My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  After Nashville, we headed to St. Louis to play at Gaslight Square, because the money was better. We started going back and forth from St. Louis to Nashville on a regular basis. While were on the road, we would share a room with two double beds, push them together and then sleep on them crossways. When you woke up in the morning, if the beds had rolled, your ass would be on the floor, your head would be on one bed, and your feet on the other bed! We slept like the Three Stooges, man. The first time I got my own room, I was lonely as shit.

  We were out on what we called back then the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” We played in the old roadhouses, places that have chicken wire in front of the band so they won’t get hit by the bottles. We’d have Sweaty Betty and her sister dancing like go-go girls. Some of ’em were super fine, until they started talking.

  We played five sets a night, forty-five minutes a set, six nights a week. We didn’t have any drinks unless somebody bought ’em for us. Every now and then, some dude would waltz up to the stage with his honey, and I don’t know who he was trying to impress, but he’d hand us a hundred-dollar bill and say, “Would you play ‘Wipe Out’ or ‘Ticket to Ride’ or whatever?” One guy came up and said, “Do you know ‘na, nana nana, nana nana’?”

  I said, “You mean ‘Land of 1,000 Dances’ by Wilson Pickett?”

  “Oh, is that the name of it?”

  Everybody would request whatever was real hot on the charts, and you’d better know how to play that son of a bitch, and if not, you better learn it tomorrow afternoon.

  At those shows, it was all people that wanted to unwind from the day’s work. There were some nights where we’d be playing to like fourteen people, and that doesn’t feel too good. But the places were just jammed on Friday and Saturday nights, and there was always one of the other days of the week that every town had—girls’ night out or whatever. I don’t know if they had a dudes’ night out. But pretty soon, it started being full every night.

  After that first run, the station wagon was shot, so damn if my mother didn’t up and buy us a 327 Chevy 108, one of them long vans. We met this guy in Birmingham who sold us some Vox equipment and let us pay on it as we could, though I don’t think we ever fully paid him for it. When we’d been in Pensacola on that first tour, a dear friend of mine named Barbara Trouncy and her mother had bought me a Vox organ. She cared about me and wanted me to have it.

  At first, there wasn’t a lot I could do on it. For a while, it sat there on stage left, as I was still playing my Gretsch. People would come by and ask, “What’s the matter? Keyboard player sick?” When it came time to play “Wooly Bully,” I could do it on the Vox. “When a Man Loves a Woman,” no problem—I had it. The organ came with a plastic card that was laminated, and it went A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and major, minor, augmented, third, ninth, fifth, and there was a little picture in each block, with little red dots showing where your fingers go. That’s how I learned to play keyboard.

  As time went by, I got more and more tunes down with the Vox, and by the time we were in Birmingham the guy there had a used Leslie 147 amp that he sold to me. I hooked it up and ran it through a Beatle Top amp, and that son of bitch sounded real close to a Hammond, which added so many dynamics to the band. Let me tell you, the guys were going, “Jesus, that’s a Hammond!”

  I saw my first Hammond organ at the Martinique Club in Daytona. A guy named Johnny Ford, who’d died before we hit the road in ’65, had played one. He drank himself to death. He was from Knoxville, and he played in this little trio with a guy named William Sauls, who everyone called Sweet William, this big fat white bass player, and another guy named Stallsworth on drums, who played a gorgeous set of black drums. He had his cymbals real high—he was the first real drummer I ever saw.

  The first time I actually played a Hammond was at the Bali Restaurant, where my mother was the accountant. They had one there, and sometimes I’d sneak in early in the morning, and I knew how to start it. Nobody would be in there yet, and my mother was way back there in the office, and I’m just having a ball playing that thing.

  I loved it, but then I didn’t see another Hammond B3 until we played at Gaslight Square in St. Louis. It was this little slice of town, kind of like Bourbon Street. It was just one street, and all the dens of iniquity were there. When we played at Pepe’s a Go Go, which was next door to the Whisky a Go Go, I was talking to a guy named Mike Finnegan who played with a band called Mike Finnegan and the Serfs. I asked him what that big piece of wood was on the stage. He said, “Come on up here. I’ll show you.”

  Now, as a rule, nobody let you play their Hammond. “Don’t ride my Harley, don’t mess with my wife, and no, you can’t play my Hammond.” That’s just it, man. But Mike Finnegan let me sit behind his, which was very cool of him. And, man, when I heard that B3, it just melted me. In the next day or two, he turned me on to Jimmy Smith and Groove Holmes. That Hammond just struck me. It was nice, round, kind of dull-ended instead of sharp, and I thought it blended with a guitar just perfect. I’ve always been pretty much surrounded by guitar—even if it was just my brother, there was plenty of guitar. The next time I sat down on a Hammond, I would write “Dreams.”

  WE WENT TO NEW YORK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ’66, AND WE PLAYED a place called Trude Heller’s, which was on 9th Street and Avenue of the Americas. Trude’s son, Joel Heller, owned the club around the corner, which was called the Eighth Wonder. New York was something else. We were only there for about a week, and we had to audition, so I’m glad we got the damn job, because we went all the way up there. If we hadn’t got the gig—shit, I don’t know what would have happened.

  Trude’s was a strange place. They had go-go boys dancing, and I didn’t understand it. The son ran a matinee at the Eighth Wonder, and we’d play that, because we got paid double. On Saturdays and Mondays we’d go in and there wouldn’t be a man in sight, not one dude in the place. Then we were like, “Oh, I get it!”

  You couldn’t play any slow songs, because if you did, Trude would run out in front of the band and jump up and down, waving her hands. One night, the whole damn Rolling Stones filed in, and my brother, being the ballsy son of a bitch that he was, launched into “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and we just smoked it, man, smoked it. I sang it, and I did my best. They liked it—they were going, “All right, all right.”

  We hooked up with the guy who worked as the maître d’, and one night after the gig, we were covering everything up with sheets and he said, “You all want to come over to the house, man, and smoke some?”

  My brother offered him a cigarette, and the guy goes, “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  Then my brother flat-out said it—and I never thought I’d hear him say this, but he said those magic words: “You mean, ‘mar-a-juan-a’?” I’d give anything for a tape of him saying that. That serious, drawn-out “mar-a-juan-a”—classic, man.

  None of us—not my brother, not me, not any of the guys—had ever smoked pot before. None of us. So we told him, “Yeah.”

  We were staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and we went to his house from there. It took us a while to find a place to park because we had a trailer hitched to the back of our car. We went upstairs, and he’s got one of those small, cigar-box-sized apartments, but it was full of this good-smelling stuff, and I’m going, “So that’s what it looks like.”

  I thought the whole thing was a sham. We smoke some, and I’m sitting there, waiting to feel something. I’m like, “When’s the ball gonna drop?”

  The guy was like, “What, you ain’t high? Man, we smoked about half a box of this shit.” He said, “Why don’t you stand up?”

  “Okay,” I told him. “I gotta go piss anyway.”

  I stood up, and my brother said something, and I started to laugh, man, and I laughed from that time until we got back to the Chelsea. Maniacal laughter. It took us almost an hour to go two and a half blocks.

  When we left New York, I came back home with one of those tall instant iced tea jars full of the brown, which I bought for
about forty dollars. We turned on all our buds, like Shepley and them.

  BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK HOME, MAYNARD WANTED TO GET OFF the road, so we got Billy Connell, a drummer we knew from Montgomery, to take over. We came back through Nashville to play the Briar Patch for a second time in the summer of 1966, and that’s when we met a songwriter named John Hurley, who was a friend of Buddy Killen, a local producer. John Hurley really liked some of the shit he heard at the Briar Patch, and he liked some of the songs I had written. He told Buddy Killen about us, and Buddy was impressed enough to book us into a studio outside of Nashville called Bradley’s Barn, which the famous producer Owen Bradley had built.

  The Barn was a great place. They had isolation booths, baffles, Ampegs, MCIs—anything you wanted, they had it. It was a very impressive place, and the sound was really good. It was nice to be in a studio, but I didn’t feel like we were lucky or we had made it to the big time, because of one thing: we weren’t doing our own songs.

  We did stuff like “Spoonful” and “Crossroads,” but they changed the arrangements, because they wanted to hear something that sounded like the Rascals. There was an endless supply of Blackbirds—speed—so it’s no wonder “Spoonful” sounded like it did.

  I spent countless hours, whenever we had time off from the Briar Patch, trying to write some shit with Hurley. Let me tell you something—anyone who thinks that writers are born, bullshit. Writing is hard work and nothing else. Nothing came out of that time, nothing worth a damn, anyway.

  So you can imagine how I felt years later, when those half-ass demos came out as an album on Dial Records. We made it clear to them that we never wanted those songs released, that we were way too stretched out on those goddamn pills when we did them, but they proceeded to put that motherfucker out anyway.

  It was called Early Allman, and it came out in 1973. If you bought it, little did you know that you were buying some songs that weren’t even close to being finished, because the time hadn’t come for them to be finished. We had to live a little bit longer, experience a little bit more, and just keep playing and playing. I had to get better as a songwriter, and stay at it for a while, and finally some really good songs came out of us. But at that particular time, we didn’t have it in us. I’d scribbled the outlines of “Melissa,” but I hadn’t even played that for the band. We weren’t capable of completing any songs worth releasing to the public, and that’s why that Dial record should never have come out.

  That record had a bunch of songs that I wrote either by myself or with Hurley or Loudermilk. “Gotta Get Away” and “Oh John” were my songs, as was “Bell Bottom Britches,” but that’s actually a Loudermilk song. Then there’s “Dr. Phone Bone” and “Changing of the Guard” and “Forest for the Trees,” which were all written by me and John Hurley. They were terrible songs, just awful.

  But Loudermilk had inspired me to keep writing. I didn’t have much confidence, because so many of my songs had hit the round file. I didn’t want to be a jukebox anymore, so I kept writing, even though I didn’t have much to show for it by this point. But the first time I showed everybody a song and it jelled, they just forgot all them other tunes. Mass amnesia, I’m telling you.

  That was an important day, because I can’t tell you how tired I was of singing about tears on my fucking pillow, of using up my throat to sing “Wooly fucking Bully.” I was sick of learning parts and making sure that they were right, especially to Byrds songs. I used to hate to see them coming, because they were rough. We did tunes like “The Bells of Rhymney,” but I think we only played that once. The club owner came up and told us, “If you play that song again, you’re fired!”

  After we finished our second run at the Briar Patch, we moved on to Paducah, Kentucky. Duane and I rode our motorcycles there. It was October, and you could feel it on those bikes, man—we just about froze to death. Paducah was a shithouse of a town, and we weren’t there but for two weeks. We went straight on to St. Louis for our second run at Gaslight Square and ended up staying the winter in St. Louis. By that point, it was just me and Duane, because the draft took Bob Keller, who we replaced with Michael Alexander. But then Billy Connell got drafted, and that was it.

  In the spring of 1967, we were still in St, Louis, and we crossed paths with Johnny Sandlin, Paul Hornsby, Mabron McKinley, and Eddie Hinton. They had a band called the Men-Its, and the draft had gotten their lead singer and their guitar player. We had known them from the club circuit, and it didn’t take long for them to get rid of Hinton and form a new band with us. We called it the 5 Men-Its—for about five minutes. Then it turned into the Almanac, and then we went back to the Allman Joys for the rest of the time we were in St. Louis.

  The lineup was my brother on guitar, myself on keyboards and guitar, Paul Hornsby on keyboards and guitar, Johnny Sandlin on drums, and Mabron McKinley on bass. Paul and I would float back and forth from guitar to keyboards, depending on the song. Duane and Paul worked up the dual-guitar arrangement for “Dimples” that we later used in the Allman Brothers. We called Johnny “Duck,” because he kinda looked like one. His playing gave the band some funk, which is what me and Duane had been looking for.

  In March 1967, we started rehearsing our butts off in St. Louis, and the owner of Pepe’s a Go Go really had a lot of faith in us. He’d let us stay in the club all night, and leave the heat on and bring in food for us, and we would rehearse. We were doing things like “Stormy Monday,” “Tell It Like It Is,” and “Neighbor, Neighbor.”

  About this time, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band came through town. They had played the Kiel Auditorium and then dropped into Pepe’s for a beer, and we were smoking that night. They just sat there stunned—they were knocked out. We had never heard of them, but Bill McEuen, their manager, really talked us up. He was all about us going out to L.A.—“C’mon, let’s go to L.A. You guys will be stars”—and he actually gave us the money to drive out there.

  Now, I was against going to L.A., because I didn’t like the pitch that McEuen gave us. When he told us he was going to make us the next Rolling Stones, I was just howling. It was so fucking lame, man. Johnny Sandlin was against going too, but my brother just told us to shut up. Anybody in their right mind would have said, “Hey, I ain’t never heard of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, so how the fuck are you going to make us the next Rolling Stones?” Duane bought into it, though. I think in part because he just wanted to get the fuck out of St. Louis.

  So we went.

  Onstage with the Hour Glass, 1967

  Bernd Billmayer

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hollyweird

  WE DROVE OUT TO L.A. BY THE SOUTHERN ROUTE FROM ST. Louis, and we were somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona when we stopped at a drive-in restaurant where they had those girls who would come out and take your order and bring the food out to your car. This little Latina girl comes out, and my brother says to her, “Hey, are you one of them damn Mexicans that we’ve been hearing about?” We’re all telling him to shut the fuck up, because there’s this big fat Mexican guy behind the counter who looked pretty pissed. But there was no controlling Duane. My brother would say just about anything he wanted, especially if there started to be too much of a lull. In the end, we didn’t care too much. We were having a blast because we were going to Hollyweed.

  I didn’t know Johnny Sandlin, but he knew me. He knew everything that I was about, and he wanted to know everything else—that is, after I opened my mouth and started singing. After a couple of road trips with him, and taking a few pills and spilling out our life stories, we started talking about the people who turned us on to music, who our favorite singers were, and it turned out that we were talking about all the same people. Johnny had a good background in production and engineering, so when it came time to run any kind of machinery, like if we were recording ourselves, he would be the one to do it. He had the dexterity, and he knew why shit did what it did. Johnny and I saw eye to eye on just about everything, and he and Duane were real tight too.

  So me
and Johnny really got along well, but as for me and Hornsby, he stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. We didn’t have a lot in common. I guess he expected me to ask him to show me a bunch of licks, and I didn’t do it. It wasn’t because of him; I’ve just never done that with anybody. The licks I’ve learned, I’ve just kinda learned them on my own. It’s not that I’m above being taught better ways to play music, but I like to watch people and to listen—have it sort of rub off on you.

  As for Duane and I, we were getting along pretty well, but we were both tired of just barely making ends meet. He was ready to stop fucking around and make some dough. I kept thinking that if we went back home, we could make some dough there. He sat me down and told me, “Dig it, we are not going home. You got that? I’m not going home, you’re not going home. You’ll thank me for this one day.”

  The truth is, we’d almost parted ways in St. Louis before leaving for California. We were freezing to death, and we were filthy. I wanted some pussy, but I was too nasty to get any. I didn’t have money, I was as hungry as a son of a bitch, and to top it off, I had to sell the motorcycle that Loudermilk had bought for me. I was in a shit mood, but Duane had so much faith in the two of us. He just knew that if we stuck together, we’d come out on top, but I didn’t believe that at all.

  Duane would have hung on until the last club owner in Tijuana fired our ass, and then he’d still look for another gig, whereas me, I would have been more like, “Why beat a dead horse?” I probably would have left after a couple of years if the powers that be didn’t make things happen as they did. I would have gone back to school, maybe gone that dentist route; Duane would have called me a pussy and hated me for the rest of my days, all while he became a real big star.

  When we arrived in L.A., McEuen got us to sign a management contract with him and a record deal with Liberty Records. Pretty much straight away we located an apartment complex called the Mikado, which was right across from the Hollywood Bowl. The whole place was covered in bougainvillea and honeysuckle, and you could smell it everywhere. I met these beautiful women, and I would get them over there to my lair and let them smell that honeysuckle—boy, I’m telling ya.