My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  My brother and I met these two little girls when we first got to Hollywood—God, I look back now and I wonder why we weren’t never in jail. One of them had long black hair past her elbows, and the other one had white hair that was the same length. They wore these little dresses, and I swear, their hair was longer than those dresses. I went out with the blonde, and my brother went out with the one with dark hair, and the first night we took them back to our place and took them to our respective bedrooms. There wasn’t any hors d’oeuvres, no wine or champagne, just some cold beer. We got them into our rooms, stripped them down, and fucked like you can’t believe. Talk about “Welcome to California.”

  We became really good friends with these girls. Every now and then, we’d have a case of the hornies, so we’d just give them a call. We never really took them out on dates, because we didn’t have the money, but we’d bring them to a few gigs.

  The first gig we did when we got out to L.A. was opening for the Doors at the Hullabaloo Club. Of course we knew who they were, because that was the summer of “Light My Fire.” Talk about some stage fright—there was like twenty-eight hundred people in that room. The damn Martinique held twenty-eight! There was a round stage in there, and it would turn clockwise when one band was through, and turn back the other way when the next band started up.

  I’ll never forget it—we were doing “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and there was this damn catwalk, and I was going to walk out there. All these record company people were in the crowd, and just as I went, “I was born …” my throat cracked something terrible. The place got silent, and I couldn’t believe it happened, but we got out of it because I just went back, strapped on my guitar, and we kicked into “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Back then, not too many people had heard of Muscle Shoals or Otis Redding or anything like that, so they liked that a lot.

  That goddamn Sam Cooke song. Do you know how many times I’ve relived that moment? Over and over again, man. It’s like the kick that was missed to lose the Super Bowl. You just torture yourself over something like that. That’s why I don’t listen to show tapes—I’ve never even watched the Live at the Beacon Theatre DVD, and it’s gone platinum now. I know that’s terrible, but all I’ll hear are the mistakes. You can pick your own stuff apart so much, so once something is done, it’s done. It’s easier for me that way.

  Liberty brought in Mr. Dallas Smith to produce our first record. It was actually Dallas who came up with the idea to change our band name from the Allman Joys to Hour Glass. Now, here’s a guy who was an ex-shoe salesman from Miami—and as a producer, he was a hell of a shoe salesman. The guy used to wear this damn grease in his hair. He had a bunch of diamond rings and was a little heavy around the waist, but had real skinny legs. He wore leather jackets with long sleeves, silk pants, and the fucking Elvis glasses with the holes in them. Just Hollywooding it up, man.

  His other band was the Sunshine Company, and by the name alone, you could tell that they sang about nice and happy things, like skipping through the park. We got packaged together because we had the same manager, the same producer, the same record deal—the same bullshit.

  When it came time to record that first Hour Glass record, Dallas came to us with a washtub full of not cassettes but acetates. One of them was signed by Carole King, and I’ve still got it. It’s called “No Easy Way Down,” and we recorded that, along with another one of her songs, “So Much Love.” They handed us that basket of songs, and said, “Okay, now pick out your album.”

  I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Sandlin. He couldn’t understand how he had joined up with such great players, and now here we all were, in Hollyweird, selling out. That’s how he felt about it, and let’s face it—we were. We were fucking selling out, but we were staying alive.

  We recorded The Hour Glass in about six days during August 1967, and then the mixing started. Of course, Dallas started showing off his stuff, so I think the whole thing took two weeks. Recording that album was a horrific experience. We hated the whole process, because every time we tried to loosen it up a little bit, they would stiffen it right back up. They’d force us back into the pop bullshit that they wanted us to do. Duane would try to get some kind of groove going, and they would shoot him right down.

  The music had no life to it—it was poppy, preprogrammed shit. When we played live gigs, we did nothing off the record. We ignored that shit and played the fucking blues. Boy did that piss them off. People from Liberty would show up at a gig, and we wouldn’t play one song off the record.

  One night we played the Whisky A Go Go, opening for Paul Butterfield. There was a waitress there who was just drop-dead gorgeous, one of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen. I thought to myself, “What the hell are you doing slinging drinks in a dive like this?” I asked somebody to go ask her what she was doing after she got off, and I got a note back that said, “Nothing, but I sure would like to do it with you.” Let me tell you, I played some music that next set—I got down into the groove.

  She had a town house down on Hollywood Boulevard, after it turns into a residential section. We got to her place, and she pulled out a bottle of Tuinals and a big bottle of brandy. We took a Tuinal each, and a couple shots of that brandy, and, man, we fucked like a couple of minks. She was every bit as good as she looked too.

  I woke up the next morning, and I put on my drawers and my pants and threw on a T-shirt, and she put on about the same. There was a knock on the door, and she opened it just a bit, looked out, and said, “I think it must be the paper boy.” All of a sudden, bam! The door busts in, and it’s these three hooligans, and they had guns. I went, “Oh shit,” but I was also thinking, “Baby, the pussy was worth it. If I gotta go today, at least I am scrubbed and tubbed.” I mean, she fucked me until I was just fucked out, and that was back in my prime. After about seven times, I was begging her to stay away from me and to please just leave me alone.

  These guys come in, and one of them started slapping her around. I stood up, and the other two grabbed me, and one of them starts poking me a few times. I didn’t want to hit him back, because I didn’t want all three of them motherfuckers beating on me. They were just slapping me a little bit, so I just kinda turned the other cheek, but I was afraid for my life. They ended up trashing the place and taking a few things—these motherfuckers were thugs, just street hoods, who must have seen her coming and going.

  After they left, you’d think she would be weirded out by something like that, so I started getting ready to go. She stopped me.

  “Hey,” she said. “Let’s take another Tuinal and drink some more brandy, and fuck some more. That’ll take our minds off of what happened.”

  “You’re the doc,” I told her. “Whatever you say.” Hollywood could be a strange place sometimes.

  THE RECORDING PROCESS ON THE HOUR GLASS ALBUM MIGHT HAVE been terrible, but what was even worse was that Liberty wouldn’t let us play that many gigs. They were “saving” us. For what, who the fuck knows. Maybe they were just pissed off that we played what we wanted to and not anything from that lifeless album. But for whatever reason, we only played about once a month, at rock halls like the Avalon, the Kaleidoscope, the Fillmore, the Vault, the Troubadour, a place called the Magic Mushroom, and a couple of times at the Whisky. They were somewhere between nightclubs and opera houses, so basically they were roadhouses. I never understood why they didn’t put us on the whole tour with the Doors, or get us to open for the Rolling Stones. We wanted to play all the time, but they just wouldn’t let us.

  Back in them days, there were usually three or four bands on the bill. That would give everybody at least an hour to play, and the headliner would get a couple of hours. We would hang around and watch whoever else was playing—Jefferson Airplane, Buddy Guy, Buffalo Springfield—because I wanted to learn all that I could. I was never at home, I was always out. Even if we weren’t playing. I’d be checking out other people all the time.

  In the L.A. area, there was a group of bands including Spirit, the
Seeds, and Love, and we’d all play the same clubs and hang out together. We played down at the Cheetah Club with the Electric Flag when they were in their prime—Mike Bloomfield was in perfect form. We were part of that whole scene, and one of the guys we found was Jackson Browne.

  I met Jackson through Jimmie Fadden, who was the harp player for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Jackson had actually been a member of the Dirt Band in their early days. He would crash at my place from time to time, because he was too proud to go back to his parents’ house in Long Beach. Jackson knew he wasn’t going to do anything else but write songs and play music. He’s a hell of a nice guy, incredibly funny, incredibly sarcastic, and him and my brother really hit it off—he was absolutely flabbergasted by Duane’s playing. Jackson was our kind of folk, a person that I just liked being around.

  I watched Jackson write a lot of stuff, and I mean slave over it. He was so deeply into it that he didn’t know I was in the room. Every now and then, he would crawl off with that guitar and you would hear some really beautiful melodies coming from the bedroom. He would come over quite often, and he’d tell you that he was starting to get a little too bluegrassy, a little too country, and we brought him out of that. We took him on some gigs with us from time to time, but of course, none of us were known by anybody at this point. Jackson Browne was just this guy named Jackson Browne—he was just another musician.

  We used to rehearse quite a bit at the Troubadour, because we lived close by and the owner, Doug Weston, was pretty cool about letting us use the place. One day we were in there rehearsing, and they were working on the power. Like I said, me and Hornsby would switch off on keyboard or guitar—Paul mostly played organ, and I mostly played piano and guitar.

  I was playing guitar on this one thing, and I had my hand resting on the guitar and I went to touch the microphone. I got a couple of inches away from the mic, and it sucked me right to it. That’s a bad kind of shock, because a shock usually knocks you away from the mic. I’d never had a shock like that, and it gave me a good jolt. They had flipped the whole circuit. You look back and wonder, “Now, why wouldn’t they say something about that?”

  We got through with the song, and I went to sit down at the piano. I heard my brother say, “How’s he doing that?” I looked around, and Hornsby had one hand on his Tele and the other one around that microphone stand. His hair used to be real long and straight back then, and it was standing straight up in the air. My brother is going, “Damn, man, will you look at that!”

  I just did a dive across the stage, hit him, and the plug pulled out and broke the circuit. Paul fell just like a statue, straight down. He got up and said, “What’s happening?” He didn’t remember anything, but the poor cat probably didn’t get a hard-on for three or four weeks.

  Because we spent so much time at the Troubadour, I used to see Tim Buckley play there quite a bit, and, my God, there was a man who made beautiful, passionate music. He played a twelve-string, and his voice had a range that was unbelievable. Tim called me right before he died from a heroin overdose. This was 1975, and I was at my home in Macon. The phone rang, and there was a bunch of people at the house, so at first I couldn’t tell who it was. Tim told me that he had read an interview with me, and that I had said that one of my wishes was to record an album with him.

  I told him, “Absolutely,” and said to name the time and place and I would be there.

  “Wow,” he said. “It just seems like you would be the last person in the world to want to record with me.”

  “Man, we could do something great together,” I told him, but he died before we could. I was so elated by that phone call, you couldn’t talk to me for three or four days.

  The first time we ran into Buffalo Springfield was when we opened for them at the Fillmore, and they were so good that night. We had been around them for a while, so they showed up early that night and heard some of our set. We stayed, of course, to watch some of theirs, and I thought, “Stills sure is singing kind of bluesy tonight.”

  Later on, when I got to know Stephen, he told me, “Man, you sure were a tough act to follow, even back then.” I was really flattered by that. The two of us have always been pretty tight; we only see each other maybe twice every three years, if that, but he’s a great guy.

  Moby Grape was another band we really dug. Their bass player, a guy named Bob Mosley, was a big lumberjack-looking dude who played a white bass that hung down real low. He would come and sing this kind of a gospel number, and I’d never really seen anybody play some serious bass and sing their ass off at the same time like he did.

  One night we played with Ike and Tina Turner at the Avalon. Buddy Guy was playing that night too, and he had a Fender Twin amp and a cord that had its own carrying case. This cord was so long, he could go out in the crowd and play, and they would have to turn his amp up as he got farther away from the stage.

  Seeing all the shows and meeting everyone was all well and good, but what it really did was make us want to play more, which Liberty made increasingly hard. To help pass the time and deal with the boredom of not playing, I got into riding horses. There were a couple of places where you could go and rent a horse, with these huge fields to ride in. As a matter of fact, Dallas Smith used to go out there quite a bit. They had big rocks going sideways into the ground and it was neat—they used to film The Lone Ranger and a lot of cowboy movies there, and you could get out there and play, get the horse to do circles and all that.

  I finally talked my brother into going out there one Sunday. It was a nice crisp, cool day, and he had on his corduroy jacket. We got the horses, and he was like, “Come on, man. Get on and let’s fucking go!” As always, he was ready to hop.

  I said, “Look, man, you gotta go across the street to get to the field. That street is asphalt, and your horse is shod.”

  Duane was like, “What the fuck do you mean, ‘shod’?”

  “He’s got steel shoes on,” I started to explain. “And steel shoes and asphalt means take him over him real slow, or he’ll slip and bust both your asses.”

  Duane goes, “Are you through?”

  I said, “Yes, but just hold him back until you get to the field, and then you can let him go.”

  Well, guess what happened? He no more than touched that goddamn asphalt, and the next thing I know, I see that horse rear up in the air, and my brother and the horse go down in a heap. I’m thinking, “God, why? Why didn’t you just bring me out here and let me get trampled?” I knew what was coming, and getting trampled would have been better than that.

  Duane was pissed off, and of course it was all my fault, no question about that. “See,” he said, lighting into me. “You fucking pestered me about this Lone Ranger shit, and now I fuck up my goddamn arm.”

  He said some really hateful shit because he was so angry, telling me, “Take me home, and do not come around me. You are not welcome—do you understand?” He suffered a pretty bad sprain, and he had to keep his arm in a sling for six weeks, and he didn’t speak to me that entire time. He didn’t want nothing to do with me. Then on top of everything, he gets a raging cold, so he was ready to put a hit man on my ass.

  It was his birthday on November 20, so I went and bought him a bottle of Coricidin, a bottle of pills that said it was for colds. Then I went by the record store and got that first Taj Mahal record, with all the butterflies on the cover and him sitting on a rocking chair. We’d played with Taj before, borrowed an amplifier from him. So I got Duane that record and the pills. Well, I couldn’t have picked two better things.

  I wrapped them up and put them on his doormat, and I knocked and ran. That was in the morning, and that evening my phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, brother, get over here—get over here, babybrah, quick. Quick, man!”

  It was a little chilly out, so as I was putting on my coat, the phone rang again. “Where are you? Where are you? Get over here quick.”

  “Jesus! All right, I’m coming!” So I hustled it over there.


  He said, “Man, thank you,” and he grabbed me and kissed me. He always kissed me, on the mouth, anywhere. So he kissed me on the cheek, and he said, “Man, that record you brought me is out of sight. There’s a guy called Jesse Ed Davis on there, this Indian dude, and he plays guitar with a damn wine bottle. Dig this.”

  And then I looked on the table and all these little red pills, the Coricidin pills, were on the table. He had washed the label off that pill bottle, poured all the pills out. He put on that Taj Mahal record, with Jesse Ed Davis playing slide on “Statesboro Blues,” and starting playing along with it. When I’d left those pills by his door, he hadn’t known how to play slide. From the moment that Duane put that Coricidin bottle on his ring finger, he was just a natural.

  Looking back on it, I think that learning to play slide was a changing moment in his life, because it was like he was back in his childhood—or maybe not his childhood, because it never seemed to me like Duane was a child, so it was more like going back to his first days of playing the guitar. He took to the slide instantly, and mastered it very quickly. He practiced for hours and hours at a time, playing that thing with a passion—just like he did when he first learned to play the guitar.

  WHEN WE WERE ABLE TO PLAY SHOWS, WE WERE PLAYING A LOT OF R&B and some blues. We always stuck to our guns musically. We were determined to do what we did best and how it was the most comfortable for us, so we did songs like “Leaving Trunk,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You,” the Solomon Burke tune, and “Dimples,” which took on a life of its own. We did “Stormy Monday,” “Feel So Bad,” and “Love Light”—I remember Johnny Sandlin keeping time on “Love Light” with that big foot of his. Somebody had given him a set of drums, and I’m telling you, it looked like they had barf on them. They were orange and yellow, like a big pile of pizza puke. They looked like shit, but boy did they sound good.