Mental Illness Took My Dad. After His Death, I Discovered His Secret Past.

So it went at the record shows: After selling for several hours, Mom and I would gingerly repackage everything back into her car, and I’d drive us back home. We’d split the cash, and I’d roll us a joint. “For Richard,” we’d toast as thick blue smoke unfurled around our heads.

“Did he hang out with the acts other than just working with them?” I asked. 

Mom bit her lip and thought about it. Long ago, Richard told my mom some of Peace Concerts’ history — how he saved money from his job at the telephone company to book his first acts, and how promoting was like gambling and he lost it all on a bad run of concerts where the ticket sales didn’t materialize. 

“Not really,” Mom said. “He wasn’t in it for that. He liked making money — and he did it for the thrill.” The thrill of the risk, or of creating an event that would reverberate in people’s minds for decades? She said she didn’t know.

My mom, Shari, met my dad when she was 22. A theater major and techie, she’d just blown out of college from Michigan State, headed 700 miles south before landing in Birmingham and met him just three days later, introduced through a mutual friend. By then, he’d lost everything to concert promotion. Their first “date” was him grilling steaks on his patio, The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See” playing loud on the turntable.

I asked Mom when she learned about Dad’s rock days. She had to think on it — her hair gray and down to her back now, unlike the dark bob she’d sported most of my life. “After just a few days together,” she said. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you my story, but only one time.’”

“Whoa, it was like that?”

She said he hated old concertgoers wanting to wax nostalgic with him about the glory days. I figured Dad, like me, always had big dreams hounding him down.

Time spins like a vinyl, and after doing a few of these record shows and hearing every tale Mom knew, I began reaching out to Dad’s old friends and work associates from his promoting prime. Yet I heard the same thing I already knew: Dad was a “workaholic.” 

“And how exactly did he fall out of promoting?” 

About this I’d heard different stories. Mom had always said he’d lost it all on a bad concert run with Joe Cocker, and that he was distracted chasing a woman nicknamed “Little Red” who never reciprocated my father’s interest.

But I’d heard more than one old associate say that Dad had also been outgunned by a hotshot New York promoter named Tony Ruffino who today gets the credit for putting Birmingham on the map for big rock bands. One old rock buddy who used to hang up flyers and do other promotional work even said that Richard tried to go rogue and represent Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on his own, and for this the record biz blacklisted him. 

“But what was he like as a person?” I’d ask these strangers who knew “the old Richard.”

That was always harder for them to answer. 

“He was a private guy,” was the best answer I got from a man named Wendell, a partner in an early booking agency my dad founded and later sold. “He didn’t talk much about what was going on in his head.” 

I became desperate, looking to our family albums and VHS tapes for answers. But here, too, Dad was the invisible promoter, so frequently on the other side of the camera capturing/directing holidays and trips instead of being in them. A backstage man, even in his personal life. 

Wendell suggested I visit the iconic 2121 high-rise in downtown Birmingham to see my father’s old office, where he built his Peace Concerts empire nearly six decades ago in what was then called “the penthouse,” room 1727. When I told Mom about the idea, she smiled and said Richard used to point out the 2121 building in their earlier days, telling her he worked at the top in an office with a view. 

So I drove a half-hour into town to see for myself, uncertain what Wendell thought I would find so clarifying there. Riding the elevator up, my reflection rippled in the scratched, stainless steel doors in front of me, looking like a leaner, taller ghost of my father.