![]() ![]() He wears newfound success as easily as a stylish summer blazer and, in fact, is driving over to his clothier of choice to browse among the Rene Lezard and Armani threads. The iron security gate at the end of his driveway is standing open, and he motors into this God-sent Tennessee afternoon a 53-year-old Southerner of refinement and modest luxury, with both hands on the wheel. Phil Walden has folded back the ragtop on his Mercedes 380SL, one of two in the garage of his turn-of-the-century, white-columned home. But as a thousand tiny nerve endings in his forehead tingled at the barrel’s presence, he just sat there, too strung out on cocaine and cognac to show anybody anything anymore, and too scared to pull the trigger.ĪFTER ONE OF THE gloomiest winters in memory, Music City, U.S.A., is finally in bloom. Phil Walden was about showing people things. Well, Phil Walden would show them, he thought. In the gun’s dead weight lay his own burden of lost opportunity, misfigured decisions, screwed-up family relations and fading glory. ![]() By then, Walden was certain he, too, was a man of destiny.īut by the time people began to call Phil Walden a living legend, he had fallen from being the recording industry’s bulletproof comer to an estranged and despondent man, sitting alone on the edge of his bed and fondling a revolver. At 35, Walden even played a role in getting a Georgia governor elected president. As record label president, his musical pedigree included 19 gold, 10 platinum, and six multiple-platinum album awards, 12 gold single awards, artistic collaboration with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and entry into Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. He had discovered pivotal talents in American music, most notably Otis Redding and Duane Allman. By the time he was 30, Walden had founded the South’s premier label, Capricorn Records. As a freshman, he founded his first company, Phil Walden Artists & Promotions, and in a matter of years, it became the largest independent booker of R&B and soul musicians and singers in the world. Since his college days at Mercer University in Macon, Walden had ridden the tail fins of skyrocket personalities. Blessed, he says, to have ever been a part of that history at all. He feels fortunate to still have a family, to be working again at the only job he has ever loved, and to have escaped final notation in the annals of American music as the Southern record label president who once stood tall as a Georgia pine, and then fell forever between the quickly turning pages of rock ’n’ roll history. So, all in all, Phil Walden considers himself lucky. And for a man inclined to Armani suits and smooth Mercedes comfort, it remains of some importance that he never did sleep in a gutter although he says that by the time he finally sobered up, he had begun to notice those people, looking for a friend. ![]()
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