So it went on the document reveals: After promoting for a number of hours, Mother and I might gingerly repackage the whole lot again into her automobile, and I’d drive us again dwelling. We’d break up the money, and I’d roll us a joint. “For Richard,” we’d toast as thick blue smoke unfurled round our heads.
“Did he hang around with the acts different than simply working with them?” I requested.
Mother bit her lip and thought of it. Way back, Richard instructed my mother a few of Peace Concert events’ historical past — how he saved cash from his job on the phone firm to e book his first acts, and the way selling was like playing and he misplaced all of it on a foul run of live shows the place the ticket gross sales didn’t materialize.
“Not likely,” Mother stated. “He wasn’t in it for that. He favored earning money — and he did it for the joys.” The fun of the chance, or of making an occasion that might reverberate in individuals’s minds for many years? She stated she didn’t know.
My mother, Shari, met my dad when she was 22. A theater main and techie, she’d simply blown out of faculty from Michigan State, headed 700 miles south earlier than touchdown in Birmingham and met him simply three days later, launched by way of a mutual buddy. By then, he’d misplaced the whole lot to live performance promotion. Their first “date” was him grilling steaks on his patio, The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See” enjoying loud on the turntable.
I requested Mother when she realized about Dad’s rock days. She needed to assume on it — her hair grey and all the way down to her again now, not like the darkish bob she’d sported most of my life. “After just some days collectively,” she stated. “He stated, ‘I’ll let you know my story, however just one time.’”
“Whoa, it was like that?”
She stated he hated outdated concertgoers eager to wax nostalgic with him in regards to the glory days. I figured Dad, like me, all the time had massive goals hounding him down.
Time spins like a vinyl, and after doing just a few of those document reveals and listening to each story Mother knew, I started reaching out to Dad’s outdated pals and work associates from his selling prime. But I heard the identical factor I already knew: Dad was a “workaholic.”
“And the way precisely did he fall out of selling?”
About this I’d heard completely different tales. Mother had all the time stated he’d misplaced all of it on a foul live performance run with Joe Cocker, and that he was distracted chasing a girl nicknamed “Little Purple” who by no means reciprocated my father’s curiosity.
However I’d heard a couple of outdated affiliate say that Dad had additionally been outgunned by a hotshot New York promoter named Tony Ruffino who right now will get the credit score for placing Birmingham on the map for giant rock bands. One outdated rock buddy who used to hold up flyers and do different promotional work even stated that Richard tried to go rogue and signify Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on his personal, and for this the document biz blacklisted him.
“However what was he like as an individual?” I’d ask these strangers who knew “the outdated Richard.”
That was all the time tougher for them to reply.
“He was a non-public man,” was the perfect reply I received from a person named Wendell, a associate in an early reserving company my dad based and later offered. “He didn’t discuss a lot about what was happening in his head.”
I turned determined, trying to our household albums and VHS tapes for solutions. However right here, too, Dad was the invisible promoter, so steadily on the opposite aspect of the digicam capturing/directing holidays and journeys as an alternative of being in them. A backstage man, even in his private life.
Wendell steered I go to the enduring 2121 high-rise in downtown Birmingham to see my father’s outdated workplace, the place he constructed his Peace Concert events empire practically six many years in the past in what was then referred to as “the penthouse,” room 1727. After I instructed Mother in regards to the concept, she smiled and stated Richard used to level out the 2121 constructing of their earlier days, telling her he labored on the prime in an workplace with a view.
So I drove a half-hour into city to see for myself, unsure what Wendell thought I might discover so clarifying there. Driving the elevator up, my reflection rippled within the scratched, stainless-steel doorways in entrance of me, trying like a leaner, taller ghost of my father.