My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  The second I got home, they pummeled me with all kinds of shit, like “You don’t love us anymore? You moving to California? What’s the deal?” I’d been out there for just over a month, and I didn’t see what the big deal was. I said something about being able to move wherever the fuck I wanted, which didn’t get the meeting off to a very good start, but they shouldn’t have jumped on my ass about where I lived—I wasn’t married to the Allman Brothers.

  They asked me about Cher, and I told them that I didn’t know what was going to happen with her. I didn’t understand why they were asking me all these personal questions. I mean, we’d only been on a few dates. I think there was something weird about all the attention that Cher and me had already gotten in the news. I don’t think anyone in the band expected to see me in the spotlight like that—I know I didn’t. That, combined with the whole L.A. thing, just rubbed them the wrong way. I finally said, “Fuck it, I thought you wanted to talk about the band,” but we didn’t get anywhere at all.

  Truth is, though, it was clear from the start that this was more about all the shit that had happened the previous fall. This wasn’t just about my living in L.A., or about what might happen with Cher—it was also about my and Dickey’s solo albums, and of course all the drugs figured into it too. We got to a point where we were all prepared to just move on and play, but there were lingering hard feelings. Unfortunately, this tension didn’t end there; in fact, that was just the beginning.

  We started to work on the album, but it was rough going—like we were all just going through the motions. I hadn’t been back in Macon working on the album for too long before Cher came to visit. She flew into Atlanta, and I drove up to the airport to pick her up. The airline had her stashed in the luggage room while she was waiting for me, and when I got there she was asleep in this big soft chair that they had pushed in there for her.

  I took her down to Macon and showed her around. Our first date was at Le Bistro, the finest restaurant in town. We met Phil Walden, and he wouldn’t keep his hands off of her. He kept saying things to her like “Why don’t you and me go off somewhere and talk?” Really stupid stuff, especially with his wife sitting right there.

  Cher kept asking me, “Who is this fucking idiot?”

  I said, “Would you believe me if I told you that he was the owner of the record company and the manager of our band?”

  “That guy? I thought he was Tony Fucking Joe White!”

  Walden loved her because he thought our relationship was a great selling point, and he was trying to convince the band of that, while I’m telling him to stay out of my business. In spite of what the band had been saying, when she would go out with them, everybody liked her, and she made them all laugh. She had the filthiest mouth in show business, and the guys in the band thought she was quite a trip. You get that girl away from Hollywood and she’s a whole different person.

  Things between me and Cher were working out pretty well, but there was one problem: she didn’t realize that I was a hop-head. I figured that when I told her it was going to shoot things right in the ass, so I might as well enjoy it while I could. Eventually, though, I had to tell her that I was a junkie, because she started to hint at marriage, which didn’t sound so bad because she was a good old gal. I felt that we knew each other well enough and we were on the right track, so I might as well just get it out of the way.

  So I woke up one morning and told her, “Look, I’ve got to tell you something. I’m addicted to narcotics.”

  “Well, how do you fix that?” she asked.

  I didn’t have much of a response beyond “Well…”

  “I know what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll go back to L.A., and I’ll get my doctor friend to write you a big prescription for Quaaludes, and you can just sleep through it. When you wake up, it will all be over.”

  I tried it—what the hell—but of course it didn’t work.

  Still, Cher was actually quite elated that I told her the truth about my addiction. She was real positive, saying things like “Don’t worry, baby, you can beat that. I’ll stand right by you, every minute.” She wasn’t pissed at all, which made me feel great. I’d been convinced she was going to get up and storm out of the house when I told her, and that would be the end of that. I had prepared myself to say, “Well, it’s been a lot of fun, thanks a lot,” but she was completely behind me.

  Right after that, we went into rehearsals for Win, Lose or Draw, but it didn’t go worth a shit because the band was convinced that I was going to split back to California with Cher. And in the end I probably did spend too much time out in California. But at that point it was easy to run; those sessions were the worst experience I ever had in a studio.

  It wasn’t just me, though; they were bad for all of us. Where the earlier albums had come together pretty quickly, this recording stretched from February to July ’75. Very rarely were all of us in the studio at the same time. The only three who regularly showed up were Jaimoe, Chuck, and Lamar. Even so, Jaimoe and Butch still missed playing drums on a couple of tracks—Sandlin and Bill Stewart had to play the drums instead. And then there was Dickey, who seemed like he only cared about playing on songs that he wrote and tried to dictate the entire process.

  As dictator, Dickey seemed ready for Chuck to go. I think he was jealous of Chuck; he claimed that Chuck was stepping on the guitar solos, and that the piano runs were too damn long. Dickey accused him of everything that you can think of, but he was doing that shit to everyone. I’ve always liked Chuck, and we had a good dynamic; he didn’t deserve all that.

  Things only got worse later that spring, when I fell off my motorcycle and broke my right wrist. Dickey was really pissed, because he thought I did it on purpose so I wouldn’t have to go back on the road. He gave me shit about wanting to stay home with Cher because I was so pussy-whipped, but it wasn’t like that at all.

  For my part, I just wanted to keep my distance—in every possible way. Throughout the spring I was bouncing back and forth between Macon and L.A., which was not a good way to make a record. Things started and stopped, in part because I wasn’t always there. I overdubbed a lot of my vocals out in California at the Record Plant with Johnny Sandlin. He would bring out the tapes of the basic tracks, I would cut my vocal parts, and then he would take the tapes back to Macon.

  My being in L.A. certainly added to the tension hanging in the air, but it was just the excuse we all needed. It wasn’t just me and Dickey who were at odds—me and Butch were going in different directions too. In our own ways, I think we’d all started to question whether it was worth it. Personally, I wasn’t sure it was. We’d taken time off, but that had only exaggerated the problems between our personalities. With each day there was more and more space between us; the Brotherhood was fraying, and there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do to stop it.

  Meanwhile, Walden kept whispering in my ear that if the band broke up, he’d be there for me. I’m sure the other guys in the band thought that I had a deal with Walden, but they were way off track. Looking back on it now I could have dealt with it all differently. I just didn’t even want to bother, man.

  In that regard, Win, Lose or Draw was a perfect reflection of our situation in 1975. It was basically all over with the Allman Brothers Band. I knew it and everyone else probably knew it too. But none of us could bring ourselves to do what needed to be done.

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING, WHEN I WAS BACK L.A. WITH CHER, WE woke up, and she said, “What are you doing today?”

  I hadn’t thought about it, because I hadn’t even gotten out of the bed yet. She said, “Well, listen—Mr. Harrah, who’s a good friend of mine, has sent us down his private jet. I was thinking we’d fly over to Vegas and get married.” I was awake then, let me tell you!

  “Married?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’ve been together now for quite some time—what do you think about making an honest woman out of me?”

  I thought about it and said, “Well, why not?” I did care
about her; I cared about her quite a bit. Well, I cared about one side of her, because there were two sides to that woman. I liked the helpless little girl side she had, but I couldn’t stand the General Patton side of her. I already had one five-star general in my life, and I didn’t need another one. But I did love that other side of her, so I said, “Okay, let’s get married.”

  On June 30, 1975, we got in the jet and flew over to Vegas. Her good friend Joe DeCarlo was with us, and I really came to like Joe—he was good people to know, and bad people to be on the wrong side of. The three of us headed to Vegas, where we had one of the wedding suites at Caesars Palace.

  We were trying to stay as low-profile as possible, which was damn near impossible. First they had to smuggle us downtown to get the license, so they started a rumor that Frank Sinatra was upstairs at Caesars getting married. It worked because then everyone was looking around for Frank. We got back with the marriage license and went upstairs to some meeting room, where they wheeled in two big silver trays with caviar all over them. That was when I got my first taste of black beluga caviar, and, man, I was hooked. The judge came in, but I couldn’t get away from the caviar. Finally someone was like, “Can you stop cramming yourself full of caviar so we can start the wedding?” God, I love that shit, and to this day I’m wild about it.

  We stand up there, and the judge says, “We are gathered together today to unite these two people in legal matrimony.”

  I said, “Wait a minute—stop the wedding.” Joe looked at me like “What in the fuck are you doing?”

  “Pardon me, Your Honor,” I said, “but I think I speak for both of us when I say that we’ve been married before, and I remember that the judge or preacher would say, ‘We are gathered together today to unite these two people in holy matrimony.’”

  He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Mr. Allman, in the state of Nevada, marriage is nothing but a law to protect children.”

  Boy, that put a damper on the whole thing right there.

  “Should I go on?” he asked. I told him to go on, but that’s when I should have taken off out of there. I remember standing there during the wedding, thinking, “I wonder what I’d be doing if I was in Macon right now?”

  After the ceremony was over, Cher and I got back on the Learjet, and not a fucking word was said between us on the way back to Los Angeles, not a single word. Just silence.

  Four days later, she found a set of works in a leather bag that I carried, and naturally that did not go over well. I’d been trying to play the role of a straight man for her, but the whole time I needed a certain amount of this medicine to stay right. I wanted to say, “You shouldn’t poke your nose where it don’t belong, because you might find something that you don’t want to find,” but I was in no place to say something like that.

  Cher was very much in love, and she was so naive I couldn’t believe it. I guess she had thought that one bottle of Quaaludes and it would be all over, I’d be clean as a whistle. I tried to shelter her from the deviousness of a dope fiend, and it was a hell of a place to be in, waking up married and knowing you’re still addicted. Sometimes I might do a little too much, and she’d go, “You look mighty sleepy. Are you okay?”

  In a way, I was glad it came out, because I’m a lousy liar, and to live with a lie is totally impossible for me. To lie and walk away is one thing, but to lie and then lie there with her—I couldn’t do that. When she found my rig, she just got in her Ferrari and took off.

  I walked down the stairs, and I saw Paulette and asked, “Paulette, where’s Chooch?” Chooch is what I called Cher, because I used to tell her that she was choochie, which was a word that Deering and I used all the time, meaning “eloquently funky.” Like a babe with a pair of old Levi’s on, real tight and real faded out, and a brand-new pair of slick-looking boots, and a fox coat—that’s choochie, and that’s what Cher was.

  Paulette looked at me and said, “Gregory, she found something in your bag, and she got mad and took off in her car. I don’t know what it was, but she sure was mad.”

  I said, “Well, I know what it was,” and I just waited for her to get home.

  When she got back, I sat her down and tried to explain to her what an evil thing it was, but there was no way for her to understand that, because like I said, she was pretty naive when it came to drugs. She gave me the silent treatment for a while, so I sat at the piano and started playing. I was who I was, and I told her who the fuck I was up front. She didn’t bother to check into it and see what it’s all about. If I’d told her that I had some strange disease, she would have called every doctor, had every book open, trying to find out everything she could about it.

  On our second date, we’d gone back over to her house, and I was sitting at the piano, playing her a song. I took out this little bottle of coke, poured some out on the piano, and snorted it. I asked her if she wanted some, and she said, “No, thank you.” I asked her if it bothered her, and she told me, “No, not at all.” A little bit of blow was okay, but not the heroin, and not my drinking (she really hated that as well). Her father had been a heroin addict, and I guess my addiction took her back to that time. She would get so frazzled about things and wouldn’t know what to do.

  When she had driven off, she had gone to her lawyer and filed for divorce, but after we talked she decided to let it go. Of course, it was all over the papers that she had filed for divorce after four days, but nothing at all about how she didn’t follow through with it.

  I called Joe DeCarlo, and I told him what was going on. He said, “Well, shit, man, if I was you, I’d get myself into a rehab,” so I did. I went to a place in Connecticut called Silver Hill, which was a pretty exclusive rehab—people used to dress up for dinner. The lady who’d invented methadone opened Silver Hill, and they had me in the Irving Berlin suite—his name was on the door and everything. As soon as I agreed to go into treatment at Silver Hill, Cher withdrew the divorce papers.

  On Monday and Thursday nights, we had group sessions. I hated it, because everybody checks everybody else’s inventory, and they all wanted mine. I think they went to group for entertainment, to get celebrity dirt or something. I was there for thirty days, I came home for two weeks, and then I was right back in there, but this time it was for alcohol only. Jonesing for a drink, once you’ve been addicted to alcohol, is just about as bad as jonesing for heroin.

  When I got out, things weren’t much better with the band than when I’d gone in. Dickey and I still weren’t getting along, but what made things worse was that he got introduced to Cher’s secretary, Paulette, started dating her, and then got her pregnant. For the life of me, I can’t understand why he did that. I would love to think that I didn’t have a damn thing to do with that relationship, that it was just a weird twist of fate, but to this day it seems like it was just Dickey Betts trying to fuck with my head.

  I think the final turning point for me and Dickey happened after he and Paulette had begun to date. Cher and I were living out in Hollywood, and one morning I came downstairs and who do I see but Dickey Betts. I’ll be damned if he didn’t walk right by me without saying a word—not a fucking word, man. I didn’t say a damn word to him either, because I knew whatever I said would not be said right. It was going to be taken wrong, because I didn’t have nothing right to say to him. That did it for me. It didn’t sit well with me and it didn’t sit well with Cher either, because shortly thereafter she fired Paulette, further pissing Dickey off.

  Angry as we both were, the release of Win, Lose or Draw did little to make either of us happier or improve things with the band. No one was happy with that release—not the critics, not the fans, not the record company, not us. The six months of frustration in the studio ended with a frustrated album. And maybe the worst part was that the tour hadn’t even begun.

  The number one band in the country

  Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer/Getty Images

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Trials, Tribulations, and the White House

&
nbsp; WHEN THE ALLMAN BROTHERS GOT THAT GODDAMN PLANE, it was the beginning of the end.

  It was a Boeing 720, and this guy from Daytona, Toby Roberts, who had managed the Escorts for a while back in the day, talked us into getting it. Toby had a whole bunch of irons in the fire, and one of them was leasing aircraft, so we figured for our first tour after Brothers and Sisters we’d make a change. This particular jet was burgundy and gold, and had been leased in the past to the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Finally, Elton John bought it, and he painted little clouds and cartoon things all over and put “Elton” on the tail.

  The layout of that plane was in-fucking-credible. It had two bedrooms in the back, with round beds and grizzly bear blankets. Every eight feet in the cabin, there was a TV monitor, and halfway down was a long bar. The first time we walked onto the plane, “Welcome Allman Bros” was spelled out in cocaine on the bar. At the end of the bar was a Hammond, a set of drums, and some amps, so we could jam if we wanted to.

  From August ’75 through May ’76, we did forty-one shows. We opened the Superdome in New Orleans on August 31, 1975, in front of ninety-six thousand people. We played Madison Square Garden, the Spectrum, Boston Garden, the Orange Bowl, Roosevelt Stadium—real big joints. These were some of the biggest solo shows we’d ever played, and the scale of it all was just unbelievable. Everything was over the top, uncalled for, and just flat-out unnecessary. We had thirty roadies on that tour—thirty. Our roadies had roadies. We had a guy whose only job was to open limo doors for us.

  Excessive as stuff like the airplane was, it was just a symptom. The truth is, we couldn’t fucking stand each other; with each day on the road, the separation grew between us. We didn’t talk, we didn’t hang, we didn’t do nothing together. Everyone had their own limo, everyone stayed in their own suite. Rehearsals slowed down to almost never, and sound checks became a thing of the past. It happened little by little, where you don’t even notice that it’s happening, until it’s wrapped all around you, and then the realization hits you like a ton of bricks.