My Cross to Bear (13 page)

I started hanging with Richie and them, and we learned “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” and “Dreams,” which I had actually written at the Heart House, on Ed Sanford’s organ. Everybody had gone out one night, so I was at the house by myself. I had a big fat joint, so I smoked that bad boy down and I started writing.

The words to “Dreams” are completely true. At that time, I was staying up at Julia Brose’s place. Julia worked for Dallas Smith as his secretary. She was very pretty, and she lived up off of Laurel Canyon. You’d go up there, and on this little hill was a little tiny shack, just big enough for a very romantic hideaway. Of course, she had an old man, who happened to be in the Doors—she was hanging out with John Densmore, and she eventually married him. Julia’s been married to so many musicians; there’s no telling what kind of royalties she gets.

When I was staying up there, when I woke up and my eyes would open, I would be looking down the mountain. If it was raining, there would be mudslides and all that. That must have been in my mind when I sat down behind Sanford’s Hammond.

That’s where the lyrics to “Dreams” came from.

I ended up staying at Julia’s a bunch. Sometimes she would be out for stretches of time and I’d stay there. One time Julia was on the road with the Doors, so she asked me to watch her dog, who was going to have puppies. While I was there, her next-door neighbor turned me on to my first tab of Orange Sunshine. I’m tripping out when the dog starts having puppies. It’s times like that when I don’t like being alone, but God bless that neighbor.

I did my best to help the dog out with the puppies, and it went okay. Then I looked out the window and here come four limousines up the drive. It’s them, the fucking Doors. All of them come in—Densmore, Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, and Ray Manzarek—because Julia wanted them to meet me. Robbie and Ray split, but Densmore and the Lizard King decided to stay. Julia introduced me, and I’m like, “Hey, how you doing?” and of course, I’m still tripping.

Morrison looks at me and goes, “What you got there on your hand, man?”

“Oh,” I said looking up at him, “it’s just a little puppy juice.” Densmore was looking at me kinda strange, and my man Morrison said, “Oh, boy, this is going to be a good one. I have to stay and hear about this.”

He left laughing—and the good thing was, we were all laughing so hard that Densmore wasn’t thinking about me banging Julia, because he thought I was just the house sitter.

D
UANE HAD BEEN BACK IN
F
LORIDA FOR A WHILE WHEN
I
CAME
home from California to see what was happening. This guy named Butch Trucks had some kind of an idea about forming a band by combining his group, the 31st of February, with Duane and me, but he was the only one thinking that. I was planning to go back to L.A. to fulfill the deal with Liberty, and Duane was looking for something else to do, and eventually ended up in Muscle Shoals. We did a few tracks down in Miami, around late ’68, but that was it. I had to get back to California, so I said, “Fuck it,” and went on back out there.

Butch may still hold a bit of a grudge, to this day. He thought that was the beginning of the Allman Brothers Band—in his mind, it would have been David Brown on bass, Scott Boyer on guitar, Duane, me, and Butch on drums. Honestly, I don’t know how that would have worked out.

It seems to me that people sometimes have the wrong perception about what going into a studio means. Just because you lay some stuff down in the studio, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically a finished product. In that particular case, the stuff we did in Miami was an example of going in there, laying it down, and seeing what came out of it, because you never know. A lot of songs have come about doing it that way, but in my mind that wasn’t a formal recording session at all. We weren’t cutting masters; we were just fishing for ideas.

The right players weren’t assembled for those sessions. No offense meant, but Butch and those guys had been playing Dylan, the Byrds, with the twelve-string guitar and Fender bass—the whole folk-rock thing. They sounded very, very good, and live, the 31st of February was real good. I saw them many times, and they were great. But that sound isn’t what me and my brother were all about. We were coming from a completely different direction.

So I went back to California, because it just wasn’t happening. There was no Jaimoe yet, there was no Berry Oakley or Dickey Betts either. Duane and I knew that nothing was gonna come out of that group, so he wasn’t pissed at all when I headed back west.

I needed some money to get to California, so I sold parts of two of my songs to this guy Steve Alaimo, who claims he “produced” those sessions. I sold him half of “Melissa” and “God Rest His Soul” for $600. I gave the band $300 to have some money to eat with, and I took the other $300 to get a plane ticket.

“God Rest His Soul” was a song I wrote in tribute to Martin Luther King, right after his assassination. I never intended to put that song on an album. I thought Martin Luther King was a beautiful man, and he was trying to bring us all together and end the strife in this country. He knew we couldn’t do that by fighting each other, and he knew we couldn’t do it by bombing other people halfway across the world. He was trying to show us there was another way to go about it, and he died because of that, so “God Rest His Soul” was my personal memorial to him.

So Alaimo ended up owning some of my music that he had nothing to do with for a grand total of $600, even though down the road I was able to gain back half the credit for “Melissa” by paying him $10,000. Alaimo did all right for a guy who didn’t write no fucking songs. Personally I could never take credit for something I didn’t write, or spend money I didn’t earn—I just couldn’t do it. Karma does come back around, so I hope he lives to be a hundred and his wife has a baby every day!

After I went back out to L.A., I didn’t know what was going on with my brother. I thought he was either in Jacksonville or Miami; I doubted that he was in Daytona, but I didn’t really know where he was. I figured that if he hit the big time, I’d read about it in some magazine.

Meanwhile, I got heavy into my songwriting, and I didn’t even know why I was doing it. I guess it was because of all the emotions and feelings that were going through me every single day. I was being left out of something that I wanted to be a part of, but that hadn’t really come about. I felt pretty much abandoned by my brother and the other guys. They just wrote me off, saying, “Fuck you, man. Stay away from us, you Hollywood motherfucker.” They laid some pretty heavy shit on me.

Finally, around Christmas, I got word that my brother had gone to work for Rick Hall at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. It was a bad day when I heard that, because I thought that if he was on the damn staff, he was going to get paid a lot of dough, so he’d never have to go out on the fucking road again and we were done playing together.

Still I kept writing. I had access to that Hammond at the Heart House, so I could work some stuff up with it. Half the time I was walking around and I didn’t have enough to eat. Then I met this chick named Stacy, and she was always good for a meal. She lived at home with her mother, who was an amazing cook. I looked forward to going over to her house, because I knew I was going to get to watch a little TV, drink some lemonade, have a few snacks, and then her mama was going to make an incredible fucking meal. Then we’d go into her room, fool around a little bit, and I’d go home.

This went on for a while, until I found out that the deal was that I was supposed to marry the daughter—that’s what all the hospitality was about. Well, the gods were looking down on me, because one night we were talking after dinner, and her mother slipped and said, “Well, you’re sixteen, you can get married.”

I was like, “Thanks, Ma, you got me out of that one.” I told them, “Thank you, ladies. Good night, and goodbye.”

I split, and right around that time—this was March 1969—the phone rang. It was my brother, calling me from Jacksonville, telling me to come back to Florida.

At Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia

Twiggs Lyndon

I
GOT THESE TWO DRUMMERS
…”

That was how Duane started his call, and I’m thinking, “Two drummers? Sounds like a train wreck,” but he continued, “… and a bass player from Chicago.”

I thought, “Hmm, okay, that might be nice.”

Then he hit me with, “I got a lead guitar player.”

“Wait, what do you do?” I asked. “Last time I checked, you were a guitar player.”

“Don’t worry about it; I’ll show you when you get here. What I need you to do is kinda round this whole thing up and send it somewhere. I need you to write something for it.”

“Let me hang up so I can get going.”

I got the phone almost on the hook and he said, “Wait! And I need you to play a Hammond organ.”

“A Hammond organ? Man, I’ve only sat behind one of those two or three times.” After I wrote “Dreams” and “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” at the Heart House, I kinda put them out of my mind, so when he said that, I didn’t even think, “Well, man, you just wrote two songs on a Hammond.”

The first thing I did was call Richie Furay and tell him, “Man, I’m afraid can’t make it to tonight’s rehearsal—or any more rehearsals, for that matter.”

“Really?” Richie asked. “Are you going somewhere?”

I said, “Yeah, man. Actually, my brother just called me, and he’s put together a band back home in Florida, and I’m going to go join it.”

By some hook or crook, Michael Alexander, the old bass player from the Allman Joys, had been in L.A. looking for a job, and he’d ended up at the Heart House. I saw his car, a Mach 1 Mustang, parked out in front of the house, and I thought, “No way, it can’t be. Oh my God, I’ve got a ride back home!”

First thing he asked me when I walked inside was “Man, you got a few dollars?”

“I do happen to have a few bucks,” I told him. “And I’ll make you a deal. If you drive me back to Florida, I’ll pay your gas money and a little extra,” because I had $200 my brother had sent me.

All the way to Jacksonville, he kept bugging me, “Hey, man, can I get a bass-playing gig?”

“Look, man,” I said, trying hard not to get his hopes up, “I don’t know if I got a fucking job yet. How can I promise you anything?” My brother had parted with Mike on bad terms, because Duane didn’t think he was worth a shit.

In the end it didn’t matter. We got in the car and hit the road, heading east. When we pulled up to Butch Trucks’s house, my brother opened the door and said, “Baybrah! You made it.” Then he turned to Mike. “Hey, Mike, thanks for bringing my little brother home.”

Duane took me in the house, and slam—he closed the door on Mike’s ass, just left him standing there. That was that, man.

I was absolutely elated when I walked into that room and saw the whole band there—my brother, Berry Oakley, Dickey Betts, Butch Trucks, and Jaimoe. Of course, when you walk into a room and everybody knows everybody else except you, it’s tough, especially when you’re as shy as I am. It was real tense in that room. You could have cut it with a knife.