My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  We all retreated into our own little worlds, and by then we all had our own people, so that made things a lot easier. I had a guy with me named Scooter Herring, who was kind of like my assistant. Scooter was this big, tall, raw-boned son of a bitch who could ride the shit out of a Triumph motorcycle. He used to hang out down at the Sunshine Club, which was this little place down on Hardeman Avenue in Macon. It was a little old biker bar beer joint, with a couple of pool tables and a horseshoe-shaped bar. It wasn’t very big at all, maybe two thousand square feet. We’d go in there after we’d been riding, and I’d go a lot with Tuffy Phillips, who drove our equipment truck.

  I’d met Scooter there back in ’74, and we became real good friends. His relationship with his wife, Karen, probably inspired many of the songs I wrote back then; that man thought the woman made the sun rise and the moon set. I watched them a lot, and I’ve always been a real quiet observer of people. Like my grandfather always said, “It’s the quiet ones that you got to watch, because they’re taking it all in.”

  Around the time I met Scooter, I got a huge royalty check. I was riding high off both Eat a Peach and Brothers and Sisters, even as much as Phil Walden was taking from me. Scooter’s wife wanted to buy a house, and he came to me and said, “Man, Karen is dying for this house.”

  I had them over for dinner, and I had written a check for $54,000 and put it in an envelope. As they were leaving, I said, “Wait, you forgot something,” and I handed them the envelope. I told them not to open it until they got out in the car, and they came running back in, and, man, Karen was just bawling her eyes out. She and Scooter were so happy, and they couldn’t thank me enough.

  At that point, Scooter wasn’t working for me, we were still just running partners, but he was a real friend as well. Soon after that, though, I made him my valet for the Laid Back tour, and he did a hell of a good job. He did it like a pupil, but a damn good one. Scooter was a very intelligent man, and he had this amazing ability to do math problems in his head, like no one I’ve ever seen. He knew about numbers, so I told him to get the book This Business of Music. He read the son of a bitch in about three days, and he said to me, “Man, this is a backbiting motherfucking business.”

  When the Allman Brothers went back on the road in 1975 after Win, Lose or Draw, Scooter came out as an assistant tour manager. All the other guys in the band really liked him because they had ridden with him before, drank beers with him, he was always around, and he was just a good Joe. He certainly fit in with us, and he was funny as shit.

  But Scooter had another responsibility, one that was for me and for me only: he was my delivery guy, helping me get drugs when I needed them. I didn’t ask him where he got the stuff, and he didn’t offer it up. But he helped me score whenever I needed it, and back then that was a big job.

  I was about as tight with Scooter as I was with anyone on that tour. Scooter and I had some hellacious times out on the road. He had four teeth missing in the front of his mouth, so I got him some new teeth. All of a sudden, he started to look good, and he grew his hair out, and he was quite a sight at six foot six. Whenever he told me, “Here, Gregory, hold my glasses,” I knew there was fixing to be an ass-whipping, and it wasn’t going to be his. He was one of the most lovable people that I’ve ever met, and I miss him so bad. There wasn’t nothing criminal about that man, nothing.

  ONE OF THE FEW POSITIVE THINGS THAT HAPPENED DURING THIS time was that we got involved with Jimmy Carter, which is something that I’m very proud of to this day. I suppose I was the first member of the band to meet him. I was in the studio in Macon, and we got an invitation from him to attend a reception at the Governor’s Mansion for Bob Dylan, who was out on his first tour in years and was playing Atlanta. We brought our tuxes and everything to the studio, and we were going to do just a couple of overdubs and then get in the limo and ride on up to Atlanta.

  Well, a couple of overdubs became just one more take, and one more take, and one more take—we one-more-taked our asses until about ten o’clock. I finally said, “Shut it down. We’re going right now.” We all piled into the limo and hauled ass up there. We got to the Governor’s Mansion, which is a huge three-story place with a big horseshoe-shaped driveway and a guard shack at the entry gate.

  We got there just as the last guest was pulling out of the driveway, and I thought, “Oh shit.” I got out of the limo and went up to the guard shack and said, “How do you do? My name is Gregg Allman, and here’s my invitation. I’ve been in the studio down in Macon, and we got delayed. Would you please pass this letter of apology to the governor?”

  They said that they would, so I turned around to go back to the limo, and just as I got my hand on the door, the guard said, “Mr. Allman, please wait a minute. The governor would like to see you up on the porch of the mansion right away.”

  I thought, “Oh God—he’s either going to be a nice guy or I’m going to get a federal ass-chewing. A state ass-chewing, anyway.”

  The moon must have been full, because it was real bright outside, and I could see the silhouette of this guy standing on the porch. He didn’t have on a shirt, he didn’t have any shoes on, and he had on this old pair of Levi’s, and they were seasoned down perfect, man—they were almost white. I was thinking, “I wonder who this damn hippie is, hanging out at the Governor’s Mansion?” Well, it was him—Jimmy Carter himself.

  He had that big old grin on his face, and I thought, “Well, he could be frowning.” He said, “What the hell, come on in. You’re not too late.” We go in there, and there’s a bottle of J&B scotch on the table. There was all kinds of food laid out, and they must have had one hell of a bash. So we sat there and told stories, and pretty much polished off that bottle of J&B.

  It was getting to be time to leave, and he said, “There’s one more thing I want to say to you, Gregory, before you go. I’m thinking about running for president, and I’m going to need a whole lot of money.” I had never been approached by any kind of politician; politics and my life were on opposite sides of the world. I’d never voted, though I do vote now. Anybody who doesn’t think that it’s worth it to go down there and take a few hours out of their day to cast their vote, then they can’t have a bitch in the world when we end up with a shitty president.

  I told him, “I’ll go back to Macon and talk it over with the guys and see what they say—and I really want to thank you for not arresting us for getting here so late.” He was a really nice guy, and he was really hip to music. Some of his favorites were Leon Russell and Dylan, and he liked mainstream hippie music. If you ask me, he wasn’t nothing but a hippie who had to get a haircut. His mind was young and wide open, and it still is today.

  There were two major things that he did right after he took office. I thought one of them was the hippest, greatest thing he could have done; the other one sucked, and the next time I see him, I’ll tell him to his face. He gave amnesty to all the people who went to Canada because they didn’t want to go to Vietnam and shoot a bunch of folks they didn’t know, which was so great. Then he turns around and tells Cuba, “You all come on over!” What the fuck? Fidel Castro empties his jails out and sends them all over here. And with them came the onslaught of a little thing called crack cocaine.

  Anyway, after that night at the Governor’s Manson, I talked to the guys in the band, and they thought that we should help him out, so we arranged to play a gig to raise money for his campaign. He came down to Macon and met all the guys, and they really liked him. He hung out in the studio and went to eat with us at the H&H. We talked about music and skeet shooting and fishing—he’s an avid fisherman.

  The benefit we did for the Carter campaign was in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 25, 1975, right in the middle of the Win, Lose or Draw tour. Governor Carter introduced us, and he told the crowd that he was going to be president. I’ve been told that the money the Allman Brothers raised for him kept his campaign alive, because he was dead broke at that time.

  A little over a year later, Cher and
I went to the White House for the first dinner President Carter held after taking office. We were back in the private part of the White House, and when they asked Jimmy what he wanted to eat, he just said that he would have what the staff was eating, which I had a lot of respect for. Forget the damn rack of lamb—we ate sweet potatoes, smothered chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and sweet tea.

  Amy Carter gave us a tour of the White House, and that was something else. She was having a hell of a time showing us around her new home. We saw the Lincoln Bedroom, and his actual bed was in there. I got up there and spread out on it. Nothing magic happened; it didn’t make me a better person, but it was cool nonetheless. Cher and I had a great time with Jimmy’s mom, Miss Lillian, who was sitting there watching television. At one point, she whipped out a flask of gin and told us, “This is my medicine—I have to have this.” She was just so sweet, man, God bless her.

  THE SHOW FOR JIMMY CARTER WAS A HIGH POINT IN WHAT WAS otherwise a rough, rough tour. Sure, that ’75–’76 road trip had moments when everything jelled, but those were few and far between. It was nothing like what it had been like on the Brothers and Sisters tour. Shows like that New Year’s Eve Cow Palace performance were things of the past. A lot of what we were doing was lackluster, and we all knew it. We were just going through the motions, all while doing insane amounts of drugs and spending too much money on it. We were using coke, heroin, pick your poison, not to mention drinking all the time. If you listen to tapes of those shows, you can tell what drug we’d taken that night by how we were playing. Uptempo and edgy? Coke. More jazzy and slow? Codeine. Everybody was doing something, and some of us were doing everything.

  When we played the Roanoke Civic Center on May 4, 1976, it would be the last Allman Brothers show for two years. By that point, things had fallen apart. There was no communication going on, and our playing was pretty rough. I had just said, “Fuck it,” because I wasn’t into it at all. It wasn’t the Allman Brothers anymore.

  Things continued to go to shit when we got home to Macon and counted our money. At the end of nine months of touring, we had $100,000—and that was the gross amount. To do forty-one gigs at $80,000 apiece, we should have had a little more than a hundred grand. It was ridiculous, and it was all because of stupid expenses. The bills were stacked a mile high. When we’d taken our year off, we’d kept everyone on the payroll. We’d paid people not to work—it was crazy. And then we’d toured some with that plane. You talk about spending money. Good God! The fuel costs alone—you can’t imagine.

  It wasn’t just the plane and the personnel, though. We were out of money because we were buying blow by the ounce, as well as heroin, not to mention our regular clothing dip. Plus we had hot and cold running women, and the best food you could eat. Name it, and we had it.

  The thing is, back then we had a real epicurean attitude toward life, just tunnel vision. Eat, drink, get laid, and play some fucking music today, because tomorrow you might just wake up dead. It was kind of the attitude of the day, but the harsh reality of losing two Brothers made it that much more real for us.

  We didn’t get the bill for all that until we got back to Macon, but when that check arrived, forget about it. That’s when the Allman Brothers broke up, right then and there. Technically, it took a couple of months to go through the formalities, but after we all saw the price tag for that tour, it basically was done.

  Willie Perkins could have helped us with our money, but he was so afraid of Walden that he wouldn’t do it. You would think a friend would help you out, but it wasn’t the case. I wasn’t paying attention to the money, because I was concentrating on the music; that was the only thing keeping my feet on the ground. Oh, the money we would have today if we had just had some guidance.

  We had a meeting about money, and I was afraid that we were actually going to come up with a negative amount. The six of us were there, along with Willie, Twiggs, and Scooter Herring, and once the financial realities became clear, everything that was wrong with the band was laid on my part of the table—and I mean everything. They told me that if I didn’t have Laid Back Productions, the Allman Brothers would be doing fine, but that didn’t have anything to do with it. Them boys turned against me, man—not Lamar, not Jaimoe, but the rest of them did.

  Right in the middle of the meeting, the authorities came in, broke the whole thing up, and took Scooter away in handcuffs. There was a lot of confusion about what was going on and what Scooter had done, but it didn’t take long to figure things out. Scooter was being arrested because he’d been helping me buy drugs, but they nabbed him not because he was buying, but because they said he was selling.

  That was when I learned where Scooter had been getting the drugs from and what he was mixed up in. He’d been scoring through a guy named Joe Fuchs who was a pharmacist at Harrison’s Pharmacy in Macon. Before then, I didn’t know about Joe Fuchs, and Fuchs didn’t know about me. Fuchs was mixed up with some questionable people, people rumored to be in the Dixie Mafia, and had been selling pharmaceutical-grade cocaine to them as well as to Scooter. It was through his involvement that the authorities had gotten turned on to Scooter, and by extension, me.

  The DA in Macon at that time had been in office for about a year and a half, and hadn’t had so much as a healthy pot bust. The city fathers and townspeople were getting a little bit ticked, seeing how another load of hippies moved into town every day, so they needed a fall guy. Fuchs was the fall guy, but Scooter was swept up in it too.

  On May 28, 1976, Scooter was indicted on charges of conspiracy to possess narcotics with the intent to distribute. By that point, everything pretty much unraveled with the band, and I had left Macon and was back in California with my bride, Cher. The whole thing became a tabloid event overnight. Because of Cher, because of the band, I was front-page news every day. Now, I’ve never been big on media, but even among people who are, I don’t think there’s a person alive who likes headlines like that. And it only got worse.

  One day the phone rang, and it was Mitchell House, my attorney in Macon. He said, “The federal prosecutor wants you to come to the grand jury hearing on Scooter.”

  I asked, “Scooter? What?”

  He told me, “They indicted him on charges of sales and distribution of cocaine.”

  I did everything I could to avoid testifying, but it was made clear to me that my back was against the wall; there was no way to dodge a federal prosecutor.

  I got that horrible, sinking-type feeling, like a good friend had died or something. Eventually I was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for my testimony in front of the grand jury and later at the trial. Fuck me, man—I didn’t have no choice. I got back to Macon as fast as I could, drove over to Mitchell’s home, and Scooter was already there.

  I walked in and said, “Scooter, what in the fuck am I going to do when they ask about you?” I was crying, man, and I asked Mitchell, “Tell me what I’m going to do—you’re the lawyer.”

  They got me settled down, and they said, “Just tell them the truth.”

  I said, “What?”

  They told me again, “Just tell them the truth and don’t worry about it. One thing we’re going to do is save your career.”

  I told them, “Look, I ain’t done nothing to lose my career. All I did was shell out a little dough.”

  They both told me they knew that, and Mitchell said, “Remember, after everything that you say, make sure you state ‘to the best of my memory’ or ‘to the best of my knowledge.’”

  I agreed to appear, and I must have said those phrases three hundred times. I walked into the courtroom—and as a little footnote, there wasn’t a single member of the Allman Brothers Band there that day, or any day during the whole thing. None of them had the slightest idea what was going on, and I guess they drew their own conclusions without ever hearing from me. I’m not blaming them, but I guess they just had something more important to do. I don’t really give a fuck anymore, but at the time it hurt me real ba
d.

  That was an experience that I hate to relive, because every question was hard, but I know that the judge was totally on my side, or at least he seemed to be. He would ask me if I wanted to take a break, but it was just hell.

  It was a rough time, man. People were afraid for my life, because there were some powerful people who thought I knew more than I did. The phone would ring, and a voice would be going, “If you say the name of so-and-so, you’ll find a twenty-gauge up your ass.” I did get a few death threats. There was all this speculation that Scooter was connected to the Dixie Mafia, but if he was, he never said anything about it to me. He never told me about any chicanery, any theft, any buried treasure, any firearms, anybody getting shot—none of that, and by God, he would have told me something after twelve beers. If there was something, I would have heard about it.

  Because of the threats, they hid me out in the barracks at Robins Air Force Base, with four FBI guys assigned to me for protection. Have you ever tried to take a piss with three FBI agents standing right there, and the fourth one guarding the door? I wasn’t allowed to read anything or watch TV, but they did give me a bottle of whiskey every night.

  The thing lasted for what seemed like an eternity, and it was a complete drag. Every day I was on the front page of the paper, and wherever I went, people would yell shit at me. There was no evidence against me, it was all hearsay. I never understood why John Condon wasn’t involved in this trial, because he had been my criminal lawyer since the thing with Twiggs, and Mitchell House had been more of a guy who fixed parking tickets. I’m sorry, but that that’s the truth. It didn’t seem like he really bent over backwards for me, except when it was time to get his check.

  Scooter’s lawyers were trying to make me look bad to lighten the load on him, and the prosecuting attorney tried to make me and Scooter look like real, real close friends—I mean, like we were gay. The judge got so upset that he stood up and threw his pencil down and announced, “This man is not on trial here. If you ask him a question that is out of line like that again, I will throw you out of this courtroom.”