Gerald (Buffalo) Evans Dies; Was Notable Island Character

Gerald (Buffalo) Evans died on June 6 in Juliet, Ga. at the age of 68. He was born on May 26, 1937 in Oklahoma City, Okla. He later moved to Georgia and he also had lived on the Vineyard for a number of years. What follows is a profile of Mr. Evans that was written by Stan Hart and published in the Vineyard Gazette in May of 1980.

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In the chill of an early April morning he stands like a shaggy bison archly silhouetted against a row of gas pumps, immobile before Mobil, his ears cast to the far off rumble of an approaching vehicle. He is in jeans and wearing a yellow slicker now, but in January this bison perforce performs in an orange jumpsuit, his face a composite of frozen beard, ether eyes and leathered skin crinkled on his cheekbones. In that month his boots look like deep sea divers' boots and standing thusly before Up-Island Automotive in West Tisbury, he feels the wind course down the road from the hills of Chilmark. In January he could be standing watch on the North Sea and in April, although warmer, he is still exposed, his ears picking up the sounds of wheels on the road. Is it the Olsen Brothers or is it Spencer Hiton? His mind weighs the odds. In either case he will "fill er up."

But it was not always so for Gerald Evans, renamed (legally) Buffalo Evans. There was a time not too long ago when he meshed constant travel and high times with the violent beat of rock and roll. Indeed there were those times when on a $60,000 per year income, the frantic antics of life blew odd visions through his mind and carried him forth amidst the swirl of action that is part and parcel of the world of rock.

As road manager of the Allman Brothers he crisscrossed a continent, stickers glued to his carrying bags, concerts piled upon concerts, playful groupies trailing in the wake like dolphins behind a clipper ship. People were lost in fantasy and great stage lights illuminated the sequins, the garb of the performers. It was a god-awful, god love ‘em, half-mad combination of fans and top rated talent conjoined in concert, meeting at last in an event, a My God I've Seen the Allman Brothers Live! - all of that and much more for 12 years.

It was "full bore" he says. Standing in the small shed behind his pumps he warms himself and keeps his eyes peeled for the next car. Yes, it was full bore. "The experience was worth a million dollars but I wouldn't do it again for a another million," he comments arcanely, but you know what he means. He is 43 years old and at rest. "If it is out of West Tisbury it is out of the question," he says, and that means his days of travel are over.

It all started back in Oklahoma city when at seven years of age, his family moved on to Los Angeles. By the time he was 21 he had been discharged from the army as a PFC and his wandering days began. He "hung around Kentucky for a while" before really hitting the road working as a mechanic, as a bus boy, breakfast cook, bartender and as a driver of a cement mixer back in Los Angeles. Eventually he became a bartender at the second topless bar in Los Angeles County and this is where he began to meet musicians. From here he became road manager for a band named The Sunshine Company and went East with that group along with John Davidson. They played in tents and halls and in towns with names such as North Tonawanda, N.Y. and Owens Mill, Maryland.

Although the venues were hardly inspiring, the work more than made up for it and when the Sunshine Company broke up a combination of circumstances led Buffalo to the Allman Brothers as their road manager and to Tom Rush, a folk singer with Vineyard connections. The Allman Brothers gave him his shot at the big time and Tom Rush brought him to Martha's Vineyard where he was reunited with Alex Taylor, whom he knew "from way back." As a result of his friendship with Alex and his innate appreciation of the Vineyard he would usually head for the Island whenever there was a lay off between jobs, when there would be lull in the hyped-up salad days of a young man growing older.

Yes, it was "a million dollars worth of experience" with money falling like rain, but he was always broke. No matter what he would earn his life style consumed it. Even now he can show you with no little derision a check for a $1,000 made out to him from Greg Allman. It has never been cashed because he says, "It would only bounce," For whatever reasons, the money that flowed in like a stream - once the Allman Brothers played before 700,000 fans at Watkins Glen - went out like a torrent and even the big names themselves had empty checking accounts.

And there was marriage and death as well. Greg Allman married Cher Bono amid grand and continuous media hoopla - she was "just another groupie" to Buffalo - and both Duane Allman and Barry Oakely, another member of the band, were killed in motorcycle crashes. But they were all "brothers" and shared the same identical tattoo on the right calf half way up from the ankle. He'll raise his leg and show you the bluish-red mark depicting a psilocybin mushroom, its symbolism found in the letters LSD.

Maybe it is because he is one quarter Choctow Indian or maybe because he got sick and tired but in either case one day he said to Alex Taylor, "If you ever hear of anything nice I'll move to the Vineyard." And that is what happened even though for a year and a half after moving here he languished and idled, occasionally flying out to fulfill a commitment for the still ongoing Allman Brothers. When he finally was able to break his ties with them (or to be more precise, when the group disbanded), he became a dishwasher and scallop packer at Lawry's in Edgartown. It wasn't much but "it was nice and peaceful and I had no inner conflicts. I could hold my spot and insert myself into the flow whenever I chose to do so."

From Lawry's the flow took him to David Taylor and the West Tisbury road gang where he cut brush and kept the roads safe and beautiful for the townspeople. From there he flowed on to the Up-Island Automotive and now he has managed to combine pumping gas with being cemetery superintendent, a job he is most dedicated to and which occupies much of his weekends.

"Back in the mid-sixties I went through a crazy period," he recalls. "I was wandering about the country sleeping in tepees and sometimes the light of the fire within the tepee would frame an outline of my head against the inside of the canvas walls. I would be telling Indian tales and the image of my head with my beard and all was just like the outlines of a buffalo's head. People began to call me Buffalo then and it stuck . . . ."

There is something nice about a man living in tepees and telling tales by firelight. It doesn't sound too remote from fisherman sitting "in the lee of the longboat" swapping yarns. Maybe he was never meant for Las Vegas-style high life and all those other cities where it was always "full bore." Perhaps he would have found his way here sooner where he says "I have what I need. I have a bunch of people who are nice to me and I am nice to them. This is as far as I want to go. I'm almost like a caveman. If you can live with yourself you can live with anyone."

Buffalo Evans, cemetery superintendent and gas pumper, lives by himself. He still retains two suitcases full of clippings however, and should one of the old crowd come by he is quick to say "Hey, man, what's happening?" Half in, half out, or all the way in and all the way out? He's got a million dollar education hidden in the shadow of some tombstone and a trunk load of nostalgia fulminating in the old shed at the garage. He holds a doctor of divinity degree from a mail order house in Chicago and once married Greg Allman under that somewhat dubious aegis. And, finally, you must always understand the nature of the bison which is to say that the bison, like the sphinx, is inscrutable. A relic, it lives on, keeping its real memories and its real thoughts to itself. Is it too much to think that a man who once danced among the stars can find happiness or peace of mind checking your oil? He says he can and so be it.