by Gregg Allman
I had two real heavy crushes when I was in high school. The longest one was this lady named Dee Dee Cornelius. Her father was a math teacher of mine. I took her to the prom and what have you. She was a sweetheart.
Then there was the first heartbreak I can ever remember—I mean Shatteredsville. Vicky Fulton, Victoria Lynn Fulton. I had spent the whole summer before tenth grade with this babe, and I went further with her than I had gone with anybody before. I was infatuated with her—we had the school rings and all that. Then my mother came to me around mid-August and said, “Your grades are so bad, you’re going back to military school.” I was crushed.
Just as I was preparing to leave, I found out that the school was full. My brother could get in, but I couldn’t go until January. My brother’s grades didn’t get him in as a junior, though, but as a sophomore. Pissed him off, man. He was back in little brother’s grade, back with the hired help, so to speak. Believe me, it wasn’t because he didn’t know the shit. He could learn it just like that. It was just that now he had a guitar under his arm constantly. He was learning that guitar, but they didn’t notice things like that. No grades for that—not back then, anyway.
So Vicky and I stayed together that fall, and right around Christmas I got the news that I was going back to Castle Heights in January with my brother. My hair was just getting right. I had a kinda half-Elvis, half-Beatles haircut, I guess. It was nice and poofy, and the sun had bleached it out. I’d been on the beach every day, and my skin was so dark that I looked like a negative that hadn’t been developed. I had some freckles—it was the darkest tan I ever had.
So I went back to Castle Heights in tenth grade, and it was terrible. I got through the year, and I came back to Florida. I went to see Vicky, and her house had this long dock that went out over the water. She said, “Well, it’s nice that you’re back.” Then she grabbed my hand and put the ring in it.
I said, “What’s this?”
She said, “I’m so sorry.” I was gone for five months, and she had fallen in love with the captain of the football team.
Oh man—I found out what the blues was. Every morning, I’d stop by this one restaurant and have breakfast. They had “Dark End of the Street” on the jukebox, and I’d play it and sit there and cry. The waitress got to know me. I would sit in a booth, way in the back, and every morning I’d have me a cry.
Boy, it hurt so bad, because I knew I was gonna see her. She dressed prettier every day, and her little ass got tighter every day. I didn’t want nobody else—if Raquel Welch had fallen out of the sky, I would have tripped over her and not noticed it. It felt like I had a hole right in the middle of my soul. I didn’t even want to play guitar no more. I sold my guitar, I sold my amp. I just said, “Fuck it,” and I got back into the books. My brother thought I was crazy, and he just mocked me. He said, “Fuck you,” and went off to play with someone else.
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like forever, but it was probably like three months, just long enough for an infatuation to get over with. In other words, until some other chick speaks to ya. I was no great shakes back then, I was pretty quiet, but when we started playing that music, here they come!
Years later, I went up to Vicky’s high-rise one night, and we were feeling pretty good. She was so glad to see me, and she wanted to show me what it was that I had missed. Let me tell ya—that was one special night. I might as well have been Gene Kelly coming out of that place, and it had been raining! We caught up, and then some.
Duane’s first true love was a girl named Patty Chanley. He had a daughter by her, who’s deaf, and who now lives in Daytona Beach. In my eyes, that relationship was very legit, because he really loved Patty. He went through many changes during high school, juggling this here and that there, and her old man absolutely hated him, to the point of saying, “I’ve got a shotgun loaded with rock salt, and I’ll shoot you in the ass if you come around here anymore.” I’ve got to hand it to my brother, because he just said, “Fuck you, old man. Me and this girl, we care about each other.”
I remember Duane doing strange things, man. One day in the summertime, he was in our room, and he was doing all this math work. He’s working all these numbers, so I asked him, “Duane, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Well,” he tells me, “I just measured my dick, and from the day we got out of school until today”—which was the last day of summer vacation—“I’ve given her nineteen miles, four hundred seventy-two feet, and three inches of dick!”
“Where in the hell did you come up with that figure?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “I counted a few times, and I got me an average of how many strokes it took me before I finished. I took that and multiplied it all out, and came up with that figure.”
WE HAD A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY NAMED MAX GATEWOOD, WHO also moved down to Daytona from Nashville. Max had no wife or children, and he was just a cool guy. He’d come and get us sometimes when we would go on leave at Castle Heights. He would take us to this place called the Copia Club in Nashville.
Max had a brand-new 1960 Thunderbird—God, that car was beautiful. He’d come get us at that wretched school because he knew how much we hated it. He bought us BB guns, but he wasn’t weird or anything. When he died, he was buried with a diamond ring that I bought him with some of the first money I ever made. The first thing I bought was a pair of snakeskin boots, and then I went and got him this ring. It looked like a saddle, and it had sixteen diamonds in it. Max Burton Gatewood Jr.—let him not be forgotten.
We’d take four or five of the guys from school and come back to Nashville, because he’d give us his car. We’d all sleep over at his house, and if we wanted to drink, we had to do it there. He was just a hell of a guy. Somebody once asked me, “So what does he get out of all this?”—trying to make something of it. I just said, “Man, get out of here, put that shit away.” It was so great to have that outlet, and it helped me to get through that school.
When we first started playing, Max brought this guy that he knew up to see us, and he played guitar. We’d play and sing, and I’m learning all these chords, and I’m certainly paying attention. And my brother, he just had it inside of him. The music just flowed from his brain to his fingers. He just knew.
We actually formed a band at Castle Heights called the Misfits. The great thing about it was that when we played after one of the football games, or the prom—we played all that shit—we got to wear our civilian clothes. I had this pair of jeans that was skintight, and I loved it.
That was a big deal, because we had to wear uniforms all the time, every day. White shirt and a tie, man. We had drills and inspections every day, and on Sundays we had a pass-and-review, which was when all the folks came out to watch—unless it rained, and we used to pray for rain. We’re talking wool uniforms, heavy-gauge wool. Believe me, you didn’t want to run out of drawers, because you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on. It takes a hell of a dude to do that. In the spring, you got to change the wool pants for white pants, but everything else would stay the same, no matter how hot it was.
They had a great shop class there, and I learned a lot about measuring stuff, building things, woodworking and all that. That was good, because you were moving around and working with your hands, and that took your mind off of stuff. I also joined the school band, playing cornet, and earned a sharpshooter’s medal, because I got forty-eight out of fifty bull’s-eyes. That was from the prone position, which really isn’t that hard. They took us down to the range, with live ammunition and everything. When you got up to the high school, they had Browning Automatic Rifles and a lot of that heavy shit. ROTC was one of your classes, and they had incendiary grenades, Bouncing Bettys, claymore mines—all that shit. They taught you how to defuse them, how to wrap a bandage and treat a wound.
In the fall, we had something called bivouacs that would last a week. Behind the school there were woods, and I mean the thick woods. We’d go when the leaves were turning
nice colors and it was cooling off. We’d have the blue team and the red team, and it wasn’t really nothing but a paintball game. They called them “blood bullets” back then, but they were just paintballs. One time, my brother got lost, and he stayed out there overnight with a couple of other guys. They just found a cave and hid out for the night.
In the end, despite the few good things, I was totally lonesome and out of place—a ship drifting and drifting. I didn’t make a lot of friends because I didn’t want nothing to do with the place. I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t want to be there. Everything you did, they told you how to do it. They told you how to do everything but take a shit, man. They put saltpeter in the potatoes so nobody would get horny, and they put laxative in the coffee so everybody would crap at the same time. You’d walk into the bathroom, and up on this big concrete slab was a row of about ten toilets, and everybody would sit together. I mean, Jesus Christ, that was terrible.
Every day, I’d wake up and see the springs on the bunk above me, and I’d think, “Oh no, it’s not a bad dream.” But I never realized that it just came down to me saying, “By God, all you got to do is get the fuck up and walk out.”
After a little while, my brother did just that. He just took off, and when he got home, he called me, saying, “Come on, man, the band is together!”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
That’s when I realized that, all this time, these people had me buffaloed into thinking that if I didn’t do exactly what they said, something real bad was going to happen. Bullshit. Now that I was leaving, they were kissing my ass.
I went in there and said to the guy in charge, “Sir, I’m leaving.”
He told me, “If you stick around here a little while, you’d get yourself some rank, maybe a captain or a major.”
“Sir, no disrespect, but a captain of what?” I asked.
“That will be all, Mr. Allman.” He’d heard all he needed to.
I about-faced, man, and I had that uniform off by the time I got to my barracks.
I was never the same student in public school that I was in military school. I got so far into music, and it had gotten so far into my soul, that it totally pulled me off my studies. When I got back to the big green high school in Daytona, Seabreeze High, my discipline didn’t stick. I’d had dental or medical school in mind, but once I’d gotten music in me, there wasn’t a chance in the world of that. Well, if I had fallen on my ass, maybe I would have gone back to school—but music would have always been in the back of my mind. I went to my first football game, and girls were there, cheerleaders were there. Between the women and the music, school wasn’t a priority anymore.
MUSICIANS FIND MUSICIANS, AND I MET EVERY ONE OF THEM IN Daytona—black, white, and everything in between. Stealing licks—somebody would show you a lick, and that would open up a whole can of worms of licks. I was really studying them, and by this time, Duane was too. I don’t know who was playing guitar on Little Walter’s records, but it seemed like after Duane got a hold of that record, he just got a fire inside.
After Duane and I left Castle Heights for good, he started hanging out with a guy named James Shepley. They let me in to their crowd every now and then, because for some reason I wasn’t shy to play whatever I knew to anybody. We went to one party, and we took all our shit, because we were going to impress the girls, but then Duane and Shepley chickened out. So I picked up Duane’s guitar, which was a Les Paul Jr., and I played it real well. I even sang along with it a little bit. It got real silent in there, and that kind of scared me, but afterwards some little girls were asking me, “So what is this?” Suddenly here come Shepley and Duane, grabbing their guitars, because of course now they want to play, and it turned to bedlam.
I thought Shepley was the coolest thing that ever walked. He was the one who taught me how to play Jimmy Reed, and he was so good about it. I’d be struggling, and he would tell me, “Man, you’re trying too hard. Feel how stiff your hand is? Feel my hand,” and it was like his hand was asleep—it was just laying there, no pressure at all.
Jim was a strange little guy. Today, whenever the Brothers play around Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives, I always put him on the list, but he never shows. I think that’s why he didn’t end up in the band, because he very well could—and perhaps should—have been in the Allman Joys, and probably in the Allman Brothers. I don’t know if he had a stage-fright thing, maybe that was it. We would ask him to come play, and he’d always back out.
Shepley tapered his own pants, and he must have had a hundred pairs of pants. I thought, “What a groove, to have every pair of pants you own tailor-made,” and that’s why I’ve still got this thing about my pants being right. Stovepipe pants is what we wore. That means they’re tapered like hell—I mean tight, tight—to the knee. Then it’s the same size as your knee, all the way down, so you can wear boots with them. That’s what I’ve always worn, but back then I had to do it myself on the damn sewing machine. I went to school one day, and one whole side came undone.
If a musician could play, we didn’t look at his skin color, but unfortunately we were in the minority back then, since when it came to racism the shit was boiling up in in the South. In Nashville, there were always two water fountains and four bathrooms: men and women white, men and women colored. I would always think, “What’s wrong with those people? Are we going to get sick if we go near them? I mean, they come over and clean the house.” I remember Little Rock and the lunch counter boycotts and the signs, “No Niggers Allowed.” My grandmother would take my head and turn it away, saying, “Son, don’t even worry about it. You’re too young to worry or understand.”
I was just confused about the whole black-white thing, but I became quite unconfused in later years. I don’t know if my mother had a racial thing per se. It was just the way she was brought up. That kind of thing is just passed on and passed on from one generation to the next, and it’s still happening today. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it at all. There are good and bad people, there are heartful and heartless people, and they come in any color, any size that you want.
When my brother and I were young, we were always around white people. Our elementary school was white, and Castle Heights was the same way. The only black people we had in our lives when we were growing up were our babysitters, and two guys named Johnny Walker and Claude, who were the custodians at our grade school.
As Duane and I were playing our way through high school in Daytona, we met this guy Hank Moore who had the Hank Moore Orchestra, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were his backup singers. We pooled our money and Hank Moore came down to our house, and we had the whole garage band together. It was my brother, me, a friend of ours named Van Harrison on bass, and a kid named Tommy Anderson playing drums. Tommy was something. That skinny little kid could go, man. We called him “Slick.”
So Hank comes down to my mother’s house at 100 Van Avenue (which is still there now, with her still in it, at ninety-four years old), and he’s sitting on a barstool in the middle of the room ready to teach us. When we played in our garage band, no one ever wanted to play the bass, so Hank explained to us about the bottom end. He sat there and took us through “Done Somebody Wrong,” and that changed my whole life. I saw the structure of music, and we all got it. I was like, “Take all my money—I win.”
Then my mama came home, and she’d never grabbed me by the ear or pushed me from behind, but this time she did. She said, “Come in the kitchen. I want to talk to you right now.” She didn’t grab Duane, she grabbed me, and she said, “I want to know what you’re doing with that nigger in the front room.”
“Nigger?” I asked, confused. “Ma, that ain’t no nigger. That’s Hank Moore.”
“So what’s he doing here?” she asked me again.
“Well, so far, he’s taught us all kinds of good music.”
“I want him out of here as soon as you can do it.” She said it in a voice that meant business, but I forgot about that as soon as
I got back in there. I just picked up my guitar and started playing, and by now, man, we had it. My mother went back there to get dressed, and she noticed that we were all playing together—it was the first time we ever sounded like a band. It didn’t change her mind about a black man being in the house, but it changed her mind about the music.
Those summers back then were just priceless. They were the formative years. The great thing was that we had two guys to do it with. Duane and I could play off each other, and if one of us missed something, then the other one would pick it up.
It wasn’t too long after that that I met Floyd Miles through my brother. Duane went down to this place under the Ocean Pier Casino called the Surf Bar. Floyd’s band was called the Houserockers, and they played a lot at the Surf Bar, which was owned by a real rich guy named Nick Masters, who also owned the casino.
This guy Daps was the piano player, and he taught piano over at Bethune-Cookman College. His real name was Lindsey Morris—we called him Daps because he was such a dapper dresser—and he also had the Lindsey Morris Trio. I played with him, my brother played with him—shit, everyone played with him. Floyd always played with him. He played drums and sang, and they played all these Otis Redding songs.
I don’t know why Floyd took an interest in me, because he and Duane were real tight, but for whatever reason I started to hang with them too. As I started playing, I noticed that the more I played, the better I played, and the more I seemed like I was into it, the more they let me into that older circle. I was the youngest one there, and I would just sit there and study Floyd. I wouldn’t take my eyes off of him. I watched his every single move. I studied how he phrased his songs, how he got the words out, and how the other guys sang along with him.
He noticed all this, and I guess he saw the hunger in my eyes to be a part of this thing. Me and my brother both finally joined Floyd’s band, but they only needed one guitar player, so we’d switch off every other night. In the beginning, I played lead guitar, my brother played rhythm, and he sang. Now, he damn sure couldn’t sing, as you can tell by some of the recordings he made. But the more I played, the better I got, and when I started singing, that was the best me and Duane ever got along during my whole damn childhood.