My Cross to Bear (30 page)

It turned out that my wife had apparently put out a 643, or something like that, on me. That’s when a spouse can lock the other one up for eight days if there’s reason to think that spouse is crazy. At the time I had no idea why my wife did this. Later, I heard she had a dude across town and she wanted to roll with it, baby—I guess she just needed me out of the way for a few days at least, and this was the best she could come up with. Or maybe she really thought I was crazy.

“It seems your wife said that you were so out there on the drugs that you might have been dangerous to yourself and other people,” the doc told me. “This means you have to be in here eight days. On the ninth day, they take you to court and you have this certain amount of time to tell the judge why you’re okay. Then this group of psychologists is going to tell the judge why you’re not okay.”

“Well, that’s a problem,” I thought. If this setup meant having to be evaluated by a group of doctors, my odds weren’t looking too good. I still had my fucking stage clothes on. Back then, we used to dress up, and I had on a silk shirt, which by that point looked like I slept in it, because I actually had slept in it a bunch of times. I went back to my room and I thought, “Man, this will never do. They’re gonna throw me in for a long time.”

I thought and I thought, and then I remembered that they had just finished building the new Capricorn Studios. The guys and I were gonna do the first session. Somebody had called and asked to come record there, and it was, of all people, Martin Mull, the comedian who made some albums back then that were kinda hip.

I got another meeting with Dr. Sykes, and it was hard keeping a straight face, but I went in and said, “Dr. Sykes, sir, have you ever heard of Mr. Martin Mull?”

He said, “Why, no, I don’t believe so.” This guy was totally straight, from way back.

I said, “Well, he’s coming to our beautiful new studio.”

“Oh, I’ve heard about that being built—are Mr. Walden and them through with that?”

“They should be totally finished, they’re probably testing it out now,” I said. “And dig this, Doc—I’ve been invited to play on a session, and the session is tomorrow night. If you would just give me a pass for one night, as soon as the session is over—and it will probably be kinda late—I’ll come straight back here.”

I must’ve put on the most honest face in the world, because he goes, “Well, sure, I’ll do that.” He was one of these doctors that asks, “What’s your name?”

“Gregory Allman.”

“Sure … sure. Where were you born?”

“Nashville, Tennessee.”

“Sure … sure … sure.”

After a while, I’m going, “Where was I born? What is my fucking name?”

So the doc gave me the pass to Capricorn Studios for the Martin Mull recording session. It’s all I can do to keep from laughing in that man’s face. By now they had issued me a set of jammies, kinda like scrubs, and a robe. It was real cold outside, but I just danced outta that place and went home.

Here’s the funny part: that was in late October. More than a month later, it came Christmastime, and they were having the Capricorn office party. I was there, back in Phil’s office. We were telling a bunch of lies, cracking jokes, smoking a little reefer, and what have you. There’s a knock on the door, and I said, “I’ll get it, Phil.” I opened the door and guess who it is?

“Hello,” I said, and then, seeing who it was, I gave, on the spur of the moment, one of my best performances. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“Mr. Allman, don’t you remember me? I’m Dr. Sykes.”

And I said, “Sure … sure.”

“Please Call Home,” written by Gregg Allman, courtesy of Elijah Blue Music/Unichappell Music

Allman and Woman, 1975

© 1996 Gilbert Lee, [email protected]

W
HEN
B
ROTHERS AND
S
ISTERS
CAME OUT, IT WAS TIKE NOTHING
that had ever happened before. I mean, none of us saw it coming—not like that, anyway. Everything that we’d done before—the touring, the recording—culminated in that one album, and the thing just fucking exploded, all the way to No. 1 on the charts.

In July 1973 we hit the road hard to promote the album, playing shows just about everywhere in the United States straight through to New Year’s. That tour was where we really hit our stride with Chuck and Lamar. We had great chemistry on- and offstage—everyone was just having a good time—and our playing was the best it had been since my brother’s death. Everything just came together, and we played some amazing music.

It was during that tour that we were visited by a young, and I mean young, reporter for
Rolling Stone
named Cameron Crowe. Of course, I had no idea he would go on to make
Almost Famous
nearly thirty years later, and that it would include some of our stories.

When that movie came out in 2000, my only thought was I wished my brother could’ve been there to watch it, though I’m sure he saw it from his big seat. The way they flipped our story around was very ingenious. They’d have whatever I was doing done by a guy with dark hair and a black mustache, and then they had another guy with blond hair doing something else.

The movie definitely got the spirit right—especially on that
Brothers and Sisters
tour. When I heard about it, and heard what it was supposed to be about, I thought, “Oh God, it could be anything—this could really tear down the Allman Brothers.” Now, some of those stories came from Zeppelin and the Eagles. But the jumping off the roof into the pool, that was Duane—from the third floor of a place called the Travelodge in San Francisco. I got up there with him, but I said no, this is too high—I might miss. My brother wanted to do it again, but the cat who owned the place came out shaking his fist, yelling at him. My brother was somewhat of a daredevil, and he and Oakley would do shit like that. We told that story all the time, and I have no doubt that Cameron was around for it.

The funniest thing, though, happened at the end of Cameron’s visit. Over the years, in part because of the movie, this story has been spun out in a dozen different ways. Cameron Crowe was so young, he was such a rookie—and of course, we all were once. He was following the tour and taking us one by one, getting a long interview on each of us. So the last thing he did was he came down to my room, and Dickey was there, and we talked for about two hours and it was serious too. We laid it on him.

After he left, we sat and cooked up this idea. We went to his room and said, “Man, we are so sorry, but there’s a couple of clauses in our contract. We were just reading it over, and we can’t let you have that interview you just did.” And we took it back from him, took his notebooks and everything.

We knew what time his plane was, and just at the last minute, just as he was going out to the cab thinking, “My ass is fired,” we handed it all back to him. Cameron was white as a ghost, and he was quite a sport. He’s gone quite a ways—he’s not “almost” anymore.

As that tour rolled along, the shows only got better. We ended 1973 with a monster New Year’s Eve show at the Cow Palace, out in San Francisco. That was a big old smelly place, and it always reeked of cowshit, but we did it for Uncle Bill, who descended from the rafters that night dressed as Baby 1974 and wearing a diaper. By the end of the night, we’d left it all up onstage—just one of those amazing nights. If that tour was as good as we ever played with that group of guys, then that show was our pinnacle.

After a few months off, we then hit the road again from May until August, doing about twenty-five shows, but by the time we stepped off that mini-tour, we were all pissed off at each other and ready for a break, so we did just that. From August 1974 to August 1975, we stayed off the road. We’d worked hard, but we also needed to get the fuck away from each other for a while, man. Dickey was also making noise about wanting to do a solo album of his own, so it just seemed to make sense for us all to get a bit of space. I decided to release another solo album—the live record that had been taped during those performances at Carnegie Hall and the Capitol Theatre in New Jersey on my
Laid Back
tour.

As it turned out, both Dickey and I released solo albums and went on solo tours during that fall of ’74, which caused some issues. It seemed like things between us became a sibling rivalry of sorts, which was ironic, because when I’d had a sibling we’d never been rivals over anything. But after I did
Laid Back
, I think Dickey wanted to put his own voice out there.

My album
The Gregg Allman Tour
and Dickey’s album
Highway Call
were basically up against each other, as were our tours, and there was a lot of talk about the competition between us. That was made worse by the fact that I had Jaimoe and Chuck in my band. I don’t think Dickey was too happy about that; he probably wanted Chuck to play with him on his tour. Butch seemed pissed off too, because he now had no one to play with. The whole thing seemed to frustrate everyone—and it didn’t help that we were all taking our turns with whatever drugs happened to be around.

Despite the state of things, I was satisfied with how my tour went—more scaled-down than when I was on the road for
Laid Back
with the string players and all that. It ended out on the West Coast in January 1975, and I sent everybody back home, except for me and Chank. I kept a wad of cash along with some duds, and the two of us stayed at the Riot House—the Hyatt House on Sunset in Los Angeles.

One night Chank and I were out, going to different places and having a drink here and there. I said, “Let’s go down to the Troubadour and see Doug Weston.” Not that Doug was really a friend of mine, but he’s a nice guy, and we’d known each other since the Hour Glass days. We went by and Etta James was playing that night. When I finally saw Doug, though, he wasn’t all that happy.

“I’m not doing worth a shit,” he told me. “Man, I got problems.”

“Shit, you got Etta James playing—you ain’t got no problems,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, “but I got this other band that’s opening up, but they’re supposed to be finishing their record tonight in the studio, or the record company is going to take their contract away from them. I got to give them the night off—it’s just one of them things that I got to do.”

“Well, that’s pretty humane,” I told him. “Shit, I’ll tell you what. I’ll do it, I’ll play the son of a bitch by myself.”

“You’re on.”

“Now listen, man, I’ll have to charge you for this.”

“How much?”

“Well, now dig it, bro, I’m a union dude, and if they were to catch me doing any favors for a friend, they’d blackball my ass. It would be at least $2,500.” Bam! That money hit the fucking table, with neat little wrappers around it.

But then Doug hesitated. “Now, wait a minute—I need two nights.”

I hadn’t played by myself since that time in elementary school when those two ratfucks ran out on me, and believe me, mentally, I was right back there. It’s one thing playing in a band, but it’s a whole other playing by your lonesome ass, because if there are any mistakes whatsoever, it’s pretty obvious whose fault it is. However, I’d thought about doing it for years and years, so I said to myself, “Well, shit, I got myself into this.” Doug threw in an extra $500 for the second night, and I agreed to do it.

When I finally got up there, I played five or six songs acoustic, then Etta James’s band came on. They were one hell of a band, and we jammed on about five more tunes. Then Etta came out, and she looked good. She was in fine spirits, just real happy, and I stayed on for a few tunes before heading offstage. She kicked mucho butt for the rest of the night. That first night was pretty good, because I was able to relax. I was on autopilot for the guitar playing, and I could sing and actually hear myself, and not from the monitors either, but from the rafters of that old place.