My Cross to Bear

by Gregg Allman

  But my brother said, “This is his trip—he knows what he wants out of us, and I think he knows how to get it. If we go down there, it’s his toys and his sandbox. Let’s just go on down there and do it.” I thought back to my brother saying that and I figured, “What the hell, can’t lose, I guess.”

  About two weeks later, I called T Bone back and said, “All right, I’m on.”

  Still, he didn’t tell me who the band was; I just had to wait and find out for myself. When I got there, there’s Mac Rebennack, Dr. John—who’d played on my second record, Playin’ Up a Storm; we even wrote one together on there called “Let This Be a Lesson to Ya.” Then Doyle Bramhall II, who I’d met through Derek Trucks and Eric Clapton. And a guy named Dennis Crouch on upright bass, and Jay Bellerose, who is the most incredible drummer.

  Jay only used one stick; the other hand would have a tambourine or a maraca. He tied these things to his leg, hollow like wax grapes, with paper clips, match heads, BBs in ’em, and they put little tiny microphones around his feet. When I first got to the studio, there were drums all over the place. It looked like a drum yard sale—not one drum matched another one. Some of them looked like they were from the Middle East or the Far East. I looked for the mounting on them—no mountings, all wood.

  You talk about communication—I could tell these guys something one time and they got it done. The whole band learned all these tunes in nothing flat, and they did them really well. Somehow, the mind-set you get on a song just seems to happen. You look at the tune and right away you hear, is it a quieter song or one with lots of dynamics? That’s part of the magic of music, it just creeps in there when you least expect it.

  It was so good playing with Mac again. He played some kick-ass piano, and the best part was this time neither of us was looking through the fog. I kept thinking of those early shows in Boston we’d played with him, back when the Brothers were just starting out. I was so joyous inside that he had made it through those days and come out on top. And he felt the same about me. He’s so funny, such a character, man—he was definitely the comic relief of the session.

  We started playing and it took off like a rocket. I think we got one song and half of another one the first day. After about five hours, I don’t really trust myself much. You get to where you can’t really tell—your brain gets tired, you get tired all over. Unless we’re in a real hot moment, I usually check out around five hours. Then when you come back the next day, it’s all nice and fresh. You’re rested and you can knock it right out.

  T Bone used these old, ancient mics, those old square ones with the holes in them—they look like they should be in front of Groucho Marx. He would set those up all around the room; he had a different way of doing things, no doubt.

  About halfway through the session, T Bone said, “I’m sorry, man, you got anything in the writing bag that you want to record?”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know, but let me show you this one.” I pulled out “Just Another Rider,” which was a song Warren and I had written.

  He said, “Yeah, that’s fine,” so I said, “Let it roll.” We learned that one inside of a day.

  I played a lot of guitar on that album. I can pretty much choose which instrument I need to be playing to suit what I’m doing. If I need to play guitar, then fine, whereas with the Brothers, I usually don’t have to since I’m pretty much surrounded by guitars. That was really about the only difference making a solo record—well, that and that if something wasn’t working out right, all I had to do to change it was say the word. With the Brothers, everything’s a vote, unless it’s something really obvious.

  I packed enough clothes for about three weeks, and hell, I think we were only there for two. We got fifteen sides in two weeks. I thought, “Man, we’re already finished with this thing?” That’s the most songs I’ve ever had on a record, except maybe a double record, but it went down real nice.

  When we started Low Country Blues, we had blues on our mind. I guess we were into it, because after two or three songs we had the thing named. That was good for me, because until then I didn’t have an earthly idea what I was going to call it, and that can mean a lot more than people think. I’m not talking about marketing—it doesn’t have to be all catchy or any of those terrible words, it just has to fit. With some albums, the title has nothing whatsoever to do with the record.

  This whole thing was like it was meant to be or something, because everything just fell right in its own pattern. Even the cover shot, by Danny Clinch, really caught the right mood. It was really amazing.

  Working on Low Country was a true highlight of my career. I owe it all to trying to keep an open mind to everything, and I owe so much to Michael Lehman for keeping me focused and making this happen. Just because something isn’t the way you thought it should be doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY TRANSPLANT, THE RECORD CAME OUT, and it landed at No. 5—the highest I’d ever been on the charts and the highest debut ever for a blues record, except for one by Eric Clapton, which is pretty good company. We even got a Grammy nomination for Best Blues Album, which was great—the Allman Brothers won a Grammy for a live version of “Jessica” we recorded many years after the fact, and that was still great, even if it was for an instrumental and here I am, the songwriter. To top it off, then they announced they were also going to give the Allman Brothers a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.

  It was a little strange that I ended up nominated in the same category as solo albums by Warren and Derek. Some people tried to make it look like it was some kind of contest between us, but it really wasn’t—I just feel proud of them, and I was real happy for Derek when he won.

  The album’s success turned out to be a blessing and a curse. When you have a hit record, you need to go out and work. There were calls coming from everywhere, from Australia and New Zealand, and I always wanted to go to New Zealand. It’s the marlin capital of the world.

  We were also getting calls from Europe, and I always wanted to build more of a following for the Allman Brothers in Europe. Everybody over there has Allman Brothers records, but in forty-two years the Brothers have only been to Europe three times. The other guys didn’t want to do it because they thought we’d make less money there. I still thought it would be worth it, so I did the gigs as Gregg Allman shows in Spain, France, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Holland. Then we jumped down to Germany and we had six stops, and two of them we just burned up. Every gig we played, we just kicked.

  After those shows, I caught a serious upper respiratory infection, so I had to tell Vid Sutherland, my tour manager, “Look, I don’t think I can do these shows to the quality of what I want, so we’re going home.”

  It was a huge disappointment, but there’s nothing I hate more than a subpar performance. I want to give the crowd everything I got. The promoters were real nice about it, and said we could come back anytime and make it up. We came home, but I had to go back out and play three more in America. Then I was off a week. I had to go play one last show in Sturgis, and after that I came home.

  The problem didn’t go away, though. I kept having water collect underneath my lungs. This had happened maybe four or five times since the transplant, and I’d go down to the Mayo and they took a needle and stuck it in my back, between the ribs. Then they would take it out real quick, stick a catheter in me, and drain it. One time they got 900 ccs of fluid—that’s just shy of a liter. You’ve seen a liter of scotch before or something like that. It’s a lot.

  They tested it and tested it again and found nothing malignant in there, just water and a little bit of blood. It looked like a little rosé wine. It kept collecting, kept coming, and they said they didn’t know where it was coming from. The doctor said, “We need to go in there and suck all the water out, and then stick your right lung to the inside of your chest wall.” What started as a relatively straightforward procedure turned into a major operation.

  They started in the afternoon, and when I woke up, it was dark.
My surgeon came in, and he looked just like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, except his beard wasn’t as long. He said that because the water had been under my lung, it started to crinkle up on the bottom, and that’s why I was short of breath. And I really had been, since Holland. I could still sing—you can make it on one lung—but I was a sick boy.

  So I’m sitting in the hospital talking to Judy, and that’s when I nodded off and had that dream I mentioned at the start of all this about not going over the bridge. My blood pressure went to zero, but my heart never stopped beating.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up with this apparatus around my head and this stuff down in my lungs. I was on a ventilator, and it was breathing for me. It was late morning again, and I thought, “Man, time sure is passing quick!” That scared me so bad, because I couldn’t talk and they had my hands tied, like a jailhouse hospital.

  “This is just too scary,” I thought, and I had this very conscious thought: “I’ll go back to sleep, and when I wake up, things will have changed.” So I did. I went back to sleep.

  When I woke back up, a nurse and a doctor came in and said, “We’re going to count to three and then we want you to blow.” And when I did, they pulled this thing that looked like a plastic bag for dry cleaning out of my lung.

  “What in the hell is going on?” I asked. “What happened while I was asleep?” My foot was bruised; I had bruises all over me where they’d thrown me on the table. In an emergency, they just get you up there fast as they can.

  I figured after all that I must be pretty well fixed, but two days later the surgeon and the physician’s assistant came back and said, “We are so sorry, Gregory, but we gotta take you downstairs one more time.”

  I said, “Please, don’t tell me—I’m in so much pain already, and you gotta cut again?”

  They made a big incision across my back and went in there. They said they had surgical debris down there, blood clots, so they had to get all that shit out of there. When I came to, I was back in my room, and now I was really in pain. They’re shooting my IV with Dilaudid, and I couldn’t even feel it. But it was mission accomplished.

  Your lung is really, really delicate. It’s like peeling an orange—you peel an orange with real thick skin and it comes off real easy. But with the ones that are thin-skinned, you can’t peel one of those without cutting into it and it dripping all over you. That’s the way a lung is. And inside that, you have all these little tiny holes, no bigger than a pin. Each one of these holes had started to drip just a couple of drops of blood every couple of hours. But there’s a bazillion of ’em, so it didn’t take long for it to add up, and I was pretty much drowning in my own blood.

  In the end, though, they fixed what they needed to. When they tried to figure out why this had happened, they realized that a lot of it was related to working too much and too hard. Over time, you realize your limitations, and I know mine, down to how many nights in a row I can play, how many songs in a row I can sing, and which songs need an instrumental on either side of them.

  It’s time to realize that I’m not a spring chicken anymore. In my mind I’m still twenty-seven, but I have to realize that I’m sixty-four years old. I have to rest.

  WHEN I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL THIS LAST TIME, MY DAUGHTER Island came to visit me and brought her brand spankin’ new baby. My relationship with Island is very good, and I’m telling you, her son really is cute as a button. Just seeing the two of them together made me stronger. I’m about to go to her new home, up on the water in Virginia. She’s really caught up in the motherhood thing right now.

  Watching my kids grow up has been one hell of a ride. Sometimes I think I’m the worst father in the world, but of course I never had a father, so I don’t know what to base it on. You don’t get an instruction manual for how to be a father.

  One problem with being a heroin addict, even a reformed one, is that when you’re going through a divorce and the judge finds out that you’re registered in a methadone program, it means that the mother, and the mother alone, will decide when the father gets to see his children. Therefore, I was persona non grata with my kids. Without having had a dad, and legally not being able to see my kids, I really missed out on the father thing.

  If there’s anything positive to take away from all the health problems I’ve had recently, it’s that I’ve gotten closer to my children in the last few years, a lot closer. They’re good kids. I got four musicians and a nurse. Each one has a different mother, and each one lives in a different part of the country. One lives in San Francisco, one’s in St. Louis, one’s in Virginia, and Elijah, me and Cher’s kid, travels the world. It would be nice if some of them had grown up down south. Not one of my kids has got a southern accent—ain’t that a bitch?

  I treat them just like my mother treated me. She told me in my early teens, “Son, be what you want to be, but be the best one on earth—shoot for it, anyway. You may not hit the highest rung, but aim for it.” And remember, I did really well in school until I bought that guitar. I was valedictorian two years.

  My son Devon Lane Allman is doing quite well. He has a son of his own, Orion Gregory Allman, which made me a grandpa for the first time. Devon’s band is called Honeytribe, and he can play the fucking blues. Recently he’s teamed up with Cyril Neville, one of the Neville Brothers, and Mean Willie Green playing the drums. They’re all from New Orleans.

  He comes to visit me on Sundays and Mondays for football. We both love football—but not college football, I can’t stand that. The captive audience of all these students and the band and all that shit? The best part about that are the cheerleaders.

  Devon’s a good kid, and he loves me a lot more now than he used to. One time when I was drunk many years ago, I told him, “Man, you don’t want to be in the music business—look what it’s done to me. The best thing for you to do is go on to school and do something, but don’t bother me.” I said some hurtful things to him that he’s forgiven me for, which is an age-old story between fathers and sons. The same thing will probably happen between him and his kid, but I hope he learns from my mistakes.

  The truth is that I don’t know Elijah very well at all. It seems to me that he’s not happy, and that he doesn’t feel good about things. Elijah was a real happy kid, but because I wasn’t welcome in that household, I can’t say exactly when he got so down and depressed. The thing is, I don’t think Elijah can figure out why he’s so down either. He doesn’t have much of a family life, and if I was retired, I would get in my car and go and get him. I just wish I could get him turned on to something that he really likes.

  The music he makes scares me. They call it gothic, and it’s scary-sounding, man. It’s like he tries to play as outrageous as he possibly can, and he definitely achieves that! I don’t mean that in a bad way. I love him to death, but I don’t understand his music; I just don’t get it.

  My little girl Layla, she’s gorgeous, man. She just turned nineteen. She’s a singer and a writer, which I think is great. Last year, she started calling me. One time she told me, “Dad, I’m so sick of seeing your picture and your name and hearing your music everywhere. Here I’m trying to get something going, in a completely different genre of music. So what’s the big secret?”

  I said, “Well, gee, let me write it on the back of a postage stamp and I’ll send it to you.” Come on—the secret? I guess first you go ask your dad…

  Having the name has its advantages and its disadvantages. It seems like, unless they’re playing the same kind of music that I played with the Brothers, or kind of reminiscent of that music, the name doesn’t help. “Now we’re gonna bring up Layla Allman—by the way, this little girl’s father is you know who, ya da da.” Then they’re usually scrutinized more. But she went out as Layla Brooklyn, since her name is Layla Brooklyn Allman, and that didn’t do it either.

  I’ve tried to put myself in their place, and I think I would have never let people know who I was. In the end, they have to go through all of it—the hard work and carrying amps and
all that shit—just like I did. You have to get out there and be seen, and make sure people know they’re going to see a kick-ass performance.

  This year, the whole family is coming to my house for Christmas. I think we’re all really a tight-knit family; it’s just that we don’t ever see each other, you know? I’m the one that’s always gone, so I can’t really bitch.

  Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle, is writing a book about her father, and she’s trying to talk to everybody who ever came in contact with him. She’s such a sweetheart, and I wish her all the luck in the world on that. It means so much to me to have a connection to her, because I’m the only uncle. At this point, she’s more like my third daughter than my niece.

  The thing about Galadrielle is that she looks just like my brother. It’s not just her appearance—it’s everything. She has so many of his mannerisms, I tell you. Sometimes when I haven’t seen her for a long time and then I see her, it’s just like looking at him.

  Danny Clinch

  W. Robert Johnson

  Allman Family Archives

  Toby Canham/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

  My family through the years

  Allman Family Archives

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Trouble No More

  WHEN I WAS A KID IN NASHVILLE, WE WENT TO SUNDAY school at the Presbyterian church on Green Hills Boulevard. It was a beautiful church, with beautiful grounds. I enjoyed going there, because I would look at the way the place was built and I just loved it. I didn’t like Sunday school that much, because we did things that I didn’t think pertained to religion. I thought we should have been over in the big building, listening to the preacher.

  We knew the preacher, and he would come over to the house every now and then, like they do. It was all well and good, and as I got a little older, my mother began to give me the option. She said, “If you want to go to church, I’ll take you. If you don’t want to go, you certainly don’t have to.”