Category: The Arts

SPECIAL UPDATE — Fundraiser for Scooter Oi

On July 5, 2014, a benefit concert was held at The Beacon for Skooter Oi. Skooter and his wife Carolyn Jones own and operate Liberty House Guitar Shop.

Skooter suffers from non-alcohol related cirrhosis of the liver. His prognosis is unpredictable, and his condition is managed largely through diet. 

The benefit concert, which was organized by Skooter’s friend, Jamison Taylor featured singers and songwriters.  The plan is to make this an annual event to help musicians with health problems offset their medical bills.

Contributions can be made to:
Alabama Musicians Care
℅ Metro Bank
800 Martin Street South
Pell City, Alabama  35128

For more information, go to www.alabamamc.org

Story and Photos by Wallace Bromberg Jr.

When the house lights dim, and the stage lights come up, anticipation sweeps through an audience like wind blowing through a stand of pine trees.

Unnoticed and unknown are those backstage, in the wings and on the catwalks. The artist is the focal point, and the performance is everything. Those who are hidden are the technicians and gaffers who make up the production crew.

Their job is to make the show great. The lights, sound, timing and even the performance itself is driven by the crew.

Nothing happens by chance. On the stage is a clock, seen by everyone in the crew as well as the performers. When the stage lights come up, every sound and move is carefully planned, timed and executed with precision.

Stage right and stage left hide instrument technicians, ready to spring into action should any instrument slide out of tune, lose a string or have some other electronic or technical difficulty. In the back of the auditorium are sound and lighting technicians ready to make instant adjustments to overcome any anomaly that may arise.

If a drummer drops a drum stick, one magically appears in his hand. If a guitar loses a string , slips out of tune or suffers some electronic malfunction, another guitar is slipped into place, plugged in and turned on so that not a beat is missed. Being in tune is a given.

Each instrument is carefully set up to eliminate variation and to suit the playing artist. Perfect. There is no room for error.

Hard work, long hours and intense pressure on both a professional and personal level are the hallmarks of top venue concert production. The impromptu atmosphere is an act. It is a facade that conceals a tough, professionally executed schedule that lasts from 60 to 180 minutes or more.

Overruns are costly. The union workers go on overtime. Casino venues have show curfews. They want the audience back on the casino floor. The clock is everything. Precision and perfection are demanded. One mistake or miscue can cascade into a disaster.

This is the crucible where Pell City’s Liberty House Guitar Shop was forged.

A testimony to the meticulous nature of concert production is the stage clock over the passageway to the back room of the shop on U.S. 78 East. Scooter’s Clock hangs as a reminder that everyone has to work together to get it done right.

It is the same Scooter Oi Carolyn Jones met when Scooter was doing lights for Lynyrd Skynyrd and writing a backstage newsletter for the band. What started as a ploy by Carolyn’s brother to use her as “blonde bait” to get backstage grew into a successful professional and personal partnership that has lasted almost 20 years. Carolyn did not get a backstage pass for her brother, but Scooter did get her phone number, and she got his.

Two weeks after they met, Scooter was doing lights for Peter Frampton in Las Vegas, where Carolyn was working for a company that supplied uniforms and linens to the hotel industry. She went to the concert in hopes of seeing Scooter. When Scooter saw her, he said, “Look, if you want to hang out with us, you either have to be real entertaining, or you have to work.”

Work she did. Wearing high heels, business suit, makeup and puffy blonde hair, Carolyn pushed loaded equipment boxes out to the trucks as if she were one of the crew. She never looked back.

For 10 years, Scooter was Peter Frampton’s production manager, and Carolyn worked as his guitar technician. Life on the road is hard, and a 10-year run with an artist like Frampton is unheard of. Yet they did it.

Scooter, with his Dark Places, Inc. production company, was able to administer a crew and manage Frampton’s concerts successfully. During the off seasons, Scooter worked the rodeo circuit doing light and sound production. When the concert season came back, it was on the road again, primarily with Frampton.

Little more than four years ago, Scooter and Carolyn decided to come off the road. Carolyn wanted to settle close to her mother, and the concert production business was beginning to change. Scooter was interested in starting a live venue, “but the more I looked into it, the less attractive it became.” Instead, when he saw the owner putting up a for rent sign on their location, Scooter “put skid marks on the road in front of the building,” and decided to open their shop.

Scooter’s understanding of sound and lighting equipment, combined with Carolyn’s technical expertise with guitars has made The Liberty House Guitar shop a key asset for serious musicians.

Carolyn carefully inspects and adjusts every guitar that comes through Liberty House Guitar Shop. When setting up an instrument, Carolyn provides the owner with a specification sheet showing the exact settings, and the changes she has made. Using the data she provides, meaningful changes can be made to fit the artist’s preferences. “When something changes, this makes it much easier to identify what it is, and set it right.”

Jazz guitarist Reggie Stokes from Birmingham said, “Since I found this shop, I don’t take my instruments anywhere else. The work Carolyn does is awesome, and word is spreading fast. It is unusual to find a shop where the people really know what they are looking at, and know how to meet my needs. You don’t find this in the large music stores, and it is worth the drive.” According to Stokes, he and his close friend, Keith “Cashmere” Williams, are sold on the work done at Liberty House Guitar Shop.

Scooter is equally meticulous when it comes to audio visual and sound equipment. “We are about sales, service, installation and education.” When setting up a system for a church or business, Scooter and Carolyn take time to learn exactly what the customer wants the system to do.

They specify the appropriate equipment based on the customer’s objectives, then set the system up accordingly. Their strength lies in simplifying the system and training the customer.

“We label everything to eliminate any guesswork. It takes time, but it is worth it.”

Two years ago, Liberty House Guitar Shop set up in-house recording capability, so musicians could make demo CDs and collaborate with one another in a studio environment. Though in its infancy, Scooter thinks it has promise. Recording is an integral part of learning how to play on a higher level. Collaboration builds skill quickly. In addition, Carolyn’s daughter, Pink, is teaching guitar, violin and mandolin in the shop.

Long hours and years on the road set a firm foundation for Carolyn and Scooter. Liberty House Guitar Shop is, for them, more than a business. It represents a transition in life, coming home, settling down and letting the roots grow.

Editor’s Note: For a glimpse at the work of some of Liberty House Guitar clients, check out reggiesstokesmusic.com and cashmerewilliams.com.

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Meet Clayton Garner

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Wallace Bromberg Jr.

Clayton Garner sees things.

Neither ghosts nor drug-induced revelations, his visions are of projects yet-to-be constructed. His hallucinogen is creativity, and it often keeps him awake at night.

“I can see things that aren’t there,” he says. “I can see things finished before they’re started.”

A former florist, a historian and storyteller, 82-year-old Garner is a true Southern original. Some people call him, “quirky,” which in the South is just a polite term for “eccentric.” What else would you call a man who saves the cuttings from his white hair, draping them over outdoor wall decor so the fox wrens will have nest material? “I can’t stand my hair going to a landfill,” he explains.

But if Clayton Garner is eccentric, it’s because he chooses to be. He thrives on his eccentricity, wearing it as proudly as the homemade baubles and oversized turquoise necklaces that drape his neck when he goes out for Sunday dinner. He doesn’t care what people think of him. But like a larger-than-life character from a Tennessee Williams play, he does love the attention.

“I make tacky jewelry,” he readily admits. “If I’m not going to get attention, why bother?”

During his 40 years as a florist, Garner created floral arrangements for weddings and funerals. He also tore down, moved and rebuilt old houses and barns that were destined to be covered by the flood waters of a dam or eaten by vines and mildew. Now, his projects are in his own two acres of heaven in Cropwell, where he tends to his flowers and collects Garner genealogy and Avondale Mills memorabilia. He also raises purebred Nubian goats.

“I’ve been raising goats for 50 years,” he says. “I showed them at the State Fair and other shows. I’m a member of the American Dairy Goat Association.”

The man who sometimes wears a glass Jesus pin on a black vest doesn’t go to church, but has religious shrines all over his house. He believes in God and Jesus and miracles. He prays before a picture of Jesus he says turned from black and white to color overnight. He has a maple tree that was barren of buds one day, covered in its signature purple leaves the next. “I’ve learned to accept these things because I live with them,” he says.

That’s why a metal sign at the front of his yard proclaims, “Water garden plants, Miracle Acres.” Another, an historical marker, testifies that his main house was built in 1826. Confederate soldiers mustered there, and Cherokee Indians passed it during the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma territory. The house had been empty for 12 years when he got it 39 years ago. “It had three bare light bulbs, and the electricity was still on and the furniture was still in it,” he says. Built by Caleb Capps, originally it was just a one-room cabin with no windows but three doors. “In 1844, Capps sold it to John W. Jones from Virginia,” Garner says, as he begins the first of many historical recitations on an early spring tour of his property. “Jones had 10 children so he added another room and a dog trot. Several rooms have been added through the years.”

He used hired help when he first moved there in 1975, to take off the tin roof, build the porch back, to install drywall, wiring and plumbing. He put in a bath, and later tore it out and rebuilt it with marine-grade flooring and a cast-iron tub.

The chimney in wife Dean’s bedroom is original, but vines were growing from its red-clay chinking when the Garners took possession. When Garner pulled out the vines, the chinking came out. With the patience he exhibits during the hours of beading, barbed-wire bending and sewing that go into his costumes and decor, he rebuilt the chimney stone by stone, replacing mud with mortar.

His flair as a florist comes out in decor such as the barbed wire, dried okra pods and miniature wooden quail concoction hanging in Dean’s bedroom, and in the crosses of driftwood or wire and shells. Everywhere there are photographs: Of he and Dean, their daughter, their grandchildren and their ancestors. Early photos show a clean-shaven Garner with short hair, while in later ones he’s decked out in one of his costumes, or “outfits,” as he calls them, wearing a cowboy or farmer’s hat. And beads. Always the beads. They are draped over photo frames, deer antlers and crosses. They dangle from chandeliers and bed posts.

Garner points to a small, framed Christmas ornament. He made 30 just like it while recuperating from a broken leg five years ago, cutting pineapples from an antique, crocheted bedspread and sewing beads around the edges. “I’ve been doing this bead stuff a long time,” he says.

A pathway made of decorative cement tiles winds among the oxalis, English dogwoods, lenten roses, jonquils, yellow Oriental irises, bamboo, dwarf buckeye, narcissus and buttercups. Where they lead over a small stone-and-concrete bridge, Clayton tells new visitors, “Go look at those kittens and see if you can run them out from under the bridge.” He can barely contain his glee as the unsuspecting take a peak. Then he pulls a string that sets a tiny plastic-and-fake-fur troll to waving its hands and dancing from side to side. Clayton points to a spindly tree with twisted branches that stick out in every direction, like something from a surrealist painting. “This is the biggest Harry Lauder walking stick tree you’ll ever see,” he says.

In the midst of the shrubs and flowers stands a 15-foot stone bell tower Garner built a few years ago. One of its stones stands out because it’s black, charred from the fire it endured when Hall Hill School, in the former Avondale Mills village, burned down.

He doesn’t throw anything away, and sooner or later he finds a place for everything. Half-buried earthen jugs stick out of stone and mortar walls, colorful tin fish and green cactus stand silent and motionless behind a still-life “aquarium” made of boxed-in window panes, and an iron bell post flies a faded Confederate flag. It’s one of several posts someone gave him. “People give me stuff,” he says. “I don’t refuse it. I deserve it. I give away a lot, too.”

At the back of the property are two ponds, where he grows floating plants, water irises and spider lilies. “You can’t compare this place to nowhere else in this state,” he says.

Bits and pieces of St. Clair and Garner history are woven into the tapestry of the 22 rooms that make up the main house, grounds and outbuildings. The spindles in his kitchen doorway came from the Mays house that used to stand beside Cropwell Baptist Church. A chestnut bed has been in his family for 200 years. “A lot of Garners and Pearsons were born in this bed,” he says.

In 1979, he built an 8-foot-by-8-foot cabin playhouse for daughter, Michelle. The foundation stones came from his Grandfather Pence’s place on Will Creek near Attalla. Later, Clayton raised the cabin and dug out under it to build a wine cellar, which is stocked with empty bottles in a wine rack built into a wall. The rack is made from lightening rods out of Miss Iola Roberts’s house. “She was principal at Avondale Mills school,” he says. “She taught me. I was one of her pets.”

He has always salvaged old structures to make new ones. After 20 years at his own shop in Pell City and 10 with Norton’s Florist, he operated Clayton Florist for 10 more years out of a building behind his home that he refers to as “the barn house.” Framed with 2-by-6s that came from the former Tom Tucker Horse Arena in nearby Lakeside Park, it has seals of 12 x 12-foot heart pine from the old Possum Trot Church at Riverside near Huckleberry Pond. The logs in the addition to the house were salvaged from a dilapidated barn in Easonville that had to be moved to build Logan Martin Lake. Other parts came from a two-story log house on the Watson farm in Lincoln, which originally served as a post office for the Pony Express in the town of Chachotta on Choccolocco Creek. The inside walls of the barn house are lined with the last of the lumber sawed at Snead Lumber Company in Snead, Alabama.

“I have the doors to the butler’s pantry of Iola Roberts’s house, as well as its weather vanes,” Clayton says. “They are built into the barn house, too.”

The house is deceptively large, with three bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a hallway connecting one side to the other. Two of the rooms are upstairs, on opposites of the house. Each has its own stairway. There are photos of Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II, because they are distant cousins, he says, and of Elvis and Larry Gatlin, because he likes Elvis and The Gatlin Brothers, a former country music group.

This is where he keeps the genealogy booklets family members have given him. He can quote the name of each person in his lineage for 47 generations, all the way back to 534. “Ten of those generations were in America,” he says. “The first cotton mill in Alabama, at Piedmont, was built by my great grandfather, William Marion Pearson of Glasgow, Scotland. He lived to be 106.” His other great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Garner, who settled from Virginia, started the first Baptist Church in Alabama, he said.

Asked how he knows so much about history, familial and otherwise, he attempts to explain. “I’m a nut. I know a little about everything,” he says. “Trouble is I don’t ever forget. It just stacks up. If I told all I knew. …” His voice trails off, and he winks, hinting that he could get lots of folks around Pell City in trouble if he were to keep talking. “People tell their florist everything,” he says.

He has a collection of memorabilia from Avondale Mills, including signs and photos of the children who swept the floor of the mill 12 hours a day, six days a week, for the silver dollar paid to their parents weekly. An upstairs bedroom displays several manually-operated office machines from the mill. “My mother worked there,” he says. “I went to school there. I knew everyone in the mill houses. They’re all gone now, the houses and the people.”

Two hexagon-shaped, colored-glass windows in an upstairs parlor inspired him to build an addition to the barn house. “The windows came from an old cathedral in New Orleans, and they change colors as the light of the day changes,” Garner says. “The colors were sprayed on them. It’s a lost art.”

He built the 19-foot rock-and-cement chimney that is connected to an old Imperial Beaver wood-burning stove that he used to cook on. Now, the stove’s oven and warming box hold more of his beaded trinkets.

Some of his trinkets and costumes are seasonal, like the cape he made from a Christmas tree skirt and a fox-fur collar he found at a local thrift shop. When he wears one of his outfits, he accompanies it with a shiny, twisted, wooden walking stick, again draped with his signature beads. He also carries a tiny flask that he dramatically lifts to his lips from time to time, although it’s always empty. “I don’t dress like this all the time,” he confesses. “Only when I’m on stage.” One of his stages is the Cracker Barrel in Pell City, where he has lunch every Sunday. “I walk among the tables so everyone can see me,” he says. “The people love it.”

He says he can’t take credit for all of the decor in his buildings, though. “Dean crocheted the coverlets on five of the beds in our house and the barn house,” he points out. “She made most of the curtains, including the set that she made from striped overalls denim made at Avondale Mills here in Pell City.”

Come July, he and Dean will celebrate their 47th wedding anniversary. His wife says he is always doing something and can hardly stand the winter because he can’t get outside to putter.

“I keep this house clean, he keeps his clean,” she says, referring first to their living quarters and then to the barn house. “He goes down there and reads. Sometimes in the summer he takes a nap there because it’s so cool. He cleans it every spring.”

She says he’ll get an idea for a new project and will stay awake at night figuring out how to do it. Garner says when he can’t sleep, he gets up and heats a cup of low-sodium chicken broth, a guaranteed sleeping potion.

On the front porch of his main house, Garner has a stack of nine cedar boards from the old pavilion at Lakeside Park. Each is 2 inches thick and more than a foot wide. He plans to use them to build a curb for the well in his front yard. He wants to run a pipe into the well so he can draw water for his gardens. Where will he get the plans for that curb? He’s already seen them inside his head, of course. It’s just a matter of staying awake a few nights to work out the details.

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Story by Jane Newton Henry
Photos by Wallace Bromberg Jr.

When day is done for these
officials, the beat goes on
By day, he’s mayor of Pell City. But nights and weekends you’ll find him crooning to the crowds in his very own band. Same holds true for Alan Furr, a judge by day and quite the singer and guitarist for the Wingnuts away from court. And the superintendent of schools, put a mandolin in his hand and he’s just as at home as he is at the head of the class.

Pell City Mayor Joe Funderburg, Pell City School Superintendent Michael Barber and St. Clair County District Judge Alan Furr became interested in music when they were young. Although they now have “day jobs,” music remains their hobby, their pastime and their passion. Funderburg plays rock and roll while Barber plays bluegrass, and Furr plays both.

Rock-and-roll mayor
“I look at it like this,” said Funderburg. “Some people play golf; some people hunt and fish. Everybody has hobbies of some sort, and I am fortunate that I am able to play music.”

The mayor has played six- and 12-string guitars and sung in bands for more than 40 years. “I’ve always enjoyed music,” he said. “I liked to sing when I was small, and I wanted to play an instrument.

“I begged for a guitar and got a $20 Sears and Roebuck Silvertone,” he said. “It had a very thick neck and I’ve got kind of small hands, so that thing was a job to learn to play.”

In the 1960s, he formed the band Leaves of Autumn with high-school friends. After high school, Funderburg continued to play music and found that music paid his college expenses. When his father passed away, he dropped out of school and became a professional musician.

“That was about all I knew how to do, so I went to work playing, and I was fortunate to work with some top-notch musicians,” he said. “I don’t claim to be an accomplished musician. I learned music by picking it up and playing it with other people.”

Funderburg says his favorite part of his musical career was during the 1970s. “At that time, St. Clair County — as well as Calhoun, Etowah and Shelby counties — didn’t have many places where people could hear rock-and-roll music, and the Boondocks Lounge was the place to go,” he said. “That was probably the most exciting time for me because we were playing at a happening place, and the band was recording in Birmingham, too.”

A member of the band Straight Shift, he now performs about once a month. The band has recently played at the Pell City Block Party, entertained at a sock hop at Celebrations in Pell City and performed at a private Christmas party in Birmingham.

Barber’s bluegrass
“When I came up, we didn’t have a lot of things that are offered today,” said Michael Barber. “I remember when we got our first color television. We had rabbit ears, so the reception wasn’t that good. Music was a pastime for us.”

On Sundays at 5 p.m., you will find him playing bluegrass at Pell City’s Mt. Zion Primitive Baptist Church, where he is the pastor. Barber and other musicians play before the evening worship service.

“The women in the church provide refreshments and work on prayer shawls to take to the nursing home,” he said. “The music is a good transition to the service.”

The number of musicians playing on a given Sunday varies from a few to a dozen. Barber plays mandolin, guitar, bass and some banjo, and he sings. “There are three other mandolin players at the church, so we rotate around,” he said.

Members of the group play on a local radio station every third Sunday and at Golden Living, an assisted-living facility, every third Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. Barber says they have been playing at Golden Living for 15 or 20 years. They also play at the Veteran’s Home and in the schools, when invited, and do caroling for shut-ins at Christmas. “It’s a ministry,” he said.

Barber was first exposed to music in church, where he was a member of the youth choir. “I was raised in the church and sang hymns as a child,” he said. He also listened to country and gospel music, including Hank Williams and the Happy Goodman Family.

“I took piano lessons for several years; it was a struggle for me,” he said. After learning the guitar and mandolin, he found he enjoyed playing bluegrass and learned that music could help pay a good part of college expenses.

Barber is self-taught on mandolin and guitar. “You get better by learning from others,” he said. When he teaches other to play, he asks them to teach someone else and share their knowledge.

“It thrills me when I teach a child who wants to learn and that child turns into a better musician than I am and then I see that child share it with another generation,” he said. “It feels like you’ve done something.”

A good judge of music
Ten-year-old Alan Furr became interested in music after hearing his grandfather Owen Furr play old-time country music and bluegrass with neighbors on his front porch in Crenshaw County.

“When I was 12, my parents made me a deal: If I could figure out how to buy an electric guitar, then they would buy me an amplifier,” he said. He got a job paying 50 cents an hour at the Handy Andy grocery store in Montgomery. His mother went to Art’s Music in Montgomery and financed a purple Fender Mustang guitar that he paid for with the money he made at the grocery store. Within a year or two, Furr was playing rhythm guitar with the Vibrations.

In addition to guitar, Furr plays mandolin, keyboards, ukulele, dulcimer and drums, and sings. A vocal performance major in college, he added church music to his repertoire. He continues to perform church music and serves as minister of music at the First Baptist Church of Ashville.

After graduating from law school, he spent about a year playing in the band the Reflectors with some friends from Birmingham. He currently plays in two bands – Whitney Junction and the Wingnuts.

The bluegrass band Whitney Junction was formed at First Baptist Church of Ashville. The group plays for free.

The Wingnuts, originally composed of aviators, plays 1960s rock and roll. The group came together after the 2011 tornado, as Furr explained, “when Donnie Todd, a member of the Pell City City Council, and I worked up seven or eight songs to play at a benefit for the Civil Air Patrol.” The Wingnuts now play once or twice a month for corporate and charitable events, such the Fur Ball, a fundraiser for the Animal Shelter of Pell City.

Furr said he sold his purple Fender Mustang guitar to a “kid” for $75, the same amount he had paid for it almost 10 years earlier. “Then the kid called me when he was getting a new guitar,” Furr said, and offered to sell the Mustang back to Furr for $75. But Furr explained that the kid could get more for it if he traded it in, and the kid took his advice.

Years later, Furr saw the purple Mustang for sale in a music store in Enterprise. He says he told his mother about it, and, unknown to him, she called every music store in southeast Alabama until she found it. He was surprised when she returned the guitar to him the following Christmas.