My Cross to Bear (15 page)

Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records always felt that, in a way, he discovered Duane, but it was really Twiggs. Word had gotten around that there was this redheaded guitar player over at Muscle Shoals who was kicking some butt, so Twiggs went over there, on his own dime, to see my brother. He came back to Phil and said, “Dig it, man, you gotta go check out this player over there.”

Phil saw him play, and then Twiggs asked him, “Man, are you ready for that? Is that something else?”

“I don’t know. Is he good?” was Phil’s response, and Twiggs said, “Yeah!” So Phil used him as kind of his barometer, and he called up Wexler.

That’s when Wexler came down and said, “Oh yeah, he’s good!”

Phil had put Twiggs in charge of getting us up to Macon. He told us, “We got you all a place,” which was an old two-story clapboard house on College Street that had been converted into an apartment building. Twiggs rented it and put a Coke machine in there and filled it with beer. I don’t think we stayed in Jacksonville more than ten days before we loaded everything up in two vans and headed for Georgia.

Hauling that Hammond around wasn’t easy. We didn’t have a road case for it, so we just wrapped it in blankets, and belts would go around it, and there was a ratchet thing that would tighten them down. That thing weighed well over four hundred pounds, and we had a lot of second-floor gigs back then. Getting that thing up the stairs always reminded me of a Laurel and Hardy episode. Sometimes we had to use the whole band. We looked like pallbearers, but we usually preferred to use people whose hands were expendable.

Of course, we had to come up with a name for the band. I didn’t care too much about a name; I just knew it was the best fucking band I’d ever been in. Duane said, “All right, look. Here’s a hat, here’s some pieces of paper. Write down what you think it should be, and put it in the hat.” Everybody wrote down a name, and it turned out that four of them were the same and two of them weren’t.

My choice was “Beelzebub,” the right-hand man of the devil, while my brother went with something from
Lord of the Rings
, which he knew wasn’t going to fit the music. The other four all said, “The Allman Brothers Band,” and that was it. My brother and I both said, “Oh fuck—you all are kidding, right?” Neither one of us had anything to do with the name, and I think the others chose it mainly because of my brother’s leadership. So the Allman Brothers Band we became.

Our first afternoon in Macon, we went over to Phil Walden’s office for our first meeting, and he blew a bunch of smoke up our ass. The whole time he was talking, he’d only look at Duane. He was used to dealing with people like Percy Sledge, and then they dealt with their bands—and I can see his point in doing it that way, because he had signed Duane, not the band. That didn’t last, though, because Duane went in there and told him, “Hold it. My little brother is in this goddamn organization, and you will treat us all the same, or you won’t treat us at all. So what’s it going to be?”

My first impression of Phil Walden was that he was okay. I knew he had been very successful, and my brother had gone to Macon to speak with him personally. He came back to Jacksonville and said, “He seems pretty solid to me.” That was good enough for me and everybody to agree to go to Macon. To look at Phil, with his haircut and the way he dressed, he seemed to be very hip, and he could hold his liquor. I figured, “What the hell, there ain’t nothing going on elsewhere, so as long as we don’t sign our firstborn away, and as long as the fucking cards are on the table, we should go with this guy.”

Phil Walden was taking 100 percent of the publishing, because he was doing “administration.” What the hell does that mean? I asked him one time, and he told me, “Well, we make stacks and stacks of cassettes of all the songs you wrote on all the records, and we send them out to Capitol, we send them out to A&M, we send them out to …” And he just kept rambling on about all these record labels. What a pile of bullshit that was. The man was taking half my money, and I don’t remember him being there while I was writing the songs he was getting paid for.

But my brother trusted Phil, and when I started asking questions about my publishing, he would just poke me and say, “Hey, man, be fucking thankful that we got enough to eat. Just sign the fucking agreement so we can get going, and they’ll give us a bunch of money once you sign it.” So that’s how I signed all my publishing rights away.

Being the writer of these songs, I really disagreed with him, and it hurt me that Duane didn’t stand up for me more. I realize that he was looking out for the whole band and its betterment, but still, I think he could have done more, and it ended up costing all of us a shitload of money down the line.

Walden never offered us any direction at all. He would just show us off after we got famous. He strutted his stuff around like a peacock, saying, “Yeah, I’m the manager of southern rock.” He could get a record played on the radio—hell, he could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He didn’t sign Otis Redding by being no dummy. Him and Otis’s father had to go down to the courthouse when they signed the contract, or it wouldn’t be binding—and he wanted to make damn sure it was binding.

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been a roadie for Heart and who I’d become friends with at the Heart House, that if this new thing with my brother worked out and we needed a roadie, I’d send for him as soon as I got there.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“No, man, I will,” I told him.

“It’s been nice knowing you, Gregg” was all he replied, and he was upset, because we’d gotten real close out there.

Sure enough though, once things began to take shape in Macon, I sent for him, and he rode his motorcycle all the way out. It was cold and rainy, and all he had on was a pair of Levi’s, a pair of boots, a flannel shirt, a T-shirt, and a Levi’s jacket. He got off his bike and came over to me, and he said, “Goddamn—some men keep their word.”

So Kim joined up with Mike Callahan, who had been the soundman for the Second Coming. Callahan was our only roadie for our first few gigs, and he had a way about him where whenever we got to a gig, he’d talk people into unloading everything. Michael had the gift of gab for sure. He was a hell of a guy, and I can remember laughing with that man until I thought I was going to expire, because I couldn’t get my breath. I sure miss my brother Michael, who passed a couple of years ago.

We then added Joseph Campbell, aka Red Dog, who was a wounded Vietnam vet; he had been in the Marine Corps. He’d gotten that nickname in Vietnam, because he was redheaded and he was such a dog—after a while, he had one in every town. Remember that cartoon dog, Droopy? He was a little black-and-white dog with a big fluff of red hair. He had him tattooed on his arm and they had the hair real red.

Red Dog had been everywhere. My brother met him when he was selling weed in the park, these cheap-ass nickel bags that weren’t worth a shit. Friendship meant everything to Red Dog, and I mean everything. If Red Dog liked you, he loved you, but if he didn’t, forget it—you had no chance. Duane took a liking to him, and he rounded out our first road crew.

In the early days, Red Dog contributed his disability check from Vietnam to the band, but he was paid back in diamonds. Let it show, carved into stone, that Red Dog, God bless him, came along and insisted on giving us that check, because we weren’t going to take his damn check—we barely knew the cat. The fact is, he needed a place to belong. He really wanted to be in our gang, because we had a good thing going.

It was kind of a collective deal between the roadies and the band. We’d throw our backs into it, right along with them. We were used to it, because we had been our own roadies before. Butch and Jaimoe would set up their own drums, and we’d help carry everything in. We found that since we were all getting there together, we could unload the equipment that much quicker, and then we’d let them take over. I’m not saying we did their jobs for them or anything like that. But there were only three of them at first. (Eventually we ended up with twelve roadies and, oh God, that was stupid.)

From the start, Twiggs Lyndon really impressed me, because he had been there from beginning to end with Otis Redding, and he had a lot to do with the success Otis had. Twiggs had also been the road manager for Little Richard when the Allman Joys opened a show for Richard and the Coasters up in Atlanta, and even though I didn’t meet Twiggs, I did meet Richard and it broke my heart, man.

The Coasters were really funny and great to be around; we really enjoyed them. I got to one of Richard’s people, and I asked him, “I’ve been an admirer of Richard Penniman for years, do you mind if I go meet him?” The guys said, “Sure, come on,” and so I went up there. Richard was in his dressing room, and he said, “My soul! Who in the world are you, boy?”

We had just finished our run at Trude Heller’s in New York City. We had bought us a bunch of clothes, and I had on a pair of pants that had a little zipper in the back, and a big belt that went over that, and a real nice shirt. He put his hand on my belt, and I said, “No, don’t do that,” and I backed up. This guy who must have been with Richard said, “In other words, Richard, you better not do that again or there will be a dead nigger around here!” They all laughed, and I just got out of there. Years later, we became “Hey, how are you?” kind of friends, and still, whenever he sees me, Richard always extends his hand and greets me very warmly.

Twiggs and I got along really well. He loved to show me his record collection, and he was a frustrated guitar player. He was so organized and anal about everything—the world was never perfect enough for Twiggs Lyndon, and that’s why he’s not here anymore. He could drive you nuts with his organization. Twiggs didn’t have a short fuse, but if it burned down, look out. He was a little eccentric, and he was way ahead of his time, but then, shit, it seemed like all of us were.

On one of our long drives, it was raining and raining, so of course the windshield wipers broke, but only on the passenger side. We stopped at a gas station, and Twiggs got down there with all these tools, and he was explaining how this catch assembly lock arm should stay next to the band-driven catch assembly on the A-part of the arm. Of course, we all couldn’t care less; we just wanted to get going again. After about an hour and a half, we had to tell him, “Shut the fuck up, man,” but that was part of what made Twiggs so efficient; he always tended to business extremely well.

Twiggs was the original dirty old man. In his road case was a chart with the legal age of consent in every state of the union, and he had copies made for everyone in the band. He’d hand them out before the tour started, and he kept extras in case you lost it. Twiggs could be a real freak. One time, this chick came out from California to visit me when we were playing somewhere like St. Louis, and we’d been fucking all night, so we went to sleep with nothing on. I woke up, and barely opened one eye, and there’s Twiggs. He’s got the covers up, and he’s looking at her twat. Kim Payne walked in the room, butt-naked, and he said, “Twiggs, what are you doing?” Twiggs just says, “Oh, that.” I couldn’t believe he said that! Kim looked at me like, “We got to do something about that boy.”

Once we got situated at 309 College Street, Twiggs turned us on to the young ladies at Wesleyan College. We boys had been out to sea for a while, and we needed our business fixed. The girls at Wesleyan were more than happy to take care of it. I met this girl the other day, and she told me, “I remember when you guys used to live down the street. I was just a little kid, and my mother would say, ‘Don’t go down there messing with them boys. They’re not churchgoers!’” Of course, her mother was probably banging one of us.

When we got to Macon it was April, and Macon in the springtime is gorgeous, because all the cherry blossoms and dogwoods are blooming. We’d play all day, then go collect enough bottles to get some chicken necks, which we called “Allman Brothers Fried Dead Birds,” and we’d grill them up. Masons that we were, we built this big barbecue in the backyard, and there was a big pond back there, fed by this freshwater spring. One day, all of us got in the pond, and we cleaned that motherfucker out—boy, we got muddy, but it looked so beautiful. The water from the spring was crystal clear, and then it rained that night. Man, there was a frog fuckfest like you ain’t never seen.

The first time I showed “Melissa” to the guys, we were sitting on the front porch at the College Street place. I played just a little bit of it, and my brother said, “Oh yeah, man—play that one again,” and every night from that point on, he made me play it.

Twiggs took us all around town, and he introduced us to Mama Louise Hudson, who was a real nice lady with a restaurant, the H&H. It’s always been hard for me to accept any kind of handout or charity, or anything that even resembles it. A lot of times, I’d go down to her place and I wouldn’t even order nothing, I’d just wait for the other guys to finish eating. Eventually, I learned that she really loved us and believed in us, and so when she would offer me some food, I’d eat it, but I swore to myself that I would pay her back, no matter how long it took. I have always cared for her: Louise Hudson is a very special woman.

Later on, when we had that jet plane, we’d bring her on it to cook for us if we were in the area. She always wanted a Cadillac limousine, a black one, to pick her up. We’d send one to her to drive her up to Atlanta, wait for her, and drive her back. That was so fun, man. I remember the look on Louise’s face the first time we did it; she was just bawling her eyes out. Eventually we got her a gold-plated skillet. It’s still hanging up on the wall in there.