My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  But the thing was, I respected him and I loved him, and he didn’t have to beat me to get that. He was my hero, even while he was beating me. That sounds a little sick, but I knew that he wouldn’t let nobody else mess with me. Most of the time, he’d only give me one lick, just to let me know who was boss. I’m not holding a whole lot of scars from it, just a few—some inside, and some outside.

  I suppose it could have gone the other way, and I could have believed that he didn’t love me or care for me, and we could have grown up just hating each other’s ass. Who knows, though, because the guitar might have solved that.

  WE MOVED TO DAYTONA BEACH, FLORIDA, IN 1959, RIGHT SMACK dab in the middle of the fifth grade. My mother loved Daytona Beach. I guess she’d been there when she was a teenager, and she always wanted to go back and live there. It’s funny: to this day, my mother doesn’t ever complain of pain, except for her sinuses; she’s always had sinus problems. Later on in life, I said to her, “Mama, you moved from Nashville to Daytona Beach, Florida—hell, you should have gone to Arizona! You moved to the damn humidity capital of the world.”

  At first, I hated the fucking place aside from the beach and the warm weather. One thing that saved me from running away and going God knows where is that I rode my bike down to the beach where they were having the last NASCAR beach race. It was scary, because after you came out of the south turn, you had two straightaways, one paved and one beach. Toward the end of it, you had nothing but soft sand, and the whole thing was like a demolition derby. They would stop the race every now and then and get these half-ass little steamrollers out there and pat the sand down a little bit, but those guys were doing 80 to 100 miles an hour, in those big old swaying Pontiacs. It was something to behold, and I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.

  Because they shaved my head at Castle Heights, I wouldn’t cut my hair anymore. I didn’t grow out my hair because everybody else did. I grew it out because I remember them taking it down to my scalp, and with the light color of my hair, it looked like I was bald-headed. I don’t have the best-shaped head in the world—I mean, bald is beautiful, but not if your head looks like an old basketball with no air in it.

  When I went back to Nashville the summer after we moved to Florida, my grandma had been moved into a housing community, which was a big change. She’d always seemed pretty independent. My grandmother read her Bible every day, she smoked three packs of Tareytons a day, and she was one of the finest cooks I have ever witnessed, to this day. She had her ups and downs, man. She loved her gossip, and she talked to herself when she was mopping the floor. She’d start every sentence with “Well, gentlemen …” That was an old country way of talking. “Well, gentlemen …” is definitely the country side of the Allman family.

  Seeing her in that housing was tough, you know? Didn’t seem right. I think my uncle Sam was footing the whole bill, and my uncle Dave was on the police force, but I don’t know who was paying for what.

  My grandmother and my father’s brothers were all we had left back in Nashville. A few years before, my grandfather had passed away, but because he and my grandmother were divorced it hadn’t impacted her much. Though my grandmother didn’t much like Alf, his sons loved him and us grandsons were crazy about him. He brought us firecrackers and barbecue—he bought me a Wham-O slingshot with a sight on it, and a whole bag of ball bearings. I thought, “This old man is the hippest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen!” What kid didn’t want a slingshot like that one? You could take down a pretty good-sized alley cat with one of them!

  My grandfather made whiskey all his life and sold it to the state police. I think he worked in a sawmill, because I remember him always having coveralls on and dust all over him. He taught me lots of good things—just hitting me with random bits of wisdom. He told me one time, “Gregory, there’s two things that gets you in trouble and one of ’em’s your mouth.” I was way too young to understand, but later on it hit me.

  I was playing with one of those fly-backs one day—the paddle with the ball on a string. He was watching me, and he came up and took the ball in his hand and let the paddle drop.

  “Gregory,” he said, “I’m gonna tell you something about love.”

  I’m thinking, “Oh no, here he goes”—’cause I was like five or six.

  “If I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze tighter and tighter on this ball,” he said, “it might pop out of my hand. But if I just keep a nice, easy grip on it, it’ll stay with me forever.” I really loved that old man.

  The truth is, my uncles and mother tried to keep him away from me as much as possible. Sam and David would take us to see him, in moderation. Nothing really bad ever happened, even though I got a fishhook in my hand one time. My uncles were very good about letting my mother know where we were, and calling ahead and asking to see us. That’s why I looked forward to summertime, because I finally had a couple of dads. Though one of them was in this thing called the army, and it dragged him off sometimes, I could always count on the other one being there.

  Every time Alf’s name came up though, my grandmother would go, “Shi …” She wouldn’t say “Shit,” but we knew what she meant. He was a drunk, a saloon rat—he was a lot of things, man, and she hated him.

  I think back now to all the questions I wanted to ask her. “Why don’t you love him, Grandma? Look at me and tell me why you don’t love this man, who I love so much? Have you given him a chance? What happened between you all? Why can’t you just part as friends?” I don’t understand that about divorce. I’ve had a few, and it’s not like I want to have a big reunion, but I don’t hardly ever hear from any of them. There’s no “Hi, how you doing?” We did once say that we loved each other, and I did pay them all a fair amount of money.

  About fifteen years ago, I was in a session, cutting my record Searching for Simplicity. I remember somebody talking about this whorehouse, and somebody said, “Gregory, have you ever paid for it?”

  I said, “Pay for pussy? There’s too much of it.” Then I thought, “What am I talking about?” I told them, “Correction—I have paid, and paid, and paid, and I’m still paying for something I ain’t getting!”

  Seabreeze High School

  Allman Family Archives

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dreams

  THERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS THAT JUST TOTATTY ALTER YOUR life. It’s like you hear a voice yelling, “Come about, because we are changing course.”

  One night, my mother dropped me and my brother off at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, and we spent a buck and a quarter to sit in the cheap seats. The show was called a “revue” because there were a whole bunch of different acts, and they were given maybe five songs each.

  Jackie Wilson was the headliner. He closed with “Lonely Teardrops,” of course, but he put his coat on the stage floor before he got down on his knees, so he wouldn’t get his pants dirty, and that was disappointing. They had the orchestra down in the pit, and I can still see the natural starburst that came off this horn player’s instrument when he stood up to take a solo. I guess that was my first taste of live music, much like it must be for our fans who hear us live for the first time. Cheap seats or no cheap seats, it was amazing.

  Next to Jackie was Otis Redding, and Otis just took it, man. It was a huge stage, at least twenty-five yards wide, and Otis just ran back and forth across it. He got the whole place singing, and moving faster and faster. Otis was a big old son of a gun, and when he came back out to take a bow, I could see that he had big old stumps for feet. He was a big man, and I mean big—Otis was Mean Joe Greene big, that’s how large he was. He could really sing, and that band could take it down low.

  The girls up in the front row were melting in their seats, and we were watching the whole thing unfold. My brother was just mesmerized—he was frozen, and he looked stuffed, like a taxidermist had gotten through with him. Nothing on his body moved during the whole concert. I had to poke him a couple of times to make sure he was still there with us. He had a time, man, I’m telling
you.

  That music hit Duane, and it stuck like a spaghetti noodle against the wall. That music was in his heart, and it was in mine too. Then we got to playing it, and we realized how important it really was.

  That Otis show was the start, but I didn’t have to wait long for more. By August 1960, toward the end of our visit with our grandmother, I was kinda wanting to go home. It was hot as a bitch, and there was no air-conditioning back then, and no sea breeze in Nashville. One day, I looked over across the way, and I saw this mentally challenged guy named Jimmy Banes, who lived over there with his mama and another man, who I don’t think was his father. I hope he’s doing all right, if he’s still alive. He was outside, and he had an old beat-up Packard, and it looked like it was flat black, or else it had never been touched by wax—one or the other. The car ran, and he drove it around, poor guy. He was painting it with a paintbrush, like a house paintbrush.

  I had been taught not to ridicule people who were different, so I just went over there and said, “Hey, partner, how you doing?” More than I was looking at him or his situation, I was looking at him painting this car—tires, grille, over the lights, everything. He was painting it black, and it already was black, and he was painting it so it would shine.

  In the projects, they always have the front porch—the stoop, they call it. Sometimes there would be walkways going off of both sides, depending on the size of the place. There’s usually a swing that hangs there, and they had one of those. There was a bunch of stuff—a ball glove, odds and ends—out on the porch, but one thing in particular caught my eye.

  “What do you got up there?” I asked.

  “What?” Jimmy asked back.

  “That thing, leaning against the house,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s a guitar.”

  “Okay” was all I said back, and he went on about his business. I waited until he got through painting, and said, “You know how to play this thing?”

  “I sure do,” he replied. Jimmy picked it up and started playing “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” and, I mean, he was playing it with a vigor. I thought he was gonna bang the damn strings off of that son of a bitch.

  This guitar was a Beltone, and those things are almost impossible to play. This guy might have been autistic, you know? He had filed down the bridge on this old funky-ass twenty-two-dollar guitar, and the thing had enough action to where it wouldn’t be too hard for a kid to pick it up and, if done correctly, it could be played. Now, a barre chord was kind of a bitch.

  He got through the song, and it was a hell of a lot better than I could do it, so I asked him to play something else, and he showed me a chord. He told me, “Look, you gotta keep these fingers inside”—he was teaching me an E chord. “You gotta keep these three fingers inside these outside strings, because if they touch your finger—oh boy.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, it will just be bad,” he said all cryptically, as if the boogieman would come get you.

  I’ll tell you, my life changed that day. It did. Jimmy and I sat up on that porch until he had to put the top back on his damn paint so it wouldn’t dry out. We talked and talked about that guitar, and I went over the next day, and the next day, and I was so thankful for him. Later on, I was at a party, and I picked up a guitar, played maybe three chords, and my brother just about shit himself.

  When I came back to Daytona after seeing Jimmy Banes in Nashville, there was still a little bit left of summer, about five weeks or so. We went back to school after Labor Day, much later than they do now. So I went down to the newspaper looking for a job, because I wanted to get a guitar real bad, and I found one at Sears for twenty-one dollars. I knew a guy who had a paper route, and I used to help him with it, and there was nothing to it. All you had to do was remember the damn houses—this was back when people used to put their address on the mailbox.

  I had some rough times: a few dog bites and acute ingrown toenails, which two of my children suffer from today. The nail would just dive right down into my toe, the whole thing, both sides. I went to the podiatrist time and time again, and he would take the scalpel and start at the top and go in about a half-inch and cut all the way down. One time I went down and missed the pedal, and I pulled my pant legs up and pus was just sprayed all over the place. That was brutal, man.

  But I never thought, “This ain’t worth it.” I knew I was gonna get that guitar.

  Finally, I had saved the twenty-one dollars, and I went down to Sears on my bicycle. I walked up to the counter and told the guy I wanted that Silvertone, and I handed him the money. He told me, “Son, with tax, that’ll be $21.95,” and he wasn’t about to let that ninety-five cents slide. Man, I was just crushed, totally crushed.

  I got home and told my mother what had happened, and she could see the hurt and disappointment in my eyes. Well, you know mothers—I didn’t even have to ask her. She gave me a dollar, and the next day I rode back down there and got me that guitar.

  I didn’t want anybody knowing about it, because I didn’t want to hear them saying, “Oh, you think you’re a star?” People always have something to say. Of course, I didn’t have enough money to buy a case, not that that finger-bleeder was worth a case anyway.

  About the time I bought my guitar, a motorcycle of Duane’s had just fallen apart. It was an old used bike, and Duane had got it off some guy for like seventy bucks, which was still a lot of money for a teenage kid. Of course, Duane started playing my guitar, and I told him to go out and play with his motorcycle parts. He snatched it from me a couple of times, and my mother caught us fighting over it—and thank God, because my fingers were about to go.

  There’s no question that music brought me and Duane closer together. When we first started learning, it was competitive as hell, almost to the point of me saying, “Fuck you, go find another goddamn band.” I had been practicing all this time while he was out motorcycling, and then all of a sudden his bike breaks and he wants to horn in. Eventually we made peace, because that was the only way it was going to work, and he could see that—the only way that we were going to sit down and have me teach him the map of that damn guitar was if we could get along.

  If he was to walk into the room right now, and you asked him, “Did this guy teach you how to play the guitar?” he would tell you, “Yeah, I guess he did.” But it wasn’t like, “For today’s lesson …” or anything like that. He just watched me, but he watched me like a hawk. If I did something just a little bit different, he’d be, “Why? What’s that?” He didn’t miss a thing.

  Long after he could play circles around me, he’d still say, “You ought to hear my little brother play,” and “little brother” pretty much stuck right up to the end of his life. Either that or “baybrah,” as he said it, which is something he got from our old friend Floyd Miles, because that’s how Floyd would say “baby brother.”

  I played that guitar constantly, every day and night. I’d stop for a while and do my homework, but by the end of the year my mother was getting frustrated. My brother was worse, because he would play all day long, while my mother was at work. Duane passed me up in a flash—he got real good. My brother was born with the passion to play, that serious passion that he had for the guitar. That passion was second only to a woman, and it was one of them definite loves, because your guitar ain’t gonna leave ya, just like your dog ain’t gonna leave ya. He had a real love affair with that guitar.

  The first gig I ever played was when I was in the seventh grade. It was me, my little Fender guitar, and a Champ amp. This was at R. J. Longstreet Elementary, right down the street from my mother’s house in Daytona. These two guys were supposed to play with me: one of them played drums, and the other one played another guitar—we weren’t hip to a bass yet. We were going to play three or four songs in the lunchroom, and we borrowed a set of drums from my English teacher, Mr. Anderson. He was such a nice guy—very tall and skinny, very cool. We had a couple of Ventures songs that we were going to play, instrumentals only, no sin
ging. Forget singing, man.

  Right at the last minute, them two boys chickened out on my ass. They just didn’t show. There I was, with my little tiny amp and my little guitar. I’m up there by myself, the lights were on, and I turned red as a fucking barn, and I stayed that color throughout the whole performance. Mr. Anderson got up and played the drums, which was really nice of him, but it made me look like I was sucking up to a teacher. Right at the end, I played a Jimmy Reed song, and that went over pretty well.

  I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, but in the days that followed, a lot of people came up to me and asked, “When are you going to play again?” That was cool, because a lot of them had never even seen anybody play music like that, and they liked it. And when I came back the next time, I came back full force.

  AS WE GOT OLDER, THERE WERE TIMES THAT MY BROTHER LEFT ME behind, and I didn’t understand it. I even went and asked my mother, “Duane doesn’t like me anymore?” That just crushed my mother, and she told me, “No, no. Your brother loves you. He’s just growing up, that’s all.” She really tried to explain that to me.

  There was this pretty little girl named Sherry, who looked like Meg Ryan, and she was my brother’s first girlfriend. Boy, she was gorgeous. She had this leopard-skin hat, and I guess it was real. She’d wear that hat, and it was the sexiest thing in the whole world. That’s when I started to notice girls—this would have been right around the time we moved to Daytona. Duane started going to these parties, with boys and girls, and the boys would eventually go home and the girls would sleep over.

  My brother loved women, and they loved him. He was real, real private about it, even with me—he’d just give me a wink or a nod and walk on. Of course, he’d have to have a blow-by-blow description from me about my women. “Tell me everything, Gregory,” he’d say. “Don’t you hold back shit.”