My Cross to Bear Read online

  MY CROSS

  TO BEAR

  Gregg Allman

  WITH ALAN LIGHT

  DEDICATION

  To my mom and Duane

  Allman Family Archives

  APPRECIATION

  My sincere appreciation goes to contributing author John Lynskey, whose insight, knowledge, and experience with the Allman Brothers Band and my career helped to bring this project together. Thanks, bro.

  —G.A.

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  Appreciation

  September 2011

  Prologue: January 1995

  1 Brothers

  2 Dreams

  3 The Foot-Shootin’ Party

  4 Hollyweird

  5 Us Against the World

  6 The People’s Band

  7 Come and Go Blues

  8 Uppers and Downers

  9 October 29, 1971

  10 “Who’s Gonna Be Next?”

  11 Multi-Colored Ladies

  12 Cher

  13 Trials, Tribulations, and the White House

  14 It Just Ain’t Easy

  15 No Angel

  16 Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More

  17 One Way Out

  18 Low Country Blues

  19 Trouble No More

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  Index

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SEPTEMBER 2011

  I was sitting up talking, and I just kind of nodded off. But I didn’t nod off; I was Code Blue. I was bleeding inside, and I was drowning in my own blood.

  What I remember is that I went to sleep and I had the most incredible dream. It was almost like a still life, and the air smelled so good and music was playing. I always have music in my dreams, and whatever type of music it is, it sets the whole mood for whatever’s happening. If it’s a nightmare, it’s some nasty music. But this music was beautiful.

  I was standing at a bridge and it was twilight, and somebody was on the other side. They weren’t motioning, they were just looking at me, but the message got through: don’t come across this bridge. It was all so beautiful, I wanted to go over there and see who it was. All I could see was a silhouette of the person, with hair down to their shoulders. It appeared to be my brother. Maybe it was just somebody standing in my room, I don’t know. But somebody was there, telling me not to come across that bridge. It’s not my time yet.

  PROLOGUE

  January 1995

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST WEEK OF MY LIFE, BUT INSTEAD I hit an all-time low. The Allman Brothers Band, the band my brother started, the band with our name on it, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I flat-out missed it. I was physically there, but otherwise I was out of it—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You might say that I had the experience but missed the meaning. Why? The answer is plain and simple—alcohol. I was drunk, man, just shitfaced drunk, the entire time.

  I arrived in New York on a Sunday, got drunk, and stayed drunk for five days, including the induction ceremony itself. My memory is a bit hazy, thanks to the booze, but I remember little bits, flashes of this and that, of the week that ultimately changed my life. On that Monday we taped a segment for the Late Show with David Letterman, and when I look at a tape of that night, I don’t even recognize the guy singing “Midnight Rider.” My face was puffy and bloated from the booze, and my skin had taken on this gray, sickly pallor, which was accented by the fact that I had shaved my beard. With sunglasses and a top hat to round things out, I was really looking rough.

  My voice was suffering as well, but I managed to get through the taping. I spent a lot of time making it up and down the stairs that went from the studio to the green room, where there was a bar. After Letterman it was back to the bar at the Waldorf-Astoria for vodka and cranberry the rest of the night.

  On Tuesday I had to go get fitted for my tux, and after the fitting we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. My team had the idea to hold an intervention. They were there to tell me that I needed to go into treatment, and I needed to do it now. There was a plan in place, and treatment had been arranged for me at a center in eastern Pennsylvania. They all stressed how badly I needed to do this, because they told me I was dying, and they couldn’t sit by and watch me slowly kill myself any longer.

  It was a speech I’d heard before, but this was different. A little voice told me that enough was enough, and this time I listened. I gave in and told them I would go. I resigned myself to going at the end of the week, but until then I just kept right on drinking, man—I drank constantly. I couldn’t not drink, you know? Sad but true: I could not not drink.

  Later in the day, we headed over to Sony Studios on West 54th to do some vocal overdubs for the Allman Brothers record Second Set. Tommy Dowd, our beloved producer, was there, and what should have been real simple became an ordeal. I couldn’t get the fucking words to come out right. The alcohol had tied my tongue in knots, and the guys in the booth were literally cutting one word at a time. I was spitting and sputtering; we finally got it done, but it was torturous.

  We had another TV appearance scheduled for Wednesday, this time on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. We did Conan during the day, and played a couple of songs, including an extended version of “Statesboro Blues” that just went on and on. Dickey Betts and Warren Haynes really were unbelievable, but I was just trying to hold on. I was a scary-looking sight—my eyes were hollow, empty, and so yellow that they looked like a couple of lemon slices.

  After that, we were scheduled to rehearse for the induction ceremony over at the Waldorf, where the band was going to work up a shorter version of “One Way Out.” I just couldn’t make it. Sorry, but I was worn out, and I couldn’t do it.

  Thursday was the ceremony, in the ballroom of the Waldorf. That morning, I took some shot glasses, and I measured them out just right. I didn’t wanna get drunk. So I lined up the glasses, took the shots, and I was doing all right. Back then, I didn’t have the shakes—I had the hydraulic jerks. I had to keep a half-pint up under the bed in case I sobered up in my sleep. I could hardly walk, I was shaking so bad.

  One of my old buddies called me from downstairs, and I went down and saw everybody I ain’t seen for a hundred years. Next thing you know, I was at the lobby bar. “C’mon, man, let me buy you a drink.” They started collecting in front of me, from people all around the bar. Needless to say, I sat there and got shitfaced. Believe it or not, this turned out to be a good thing.

  My dear mother, Geraldine, was there, and she was very worried about me, as were a lot of people by this point. I found out later that Jaimoe, my bandmate and a sweet man, was upstairs in his room, and he was actually crying because he thought I was dying—literally dying.

  I managed to introduce my mother to Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records and someone who had meant so much to my brother and me. I was trying to pace myself, but when it was time for me to go onstage, I was in bad shape. Willie Nelson presented the band with our award, and when I got up there he asked me, “You all right, Gregory?”

  “Willie, I am not all right,” I replied. I tried every trick I knew to keep people from knowing I was drunk, but I couldn’t stand up straight; I was kind of weaving.

  One thing I’d been concerned about beforehand was my acceptance speech. I had to say something, so I wrote several ideas down on this little notepad—little phrases and what have you, things I had said in the past. I’d organized them onto one sheet of paper, and that became the speech I was going to give. There were a lot of things I wanted to say—about my mother, about the fans, about Bill Graham—but instead I just got up there an
d said, “This is for my brother. He was always the first to face the fire. Thank you.” That’s about all I could get out, and it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I had to get the hell off that stage, because I was getting a little woozy.

  After the band performed “One Way Out,” I got out of there as fast as I could. I went up to my room, changed into my jeans and leather jacket, and headed back to the bar, still clutching my Hall of Fame award. People were surrounding my table, telling me how great I was, buying me drinks, but I felt nothing. I had just won the highest award there is in my profession, and I didn’t give a damn—I just wanted another drink. People would ask to hold my award, and I’d let ’em; somebody probably could have run off with it, you know?

  The agreement that I had made was that the next morning, a Lincoln Town Car would take me to a treatment center, which was actually a farm in east-central Pennsylvania. It was about a four-hour ride, and we left around noon. I emptied the minibar in my hotel room for the drive, and I had some Valium as well. I had all these little airplane bottles of booze in my coat pocket, and we got in the car and started driving. I spent the ride taking pills and washing them down with those mini-bottles. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, we stopped at a little Italian restaurant to get something to eat, but of course my meal ended up being four double vodka and cranberry—I never touched my veal marsala.

  We got back in the car, and we finally arrived at the center, which is in a little town by a river. I had two mini-bottles of vodka left in my jacket, so I put them in my fist, took the lids off of both of them, upended them like a double-barreled shotgun, and emptied them both as we pulled into the driveway. It was so pathetic, but I remember thinking, “You are better than this, and it’s time for this crap to stop.” I knew it was time for a change.

  Welcome to the story of my life.

  A day at the beach with my brother

  Courtesy Brenda Allman, Allman Family Archives

  CHAPTER ONE

  Brothers

  I WAS BORN ON DECEMBER 8, 1947, AT 3:23 IN THE MORNING, AT the old St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville. It was a beautiful building, all marble and brownstone. Now they’ve moved to the outskirts of town, but like everybody I’ve ever known in Nashville—“Where were you born?” “St. Thomas.”

  My brother, Duane, was born on November 20, 1946, one year and eighteen days before me. Same hospital, same doctor.

  In 1949, when I was two years old and my brother was three, my father, who was about thirty at the time, came home for Christmas. He had fought in the last part of World War II and had landed on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. He’d been a gunnery sergeant and a lieutenant, and he’d just gotten promoted to captain. He was getting the pay, but he hadn’t gotten the bars yet.

  The day after Christmas, he and a friend of his, who was a master sergeant, went out to a tavern that they always went to, just shooting pool and drinking beer. The year before, when he was overseas, my father had ordered a brand-new Ford, so he’d gotten one of the first ’49 Fords that came off the line. That night, he and his friend took his new car, and they were definitely celebrating being back home.

  After they’d been there for a bit, this dude at the bar started asking them, “Tell me about the war.” He was buying them beers and all this stuff. It got late into the night and the guy asked them if he could get a ride home, and they said sure. They got up the highway, and my father asked the guy where he lived. He said, “You turn right up here on this dirt road.” Of course, back then the roads in that part of Tennessee barely had asphalt, especially out in the cornfields. They turned and started going on one of those roads through the corn, and when they got to a place where the corn stopped, the dude pulled out an army .45. He told my daddy to stop and get out, so they did. They’re talking and talking, and he thought they had a bunch of money because of the new car and their uniforms and everything.

  My dad said, “You can have everything—take the car, take everything.”

  His friend, the sergeant, said, “Listen, buddy, we don’t mean ya no harm.”

  And the guy goes, “Oh, you know my name. Now I gotta kill ya.”

  It turned out the guy’s name was Buddy Green—first name Buddy, or maybe that was his nickname. Either way, he misunderstood what my daddy’s friend had said, and they were in trouble. My father gave some kind of signal and he and his friend took off running, but the guy got my father three times in the back. He missed the sergeant, I think.

  At that time in the state of Tennessee, they had a sentence called “99+1,” and you couldn’t serve the one until you served the ninety-nine. So it was a hundred-year sentence, and Buddy Green got that. He recently died in prison, but at one point I started getting these letters from him. I guess one day one of his partners in prison must have said, “Hey, look whose papa you killed, asshole.” And, oh, they were these mournful letters, like “I’m sorry to the 16th power,” over and over. But I never wrote back. Matter of fact, I think I might’ve done away with the letters.

  My two uncles, Sam and Dave—sounds like a band to me—they always drummed it into my head not to ever hitchhike or pick up a hitchhiker. And I listened to them. The only time I ever did bum a ride was after my brother called me in March 1969 to come join him and these other four guys to play some music.

  MY DAD WAS NAMED WILLIS TURNER ALLMAN, AND THEY CALLED him Bill, mostly. When he was younger they called him Billy. His family was from White Bluff, Tennessee—actually, they were from Vanleer, Tennessee, which is a small suburb of Dickson, which is a small suburb of White Bluff, which is a small suburb of Nashville.

  Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house, and I still remember the address—703 Eighteenth Avenue South. My grandmother’s name was Myrtle Allman, and my grandfather was named Alfred. They were my dad’s folks, and they were married back in the days when the family kind of appointed who your spouse was going to be. You see those old oval pictures, where the ladies were all buttoned up, with their ankles covered up and everything—those were the times when they’d met each other. They stayed married long enough to have three boys in four years, and then they divorced—goodbye, end of story, I hate your fucking ass.

  My mother is named Geraldine, but they called her Gerry. She was from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and her maiden name is Robbins Pitt. She had a sister, Janie, and two brothers. Her oldest brother was Robbie, whose real name was Swindale, which was a popular name in parts of North Carolina back then. He built the Atlantic City Pier basically by himself. He had another guy help him pour the cement, but he put all them pilings in. He was a tough old bird who died of cancer, and he died slow. His last few days, he was just pissed off, man. My mother was the youngest sister, but she wasn’t the baby. The youngest was my uncle Erskin, who died a long time ago of testicular cancer. He died a very young man, and he was kind of a groove.

  As I remember it, my parents met in Raleigh, North Carolina, during World War II, when my father was home on leave from the army and my mother was working in Raleigh. Eventually they moved to Tennessee, and the first home my mom and dad had didn’t have plumbing, and all my mother wanted to do was get the hell out of Vanleer. My mother didn’t get along with the Allman family worth a damn—she didn’t back then, and now, hell, there’s not many left on either side. I love them all, but they don’t talk to each other. There’s no love lost there. After my father died, she was gone, out of there.

  I don’t have the slightest memory of my father, nothing. As far as I was concerned, it was always the three of us—my mom, Duane, and me. I wondered about it in the first and second grade, but you’re so damn young you can’t understand it. When I was in the fifth grade, I went over to a friend’s house, and I thought, “Who is this big son of a bitch kicking my friend around? I sure am glad that I ain’t got one!” I thought it was quite a bonus not to have a father.

  One day I was sitting with my mother, watching this speech by John F. Kennedy. He said, “Ask not what your count
ry can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” My mother said, “God, your father used to say that years ago. That’s how he snaked all them young boys into joining up.”

  After my dad died, we moved to Nashville, and my mother went to work for NAPA—National Auto Parts Association. One day, a delivery boy named Elvis Presley came by with some car parts. My mother came home and said, “This deliveryman came in, and he looked funny. He had one of them riverboat haircuts, and his name was Elvis.” Sure enough, he came on the TV, and Mom said, “That’s him—that’s Elvis!”

  My mother must have really loved my father a lot, because she never remarried and she had no social life when I was growing up. She only had one boyfriend, a guy from Greece. He was a terrible driver—it took him like six tries to get his driver’s license. He was some kind of master chef, and he had to drive to Orlando to pick something up. On the way back, he had a head-on crash with a tractor-trailer, and I can remember how hard that hit her. She never went out on a date again.

  Later on in life—when I was old enough not to get smacked for asking something like this—I asked her about it. She said, “I was so afraid that some belligerent guy would come around here and knock you boys around, and I’d have to kill him, and I didn’t want that to happen.” At first I didn’t believe her. I thought that maybe she just didn’t want the confusion, but I didn’t know that much about life and love, I guess.

  Still, my mother knew how to wield a switch, but that was a real rare thing. One time, she caught me playing with matches. We had these big hedges that went around the house, and there was this space in between ’em. Me and one of my little school chums were in there and we were lighting model airplanes with a can of lighter fluid—I’m sure every kid did it.