haired rock musician in North Florida could be hazardous to your health. Packs of rednecks cruised around in muscle cars, looking for long- hairs to terrorize. There was one area where you could be left alone: Riverside, Jacksonville’s an- swer to Greenwich Village. My dad had taken me to Paulus Music
downtown and co-signed for my first professional guitar, a cherry-red Gibson SG Standard, which we bought for the princely sum of $348.40—I’d wanted a Les Paul, like my buddy, Page, in the Daybreakers had, but it was out of our price range. I was to make the $22 monthly payments with wages I earned busing tables at the enlisted men’s cafeteria for $1.65 an hour. The jarheads constantly hassled me about my hair, which was maybe an inch over the tops of my ears. That job lasted about a month. Things were getting tense between my dad
and me. He didn’t object when I moved in with my grandmother, who had come down from rusty old Roxbury to get away from the gray slush and the cold. She bought a mobile home and rented a lot in a trailer park close to school. She also wound up making most of the payments on my guitar for me. In Freeman’s Trailer Park lived local leg- end Paul Glass. His black, stringy hair was al-
ready almost to his shoulders. He had quit school a few months before I met him to become a rock musician with a band called Marshmallow Steamshovel and was making decent money. He spent most of his days in his parents’ trailer, shades drawn, practicing his Epiphone ES-335 replica. I brought my luscious, new SG by one day, hoping for some pointers. Never one for niceties, Glass sneered, “You don’t deserve this guitar,” as he lovingly fondled it. He wanted to borrow it, but I wouldn’t let it out of my sight. So we struck a bargain: He’d bring me along on his gigs; I would let him use the guitar and, in return, I would get to meet his bandmates and other mu- sicians like Jeff Carlisi, later of .38 Special, and Leon Wilkeson of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who lived two blocks from Carlisi. I might even get to “sit in” and gain some valuable experience. This connec- tion did eventually lead to my being invited to au- dition for a group called Sweet Rooster, which later became .38 Special. As part of my instruction in guitar lore,
Glass took me to see a Riverside band called the Second Coming, which featured a virtuoso picker named Dickey Betts. If Clapton was God, as the saying went, then Betts was Jesus—he could play Clapton’s solo on “Crossroads” note-for-note. Clapton himself couldn’t do that. When the Bradenton Boys—especially
Betts—hit town, a lot of local players—Gary Ross- ington, Allen Collins, Don Barnes, Jeff Carlisi, Dave Hlubek, Charlie Hargrett and others—found out the hard way they’d have to step up their games.
Dickey Betts
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