My Cross to Bear (41 page)

You gotta let the motorcycle become a part of you, and of course, you gotta drive defensively. I don’t go on the freeway; I stay on the two-lane. I usually just putt. If it’s wide-open spaces, with nothing on either side of the road, I might open it up then. You gotta see what the ol’ boy can do—once, at least.

Riding a motorcycle will just blow the stress right off of you. It’s a total feeling of freedom, and having control of that much power just does something for you. It’s not an ego builder or anything like that, but it’s a real good feeling. Some people got it, some people don’t—some have the fever for it, and some people live their whole life and wouldn’t even go near one. That’s totally understandable, because not only can you get killed on one, but you can get just about drawn and quartered.

But that’s a rarity, and now there’s so many of them. Drivers used to ignore bikes on the road, but now there’s not a time I go riding I don’t see at least ten of ’em. Man, just talking about it has me itching to ride.

B
ECAUSE
I’
D JUST ABOUT DONE MYSELF IN BY DRINKING SO MUCH
during the ’80s, I honestly wanted a change—it just took a while.

When the band got back together in ’89, I really did try to quit drinking, but I didn’t get any help from Dickey. He was drinking just as hard as me, and he looked at me like, “You poor trash.” He would call me a hypocrite, anything to make what he was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Of course, I tried to ignore it. I didn’t bear him any malice. I wasn’t judging anybody, and I never have. I’m not a judgmental person—I do not have the right to say anything about what other people do, because whatever it is, I’ve done it.

But we had some great years, despite Dickey. The name of this section could be “And one more time, it worked.” We were back in the saddle again. After Allen came in, we just steadily kept getting better and better. I started writing new stuff and everything was fine, except for Dickey. I would catch myself saying, “It’s always something”—you fix this end, that end goes wrong.

Still, I think it was the fact that the band was working out so well that allowed me to make the change that I really needed and get sober. Early in the ’90s, I was drinking real heavy. I’d given up on drugs, but I just traded one for the other. It’s such a sleazy way of living. When you sweat, you smell like vodka. You know, I say I “traded,” but if drugs just fell into my hand, if somebody came by and they had some killer blow, we’d do it. I just didn’t reach out for it, didn’t have to.

Musicians get famous and they’re sitting ducks for it. “Here, man, try some of this; it’ll get you going onstage.” Then, “Here, man, try some of this; it’ll settle you down after you get off of the stage.” And sure enough, it does for a while, and then it becomes a way of life. It’s insidious. And cigarettes are right in there with it.

The more you drink, the more you have to drink. At one point, I was up to one and a half, sometimes two quarts a day. And the whole time I was drinking I had no idea that I had hepatitis C, which affects your liver. I’ve often wondered, if I’d known back then that I had hepatitis C, would I have drunk as much? I’d like to think not. It was a rough ride.

The Brothers went to Japan in ’91, and that was good. I was still one of those twenty-four-hour drinkers, though, with a pint under the bed because the next morning I would have the shakes so bad. In Japan they had vending machines on the damn sidewalk; you got a pint of vodka in there and you just put the dough in, if you can figure out which coin is which.

During the day, I would try not to drink too much, and some days I would get it just perfect. The band tried every way in the world to help me, but it’s something a person’s got to do on their own. I’d go on these benders and then I’d come down—to come down off alcohol is rough, man. You see spiders and all kinds of stuff. I don’t know if it’s as bad as heroin; it’s just different. I don’t think it’s any less scary.

It finally got to the point where, right before I quit drinking, the other guys were gonna throw me out of the band. That just crushed me, to think that the only reason I was in the band was because of my last name. But they were like, “Man, you let us down,” and I can’t say that I blame them. I started having intro-itis—I would forget intros. I would know the song, I probably wrote it. But they’d call “Black Hearted Woman” and I’d think, “How does that damn thing start?”

Which brings me back to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. I was totally disgusted with myself for letting myself get drunk that day. I knew I shouldn’t have gone out of the room. I was so repulsed. But I didn’t stay long at that rehab in Pennsylvania either. I caught the plane back to California, and I might have had three drinks on the plane just to make it back. It was a nightmare; it really, really was.

A few days later, somebody came over and showed me the footage of me accepting the award. When I saw that, I was just mortified, to the point where I hired a male nurse to come into the house. Now I was bound and determined to get released from booze, and I thought the best way of doing it was by myself, in my digs, in the familiarity of my house.

At the time, I’d been seeing a woman named Stacey Fountain, who I eventually ended up marrying. She was so proud of me then, saying, “You’ve got to stop wearing this chain—you look bad, you smell bad.” Then she grabbed me and said, “But I love you anyway. I don’t want to lose you, not to that fucking bottle.”

She was right, and she had a lot to do with saving my life, not only with my drinking, but also during my treatment for hep C several years later. But the one it started with is me; a person has to want to be set free from that shit.

Mind you, I’d been to, like, eleven rehabs, but I always had that little spark back there saying, “All right, go ahead and dance for ’em, get ’em off your back for a while. I’ll meet up with you later.” Not this time. This time, I didn’t go to any rehab. I just called in a nurse—actually two guys, who switched twelve-hour shifts. Now it seems like I just kinda blacked out, but for about the next three or four weeks I was just limp. I didn’t have any want though; the more time that passed, the stronger I got.

And then it was all over. I mean, it was over, man. It was flat over. I quit drinking, I quit smoking, I quit snorting anything—I quit all that. I had prayed to God, “Man, get me off of this shit,” and he did. I thought, “I have been released.”

First, you’re just so glad that it’s over. For weeks, that’s the only thing on your mind. Your mind is free. You want to go out and tell everybody. Then I realized that people started saying, “Man, you’re looking good.” You know, they never said, “Hey, you look bad.”

But then you wonder, how the fuck did all this happen? Did I get any positive anything out of all that? And you’ve got to admit to yourself, no, I didn’t. You can see what happened and that by the grace of God, you finally quit before it killed you.

When you’re an alcoholic, you don’t ever stop to think, “I wonder how much my body can take?” And you don’t really think about death. But as soon as it’s over, you start thinking about how close you came to actually killing yourself. You hear of people having esophageal hemorrhages, when that big vein in your esophagus just pops. My blood pressure was always way up there. Now it’s like 120/65, which is like someone in the NFL.

It takes over your brain. There’s not much left to think with, it’s all floating in booze. It’s not something you can really imagine—it’s like nobody knows what it’s like to be locked in a cage with two big grizzlies until they do it. And even then they probably wouldn’t know what to tell about it, anyway.

I only went to AA once, and it was years before I quit. I walked in, and these three girls dragged me in the corner and asked me if I’d sign this and that. One of them was hitting on me pretty heavy. I looked at them and said, “Anonymous, my ass.” I walked down the street and got drunk. I showed them, didn’t I?

Because AA didn’t work for me, I thought I was weird until I talked to Waylon Jennings about it. Waylon told me, “Me and Johnny”—meaning Johnny Cash—“we can’t go to the AA meetings or NA meetings either. But I’m gonna tell ya, brother, all you need to have an AA meeting is two drunks and a coffee pot, and that big book.” And that’s basically what I did.

Now I look around at my beautiful house on the water, and part of me says, “I don’t deserve this,” but I realize that’s just an alcoholic’s way of thinking. Alcoholics don’t believe they deserve anything, which is a reason to have a drink. “I’m not good enough for this house, I’m not good enough for this woman, I’m not good enough for my cars and motorcycles.” I’ve fallen off the wagon after I received a gold record—I don’t know if it was because I didn’t feel worthy of it or “Hey, let’s celebrate, just for one day.”

The truth is, I worked hard for all of this and I love having it, but every now and then I’ll think of all the hell I caused other people over the years. To some people, I was just a little pain in the ass, but, next to myself, I was roughest on the band and my loved ones. That’s the thing about being an addict—people say, “I’m only hurting myself.” Well, that’s bullshit, because you’re hurting all the people around you. They haven’t done anything wrong; all they’ve done is love you.

I always thought my alcoholism was punishment for what I had done in the past, only I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was I had done. I guess it was feeling like a failure after my brother died, and he was still kicking my ass from up there. It was like he was saying, “Baybrah, I leave you, and then you go and get fucked up.”

I was trying to be as a good a person as my brother, because he set the pattern for my life to follow. The way people try to be like their dads, I tried to be like my brother. The thing is, he was such an outrageously confident man and I’m just the opposite, so there was no way for me to match up to him. It made me feel like I was a failure, so I drank.

I wonder if someday they will find an answer to addiction. If they don’t get an answer to this crack stuff, somebody’s going to invade us, and ain’t nobody going to be ready, especially if they got that pipe in their hand. That shit is like taking a hit of paranoia, man. I only tried it once, and it was awful. Crack is a terrible waste of money and brain cells—at least that’s one drug that never got me.

The bottom line is that drugs are a nasty trap. All I can say is don’t do it—don’t fucking do it. Don’t anybody do it, for any reason. If I can get through to one cat who has tried heroin once and knows that groove, and if I can convince him to stay away from that second hit, then cool. I believe in my heart that over the last few years I have saved a few people from making that mistake.

In most every interview I do, they ask me what I would change if I had it to do all over again, and I tell them that the one thing would be the drug use.

R.J. Capak

The Allman Brothers Band in New York City, 2006
Danny Clinch

T
HE
A
LLMAN
B
ROTHERS KEPT ROLLING THROUGH THE
’90s. We recorded
Where It All Begins
in 1994, which was a solid album overall and eventually went gold. The best part of it was recording up at Burt Reynolds’s ranch in Jupiter, Florida, with cypress trees all around; it’s just a gorgeous place.

And once I’d gotten sober, man, for the first time in years I was able to just sit back and enjoy it. Marc Quiñones let me know how proud he was of me for getting sober. So did Butchie, and Jaimoe too, in his own way. When we’d play shows, it was a sweet sight—the fans, the crowds. We were playing huge shows in front of packed houses. The best part was that now I was actually aware enough to appreciate them. Once we got that momentum going, we never looked back.