My Cross to Bear (37 page)

When the dust settled with Capricorn, we signed a deal with Arista Records, but the honeymoon phase that had enabled us to record and promote
Enlightened Rogues
did not last long. We did two insipid albums on Arista—
Reach for the Sky
and
Brothers of the Road
—and you won’t find a copy in this house, and I doubt that any of the other guys have those records either. It was like a whole different band made those records. We had background singers, songwriters, synthesizers—fuck me, man.

In truth, though, I was just too drunk most of the time to care one way or the other. After
Enlightened Rogues
, I just fell off the deep end. Before then, my drinking and drug use had been more or less in check. I’d have my bad days, but most were pretty good. By the early ’80s, those good days were hard to come by.

I was drinking a minimum of a fifth of vodka a day, and even though I knew things had gotten out of hand, it didn’t feel like there was a damn thing I could do about it. I remember one time around then; I was living on the west coast of Florida, and I was visiting my neighbor. She was watering her flowers. I didn’t have a driver’s license at this time, so I asked her if she would give me a ride down the street. She said, “Sure,” so we got in the car and I told her to turn in at the ABC liquor store. I got a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two pint bottles of Smirnoff Red.

I got back to the car, and I poured about half the orange juice out, and I took one of the pint bottles of vodka, poured it in, and shook it up. She’s just looking at me, and by the time we drove the six blocks, I had pulled out the second bottle of vodka and dumped it in.

My neighbor asked me, “My God, Gregory, you like to do this often?”

I told her, “Honey, I don’t like to do this at all, but I have to do it. If I don’t, my muscles will start cramping up on me, and I’ll get the sweats and vomit. It’s just terrible.”

Of course, she couldn’t understand, and looking back on it, I can’t say that I blame her. That was my morning regimen for years and years, but it was at one of its worst points in the early 1980s. I was so out of it, man. I wasn’t listening to the music or really paying attention to what was going with the band—I was just a total fucking mess. Those two awful albums for Arista were the price I had to pay for that drinking—and unfortunately all our fans had to pay that price too—but the real crime was how I lost sight of the music.

Before we recorded
Brothers of the Road
, Jaimoe and Dickey got into it over where our money was going, and Dickey fired Jaimoe. After Duane died, Dickey’s crown had gradually gotten bigger and bigger, and it only got worse when we’d gotten back together. At first, things had been better, but I think he took reuniting as a sign that he was going to be running things. He certainly didn’t have much finesse when it came to dealing with people. He’s just not a natural leader, and firing Jaimoe was the prime example of that.

Now, the Allman Brothers have had our share of conflict over the years—hell, show me a band that’s been around as long as we have that hasn’t fought. But one of the real blights on the history of the Allman Brothers Band was that Jaimoe, this gentle man, was fired from this organization. The thought of that makes me want to throw up, but sadly I was too drunk to put a stop to it before it happened. I thought that Dickey Betts had pulled some pretty low shit in his day, but that was the worst. Old Man Time has a way of coming back around, and now Jaimoe is right here with me, and we’re having a hell of a good time without Mr. Betts.

When Dickey axed Jaimoe, I should have checked out then. It was 1976 all over again, but I wasn’t together enough to see what was happening. Thankfully, this time the end came much more quickly.

We appeared on
Saturday Night Live
on January 23, 1982, and that was it for the Allman Brothers Band. We had a gig scheduled in Sarasota, and I heard that Dickey said he wouldn’t play in Sarasota with me because he thought I would get drunk and embarrass him in his own town. Now, mind you, I’d lived there for six and a half years, and he says some shit about “his town.” Excuse me, you know?

We were supposed to play at the Playground South, so I accepted the gig and decided to play it with the Gregg Allman Band. I think it was all for the best, so I put a band together and hit the road, and didn’t look back. We were released from our contract with Arista, which was a good thing—with all the shit going on in the band, it just wasn’t working anymore.

By that point, I didn’t like to think about the Allman Brothers, I didn’t like to talk about them, and I damn sure didn’t like to play with them. You would figure that they would have appreciated all the songs I had given to them, but because of the alcohol, they pretty much lost all respect for me. They just kinda put up with me because of my last name, and I’m pretty sure that’s why they kept me in the band. I mean, they couldn’t fucking fire me and still call it the Allman Brothers Band, could they?

The breakup of the Allman Brothers in ’82 wasn’t all about me, though. The ’80s saw the onslaught of electronic music—synthesizers, electric drums, disco, all that bullshit—and our kind of music just fell by the wayside. That decade wasn’t worth a shit musically. There was hardly anybody playing live music, and those who did were doing it for not much money, in front of some die-hard old hippies in real small clubs.

It was like going back to square one. It wasn’t like I was washed up—I never thought about that shit. To this day, I don’t ever think about being washed up. I don’t waste my time thinking about where we lie in the public’s eye. Who gives a shit? The only thing I think about is where we are going to play next. Two hundred people or twenty thousand people, I just want to play.

I actually first started thinking about writing this book in the ’80s, when the Brothers broke up. Between ’83 and ’89, when we got back together again, I started writing stuff down, a little bit every day. I kinda wanted people to know me past what they see onstage. I’ve watched John Wayne all my life, I’ve always dug the Duke, but I know nothing about the man.

What got me started was the thought that maybe the band was really over. The first time we broke up, in ’76, I thought there was at least a chance that we’d get back together. When we got back together in ’78, we figured that’d been enough time. But the second time we broke up, that’s when I thought it really might’ve been over.

It was a relief to be out of the Allman Brothers. It’s like having a constant pain, and you get so used to it that when it finally goes away, you realize just how much pain you were in for all that time. It’s like what my brother used to say about banging your head against a wall, because it feels so good when you stop. I couldn’t deal with all the hypocrisy, and we just let the band fade away. Nobody called anybody, it just kinda ended.

As I was trying to figure out what to do next, I had a whole different thing to think about. One day I get a letter from Mary Lynn Green. Back in 1965, there was a club in Daytona called the Bat Cave A Go Go, of all things. It had a great stage and great sound in it; they built this place perfectly, and it was out of sight playing there, except for the fucking name.

Mary Lynn was one of the waitresses there, and, to be real blunt, I punched her ticket in the car out in the damn parking lot one night. Twelve years later, I get a Christmas card. I open it, and there’s a picture of a little kid, sitting behind these drums. The card says, “This is your son, Michael, and he’s doing fine.”

A few years go by, so it’s about 1981, and I was living on Anna Maria Island. I get this letter from Mary Lynn, and it said, “Gregory, some things have come up. I would greatly appreciate it if you would take Michael and keep him for the summer.”

So here comes this guy, and he’s about six foot four, and he knows shit about shit. We did have a great old time; I bought him a fishing rod, and I took him out one day. We hit a damn redfish hole, and he was catching them right, left, and in between, just having the time of his life. He’d never been to a strip joint, he’d never been on a motorcycle, so we did all that. It came to be the end of the summer, and time for him to go home. He was like, “Oh, Dad, can’t I stay here? You can put me in school down here.”

Michael stayed for a while, and I tried, man. I really did. It just wasn’t a good situation, so after a time he returned home, and that was the end of that.

W
HEN
I
STARTED PLAYING WITH THE
G
REGG
A
LLMAN
B
AND,
there wasn’t as much money, but everybody was in a good mood, and how much is that worth? I got on the phone, put a band together, and started rehearsing, because we weren’t going to play Allman Brothers songs, we were going to play my songs, and so we had to learn them real quick. Eventually I put together a solid lineup, with the Toler brothers—Danny on guitar, Frankie on drums—Bruce Waibel on bass, Tim Heding on keys, and Chaz Trippy on percussion. We went out there; we were tight, and we hit it hard.

I used to call Frankie Toler “Franklin Delano Crash Pad” for some reason, even though his real name is David. They called him Frankie because one night some chick mistook him for somebody else and called him that, and it just stuck. Frankie was a lot of fun, and boy could he fight. Me and him were in the French Quarter one night, at a place called Black Beard’s, shooting some pool. We were getting ready to leave when these three black guys came in. They started in on us, giving us shit, and we tried to ignore them, but they wouldn’t have it. They grabbed Frankie and took him down, and one of them stomped on Frankie’s hand. Another one was holding me back, but Frankie got loose and grabbed a pool cue, broke it in half, and stuck one of those dudes right in the gut with it. We got the hell out of there, and I don’t know what happened to the guy he stuck, but, man, they might have killed us.

Bruce Waibel went from roadie to guitar player to bass player, and that’s when the band really started cooking. Bruce played just what needed to be played, and he caught on so fast. I couldn’t believe it when I found out he committed suicide in 2003. I wish he had called me before he did it, because I would have told him that there’s nothing worth killing yourself over. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Life isn’t a bowl full of cherries, but it’s not a bowl full of shit either.

For his part, Tim Heding was a great keyboard player. There isn’t a horn on either one of those records; Tim played all those parts on keyboard. The thing about Tim was that he was a cheap drunk—three beers and he was done for the evening!

That was a good band—I really had a lot of fun working with those guys. Frankie and Danny were both good at bouncing ideas off of each other and helping the creative process. That band was really good when it came to arrangements. There was never any arguing about this part or that part. It was one of the most easygoing organizations that I’ve ever been in, and it’s too bad that we were so poisoned, because it took away from the direction we had going. For me, the poison was alcohol; for the other guys, it was Quaaludes. We’d play a gig, and after it was over we would look for whatever we could to get a nod going with. It wound up being anything from cough syrup to pills, but it was more me than them.

During this time, we did some shows with Stevie Ray Vaughan, and good God almighty, what a player that man was. The people just loved him, and they gave me credit for bringing him, since he was opening for me, but I had nothing to do with the talents of Stevie Ray Vaughan. I was real heavy into drinking, and Stevie was just getting sober, so he and I drifted apart, but, man, we had some nights.

I enjoyed the playing, but the pay sucked. My manager at the time was Alex Hodges at Strike Force Management. Alex had been at Capricorn before it all fell apart, and I’d thought he was the only person who came out of there that I could trust, but I was wrong. Strike Force Management, my ass—the only person who got struck was me.

I couldn’t believe that Willie Perkins, who was my road manager then, let that go on for so long. Willie wasn’t as bad as Hodges was; I think that Willie’s an honest man at heart. He didn’t tell lies; he just didn’t say nothing at all. Here’s a man who we picked up on Twiggs’s recommendation, and who I thought was a real friend. What those guys made off of me, you could probably retire on. I hope they still have some of their stash left.

When you’ve got a band, a tour bus pulling a trailer, and you’re staying at a Holiday Inn, you’ve got to get paid $5,000 a night just to break even. Every now and then we’d made $10,000 for a gig, but for most shows we got paid $7,500. I was getting paid a certain amount, but with all the things that were being taken for various expenses, I was bringing in about $150 a week—just enough for smokes, basically.

One thing that really helped was going over to Marcia and Chuck Boyd’s house, where I’d been staying during the rehearsals for
Enlightened Rogues
. I finally wound up living with them so I would have somebody to talk to. When I moved back in with Marcia and Chuck I’d been living in this damn one-room apartment with all these yuppies around the communal pool, and I needed to get out. I just didn’t fit in with the scene there at all. Before I moved in with Marcia and Chuck, I was never really happy living in Sarasota. When we would come in off the road, I would think, “Well, shit, now the damn tour is over, where do I go now?” That’s why it was so great when I moved in with them, because it gave me a place to call home.

Marcia and Chuck made me feel welcome, and I loved Marcia’s cooking, especially her chicken and biscuits. I lived with them for the majority of the seven years that I lived in Sarasota, and they were so good to me. They had a bunch of dogs and gave one to me, whose name was Professor Dodsworth.