Best known as the musical director and keyboardist for the Rolling Stones, Chuck Leavell is also an avid outdoorsman who owns the 3,000-acre Charlane Plantation in Bullard, south of Macon, where visitors hunt quail, turkey and deer. In January he and ad man Joel Babbit started the Mother Nature Network (www.mnn.com), an Atlanta-based Web-site devoted to environmental news.
I have had dogs in my world all of my life. The first one I can remember was a wirehair fox terrier named Tuffy. He was a great little dog -- always happy, playful and a wonderful companion.
My dad used to shake my pants leg and tell Tuffy to “s’kit” me, which meant for him to growl and “get” me. He never hurt me; he understood it was just play. To my delight, he would grab my pants leg with his teeth and drag me along the floor, wagging his tail and growling, shaking his head. I must have been 4 or 5 years old at the time.
That sealed the deal with me and dogs. I’ve had so many great ones through the years. After Tuffy came Oscar, a mutt that had a lot of Dachshund blood. He was a small black pup and full of vim and vigor. Running alongside me with a big grin on his face, he would accompany on my bike wherever I went.
Oscar lived a long time. We must have had him for 14 or 15 years. After I left home to pursue my musical career, my mom looked after him until he passed on.
But when I would make trips home, even though Oscar was old and had lost a lot of his spunk, his tail would always wag emphatically and that grin would be there.
Through the years since, I’ve had many K9 companions -- Chester, a Springer spaniel; Sam, my first bird dog; Elliot, another Springer I brought back from a trip to Alaska; and others.
We used to raise Jack Russell terriers -- or as we prefer to call them, Jack Russell terrorists! But now we have only one. Lilly is 13 years old and still quite lively. She loves to ride with me in my pickup truck, and I made a special place for her on the passenger side by cutting a piece of plywood and putting carpet on it where she can stand. It goes from the crux of the seat up to the dashboard and makes a “ramp” for Lilly so she can see out of both the front and side windows. I call it the “Lilly Board,” and when I first installed it, she looked over at me as if to say, “Dude, this is the coolest thing in the world!”
In addition to Lilly, we have three other dogs that hang around the house. There are two Border Collies, sisters named Molly and Maggie. I got them for my wife, Rose Lane, on her birthday about eight years ago when we were on tour with the Rolling Stones in Europe.
Our drummer, Charlie Watts, found them for me in Wales on a farm that is near his own farm. We shipped them back with us at the end of the Forty Licks Tour, and they are now fixtures on our tree farm, Charlane Plantation. Molly and Maggie are actually the stars of the first chapter of my autobiography, "Between Rock and a Home Place."
Recently, we added a mutt named Charlie that found us. He just showed up one day and started hanging around like he belonged, and as it turned out, he does.
So every evening, Lilly gets on the Lilly Board, and Molly, Maggie and Charlie get in the bed of my truck and we go riding around the plantation to check on things.
Somehow that keeps me sane and helps to remind me how great life is.
I can’t imagine a life without dogs. And of course in the end, they own me, I don’t own them.
-- Chuck Leavell
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