and probably is still playing some. My old pal Glen Butts still plays around Birmingham, and my good friend Dr. Jim Coleman has at least three really good records out. Tuscaloosa was a hot spot there for a few years, for sure.
Tell us about where you live now. It's a bed & breakfast, tree farm, animal farm, all in one, right? Well, not exactly a bed and breakfast or an animal farm, although we do have some horses and lots of pointing dogs. It's a Planta- tion. A Plantation is technically a farm or par- cel of land that is devoted to one central agricultural commodity, such as in a sugar cane plantation, a cotton plantation, and so on. Ours is a pine plantation. It started when my wife inherited 1200 acres from her grand- mother back in '81. We had to overcome some problems, like high estate taxes, and the fact that the place had somewhat run down due to Miss Julia's (Rose Lane's grandmother) bad health the last ten years of her life. When she was running it, it was more like a farm, but had some timber on it as well. We managed to get through the hard stuff, and over the last ten years we've added about another 1000 acres to the inheritance, so we have about 2200 acres now. In addition to being a pine plantation,
we manage intensely for wildlife, and have a commercial hunting preserve. We offer guided deer, quail, turkey and duck hunting with lodging and meals. From time to time we also book conferences and other events, but mainly the accommodations are for the hunters. We are also very involved in using Charlane for educational purposes, and occa- sionally sponsor tours to that end for young and old. Our website tells a lot about what we
do.....it's
www.charlane.com.
You recently "retired" from the road life with The Rolling Stones, at least that's what I heard. What caused this
decision, and how long did you per- form with the band? Wrong, wrong, WRONG!! Where in the world did you hear that? No, I have no plans to stop rockin' and rollin', dude! We did what turned out to be almost a two year tour with the Stones, and we finished last June, almost a year ago now. I think all of us wanted to get off the road for at least a year after that tour.
It was an enormously successful run, and we had a blast, but it was long, and we needed a long break. I've taken the last ten months to work on Charlane Plantation, and do some other projects. Rose Lane and I were named the National Outstanding Tree Farmers for 1999 by the American Tree Farm System, and we've been very active in the forestry commu- nity this past year. We sit on the operating committee of the American Forest Founda- tion, sponsor a scholarship at the University of Georgia's Forestry School, and I'm writing a book on forestry now. I'm about halfway through it at the moment, and hope to have it out before the end of 2000. I serve as a spokesperson for the Georgia Forestry Associ- ation, and give speeches to groups from time to time.
I went to Yale University within the past year and had a great experience there. I will be the keynote speaker for the PERC organization (Political Economic Research Center) in Mon-
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