Rolling Stone Gathers Trees
By Andy Serwer

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Say you're a piano player extraordinaire and your principal job is to wait for Mick Jagger to call you up every couple of years to tour with the Rolling Stones. Great, but what do you do with the rest of your life? Well, if you're Chuck Leavell, you farm trees. Great big tall pine trees mostly, on a dreamy 2,200-acre plantation outside Macon, Ga.

How does Leavell marry his passion for forests with his rock & roll career? Not very easily. Asked what his two loves have to do with each other, Leavell seems a little--dare I say it?--stumped. "Well, my piano's made out of wood," he answers with his trademark easy grin. And then there's the fact that Mick and Keith (who calls Chuck "Boy Georgia") don't really get their piano player's obsession with trees.

That hasn't discouraged Leavell. In fact, he is one of the nation's foremost conservationists. A tree hugger and proud of it, he has lobbied in Washington for legislation to preserve forests and open spaces, and won the National Outstanding Tree Farmer award in 1999. He's even written a book on the subject, Forever Green: The History and Hope of the American Forest, that is--actually--pretty interesting.

Leavell was born in 1952 in Birmingham, Ala., to a mother who loved to play the piano. Her music obsession passed to young Chuck, who soon started tickling the old 88s and playing guitar in local bands. When he was 18, he dropped out of high school and headed to Macon, which then had a thriving music scene. At its center was an innovative blues-rock band called the Allman Brothers. "Greg and Duane [Allman] and Dickie Betts, all of them were there, and I was just in awe," Leavell recalls. The Allmans' story, of course, is a strange blend of great music, triumph, and tragedy. As the band became more and more popular, first guitarist Duane Allman and then bassist Berry Oakley were killed in motorcycle accidents. By 1972, someone had to step in to fill the musical void.

That's when Chuck Leavell, then just 20 years old, entered the scene. "We began playing right away, and we started recording [the album] Brothers and Sisters." (On that record Leavell plays what I consider to be the greatest piano solo in rock & roll history, on the song "Jessica.") After some success, the usual 1970s bugaboos--drugs and discord--took their toll, and the band split up. "It was just like the movie Almost Famous," says Chuck's wife, Rose Lane, whom Chuck met in 1970 while she was working at Macon's Capricorn Records.

It was Lane who got Chuck into the whole tree-farming thing. She inherited that big parcel of land from her grandmother in 1981, and--not wanting to sell it--she and Chuck decided to move onto it. But much as Chuck loved being down on the farm with his tractors and his 22 bird dogs, it didn't satisfy his inner rock & roller. And so when the Rolling Stones asked him to tour with them in 1982, well, it just made sense. He has traveled with them on every tour since then.

Between the Stones and his trees, Leavell has found time to do some solo work, including a mighty fine Christmas CD called What's in That Bag and Forever Blue, a collection of piano pieces. So does the music help with the trees? Maybe not, but the trees definitely help with the music. "I come off the road, and I just feel so at peace here," he says as we walk through his piney woods. "With all that's going on in the world today, we really need to protect and respect our homeland and our woods, more than ever."