My name is David Caprita. I grew up a Navy brat in the Florida panhandle from the early sixties until the late seventies, where I began my radio and music career. So, for a kid with dreams of being a big city dj and musician growing up on the Redneck Riviera, Atlanta was the Valhalla you wanted to end up in.
My brother was a band promoter and producer in those days, so I was pretty much clicked in with the Southern music scene vicariously, attending concerts at venues where I was too young to attend but, hanging on to my brother Charlie’s coattails, I always sneaked in and stayed in the background. One of those venues was a shack on Pensacola Beach, where one of the bands Charlie booked was a group of young guys from Daytona Beach named “The Allman Joys”. When they weren’t backing up a girl band Charlie managed, they’d play their own stuff. I wouldn’t see them on stage again until the Atlanta Pop Fest of 1970 at the Free Stage down the hill from the main stage. By then, and probably with the help of that venue, they were a household name.
One of my first connections to Atlanta was selling “The Great Speckled Bird” at my high school for a quarter. My parents weren’t too crazy with a hippie rag tied in a bundle arriving at their doorstep every week. And the faculty was none too happy about it but my classmates were eager to learn about the national freak scene from a place in their own backyard.
My first of two experiences at an Atlanta Pop Fest was in the summer of ’69. One fine June morning, a few days after school ending for the year, I was perusing through one of Charlie’s Billboard magazines – I’d always go directly to the “Concerts” page to see what was happening around the country – when I saw that a pop festival, whatever the hell that was, was coming to the Atlanta area. The list of performers was enticing so, without telling our parents or anyone, my friend Moose and I (that was his real name) hopped on a Greyhound bus the Wednesday before the event and headed up to a place called Hampton, Georgia. I was fifteen.
Now keep in mind, I had hardly ever had a beer, much less indulged in drugs or even pot. I was so ignorant about how that world worked, I remember the first night of the fest we were squeezed among the crowd about a hundred feet from the edge of the stage when a guy a few years older than me handed me something in the dark. I looked down and saw what looked like a Marlboro cigarette, glowing on one end. I was confused. I looked quizzically at the guy and actually asked him, “What, you want me to put that out?” I’ll never forget his look of confusion and annoyance at this kid who had no idea what to do with a joint.
Thanks to Charlie’s connection to the music and radio world, I was lucky enough to hear music before the rest of the world got to check it out. So when I saw this band called “Grand Funk Railroad” making its national debut at the Atlanta Speedway that weekend, I was already pretty familiar with them and the repertoire they performed. Same with Led Zeppelin, who hadn’t released Led Zeppelin II, the follow up to their first album from the year before. That album wouldn’t be available to the general public until that fall. So I’m sure a lot of the crowd hearing “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time was mind blowing. But they didn’t realize they were hearing it performed a bit differently from the album cut; Just before the big finale where Plant wails, “You neeeed!” And the band hits those two chords, Blam, Blammmm! And instead of going down in pitch on “Looooove!”like on their record, he went up! And I always thought that was so cool to hear it performed that way.
Anyway, we had a blast. It was a great experience for my fifteen year old mind, although the adults around my house didn’t think so. Upon returning home, I got my brother’s latest edition of Billboard, went straight to the “Concerts” section and saw that another pop fest was planned in just a couple weeks: “A pop festival is scheduled in the town of Wallkill in upstate New York featuring such and such bands, etc., etc.” It looked like most of the same acts that we had just seen at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. We figured we’d go. Only thing, when the dates to the event (which had changed its venue to Woodstock) approached, the night before, juvenile delinquents that we were, we got arrested for stealing packages of frozen chickens from an outdoor freezer at a nearby middle school. We both ended up in jail, my partner in crime – literally – Moose for a month, since he was a year older than me. I watched Woodstock unfold from my parents’ living room.
I didn’t make it – one of those major regrets you live with for the remainder of your life – but it does make one hell of a story at cocktail parties when my wife, who attended Woodstock, reveals to the thrill of people meeting her that she was there (“what was it like?? Where did you stay??”) that I can tell them I was on my way but got busted for stealing chickens.
Between then and the next pop fest exactly a year later in Byron, my experience with drugs, pot, psychedelics had taken a total 180. I was ready for the 1970 fest amidst the soybeans and peachtrees. I took my friend Jimmy Howell with me this time, not my first choice but my best friend lived with strict, God fearing parents and he couldn’t sneak away from his house as easily as I and Jimmy could.
The first afternoon we were there, was a Wednesday, I believe. And of course the first thing we did was pull out our measly handful of dollar bills and purchase two huge caps of brown powder that turned out to be pure mescaline. Jimmy and I took one cap each. Within less than twenty minutes we started to come on as we were walking to a patch of woods about a quarter mile away where some other freaks had told us was what they called a “free stage”.
The next thing I know, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a huge wave of ennui. I suddenly was too exhausted to walk anymore, like Dorothy in the poppy fields on the way to the Emerald City. We could hear the constant “Boom, boom” of music drifting from the woods enticing us to continue, but all I could do was lie down laughing in the soft grass in the peachtree grove we were camping in. Jimmy kept prodding me to get up, “Come on! It’s not that far!” we were both laughing about the silliness of it all but finally, in frustration, he walked away and hollered over his shoulder, “I’ll see ya there. I wanna hear some music. Just look for me when you finally get there.”
I watched him disappear over a low hill and I just lay there, listening to ape-like voices drift in and out from across the meadow, varying in pitch and timbre like a broken record player. Suddenly, as the entire world turned to day glo rubber before my eyes, I realized I was . . ALONE.
After a few minutes I forced myself up and looked around. The peachtree orchard was dark. People were crossing it from one end to the other. I couldn’t discern distance; One moment they were a hundred yards away, the next moment they were in my face. I slowly headed toward the low hill where Jimmy had disappeared and stumbled upon two older guys. To my fifteen year old brain, they looked ancient but looking back now, I’m sure they were maybe in their early twenties. I flopped onto the ground right next to where they were chatting. They grew silent and observed me, not a great feeling while you’re tripping. I opened my hallucinating heart and forced out a confession: “I took a bunch of mescaline.” “Oh? Really?” they responded, feigning their desire to have a conversation with a teenage stranger tripping his brains out. “I think I took too much.” “Maybe you did,” one of them responded. A moment of silence as I thought it over while the music boomed off in the distance and the ape voices drifted across the field . “Maybe I didn’t take enough.” They got a kick out of this and replied, “You may be right.” I sat there speechless as they watched and resumed their conversation. In my addled mind, I could hear THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT ME. In the third person, they surmised my situation. “Yeah, these kids come to these things and take anything anyone gives them and the next thing you know, you got this,” one offered. “Yeah, the one thing about these events. You got children from all over the country getting into God knows what.” This went on for about five minutes before I finally had the strength to get up and stumble away, leaving them behind in the meadow without saying goodbye. I walked down a dirt road as the boom, booming got louder and more visceral. There was something about the rhythm and the cheers that went up when the music stopped that encouraged me, put a smile on my face and calmed me down. Looking back, I’m estimating at least an hour had gone by since I had dosed with Jimmy. Finally, I entered a woodsy area and started walking down, down an incline of trails and freaks bordering each side, listening to the music, selling their wares, everything from handcrafted goods to more drugs. Finally I made it to the Free Stage. The area before it was packed with kids and freaks rolling to some band that was blasting. I do remember the Allman Brothers did perform that night, the first time I had seen them since the Pensacola Beach days when they were the Allman Joys.
In between bands, the obligatory barefoot, long-haired freak in jeans and no shirt walked out on stage and started making announcements: information on drugs, events, the next band coming up and, to my relief, lost people announcements. I squeezed my way through the crowd and walked to the edge of the stage it his feet. He leaned over to me and I asked, “Can you tell Jimmy that David is here and to meet me at the front of the stage?” He repeated it and within five minutes, there was my partner in crime. When we saw each other, you’d think we were two long lost brothers, war refugees in the battle of the mind seeing each other for the first time in eons. We hugged and listened to the music for the next several hours until we figured it was time to head to the main event. It must have been dawn when we started climbing the trail back up, bordered by people in tents selling their wares and watching the parade pass them. I remember one person calling out like a Bedouin in a bazaar, “Mushrooms! Three dollars!” Walking next to us hunched over a long walking stick with a look like a disgruntled hobbit, a young man who looked centuries older than his age growled, “Mushrooms? For sale?? Bah!” as we got toward the top of the trail, there was a fellow, tall, long hair and the look of infinite wisdom on his face, older than us (I now realize pretty much everyone there looked older than us because they were) our eyes met. We knew he knew what we knew, that he was holding and selling. We walked up to him eager and puppy-like. “Do you have anything we can take off your hands?” He looked warily at us, and then paternally as he pulled a matchbox out of his military jacket and held it before our eager eyes. “I have two hits of purple microdot left. I’m not gonna sell it to you. I’m gonna give these to you. As long as you promise me: you are NOT GONNA FREAK OUT.” “We won’t!” we nodded obediently to him. So, it was pretty much like that every night, each day we were there for the entire four days, to the point that after the third day, any psychedelic we took – mescaline, acid, psilocybin, you name it – pretty much stopped working on our brains until we were just beatific beings, speechless, sleepless and observant of the cosmic carnival that was going on around us.
It’s been fifty years. I recently had my decades long dream come true: I finally moved to the Atlanta area after living in LA for twenty years, twenty years in Miami before that. I dragged my Brooklyn/LA wife with me, who wasn’t too happy with the move, but I assured her it would be all right. We live in a beautiful house about twenty miles south of downtown in Fayetteville. We meet younger folks to whom we tell our war stories, mine of Atlanta, Ellen’s of her days at Woodstock, which annoys the hell out of me because her confession of attending Woodstock is always followed by a litany of “oohs and aahhs!” while mine of the two Atlanta events get a polite nod of condescension. I got a little revenge the other day though; We were on our way back from a field trip to Milledgeville about a hundred miles away when our GPS led us back home through Hampton. I thought, the raceway must be around here somewhere. Our map led us down the exact roads to the place and, sure enough, we turned a curve and there, for the first time in a half century, I drove past the entrance to the Atlanta Motor Speedway for the first time since that summer of ’69.
So, I didn’t make it to Woodstock. Who cares? I got my revenge by moving my wife to near the scene of the cosmic crime not far from our very back yard.
I love finally living in the Atlanta area. Long time coming. Next stop: Byron, Georgia at the historic landmark where the last true life adventure occured on the fiftieth anniversary this coming Fourth of July.
