My Cross to Bear (12 page)

“Hello?”

“Hey, brother, get over here—get over here, babybrah, quick. Quick, man!”

It was a little chilly out, so as I was putting on my coat, the phone rang again. “Where are you? Where are you? Get over here quick.”

“Jesus! All right, I’m coming!” So I hustled it over there.

He said, “Man, thank you,” and he grabbed me and kissed me. He always kissed me, on the mouth, anywhere. So he kissed me on the cheek, and he said, “Man, that record you brought me is out of sight. There’s a guy called Jesse Ed Davis on there, this Indian dude, and he plays guitar with a damn wine bottle. Dig this.”

And then I looked on the table and all these little red pills, the Coricidin pills, were on the table. He had washed the label off that pill bottle, poured all the pills out. He put on that Taj Mahal record, with Jesse Ed Davis playing slide on “Statesboro Blues,” and starting playing along with it. When I’d left those pills by his door, he hadn’t known how to play slide. From the moment that Duane put that Coricidin bottle on his ring finger, he was just a natural.

Looking back on it, I think that learning to play slide was a changing moment in his life, because it was like he was back in his childhood—or maybe not his childhood, because it never seemed to me like Duane was a child, so it was more like going back to his first days of playing the guitar. He took to the slide instantly, and mastered it very quickly. He practiced for hours and hours at a time, playing that thing with a passion—just like he did when he first learned to play the guitar.

W
HEN WE WERE ABLE TO PLAY SHOWS, WE WERE PLAYING A LOT OF
R&B and some blues. We always stuck to our guns musically. We were determined to do what we did best and how it was the most comfortable for us, so we did songs like “Leaving Trunk,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You,” the Solomon Burke tune, and “Dimples,” which took on a life of its own. We did “Stormy Monday,” “Feel So Bad,” and “Love Light”—I remember Johnny Sandlin keeping time on “Love Light” with that big foot of his. Somebody had given him a set of drums, and I’m telling you, it looked like they had barf on them. They were orange and yellow, like a big pile of pizza puke. They looked like shit, but boy did they sound good.

People wanted me to get out there and stand up with a microphone and be a frontman, and I don’t know why. We were what we were, and by God, that’s what they should have been searching for—a one-of-a-kind thing. As long as it sounds good, why should it matter if someone is standing up or sitting down? Sounding good was what mattered, and my brother really believed that.

We would meet people in the business who would say things like, “Well, if you all turned just a little bit pop …” Duane would say back to them, “If you just turn your ass a little bit around, the door is right behind you.” His attitude was that if what he was playing wasn’t good enough and we had to play somebody else’s shit, then fuck that. It’s like the difference between owning a car and being a cabdriver.

Neither Dallas Smith nor Bob McEuen could really express what the hell they wanted us to do. If they had just shut their mouths, pushed the right buttons, and let us play, we’d probably still be living on the West Coast.

Mabron McKinley eventually went back home to Alabama, because he took a whole handful of acid and never quite got back, you know? He just got fucking out there. He called a band meeting one day, and we were all there, including Johnny’s wife and Paul’s wife, who had moved out there by this time. We met in Johnny’s room, and Mabron was holding a Bible and said, “Now listen, you all. I know you may be disbelievers, but the end of the world will be upon us real soon.” He gave us a date and everything.

We all looked at him and said, “Mabron, now listen, man. You need to think more about playing bass than the end of the world.” He was way into UFOs, and after taking all that acid, he saw UFOs all the time. Of course, they were probably birds.

I have no idea why he took all that acid, but I never knew Mabron that well. Either way, we knew he wasn’t going to last and we’d have to get a replacement, so we talked about a guy named Pete Carr from back home. We didn’t want to use anybody out there, because it was obvious to us that we would have to retrain them. Nothing against West Coast players, but if they ain’t from the South, just forget about it. It would be like trying to train an accountant to be a bouncer.

Pete was from Port Orange, Florida, and he was known as a good guitar player. He became kind of a protégé of my brother’s, because whenever we would come back home to Daytona to play, Pete would be right there. He had played guitar with the Men-Its for a while, so when Mabron finally split, we called Pete. We told him that we wanted him in the band—but as a bass player, which he had never played. All that guitar stuff that he had learned, he could forget about it. How’s that for a challenge?

We flew him out to L.A., and it worked out so good—he made that transition instantly. Pete put some spark to it, some life to it. You can tell the difference between the two records, and he had a lot to do with that.

Our second Hour Glass record,
Power of Love
, which we recorded in January 1968, had a lot more of my original songs on it. I said to the Liberty guys, “Look, it’s going on the record, and that’s all there is to it. We ain’t putting nothing else on there.”

I ended up with seven of my songs on it, including “Changing of the Guard,” which dated back to the Allman Joys, and “To Things Before,” plus “I’m Not Afraid” and “I Can Stand Alone.” We also did “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, where Duane played electric sitar, which sounded pretty good. “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” was also a hell of a song, and I loved to sing it.

We felt better about
Power of Love
than we did about the first album, but we were still getting really fed up about not having any gigs or cash. Thank God for Pete Carr, because he added much-needed comic relief to the situation. We started calling him “the Beaver,” because he looked like one. It got to the point where I couldn’t go to lunch with Pete anymore, because I almost died from laughing. He kept us going at a time when the rest of us were ready to quit.

After we put out
Power of Love
, the record company finally paid for us to go on a small tour. We actually flew on that tour, and I thought it was the big time. A limousine would pick us up and take us to the hotel, and all Johnny Sandlin kept saying was, “Here we are, man, in a big old long black limousine, and I got five dollars to my name! We’re going to play with Big Brother and the Holding Company in St. Louis. I’ll be damned.” We were going to play the Kiel Auditorium, and it was like hometown boys make good, because we used to play in that St. Louis shithole, and now we’re playing the big auditorium.

We got there in the early afternoon, and we were setting up our stuff, because there were no technicians, no roadies—and no Hammond yet either. We’re sitting there, and these two dudes come in wearing skinny ties and hats with feathers in them. My brother went up to get something to drink, and he came back and told me, “Hey, man, you see that fucker over there in that green suit? He’s looking for you, so you’d better go up there and talk to him, because he ain’t getting my stash on account of your ass.”

I went over and said, “Hello, might I help you?”

“You are Mr. Gregory L. Allman?”

“I am that, sir.”

“Do you have a picture ID?”

“Yes, I do.” I showed them my ID, and as I held it out, the cuffs went right around my fucking wrist. They told me, “We’re from the Health Department,” and I told them, “Wait a second, man. You don’t need to cuff me,” so they took the cuffs off.

They told me, “We have a girl in our clinic, three blocks over, who has a syphilis sore on the back of her uterus that dials out at about five and a half centimeters, and she told us the last person she was with was you.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, “because I just came into town today, and I haven’t been here in months.” This chick must have heard of us and picked my name at random or something.

They said, “That doesn’t matter at all—we have our instructions to inoculate you, and, sir, if you won’t come peaceably, we’ll be glad to show you the way.”

I look up, and there’s two more big Italian dudes standing there. So I go down there, and they fill both cheeks of my ass with about five million units of medication. Well, I couldn’t get my pants on after that. I had to stand up and play that night with my pants down real low and my drawers showing above them—kinda like the kids wear them now.

My brother laughed at me, but you know that you should never laugh at the misfortunes of others. It wasn’t much later that he got on a plane at the request of Atlantic Records, to come and play on the Aretha Franklin song “The Weight.” My brother got up there, and the same thing happened to him. On his way out of town, they got him and shot him in the ass with that shit. Whole different girl, whole different story, but the same end result.

Aside from St. Louis, we also played Cleveland, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, and Jacksonville, and we ended up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at Fame Studios, to record a session the way we wanted to. It was a hell of a session—we almost hit the note there, man. It felt so good, because we were back down south, on our own turf. I was never so glad to be in Alabama in my life, and Duck kept saying, “Why did we ever leave, man?”

We were away from that whole pseudo-star shit, and it made a huge difference. At first when it came to stuff like the limousines, I’d thought, “Yeah, we’re styling, man,” but that didn’t last long. We just wanted to get away from California and those fuckers at Liberty. It was a great session at Muscle Shoals, especially the B.B. King medley we did. We knew that was the way we were supposed to be recorded. We had the freedom to dictate those sessions, and it was the way we were meant to sound.

We go back to California all excited about the great music we’d cut, and they didn’t want to hear it. The people at Liberty hated it, thought it was garbage. We had gone back there with the attitude that we had had a good tour, and this music was what we were really all about. Dallas Smith was talking while the Muscle Shoals tapes were playing, and I could see my brother sitting over there, getting hotter and hotter.

I’m thinking, “Here it comes,” and sure enough, Duane stood up and pointed at the Liberty guys in the room.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You, you, you, and you and Liberty Records can kiss my fucking ass. Me and the guys are picking up and going the fuck back down south, or anywhere but here. Fuck this place, and all the tinsel, and all the other bullshit. Stick your papers and contracts up your ass, we’re outta here.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Liberty threatened to freeze us, so that we couldn’t record for any other label for seven years, unless I stayed and recorded with their studio band. So I stayed. I stayed for our band, and they hated me for it—they did. Duane even told me how he felt on the way out, between all the “fuck you”s. The other guys were like, “Man, we didn’t know that you were so easily scared.” I wasn’t scared—I didn’t want nobody to be frozen. What if a contract came up for them and then Liberty was to step in?

The whole thing just sucked, and I couldn’t understand why the other guys were so pissed at me. It wasn’t my idea to go out there in the first place, and I was just trying to save their ass. I had to believe that Liberty would freeze us, because there you are, standing in their place, right in the middle of Hollywood. So I stayed, but I was there in body, not spirit.

I cut some songs with this whole big band, and after we ran one of them down, I told them that it was in the wrong key. Dallas Smith decided to throw his weight around a little bit. He’d say, “What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve been working all day, trying to get this thing to work, so I don’t need you telling me how things are supposed to sound.”

I couldn’t believe what they were having me do. I mean, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”? It was bullshit, but Dallas Smith and them would come to me and say, “We want you to do this song. Just do it, and don’t worry about it. Do it as a favor for me.” Bullshit—I was doing it as a favor for somebody’s publishing company. That’s why they had us do that ridiculous song, “Bells,” on the first Hour Glass record. That song has got to be the epitome of hokey, of absolute sellout bullshit. Had I not been hungry, had I had any choice at all, I never would have done those songs.

On those sessions, I put those poor guys through such shit. After that “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” session, I made them not want to do another one. I kept telling them I was sick and couldn’t make it, and they kept calling me. I’d show up late, I was just a prick about it. I would have rather been in hell with my back broke than do those sessions.

It was during this time that I started hanging out with the guys who were in Poco. I knew Rusty Young real well, and I knew Richie Furay from Buffalo Springfield, and Jim Messina was there too. Richie came over one night, and he told me, “Look, man, we’ve got some guys together. We don’t have any songs, but we’re working on some things.”

Richie had been hanging out at the “Heart House,” which was where the guys in this band called Heart lived. Heart consisted of John Townsend and Ed Sanford, two Alabama boys. They had two guys with them I really loved playing with: Court Pickett, who played guitar, and Lou Mullenix, who could play the shit out of the drums. He went on to play with Dr. John. They were wonderful people, from Tuscaloosa, but Lou ended up dying from a methadone overdose a few years later. Another Alabama cat named Kim Payne was a roadie for them, so this was the beginning of my relationship with Kim.