Share your memories of Frank’s restaurant Le Bistro. In London Frank had many friends in the restaurant business and one day he decided to bring them all over to Macon and open up the town’s first gourmet eatery. He opened “Le Bistro” it had great food, beautiful people and good times, it was a success. Some of the more memorable times I recall were when Dicky Betts got drunk and danced on the din- ing room tables, Greg Allman romancing babes behind the curtains in a private booth, Bobby Whitlock walking on the bar and Hank Williams Jr. regaling everyone with his jokes. Frank did his best to keep the pandemonium down to a tolerable roar, it was a chaotic, but a fun scene. Then for some reasons Frank rehabbed


an old building next door to Le Bistro and opened another restaurant/bar he called Le Brasserie. Le Brasserie as far as I know was a place for Frank to escape when things got too hectic at Le Bistro. But in reality Le Brasserie was in direct competition with his own Le Bistro restaurant standing just a few feet away, it may have looked good on the drawing board, but it didn’t go as he’d planned.


Talk about the huge success years of Capricorn. The year I started, 1972 we had a minus bal- ance sheet and four years later we were billing a little over thirty million a year.


How did you come to form Rabbit records? Tell me about signing Grinderswitch and the Winters Bros. When I left Capricorn I had zero plans, but I couldn’t yet leave Macon because my wife at the time was in Mercer Law School, so I had to structure something that would accommo- date her graduating Law School and me mak- ing money. Fortunately my friend Jerry Greenberg the President of Atlantic Records called and wanted me to get them in the Southern Rock business and gave me what in


today’s money would be the equivalent of a five million dollar line of credit to start Rabbit Records. My experience with Phil proved the key


to getting artists was to get the managers and the first thing I did was call Charlie Daniels manager Joe Sullivan asking him to team up with me he agreed and offered to back me with his Winters Brothers band. On his rec- ommendation I said yes and took his band into a Nashville studio to record a demo for Atlantic. The Winters Brothers were a high- energy twin-drummer band and were very well prepared. Within a few hours we had what I was looking for a hard-driving South- ern band. I played the demo for Jerry Green- berg and we formalized the deal. I rented the Capricorn studios to record


the Winters Brothers, but I was stunned when they showed up at the studio with only one drummer… this was not the band I’d signed! The studio clock was running and there was no time to argue or do anything but go for- ward and record the session. The band recorded their song list and left me with a de- cent record, but I knew it was not radio ready. But with the help of Al Moss my new promo- tion man who did a fantastic job getting it on radio and manager Joe Sullivan giving them massive touring with the biggest artists of the day, the album struggled up to a mid chart position and then fell off. Phil had released Grinderswitch, they


had a huge following due to constant touring with the ABB and had just completed a suc- cessful European tour, and they had a new album ready. I immediately bought the rights and released the album, and “Redwing” was by far their best work. Over time Dru Lombar the leader of the band and I became great friends, but neither of us could get the band to agree on direction. Some members wanted Blues and some wanted Country but walking that tightrope just wouldn’t cut it. Later, for the second Winters Brothers album I reluctantly sent them to a studio in


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