My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  We were supposed to wait for an attorney to call, Mr. John Condon, who was kin to Twiggs’s aunt Anne in Rye, the one who had taken care of Dickey. Mr. Condon called us pretty quick, telling us, “I want you to get in that bus, or whatever it is, and lay down on the floor. Whichever one of you looks the least like a long-haired hippie, get in and drive, and get the hell out of here as quick as you can. I mean, move it—now!”

  We were out of there in a flash, because with a name like Aliotta in Buffalo, we didn’t want to take a chance.

  Now, people have long speculated on Twiggs’s mental health, but he was really just overworked. He was so fucking thorough that he didn’t realize he was making the job twice as hard. He could have done just fine with only half the energy. Like I said, he didn’t snap very often, but when he did, watch out.

  There was one night when he was changing some speakers in an amp, and somebody pulled the chair out from under him. He caught himself before his ass hit the floor, and, boy, he stood up and snatched that son of a bitch, bit down on his ear, and spit a little piece of that ear right into the air. There was blood everywhere, and that guy was screaming like you’ve never heard, but Twiggs went right back to changing out that speaker like nothing had happened.

  That was the only other time I ever heard of him losing control like that, but what happened in Buffalo really stunned me. He completely lost it, and it took everything Payne and Callahan had to get his ass restrained after he stabbed Aliotta. This guy was trying to fuck with us, because he had the money we needed to get to Cincinnati and then make it home. Twiggs was gonna make sure we got our money.

  What happened really fucked with all of us, especially my brother. He was catatonic the rest of that day and night. He didn’t say a single thing, and that worried me. We didn’t know if they were going to charge all of us, or if we were going to get sued for everything we had—which wasn’t much. Still, if they took it, we were done. All we could do was stay in close contact with John Condon, who kept us informed. John eventually told us that we as a group were out of harm’s way, and he advised us to go ahead and finish up our run.

  Twiggs ended up doing about eighteen months in jail. In the end, he was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. He spent six months in a mental hospital and was back on the road with us by the spring of 1972.

  It was kind of weird that Twiggs had introduced us to Willie Perkins right before that all happened—almost like he knew what was coming. Twiggs had connected us to Willie in Atlanta because a little money was starting to come in and Twiggs didn’t want to feel responsible for it. Twiggs was more about keeping the roadies in order, and Willie had a background in banking. But with Twiggs in jail, we hired Willie on as our new road manager, and he stepped right into the job.

  At the Grand Canyon, 1970

  Twiggs Lyndon

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Come and Go Blues

  WHEN I THINK BACK ACROSS MY LIFE, I USUALLY COME UP with positive stuff—like the fun times with my brother, the great times I had with Allen Woody, and all that. My memories aren’t about being in jail or my ex-wives. I imagine that most people have enough negative shit in their life that if they dwelled on it long enough, they’d probably blow their brains out, and I’m no different. I just naturally don’t dwell on the negatives, just like I naturally don’t eat the white part of the turnip—because I can’t stand it. Thinking about drugs at this point is another negative, but there’s no denying that drugs were a big part of my life.

  If you check the records, the most consistent thing about my drug use was that I kept on trying to get straight. I kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, trying to quit. I must have gone into treatment eighteen times, and the time between each visit got to be a little longer, which I saw as a good thing. That little voice telling me to clean up was always in my head, even though there were times when I could barely hear it.

  I started using pills in Daytona, because I had to go to school after playing gigs at night. They were red-and-blacks—they had a little phenobarbital, so they’d take the edge off a little bit. In New York, there was a bit of speed, and I believed in my speed. As long as I had my speed, I was okay, but I never took too much. You know when you’re young like that, before you’re thirty, you’re fucking bulletproof.

  When we weren’t playing music, we’d do speed and drink or do downers and fuck. We had Nembutals, and we’d grind them bad boys up, sit and wait a bit, and then just fuck for hours. One time, I was visiting Daytona, and we had to go all the way down to Deland to pick up a prescription that somebody had for Nembutals. It was me and these two real pretty girls. We got those pills and chopped them up, put just a bit of water in them, set them up on the dash, and I’m thinking, “Boy, I’m fixing to have me a hell of a time!”

  We pulled off on an old country road, did them Nembutals, and then we fucked until the sun went down. I did both of them, one at a time—my dick was like a damn oak tree all day. There weren’t no mosquitoes, neither! We didn’t have any AIDS back then; there was none of that. Fucking didn’t kill you, but it might just make you a little sick or itchy.

  I was turned on to cocaine by King Curtis, during the Brothers’ first trip out in Los Angeles. I had done a fair amount of speed before I tried cocaine, and to tell you the truth, coke didn’t really work on me. It seems that people who had taken speed, when they tried coke, it wouldn’t work, and the people who took cocaine, when they tried speed, it wouldn’t work. When I first tried coke, it just gave me cottonmouth, and not much else.

  I didn’t get into coke real serious until I moved up to Macon. This guy who had robbed a drugstore gave me a full sealed ounce of pharmaceutical cocaine, and between me and the band, we about blew our brains out on that shit. You’d do a little bit of coke, you’d pour a real stiff drink so you could level out, and you’d go play some music. Then, when you came back down, you wanted another hit of that damn cocaine, even though you realized that you felt like shit from it and needed that drink to cool out. Doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

  Whoever came up with that slogan, “Cocaine is a lie”—well, it is a lie. I don’t know how many times I got high on coke, and then sometime between eleven and one o’clock, I felt so fucking bad. I’d be paranoid and jittery, and thinking, “Man, I paid $125 to get like this?” The thing is, then I’d do it again the next night.

  After we had gotten into cocaine, we were playing one gig, and we went to count off “Statesboro Blues,” and my brother went, “One, two—the band needs some coke!” At intermission, there must have been nine cats come back there with shit to sell. I thought for sure we were all gonna get popped, but we got lucky.

  I never did like cocaine by itself, because it made me too nervous. But a little coke and two Percodan and I was ready to fight three lions at once. Then it would stop working, and that was the problem.

  Bad as all those were, they were no heroin, man—and it was smack in the middle of that crazy year of 1970 that heroin made its first appearance. We’d been playing so many fucking gigs we couldn’t count them all, and by summer we’d found ourselves back in Macon. Back then in Macon, it was really hard to find a nickel bag of reefer, let alone an ounce, but you could buy heroin in a snap—seven dollars a bag.

  The first time we scored heroin, we were having a little party over at Duane’s house on Bond Street. We had just come in off the road, and we had done pretty good—we each had a couple hundred dollars to show for it. A black dude who was a friend of Chank’s came over to me and said, “Hey, bro, try a whack of this.” He had a pocketknife that he dipped down into a little plastic bag of off-white powder, and the tip of the knife just barely touched it. He put the point of the blade right under my nose, and I snorted the powder off of it.

  It hit me with a big rush, because back then they would cut heroin with quinine, so that it would surge through your blood real fast. I started drifting, and I didn’t give a shit
about nothing. I felt relaxed, so I sat down in this big leather chair, which was so cool. I remember seeing big purple hippos kinda floating through my head, and that’s about all that was going on up there. I thought, “Man, this is neat,” because it shut up all the noise in my head.

  This cat let me keep enough for about two more little tastes, and then we hit the road for about a month, so I didn’t see him. When we got back to town, I ran into him, and the same thing happened again—same amount, same result. It was just as much of a groove, because it hit and I went, “There’s that feeling again!”

  After that, this cat would kinda be around all the time. After about a month or so, all the band and all the roadies were participating. It wasn’t long until everybody associated with the Allman Brothers Band, with the exceptions of Twiggs Lyndon and later Joe Dan Petty, from our road crew, was addicted to opiates. The thing is, no one ever used the word “heroin.” The only word that was ever said was “doojee.” If I’d had any idea of what it really was, I don’t think I would have done it. I honestly didn’t know that this doojee stuff was heroin. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.

  Heroin is a musician’s drug, because you work till you drop, and this stuff would just ease you down off the mountain. You don’t think people sneak around and put needles in their arms for nothing, do you? You’ve never been high till you’ve been high on heroin. A lot of people who try heroin for the first time will barf up a lot of air and have the dry heaves for about four hours, and it’s so terrible that it stops them from taking it again. That didn’t happen to us, because we must have taken just enough not to get sick.

  At first, there were no needles. We were just snorting it, and we didn’t have any accidents. Oakley just loved that stuff. He was an Aries, a fire sign, and the doojee brought him down just enough, but he had enough smarts to never do it two days in a row. Duane liked doojee all right, but blow was much more his thing, and he did a lot of it. Me, I had to learn the hard way about doojee; that shit brought me nothing but pain and agony, and it almost took me from this world about six times.

  In the beginning though, I never thought we were real junkies—we were just trying to keep a buzz going. We never got too high to play, at least while my brother was alive. Even though those drugs are real habit-forming, it does take a while for the shit to really get into the marrow of your bones, to the point where you wake up and that’s the first thing you think of. Thank God that didn’t happen but to two of us, but the money we laid down for that shit was unbelievable.

  SOMETIMES I’LL SEE AN OLD POSTER, AND IT WILL SAY “$3.50 FOR tickets,” and I’ll think, “How in the hell did we make it?” Because the promoter took about half, the booking agent took off another 10 percent, and then Phil Walden took his cut.

  But by the summer of 1970, we did have some money coming in, and even though that’s a good thing, it also separated us some. What I mean is, with money, if you’ve got a hobby or an interest or whatever, you can go do it or go buy it. If skydiving is what you like to do, well, now you can go do it. If you wanted to fly down to Jamaica, now you could go. Whereas before one of the band members might call and say “Let’s go shoot pool” or “Let’s get a watermelon and go down to the rock quarry,” and you’d go without thinking, now the answer was “I’m fixing to close on this house.”

  The thing is, we had absolutely no financial direction. Not that we needed Phil Walden to sit us down on his lap one at a time and explain to us how to invest, but he could have done something. When you’re someone who never had any money, and then all of a sudden, you do—whew! Plus, it was never-ending money. All we had to was go out and play and make some more. Come back, spend it, it’s gone, fuck—go out and make some more.

  That July, we played the second Atlanta Pop Festival, which was actually held in Byron, about twelve miles outside of Macon. It was so fucking hot out there, it was good that we could get back home, because we didn’t have no freezing-cold tour buses back then. We had the Winbag out there, and that helped some, but not enough.

  The backstage area was pretty nice; they went to a lot of trouble to keep it nice. They kept the mud under control by piling hay on it, and there were plenty of lounge chairs for us to spread out on. There was even a naked chick riding around on a motorcycle, which we were all very happy about.

  One thing I’ll never forget about that day was getting to see Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t see that much of him, and I don’t have anything to compare it to because that’s the only time I ever saw him, but in all honesty, I thought he could have done better. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t always all that much when he played live.

  It must have been about four thirty in the morning, and I was asleep on the cold-ass hard ground, when somebody came by and said, “Showtime! It’s time to play.” I’m going, “Show what? What? We got to do it now?” But we got up and did the best we could. As it turned out, we were the first band to play, and the last one to play, and the only band that got to play twice. Just the chance to play in front of so many people—three or four hundred thousand—was great exposure for us. I haven’t heard the tape of the show lately, but I remember hearing it right after we did it. I thought we sucked, but people tell me it really sounds good.

  I was so critical of the band, always. We were too loud, but every now and then it would get just right. Just when I was I about to say, “Fuck this, I don’t need it,” a perfect show would come along. One perfect one could make up for a whole bunch of loud ones.

  There are a lot of our shows that I haven’t listened to yet, and the reason is simple: one day, I’m going to be a fucking jaded old man, and if I can listen to some shit from back in the day that I ain’t never heard before—well, shit, do you know how happy that will make this old man’s heart? If I could hear something my brother played, it will take me right back in time to that moment. That’s why I always used to save me a taste—I was the ratholing-est son of a bitch around.

  A couple of weeks later, we played the Love Valley Festival up in North Carolina, and I’m not sure we ever got paid. Love Valley was the idea of this old man named Andy Barker, who was always bragging, “I ain’t never smoked a cigarette nor tasted no liquor!” After I’d heard that line enough, I started asking him, “Hey, have you ever had any pussy?”

  The local sheriff tried to put my brother in jail, because Duane got a ticket for speeding on his way in there. My brother said, “Fuck you, and your town too. We’ve come to play—do you want us to play, or do you want to fuck around?” Andy Barker told him, “As soon as you’re done playing, boy, you have to go into that jail.” Duane told him to get the fuck out of there, and we just started playing. We were playing good too; we were way into this real heavy fucking thing, and somebody threw mud up on my brother’s guitar. Big mistake, because that was it. He finished the set, walked off the stage, got in his car, and left.

  It was during this time that a guy named Joe Dan Petty joined the road crew. I met Joe Dan the first time we went down to Sarasota. Dickey was from down there, and he introduced us to this skinny little friend of his who he called J. D. Petty. I always thought it was cool to have a name like that—J. D. Souther, F. Lee Bailey, or what have you—though G. L. Allman, I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t fly.

  Right away, Joe Dan and I got along. For the longest time, I had no idea that he was a musician. (I also have no idea where he learned how to make boots, but I still have the four pairs that he made for me, and they’re still like brand-new.) One day we were in rehearsal, and Oakley wasn’t there; he was sick or something. So J. D. went over and picked up that Fender Jazz Bass and started laying it down, with perfect timing. He didn’t play a lot of notes like Oakley did; Oakley was a very instinctive bass player, because he knew when to just sink into the repetition of a song, so the bottom was there for the rest of the band.

  I’ve played with many bass players, and Berry Oakley was the perfect bassist for the Allman Brothers Band. If you wanted him to get crazy, he could, but only
if everybody else did. He didn’t go off on tangents in the middle of “Melissa,” and Joe Dan was like that too. He could bring down the band when he had to, because if the bass player or the drummer shuts down, the other guys got to.

  The right hand of the bass player and the right foot of the drummer are the main beam of the whole damn cabin; without that, the whole thing collapses. The bass player and the drummer have to constantly think about what they’re doing, whereas a guitar player can have his mind in South Georgia somewhere, thinking about being home.

  After a while, I asked, “Joe Dan, why are you here?”

  He told me, “Well, I’m one of the roadies.”

  “No, seriously, bro,” I said. “You’re not really here for that, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re here to watch Oakley, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, you got it.”

  “Then there’s going to be a day that you’re going to leave and form your own band, right?” But Joe Dan was an excellent roadie, and he was there for us when we needed him. He really was great to have around, because when the shit got too heavy, he knew how to make everybody laugh, and the more you would laugh, the more he would laugh. When Joe Dan laughed, his whole body would shake; that man loved to laugh. And he was truthful. You couldn’t beat a lie out of that guy with a ball bat—he would have died first. You couldn’t have gotten him to fuck over somebody if his life depended upon it. He was a good man, and it was such a tragedy when he died in a plane crash in January 2000.

  Another cat that came along about this time was the Buffalo, Gerald Evans. I spent many a night sitting with him and a bottle of Remy Martin, just sipping away. He was a real sweetheart, and he was the only guy who could ever look at me after I had done something wrong and say, “Do you really want to know what I think about it?”