Richard “Hombre” Price, another Sarasota
player who came to Jacksonville in the late 1960s to take advantage of the proliferation of gigs, agreed. “Dickey was already considered one of the hottest guitar players in Florida,” said Price, a bass player who worked with Reinhardt in a band called the Load. Price would later replace Oakley in the Second Coming. Sarasota keyboardist Reese Wynans, who
would join the Second Coming in 1969, told au- thor Alan Paul, “Dickey was the hottest guitar player in the area, the guy [guitarists] looked up to and wanted to emulate.” Betts had been performing on and off in
Jacksonville for several years. Betts had spent many months here in the mid-1960s with his Bradenton band, the Jokers, who were fixtures at the Westside’s Normandy Club. Back home in Sarasota, Betts ran into Ray-
mond Berry Oakley, a guitarist and bassist from Chicago, who had relocated to the area after leav- ing Tommy Roe’s band. In 1967, psychedelic music or “acid-rock” was the next big thing, and Oakley wanted to get in on it. Betts was reluctant at first because it was easier and safer to eke out a steady paycheck playing bar-band dance music. Oakley convinced him that psychedelic blues, a la Blue Cheer and Cream, was the wave of the fu- ture, and they needed to ride it. He talked Betts into forming an “underground” group they called the Blues Messengers along with Betts’ wife, Dale, on keyboards, guitarist Reinhardt and drum- mer/vocalist John Meeks. Meeks had played along to records at an
Atlanta discotheque called the Scene, whose own- ers were opening another location in Jacksonville and needed a band. The Jacksonville location, at 4403 Roosevelt Blvd., near the corner of U.S. Highway 17 and San Juan Avenue, happened to be adjacent to the Riverside hippie district. The owners came to see the Blues Messengers in Tampa. An offer was tendered with the demand that the band change its name to the Second Coming. Betts told a Guitar World interviewer this was because the owners thought Oakley was a ringer for Jesus. “We thought that was corny as shit, but the club owner offered us double what we were making in Tampa.” The Second Coming came to Jacksonville and became the house band at the Scene. Rein-
hardt came up and played for a while but decided to back to Sarasota, where he joined a group called Bittersweet with keyboardist Reese Wynans along with drummer Ramone Sotolongo. Reinhardt and Sotolongo left Bittersweet to form the power trio the Load, adding bassist Richard Price. Sotolongo was soon replaced by Monty Young, and the group landed a steady gig at Dub’s Steer Room in Gainesville. The Second Coming arrived in Jack-
sonville about the same time I did. “We were the only [guys] in town with long hair,” Betts told an interviewer. “We’d be driving around, and people would throw shit at us.” Scene co-owner Leonard Rensselaer put the members up in an apartment above the R&R Bar, a downtown strip joint he co- owned. After getting the lay of the land, the band members rented an old Victorian house at 2799 Riverside Ave. they nicknamed the Green House. The Second Coming began its six-night-a-week grind at the Scene, becoming an instant hit. Big- name musicians would stop in after concerts to sit in with the band. One night a pair of musicians from Daytona Beach, brothers Duane and Gregg Allman of the group Hour Glass, sat in.
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