My Cross to Bear (35 page)

I said, “Sure, let’s go to some quiet, dark place.” There was this Cantonese restaurant on the outskirts of Beverly Hills that we liked, so we decided to go there. And wouldn’t you know it, there were at least thirty-five fucking photographers waiting for us when we got there. Now, who told them? It sure wasn’t me. She loved that, man, but I wasn’t from Hollywood, so I never got used to photographers hanging around our front gate all the time, clicking away.

Still, I can’t say that being married to Cher was the worst thing in the world, because it wasn’t. We had our good times, we had our bad times. We were just different in a whole bunch of ways.

One day I was in the shower, and the next thing I knew, someone was washing my back. It was her, of course, so she turned around and I was washing her. She started singing the Smokey Robinson song, “I don’t like you, but I love you,” and all of a sudden I came in with the harmony part: “Seems like I’m always thinking of you … I need you badly, I love you madly,” and it sounded pretty good.

I was really glad that she never asked me what I thought of her singing, because I’m sorry, but she’s not a very good singer. When she talks, she has the sexiest-sounding voice, and I tried to tell her that that’s the way she ought to let it out when she sings. If she sang like she talked, good God. I guess Sonny must have been on her every move, because he saw the gold mine in her. Without her, he would have been nothing—he certainly never would have become a congressman.

I tried to talk to her about her singing, but she never wanted to hear it, until one day she said to me, “Well, enough other fucking people like it, so if you don’t like it, fuck you.”

“I didn’t say that I don’t like it,” I told her. “And I’m not saying now that I don’t like it. I’m just saying that part of it is contrived.”

I tried to show her some inflections, and she showed some interest. Finally she said, “Why don’t you produce a record for me?” That led us to start talking about making an album together.

At the time, I’d been putting the finishing touches on my next solo record,
Playin’ Up a Storm
, which I’d cut out in Los Angeles. Neil Larsen played keyboards, Willie Weeks played bass, Steve Beckmeier, John Hug, and Ricky Hirsch played guitar, Bill Stewart played drums, and Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker produced it.

I’ll tell you, there were times when Lenny really had to wrangle my ass on that album. Cher and I were having a rough time then, and this one morning I was running late when Lenny came busting into the house. He walked right past Cher, went upstairs, and told me, “Get your ass out in the car. You’re not going to be late for this session.”

Cher shot me this look and I told her, “Later, baby,” and went out and got in the car.

I thought it was a pretty good album, and it was certainly well produced. Because I had moved out to the West Coast, though, Phil Walden thought there was no more Allman Brothers, so he decided to fuck me too. When it released in May 1977, he only printed up about fifty thousand copies, which made it hard for people to buy it.

Cher and I did end up working together on an album, and that album,
Two the Hard Way
, by Allman and Woman, came out later in ’77. That record sucked, man. That’s the truth, and I know it as well as anyone. It bit the dirt, and it didn’t sell worth a shit. There was one, maybe two decent songs on that record, but it was basically terrible, just awful.

In November 1977, I went over to Europe with my band, and we took Cher with us. We did a few Allman Brothers tunes, then we did some of my stuff from
Laid Back
and
Playin’ Up a Storm
, and then Cher would come out and we’d do about six or eight songs, including a few off of
Two the Hard Way
. The crowd was pretty interesting, because half the people were in tuxedos—I mean, dressed to the nines. Some of them were even in floor-length tails, because they thought they were going to see Sonny and Cher. The other half of the crowd was all backpacks and Levi’s jackets, and they were there to see the Allman Brothers.

It was an interesting mix, and the fights out back were something else. There’d be some dude out there, duking it out in his tux with a guy in denim. It was funny, man. Some old bitch came after me, going, “Why didn’t you let your wife sing a little bit more? You would have gotten a lot more claps.” I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just let it go. “Claps”—good God!

We got to Germany on that tour, and it was snowing like a bitch. We stayed at a hotel that was once a big castle, owned by some squire or somebody. In my room, I had a fireplace that I, at six foot one, could very easily stand up in, and the bed could have slept my whole band very comfortably. The menu was unbelievable; it was truly from the Black Forest. They had quail, venison, elk burgers—all kinds of good, wild stuff that I was just digging the shit out of.

It was right after that—the tuxedos against the backpacks, because I think the Allman Brothers outnumbered the Sonny and Chers—that Cher came to me, and the poor thing was just crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, “We’ve got to cancel the rest of the tour, because I can’t stand the fighting.” So we ended it right then, which was about halfway through it. We went home the next day, and that was the last time I ever played with her.

That tour, along with everything else, laid bare the fact that things had changed between us. I had never done anything to hurt her; I’d hurt myself, I’d degraded myself, and I’d hung with some pretty shady people, but I’d never done anything to harm her.

One day, she came to me with this big wad of money, $50,000 maybe, with a big red rubber band around it. She said, “I need time to think about this—I don’t know about this anymore.”

“You don’t know about what?” I asked. She never did quite come out with “what”—she just said she didn’t know about “this.” Maybe it was all too much for her, or she had lost it for me. I don’t know, and I never found out.

She held the money out to me and said, “I want you to take this and get an apartment and stay there for a couple of months, and let me think this whole thing over, and I’ll get back in touch with you. We’ll see what happens.”

I told her, “Honey, you keep your money, because I make a pretty damn good living on my own. You got your reasons, and I sure hope you come to grips with them. You’ve got my number.” So I walked, man, and I went down to Daytona to see my mother.

I
STOPPED BY
M
ACON IN EARLY
1978,
WHERE
I
HAD STASHED
$12,000 in the bank. I got it out, and I partied my ass off with it. Then I took some of that money and bought myself a new white Trans Am. It made me feel good, plus I needed a way to get around. I got it home, and Mama A loved it.

When I was in Daytona, I would go down and check out the bar scene, and somebody told me about a band called the Nighthawks. They said this band was nothing but straight-on, hard-core blues, and they had a harp player with so many tattoos, that’s all you could see when he was playing. I said, “They sound like my kind of guys,” so I put on a pair of Levi’s, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket and headed down to the Martinique, which had been renamed the Wreck Bar.

I had known the woman who ran the club for years. We called her Ringo, which obviously wasn’t her real name, but she looked just like Ringo Starr. She’s such a sweetheart, and I love her. She was so glad that I was back home, because I had been gone since 1965.

That night, the Nighthawks were blowing. They took a break and I met them, and then I sat in during the next set. They knew a lot of blues songs, and we sounded really good together. Afterwards, they asked me to come out on the road with them, and I figured, why not? So we went out and did a shitload of gigs, mostly around the Midwest and Northeast.

We had a good turnout from my fans, and I guess I needed that acceptance, because I wanted to know if everybody had turned their backs on us. That really mattered a lot to me, because it took many years to build that fan base. They loved the blues, and they stuck to the blues through it all. I hadn’t played any of those clubs in a long time, and they were just dying to see me. I was drinking pretty heavy then, but we played some smoking shows.

On the way back into Daytona after we were done, I stopped at the Pontiac place and got myself another Trans Am, since my mom had taken mine. I’d gotten paid for the gigs in cash, and I had two briefcases full of it with big wads of cash stuffed into every pocket. Back in Daytona, I bought a new Triumph motorcycle too, and I used to ride uptown every night, just to see who was playing at the Martinique or wherever. There were some good shows, but mainly I went into town just to jam, look at the pussy, and drink.

One night I went into the Castaways, and they had a band in there, and a guy had a B3. He loved it when I came in, because I’d play a few songs while he took a break. One night the band was just smokin’, and someone asked me if I wanted a drink. Without looking up, I ordered a vodka and tonic. All of a sudden, a bar napkin drops on the table, and the most beautiful hand I’ve ever seen places my drink down.

I fell in love right there—the hand of fate did it to me. She told me her name was Julie Bindas, and she loved motorcycles, so we rode up and down the beach all the time. Julie was a really nice, together person when I met her, but that changed real fast. It turns out that she was born in the Ukraine, and her father got her out of there just in the nick of time. He was a Soviet diplomat, and when he saw that the whole thing was going to fall over there, he sent her to America.

A year later, in 1979, we got married, and it went downhill from there. Julie was a knockout in her day, but, man, I thought she was crazy. I knew it was over when I came off the road and there was a note from her telling me that she had a Smith and Wesson .45 and she would be glad to use it on me. Welcome home, right? We ended up getting divorced in 1981.

The best thing to come out of that marriage was my daughter Delilah Island Allman, who was born on November 5, 1980. Julie came up with Delilah, and I came up with Island, because we were living on Anna Maria Island, Florida, at the time. Island is the love of my life, she really is. I trust her completely, and that’s great, because she was out of my life for a long time.

Not long after I met Julie, in the summer of ’78, Dickey tried to call me a couple of times, because he knew that Daytona wasn’t too good for me in terms of drugs and alcohol. When we were in Macon together, Dickey had always been afraid of me going back to Daytona. He’d tell me, “Go see your mother, fine; but why don’t you just bring her up here?”

One day I was taking a shower at my mother’s house, and I was actually planning to call Dickey that night to find out what he wanted. I got the towel wrapped around me and I walked out into the living room, and there sits Dickey Betts. He had actually rented a prop plane from his home in Sarasota to fly over to Daytona, and he asked, “Did you get my messages?”

“Man,” I said, “you’re not going to believe this, but I was going to call you back this evening.” Of course he didn’t believe that, but I really was going to call him. I said, “You don’t have a car with you, so what’s the deal? Did somebody die or something?”

He told me, “No, nothing like that. I wanted to come down here and talk to you about re-forming the band.”

I just said, “Oh,” and the words hung there for a minute. I wasn’t sure what to say about getting the band back together. I was pretty strung out, because I had been doing Dilaudids and drinking vodka, so I wasn’t in no shape to go anywhere at that moment, but I told Dickey I would get back to him.

Thanks to my good friend Bob Merrill, I got into the hospital and went through detox, and within a few weeks I had straightened myself up. The four of us—Butch, Jaimoe, Dickey, and I—got together and agreed to play together again. I’m sure the specific reasons were different for all of us, but my sense was that we all just needed this in our own way. No one was pleased with how things had ended back in ’76, and the combination of the passing of time, missing each other musically, and money all made it easier for us to put the past behind us.

In the years since the breakup, all of us had been doing our own thing. Dickey had formed his own band, called Great Southern, which consisted of two guitars, two drummers, bass, and keyboards—go fucking figure. Jaimoe, Chuck, and Lamar had started a pretty hip band called Sea Level, which did this cool jazz-fusion thing; and I had recorded
Playin’ Up a Storm
. We had all gone our own ways, but none of us had ventured so far from home that we couldn’t find our way back.

As we had been doing all that, Capricorn had been splintering. The year before, we hadn’t been getting our royalty checks, and an audit showed that Capricorn was deeply in debt. Phil had borrowed $4 million from PolyGram Records and wasn’t even close to paying it back. As we started to work together again, I didn’t talk to Phil Walden at all, but we did call Willie Perkins; at that point, none of us were sure if we would work with Phil again.

It was decided that Butch, Jaimoe, and I would join Dickey’s band, Great Southern, for a few songs at their concert in Central Park in New York on August 16. As Great Southern was wrapping up that show, Dickey said, “For my last song, I’m going to have to call out some friends to help me.” They brought us up one by one, and I was the last one to be called. When we walked out there, the place went apeshit. New York has loved us for so many years, I’m telling you.

We did five songs—“One Way Out,” “You Don’t Love Me,” “Stormy Monday,” “Statesboro Blues,” and “Blue Sky”—and we just stomped. We ran late and the sky got pretty dark. It seemed like they weren’t prepared to have to use lights; maybe they were onstage, but they weren’t prepared for the gig to go on into the night. But it did, lights or no lights. That day reminded me how much I enjoyed playing music, and what a fan base we still had, because them people went crazy. Leaving the park, there were people jumping up and down on my damn limo, and they ruined it, man.