The High Road: Going Places

Excerpt from The High Road: Memories from a Long Trip by Mark Herndon

The southern rock explosion was at its peak, and it captivated me. Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, The Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels Band, and Atlanta Rhythm Section were in a class all by themselves. I more or less learned by playing along to their records on the set of drums in my bedroom. I set two stereo speakers on either side of my head, and I put a turntable on a piece of plywood hung from the ceiling so the needle wouldn’t skip from the vibrations filing the room from the drums. On off days, I would spend seven or eight hours at a time practicing that way.

My neighbors were mostly college kids from Francis Marion where I had recently attended. Like I said—mostly.  I came to blows with a guy who wasn’t a student one evening. We went at it pretty good for a while until somebody called the cops. The fight broke up before the law got there. Neither of us really “won” the fight, but I kept on playing and practicing and he didn’t hassle me anymore.

The thing is, it really wasn’t practice to me—it was me playing to the imaginary people up in the nosebleed section, playing out to a sea of faces and a forest of arms in the air, filling a sold-out arena. Sometimes a whole day would be gone in what seemed like thirty minutes.

My poor angry neighbor might have been banging on the door, but I was in another world. I reckon he just gave up. To him I’d like to say, “Wherever and whoever you are now, I’m sorry for being a pecker-head, but it was worth it.”

After that, I began to play in a few local bands, and we even landed some local gigs. Man, did I think I was big time! I was a pro! (Now mind you, the only difference between a pro and an amateur is that the pro gets paid.) I even got a taste of how ugly the “biz” can be, too.

One of the bands I played in for a while was a rock group called “Magic City.” We got a gig playing at a hole-in-the-wall club called “Big Daddy’s Lounge” in Latta, South Carolina.

Back then, Latta was a one caution-light speed trap with a smattering of mom-and-pop stores and a few trailers scattered around, about twenty miles south of Florence. I think the club was a tobacco barn before it was a watering hole, because the atmosphere was “unfinished,” to say the least. 

During daytime, the place was dark as a tomb inside. The floor was packed dirt. One stinky gas heater squatted in the center of the room, it’s blue flames hissing and throwing off just enough warmth to heat the space where two or three old frazzled stuffed chairs sat amidst peanut hulls, cigarette butts, and empty beer cans. The rest of the room shivered or sweltered, surrounded by walls covered by only the patchy siding—no insulation, no drywall, just boards with drafty space between them. I reckon building codes did not apply to places like that back then. Someone had thrown together a bar made of plywood with a cash register on top.

This is where ole “Big Daddy” himself sat all night, taking in money for beer, wine, and God knows what else. The stage, on the opposite side of the room, was constructed of wooden pallets held together by a big musty piece of carpet someone had nailed down.

The bathroom was missing most of the outside wall where one of the urinals once hung. A small sink clung to the other wall, mostly brown from the minerals in the water—I hope. If you had any other business in there besides peeing, you could step through the gaping hole in the wall and visit the outhouse standing a few steps into the piney woods out back.

We were thrilled because we had been booked to play there every night for a week, which equaled one hundred and twenty-five bucks! Boy, were we getting somewhere now.