My Cross to Bear (6 page)

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

That’s when I realized that, all this time, these people had me buffaloed into thinking that if I didn’t do exactly what they said, something real bad was going to happen. Bullshit. Now that I was leaving, they were kissing my ass.

I went in there and said to the guy in charge, “Sir, I’m leaving.”

He told me, “If you stick around here a little while, you’d get yourself some rank, maybe a captain or a major.”

“Sir, no disrespect, but a captain of what?” I asked.

“That will be all, Mr. Allman.” He’d heard all he needed to.

I about-faced, man, and I had that uniform off by the time I got to my barracks.

I was never the same student in public school that I was in military school. I got so far into music, and it had gotten so far into my soul, that it totally pulled me off my studies. When I got back to the big green high school in Daytona, Seabreeze High, my discipline didn’t stick. I’d had dental or medical school in mind, but once I’d gotten music in me, there wasn’t a chance in the world of that. Well, if I had fallen on my ass, maybe I would have gone back to school—but music would have always been in the back of my mind. I went to my first football game, and girls were there, cheerleaders were there. Between the women and the music, school wasn’t a priority anymore.

M
USICIANS FIND MUSICIANS, AND
I
MET EVERY ONE OF THEM IN
Daytona—black, white, and everything in between. Stealing licks—somebody would show you a lick, and that would open up a whole can of worms of licks. I was really studying them, and by this time, Duane was too. I don’t know who was playing guitar on Little Walter’s records, but it seemed like after Duane got a hold of that record, he just got a fire inside.

After Duane and I left Castle Heights for good, he started hanging out with a guy named James Shepley. They let me in to their crowd every now and then, because for some reason I wasn’t shy to play whatever I knew to anybody. We went to one party, and we took all our shit, because we were going to impress the girls, but then Duane and Shepley chickened out. So I picked up Duane’s guitar, which was a Les Paul Jr., and I played it real well. I even sang along with it a little bit. It got real silent in there, and that kind of scared me, but afterwards some little girls were asking me, “So what is this?” Suddenly here come Shepley and Duane, grabbing their guitars, because of course now they want to play, and it turned to bedlam.

I thought Shepley was the coolest thing that ever walked. He was the one who taught me how to play Jimmy Reed, and he was so good about it. I’d be struggling, and he would tell me, “Man, you’re trying too hard. Feel how stiff your hand is? Feel my hand,” and it was like his hand was asleep—it was just laying there, no pressure at all.

Jim was a strange little guy. Today, whenever the Brothers play around Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives, I always put him on the list, but he never shows. I think that’s why he didn’t end up in the band, because he very well could—and perhaps should—have been in the Allman Joys, and probably in the Allman Brothers. I don’t know if he had a stage-fright thing, maybe that was it. We would ask him to come play, and he’d always back out.

Shepley tapered his own pants, and he must have had a hundred pairs of pants. I thought, “What a groove, to have every pair of pants you own tailor-made,” and that’s why I’ve still got this thing about my pants being right. Stovepipe pants is what we wore. That means they’re tapered like hell—I mean tight, tight—to the knee. Then it’s the same size as your knee, all the way down, so you can wear boots with them. That’s what I’ve always worn, but back then I had to do it myself on the damn sewing machine. I went to school one day, and one whole side came undone.

If a musician could play, we didn’t look at his skin color, but unfortunately we were in the minority back then, since when it came to racism the shit was boiling up in in the South. In Nashville, there were always two water fountains and four bathrooms: men and women white, men and women colored. I would always think, “What’s wrong with those people? Are we going to get sick if we go near them? I mean, they come over and clean the house.” I remember Little Rock and the lunch counter boycotts and the signs, “No Niggers Allowed.” My grandmother would take my head and turn it away, saying, “Son, don’t even worry about it. You’re too young to worry or understand.”

I was just confused about the whole black-white thing, but I became quite unconfused in later years. I don’t know if my mother had a racial thing per se. It was just the way she was brought up. That kind of thing is just passed on and passed on from one generation to the next, and it’s still happening today. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it at all. There are good and bad people, there are heartful and heartless people, and they come in any color, any size that you want.

When my brother and I were young, we were always around white people. Our elementary school was white, and Castle Heights was the same way. The only black people we had in our lives when we were growing up were our babysitters, and two guys named Johnny Walker and Claude, who were the custodians at our grade school.

As Duane and I were playing our way through high school in Daytona, we met this guy Hank Moore who had the Hank Moore Orchestra, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were his backup singers. We pooled our money and Hank Moore came down to our house, and we had the whole garage band together. It was my brother, me, a friend of ours named Van Harrison on bass, and a kid named Tommy Anderson playing drums. Tommy was something. That skinny little kid could go, man. We called him “Slick.”

So Hank comes down to my mother’s house at 100 Van Avenue (which is still there now, with her still in it, at ninety-four years old), and he’s sitting on a barstool in the middle of the room ready to teach us. When we played in our garage band, no one ever wanted to play the bass, so Hank explained to us about the bottom end. He sat there and took us through “Done Somebody Wrong,” and that changed my whole life. I saw the structure of music, and we all got it. I was like, “Take all my money—I win.”

Then my mama came home, and she’d never grabbed me by the ear or pushed me from behind, but this time she did. She said, “Come in the kitchen. I want to talk to you right now.” She didn’t grab Duane, she grabbed me, and she said, “I want to know what you’re doing with that nigger in the front room.”

“Nigger?” I asked, confused. “Ma, that ain’t no nigger. That’s Hank Moore.”

“So what’s he doing here?” she asked me again.

“Well, so far, he’s taught us all kinds of good music.”

“I want him out of here as soon as you can do it.” She said it in a voice that meant business, but I forgot about that as soon as I got back in there. I just picked up my guitar and started playing, and by now, man, we had it. My mother went back there to get dressed, and she noticed that we were all playing together—it was the first time we ever sounded like a band. It didn’t change her mind about a black man being in the house, but it changed her mind about the music.

Those summers back then were just priceless. They were the formative years. The great thing was that we had two guys to do it with. Duane and I could play off each other, and if one of us missed something, then the other one would pick it up.

It wasn’t too long after that that I met Floyd Miles through my brother. Duane went down to this place under the Ocean Pier Casino called the Surf Bar. Floyd’s band was called the Houserockers, and they played a lot at the Surf Bar, which was owned by a real rich guy named Nick Masters, who also owned the casino.

This guy Daps was the piano player, and he taught piano over at Bethune-Cookman College. His real name was Lindsey Morris—we called him Daps because he was such a dapper dresser—and he also had the Lindsey Morris Trio. I played with him, my brother played with him—shit, everyone played with him. Floyd always played with him. He played drums and sang, and they played all these Otis Redding songs.

I don’t know why Floyd took an interest in me, because he and Duane were real tight, but for whatever reason I started to hang with them too. As I started playing, I noticed that the more I played, the better I played, and the more I seemed like I was into it, the more they let me into that older circle. I was the youngest one there, and I would just sit there and study Floyd. I wouldn’t take my eyes off of him. I watched his every single move. I studied how he phrased his songs, how he got the words out, and how the other guys sang along with him.

He noticed all this, and I guess he saw the hunger in my eyes to be a part of this thing. Me and my brother both finally joined Floyd’s band, but they only needed one guitar player, so we’d switch off every other night. In the beginning, I played lead guitar, my brother played rhythm, and he sang. Now, he damn sure couldn’t sing, as you can tell by some of the recordings he made. But the more I played, the better I got, and when I started singing, that was the best me and Duane ever got along during my whole damn childhood.

I became a singer out of necessity, not by choice. My brother came to me and said, “Hey, man, we gotta do something.”

I thought, “Oh fuck, here it comes. He’s gonna push me out of the band and get Shepley in.”

Instead, he said, “Obviously, I’ve been playing a little more lead.”

“Yeah, because you quit school and have had nothing to do for a whole year but sit home every day and play.”

To sing properly, you have to get into a mind-set where you don’t give a damn if somebody doesn’t like it. You couldn’t care less, you’re singing for the gods—because they gave you the ability to sing, or at least what sounds like singing to you. You’re putting your whole soul into it, all the happiness you ever had, every tear you’ve ever shed—all of that goes into your singing.

It was once said that the blues is nothing more than a good man feeling bad, and that’s what it is. Believe me, singing a blues song makes you feel better afterwards. Singing the blues doesn’t mean that you have them at that minute—the blues usually crawl up on you late at night or early in the morning. You get the blues when someone close to you dies or has an accident or gets sick, or when your dog passes away, and singing is a way of letting go of it.

Me and my brother had this friend in Daytona Beach who was like the audiovisual dude in school. I wouldn’t really call him a geek—he didn’t wear glasses or button his shirt all the way up. He would come to our gigs and make recordings on one of those old suitcase Ampexes. They sounded so crispy and rich. Even back then they sounded great, and they still do.

He sent me a recording of the third or fourth night that I ever sang. My brother comes up to the mic and says, “Now little Gregory Allman’s gonna come up here and sing you a song.”

“Man,” I said to Duane, “if you wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t be so damn scared”—because I was petrified, I was just catatonic.

When you hear it, ooh, you know talent isn’t something inborn. That tape is atrocious, man. It sounds like some country bastard that’s trying to sing James Brown songs, but he doesn’t have any lips. It’s terrible—I don’t know, you might not think it’s terrible, but I do. I’ve never played it for anybody.

But I stuck it out. And the more I did, the more I learned. Early on, Floyd gave me a tip about singing that I later heard from some other people: don’t sing from your chest. If I sang more than a couple of songs, my voice would be gone, because I was singing from my chest. You don’t want to do that, because then you’re blowing wind past your vocal cords, and they’ll get pretty tattered if you keep doing that.

Floyd pulled me over to the side and said, “Listen, Gregory. If I may, can I give you a little word of advice? Let’s say I was going to count to three, and haul and hit you in the stomach as hard as I could. What would you do?”

I told him, “I’d tighten up my tummy.”

He put my hand on my stomach and said, “You see how hard that is? That’s where you sing from. That’s where the power comes from. When you know you’re going to scream, you lay your head back, which spreads your vocal cords real wide, and when the scream comes out, it barely nicks your vocal cords. You don’t want to do too much of that, because there’s soft, tender meat down there.”

It took me forever to figure it out. Floyd said, “You’ll get it when you don’t think about it,” but I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. I don’t know what day it happened, but once I got it, then I didn’t think about it. Now I don’t know how to do it any other way. Starting then, many nights I’d be coming off the stage and all the band, my brother especially, started saying, “Man, you’re sounding better every night.” Of course, I didn’t believe them.

Coming up, I sang a lot of Otis Redding, a little James Brown. That would always tear my throat up. You have to find out your range, so you won’t get up there and encounter a note that there ain’t no way in hell you’re gonna hit. You know to lower the key or change the phrasing. I learned all about phrasing.

The more different songs I tried, the more I learned, and I must say I had some great teachers. Half of them didn’t know they were teaching me. I would just go somewhere and stand and watch. I’d be so focused, the ice in my drink would melt.

“Little Milton” Campbell had the strongest set of pipes I ever heard on a human being. That man inspired me all my life to get my voice crisper, get my diaphragm harder, use less air, and just spit it out. He taught me to be absolutely sure of every note you hit, and to hit it solid. Little Milton taught me to know what you’re going to sing, to know what ladder you’re going to climb, and to know how many turns it’s going to take. I learned from him to understand which part needs to be soft and which part needs to be delivered with force, what I call “throat busters.” On those, you just harden up your tummy, and you let that boy out real quick, you kinda let it escape. Milton could do that better than anybody, and his voice was strong as ever, right up until the day he passed.