My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  Not long after I’d started work on my album, Deering decided he wanted to get in on it. Early on, before Oakley died, I had done some demos—including “Multi-Colored Lady”—down at Criteria in Miami as kind of a warm-up thing. Oakley had been there with me, and so had Deering. Deering had some experience with Hendrix; not a hands-on-the-board thing, but he was interested in what I was doing. This is a guy who inherited a rather large sum of money, who went to some fine schools, is very well-read, and has been all around the world. He’s seen it all, man—he’s seen a monkey fuck a football! It might be true that “work” is just a four-letter word to Deering, but he really wanted to be involved. He told me, “Just put me down as the producer, and I’ll put up the dough for it,” so I wouldn’t have to fuck with Capricorn. We got a few rough demos down, but then the Brothers started rehearsing again for Brothers and Sisters, so I shelved the demos until I had time to get started again in Macon.

  I decided that I wanted to call my album Laid Back. “Laid back” is a studio term, and to me, it’s what you needed when a song is in the right tempo, but it has too much energy to it. What I would always say was “Man, can you make it just a little bit more laid back?” Just a little easier, you know—pull a little of the insanity out of it. I’ve always pictured it this way: go at it as if you were Mr. Natural, that R. Crumb character. Mr. Natural’s feet always got to where he was going before his head did, so “laid back” means don’t dive in there headfirst. When I got the guys together who were going to play on my record, I told them to picture a Freak Brother, and they laughed for about half an hour, but they got it.

  I got some good players on that record: Bill Stewart on drums, Chuck Leavell on keyboards, Scott Boyer and Tommy Talton on guitar, and Charlie Hayward on bass, who plays with Charlie Daniels, plus Jaimoe, who overdubbed some congas later. I got these guys together and we went to work. Johnny would ask me, “What do you want to hear?” and if I needed something, Johnny would get it for me if I didn’t already know where to get it.

  He got Scott to play steel on “These Days,” and he helped make “Midnight Rider” sound a lot different than the version that was on Idlewild South. I told him that I wanted it to sound real swampy, with the image of moss hanging off the trees, alligators and fog, darkness, witches, and shit. That’s what I told Johnny, and we took it to the swamp, man.

  I did all the harmony work on “All My Friends,” the Scott Boyer song we cut. I’ve always loved the Everly Brothers style of harmony, but I didn’t want it to just follow the traditional 1–3–5 pattern. If you listen real close to “All My Friends,” that’s what made the song what it is, and the same goes for “These Days”—I got those harmonies on that one too.

  The Brothers were working on Brothers and Sisters at the same time I was cutting Laid Back, and it was great flip-flopping back and forth between the two sessions; it was like the guy who has a girlfriend across town so as to keep his marriage together. The wife knows, but then again she don’t. She wouldn’t admit it, but she knows that if it wasn’t for that girl across town, she might lose her man.

  With that in mind, Laid Back was my mistress; it was my baby across town. It didn’t make the other guys happy, because it slowed down the recording process of Brothers and Sisters, but making that record was something I needed to do at that moment. And it came out just fine. I wish it could have been longer, because it only had eight songs, but in the end I was really proud of that record, and it took off. As soon as it came out, it got good reviews and went right up the charts. The rest of the band didn’t really say anything to me about it, but I could tell that they felt the record interfered with what we were doing as a group. It was one of the first times that I felt a hint of what was to come; to this day, I don’t know if Dickey Betts has ever heard it.

  Ever since that record was released in 1973, I’ve had a band on the side. In one band, you’re the total leader. You put the band together, and you’ve got the full run of it. If you’re like me, you stay open-minded, and if somebody’s got an idea that they want to interject, you encourage it. That’s how I am—I never tell the guys in my band to play this or that. If we’re doing an Allman Brothers song, it has to be totally rearranged, and I don’t think there’s going to be much more of that.

  After Laid Back came out, I decided to go out on the road with that band, plus a full string orchestra. That was a dream I had had for a very long time; I had always had this thing about going out with a big band, like Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, except with a string section. I knew it was going to be a lot of people and the payroll was going to be atrocious, and I knew we weren’t going to make any money, so I decided to record it.

  Young whippersnapper that I was, I really wanted to pull it off. We got people from the New York Philharmonic to go out with us; three cellos, six violins, and seven violas. Half of them were men, half were women. At the end of the tour, which lasted about a month, they got a big book, they took one page a piece, and they all wrote something on it and put their picture in there. None of those string players had ever been on a rock and roll tour before, and the girls were crying, because they’d had the time of their lives.

  We played only theaters on that tour, real upscale places, because I wanted the best sound quality possible. You can’t put that kind of instrumentation in an arena and expect to hear anything. We played Carnegie Hall, and we did the longest sound check I can ever remember, but I wanted the sound to be just right. That place was built for the spoken word, so I told Red Dog to go up to the very top row in the balcony, while I stood in the exact middle of the stage. I whispered my social security number, and he heard every number in it. That’s when I knew we had to have the sound absolutely perfect. We made it work, man, and it sounded great. Anybody who was coming to see the Allman Brothers might as well have left, because there wasn’t any of that at all.

  I was really pleased with how the tour went. Some nights were better than others, but they were all good. I remember we played the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, and we burnt that fucker down. The only thing I was unhappy about was me—I wasn’t pleased with my singing. The change from the Allman Brothers to that band was more than I realized. There were times when I would be singing way too loud, and it took me a while to adjust. Everybody had a real good time, they all got paid very well, and after good sales of the Gregg Allman Tour album, we made money.

  WHILE EVERYTHING HAD BEEN GOING ON WITH LAID BACK, OVER with the Allman Brothers we were wondering what we were going to do about getting a new bass player. Unlike after Duane’s death, when Oakley died there was no question that we were going to keep going. Jaimoe stepped in and said that he had a guy, his friend Lamar Williams. We didn’t really have what you would call an audition. Lamar came and played for us. That was it. Within two weeks we were playing shows again, and we got back in the studio to work on Brothers and Sisters. We had already cut “Wasted Words” and “Ramblin’ Man” with Oakley, but after Lamar laid it down on “Come and Go Blues,” the rest of the album just flowed, man.

  I really liked Lamar Williams. He was a nice guy, and we had a very nice relationship. He and Jaimoe were old-time friends because they grew up in the same town, so they hung together all the time. Lamar was a good addition to the band. It was a shame what that Agent Orange shit did to him when he was over in Vietnam—he was only thirty-four when he died from lung cancer a few years later.

  Chuck Leavell was another addition who came on board for Brothers and Sisters. Chuck had come through town with Dr. John, and after they parted ways, Chuck stayed in Macon. He was hanging around the studio, and he certainly looked the part, but when I heard him play, I knew he was there for a reason. I got him to play keyboards on the whole Laid Back record, and he did so well, in addition to being easy to work with. You’d show him something one time and that was it. He’d give you exactly what you wanted, without any questions, and if he embellished on a song, he made it even better. His piano playing was so rich and
so good, and it fit perfectly on all the songs.

  As we were finishing up the recording on Laid Back and the Brothers were getting ready to start laying down Brothers and Sisters, I introduced Chuck to the other guys in the band. After Eat a Peach, we needed something, and adding keyboards was the right thing to do. He started jamming with us, and everybody liked him right away—especially Oakley, who really took Chuck under his wing for the brief time they played together.

  It did take a little while for Dickey to warm up to Chuck. Dickey has that country blood in him, and at first he looked at Chuck kinda funny and would call him “Chopin” or something like that. At the same time, it took some of the load off Dickey as the only guitar player, so he came around pretty fast. Musically, I think Chuck added a lot to the band. He put a little bit of a different sound to things, which was just what we needed.

  I wrote fewer songs on Brothers and Sisters, and Dickey wrote more, because this is when he started acting like he was the five-star general of the Allman Brothers Band. I was acting like I was a member of the band, which is what I am today. I’m a member of the Allman Brothers Band, and although I’m president of the company, I remain one of the players who tries to make things sound better.

  Dickey came to the sessions with songs in hand and just jumped right in, whereas I didn’t arrive with much. For some reason, Dickey was upset that more of my songs had been used on the previous records. Well, no shit; that’s how it had been since we started the band. I don’t know, maybe he had been trying to write since the Second Coming. So he was determined to get his songs on Brothers and Sisters, and by that time I was real tired. I was real strung out, and I’d been getting more into alcohol, which was starting to replace narcotics because I was getting tired of chasing that fucking bag.

  Meanwhile, Dickey was becoming more serious about his writing; every day, he wrote. At three o’clock every afternoon, he’d sit down and write. I don’t write like that, I write when it comes to me. We just had very different approaches that didn’t mesh well. He and I did try to write together one time, but it really didn’t work.

  In songwriting, the first thing that you write down is usually what you want. Dickey would change everything. In our attempt to write songs together, I could have written, “A rose by any other name …” and he’d want to change it. “‘By any other name, a rose.’ No, that doesn’t work,” and he’d try something else. Then he’d say, “Fuck it. I’m just fucking up your song, man. I’ll go away.”

  About fifteen minutes, a shot of Jack, and a beer later, he’d be knocking on my door again. “Hey, man, how’s that song going? Listen, I had an idea. Dig it—if you take this and put it down here, and this over there. Oh, no, that wouldn’t match with that.”

  I’d say, “Why don’t you read it like it’s written down?” Which should have been the first thing he did.

  He’d say, “Well, you know, if you had this line here, and this much of that line up here … Oh, I’m fucking up your song again. Fuck this, good night,” and he’d leave.

  Another half an hour and half a gram later, he’d be back, but I wouldn’t even answer the door. So that’s why you don’t see anything written by Allman/Betts, with the exception of “One More Ride”—we wrote that one during the Idlewild South sessions, when we really didn’t know each other, and we never really finished it, so there you go.

  When something goes wrong or starts to get weird, you try to nip it in the bud. After seeing how he wrote, I thought that maybe Dickey hadn’t written before. Then he wrote a couple of instrumentals, and here comes “Ramblin’ Man.” The son of a bitch goes to No. 2 on the charts, while Brothers and Sisters gets to No. 1, our only No. 1 album. Suddenly in his mind he was a seasoned writer, way more experienced than myself. He was then ready to write the rest of the songs for the Allman Brothers for the duration of the band’s existence.

  There was no power struggle or anything like that. He stood up, whereas I sat down. It’s hard to be a frontman when you’re sitting behind a 460-pound organ. Up until then, we’d never really had a frontman; Dickey took it upon himself to create that role.

  Without Duane and without Berry, there needed to be a leader in the band, and the question that has been asked for years is why didn’t I take it? Well, the answer is because the first thing I would have done is fire Dickey and get another guitar player. When I think of the time and money he wasted in the studio and during rehearsal—I mean, there are twenty-nine takes of “Les Brers,” and we used the second one. We must have been pretty attached as a band to take that crap from him for so long before we finally said, “Hey, man, you’re out of here.”

  Right before Brothers and Sisters came out, we played the festival at Watkins Glen with the Band and the Grateful Dead, in front of six hundred thousand people—the biggest show in history to that point. People always talk about Woodstock. Watkins Glen was like three Woodstocks. I think actually it might’ve been a little too big. They should have had people all the way around the raceway, and maybe had the stage in the center revolving real slowly, do a revolution in a minute. That’s not that complicated.

  A show like Watkins Glen was uncomfortable, because you know that you’re getting the show across to this many people, but you still got two times that many behind them. You could finish a song, take your guitar off, put it in the case, and latch it up before the last guy heard the last note. Sound ain’t all that fast, not compared to light.

  When you’re playing in that situation, you’re kind of thinking about the end. Not that you’re wishing it to be over, but you can’t even hear yourself—that was back before we had the in-ear monitors. Everything was so loud. You just walk out there and start to wince before you even start playing. It’s hard to get any kind of coziness, any kind of feel with the audience.

  I guess there’s something about that many people seeing you all at once that’s real nice, but it’s just too much. You’re just like a little squeak in the middle of a bomb going off. But it was interesting, and it was a pretty fun day. People were OD’ing all over the place. And of course, Uncle Bill was there, which cured everything. It was exciting to be there and see it—and to be able to make ’em stand up, now that was something else.

  Courtesy Jerry Weintraub

  Layin’ back, 1973

  www.SidneySmithPhotos.com

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Multi-Colored Ladies

  MOST OF MY GOOD FRIENDS CALL ME GREGORY, BUT MY mother still calls me Gregg—and I hate it. To me, the name “Gregg” sounds like a brand name for a product, especially put with “Allman.” Gregory, which is my real name, that’s all right. To this day, you can tell my good friends, because they always call me Gregory.

  I always listen real hard to what people say to me, because if you listen hard enough, you can tell what they’re really saying. People will tell on themselves if they’re trying to blow some smoke up your ass. Not that I look for that all the time, but I’ve always picked and chosen my friends wisely. Now, when I was drunk, shit, I’d talk to anybody. But since I became sober, I’ve been more careful.

  Considering all the people I’ve come in contact with over the years, you would think that I would have developed a lot more good relationships than I have. Some friends genuinely like me for who I am, and if both my hands got cut off tomorrow and I couldn’t sing again, they would still like me. Then there are the ones who show me off, and I can tell it just by looking at them. Like if I’m sitting there talking to them and the phone rings, they say, “Hey, I’m sitting here with Gregg Allman.” Wait a minute—they didn’t have to say that. They did that for themselves.

  When you’re in a band with someone, being their friend changes things. I have a relationship with most of the people in the Allman Brothers, and I have friendships, and they might not be outstanding, but they’re okay. I’ve never really been tied at the hip with any of my bandmates. In the old days, Oakley was always with Duane. Where Oakley was, Duane was, and where Duane was, Oakley was. I
thought it was kind of strange, but they were just like that—and at the same time, they were my cheerleaders. They would come and tell me how great my songs were, and other than Jaimoe, no one else said too much. They made me feel like I belonged, and they made me feel loved.

  I think I know how to be a good friend, because I really work at it. Many, many times I’ve gone out of my way for people, and I still help people on a regular basis. Like my good friend Floyd Miles, who turned me on to rhythm and blues and good soul-moving music. Watching him night after night, I kinda got the idea that that was what I wanted to do. Because of that, he’s now one of the members of my band, and when we’re not playing, I still pay him. His knees are just about gone, and his wife is on disability, so I try to help them out by picking up their house note. I do think I make a pretty good friend.

  I was married and divorced three times by age thirty, and looking back, I think I was trying to find a friend, even if I had to marry one. And that’s how I spent a lot of the early ’70s: chasing that feeling of friendship into marriage. I had a male friend in Chank, and I had the guys in the Brothers. I had everything I wanted, and that’s all well and good, but have you been to Jamaica by yourself? It’s not much fun. Even having a tricked-out motorcycle—one you can ride alone and turn a bunch of heads with—isn’t enough to make you forget that that’s not what life’s all about. It’s supposed to be you and somebody else, both cruising down the road, enjoying the ride together.

  The thing is, I really love women. I always have. I think there’s nothing more beautiful than the naked female human body. Nothing else compares to that, and that’s the way it should be. The guys from the band back then would all say that I was such a pussy hound, and such a cocksman. My nickname was “Coyotus Maximus,” which Kim Payne gave to me. Sometimes after a gig, I would have women in four or five different rooms. Mind you, I wouldn’t lie to anybody; I’d just say, “I’ll be right back.” Lord have mercy, if I had a twenty-dollar bill for every time I told a woman, “I’ll be right back!”