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 2, Sid Vicious, the new punk rocker, had jumped out of the window of his room in the Chelsea Hotel and died in that New York alley at the age of 21. (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.

But Malcolm Gladwell had not written his book Outliers: The Story of Success at that point in time, so I didn’t know that it took 10,000 hours of hard work, plus a lot of help from important others — and luck and timing too. I just thought there was a silver bullet that a successful person could give to a young person, and that would somehow, magically, make the world open up and become your oyster overnight.

I had been playing music for a few years. I put my own band together when I was only 16. We practiced in my basement (now known famously as The Bunker) and played roller-skating rings on the weekends for $17 apiece a night. It was enough for some cheap beer, maybe an eight-pack of little Miller ponies, a bag of weed (which was about $15 a lid in those days, split four ways) and gas for the truck to haul the equipment. The price of gas had jumped from less than 50 cents a gallon to about 86 cents that year, thanks to the second oil shortage of the ’70s and our dependence on oil from the Middle East. (We still haven’t figured that one out.)

Billy Joel won the Grammy for song of the year in 1979 for “Just the Way You Are,” and a lot of couples liked that when we played it, along with the Stephen Stills hit, “Love the One Your With.” If your true love wasn’t around, in other words, make love to the one who was around, the prettiest or not.

I looked pretty damn good in those days, however, in part because I got plenty of sleep and exercise. Playing music into the night and sleeping until noon and playing tennis all afternoon made for a fit body with a Bain de Soleil tan. The ladies loved it. It was, after all, the height of the sexual revolution, a decade after scientists developed the pill and a few years before the scourge of HIV and AIDs would change life for teenagers everywhere.

Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson won the country performance award that year for “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” which just happened to be my theme song to a lot of people, since everybody in the music business in Birmingham called me Cowboy. It was a nickname I earned when I was four-years-old.

This is about a year before the contest, I think, but it’s the only photo I could find…

A Baptist preacher pinned the name on me for dressing the most like a cowboy at a contest to win the drawing of a traveling chalk-talk artist-evangelist. On a vote of the congregation, I won a four-by-six-foot chalk sketch of Mt. Calvary, where Jesus died on the cross “for you and me,” as the song went. I kept it hanging on the wall of the underground suburban basement for many years, along with all the black light posters, until it was finally torn to tatters. I ripped it down one day and threw it away about the time I quit rock ‘n’ roll for journalism.

By 1979, I wasn’t exactly the same little cowboy. I had been fairly famous as a kid, or popular as they say, which may have something to do with my confidence to this day. But by then I had become more like a “wild and crazy guy” from Steve Martin’s “Saturday Night Live” sketch, which coincidentally won the Grammy for best comedy recording that year.

I had played in rock bands since 1973. But I was getting burned out on it and beginning to think there might be a smarter way to make a living. Musicians tended to possess very large egos the size of elephants. It was hard to find a group of guys who could work together for any length of time without falling apart in a fit of jealousy. I called it musical chairs, since we tended to move from band to band, always trying to find a combination that worked.

Besides, the future of rock ‘n’ roll was in doubt with the advent of disco. And the two hottest rock bands out of Birmingham at the time had signed record deals but went nowhere fast. Hotel and the Alabama Power Band had signed deals with Capitol Records, but neither survived the beating they took in the marketplace when their albums didn’t sell.

Some of my best friends were members of the Alabama Power Band, including Wayne and Dale Perkins. They were about the best players around from not only my hometown, but from my side of town. Wayne Perkins had actually been considered to replace Mick Taylor on guitar in the Rolling Stones in 1974 after Taylor quit the band. Ron Wood got the job instead. (That’s another long story I may tell in a book one day, but not today.)

I figured if those guys couldn’t make it in “the big time,” what chance did I have?

Unfortunately for my friends, when they signed their record contract, Alabama Power, the power company, threatened to sue over the use of the name. I kid you not. The record company caved, and the boys in the band changed their name to Crimson Tide — one of the worst marketing decisions in the history of rock. If I could have advised them I would have told them to fight the power company in court and get famous on the publicity. But no one was listening to me then. I didn’t possess the secret.

Then in July, during my long hot summer of youthful contemplation on parole from rock ‘n’ roll, President Jimmy Carter outlined his plans to reduce oil imports and improve energy efficiency in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech, otherwise known as the “malaise” speech. He went on TV in a cardigan sweater and encouraged citizens to reduce their energy consumption. He asked Americans to turn down their thermostats, turn off the lights in unoccupied rooms, and to wear sweaters indoors in the cold winter months.

I had voted for Carter in 1976 at the age of 19 in my first election of voting age. It was as much a vote against Nixon of Watergate infamy as a vote against Ford. Plus, Carter was a fellow Southerner from Georgia. But after the Iranian hostage crisis, I was a fan no more.

Of course I was raised in the white-flight suburbs on The Birmingham News. I remember reading all their editorials that year, including the one in which the “Big Mule” paper endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. I thought they knew what they were talking about. It took me a few more years to figure out they were full of shit.

But there sitting by that swimming pool and soaking in the sun after a few sets of tennis, sipping on a cool one and toking on a fat stogie, casting sideways glances through sun-squinted eyes at the ladies in their bikinis, I was thinking about doing something different with my life. So I said a prayer.

It was probably a stupid prayer in retrospect. No, not probably. It was stupid. I asked “the Lord” for the gift of knowledge and wisdom, one of the forbidden fruits. What did I know?

I was a teenager raised in a Southern Baptist home and church, just searching for something to do with my life besides the music business. After fucking off for the most part in high school, bored with it all, I wanted to get an education. I always loved reading. I mean I read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi in the seventh grade. That book is a tome, not a little book like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.

But after growing up surrounded by a bunch of dumbass, racist rednecks, I wanted to be smart. I wanted to find a way out.

I decided to head across the street to the local community college and enroll for the fall term. That decision would change my life. It would give me the mechanism to get out of a life in the white-flight suburbs and explore the world beyond Birmingham. I had no idea where it would take me or where I would end up. But I wanted that journey. I craved it, like Ahab obsessed after that great white whale in the sea.

It would not be long before Ronald Reagan was elected president in the big conservative tide — and I learned my first lesson in how the press and government work together, or apart. As they teach you in political science and communications courses, and as Thomas Jefferson said, there can be no democracy without freedom of the press. The problem is they don’t teach you exactly what that really means when they first tell you the story. You have to work at it for a while and find out for yourself.

Coming Next Week

Chapter 2: The Pioneer (how I ended up studying journalism and starting a college newspaper).

Tags: Chapter One: Musical Chairs and the Summer of '79

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