My Life With the Allman Brothers
Uncle Jimmy was the best friend in the world to our publisher Don and his sister when they were growing up in St. Louis. He was also friends with the Allman Brothers.
A high-school-age Midwestern hippie discovers the world’s greatest rock and blues band in a local bar. They like him back.
Then she took off all her clothes.
One night in February, 1967, I drove down to the St. Louis entertainment district, Gaslight Square, which was sort of a mini Bourbon Street. At the local Whisky a Go-Go, Billy Peek was playing his rock ‘n’ roll. So I watched from the street for a minute, until I heard a wild sound coming from Pepe’s a’ Go-Go, the club next door. Through Pepe’s picture window I could see, and clearly hear, a four-piece band tearing through Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6” with a ferocity unlike anything I’d ever heard before.
The sign in the window said the Allman Joys. I showed my fake ID and found an empty table. The blond singer, seated at a Vox organ, sang forcefully in a voice that sounded half-Black and half-Southern-white. His hair was to his shoulders, and his blond sideburns reached his jawbone — the longest sideburns I’d yet seen. He was dressed to the nines in mod clothing: a ruffled shirt, vest, bell …
Kerouac Dreams
Yeah, I did it. I slept in Jack Kerouac’s bed in the spring-training town of St. Petersburg, Florida, and smoked in his yard with the pinwheeling moon above my head as bright as a one-eyed headlight on a south-bound freight train.
In this way, I drew closer to my God.
BONUS: The secret of how Jack Kerouac died can be found below.
The odometer broke, thousands of miles and a lifetime removed from the all-night neon hustle of Times Square and the evergreen Zen of the northern Cascades, the pagan thunderclap poetry of the Big Sur coastline and the redbrick sadness of smokestack Lowell. In his final sighs, Jack Kerouac found himself unmoored from the moonlit amphetamine rambling of his own fables. No more thumbs out hitchhiking in ’49 Hudsons, past apple pie diners and the lonesome shadows of grain farms in the flat Midwestern infinity. To riff on a phrase from an Aquarian band inspired by the Beat Generation avatar: This was the end.
In the last year of the sixties, the On The Road author had become a bloated phantom, chasing Johnny Walker with half-quart cans of Falstaff beer while secluded in St. Petersburg, Florida — a slow-motion suicide in a spring-training town, about as far away from Route 66 as you can get. …
Stop Interrupting!
Is it really that much trouble to answer my texts? Lady, you have no idea.
The average American is being interrupted once every seven minutes throughout the day, making it impossible to form a single complex thought.
If we ever wanted to regain focus and resume our tasks, we would need 3,312 minutes each day just to recover from our interruptions.
At 2:13 in the afternoon one day not too long ago, my wife texted to inquire if I wanted to have dinner with friends the following Friday. Her text message was sweet and thoughtful, asking me how my day was going and sending her love. About an hour later, having not heard back, she texted again, this time making do with three question marks. Forty-one minutes after that, it was an angry-face emoji, words and emotions having by now collapsed into rageful hieroglyphics.
I did not answer, and when she returned home that evening she made no effort to conceal her dismay. “I know you’re busy,” she said, chopping onions at a furious pace, suggesting that one wrong word out of me and the knife might swiftly change its trajectory. “But is it really that much trouble to take five seconds and respond to my fucking text?”
It’s a profound question. In fact, it may be the single most important question …
