My Cross to Bear (19 page)

I would usually room with Oakley, and the roadies would all room together, because they stunk so bad. Twiggs tried his best to make us as comfortable as possible, and we really appreciated that. My brother really loved Twiggs, and so did I. One night Duane told Twiggs that he was just like a part of the band, that he might as well be in the band. Boy, that meant so much to Twiggs.

As we were getting out on the road more, we needed something new to travel in. We’d had this damn Econoline van that was busting our ass. We went shopping for a Winnebago and found the one we wanted, and it was $23,000. Duane went to Phil Walden’s office, and twenty minutes later he came out with a check. Sometimes we would sleep some people in the Winnebago, or the “Winbag,” as I liked to call it, or the “Bag,” as it eventually became. Somehow, “Winnebago” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. If you’re talking to a girl and you say, “Well, we travel in a Winnebago”—that’s not cool. We would sleep people in there when we had to, or, to save money, we would get a room with two double beds and sleep four guys in there.

We seemed to have endless energy in those days. One meal at the H would hold me for the whole day, and you wouldn’t get the munchies at night. Of course, we never had trouble sleeping at night either. Except for Jaimoe, all of us smoked back then—me and Dickey smoked Marlboros, and Duane smoked Kools like they was going out of style.

On the way back from California, I was still feeling pretty bad, so I slept almost all the way home, except when we stopped off at the Grand Canyon. It was Twiggs’s idea to stop there and take some pictures, and man, they had to prop me up—I was freezing cold, I was shaking, and I had a fever. It was the crack of fucking dawn, but Twiggs said the lighting was just right, so we did it.

By February 1970, we were back at the Fillmore East for three nights, playing with the Grateful Dead and Love, and we were the middle act. Uncle Bill, as we called him, had fallen in love with us after he’d heard us that very first time. Not long after that first trip to the Fillmore East, Bill had come down to Georgia and we’d gotten to know him. Even way back then I was thinking that we needed to drop the whole Capricorn bullshit and all the Phil Walden crap and simply talk Bill Graham into managing us. I knew that Bill had something to do with the Grateful Dead, and I thought that if he was managing the Dead, then we could show him what a real band was like.

Before we played with the Grateful Dead for the first time, I had heard all this hype, but I didn’t really have an opinion of them. If somebody had asked what I thought of them, I would have said, “I think that their music ain’t got no groove to it at all,” and it didn’t. But they played the music that they played while the crowd did this thing that we eventually called “the Grateful Dead waltz,” which consisted of dancing around, twirling, and jerking a whole lot. I didn’t understand it at all, and I was the same age as them. I kept looking for something, but I just didn’t get it.

“What do you think of these guys?” I asked my brother. He didn’t hesitate.

“This is shit. You see them jugs that they’re passing out?” he said, referring to the cases of Gatorade that they would electrify backstage and then pass out to the crowd. And then I knew what he was talking about. One tiny sip of that shit and it would be raining fire, man, so no wonder everybody was grooving on that music—anything would sound good like that.

Not that the Grateful Dead had a trick in passing out a bunch of crazy pills so that people would like their music—that’s not what I am saying. I’m just saying that that was part of their whole culture, part of their whole deal. I don’t know their story, and I don’t know any one of them well enough to ask them, “What’s the deal with this?” but I really don’t give a fuck that much. I just know that there’s the Grateful Dead, and they have their place. They’re pretty good people; I liked them all right. Garcia called me a narc at one point, so I never really gave two shits for him, but him and my brother got along because they were guitar players. Mostly I just ignored them.

E
ARLY IN THE YEAR
, O
AKLEY HAD BEEN LOOKING FOR A BIG HOUSE
to rent, and he found one on Vineville Avenue in Macon. He and Linda and Brittany moved in there, and so did his younger sister, Candy, who I was seeing a little bit. She asked me to move in there with her, and I said okay—but I insisted on paying rent, because I wasn’t going to freeload on anybody. I’ve never done that. Duane, his common-law wife, Donna, and their daughter, Galadrielle, also moved in, but they didn’t stay there very long.

It was a big place—I remember thinking that we could put the whole band in there—but we didn’t want to be on top of each other all the time, since we traveled like that. The “Big House,” as we came to call it, was a place for all of us to hang, but it was really Oakley’s place.

The vibe at the Big House was always good. We had a real sense of camaraderie, of family, and we would always have one big meal a day—you could count on it. All the girls would get together and cook for us; they’d make a huge pot of chili, and four or five pans of cornbread, and we would hog down, man. Then we would lay around and talk, and play some music on the stereo. We never watched TV; in fact, we didn’t even have a TV in the Big House. We talked about all kinds of things, and my brother, being the most well-read of all of us, would talk about stuff that he had been reading, and by the time he was done talking about it, it was like I had read the book myself.

The girls kept that house spotless. They were always telling us, “Take those motorcycle boots outside and leave them on the porch,” because they didn’t want mud on the floor. Linda and Candy put so much energy into going out shopping at these junk stores to find things for the house. They’d find some great stuff, like say some old tapestries, and then they’d bring it home to decorate the house with.

I remember rainy days when Candy and I would lay in bed and look out the window, watching the cars go by on Vineville Avenue. We’d sit in bed and string beads for hours, and Candy was wonderful at it. She made me all kinds of beautiful pieces, and I don’t know whatever became of those, but I would give anything to have them back, because she made them especially for me.

When Candy and I were in love, we really cared about each other. We were friends too, and that’s what it takes. We were buds, man. I remember the first time we ever made love, because I thought it was so hip. It happened on the second or third day after we first met in Jacksonville. It was so incredible, and at the end of it I said, “Baby, I just don’t know what to say,” and she said, “You ain’t got to say nothing; it’s done been said.”

I can’t really remember what happened to me and her, but I think it was me. I went out on the road, and there were all these women; when I came back home, it didn’t feel right to go in there like nothing had happened. My conscience was bothering me, but I was too chickenshit to tell her what I did, so I just tried to fade on out of there. Plus, she had eyes for Kim Payne, and when I saw that, I felt relieved. It was like going to confession without actually going.

Take a lesson from my life: if you’ve cheated, either leave or just shut the fuck up and stay in your happy home and don’t do it again. I knew there was no such thing as me not doing it again. I became the biggest pussy hound in the world, and I have had my fun when it comes to women.

At the Big House, we listened to music all the time. Linda and Berry had this little community room outside their bedroom that we called the Casbah, and Linda set up a stereo system in there. Jaimoe turned all of us on to so much neat stuff. He gave us a proper education about jazz and got us into Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Kind of Blue
was always on the turntable—my brother really got his head around that album—and he also seriously dug Coltrane’s
My Favorite Things
. Fuck me, man; my brother could soak up music like no one else I’ve ever seen, and then turn it into something else. He’d be listening to an album or hear a song on the radio, and the next thing you know we’d be working it into our music onstage.

Butchie had a little bit of schooling, and he was into jazz too, even though he came from a band that did a lot of Byrds stuff and electric folk. Me, I was strictly rhythm and blues. I think that’s what my brother wanted, a revitalized, up-to-date rhythm and blues band, with the guitar players being very present and playing all this harmony—from the start, you could see that was going to be part of it, those guitars doing the harmonies. And, man, the hours that the rest of us would spend off to the side while those two worked out those parts.

The group Cowboy was on Capricorn, and we played their album
5’ll Getcha Ten
quite a bit at the Big House. Scott Boyer had been in the 31st of February with Butch, and Cowboy had a sort of southern-folk sound to them. Then there was Junior Wells and Bobby “Blue” Bland, two of my favorites, plus B.B. King’s
Live at the Regal
and John Hammond’s
Southern Fried
. King Curtis—my brother thought the world of that man, and he loved Curtis’s album
Live at Fillmore West
. Duane wore the grooves right out of that one. The Staple Singers, Taj Mahal—and of course everyone was still listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Dylan’s songs are just ageless; they’re just like a part of life and they probably always will be.

Dickey and Berry had come more from that psychedelic scene. Dickey was way into Jefferson Airplane—he was a big fan of Jorma Kaukonen, and he loved Clapton’s work in Cream too. Eventually the jazz thing rubbed off on Dickey—you can hear it on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Shit, what he and Duane did on that one came straight from Miles Davis. Duane, Dickey, and Berry also picked up on the Butterfield Blues Band sound—that album
East-West
was a killer. Berry and Dickey also were way into the Dead’s
American Beauty
album, so you start mixing all that together and you come out with a pretty wicked musical brew, and we used bits and pieces of all of it.

Duane, Berry, Butchie, and Jaimoe all appeared on an album by Johnny Jenkins called
Ton-Ton Macoute!
My brother played his ass off. His Dobro work on “Walk on Gilded Splinters” was just flat-out evil, man, and that’s why we still do that song to this very day.

As we were getting ready to record our second album,
Idlewild South
, which we named after that cabin in the woods where we’d spent New Year’s Eve 1969, my songwriting was getting better—everything was getting better. We had enough to eat, for one thing. I would just wait, and these songs began to take shape in my head. Sometimes you hear somebody say something and you can get an idea for a song from that. I heard a story about Stephen Stills and Billy Preston. They were at a party, and Billy’s date was with him; Stephen’s lady was supposed to meet him there, but she didn’t show. So Stephen was talking with Billy, and Billy says, “Man, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Stephen says, “Fuck, man, do you mind if I use that?” Billy told him, “No, I don’t mind,” and “Love the One You’re With” is a very good song.

That’s one way a song can happen. Another way is you can see something happening or going on with someone you know, and it’s really fucked up. Maybe you know somebody who really cares for another person, but that person has no idea of it and you can’t say anything about it. All these things can inspire a song.

I don’t think you can put a time limit on songwriting, but a lot of people do that. They start it, they got a verse, and they want to finish it that night. I let it ooze out, man. It’s like some people squeeze too hard on the toothpaste tube. If I squeeze too hard on a song, it will sound contrived.

I’ve had a few songs that I’m proud of that haven’t gotten a lot of recognition, like “Oceans Awash the Gunwales,” which was on the album
Just Before the Bullets Fly
from ’88. If you’ve ever seen a picture of a battleship in rough seas, where the whole front end of the ship is underwater, and you wonder how it can possibly stay afloat, but it does—that song is about staying afloat in life.

Actually, it’s about overdosing in a New York hotel, which happened to me in 1987. I’d done too much coke and I was under an assumed name. Paramedics got me out of there and were bringing me to Roosevelt Hospital. As they were taking me out on a stretcher, we went by our tour bus, which had the USS
Alabama
painted on the side. I remember thinking to myself, “Battleships don’t sink, and by God, I’m not gonna sink either—I’m not going to die.” It took a few days, but I got it back together and I started writing a tune about it. When something that serious happens, it will definitely inspire a song.

Another one, also on
the Just Before the Bullets Fly
album, is “Fear of Falling.” I’m also proud of “Oncoming Traffic.” I worked real hard on that one, and it’s a special tune to me. Most of the songs that haven’t gotten a lot of recognition would be on my solo records, because it seems that the Brothers’ songs are all pretty much accepted and well liked.

If you’ve got something on your mind that kind of takes over everything else, then you’re pretty well fucked as far as writing goes. It helps if you’re at total peace, and I guess being out at Idlewild South made me feel like I didn’t have a care in the world. Since there were no cops, I could smoke a doob out there, and that was nice. I really liked it out there; it put me in the right state of mind to write, and that’s where I came up with “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’” and “Midnight Rider.”

On “Midnight Rider,” which is the song I’m most proud of in my career, I had all but the last part—so, as I like to say, I had the song by the nuts, I just had to reel it in. The third verse is really important, because it’s kind of the epilogue to the whole thing. Basically, you state the problem in the first verse, you embellish on the problem in the second verse—like “let me tell you what a bitch she
really
is”—and then you usually have some music, to let you think about them words for a while and also get lifted up by that music.