Heaven and Hell Read online

  Unbeknownst to us all, one day she drove herself to the car dealer and traded in Dad’s beloved Chevy on a clean, used, green two-tone ’56 Pontiac with power windows. He came home from work that night and nearly dropped dead.

  Jerry and I waited just inside the house, holding our breath.

  “Where’s my Chevy?” Dad exploded, staring in disbelief at the gleaming Pontiac.

  “Probably in the junkyard where it belongs,” Mom replied, hands on her hips defiantly. Then, more sheepishly, she added, “I traded it.”

  “You take that damn car back to where it came from and you bring me my Chevy,” Dad shouted, a vein pulsing in the side of his neck.

  “If you don’t want this car, then I’m gonna pay for it,” she yelled back. “I’ve been working and I’ve been saving. Me and the boys deserve a better car.”

  The screaming match went on until Dad stormed into the house, slamming the screen door so hard I thought it would fly clean off its hinges, and Mom drove off in the Pontiac. An hour later, she returned with Dad’s old car, parking it haphazardly in the drive before stalking into the house by the back door. Jerry and I watched this power struggle in stunned silence.

  Within a week, the Pontiac was back. I don’t know what she did or said, but Dad just rolled over like a lazy dog after a meal and let her get her way. Man, we loved that car. It was a four-door hardtop. Suddenly, I felt like I could travel for weeks without wanting to stop. With our “new” car parked in the drive, we could hold our heads up in the neighborhood at last. I’d never realized how poor we were until suddenly we didn’t feel quite so poor anymore. It was a good feeling.

  THREE

  The radio in the polio ward first introduced me to the pleasures of music, but my father latched onto my early interest and used it as common ground. He’d always had some sort of stereo, no matter how poor we were, that played 33- and 45-rpm vinyls. By the time I was old enough to appreciate it, our home entertainment center—cobbled together from parts—was the biggest feature of our living room. After a hard day at work, Dad would come home, clean himself up, and kick back by listening to tapes. It was his only real escape from the life he’d been born to. That and television, although I think we must have been the last family in Gainesville to buy a set. It was so big and tall, it looked like a wooden washing machine with a twelve-inch screen.

  He’d borrow albums from friends, play them on his turntable, and record them on his secondhand Voice of Music tape recorder. He knew it was illegal duplication, but it was all he could afford. When he got tired of hearing something, he’d erase it, borrow a record from someone else, and tape that instead. Soon, he had an extensive collection by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Lawrence Welk, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller. I still can’t hear “Moonlight Serenade” without thinking of my dad.

  Thanks to him, I had my first introduction to jazz and country music. Well, him and the Grand Ole Opry. We’d listen to that on WSM Radio from the Ryman Auditorium until we acquired a television and could watch it live from Nashville on Friday and Saturday nights. Despite the poor quality of the set, we had the best reception in the neighborhood, because Dad rigged up a sophisticated rotating antenna so that, when the channel changed, a motor pointed it in the right direction. I thought that was pretty cool.

  I remember seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night in 1957 and going wild. He sang “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Love Me Tender,” and I was completely blown away. Even though he was only shown from the waist up because of complaints about the sexual nature of the way “Elvis the Pelvis” danced, I’d never seen anybody move like that before. Soon afterward, there came a flood of music called rock and roll, and I knew right away that this was for me. Something about it really made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  My first introduction to the technical side of music also came through my father. One day, he called me over to his tape recorder, which consisted of two boxes, one with a reel-to-reel and a tiny six-by-nine speaker, the other with a small amplifier and a second speaker. Without explaining anything, he set up a microphone, put it in front of me, and instructed, “Okay now, Doc, I want you to count every odd number aloud.”

  I duly counted, one, three, five, seven, and so on. After rewinding the tape, he played it back and said, “Now, when you hear one, start counting even numbers.”

  Within minutes, he played the finished result back to me. Via the stereo’s sound-on-sound capability, I heard my voice on the left channel saying “one,” then on the right channel saying “two.” It was the first stereo overdub I’d ever heard, and I thought, “My God, this is incredible!” I was hooked.

  First and foremost, I needed a guitar. The Elvis explosion had hit America, and a guitar was suddenly the coolest instrument to play. I’d been raised on a diet of Nashville guitar and banjo music, and there was no other instrument I was remotely interested in. By the time I was eleven years old, everybody on the block seemed to be playing guitar but me. Trouble was, I didn’t have the money to buy one. Utterly despondent, I suddenly realized I might have something valuable to trade—cherry bombs. Jerry and I would buy them when we visited Uncle W. L. in Carolina, then bring them home to Florida, where they were illegal. If you threw one into the concrete culvert in the ditch outside our home, it would make such a bang that all the kids in the street would come running, long before the cordite had dispersed.

  The boy directly across the street from us owned an acoustic guitar I badly wanted, so one day Jerry and I got going with the firecrackers. As planned, the kid came right out. “Hey, can I have some of those?” he asked, his eyes bright.

  “Sure,” I said, with youthful cunning, “but it’ll cost you that old guitar on the top of your closet.” It was a horrible instrument with three strings missing and full of holes, but it was my first true love. I took it to the drugstore and bought new strings with the last of my savings. A neighbor across the street taught me how to tune my new toy and work my way through those agonizing first D and G chords. I’d monopolize the sliding glider seat on my parents’ front porch, strumming away for hours. I nearly wore it out.

  Later, with a little extra from Dad, I saved up what seemed like a fortune and sent twenty-eight dollars off to Sears, Roebuck for a Silvertone archtop, which seemed to me like the height of musical sophistication. Every morning for a week, I was late for school, waiting for the mailman to deliver it. I can still remember the pungent whiff of fresh varnish when I first opened the case. I’d never had anything so glossy and shiny and new. I took unbelievably good care of that guitar. Everything else had been a hand-me-down from Jerry; his clothes, his shoes, even his old bike. This was the first possession I had that was mine and mine alone.

  Music was the only thing I was better at than Jerry. He could just about manage a couple of chords on the piano. It was also the only activity my father positively encouraged me in. The double incentive of pleasing Dad and being better at something than my brother was enough to make me want to do it real bad.

  Dad seemed to be genuinely excited by my enthusiasm for something other than daydreaming. Ever the innovator, he took the back off the television and found that it had a little jack at the back where I could plug in my guitar and play out of the set’s speakers. Every Saturday morning, when my brother was playing baseball and my parents were at work, I’d plug in and watch cartoons like Mighty Mouse and Winky Dink and You and make up musical soundtracks to go with them.

  Dad would boast about me to people at the plant. “My youngest boy has a great ear,” he’d say proudly. “I think he could be a natural.”

  One day he overheard one of his buddies complain that he’d bought his daughter an electric guitar that she never played. “The damn thing just sits in her closet, gathering dust,” he moaned.

  “Oh, yeah?” Dad commented, knowing that I’d already outgrown the Silvertone. He came home later that night and told me about the electric guitar, but warned, “When we go over to t
ake a look at it, act like you don’t really care.”

  The minute I set eyes on that guitar—a cream and gold Fender Musicmaker in a little tweed case—our cover was blown. Dad knew from the expression on my face that he’d never get a good deal now. It was probably the cheapest Fender money could buy and with its gold pick guard, it looked like a girl’s guitar, but I was in love. I wanted it so bad, especially when I saw it came with a little amplifier not much bigger than a shelf radio. I proudly took it home and played it so much my fingers bled. Dad helped me upgrade the amp to a Fender Deluxe, which was really something. Now all I had to do was improve my performance.

  I practiced and practiced, and as soon as I thought I was good enough, I took myself off to the State Theater movie house, where, on Saturday mornings, most of the kids in Gainesville could be found watching a twenty-five-cent movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon or King Kong. Most weeks, the theater also put on a live talent show immediately after the film. Many of the kids would go early and pay their quarter and get more for their money—a movie and a bit of amateur talent.

  I was just eleven years old, my white blond hair slicked to one side, wearing my best Sunday shirt and pants, when I stood up on that stage for my first public performance. A chill fear gripped my heart. I was so nervous that I had a sheen of sweat on my as yet hairless upper lip. My shirt was sticking to the skin on my back, and my face turned bright pink. Placing my fingers in the correct positions with the utmost concentration, I played the opening bars of “Red River Valley,” a seminal American country song I’d heard played by Porter Wagoner a dozen times on the Grand Ole Opry. It wasn’t exactly Elvis, but I didn’t yet have the courage to publicly perform the moves I’d practiced for hours alone in my bedroom.

  There were only a few people in the crowd I knew. The rest were complete strangers, and, in some ways, that made it easier. They sat hunched in their seats, talking and laughing, drinking sodas, and throwing popcorn at each other while I played.

  I didn’t sing or anything. I couldn’t. I had little or no confidence in my voice back then, and, in any event, I could never have generated enough saliva to lubricate my vocal cords. Nor could I stop my mouth from moving strangely while I was playing the most difficult parts on the frets. I just hoped that anyone sitting near the front would think I was mouthing the words to myself.

  The reception to my standing there stiffly playing guitar was less than enthusiastic, but after a while, a small silence fell, and I noticed that some of the kids were actually listening. Allowing myself a little smile, I relaxed into it and began to play with more confidence. I even strayed slightly from the song, injecting a touch of personal improvisation. There was hardly a standing ovation as I went into the last chorus, but I wasn’t being booed and they weren’t throwing paper cups at me, which I knew was a good sign.

  As I heard the final chord echo away, I focused on a couple of pretty young girls in the second row who were, for some unknown reason, beaming back at me with a look of adulation. I knew that this was what I had to do. Stumbling off the stage in a daze, as if I had just woken from a long sleep, it wasn’t as if I had a choice. From that day on, my life would never be the same.

  Puberty was, for me, an agony of teenage confusion. Hairs sprouted, bones grew, skin erupted, my voice broke, and all manner of alarming thoughts stole into my head. Ripples of heat would pass through my body at the very thought of a girl. A close encounter with the likes of Sharon Pringle probably would have killed me.

  Along with the physical changes came unforeseen psychological ones—like not appreciating how impoverished my family was until my first day at F. W. Buchholz High School. Almost overnight, I discovered completely new areas of embarrassment. Just by looking around at other people’s clothes, bikes, and even cars, and comparing them with my own painfully visible lack of assets, I came to understand what I was: dirt poor. And with that realization came a searing, scorching shame.

  Friends like Kenny Gibbs, whose father owned the furniture store in town, lived in new cinder-block houses with air-conditioning, something I could only dream about. I found myself spending more and more time over at his place, enjoying the permanently cool air along with unimagined luxuries like a color television and a refrigerator full of candy bars and Coca-Colas we could help ourselves to. I’d readily accept an offer from his mother to sleep over, just for the novelty of not lying in a pool of sweat.

  I rarely, if ever, invited Kenny back to my house in return. Or anyone else, for that matter. I usually made the excuse that Mom was home or my brother was studying. Everything about my parents suddenly seemed excruciating to my teenage mind. Their English seemed very broken; they weren’t articulate like other people’s parents, and I felt that the minute anyone met them, they’d know I came from limited means.

  Every now and again, my family background would rear up and threaten to expose me, if someone asked me a personal question like, “Isn’t your dad a mechanic at Koppers?” or “Didn’t I see your mom in the thrift shop?” But I usually managed to quash it before it was too late. Music, ever my escape route, continued to be my salvation.

  I couldn’t afford my own records to keep up with the latest sounds, so I listened to the radio endlessly. I had an old wooden one in my room, which quickly usurped any attention I might otherwise have given to homework. In Gainesville, most of the white-owned stations stopped broadcasting at sundown. If the weather was good and there wasn’t a big storm between Florida and Tennessee, I could wiggle the antenna around until I picked up WLAC in Nashville, at 1510 on the AM dial, the only station playing black music. Through its crackly broadcasts hosted by Gene Nobles, I was introduced to legends like B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. Tired of Pat Boone’s mind-numbing version of “Tutti Frutti” all day on the regular channels, I’d listen at night, open-mouthed, to Little Richard strutting his stuff.

  With my hair greased to one side and my jeans pegged in on my mother’s pedal Singer sewing machine, I started getting into the North Florida music scene in a serious way. I took a lead from Dad and began to borrow other people’s records—Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and His Comets—in fact, just about everything from the dawn of rock and roll. Using Dad’s Voice of Music machine, I’d record them on one channel while I played guitar on the other, trying to mimic the rock-and-roll greats. Once my dad upgraded to a better stereo, I requisitioned his old one and carried it carefully to my bedroom, giving up all thoughts of academic study, to spend my nights devoted to music.

  My second public performance came when I was fourteen. I entered a talent contest at junior high school and walked onto the stage alone with a guitar and an amp. “OK now, boys and girls, let’s hear a rousing round of applause for our next contestant—Donald Felder,” the host announced, feedback screaming through his mike. I was far more nervous than my last gig, chiefly because I now knew everyone in the audience, but I somehow managed to play “Walk Don’t Run,” by the Ventures, well enough to be recognizable. There was a crowd of about five hundred, and the reaction was surprising. They seemed to like me, and by the end of the gig, I’d acquired newfound status. My peers were at the age when, like me, they were identifying with their rock-and-roll heroes, and I suddenly found that, as the nearest Gainesville equivalent, I had fans. Best of all, some of them were girls. With my fair complexion and lean looks, I was apparently considered a catch, now that I had proven musical talent. Needless to say, I reveled in my new cool.

  Three weeks after that performance, one of my teachers suggested I contact the local radio station, WGGG, which regularly aired Gainesville’s best amateurs. He came with me and, because he knew one of the DJs, fixed it for me to play live. Standing in a tiny recording studio, in front of a microphone, I hammered out two instrumental songs, “Apache,” written by Jerry Lordan and popularized by the Shadows, and my old standby, “Walk Don’t Run.” A few of my friends heard the broadcast. “You done good, Don,” they told me. “It was real neato.” They m
ade me feel like someone, like Elvis even. I was amazed even then how just stepping up to the microphone affected the way people viewed me. The DJ, a guy called Jim, whose full-time job was as a driver for the local Williams-Thomas funeral home, offered to help me make up some tapes. He and I became good friends and used to hang out in the viewing room of the funeral parlor at night, playing Frisbee beside the plinth where the open caskets stood.

  I put together a small band at school with Kenny Gibbs and his brother, and we practiced regularly in their garage. His mother wanted us to call ourselves the Moonbeams, but we thought that name sucked. I can’t remember what we decided on in the end, but we eventually evolved into the Continentals. It was sort of my band. I put it together and had cards made up with my telephone number on it for bookings. As was the nature of teenage bands in a college town, players came and went as they dropped in and out of Gainesville for their studies. Kenny played bass for a while, not because he was particularly talented; he just looked good and pulled in the girls. He also had the money to buy equipment, which was vital. There were two other bass players who were much better, Barry Scurran, a college student from Miami, and a guy named Stan Stannell.

  I’d go over to Stan’s house for a rehearsal, and he’d be sitting on his bed in his underwear for hours, foot propped up on a little stool, reading sheet music for classical guitar. He was a phenomenal player, but if you put an electric guitar in his hand, it sounded awful. The only thing that worked for him was bass, because of the similarities with classical technique. He played with us for about a year and then moved on, ending up as head of the guitar department of the Boston Conservatory of Music. I had probably one of the best classical guitar players in the country playing bass in my teenage rock-and-roll band, and I didn’t even know it.