Hello boys and girls, grampas and mee-maws. Its your ole fiend Eddie the Road Manager with some more rambleings ’bout when I had some of the best times of my life in the Hippie community in good ole Atlanta.

Ya’ll remember The Fruit Jungle? I spent many late nights food tripping in that place. One thing cool…for a while there was an older dude probably in his late 40’s working there late shift, and I had been told that if you were broke, slip the dude a joint and he wouldn’t charge you. I had to try this and with a little paranoia on my part slipped the man two joints to pay for soda, cake and cigs…WOW!!! the cat smiled at me wiggled his eyebrows and said have a nice nite. After this, I would always bring him a “present” even if I wuz paying…unfortunatly he didn’t last too long there.

This ones a hoot…I know there has to be folks who remember this happening. In the rear of Atlantis Rising was a large dirt parking lot where folks started hanging out doing what we did back then. My friend Jimmy Smith and I were walking down a side street going to the parking lot when all of a sudden! Man all the cops you ever wanted to see were screeching and motorcycling and sireening to the parking lot…scared us to death!! I mean we thought it was the inquisition-final last round up-death to the beholder and then some come at last. Being prudent and not half dumb hippies he and I found a nice little hidey hole and hid our stashes and went to investigate. Not 10 minutes after the big cop-o-rama drama cops began leaving the area…swear to god 2 different motorcycle dudes shot us the peace sign!! Others were waving and smiling as they left…strange mo-pocky…we found out latter there was a beat cop in the area and was in the parking lot being pretty friendly with everybody and a couple of guys hanging out thougth it might be fun to dose this cop. They got a very pretty lady to offer the cop an iced cold coke with a hit of acid in it. What caused the big cop infestation was the poor guy was having so much FUN he forgot to call in on his radio and let the big cop on the radio know all was well. As I remember, the tripping policeman stayed with us for a few hours…I guess the cops thought we could take care of him….wonder where he wound up…..

Another fond memory of mine was the Turkey Trip in the ballroom of that hotel across from the Fox. I saw the poster for it, but I only remember the ABB playing that night. I had a friend who was new to atlanta and had never seen the allmans…so I somehow arranged to get him on the stage crew and buy him a hit or orange barrel. the first time I saw the ABB i was tripping my a** off so this would be a good way for Acey to see them (see previous post)…it was fun watching every body bumping around and trying to maintain while moving various mysterious pieces of musical equipment….sometime during the show, the Brothers were in a particularly intense jam and this weird guy jumped out of the audience and started wailing on Duane’s microphone…he was doing some pretty good lead singer moves but the mike was turned off…what was cool was no one jumped on the guy or tried to bounce him off the stage, Kim Payne Allman Bros. road manager just reached up and turned the mike on. This scared the shit out of leadsinger man to hear himself at volume and he kinda slunk back in to the audience.

First real concert I saw was the Dave Clark 5 in the auditorium…went to Atlanta Cabana and oggled them for a while.

Place I stayed for quite a while was wonderful. An apartment in an old house about block and a half from Catacombs…pot-ment was one of 3 in this house and Berry Oakley and Mike Callahan lived there for a while…Berry had just come off a tour with Tommy Roe and was just hanging…he used to get me stoned and teach me progressions on the guitar so he could practice bass lines…I was awful but it was fun. Our ‘potment was close enough to the strip where alot of times I would just put on some tunes turn um up and sit on the front porch and meet bunches of people…so cool.

Almost every memory I have about those days are positive and truly fun. There were times when a friend would get busted or in trouble and that would be a drag. I was stopped once driving and didn’t have my wallet on me so I was guilty of driving without a license…withno ID the good ole DeKalb county po lice called a PADDY WAGON!! and hauled me down to the city jail…bummer…I actually met these great black dudes whome I played checkers with at a quarter a game. I didn’t have to try very hard to lose but I made sure to. So these guys could buy cigaretts & shit. One bummer was there was a thing with music in the park that day and my friends who could get me out did not know i was busted untill Jim Neiman was doing his set and dedicated a song to “Eddie the road manager in the clink”. Man!! do you think i was lucky or what? I think I was very lucky at that time in history to go to the Atlanta city jail and come out smiling…..whew!!

I’ll try to add to this as time goes on…shoot I’m 59 years old memory ain’t what it used to be. I do miss all the friends I made back then…some of the best friends i’ve ever had…having some of the best times WE ever had. Now a days when i see the news and all the crap thats happening in the world and around the town i live in, I realize how very lucky we were to grow up in such turbulent times (LOL).

peace and happiness, eddie