My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  When we weren’t rehearsing, we’d pass the time by playing corkball, which is the lazy musicians’ game. You get a pool cue, take the smaller end, and cut off about a foot of it. You wrap black electrical tape around the big end of the pool cue, and there’s your bat. Then you go to the hardware store and get one of those corks that go into a thermos. Take a penny, lay it on top of the cork—preferably heads up—and then take adhesive tape and wind it around and around, until it looks like a little mummy.

  When you throw the ball, you rest the penny against your finger, and you throw it as hard as you can to the batter. A little past the pitcher, there’s a marker with “#1” on it, and a little farther there’s “#2,” and then “#3,” and way back was the home run marker. The odds of you hitting that damn corkball with that cue stick were pretty slim, but if you ever did connect with that fucking penny, you’d send that son of a bitch into the next county. We used to play over by Butchie’s place—the little triangle park there was the corkball field. It was a great game, man.

  In the summertime, we’d get a bunch of inner tubes and go down to the Ocmulgee River. We’d take a little pot in some Tupperware containers because you knew you were going to tip over at some point, and we’d float down them rapids and smoke them phatties, and just laugh. We’d bring girls with us and snatch their tops off—just some good clean fun. We’d have a good old time, but then either we had to walk back or somebody would meet us down there and drive us back.

  Good as the summer was, Macon was a general bummer in the winter. The sky was gray, no leaves on the trees, freezing rain and ice, so that first winter we split and went to this place near Tarpon Springs, on the west coast of Florida, called the Weeki Wachee River. There’s a place there called Silver Springs, and that’s where they filmed all those Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller. They have springs there that are like 130 feet deep, and you can look down through these glass-bottomed boats and see catfish that are like eighty pounds. I mean, huge fucking catfish—you could fit a football in their mouths. There are several little tributaries, which all dump into a main spring. It still keeps belching that good old artesian water, and you can swim along and drink it, and it’s so delicious.

  We would go down there—usually me, Kim Payne, the Hound (which is what we called Red Dog), and Mike Callahan. We would rent canoes and head down the Weeki Wachee. That water is cold—it will freeze your nuts up into your tummy. We’d go out there, and we wouldn’t see another canoe the whole trip. Just like back on the Ocmulgee River, we’d put our reefer in Tupperware to keep it safe from the rapids, and we had bottles of wine, which were half-empty so they would float.

  In one spot was a huge oak tree with a rope on it. You could swing out and then drop into the water—boy, we had so much fun. Next time we went down there, we took everybody in the band, and that was really something. I’ve always wanted to go back there.

  My brother loved to go bass fishing. Duane and Butch went fishing all the time, and Duane and Dickey would go fishing every now and then. Jaimoe wasn’t no fisherman, but I remember the one time he got a sunburn. I didn’t even know that black people could get a sunburn. We were down at my mother’s house, because we had had a gig in Miami, and the next one was in Jacksonville, but we had a few days off in between. We got out two lawn chairs, and that sun was directly overhead and beating down on us. Jaimoe fell asleep, and I went inside and got on the phone. After a while, I remembered him, and I went, “Oh shit—I gotta go over and flip him.” Oh man, he was as black as a piece of coal, and he couldn’t move his arms at all. I had to help him back into the house. He was cooked.

  I’ll say it again: I love Jaimoe like I loved my brother. Of all the people who have ever been in the band, I love Jaimoe the most.

  I met my dear, dear friend Chank Middleton one day at the barbershop that was next door to the studio. I had a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses with the round backs, and I couldn’t stand them, so I gave them to Chank. They were worth like $40 back then, so they’d be like a $200 pair of shades today. Hell, he kept them things for the longest time—I mean, for like fifteen years.

  “You mean you’re giving these to me?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “you can give me a shine.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  I jumped up into the chair wearing sneakers, and I told him, “You motherfucker—I got ya!” He hit me with that laugh of his, and we’ve been friends ever since.

  Aside from Floyd and Jaimoe, Chank was the first black man I’d ever known real closely. We just hit it off, right from the very beginning, and we hung pretty tight. Every time Chank would see us going into the studio, he’d call us into the barbershop to play craps. We had some incredible craps games in the back of that damn barbershop. I learned all about craps in there, especially how fast your money can disappear, and sometimes Chank would have a little smoke for us. You always knew Chank would be in one of three places—at the barbershop; with Carol, his girlfriend; or hanging with us.

  From time to time, we would all go down to Rose Hill Cemetery, and we wrote some songs down there. It was a very reverent place to us, very quiet, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my way with a lady or two down there. It’s cozy, with all those beautiful willow trees and the beautiful river. I don’t want people to think that I’m some kind of exhibitionist, but there’s nothing like going out and having sex on God’s green earth—as long as there are no friggin’ red ants.

  We shot some pictures for our first album down at Rose Hill, and I thought that was kind of strange, especially that shot of Oakley with arms outspread above the rest of us. Right after we took that shot, a train went by, and the conductor had no idea what the hell was going on. He must have been thinking, “They don’t have no white hoods on, so they ain’t none of my buddies.”

  We were absolutely inseparable. We did everything together. We shot pool together. We jumped off cliffs together. Chank turned us on to this rock quarry down on the outskirts of town, and we’d go down there with a watermelon, roll a few joints, and jump off its hundred-foot cliff. We’d make a day of it. It was our gang—it was that simple.

  Our family thing only grew stronger, and that included dealing with the perennial redneck questions: “Who them hippie boys and who’s the nigger in the band?” We dealt with that second question quite a bit. Keep in mind, this was the 1960s, and we were in the Deep South, so having a black guy in the group came up a lot. But Jaimoe was one of us and we weren’t going to change that for nobody. Whenever some asshole came around, all of us, together, would do something about it. Any kind of problem that came from the outside, we met head-on. It was like we had a force field around us. It was us against the world, man.

  For the most part, we were fine as long as nothing started within the confines of our gang. Duane and I would do that brother thing from time to time, but it was nothing serious. I’m sure that my brother had words with other people in the band, but he had a way of nipping problems in the bud. The first whiff of any shit at all and Duane took care of it. Why I didn’t learn that from him, I don’t know, but I wish I had. Letting stuff build up only makes it worse, so jumping on it early prevents hard feelings and grudges.

  Back then there was no lingering tension between any of us, and that included Dickey, who has always been a real hothead—even then. Instead of working things out, he’d work them out with his fists, or screaming, or kicking some ass. The fact is, me and Dickey hardly ever said anything, not while Duane was around, anyway. I can’t remember Dickey having any big blowups while Duane was alive.

  I wore my thirties out and was approaching forty before I realized that you have to watch how you get into it with people, because they might change over time, or you might change, and the two of you might become just what the other one needs, in business, in friendship, or whatever.

  I loved the way my brother would deal with Phil Walden. He would walk into Walden’s office, and his heartbeat would not change at all. He would never be ungra
cious or anything, because we were fixing to cut a record and have a career together. He would just go in there and say, “We need this, this, and this.” He wore Walden down so much that Phil eventually stopped asking why and gave us what Duane asked him for.

  My brother strived to make sure there was a comfort zone in our gang at all times, and there wasn’t going to be any bullshit about Duane Allman and his sidemen. We were all equal, all together. A band means a bunch of guys working together for the same goal—that’s what the word “band” means, and we defined that. We weren’t famous yet, but there was a time in there when we got to watch ourselves create this thing that really worked. Being in that group was the best thing you could ever imagine.

  The Allman Brothers Band at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia, April 1969

  Twiggs Lyndon

  CHAPTER SIX

  The People’s Band

  WE JUST WANTED TO PLAY ALL THE TIME, AND IT DIDN’T matter where or for who. Everywhere we went, we played for free. If we had a gig on a Saturday night, then on Sunday we’d play for free at the nearest park. We would just plug in, start playing, and an hour later there would be two thousand people there. Sometimes it would take about an hour for the word to spread and for people to start showing up, so by the time we had played for two hours, the place was starting to fill up, and we’d start over. We’d just pick all afternoon, because we loved to play.

  I remember our first gig at Piedmont Park in Atlanta like it was yesterday. This must have been around May ’69, and we had gotten enough songs for a real set. It was only about twelve songs, but it was a set, because of the length of some of the songs. We also had some alternate songs we could use as backups, like “Sweet Home Chicago” or “Love Light.”

  From the very beginning, we were too loud. I was always saying, “Guys, it’s just too damn loud,” but the only one who would pay any attention to me was Jaimoe. My brother got double-stack 50-watt Marshall amps, and Dickey got double-stack 100-watt Marshalls. We were playing small clubs, and we were so loud that there were times I’m sure people couldn’t hear us.

  That’s why I’ve always stayed way over on stage right—to get out of the line of fire. I’ve always worn earplugs, and I’m about the only guy in the band who doesn’t have hearing problems. Back then, they didn’t even make earplugs, so I’d just take a bar napkin, roll it up, and stick it in my ear.

  We finally called some kind of moratorium on the volume, because it was getting ridiculous. I couldn’t even sing over the shit, and that finally was the deciding factor. My brother went to one 50-watt Marshall, and Dickey just turned his 100-watt way down—he never even tried the 50-watt, because he wasn’t going to be a conformist.

  Duane and Dickey spent a lot of time together, working out all those harmony lines. I’d give them a basic line of what I wanted on some songs, or they would take a basic line out of the melody and try to complement that. My brother was way into that, because he was way into Curtis Mayfield—you talk about king of the guitar fills, that was Curtis Mayfield, and that’s what Duane and Dickey tried to do.

  I have this ridiculous picture of the first time we went back to Daytona and played the Peabody Auditorium near Seabreeze High, my old school. I had on a pair of white pants and white shoes, with no socks—I look like something out of Miami Vice—but I had no tan. You’re supposed to have a good tan if you wear white pants and white shoes. Duane had striped pants on, Dickey was wearing that damn ruffled shirt with black cotton pants and his wingtip shoes, and Butch was wearing his Billy Jack hat.

  Our first trip up to the Northeast was to Boston, to play Memorial Day weekend at a place called the Tea Party. A guy named Don Law owned the Tea Party, and he was a straight shooter. He paid us what he owed us; there was no bullshit with him. The Tea Party itself was a brick building with white trim, and it was next door to a pizza parlor. It had a flight of stairs outside, and then you got inside, where there was another flight of stairs. I remember hauling that Hammond up them damn steps. I don’t know which was worse—the ones inside, where it was cool but the steps were velvet, or the shorter ones outside, where it was 104 degrees. They all sucked, every single step. With every step I took, I thought, “I’m not making any money; I don’t even have enough to eat. I have a twenty-eight-inch waistline, and I never have a day off.” I was thinking of reasons to go home, and I had one for every step. The last thought I had was, “If I leave, my brother will kill me—I’ll never get out of here alive!”

  What we got paid wasn’t enough to get us home, but it was enough for us to eat on until they could get us back into the Tea Party. That’s when we went to this slum area over on Kempton Street, and it was rough. There were tenement houses, like row houses, and we found one that was empty, so we snuck into the first floor. Twiggs eased out on a ledge, and eased the window up next door. Nobody was home, so he ran an extension cord from there, and we had power and music. We lived there for about three weeks until they found us. Early one morning, somebody threw an M-80 through the window, and I thought I was going to have a coronary.

  While we were in Boston, I did manage to meet one girl who took me in for a bit. I told her the truth—that we were a struggling band trying to get by—because, like my grandfather told me, you can’t lose by telling the truth. I would get depressed sometimes, but I would look at how hard everyone was working, pitching in day and night, and there was no way I could quit.

  During our stay, we met the J. Geils Band, and they were nice people. We hung out with J. Geils and Magic Dick, the harmonica player, and played a few gigs with them. Since they were from Boston, they were better known than we were. Between our gigs at the Tea Party, we did a free show at the Boston Common, and, man, we blew everyone’s shit away. Magic Dick came up and he just started blowing. It was one of those times when all the bio-rhythms were on.

  The people up there were really nice to us, but because it was our first time up north, and there was the way we talked, and we had a black guy with us, I’m sure it was rather confusing for them. They would hear us talk, and they’d be real amused. They used to say, “Wait, wait—sit here and talk a while.”

  Playing for free in the parks was really starting to get to me. I hated busting our asses like that and just giving it away. Sure, we would pass the hat, but I thought that was ridiculous anyway. It made me feel weird, because I wasn’t some dude pounding on a guitar on a street corner in New Orleans, putting a quarter in the hat first. Of course, it did help us become the “people’s band,” so to speak, because we would go in there and kick all their asses for free. I can see now that it was the right thing to do, because back then we weren’t as polished as we are now, we weren’t as good as we are now, we weren’t as tight as we are now, and we didn’t have the songs that we have now. But, by God, we were there, and we were doing it for free. We were doing it for the people, and we were doing it for us, because we loved to play.

  Our second gig at the Tea Party was opening for Dr. John, and let me tell you, I thought he was a dork. The way he talked, I thought he was jive, because I figured he was just putting it on. I mean, “They call me Doctor—Dr. John.” Well, I walked into this dressing room, and this one broad had two scarves, and she was behind him, and she had them boys tightened down, and these two other broads were popping him in the arm. I froze, and he said to me, “Well, shit, man, they’re just my get-together drops. Don’t have no kinda conniption on me.” “My get-together drops”—that’s when I knew he didn’t put on an act.

  I had three or four reds on me, so I laid them on him, and later he told me, “That was real nice, man, because I couldn’t get to sleep. I took my dose”—his methadone—“and popped them reds afterwards, and I had a nice night’s sleep.”

  Meanwhile I was thinking, “Fuck me running, man—that would kill my ass,” so I figured that even though I was doing drugs, I must be okay, because I didn’t do things in that quantity.

  Dr. John also had a gris-gris situation going on too. Basicall
y they were these bags that he had hanging around each shoulder which were leather or goatskin and smelled kinda funky. Inside the bags was this New Orleans voodoo stuff called gris-gris. He threw that gris-gris shit all in my brand-new Hammond—he was throwing whole handfuls of that shit. Gris-gris, my ass. It was gold glitter, and it went down through the keys, down into the stops, gumming the oil up. They had to take the organ apart and scrape down each piece. They said, “What is this crap?” and they charged me $190, which meant I could eat, but I couldn’t drink a cold beer for two weeks.

  After the gig, Dr. John came up to us and said, “You all are pretty good. You all from down around Alabama? I’m from N’awlins. You know, you all got off to kind of a slow start tonight, and I was getting a little paranoid there, but after a while you all got it cookin’, Jack. Them folks were out there, boogying in the house, and they wasn’t leaving.” I thought the guy was all right.

  Dickey, though, was not all right. Not long after, he got real sick with hepatitis, which he got from some nasty girl. We ended up having to take him to Twiggs’s aunt’s house, in Rye, New York. He was so sick, man. I remember we were driving to Twiggs’s aunt’s place, and it was raining like hell. I had Dickey by one leg, somebody had the other one, two guys held the doors open, and he just barfed right out the back, with the rain pouring down. The poor dude would drink a pint of water and barf a quart, and I’m thinking he might die.

  We got to Twiggs’s aunt’s place, and it was real warm outside. I said to him, “Listen, Dickey, I ain’t no doctor, but it looks to me like you’ve got hepatitis. The whites of your eyes look like lemons, you’re barfing like hell, and when you crap, you tell me it’s white. To me, that spells hepatitis.”

  I stayed there with him for the weekend. Twiggs’s aunt, Anne Watkins, was a real sweetheart, and she saved our ass, because Dickey was really shook up and so weak. We finally had to put him in the hospital, and we played a few gigs without him around the Rye area, because we weren’t going to go back to Macon without him.