My Cross to Bear (31 page)

It was a good show, but I didn’t think too much of it. As it turned out, a woman named Paulette Eghazarian was in the audience that night, and she was the secretary for Cher, who lived out in L.A. After that first show, she told Cher she
had
to come see me play. I think Cher went to the second show just to shut Paulette up. Cher wasn’t hip to the Allman Brothers at all—she had heard “Ramblin’ Man,” but everybody had heard that song.

She showed up with David Geffen as her date, but I had no idea she was in the audience. If I had, I would have had a fear in me. See, a long time ago, I’d had a dream about her. She was by a swimming pool, surrounded by all this beautiful ivy, with weeping willow trees hanging over it, and I’ll be damned if that same pool didn’t end up in our backyard when I married her.

After the show, Chank ran up to me, going, “Guess who’s here? Guess who’s here?”

“Who?” I asked.

“I want you to just ease over that railing and look to your right.”

Well, I did just that, and there she was, man, looking so good—I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. I wrote Cher a note, asking her to go out with me the next night. I went to Chank and asked him to give her the note.

“Oh noooo. I ain’t doing that,” he said.

“Come on, Chank, you’re my man. Take this note and give it to her,” I said. He finally took it down there, and he’s gone forever, and a little while past that. When Chank finally came back, he told me, “Man, she gave it back to me and told me she couldn’t read it …”

“Oh fuck,” I thought.

“… because there ain’t no light over yonder.”

“So what did you did do? Come up here to get some light from me? Go back and tell her to take it over by the cigarette machine, read it, and send me back an answer.”

“Man, I just got me a raise!” Chank said. (As a matter of fact, I think he got a white Corvette out of the deal.)

I got my guitar and headed down there like I was leaving, and, man, I had tunnel vision. I didn’t see no one else in the joint but her. I had met David Geffen on many occasions before, because he used to be Jackson Browne’s manager, but I didn’t acknowledge him at all—or anyone else, for that matter. I was so rude; I didn’t say hello, or kiss my ass, or nothing at all, because I was so blinded by her.

I was walking by, and she was down on the floor looking for something. She looked up and said, “Oh, I lost my earring.” Then she said, “Here’s my number—call me.”

God, she smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell—I’ve never smelled it since, and I’ll never forget it. So she split, and as I was leaving I looked around, and I saw David Geffen. I went, “Oh fuck,” and thanked God that his eyes weren’t locked on mine. I just eased on around to the car and split.

The next day, I called the number, and Paulette, her secretary, answered. I asked to speak to Cher, she asked who was calling, and I told her who I was. She told me to wait just a minute, and then Cher gets on and says, “Well, hello.” I asked her if she wanted to go out to dinner, and she said yes.

I went to her house in a limousine, and when she came out she said, “Fuck that funeral car. Let’s go in my car,” and she handed me the keys to her blue Ferrari.

She really put me on the spot; for one split second, I looked at her like she was a star, instead of just a human being. That was the first and last time I ever did that. This she knows, deep in her heart, and I hope she never forgets it.

We went to Dar Maghreb, a Moroccan restaurant on Sunset. It’s a kick-ass place, man, really great. They have all the food in a big tray in the middle of the table, and you eat with your hands, using a piece of bread to grab the food. So we sat there, eating with our hands with the sitars playing. She didn’t have shit to say to me, and I didn’t have shit to say to her either. What could I say to her? What’s the topic of conversation between me and her? It certainly ain’t singing, that’s for sure.

We finally got through with dinner, and I said to her, “I’ve got a friend who lives up in the hills, and his wife is Judy Carne.” Cher knew Judy, who used to be on
Laugh-In
, from years before, but she didn’t realize that Judy was into heroin pretty heavy. We got up to Judy’s house, and I had just a little taste of doojee. I nodded out in the bathroom for twenty minutes or so, while Cher was out in the living room with Judy, who’s also nodding out.

I came out of there and asked her, “Okay, toots, what else would you like to do?”

“I want to get the fuck out of here as fast as I can,” she said.

I walked her out to her Ferrari, and as she got in, all I could think to say was, “Honey, be sure to tell your secretary that I said hello.” I really pissed her off when I said that.

I got a case of the braves, and I called her the next day. When Paulette answered the phone, I told her, “I just want to say something to her, and tell her that if she doesn’t get on the phone, she’s a chickenshit.” I knew that would get her, and when Cher got on the phone I said, “Wait, before you say anything—that was possibly the worst fucking date in the history of mankind. We might be ready for the
Guinness Book of World Records
.”

She totally agreed with me, so I said, “Well, listen, seeing how it was so bad, why don’t we try it again, because it can only go better this time?”

Cher agreed, and asked, “Where are we going to go this time?”

“Let’s go dancing,” I said.

“That sounds great!”

That did it, boy. We went dancing, and I don’t know how to dance, but I got drunk enough to where I did. I danced my ass off. She’s a dancing motherfucker, let me tell you. This is when disco was just taking off, so we did some dirty dancing; a little of this, and a little of that. She had one drink, while I had my twenty-one, of course.

After dancing, we went to a Polynesian place, which had really good food. It really was a glorious night, just a great time. When we got back to her place, she took me out to her rose garden, and all the roses were just starting to bloom with the scent jumping off them. We’re standing out there, and all of a sudden, she said, “No, Honky!” This big Rottweiler was sniffing me, but she made him back off.

She had on this gorgeous Bob Mackie shirt made out of beads. Purple going into gold, going into green, back into purple, all beads, and they just covered her tits. That shirt must have cost thousands of dollars. We started kissing, and then she took the shirt off and grabbed my hand to go inside.

“You’re not going to leave that out here, are you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine,” she told me. (The next morning we learned that Honky ate that motherfucker.) “You’ve got to stay here tonight.”

Part of me is thinking, “Gregory, you do not belong here, man,” but the other part of me is saying, “Come on, let’s go! Get your ass upstairs, boy!” We went up this big huge staircase to the third floor and she started ripping my fucking clothes off. She had this huge canopy bed, and her room had a marble fireplace along with these huge lamps—it was something else, man. All told, the house had thirty-six rooms; you’ve never seen anything like it. The first time Jaimoe went there, he said, “Shit, man, if this was my place, I’d be renting out them rooms!”

She was hot to trot, man, and we made some serious love. In many of her interviews, she said that I was the best—the best—in the bedroom. I always thought that was nice, because I’m certainly not the most endowed guy there is, but as the old saying goes, “It’s not what you got, it’s how you use it.” So I thank her for that.

A
FTER THAT,
I
ONLY SAW
C
HER TWO OR THREE MORE TIMES, BECAUSE
I had business to attend to. There was trouble with the band, and I needed to get right back to Georgia. So in February ’75, I went back to Macon for a band meeting.

We’d originally been planning to start rehearsing for
Win, Lose or Draw
, our next album, but from the start there was all kinds of bad blood. There had been a rehearsal scheduled and I got back a day late, so that gave them an excuse to get their panties in a wad.

The second I got home, they pummeled me with all kinds of shit, like “You don’t love us anymore? You moving to California? What’s the deal?” I’d been out there for just over a month, and I didn’t see what the big deal was. I said something about being able to move wherever the fuck I wanted, which didn’t get the meeting off to a very good start, but they shouldn’t have jumped on my ass about where I lived—I wasn’t married to the Allman Brothers.

They asked me about Cher, and I told them that I didn’t know what was going to happen with her. I didn’t understand why they were asking me all these personal questions. I mean, we’d only been on a few dates. I think there was something weird about all the attention that Cher and me had already gotten in the news. I don’t think anyone in the band expected to see me in the spotlight like that—I know I didn’t. That, combined with the whole L.A. thing, just rubbed them the wrong way. I finally said, “Fuck it, I thought you wanted to talk about the band,” but we didn’t get anywhere at all.

Truth is, though, it was clear from the start that this was more about all the shit that had happened the previous fall. This wasn’t just about my living in L.A., or about what might happen with Cher—it was also about my and Dickey’s solo albums, and of course all the drugs figured into it too. We got to a point where we were all prepared to just move on and play, but there were lingering hard feelings. Unfortunately, this tension didn’t end there; in fact, that was just the beginning.

We started to work on the album, but it was rough going—like we were all just going through the motions. I hadn’t been back in Macon working on the album for too long before Cher came to visit. She flew into Atlanta, and I drove up to the airport to pick her up. The airline had her stashed in the luggage room while she was waiting for me, and when I got there she was asleep in this big soft chair that they had pushed in there for her.

I took her down to Macon and showed her around. Our first date was at Le Bistro, the finest restaurant in town. We met Phil Walden, and he wouldn’t keep his hands off of her. He kept saying things to her like “Why don’t you and me go off somewhere and talk?” Really stupid stuff, especially with his wife sitting right there.

Cher kept asking me, “Who is this fucking idiot?”

I said, “Would you believe me if I told you that he was the owner of the record company and the manager of our band?”

“That guy? I thought he was Tony Fucking Joe White!”

Walden loved her because he thought our relationship was a great selling point, and he was trying to convince the band of that, while I’m telling him to stay out of my business. In spite of what the band had been saying, when she would go out with them, everybody liked her, and she made them all laugh. She had the filthiest mouth in show business, and the guys in the band thought she was quite a trip. You get that girl away from Hollywood and she’s a whole different person.

Things between me and Cher were working out pretty well, but there was one problem: she didn’t realize that I was a hop-head. I figured that when I told her it was going to shoot things right in the ass, so I might as well enjoy it while I could. Eventually, though, I had to tell her that I was a junkie, because she started to hint at marriage, which didn’t sound so bad because she was a good old gal. I felt that we knew each other well enough and we were on the right track, so I might as well just get it out of the way.

So I woke up one morning and told her, “Look, I’ve got to tell you something. I’m addicted to narcotics.”

“Well, how do you fix that?” she asked.

I didn’t have much of a response beyond “Well…”

“I know what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll go back to L.A., and I’ll get my doctor friend to write you a big prescription for Quaaludes, and you can just sleep through it. When you wake up, it will all be over.”

I tried it—what the hell—but of course it didn’t work.

Still, Cher was actually quite elated that I told her the truth about my addiction. She was real positive, saying things like “Don’t worry, baby, you can beat that. I’ll stand right by you, every minute.” She wasn’t pissed at all, which made me feel great. I’d been convinced she was going to get up and storm out of the house when I told her, and that would be the end of that. I had prepared myself to say, “Well, it’s been a lot of fun, thanks a lot,” but she was completely behind me.

Right after that, we went into rehearsals for
Win, Lose or Draw
, but it didn’t go worth a shit because the band was convinced that I was going to split back to California with Cher. And in the end I probably did spend too much time out in California. But at that point it was easy to run; those sessions were the worst experience I ever had in a studio.

It wasn’t just me, though; they were bad for all of us. Where the earlier albums had come together pretty quickly, this recording stretched from February to July ’75. Very rarely were all of us in the studio at the same time. The only three who regularly showed up were Jaimoe, Chuck, and Lamar. Even so, Jaimoe and Butch still missed playing drums on a couple of tracks—Sandlin and Bill Stewart had to play the drums instead. And then there was Dickey, who seemed like he only cared about playing on songs that he wrote and tried to dictate the entire process.

As dictator, Dickey seemed ready for Chuck to go. I think he was jealous of Chuck; he claimed that Chuck was stepping on the guitar solos, and that the piano runs were too damn long. Dickey accused him of everything that you can think of, but he was doing that shit to everyone. I’ve always liked Chuck, and we had a good dynamic; he didn’t deserve all that.