My Cross to Bear (23 page)

I
N
M
ARCH 1971, WE WENT TO THE
F
ILLMORE
E
AST TO RECORD A
live album. We had the recording trucks set up outside, and we knew we had more than one night to do it, so we weren’t uptight about it. That was good, because I would have been the first one to make the first mistake, to be the uptight one. Our attitude was to go in there and play our shows, let Tom Dowd figure out the rest, and then we’ll have us a record. We played two shows each day, we played for a long time, and the audience was just whupped by the time we were done.

The funny thing is, Tom Dowd almost missed the recording of the album. He was supposed to be on vacation in Europe, but the weather was shitty, so he decided to head back to New York on a red-eye flight. He checked into a hotel and slept until the afternoon of the show. He didn’t even know we were recording that night, and we didn’t know he was back in town. Tom barely made it into the truck before the music started, but he got it all down on tape. If he hadn’t made it in time, the rest of our career might have been very different.

On the first night, we had Randolph “Juicy” Carter sit in with us. Juicy was a baritone sax player, a good old friend of Jaimoe’s who had been with him during that New Orleans bust. I think he had been one of the horn players in Percy Sledge’s road band, and every now and then he would sit in with us. We enjoyed having him because it broke up the musical routine. We had a lot of guitar solos, so to have a solo on sax, which is the most romantic instrument ever made, was a nice breath of fresh air. But we didn’t use any of the songs with him on the album.

Thom “Ace” Doucette used to play harp with us a lot at the Fillmore, and he shows up on part of the album. Thom was from Sarasota originally, and he had the come and go blues more than anybody I’ve ever seen. My brother really liked him, and gave him the nickname Ace. We would have hired him to be a full-fledged member of the band, but I don’t think he wanted the responsibility. I don’t think he wanted to have to be anywhere at any time—Thom just kind of drifts, still to this day. Wherever the wind takes him, that’s where he goes.

That record shows very well what we could do. Those concerts were so special. It was almost like somebody knew what was gonna happen; it was kind of eerie.

But I have to say that I was still the big doubting Thomas of the whole thing. It goes back to high school—I made the other guys wait to tour until I got my diploma, because, as I told my brother, “Man, we will never make enough money to pay rent doing this.” My brother would say, “Gregory, you need to get a little more faith.” Anytime I would get in a crisis, he would say something funny and bring me right out of it.

It was the same thing with the live album. The first two records had fallen on their ass. Just barely cracked the charts, if that. Our kind of music was so new that eventually they started calling it a whole different genre of music. I always thought we were just playing some blues with some jazz mixed in, and with Dickey we had a country boy in the band, so that accounted for stuff like “Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man”—that’s very good as a country song, by the way.

So I thought, live album or not, how many times are you wanting to fail before we finally give this thing up? Not to mention we were working our butts off. In 1970, we played 306 nights, and that was just the gigs; the rest of it was traveling. So we were gone the whole year.

The album cover of
At Fillmore East
was shot by Jim Marshall, who shot all those famous black-and-white pictures of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Hendrix—just everybody, man. For a while, they were pushing us for a cover, and we couldn’t think of what to do. Somebody, I think one of the roadies, said, “Why don’t we just stencil up a bunch of these cases, go across the street from the studio, stack them up against that brick building, and take a picture?” It was a great idea, because nobody could tell what fucking town we were in, and it looked cold, so you would think we were in New York, but we were really in Macon, Georgia.

I didn’t want to be out there, because we weren’t really dressed for cold weather. I was wearing a buckskin coat and a pair of thin Levi’s, and the wind was blowing, so my ass was cold. The roadies began to unload the road cases and got them stenciled up. They had to do it quick—if you look real close at the photo, you can see where they got some paint on the wall, and when they tried to wipe it off, they smudged it and made it worse.

We were across the street, inside the studio, while they were doing all that, and they finally said, “Okay, we’re ready.” Jim Marshall had all his cameras and film, and he shot and he shot and he shot, and he shot some more. How many shots can you take of a bunch of dudes in front of a fucking brick wall? We were getting edgy and ready to walk. Marshall was like, “Look, you sons of bitches, hold still.” He was a very successful photographer, and quite bossy.

We were fucking around, grab-assing and everything, because that was back when we were all real brothers. He said, “All right, I’m going to turn around and reload this Hasselblad, and this is the last fucking roll. If you motherfuckers move, I’ll never do this again.” Meanwhile we’re all going, “Boy, I hope not!”

Suddenly here comes the candy man walking down the street, and he ain’t never seen nothing like this. My brother goes, “Hey, bro,” runs across the street, buys a couple of bags, makes change, runs back across the street, and sits back down just before Marshall turns back around to shoot the picture. That struck us all real funny, and we just cracked up.

Marshall started clicking away, going, “What’s so fucking funny?” because he hadn’t seen Duane run across the street, so we just laughed harder and harder. He thought we were laughing at him, and the more he thought that, the more we did laugh. We were really laughing at the whole stupid situation, because it was pneumonia city out there, man.

It was Duane’s idea to put the picture of the roadies on the back cover. The rest of us weren’t too sure about that, but he said, “Hey, man, they work just as fucking hard as we do,” so Marshall went ahead and took it.

A
FTER THE
F
ILLMORE SHOWS, WE TOOK SOME TIME OFF.
I
WAS IN
such a good mood, because back then, time off was so very precious. We headed up to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to do some songwriting and rehearsing. We rented out a ski chalet, which cost quite a bit of money.

Once we got there, I started to realize that we had some problems, because as soon as we arrived, Oakley and my brother got into Duane’s Volvo 1800E, and they took off for Atlanta and copped. Did they cop for me? Nope, but it didn’t matter, because I went up there to write. Besides, I had my own stash anyway.

By the time they got back, we had some new tunes worked up, but we only had two or three days left. On top of that, they were barfing their guts out, so that whole trip ended up being kind of a washout. We did get a couple of my songs learned, and Dickey’s song “Blue Sky,” and then when we got to Miami to start working on
Eat a Peach
, things moved pretty fast.

In June, Bill Graham asked us to be the last band to play at the closing of the Fillmore East, and that was a big thing to us. That weekend there was lots of confusion, because there were so many bands playing. In those last three days, there must have been ten or twelve bands playing, including Albert King, J. Geils Band, Mountain, and the Beach Boys. The lineup was the perfect example of Uncle Bill’s eclectic taste—he liked a little bit of everything, all the way up until the last show. There was actually a bit of tension that night because the Beach Boys were annoyed about having to go on before us. They put up a fight until Bill told them what’s what, but they took out their revenge by playing long, so we didn’t take the stage until much later than we were supposed to.

When we were finally about to go on, Bill introduced us by saying, “We’re going to round it off with the best of them all, the Allman Brothers Band,” and that was special. I’d heard a rumor before that Bill had said of all the bands he’d ever worked with, we were his favorite, but I hadn’t believed it. So when I heard him say that with my own two ears, I was elated.

I respected, loved, and appreciated Bill Graham probably as much as anybody I’ve ever known. One day Chank and I were on I-16, heading from Macon to Savannah, and we saw these three Quonset huts right together on the side of the road. A sign said “Antiques,” and that’s all it took. We pulled in there, and this guy running the place had three crates of 1926 Coca-Cola that still had the cocaine in it. He also had arrowhead collections, rocking chairs, and all kinds of old cans and bottles, just neat, neat shit. He had a wooden box with a glass top and purple velvet underneath it, and when you opened it up there was a .44 cap and ball. The powder horn was there, and the little thing to make the musket ball with, and it said, “Commemorative Model—Robert E. Lee, 1865.” I bought it on the spot for Bill.

I wasn’t sucking up to him or anything like that; I gave it to him out of respect. He tried three times to give that damn thing back to me. He brought it to a gig once, and he had it in this sack he always carried. He asked, “Are you sure about this pistol?”

“Bill,” I said, “if you ask me one more time about that damn gun, I’m going to take it back!”

He said, “Okay,” and from what I hear, he went out and bought a black marble pedestal and put the gun on it, right in the foyer of his house. He had a plaque made that said, “Given to me by Gregg Allman.” That’s what I heard—I don’t know if it’s true, and there’s no telling where it is now.

The Allman Brothers had a special relationship with Bill Graham. Bill was always there when we played the Fillmore, and he’d come in and shoot the shit with us in the dressing room. He’d come down in the afternoon when we were setting up and sit there talking to us. He came down to Macon several times for the annual Capricorn barbecue. He got along real well with my brother and always went out of his way to talk to Jaimoe. I don’t know why he connected the way he did with Jaimoe, but maybe it was because Bill was a German Jew. He got out of Europe right before the Holocaust, but his whole family died in the camps, and I think he related best to people who’d had a rough go of it.

Bill Graham certainly had a passion for music, and the live performance of music, right up until the day he died in 1991. He was probably the most assertive person I ever met, but he was real fair with everybody. He didn’t give a shit about how famous you were. The opening act got the same treatment as the headliner, and they were made to feel welcome. That was smart on his part, because in three months to a year, who knows? That opening act might be wiping out the whole world.

I remember one night when Jeff Beck wasn’t going to play because there was no shower for him. Bill picked him up off the floor, pushed him up against the door, and told him, “You get your little Limey ass out there and play. Quit whining, or I’ll give you a fucking shower.”

O
NE NIGHT WHEN WE WERE IN
N
EW
Y
ORK, OUR FRIENDS
P
ETER
Harron and Collette Mimram, who we had met through Ace Doucette, took us to dinner at the apartment of a guy named Deering Howe. Deering either owned or leased the penthouse at 1 Fifth Avenue, and that night Alan Douglas, who had worked closely with Jimi Hendrix, was also there with his girlfriend, Stella.

Deering had one of Jimi’s old guitars, strung right-handed so he could play it. When we got there, we all took off our coats, and my brother made a beeline for that damn guitar, plugged it in, turned this little Champ amp on, and started blowing this scathing, molten lava line that went on for about twenty-five minutes. It was like nothing I ever heard him play onstage, and everybody was just in awe. There was a long silence afterwards, and Duane just said, “Nice guitar,” and put it down.

Then Collette said, “I’d like you guys to meet some people here,” because we hadn’t even met Deering yet.

It was funny, man. Duane was just like a kid in the candy store when he saw that guitar, and he burnt that son of a bitch up. It was like his “How do you do?” and it was just perfect. Stella just fell in love with him, and so did Collette. We hit it off with Deering right away.

His penthouse was a pretty cool spot. There weren’t any chairs in there, it was all cushions. It was decorated in an East Indian type of thing, and you could almost hear a sitar playing when you walked in there, even though there wasn’t any music on. I liked these people from the start; I had never seen anything like them before. They were educated, sophisticated, and just filthy rich, but I had never seen people this hip who didn’t play music, and they were just a good bunch of folks. That night was my introduction to Deering Howe, a man who to this day remains one of my dearest, dearest friends.