..   Once in Macon in 69' Duane offered me a little spoon full of white power that I asumed was coke...so I snorted it and got sick an started throwin' up and passed out and when I came to Duane was standin' over me with another spoonful loaded up...and I said  "What in the Hell was that stuff...are you tryin' to kill me..?" and Duane said,,,"Here try some more and I said "I don't like that shit..whatever it is !" and he said "It's smack..doogie...china white..you know herion !" and I said "Hell no I don't want anymore of that shit...it made me sick" and Duane was still standin' there holdin' that little silver spoon out to me and he said "Come On man...do it... I've finally got your dose figured out !"   To hell with that stuff...if it kills you in order to get the dose figured out I don't want it !     THE JAMAICANS   When Hinton and I were in Memphis back in 88' when he was playin' on a Toots Hibbert album for Jim Dickinson we got to hangout with Teenie Hodges that wrote TAKE ME TO THE RIVER and LOVE AND HAPPINESS ......I've got a video I shot somewhere...and all those Jamaican musicians like Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were talkin' in that cool Jamaican accent and one of them asked Teenie,who is a real skinny small black cat,what kind of guitar he liked best and Teenie in his slow as molasses Memphis Southern drawl says' "Weeelllll I used to like to play those Gibson Les Paul guitars ...but they are just some damned heavy that I couldn't handle it and I switched to playing a Fender Stratocaster"..he said "But I have a Japanese copy of a Strat that I love now"   One of the funniest moments comes when one of the Jamaicans asked Teenie what gave him the inspiration to write such a beautiful song as LOVE & HAPPINESS and little Tennie took a long pull on a big bottle of Vodka and then he smiled and replied in a even slower voice....."WELL my wife wanted to go to the grocery store and do some shopping ....and I want to fuck....and when she left I just sat down and wrote that song !" I laughed til I almost cried ! Ya'll will have to pardon my French on that one ...but the story just does not work if you use any other word !     MACON & CAPRICORN RECORDS: The year 1969 was a wild and strange and crazy time for me. The Allman Brother and Wet Willie,and other performers that were signed to Capricorn,were puttin' a fresh new Southern style of Rock and Roll on the world's musical map ! I had just gotten a divorce from my first wife...The Rubber Band had broken up a year or 2 earlier and I had made up my mind that I seriously wanted to work in the music business full time.I was aware that I would have to make some changes in my life and make some personal sacrifices to make my dream of making music become a reality. We had a sayin' back in those days that we could use to justify and endure just about hardship oranythang that went wrong and when thangs we'ren't goin like we wanted them to or some big imporatnt deal feel through that might have put a few bucks in our empty pockets .We would always just say it was part of what was called "payin' your dues ". It's amazing how a phase and attitude like that can help give a person with a dream the extra courage they need when times get hard and you need somethang to help give you a reason to keep on pushin' and to hang in there when thangs got tough and it looked like you couldn't get a break anywhere. We'd just marked it up as "payin' our dues".It was like nobody knows when they will die...and nobody knows when they have paid enough dues to have their dreams come true.When your number comes up and you start making some money off of your music ..it's then when you know that you have paid enough dues. When you are really first staring out in the muisc business back in those days it very had to find anybody that would pay you to do anythang.Especially around the recording studio scene.There were no schools you could attend back then that could teach you what you needed to know so you had to prefect the art of hangin' out and tryin' to be helpful in some way and in return maybe somebody would teach you somethang that would help you along. I knew I'd have to learn to travel light and to get my life style down to it's most simple and basis form.When you stop and really think about it it's amazing just how little we each need in our lives to make it though each day.A little food and water and of course air and shelter. I've lived in tents, on houseboats, RV trailors, in trucks, sleep in car and on friends couches and floors.I learned to do without alot of the luxuries and to be able to live on barely nothing in life in order to be free to follow my own dream of making music my life. The first thang I did was to sell the red 1966 fastback Corvette that me and The State National Bank owned. I loved that car and it used to be like Duane Allman's own private Taxi Cab when he lived in The Shoals and played sessions at FAME Studios in the 1960's. I hated to sell that car but it was one of the scrafices I had to make.So the next owner of that red Vette was drummer Roger Hawkins.A few years later he sold it to Terry Woodford of Wishbone Studio and then the next owner was keyboard player and Wishbone co-owner Clayton Ivey...So that Corvette stayed in the music business for about the next 2 decades ! It really felt good to get out from under having to make those car payments every month.I had to have somethang to get around on so I bought a used 450 Honda Scrambler motorcycle which was fine until winter came and it suddenly became a Strato-freeze air conditioner ! But proably the most important thang I did to free myself from my old lifestyle and be free to follow my dream was I got my wallet out and took all of my credit cards out and tore them up...I also closed my checkin' account and tore up all the left over blank checks....I was preparing for hard times and I knew that if I kept the credit cards and a check books that it would be too easy for me to use them when times got really hard.Having credit makes it way too easy on a person like me to get into debt way over head.My motto and mantra most of my life has been that if I did not have the money in my pocket I would have to do without it. Johnny Sandlin, the cat that had gotten me in the music business, had already moved to Macon and was putting together a rhythm section for The Capricorn Studio.He had hired or suggested to Phil Walden that he also hire guitarist Pete Carr and Keyboard player Paul Hornsby...both had worked in The Hour Glass with Sandlin and The Allmans. Bassist Robert Popwell was hired and after he left Macon he later went on to play bass with The CRUSADERS. Some other fine musicians and songwriters like Jackie and Ella Avery had also been hired.The Allman Brothers were takin' the music scene by storm and every rock and roll musician in The South started flockin' to Macon to try to find a place to fit in and get in on some of this action that Capricorn was creating. I was between marriages, and bands and jobs and was livin' on Shoals Creek right next door to ahouse that Eddie Hinton had bought with a loan that Jerry Wexler had given him.This was also about the time that Eddie started acting strange.At first it as just a few little thangs but before long he had gotten busted and lost his lake house and his Lincoln Continental and his wife Sandra's XKE Fastback Jaguar.After they got busted the lawyers made a deal with The powers that control The Shoals and a deal was made that if Eddie and Sandra would move to Nashville or somewhere out of state they would drop all charges. Thangs in The Shoals were still rockin' along pretty good and FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound were always booked up and making great music.But I had the wander lust and I wanted to go to Macon and check thangs out for myself and also Johnny Sandlin had told me that he though he could help me get a job with Capricorn.So Becky Robbins ,who would later become my second wife for about 8 months, and Donnie Fritts and I loaded up in Becky's Blue Ford Maverick and headed out for Macon. Fritts and Becky only stayed a few days and the drove back to The Shoals. Sandlin gave me a room to live in the house he had rented and his place was always the center of action. Back then their were no boom boxes or cassette tape players or anythang like that that we take for granted these days....but Sandlin had the best reel to reel set up money could by and there was always somebody comin' over to listen to tapes they had recorded. One of the most memorable times I remember at that house of Sandlin's was the night that Duane Allman got back to Macon after he had finished workin' on The Derek and Dominoes album. He had a reel to reel copy of the album and we put it on and it played for days. I can still see Duane walkin' around the house in a tank top and bell bottoms and he was fired up...he was sayin' thangs like "I can play with the big boys Now ! Y'all listen to the end of Layla." We were believers...there was no denying that Duane and Clapton and Bobby Whitlock and the others had really cooked up somethang special and Duane was like a proud papa...and nobody could blame him at all for all the chest beating he was doin' after a session like that....he had arrived and he knew it ! We all knew it. I used to love to go down on Cotton Avenue to Capricorn's main office complex. It was a beehive of action.You never knew who you would bump into down there.Upstairs when you walked in a beautiful and very friendly secretary named Carolyn who had been with The Walden's for years would greet you when you walked it.Somewhere behind that front office Phil had his office and his brothers Blue and Allan also had offices in that upstairs area. My favorite place in the building was down in the basement. This is where the main part and heart and soul of the booking agency was located.There most have been about 50 dudes that worked down there in the basement.They all had desks and several telephones.... and they were Watts lines so you could call anywhere in the country and talk forever and nobody would mind...it was like a boiler room operation.This is where the cats that were called "booking agents" did their thang and that meant livin' with a telephone to your ear all day long. That's why Capricorn's booking agency was so successful.These cats got paid by how many jobs they could book and if they were not talkin' on the phone to some college Fraternity social chairman or some club owner then they were not doin' their job and would be replaced in a heartbeat ! When I first started hangin' around the Cotton Avenue offices it seems like everyday at least one of the Allman Brothers or one of Walden's other acts were there tryin' to get someone to set them up with a doctors appointment so they could get some penicillin to cure their STD's. I had been in Macon for about a week when Sandlin finally took me with him to Phil Walden's office...Phil was kind of aware of who I was because of that time in Memphis when Dan Penn introduced us at AMERICAN STUDIOS when The Box Tops were recording CRY LIKE A BABY ....and we had also seen each other maybe one other time at FAME STUDIOS. I had also met Phil and Alan Walden about five years earlier when I was a freshman at The University of Alabama.I had pledged the Kappa Alpha Order Fraternity and our social chairman knew I was into music so one night he grabbed me by the arm and said "Come with me...we are going to have a meeting with a couple of booking agents from Georgia.We got in the KA social chairman's car and drove the short distance down University Blvd to The Moonwinks Motel. There was a red Corvette convertible parked in front of the room where the meeting was to be held.The motel room door was open and some great R & B sounds were floating out on to the night's breeze.When we entered the motel room we realized that these cats had brought a record player with them and stacks of 45 rpms records.The room had 2 double beds and both of them were completely covered with 8 x 10 black and white glossy promo photos of every black recording artist in the business. The Walden's also had a wet bar set up and it was impossible for us to turn down free booze. Just about every college Fraternity and Sororities have very large amounts of money set aside and ear marked for all of the parties they would have that school year. Phil and Alan had come to Tuscaloosa to see how much of that business they could get signed to a contract...after stiff drinks and all that great music and lookin' at all the pictures of the stars we signed contacts with them for every party we had that season and the social chairman wrote them a check for 25% of the total....and I'm sure that just about every other Fraternity and sorority on campus did the same thang. They probably made enough money in a couple of days on campus to buy another Corvette .We left The Moonwinks and the company of The Walden Brothers feelin' high as a kite and I'm sure they were satisfied with how much we spent with them that night ! The next time I saw Phil Walden was at American Studios in Memphis the night The Box Tops were recording CRY LIKE A BABY...in between takes Dan Penn introduced us...of course I didn't mention that night in 1965 at The Moonwinks ! Fast forward back to 1969: Also Sandlin had recently recorded a song I wrote titled BABY RUTH that was on Alex Taylor's first LP titled Friends and Neighbors on the Capricorn Label. Alex as one hell of a Soul & R & B singer and also James Taylor's oldest brother. Sadly Alex died a few years ago at far too young of an age. Sandlin introduced me to Phil and we shook hands and then we all sat down and listened to a couple of new songs that had been recorded by COWBOY at the new Capricorn studio,which was still under construction...it was a very relaxed atmosphere. The next thang I knew the conversation had taken a turn and Phil was starting to talk about all the good thangs that he had heard about me from Sandlin and others and how talented I was and he wanted to know what it would take for me to come to work full time for Capricorn. Back in those days I was usually terrible at negotiating any kind of deal except when it came to booking bands....there was one point a few years earlier when The Rubber Band got so popular that I had to start my own booking agency to handle all of the people that we were having to say no to because we were already booked. Anyway during this meeting with Phil Walden I was determined to do a better job at negotiating and not to cave in at the first offer.Phil started out offering me $75 bucks a week and I countered with the fact that I could not even find a decent place to live on that kind of pay....so he raised the ante another 50 bucks..and still I played hard to get..but then added that I really would like to work for him and I made up a little white lie to try and make him up his offer....I told Phil that I had just sold some stocks and I was planning to go to Europe and do some travelin' and sight seein'..... Finally Phil told me that Sandlin and Pete and Hornsby and the rest were makin' $275 a week and that was as high as he could go...he said he would pay me $250 a week...and then the strangest thang happened...the day before I had been half listening to The Paul Harvey Show and I kept hearing him using the phase "vertically intergraded" company....I really had no idea on that day at that particular meetin' with Phil Walden what in the Hell "vertically integrated" actually meant....but it sounded good and before I could stop myself I blurted out these words to Phil. I said "Phil I can see what you are tryin' to do here at Capricorn...it looks to me like you want to build a company that uses the concept of vertical integration ! I swear I had no clue what the term actually meant but I had heard Paul Harvey tellin' all of his many radio listeners that it was a good thang and that in the future most big companies would be tryin' to set up their operation to be as vertically integrated as possible.Well sir when Phil heard me use that term his eyes widened...his eyebrows went up and he had a look on his face like I had really stuck a nerve with him ! And then he said "Please excuse me for a minute I need to discuss somethang with my brother Blue. Blue's office was right next door so Sandlin and I sat there and waited...and I was praying that Phil would not come back in the office and ask me what the definition of "vertically integrated " was.I would have been a dead duck..I did not have a clue. Finally Phil came back in the office and Blue was with him.Blue said "Phil wants to hire you but we have a problem with the money...we have already almost gone over budget in hiring people for our production company.But we can hire you and we can pay you $275 which is what all of our top people are gettin' paid...the problem is that we will have to issue you two checks every week. Half of you pay will come from the production account and the other half will have to come from our publishing company NO EXIT Music ...but it will all add up to $275 a week. I mumbled somethang about how I did not care how many checks it took...I was ready to go to work for Capricorn and $275 a week sounded great to me ! We all shook on it and I was hired !    Click HERE to Purchase Sailcat Music    Click HERE to Purchase Eddie Hinton Music & Video