My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  I got this big old shaky-ass gun, and I went out to the garage by myself. I sat down, drew a bead on my foot, and all of a sudden, it hit me—I was fixing to shoot my own ass with a fucking gun. At that point, I decided to weigh things out and see what exactly it was that I was going to gain from inflicting pain on myself.

  I got up and went back inside and poured myself another stiff drink, and I said to my brother, “Man, this is fucking crazy. I could miss and maim myself for life, and then it wouldn’t be so funny.” By this point, the girls are crying even harder, so Duane said, “Give me that fucking thing—I’ll do it!”

  Now, he’s pretty loaded because he’d been drinking all day, and when he grabbed the gun, he points it right between my eyes. I’m thinking, “Shit, he’s gonna miss and shoot me in the head.”

  “Give me that fucking thing back, and get the fuck out of here,” I said to him.

  He left, and I drew down on that target, and boom! The fire came out of both ends of that gun, and it scared me to death.

  Man, it felt like a rocket had gone through my foot, and for like three seconds I thought I was going to die. Then it went numb, all the way up to my thigh. Every time my heart would beat, the blood would spurt out the hole in my foot, like a geyser. My brother got a beach towel and wrapped it around my foot, and he and Shepley loaded me into the car. Even though he was good and drunk, Duane insisted on driving, and we headed off to the hospital.

  We got to the emergency room, and the doctor asked me what happened, and I told him, “Well, I was cleaning my guns before I had to go off to war, and when I got to one of my Magnums, I forgot I had a round in the chamber. It went off and hit me right in the foot, Doc.”

  He goes, “My, I wonder how much of your foot is left,” and he starts to poke around down there.

  Suddenly I had a bad thought: “Oh, fuck me. He’s gonna see the target on my damn moccasin, and he’s gonna put two and two together. He’s gonna call Selective Service, and I’m gonna end up in Leavenworth!”

  For some reason, he left the room, and I said to my brother, “Man, there’s a fucking problem.”

  He’s like, “What? What is it?”

  “The moccasin’s got a fucking target on it.” I said.

  “Oh shit,” he said, without seeming all that worried. “Just wait a minute, I’ll be right back. I’ll fix that.”

  I’m thinking, “Why don’t you just take it off, damn it?” He goes and finds a marker and paints a target on the other moccasin, and I’m like, “Man, what is wrong with you?”

  A nurse came in and hit me with a shot of morphine, so I was really rocking now. The doctor returned, grabbed the moccasin, and without even looking at it, snatched that son of a bitch off and threw it over his shoulder. That hurt worse than the bullet going in did, because the damn leather had sunk inside the hole and dried in there, and he just ripped it wide open again.

  He asked me what caliber gun it was, and I told him it was a .22 Mag. He said, “Well, you’re lucky, because it could have hit one of those bones, traveled down it, and come out the tip end of your toe, and you might have never walked right again. Don’t worry, I got just the thing for you.”

  He pulled out this little tube, which looked just like Blistex, and he stuck it in the hole and filled the wound up with this goo, put a Band-Aid on either side, and told me, “Okay, you’re out of here.”

  “Wait a minute, Doc,” I said. “I’ve been mortally wounded here. I’m fixing to go off to war, you know?”

  He said, “You’re going to need some papers drawn up,” so he wrote up what happened, but I thought, “Fuck that,” and just stashed that report—I never took it with me.

  We went back to the house, and I put on a bandage so big that I actually sprained the toe next to my big toe. By the time we got to the induction center in Jacksonville, I didn’t know where the fuck I was. I’m on these crutches, trying to manipulate them up these steps, and I was struggling, man.

  I finally made it into the room, and the officer asked, “What happened to you?”

  I told him, “I was cleaning my favorite Magnum, and it went off and shot me through the foot.”

  He didn’t even look up. All he said was, “You’re out of here.” And that was it for my military service.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1965, WE HAD BECOME A PRETTY GOOD BAND, and we were calling ourselves the Allman Joys. Van Harrison, who’d been at my house that time Hank Moore had been in our living room, was on bass for us. Van also played linebacker on the high school team, and one night before we had a gig, we were listening to the game on the radio. Van was going to meet us at the gig after the game, and we heard on the radio that Van broke his leg. He broke it real bad too—all the way broke. I’ll be damned if he didn’t go down, have it set, and come straight to the gig and play. He was a little happy, but he made it. Van was a hell of a guy.

  We had some changes with our drummer. First we had Maynard Portwood, then Tommy Anderson took over. Tommy, for some reason, couldn’t go on the road, so we took Maynard back.

  We started out playing anywhere we could, because we just had the fever for it, and they can’t turn you down when you tell them, “Man, we’ll do it for nothing.” There was a place called the Safari Hotel, right on the corner of South Atlantic and the beach, run by a guy named Bud Asher, who later became the mayor of Daytona Beach. I think he still owes us some back pay!

  There was this other group of dudes across town who were “the” band in town. That was the Nightcrawlers, who had a regional hit called “The Little Black Egg.” Sylvan Wells, the founder of that band, is now a very prominent attorney in Daytona Beach, and he turned out to be a hell of a guy. We had a battle of the bands with them, and all this stuff going on. Then “The Little Black Egg” came out, which was about as bubblegum as you could get—sort of along the lines of “Crimson and Clover,” only with half as many chords. There’s only two, instead of four. Get the fuck out of here, you little black egg!

  They were the hotshots on the other side of town, and then we got called to do our first University of Florida fraternity gig. We killed ’em—I guess we had some butt-bumping rock and roll going down. Van Harrison was good, man. He played with a heavy hand; he didn’t play with a pick. We played stuff like “Blue Moon” and “There’s a Thrill Upon the Hill,” but we did no original songs—at this point, we never even thought about it.

  The song list would kind of make itself. We had a hell of a rockin’ version of “Walk, Don’t Run,” and we played “Neighbor, Neighbor,” the Eddie Hinton song. We also did a lot of old ethnic stuff, blues and whatnot, that carried over to the Allman Brothers. An example would be “Trouble No More,” which was the first song we worked up with the Brothers. It was a pretty obscure record, but you would take some of those old album cuts, and there would be something on there—a hook that you could change or something—and who gives a damn who wrote it? It just had that old-time feel to it, and we loved it. We also played our own version of “Tobacco Road,” and it was psychedelic, man. We came close to losing a couple of jobs after playing that. It amounted to what “Mountain Jam” is now.

  We listened a lot to WLAC, the radio station out of Nashville that played all that old blues. You could get that from Miami to New York on a nice clear night, usually in the spring and the fall. When we were going from gig to gig and driving for hours, we would listen. We’d say, “Man, check out that guy blowing that harp,” and they’d come on and say it was Sonny Boy Williamson.

  That’s when I first heard Jimmy Smith, Little Milton, Howlin’ Wolf—I thought they were joking, a guy named Howlin’ Wolf. Muddy’s the first one we really got into, because if you’ll notice, there’s Muddy Waters songs all through the Allman Brothers records. My brother would play that stuff on acoustic for hours.

  For me, it was mostly rhythm and blues. Garnet Mimms, Otis, Patti LaBelle, Jackie Wilson, even B.B. King was on the rhythm and blues chart. My brother was also a big fan of Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in the
Yardbirds, especially Jeff Beck. At this point, Eric Clapton was back in the shadows—we didn’t hear about him much. Duane also listened to a lot of the Rolling Stones, while I was still listening to Bobby “Blue” Bland.

  Every time a 45 would come out, we’d buy it, jump on it, and learn it. My brother would cop licks off of those records. When “Over Under Sideways Down” came out, it threw my brother into a fit until he learned it. He wouldn’t sleep or eat until he had it down. We were also doing “Yesterday” and “Paperback Writer,” because you were always expected to play a lot of Beatles songs. We did a lot of stuff off of Revolver. That’s still the best Beatles album.

  I’m telling you, when the Beatles first came out, I just went, “Okay, it looks like I’m going to med school. Music has been a nice thought!” Everybody and their brother—no pun intended—had a band, and I was thinking, “Man, we’re never going to make any headway doing this. There’s so much talent, and so much more that’s probably going to be found. We’ve got no chance.”

  Though we admired the British Invasion, we thought some of the music was kinda funny. I hate to mention any names, because Graham Nash is a really good friend of mine, but we thought the Hollies were silly. Now, I’m just crazy about my man Graham—I did his TV show, The Inside Track, in 1990, and it turned out really nice. He let me borrow this black guitar that he had bought for David Crosby. Let me tell you, that guitar was special. If I was going to steal anything, that guitar would be it. For real, I almost left there with that guitar.

  No matter what everyone else was doing, though, my brother always believed. He kept that light going. He was like, “Man, you need to do this with me.” One night I had a date, but he talked me into canceling it and going to play a gig with him. It was going to be our first date, and I couldn’t wait, but he talked me out of it. My brother had the drive, and I couldn’t turn him down.

  Meanwhile, I’d lay in bed at night wondering if we were ever going to play our own music. Where was it going to come from? Was this whole thing going to blow up in our faces? When things would get down, Duane would just inject some energy into it, and he could always figure something out and know what to do. My brother was a hell of a chess player, actually—not too many people know that.

  We would rehearse every day in the club, go have lunch, rehearse some more, go home and take a shower, then go to the gig. Sometimes we would rehearse after we got home from the gig too, just get out the acoustics and play. The next day, we’d go have breakfast, go rehearse, and do it all over again. We rehearsed constantly.

  At the time, we were wearing black suits, white shirts, red silk vests, and a white silk tie. That was us, man. The clothes were Duane’s idea—he saw them Beatle jackets and he went crazy. It was the look of the time.

  That summer of ’65, we were the top dogs in town. Hands down, hell yes, we were the best. Our last couple of gigs, we just knocked them dead. We played the Safari, we played the band-shell, and they were just packed. I was amazed by it, man.

  We decided to give the road a try, and a guy named Toby Gunn, who had Toby Gunn Enterprises out of Atlanta, booked our first tour as the Allman Joys, and he was booking us for $440 a week—and had the gall to take $44. He was like sixty-nine years old, and he was totally unhip. It was just the four of us, no crew, getting $100 each a week. We traveled in a 1965 beige Chevy station wagon, with a 300-horsepower engine in it, pulling a trailer. It was a big trailer, but that engine pulled it with no problem. We ran that son of a bitch down, man.

  We split to go on the road on July 5, 1965. Unfortunately, Van Harrison decided to enroll in college, so we got a guy named Bob Keller to play bass. The gig was at the Stork Club in Mobile, Alabama, and we were booked there for a week. When we arrived, the head of the club greeted us and told us to come back to his office. He unbuttoned his shirt and turned around to show us an army .45.

  “Now listen up here,” he said. “If you all got any knives or guns, or any shit planned for my club, just remember, I got bigger ones than this in here,” patting his big fat belly, holding his .45. “Now, I’ll see you tomorrow night, and there ain’t gonna be many people in here, because it’s a Monday night.” Well, we played that first night, and the guy loved us so much, he held us over a few weeks.

  We went from the Stork Club to the Sahara Club in Pensacola, where we were booked for a few weeks. At the Sahara Club, they had a big old floodlight, pointed straight at us, but it was recessed into the wall, so we were the only ones who could see it. If we got too loud, or played too many slow ones, they would flash that light. Once for loud, twice for slow. One Sunday we had an off day, and this guy asked us to come over to Dauphin Island, Alabama, down the way from Mobile. I’ll always remember the room—it was exactly the size of the original Fillmore West. It looked like it, it felt like it, same ceiling height, and there were a lot of people there, man.

  I can remember saying to the crowd, “Boy, we got something for your ass!” And we lit into “Paperback Writer,” and them people went crazy. We’d slip a good rocker on them, and we had them going.

  That was an amazing day. It’s the first time I’d ever seen wall-to-wall people, what they now call “festival seating.” You talk about scared—I had some serious stage fright, but once I got up there I was fine. We mesmerized those people. Something deep inside me told me, “Man, everything is going to be all right. You don’t have to worry about going back to school.” For the first time, I believed it. I felt it.

  Pensacola was a real turning point in my life, because I realized that if we did things right, we could grab people with the first eight bars of a song, and we wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the night. The key was getting them right away. You can’t pussy around up there, as scared as you might be. I learned to ignore hecklers, because we had a couple of those there. They didn’t like it because their girlfriends came to see us, so these guys came to the hotel once and they wanted to kill us. I learned about dealing with that kind of thing as well.

  In Pensacola, we were staying at one of those no-tell motels, with little bungalows by the week. Pine Haven or Pine Hurst or something. I had this song written. I was lonely, again, and there was a woman that I had really wished was there, to bring me some happiness and companionship and all that goes with it. I had the song, but I didn’t have the title. I’d go, “But back home you’ll always run / With sweet … Bar-bar-a.” It had to have three syllables in it, it just had to. I had tried every damn name. I had almost settled on “Delilah,” but I knew inside me that wasn’t what I wanted.

  It was my turn to get the coffee and juice for everyone, and I went to this twenty-four-hour grocery store, one of the few in town. There were two people at the cash registers, but only one other customer besides myself. She was an older Spanish lady, wearing the colorful shawls, with her hair all stacked up on her head. And she had what seemed to be her granddaughter with her, who was at the age when kids discover they have legs that will run. She was jumping and dancing; she looked like a little puppet.

  I went around getting my stuff, and at one point she was the next aisle over, and I heard her little feet run all the way down the aisle. And the woman said, “No, wait, Melissa. Come back—don’t run away, Melissa!” I went, “Sweet Melissa.” I could’ve gone over there and kissed that woman.

  As a matter of fact, we came down and met each other at the end of the aisle, and I looked at her and said, “Thank you so much.” She probably went straight home and said, “I met a crazy man at the fucking grocery.” So that’s how “Melissa” got finished.

  From Pensacola we went on to Savannah, then on to Nashville, at the Briar Patch, where we met John Loudermilk, who wrote “Tobacco Road” and songs for the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran and a bunch of other people. He wrote “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” which we later recorded. We met John when we were staying at the Anchor Hotel. Right next door to the Anchor was a place called Mario’s, a really fine Italian restaurant. John and George Hamilton IV and
their two ladies were over there having dinner. The rooms at the Anchor were laid out in such a way that we could actually set up and play, so we’re in there, just blowing away, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s John Loudermilk, and he said, “I’d like you to come out to my house tomorrow, guys.”

  We had the good fortune of spending a whole summer with Loudermilk, just watching him write. His wife went off to Europe, the three kids went off to camp, so for a month I got to live in his house. He had forty-five gold 45s on the wall. That was impressive, man.

  Loudermilk was a generous host and an even better person. Somehow, my brother had acquired a Triumph motorcycle, a T110, and I was having a fit for one. I’d always loved them. I’ll be damned if I didn’t find one in the paper, a used Triumph Bonneville, but they wanted $1,700 for it. Loudermilk saw how bad I needed it and bought me that bike. When that man looked at you, he looked at all of you.

  I learned a lot from that man, really. He and I would sit down to write songs, and I would absolutely film him with my eyes. I guess he saw in me someone who could flat-out pay attention, keep their mouth shut, and watch how the process is done. I will be forever grateful for what he did for my songwriting. John Loudermilk taught me to let the song come to me, not to force it, not to put down a word just because it might rhyme or fit. He taught me to let the feeling come from your heart and go to your head.

  You know, it’s all been said before. How many different ways are there for people to say “I love you” in a song? Yet every day, they’re still coming out with love songs. A long time ago, I was reading this thing about Lauren Bacall, and they asked her what it was like when Humphrey Bogart died, and she said, “Well, one day, I noticed I didn’t go up the steps so fast.” I thought that was a really good answer—kind of vague, kind of poetic—and it would be a great line for a song.