Editor’s Note: As I indicated last Sunday in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. For example, you can’t just start a blog as a lay person and expect to change the world over night. But hey, you don’t have to believe me. Listen to Malcolm Gladwell talking about his book Outliers: The Story of Success. This is the second part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a memoir published with ink on paper in book form. Enjoy the last day of your Thanksgiving weekend, if you can…
Chapter One: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ’79
by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
The Locust Fork News-Journal
The sun was warm on my face as I reclined by the pool at the old Queensbury apartment complex in northeastern Jefferson County, due east of Birmingham, Alabama. It was the summer of 1979, a major turning point in the history of the country — and my life.
Bill Haley, one of the pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll from the 1950s, made his final studio recordings that year in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He died two years later. Back on February 1, Sid Vicious, the new punk rocker, had overdosed on heroin and died in what he said in a suicide note was a death pact with his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, who he was charged with killing in the Chelsea Hotel the year before. (I ended up staying in that very room on my first trip to New York in 1988, but that’s another story best saved for later).
On June 29, Lowell George, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist for Little Feat, died not long after I met him in Birmingham after a concert at Boutwell Auditorium. I had spent one long night hanging out with the band at Al’s Cabaret, the late-night rock bar on Birmingham’s West End. I struck up a friendship with the drummer, Richie Hayward, and we drank beer and played pinball until the sun came up. We talked a lot about the music business. I remember asking some pretty stupid questions, like “what’s the secret?” The secret of making it in rock ‘n’ roll, that is.
You see, since the eighth grade, all I had ever wanted to be up until that summer was a drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Like a lot of teenagers who want something, I thought if I could just get close enough to touch the clothes of someone who had lived that dream, perhaps it would wear off on me and I could make it too. I thought if they would just pass on one key piece of knowledge, like a magic bean, it would make everything else fall into place.
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