My Cross to Bear (27 page)

For some reason, people think that we all grew up together and we all knew each other, and our friends were their friends and their friends were our friends, like there was one big town of southern rock stars or something. Man, it wasn’t nothing like that at all. You might know two or three cats in one band here and there, and you’d see each other passing in the night. If you did a tour together, then you’d see each other maybe a couple of hours a day.

Of course, there was some competition between bands—there has to be. But we weren’t out there to sell southern rock, we were out there because we had the best goddamn band in the land. The Allman Brothers Band has had its bad nights, but we are some Super Bowl motherfuckers compared to all them other bands.

In the summer of ’72, we started rehearsals for what would become
Brothers and Sisters
. Early on in those sessions, I brought in a song I had written the beginnings of called “Queen of Hearts.” It took me a year and a half to finish it, and it’s one of my favorite songs that I have ever written. I had the basic frame of the song; it was in 11/4, like the intro to “Whipping Post.”

I brought the song to the band during a rehearsal, and because I was a drunk—and nobody listens to a drunk—they turned it down without even really listening to it. I felt like I was begging, and, after all, I was the guy who brought them “Whipping Post” and “Midnight Rider.”

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t we at least try it? The worst thing that can happen is it will be so bad we’ll all have a real good laugh.”

But the guys were firm: “No, man.”

When I asked why, they told me, “Because that song just ain’t saying nothing.”

Boy, those were the best words they could have ever said to me. You might even say my solo career started right there. I waited until that rehearsal was over, and then I headed into Capricorn Studios by myself. I tried to be on both sides of the glass at the same time, and I did two sessions back-to-back. One was forty-two hours, and after I got about six hours of sleep, I went back and did another twenty-eight-hour session.

I was mentally and physically exhausted, and I had the beginnings of two songs that did nothing for me whatsoever. There was this big round metal trash can in there, so I took those big old twenty-four-track tapes and threw them in that damn can and poured lighter fluid all over them.

I heard the door open, and in walked Johnny Sandlin, of all people.

“What are you doing there?” he asked. “You’re trying to be on both sides of the glass at the same time, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I am,” I replied.

“I got an idea. Why don’t you let me help you with this, and we’ll start all over again, like nothing’s happened. We’ll get this damn thing cut, and it’ll be your first solo record, your baby.”

He asked me what I had, and I played him the Jackson Browne song “These Days.”

“Man,” he said. “I sure can hear a pedal steel guitar in there.”

“Yeah, but it’ll sound country as shit,” I said.

“Well, not if somebody can play it and have it not sound country—and I know just the guy, and you know him too.” It was Scott Boyer, and sure enough, Johnny called him, and he came down, and Scott did great. He played this four-pedal Gibson steel guitar, and he did an amazing job.

When I wasn’t in the studio, I was going back and forth to New York, seeing Deering. He had already introduced me to Abdul Mati Klarwein. Mati, as everyone called him, was a soft-spoken Israeli guy who lived in New York, and he looked exactly like Charlton Heston. He’d painted the covers to
Bitches Brew
and
Live-Evil
by Miles Davis. (That thing with the curlers and the frog feet on the back of
Live-Evil?
It’s J. Edgar Hoover.)

I called Deering and said, “Man, do you think you can get Mati to paint an album cover for me?”

“Yeah, for the right amount of money you can get anything done,” he said.

“Well, the question is, what do you think he’d charge me?”

“I don’t know, man,” Deering said. “I know he really enjoys your company. Why don’t you ask him, because you’ll probably get better results.”

So I called Mati, and he said, “Do you have time to come sit for it?”

I told him, “No, but I have a photograph you can use.” I sent it to him, and he used that. I loved that cover; I thought it turned out perfect. It cost me $1,500 back then, but today it would be like $50,000, maybe even $150,000.

Not long after I’d started work on my album, Deering decided he wanted to get in on it. Early on, before Oakley died, I had done some demos—including “Multi-Colored Lady”—down at Criteria in Miami as kind of a warm-up thing. Oakley had been there with me, and so had Deering. Deering had some experience with Hendrix; not a hands-on-the-board thing, but he was interested in what I was doing. This is a guy who inherited a rather large sum of money, who went to some fine schools, is very well-read, and has been all around the world. He’s seen it all, man—he’s seen a monkey fuck a football! It might be true that “work” is just a four-letter word to Deering, but he really wanted to be involved. He told me, “Just put me down as the producer, and I’ll put up the dough for it,” so I wouldn’t have to fuck with Capricorn. We got a few rough demos down, but then the Brothers started rehearsing again for
Brothers and Sisters
, so I shelved the demos until I had time to get started again in Macon.

I decided that I wanted to call my album
Laid Back
. “Laid back” is a studio term, and to me, it’s what you needed when a song is in the right tempo, but it has too much energy to it. What I would always say was “Man, can you make it just a little bit more laid back?” Just a little easier, you know—pull a little of the insanity out of it. I’ve always pictured it this way: go at it as if you were Mr. Natural, that R. Crumb character. Mr. Natural’s feet always got to where he was going before his head did, so “laid back” means don’t dive in there headfirst. When I got the guys together who were going to play on my record, I told them to picture a Freak Brother, and they laughed for about half an hour, but they got it.

I got some good players on that record: Bill Stewart on drums, Chuck Leavell on keyboards, Scott Boyer and Tommy Talton on guitar, and Charlie Hayward on bass, who plays with Charlie Daniels, plus Jaimoe, who overdubbed some congas later. I got these guys together and we went to work. Johnny would ask me, “What do you want to hear?” and if I needed something, Johnny would get it for me if I didn’t already know where to get it.

He got Scott to play steel on “These Days,” and he helped make “Midnight Rider” sound a lot different than the version that was on
Idlewild South
. I told him that I wanted it to sound real swampy, with the image of moss hanging off the trees, alligators and fog, darkness, witches, and shit. That’s what I told Johnny, and we took it to the swamp, man.

I did all the harmony work on “All My Friends,” the Scott Boyer song we cut. I’ve always loved the Everly Brothers style of harmony, but I didn’t want it to just follow the traditional 1–3–5 pattern. If you listen real close to “All My Friends,” that’s what made the song what it is, and the same goes for “These Days”—I got those harmonies on that one too.

The Brothers were working on
Brothers and Sisters
at the same time I was cutting
Laid Back
, and it was great flip-flopping back and forth between the two sessions; it was like the guy who has a girlfriend across town so as to keep his marriage together. The wife knows, but then again she don’t. She wouldn’t admit it, but she knows that if it wasn’t for that girl across town, she might lose her man.

With that in mind,
Laid Back
was my mistress; it was my baby across town. It didn’t make the other guys happy, because it slowed down the recording process of
Brothers and Sisters
, but making that record was something I needed to do at that moment. And it came out just fine. I wish it could have been longer, because it only had eight songs, but in the end I was really proud of that record, and it took off. As soon as it came out, it got good reviews and went right up the charts. The rest of the band didn’t really say anything to me about it, but I could tell that they felt the record interfered with what we were doing as a group. It was one of the first times that I felt a hint of what was to come; to this day, I don’t know if Dickey Betts has ever heard it.

Ever since that record was released in 1973, I’ve had a band on the side. In one band, you’re the total leader. You put the band together, and you’ve got the full run of it. If you’re like me, you stay open-minded, and if somebody’s got an idea that they want to interject, you encourage it. That’s how I am—I never tell the guys in my band to play this or that. If we’re doing an Allman Brothers song, it has to be totally rearranged, and I don’t think there’s going to be much more of that.

After
Laid Back
came out, I decided to go out on the road with that band, plus a full string orchestra. That was a dream I had had for a very long time; I had always had this thing about going out with a big band, like Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, except with a string section. I knew it was going to be a lot of people and the payroll was going to be atrocious, and I knew we weren’t going to make any money, so I decided to record it.

Young whippersnapper that I was, I really wanted to pull it off. We got people from the New York Philharmonic to go out with us; three cellos, six violins, and seven violas. Half of them were men, half were women. At the end of the tour, which lasted about a month, they got a big book, they took one page a piece, and they all wrote something on it and put their picture in there. None of those string players had ever been on a rock and roll tour before, and the girls were crying, because they’d had the time of their lives.

We played only theaters on that tour, real upscale places, because I wanted the best sound quality possible. You can’t put that kind of instrumentation in an arena and expect to hear anything. We played Carnegie Hall, and we did the longest sound check I can ever remember, but I wanted the sound to be just right. That place was built for the spoken word, so I told Red Dog to go up to the very top row in the balcony, while I stood in the exact middle of the stage. I whispered my social security number, and he heard every number in it. That’s when I knew we had to have the sound absolutely perfect. We made it work, man, and it sounded great. Anybody who was coming to see the Allman Brothers might as well have left, because there wasn’t any of that at all.

I was really pleased with how the tour went. Some nights were better than others, but they were all good. I remember we played the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, and we burnt that fucker down. The only thing I was unhappy about was me—I wasn’t pleased with my singing. The change from the Allman Brothers to that band was more than I realized. There were times when I would be singing way too loud, and it took me a while to adjust. Everybody had a real good time, they all got paid very well, and after good sales of the
Gregg Allman Tour
album, we made money.

W
HILE EVERYTHING HAD BEEN GOING ON WITH
L
AID
B
ACK,
OVER
with the Allman Brothers we were wondering what we were going to do about getting a new bass player. Unlike after Duane’s death, when Oakley died there was no question that we were going to keep going. Jaimoe stepped in and said that he had a guy, his friend Lamar Williams. We didn’t really have what you would call an audition. Lamar came and played for us. That was it. Within two weeks we were playing shows again, and we got back in the studio to work on
Brothers and Sisters
. We had already cut “Wasted Words” and “Ramblin’ Man” with Oakley, but after Lamar laid it down on “Come and Go Blues,” the rest of the album just flowed, man.

I really liked Lamar Williams. He was a nice guy, and we had a very nice relationship. He and Jaimoe were old-time friends because they grew up in the same town, so they hung together all the time. Lamar was a good addition to the band. It was a shame what that Agent Orange shit did to him when he was over in Vietnam—he was only thirty-four when he died from lung cancer a few years later.

Chuck Leavell was another addition who came on board for
Brothers and Sisters
. Chuck had come through town with Dr. John, and after they parted ways, Chuck stayed in Macon. He was hanging around the studio, and he certainly looked the part, but when I heard him play, I knew he was there for a reason. I got him to play keyboards on the whole
Laid Back
record, and he did so well, in addition to being easy to work with. You’d show him something one time and that was it. He’d give you exactly what you wanted, without any questions, and if he embellished on a song, he made it even better. His piano playing was so rich and so good, and it fit perfectly on all the songs.

As we were finishing up the recording on
Laid Back
and the Brothers were getting ready to start laying down
Brothers and Sisters
, I introduced Chuck to the other guys in the band. After
Eat a Peach
, we needed something, and adding keyboards was the right thing to do. He started jamming with us, and everybody liked him right away—especially Oakley, who really took Chuck under his wing for the brief time they played together.

It did take a little while for Dickey to warm up to Chuck. Dickey has that country blood in him, and at first he looked at Chuck kinda funny and would call him “Chopin” or something like that. At the same time, it took some of the load off Dickey as the only guitar player, so he came around pretty fast. Musically, I think Chuck added a lot to the band. He put a little bit of a different sound to things, which was just what we needed.