Mental Illness Took My Dad. After His Death, I Discovered His Secret Past Inside An Old Filing Cabinet.

The author's father in the late '60s, just beginning to dabble in concert promoting.In my memory, there are two dads: the Richard before mental illness — and the one after. The Richard beforenever seemed very rock ‘n’ roll.He was just another workaholic father, keeping his brick of an early mobile phone close, even on vacations, and coming home late from the family business, the Great American Tent Company.The one after ... well, I try not to dwell on him as much.But there was a third Richard I knew nothing about until after he was gone.One day when I was 26, just months after my dad’s death from congestive heart failure, I visited to check on my mom. I found her at the kitchen tablewith a pile of well-worn manila folders fanned out in front of her, an ashtray nearby with a half-smoked joint still smouldering. Mom was an old eBay queen from the ’90s — she bought and sold Beanie Babies for profit back when that was possible — and I could tell she’d hunted up something good. I looked closer. Each file had a famous name written on it in my father’s neat print: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lionel Richie, Allman Brothers, Santana. “What is this?” I took a seat across from Mom.“Your father’s rock files,” she said, toking on the joint. “He kept everything from his days running Peace Concerts.” “Peace Concerts?”“Take a look!” I could tell she was high on more than just pot. She opened a folder and produced a yellowed letter that read, “The Birmingham Hyatt House will not be able to accept any further rock group reservations. This directive is a result of many bad situations with these groups staying in the hotel and especially the malicious destruction caused by Lynyrd Skynyrd staying here over July 4th, 1975.”The letter said the damages amounted to $500.I looked up at Mom, eyes wide, and we laughed. My soft-spoken dad had dealt with these musical madmen? “Richard said they were the nicest boys,” Mom said, “when they weren’t drunk.”“You knew about this?” “Not this,” she said, taking back the letter and handing me the joint.“Why would Dad save this?”“Eh, he was a hoarder. But also probably for tax purposes.” I dragged on the joint and ruminated with the smoke. That was Dad, always business-minded. However, I suspected there was more to the story. He’d always loved music, filled his days with it from the radio or cassette player, or his voice, smooth as Southern syrup, or his acoustic guitars, which he left me. He loved music until depression struck him down.The author’s father playing the guitar in 1974.In addition to his heart issues, my father spent the last dozen years of his life numbed by mental illness and antidepressants. Years ago, when he began to slip mentally, he paced our house at night, thought my mother was poisoning him, and believed my siblings and I were starving (even though we were all chunky). I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Maybe that’s because on that day in 2001, I came home from school, sensed something was off, and asked, “Where’s Dad?” My mom told me that she and my older cousin had taken him to the hospital, that he’d tried to jump out of the car on the way, that he was now admitted to a psychiatric ward. I was on the cusp of turning 14, my mother 44.Over the next dozen years, as I meandered through adolescence and early adulthood, I grew to resent this man, his apathy toward his family and even his own life, as he deteriorated mentally and physically. His nails grew long and yellow, his hair dreadlocked into a mat of grey wire. And after years of an all-fast food diet and not taking care of himself, his heart finally gave. But here was my father, an energetic young promoter, in folder after folder of rare rock memorabilia: a contract signed by the legendary guitarist Duane Allman, another by Glenn Fry of the Eagles, a promotional flyer featuring a 20-something Lionel Richie in some of the first concerts the Commodores ever did — all shows my dad booked. He was a pioneer in carving out a new Deep South concert scene, billing these rock shows as “dances” because, as Mom explained, going to concerts back then wasn’t yet accepted in the buttoned-down Bible Belt. A poster that the author's father made for what would become the last concert that Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham played as a duo before joining Fleetwood Mac.Not once did Dad talk about this to me. I wondered if he was secretly ashamed that his dreams had deflated into owning a company that supplied concerts with tents, tables and chairs instead of attention-grabbing talent — a company that started from the leftovers of those rosy rock days, with an old red-and-yellow tent top Richard put up over the stage for his acts.“Where did you find this?” I asked Mom.She waved me down the grungy, carpeted stairs to the basement, where a battered tank of a file cabinet stood tucked away in a nook. As a kid, I’d overlooked it a million times, more captivated by the toys and board games surrounding the 1940s-era metal tower. Opening a squeaking drawer, I saw it fully packed with documents, an extremely thorough paper archive focusing on Dad’s time as a concert promoter from 1968 to 1976. He’d saved it all: contracts, guest passes, flyers and posters, ledgers, photos, receipts (sometimes scrawled on a bar napkin).Bathed in the sickly, fluorescent basement lights, I was overwhelmed by the gravity of these artefacts.What to do with all this?The author's father with Tom Moncrieff, the drummer for Stevie and Lindsey, at the concert after-party Richard Dingler threw for the duo at The Luau in Birmingham.Back upstairs, Mom and I discussed selling some ofthe hoard. Dad had saved many copies. But I was hesitant. “Some items should be off-limits,” I said. Out of respect for Dad, for his story, for this side of him I didn’t know. Mom agreed.So we went through each document of Dad’s old music promotion business, Peace Concerts. I read the print too tiny for Mom’s eyes and wrote descriptions while she priced and categorised. For an eye-catcher, we chose a silvery, vintage poster of a bare-chested Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham when they were still a duo.My dad had booked the last concerts they did before joining Fleetwood Mac and made a bundle on those few shows. The pair were treated so well that Nicks later said in an interview: “We could join Fleetwood Mac or we could move to Birmingham, Alabama.” Mom and I decided we would not part with the poster. However, we did make glossy reproductions and sell them for $20 a pop. Photo booth images of the author's parents shortly after they met.On a too-brightspring day about a year after Richard’s passing, I packed my mom’s car with the rock files anddrove us to our first record show at a modern, red-bricked convention centre. Set up in a large room by plate glass windows, we sold “retro musical mementos” mostly to old rock ‘n’ rollers and longhaired hippie-looking characters, all grizzled or grey now, some with a limp or cane. Yet when they browsed the faded posters and dog-eared flyers, a smile would break across their faces as they remembered that packed after-party my dad threw for Stevie and Lindseyfor their sold-out show at the Alabama Theatre, the last concert they played before merging with Fleetwood Mac —or how everyone’s ears were ringing after that raucous Lynyrd Skynyrd concert at Rickwood Field in ’74, the first time that group performed “Sweet Home Alabama” in the state.For this generation, music was a spiritual experience, and my dad was at the centre of it. Well, centre backstage. I fidgeted in my chair as I nodded along, jealous that it seemed like these strangers knew my father better than I did. Occasionally, one would squint at meand say, “You look just like him.” It’s true. I have my dad’s red-brown curls and intense blue eyes. Although I always thought his shade of eggshell blue was far prettier.Music was another thing we had in common. Dad possessed a sweeter voice, but I was the better guitarist. I didn’t start learning until I was 16, so he never played music with me nor expressed an interest after the depression sank deep inside him.Years into his isolation, I visited to perform for him. I must’ve been 20 and studying classical guitar, eager to show off my new finger-style skills. But after I finished my first piece, a difficult and delicate arpeggiated prelude by a Paraguayan composer named Barrios, he snapped at me, “That’s good, andI won’t even count those two mistakes you made.” My throat clenched —my voice evaporated. His ear was still so sensitive. It wasn’t a spotless performance, as he’d demanded of his local bands back in the Peace Concert days — he’d told my mother how he kept detailed, sometimes harsh, performance notes from his spot in the back row.I wanted to snap all my guitar strings. Instead, I never played for him again. For years, a feeling of shame flooded over me when I flashed back to that memory — and I carried my resentment around inside like a balled-up mass of old strings.The author and his father in the 1990s.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 unfurledaround 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 materialise. “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 theatre 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’sold 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 namedTony 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 findso 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. The "malicious destruction" letter from the Birmingham Hyatt House regarding Lynyrd Skynyrd's “stay” there.On the top floor, I saw only three suite numbers: 1700, 1710, and 1720. I rang the bell at 1700, where a woman with greying blonde hair and sleepy eyes answered. I explained I was writing something about my relationship with my father and trying to hunt down his old office. Albeit bemused, she was nice enough to let me in and give me a quick tour. She explained that this suite connected to 1720 but there was no room #1727, not even 27 separate offices on that floor. The place had clearly been redesigned since my dad last stepped foot there. It was hard to believe that any rock concerts were ever planned in this now drowsy, overly air-conditioned space.But what I did see, everywhere I looked, were plate glass windows waist-high to ceiling. It was the kind ofspace where an overachiever could dream big while watching the world spin down below — exactly like something I would prefer, for I need a window nearby to write. “I’m sorry I don’t know any more,” the office worker said before walking away. I snorted a laugh and had to accept that I would never know my father like I wanted — that a history of objects can reveal but never resurrect — and also that, to some degree, he’d been there right in front of me. That private but friendly guy always working, always dreaming — that was my dad. A dozen years after my father’s passing, the days of selling rock files are done. My mother eventually sold what was left in the file cabinet to a local collector who’s creating an archive of the Birmingham music scene with the hopes of turning it into a museum. The archivist hauled away that clanky metal thing that, although lighter from fewer files, still had to be hand-trucked out by two strong guys.But one day, Dad’s papers and accomplishments could be on public display. Mom kept a few favourites, including that black-and-white poster of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, forever frozen in their 20s, forever beautiful, boldly staring back at the viewer like wild-haired rock gods. Mom displayed it in her living room, a reminder of when she and Richard were young.Over the years of sellingrock documents, the parent I got to know was my mom. Even though she frequently griped about Dadnot being more involved in child care and housekeeping, I could tell part of her still loved him — the version of Richard before the disease of depression stole himfrom us. That’s why she kept selling these rare items, not for the money, which she didn’t need, but to keep his memory living and moving,just like the music they both craved.Remembering is also reacquainting. Although I thought I never played for my father again, that’s not entirely true. I never played for him in person. While writing this essay, a memory returned to me: I used to keep in touch with Richard over the phone in the early days of his decline, when there was still some little spark of the old dad inside him. I must’ve been practicing guitar during a call one evening (a habit I still have) because he grew silent, listening to me play. I stopped plucking the strings, anxious.“You sound good, son,” he finally said. “Sound really good.”Related...Biphobia Is Louder Than Ever This Pride – Stop Asking Us To 'Be More Queer'I Went On A Sexual Wellness Retreat. 5 Words Landed Me Back In Therapy.Opinion: Karen Millen Called A Breastfeeding Mum ‘Selfish’ – Here’s Why She’s Wrong

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