![]() Nelson and I piled into my parent’s blue Chevy Laguna and headed toward a parking lot in nearby Monterey, where at the appointed hour of 5:00am we gathered three of my high school friends. ![]() A family financial tragedy caused by our father losing his small business in Chicago had necessitated the sudden dislocation, and Nelson being asked (more like “strongly encouraged” in Geiger dialect) to transpose himself from Chicago to California to help bailout the family shipwreck was part of the collateral damage. My parents and I had recently relocated from the quaint confines of our lovely Carmel townhouse to a dark and dilapidated two-bedroom apartment clinging to the side of a dusty highway in Salinas, a low-income farming community twenty-five miles due east from the nearest beach and referred to by locals as the Lettuce Capital of the World. I was 17, and I was sharing a bedroom with my brother Nelson. JThat’s the day I heard “Free Bird” for the very first time. I’m the short guy standing next to the girl in the tank top. Check out the video if you don’t believe me. Imagine my surprise when, in a sea of humanity, I looked over the crowd and saw myself onscreen. The final scene of the one-hour and thirty-five-minute documentary, titled “If I Leave Here Tomorrow,” is shot in a blaze of sunshine at an outdoor stadium as the band plays its finale. I recently found myself watching a film on the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the legendary southern rock band that tragically lost several members in a plane crash in 1977.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |