The Night I Tripped With Duane Allman- And Learned About The Blues
He wasn't tripping, I was, but after a wild night of free love I found myself on the back of his motorcycle.
So many weekends seeing The Allman Brothers Band play in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. I was the high school correspondent with The Great Speckled Bird newspaper, I think I was the only high school correspondent at any underground newspaper in the country and had struck up a conversation with Duane after a free concert, and after that we spoke many times. He had no idea what my age was, I had been to a Steppenwolf concert and John Kay had said he was going to burn draft cards onstage and many people passed them forward. I realized this was a fake ID and cupped one in my hand. For several years after I was Randy Craig and I could always go along to any bar for a beer because the draft card worked. Some hippies called me Flash because of my high energy level (I was a speed freak without speed) so I had 3 names!
Video: The Allman Brothers Band playing 'Mountain Jam' live at Atlana Georgia's Piedmont Park, during one of their notorious free concerts.
For a kid loose in the free love era, there is no sense all this will end. It is a perpetual party. Atlantis Rising was the "head" shop on Peachtree Street that I'd sit in front of, selling my Great Speckled Bird newspaper. When you walked into the shop there were bootlegs on the floor, barrels of coffee beans, day glo posters and blacklights. Pipes and rolling papers of all colors and images of every kind on the papers. Some like the flag. Some like draft cards. I had the poster that matched astrology signs with sex positions on my wall and a poster of W.C. Fields.
Peter Pan was the hot girl on the strip of the moment and I saw her walk by with her giirlfriends who worked at the topless club further downtown. The world had gone topless it seemed. Go go dancers had lost their tops, movies were often topless, there were even topless barber shops. Not that I would go to one. I looked like a stick of broccolli with my huge uncut afro and skinny body.
"Hey chick, wanna ball?" I blurted out. Ball meant sex.
She looked at me, turned to her friends and looking back at me said, "Groovy", her long blonde hair swaying as she walked.
That was that. I got up and we walked a few blocks to her place. It was a great walk, as many of my friends watched me with them. There was Peyote, so named because when he first came to town he had a trunk full of peyote buttons. You can see him in the WOODSTOCK film during the fish cheer section with his unkept hair and beard. There was Jimmy, awol from the Army giving me a huge smile. He blew his brains out when the MP's came to take him back. There was Dottie, beautiful Dottie who liked women and men. We walked by the guys giving away Orange Sunshine on the street. See, they'd give it away one day and come back on the weekend to sell it. Word of mouth would be the best advertising.
Acid was about altered realities, but it was also about advertising. TURN ON, TUNE IN AND DROP OUT was what Timothy Leary said. Well, we all were raised to do that. We'd turn on the TV, tune in one of the three to five channels, and drop out on the couch to watch. The words matched a ritual we had been doing since childhood. Which technically, I was still in.
There I was in her place with her three friends.
"Have you ever had a flower?", she asked as the other girls laughed. I had no idea what she was talking about. We all got undressed and I stood as the girls took turns kissing me. Funny, I didn't feel sexually abused.
The girls then saw I was aroused and turned away, bending over.
I got it. Each was a petal, I was the stem.
I spun like a top!
I have no idea how long this went on but when it was over we started getting off on the Orange Sunshine. The girls were having fun, but I wanted to go back to the strip to trip. So, I split. "Hey", Peter Pan called out to me, "What's your name?" as I walked into the night.
"Flash", I yelled back, stumbling towards the scene.
I sat myself down in front of the shop as a bootleg of Bob Dylan THE GREAT WHITE WONDER spilled it's sounds into the street.Cars were backed up now as rednecks came to look at the hippies. No cops in sight. Duane Allman walked by. He smiled and said, "Hey Flash. Far out" and walked over to me. He sat down next to me on the sidewalk.
"Hey dude", he said in his always friendly southern tone. "What's happenin"?" and I told him he'd missed the Brotherhood giving out free sunshine. We talked about the music coming from the store and I told him I wished I knew about the blues. I knew the British and American versions, some B.B. King, and that was about it. He told me to come with him. So we go behind the shop and we get on his bike and take off. I'm starting to trip hard riding with Duane and we get to his place and go inside.
He has a collection of 78's and 45's that is the biggest I've ever seen.
He hands me a beer and sits me down.
"This is Delta blues.", and so begins my class on the blues.
“Mississippi has blues that doesn’t sound like anything else. It’s called drum and fife”.
A slight break:
Duane was the first record collector I ever met, he had 78’s, and a player to play them on. He talked to me about much rock owed to Chicago blues
For the next 7 hours or so, I heard every form of the blues and who played on the record. How it was recorded. What happened to the artist, from Duane Allman. I finally fell asleep on the couch, as he played the slide guitar.
And I thought what a great day. And I thought it would always be like this.
LIFE IS A CARNIVAL
You can walk on the water, drown in the sand
You can fly off a mountaintop if anybody can
Run away, run away--it's the restless age
Look away, look away--you can turn the page
Hey, buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap
Here on the street
I got six on each arm and two more round my feet
Life is a carnival--believe it or not
Life is a carnival--two bits a shot
Saw a man with the jinx in the third degree
From trying to deal with people--people you can't see
Take away, take away, this house of mirrors
Give away, give away, all the souvenirs
We're all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world
The flat old world
The street is a sideshow from the peddler to the corner girl
Life is a carnival--it's in the book
Life is a carnival--take another look
Hey, buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap
Here on the street
I got six on each arm and two more round my feet
Life is a carnival--believe it or not
Life is a carnival--two bits a shot
- The Band