his blue van and I fixed it for him. That's the first time we ever met. At this point I still haven’t listened to any Chris Hicks music. Neil would try to force it on me whenever I visited, but I wasn’t interested. In 1988 we had my 20th high school re-
union at Northside in Warner Robins. It was a Friday night and I actually had a suit coat on with a bolo tie. Neil said he was filling in with the band again that weekend, and he wanted me to stop by and listen to them and give them my opinion of what I thought. I told him, oh, okay, I'll make you a deal. I will stop by there tonight on the way back from my thing in Warner Robbins and I'll watch a little bit of it and I'll tell you what I think, and then after that you have to promise no more of this Chris Hicks shit! The only problem was, by the time I got
there it was over and all we did was meet Chris. He asked me to please come back to- morrow night. I remembered fixing his car out there, and he was a real nice fella, and now he is personally inviting me and I could- n't say no to him The next night was Saturday night and I
went down there by myself and got there early. I met up with Neil, and we went to- gether and met James Lumpkin. I met Alan Walden that night, and I met Alan’s secre- tary. I met the band, which at that point in- cluded Mark Johnson on drums, Randy Arthur on bass, Neil on keyboard, and Chris Hicks on lead and slide guitar, rhythm guitar, and lead vocals. I sat at the table with Alan Walden, not re-
ally appreciating who Hicks was at that point. After the first two songs I asked Alan why Chris was playing here tonight and not at the Omni in Atlanta? With respect to me, Alan replied, “he needs little more time on the chitlin circuit.” After about an hour into it they took a break and Chris walked over to the table
where we were all sitting. Chris asked me what I thought. All I could say was, “I think you’re a bad ass!” I was riveted to him and that music all
night long, all three hours of it. Then Neil says, Chris wants us to come over his house. Okay I go, sure, hell yeah. We drive over to- gether and the other people there are Alan Walden, Chris Hicks and the road manager Stelling Nelson. It was a two story antebellum house on Col-
lege Street near Mercer University. Chris had the top half of it for his apartment. There was no electrical power. They ran a long electric cord from the window next door, across the living room, and off of that it had one light bulb and a radio playing tapes and that was it. There was almost no furniture, just like all
the houses along College Street in those days. It was all blacks and hippies living in hun- dred year old houses that were just basically flop houses. At that time, being long-haired was almost the same as being black. We were looked down upon by the general population. So we party over there till the sun came up and then Neil and I went home. As we were leaving, Chris says to me, hey
Dave I wish you would come to Chattanooga next weekend. We’re playing at a place called the Brass Register. Come on up there and check us out. I did and that's another whole story, but
that night Chris and I bonded like brothers. And I'm still fascinated with him today - he is just a dynamic motherfucker. At the same time I had quit the job at the
base and was back in college and I had three thousand dollars saved up from the old job. Instead of buying the Macintosh computer that I needed for school, I bought a Panasonic video camera. I'd been to the Byron Pop Festival (Atlanta
Pop) and I had a little snap camera so I took some color pictures out there, but I wished I
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