by Gregg Allman
I became a singer out of necessity, not by choice. My brother came to me and said, “Hey, man, we gotta do something.”
I thought, “Oh fuck, here it comes. He’s gonna push me out of the band and get Shepley in.”
Instead, he said, “Obviously, I’ve been playing a little more lead.”
“Yeah, because you quit school and have had nothing to do for a whole year but sit home every day and play.”
To sing properly, you have to get into a mind-set where you don’t give a damn if somebody doesn’t like it. You couldn’t care less, you’re singing for the gods—because they gave you the ability to sing, or at least what sounds like singing to you. You’re putting your whole soul into it, all the happiness you ever had, every tear you’ve ever shed—all of that goes into your singing.
It was once said that the blues is nothing more than a good man feeling bad, and that’s what it is. Believe me, singing a blues song makes you feel better afterwards. Singing the blues doesn’t mean that you have them at that minute—the blues usually crawl up on you late at night or early in the morning. You get the blues when someone close to you dies or has an accident or gets sick, or when your dog passes away, and singing is a way of letting go of it.
Me and my brother had this friend in Daytona Beach who was like the audiovisual dude in school. I wouldn’t really call him a geek—he didn’t wear glasses or button his shirt all the way up. He would come to our gigs and make recordings on one of those old suitcase Ampexes. They sounded so crispy and rich. Even back then they sounded great, and they still do.
He sent me a recording of the third or fourth night that I ever sang. My brother comes up to the mic and says, “Now little Gregory Allman’s gonna come up here and sing you a song.”
“Man,” I said to Duane, “if you wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t be so damn scared”—because I was petrified, I was just catatonic.
When you hear it, ooh, you know talent isn’t something inborn. That tape is atrocious, man. It sounds like some country bastard that’s trying to sing James Brown songs, but he doesn’t have any lips. It’s terrible—I don’t know, you might not think it’s terrible, but I do. I’ve never played it for anybody.
But I stuck it out. And the more I did, the more I learned. Early on, Floyd gave me a tip about singing that I later heard from some other people: don’t sing from your chest. If I sang more than a couple of songs, my voice would be gone, because I was singing from my chest. You don’t want to do that, because then you’re blowing wind past your vocal cords, and they’ll get pretty tattered if you keep doing that.
Floyd pulled me over to the side and said, “Listen, Gregory. If I may, can I give you a little word of advice? Let’s say I was going to count to three, and haul and hit you in the stomach as hard as I could. What would you do?”
I told him, “I’d tighten up my tummy.”
He put my hand on my stomach and said, “You see how hard that is? That’s where you sing from. That’s where the power comes from. When you know you’re going to scream, you lay your head back, which spreads your vocal cords real wide, and when the scream comes out, it barely nicks your vocal cords. You don’t want to do too much of that, because there’s soft, tender meat down there.”
It took me forever to figure it out. Floyd said, “You’ll get it when you don’t think about it,” but I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. I don’t know what day it happened, but once I got it, then I didn’t think about it. Now I don’t know how to do it any other way. Starting then, many nights I’d be coming off the stage and all the band, my brother especially, started saying, “Man, you’re sounding better every night.” Of course, I didn’t believe them.
Coming up, I sang a lot of Otis Redding, a little James Brown. That would always tear my throat up. You have to find out your range, so you won’t get up there and encounter a note that there ain’t no way in hell you’re gonna hit. You know to lower the key or change the phrasing. I learned all about phrasing.
The more different songs I tried, the more I learned, and I must say I had some great teachers. Half of them didn’t know they were teaching me. I would just go somewhere and stand and watch. I’d be so focused, the ice in my drink would melt.
“Little Milton” Campbell had the strongest set of pipes I ever heard on a human being. That man inspired me all my life to get my voice crisper, get my diaphragm harder, use less air, and just spit it out. He taught me to be absolutely sure of every note you hit, and to hit it solid. Little Milton taught me to know what you’re going to sing, to know what ladder you’re going to climb, and to know how many turns it’s going to take. I learned from him to understand which part needs to be soft and which part needs to be delivered with force, what I call “throat busters.” On those, you just harden up your tummy, and you let that boy out real quick, you kinda let it escape. Milton could do that better than anybody, and his voice was strong as ever, right up until the day he passed.
I had a lot of respect for my throat and my ears, although I did smoke cigarettes. I used earplugs, I drank hot tea and honey, I gargled in the shower, and I let the hot water run down my throat. But the one thing that brings your throat back completely is sleep—lovely, peaceful sleep, and lots of it.
I think I’m singing better than ever, but I can’t do as much as I used to. I can’t sing as long and as hard, song after song. Still, when we play our annual shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York City every year, I get stronger as the run goes on. I’m not sure why that is, but I think opening night is so tough on my voice because I’m so nervous. It’s opening night, and you’ve got those butterflies.
THE ESCORTS WAS OUR FIRST REAL BAND. WE DID A WHOLE BUNCH of old R&B love songs, stuff like “Pretty Woman,” “I’ve Been Trying,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which we butchered. “Are You Sincere,” by Lenny Welch, was one of my brother’s choices, and we did “This Boy” by the Beatles, because we had to play enough Beatles songs. We did some instrumentals as well, including “Memphis” and our version of the theme from Goldfinger. We’d also do “Wild Thing,” which got us real close to getting fired several times.
Most clubs just wanted us to be a jukebox onstage, and we were a great one. They wanted you to play this many Top 40 songs and this many Beatles songs, or you shouldn’t even bother calling them because they wouldn’t hire you. And we could do both. We played so many of ’em. I remember every Motown song was like that, with that great guitar sound they got. I will never know why they stopped recording in that studio in Detroit.
The songs we played were a collection of tunes that we all happened to know; if me and Duane and one of the other two guys in the band knew it, that song was in the bag. If there was a song that only one of us knew, that sometimes got learned and sometimes not. It was like taking a song apart and putting it back together like a model airplane, finding out what goes here and what goes there.
I tried my best to sound like Aaron Neville on “Tell It Like It Is.” If that man knew how many 45s I wore out trying to get his inflections down, and his emotion—but I never, ever came close to sounding like Aaron Neville. We were doing “Turn On Your Love Light,” because we had heard Bobby “Blue” Bland do it, and, man, you talk about an original talent—there will be, and can be, only one Bobby “Blue” Bland.
We bought as many records as we possibly could. We would save our money, borrow from others, whatever we had to do. Duane would take my dough to buy records, and he would say, “But, bro, we need this. Can’t you see you’re holding back progress?” “But, bro”—when I heard those words, I knew what was coming. “All I need is half of your money,” and then the next day he would need half more. But he would come back with something amazing and we would learn eight songs off of that.
We played shows constantly. I didn’t go to my high school graduation because I had a gig that night. As a matter of fact, I stood my date up for the prom because I had a gig. But I’ll tell you, non
e of the people I went to school with did a damn thing. At my high school reunions, I find out that this guy’s in jail, this guy’s dealing dope, some of them died in Nam—hell, there’s nobody successful, so I guess missing the prom wasn’t that big of a deal.
Around that time, this band called Sweet William and the Stereos came into town. They were headed down to Fort Pierce to play in this big club called the Shamrock, and they wanted to borrow my brother for a bit. Their regular guitarist, a guy named Jimmy Matherly, couldn’t leave town with them. He’d had a divorce in Daytona, and my understanding was that the judge made him stay in town to take care of certain financial obligations. Duane said, “Fuck it, I just wanna play,” so the switch was made. They took Duane and left Jimmy with us.
This cat could play—holy shit! He was a real country dude and a real nice guy. He played a full-blown Gibson 355, through one of those triangular Gibson amps, and it sounded like a million bucks.
Not long after we temporarily swapped Duane for Jimmy, word got out that I was still a virgin. Girls had never noticed me until I bought a guitar, and for a while I thought, “Well, is it because I play music? What if I sold insurance?” That bothered me for a long time, it really did. I was a pretty shy guy in high school, and I still have a certain amount of shyness today. It’s just something that you have. I’ve worked on it, and I’m much better today than I was. Back then, though, being shy made things difficult with the girls, and everyone had been giving me a hard time about being a virgin.
One day, Matherly pulled me aside and said, “Man, I heard that they’ve been bugging you about being a virgin?”
“Maybe so—what the fuck is it to you?” I said.
“Wait a minute, don’t get huffy,” he said. “Dig it, man, I got divorced recently, and I know what it’s like. They would bug me about her owning my dick, and the first hundred times it was funny, but then it got unfunny. Look, I got to sign some papers with her, and if you want, I’ll set you up with her, and I’ll tell her what’s happening.”
See, he was still friends with his ex, and he was going to tell her that I’d never had my hambone boiled. So he set it up with her and told me we were all set, and she said I should come over for dinner. She lived in one of those one-bedroom studio apartments, with one of those Murphy beds, and it was already down, so I’m thinking that everything is cool. Of course, he ain’t said nothing to her and ain’t said shit about my “situation.”
We had dinner, and she turned the lights down low, and we were sitting there watching TV, got a candle burning. I sort of put my hand on her tummy, then slid it up around her boob, and she said, “Oh, you came for that!”
“Nope—no, no!” was about all I could get out before I jumped up ready to bolt for the door.
“Wait just a minute, honey. Did Jimmy Matherly put you up to this? He did, didn’t he?”
And with that, she proceeded to show me what it was all about. I’m telling ya, it pretty much took a stretcher to get my ass out of there. I thought that was the finest thing I’d had since black-eyed peas. I think she later told Jimmy that I got the lay of my life—like he never did!
Courtesy SATV
The Allman Joys, 1966
Courtesy SATV
CHAPTER THREE
The Foot-Shootin’ Party
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DISMAL, COLD, RAINY JACKSONVILLE DAYS in 1965 when I took Duane down to the induction center. He’d been up all night, drunk as shit, and his plan was to try and convince them he was a sissy. He had the swish going, and he had on these panties that ran up his ass. There were all these red-necks there, with that “I wanna get me a gun and kill a Commie for mommy” attitude.
A lot of guys we knew were getting drafted and sent to Vietnam—seemed like more were getting their draft cards every day. The way it worked was, you’d go to this old, terrible three-story army building in Jacksonville, right down the street from the WAPE radio station. You reported in the morning, and then around noon they gave you a break and you got a box lunch. I had taken Duane up there in my mother’s car, and he came back out to the car at the break, and he was crying—that was something the average person never saw my brother do. He hardly ever cried, and if he did, he went off somewhere alone to do it.
This day, though, he was really crying, and he told me, “Baybrah, I can’t pull it off, man. They ain’t buying this shit at all.”
“Man, just be as brave as you can,” I told him, “and fuck those motherfuckers. No matter what, do not get on that fucking bus.”
“I know, I know,” he said, adding, “Shut up, you little know-it-all prick.”
“Well, I’m just trying to give you some kind of help here,” I said. “Just tell them to take their war and stick it in their ass, and we’ll deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”
He went back in there, and the officer in charge said to Duane, “What’s this panties shit?” The guy took them off of him, threw them over in the corner, and told my brother, “Put your fucking pants back on. You’re fine,” and he stamped my brother 1-A. Then he said, “Now go into the room over there. We’re gonna take an oath.”
This asshole in a little fucking Smokey the Bear hat tells my brother, “Hey, blondie—raise your right hand,” and Duane put his hand in his pocket. That guy started going off on my brother, telling him that he was going to spend the rest of his natural life in Leavenworth, busting rocks. They told him to go on home, and that the marshal would be by to pick him up.
Duane came back down to the car, and he looked drained, man—he wasn’t the same person.
“I’m going to jail, man.”
Just joking, I said to him, “Knowing you, they’ll lose your fucking card.”
Well, guess what? They lost his card. They never came after him, never called him, nothing. As far as the United States Army was concerned, my brother was no longer in existence.
A year later, they called me with my “greetings.” Things were just going right with the band, and of course, that’s when they called me up. Man, the bottom just dropped out for me. I went to my brother, and I said, “What am I going to do?”
“Well,” he said, “like you told me—just don’t go.”
“Man, I don’t think that works but once,” I said. “And besides, you still might get a letter tomorrow.”
Then it came to me: I decided to shoot myself in the foot. It seemed like the thing to do, and when I told my brother, he was in complete agreement.
“Yeah,” he said, “that might just work. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do—we’re gonna have a foot-shooting party. We’ll get a bunch of whiskey and have a bunch of women come over. We’ll get you good and fucked up, and then you can take care of business. You can do it out in the garage, and then we’ll take you on down to the hospital, and then over to the induction center. It’s gonna work out fine, bro.”
The fateful day arrived, and my brother invited a bunch of friends and told them that we were going to have a foot-shooting party. We put a big box full of sawdust out in the garage, and my brother turned to me.
“Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I said.
Now, I wasn’t slobbering drunk yet, but I wasn’t feeling any pain either. Then something occurred to me and I got Duane’s attention.
“Hey, genius, we forgot something.”
“What?” he asked.
“A fucking pistol, man.”
“Oh shit.”
There was a silent moment, and all the girls were crying, and I realized, “This really is a foot-shooting party. Somebody is fixing to shoot themselves, and that somebody is me.”
Duane, Shepley, and I got in the car and headed over to “Spadetown,” as we called it, to get a pistol. It wasn’t a racial thing at all, because we loved it there—it was just the name that everybody used back then. They had the best barbecue over there, they had the cheapest gas, and they had the best records, so we loved to go over there.
Now, I know this sounds like a bullshit
story, but it’s all true, every word of it. We stopped one guy on the street, and he said, “Can I help you?”
One of us asked him, “Hey, man, you know where we can get a Saturday night special?”
“Oh,” he responded, “it’s a pistole he wants! Well, maybe I do.”
“How much is it?” I asked.
“Well, how much do you got?” he replied.
“C’mon, man, how much is it?” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “Man, don’t fuck with me—I’m fixing to shoot my own ass.”
“It costs however much it is you got in your pocket.”
“How far do you got to go to get it?”
“I just got to pull it out of my pocket is all.”
“Well, in that case, we got twenty-seven dollars.”
“Ain’t that strange,” he said. “Because that’s just how much it is.” We collected up all the dough, gave it to the man, and he gave us the pistol, a .22 short, and three bullets, and we took it back to the house.
If you picked that damn pistol up by the butt and shook it, the whole thing would rattle, like somebody had loosened all the screws on it. A precision weapon it wasn’t. I mean, that gun had no hope. I asked my brother, “Man, you expect me to fire this fucking thing?” He told me, “Don’t worry about it, man. You’ll be fine.”
I did luck out in one way, because beforehand I had studied a foot chart. The long bone in your foot comes to a V with the bone next to it. I wanted to put the bullet between the two bones, so I’d crack both bones but not break either one. Just take a little off the side, you know? I didn’t want a permanent limp or nothing—I was just trying to dodge the draft.
I had on this pair of moccasins, and I dotted that spot on my foot just perfect. I ended up with a big old target on my moccasin. The girls were watching this, and when they saw the target, they really started in with the tears.