My Cross to Bear (20 page)

The bridge from the music to the third verse is when you want to be different, but you don’t want to go all the way from A to Z. You want something that contrasts things a little bit—kind of like matching a shirt with a pair of pants. You want it to be a little different, but not clashing. The bridge is where you say what you want to do about the problem, or what you’re damn sure going to do about it. Then the third verse is, like I said, the epilogue to the whole thing.

It might sound like I’m giving you a formula to write a song, but I’m not, because it’s never that simple. On “Midnight Rider,” I needed something to start the third verse, and Kim Payne came up with “I’ve gone by the point of caring,” which was exactly what I needed. “I’ve gone by the point of caring”—fuck it—and then, “Some old bed I’ll soon be sharing.” I’ve got another buck, and I ain’t gonna let ’em catch my ass, and then it’s just kinda off into the sunset.

I
N
A
PRIL
1970,
WE PLAYED A SERIES OF GIGS AROUND THE
Northeast—Boston, upstate New York, and SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island. We played a really good show at Stony Brook, and, man, they loved us there. I remember being in the Winnebago heading down to Long Island, and we had this girl with us who sometimes came along for the ride. She was nice and clean, and none of us had anything, and we knew we weren’t going to pass anything on, so she would tighten us up every now and then. Nothing will take the blues off of ya like a good head job. Red Dog had to drive the whole way to Long Island though, so he didn’t get none.

When we arrived at Stony Brook, we went in for sound check, leaving the Winnebago parked right in the lot. After we finished, we came back out, and right away I heard all this laughter along with a huge line of people. I looked over to the Winnebago, and Red Dog had it rocking back and forth—fucking that girl’s brains out. She was moaning like crazy, and everybody standing in line could hear her. That Winnebago was cookin’, man—it was just like
Up in Smoke
. I just did a little U-turn and headed right back on in. I wasn’t going out there. That poor old girl. She was a pretty little thing from New York, and she liked us, man, and she really did take care of all of us.

And we needed it, because 1970 was a crazy year. We were on the road three hundred days that year, and it wore on all of us. Our next stop was Buffalo—just another gig on the road. Everything had been running pretty smooth up until then, and we got there with no problem, but we were all tired. The place we were playing at was called Aliotta’s Lounge, and when we got there I counted seating for forty-seven people, man—forty-seven. We were jammed onto this little tiny stage, and there was absolutely no room in there.

Still, we played, and it ended up being a nice show. I met this beautiful girl with hair down to her ass, but short on top. It was a mullet haircut, but it looked good. It was a Friday night, and we were all tired, but we had to get to Cincinnati to play a free show at Ludlow Garage. The plan was to play that free show, help them keep the place open, and then we were supposed to go home.

On Saturday morning, we were going back to Aliotta’s to get our equipment, and me and Oakley were sleeping at the hotel. Twiggs came in our room to use the phone, and he woke us up screaming, “You motherfucker, you’re gonna pay us that goddamn money, and we’re not going to play another night. We have a contract, and you’re gonna pay us, or I’ll come down there and cut your motherfucking Yankee guts out.”

I didn’t think too much of it, but he did have a knife strapped on to his belt. The last time we had been in New York, my brother, being the avid fisherman that he was, had bought this Finnish gutting knife. He’d given it to Twiggs, and Twiggs began to carry it everywhere he went in a leather scabbard.

A little bit later, I overheard my brother talking to Twiggs and telling him, “Twiggs, maybe you shouldn’t take that knife with you.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” Duane told me. “The guy is just giving us some shit about paying us.” Duane was trying to calm Twiggs down, so I got up, took a shower, and went to get something to eat.

I came back to the room, and just as I put the key in the door, my brother opened it from the inside. He was white as a ghost.

“What is it, man?” I asked.

“Gregory, Twiggs went on down there and killed that man. He stabbed him five times, maybe more.” I couldn’t believe it, and I got that feeling where the skin on the top of your head starts to crawl.

We were supposed to wait for an attorney to call, Mr. John Condon, who was kin to Twiggs’s aunt Anne in Rye, the one who had taken care of Dickey. Mr. Condon called us pretty quick, telling us, “I want you to get in that bus, or whatever it is, and lay down on the floor. Whichever one of you looks the least like a long-haired hippie, get in and drive, and get the hell out of here as quick as you can. I mean, move it—now!”

We were out of there in a flash, because with a name like Aliotta in Buffalo, we didn’t want to take a chance.

Now, people have long speculated on Twiggs’s mental health, but he was really just overworked. He was so fucking thorough that he didn’t realize he was making the job twice as hard. He could have done just fine with only half the energy. Like I said, he didn’t snap very often, but when he did, watch out.

There was one night when he was changing some speakers in an amp, and somebody pulled the chair out from under him. He caught himself before his ass hit the floor, and, boy, he stood up and snatched that son of a bitch, bit down on his ear, and spit a little piece of that ear right into the air. There was blood everywhere, and that guy was screaming like you’ve never heard, but Twiggs went right back to changing out that speaker like nothing had happened.

That was the only other time I ever heard of him losing control like that, but what happened in Buffalo really stunned me. He completely lost it, and it took everything Payne and Callahan had to get his ass restrained after he stabbed Aliotta. This guy was trying to fuck with us, because he had the money we needed to get to Cincinnati and then make it home. Twiggs was gonna make sure we got our money.

What happened really fucked with all of us, especially my brother. He was catatonic the rest of that day and night. He didn’t say a single thing, and that worried me. We didn’t know if they were going to charge all of us, or if we were going to get sued for everything we had—which wasn’t much. Still, if they took it, we were done. All we could do was stay in close contact with John Condon, who kept us informed. John eventually told us that we as a group were out of harm’s way, and he advised us to go ahead and finish up our run.

Twiggs ended up doing about eighteen months in jail. In the end, he was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. He spent six months in a mental hospital and was back on the road with us by the spring of 1972.

It was kind of weird that Twiggs had introduced us to Willie Perkins right before that all happened—almost like he knew what was coming. Twiggs had connected us to Willie in Atlanta because a little money was starting to come in and Twiggs didn’t want to feel responsible for it. Twiggs was more about keeping the roadies in order, and Willie had a background in banking. But with Twiggs in jail, we hired Willie on as our new road manager, and he stepped right into the job.

W
HEN
I
THINK BACK ACROSS MY LIFE
, I
USUALLY COME UP
with positive stuff—like the fun times with my brother, the great times I had with Allen Woody, and all that. My memories aren’t about being in jail or my ex-wives. I imagine that most people have enough negative shit in their life that if they dwelled on it long enough, they’d probably blow their brains out, and I’m no different. I just naturally don’t dwell on the negatives, just like I naturally don’t eat the white part of the turnip—because I can’t stand it. Thinking about drugs at this point is another negative, but there’s no denying that drugs were a big part of my life.

If you check the records, the most consistent thing about my drug use was that I kept on trying to get straight. I kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, trying to quit. I must have gone into treatment eighteen times, and the time between each visit got to be a little longer, which I saw as a good thing. That little voice telling me to clean up was always in my head, even though there were times when I could barely hear it.

I started using pills in Daytona, because I had to go to school after playing gigs at night. They were red-and-blacks—they had a little phenobarbital, so they’d take the edge off a little bit. In New York, there was a bit of speed, and I believed in my speed. As long as I had my speed, I was okay, but I never took too much. You know when you’re young like that, before you’re thirty, you’re fucking bulletproof.

When we weren’t playing music, we’d do speed and drink or do downers and fuck. We had Nembutals, and we’d grind them bad boys up, sit and wait a bit, and then just fuck for hours. One time, I was visiting Daytona, and we had to go all the way down to Deland to pick up a prescription that somebody had for Nembutals. It was me and these two real pretty girls. We got those pills and chopped them up, put just a bit of water in them, set them up on the dash, and I’m thinking, “Boy, I’m fixing to have me a hell of a time!”

We pulled off on an old country road, did them Nembutals, and then we fucked until the sun went down. I did both of them, one at a time—my dick was like a damn oak tree all day. There weren’t no mosquitoes, neither! We didn’t have any AIDS back then; there was none of that. Fucking didn’t kill you, but it might just make you a little sick or itchy.

I was turned on to cocaine by King Curtis, during the Brothers’ first trip out in Los Angeles. I had done a fair amount of speed before I tried cocaine, and to tell you the truth, coke didn’t really work on me. It seems that people who had taken speed, when they tried coke, it wouldn’t work, and the people who took cocaine, when they tried speed, it wouldn’t work. When I first tried coke, it just gave me cottonmouth, and not much else.

I didn’t get into coke real serious until I moved up to Macon. This guy who had robbed a drugstore gave me a full sealed ounce of pharmaceutical cocaine, and between me and the band, we about blew our brains out on that shit. You’d do a little bit of coke, you’d pour a real stiff drink so you could level out, and you’d go play some music. Then, when you came back down, you wanted another hit of that damn cocaine, even though you realized that you felt like shit from it and needed that drink to cool out. Doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

Whoever came up with that slogan, “Cocaine is a lie”—well, it is a lie. I don’t know how many times I got high on coke, and then sometime between eleven and one o’clock, I felt so fucking bad. I’d be paranoid and jittery, and thinking, “Man, I paid $125 to get like this?” The thing is, then I’d do it again the next night.

After we had gotten into cocaine, we were playing one gig, and we went to count off “Statesboro Blues,” and my brother went, “One, two—the band needs some coke!” At intermission, there must have been nine cats come back there with shit to sell. I thought for sure we were all gonna get popped, but we got lucky.

I never did like cocaine by itself, because it made me too nervous. But a little coke and two Percodan and I was ready to fight three lions at once. Then it would stop working, and that was the problem.

Bad as all those were, they were no heroin, man—and it was smack in the middle of that crazy year of 1970 that heroin made its first appearance. We’d been playing so many fucking gigs we couldn’t count them all, and by summer we’d found ourselves back in Macon. Back then in Macon, it was really hard to find a nickel bag of reefer, let alone an ounce, but you could buy heroin in a snap—seven dollars a bag.

The first time we scored heroin, we were having a little party over at Duane’s house on Bond Street. We had just come in off the road, and we had done pretty good—we each had a couple hundred dollars to show for it. A black dude who was a friend of Chank’s came over to me and said, “Hey, bro, try a whack of this.” He had a pocketknife that he dipped down into a little plastic bag of off-white powder, and the tip of the knife just barely touched it. He put the point of the blade right under my nose, and I snorted the powder off of it.

It hit me with a big rush, because back then they would cut heroin with quinine, so that it would surge through your blood real fast. I started drifting, and I didn’t give a shit about nothing. I felt relaxed, so I sat down in this big leather chair, which was so cool. I remember seeing big purple hippos kinda floating through my head, and that’s about all that was going on up there. I thought, “Man, this is neat,” because it shut up all the noise in my head.