My Cross to Bear (17 page)

W
E JUST WANTED TO PLAY ALL THE TIME, AND IT DIDN
’
T
matter where or for who. Everywhere we went, we played for free. If we had a gig on a Saturday night, then on Sunday we’d play for free at the nearest park. We would just plug in, start playing, and an hour later there would be two thousand people there. Sometimes it would take about an hour for the word to spread and for people to start showing up, so by the time we had played for two hours, the place was starting to fill up, and we’d start over. We’d just pick all afternoon, because we loved to play.

I remember our first gig at Piedmont Park in Atlanta like it was yesterday. This must have been around May ’69, and we had gotten enough songs for a real set. It was only about twelve songs, but it was a set, because of the length of some of the songs. We also had some alternate songs we could use as backups, like “Sweet Home Chicago” or “Love Light.”

From the very beginning, we were too loud. I was always saying, “Guys, it’s just too damn loud,” but the only one who would pay any attention to me was Jaimoe. My brother got double-stack 50-watt Marshall amps, and Dickey got double-stack 100-watt Marshalls. We were playing small clubs, and we were so loud that there were times I’m sure people couldn’t hear us.

That’s why I’ve always stayed way over on stage right—to get out of the line of fire. I’ve always worn earplugs, and I’m about the only guy in the band who doesn’t have hearing problems. Back then, they didn’t even make earplugs, so I’d just take a bar napkin, roll it up, and stick it in my ear.

We finally called some kind of moratorium on the volume, because it was getting ridiculous. I couldn’t even sing over the shit, and that finally was the deciding factor. My brother went to one 50-watt Marshall, and Dickey just turned his 100-watt way down—he never even tried the 50-watt, because he wasn’t going to be a conformist.

Duane and Dickey spent a lot of time together, working out all those harmony lines. I’d give them a basic line of what I wanted on some songs, or they would take a basic line out of the melody and try to complement that. My brother was way into that, because he was way into Curtis Mayfield—you talk about king of the guitar fills, that was Curtis Mayfield, and that’s what Duane and Dickey tried to do.

I have this ridiculous picture of the first time we went back to Daytona and played the Peabody Auditorium near Seabreeze High, my old school. I had on a pair of white pants and white shoes, with no socks—I look like something out of
Miami Vice
—but I had no tan. You’re supposed to have a good tan if you wear white pants and white shoes. Duane had striped pants on, Dickey was wearing that damn ruffled shirt with black cotton pants and his wingtip shoes, and Butch was wearing his
Billy Jack
hat.

Our first trip up to the Northeast was to Boston, to play Memorial Day weekend at a place called the Tea Party. A guy named Don Law owned the Tea Party, and he was a straight shooter. He paid us what he owed us; there was no bullshit with him. The Tea Party itself was a brick building with white trim, and it was next door to a pizza parlor. It had a flight of stairs outside, and then you got inside, where there was another flight of stairs. I remember hauling that Hammond up them damn steps. I don’t know which was worse—the ones inside, where it was cool but the steps were velvet, or the shorter ones outside, where it was 104 degrees. They all sucked, every single step. With every step I took, I thought, “I’m not making any money; I don’t even have enough to eat. I have a twenty-eight-inch waistline, and I never have a day off.” I was thinking of reasons to go home, and I had one for every step. The last thought I had was, “If I leave, my brother will kill me—I’ll never get out of here alive!”

What we got paid wasn’t enough to get us home, but it was enough for us to eat on until they could get us back into the Tea Party. That’s when we went to this slum area over on Kempton Street, and it was rough. There were tenement houses, like row houses, and we found one that was empty, so we snuck into the first floor. Twiggs eased out on a ledge, and eased the window up next door. Nobody was home, so he ran an extension cord from there, and we had power and music. We lived there for about three weeks until they found us. Early one morning, somebody threw an M-80 through the window, and I thought I was going to have a coronary.

While we were in Boston, I did manage to meet one girl who took me in for a bit. I told her the truth—that we were a struggling band trying to get by—because, like my grandfather told me, you can’t lose by telling the truth. I would get depressed sometimes, but I would look at how hard everyone was working, pitching in day and night, and there was no way I could quit.

During our stay, we met the J. Geils Band, and they were nice people. We hung out with J. Geils and Magic Dick, the harmonica player, and played a few gigs with them. Since they were from Boston, they were better known than we were. Between our gigs at the Tea Party, we did a free show at the Boston Common, and, man, we blew everyone’s shit away. Magic Dick came up and he just started blowing. It was one of those times when all the bio-rhythms were on.

The people up there were really nice to us, but because it was our first time up north, and there was the way we talked, and we had a black guy with us, I’m sure it was rather confusing for them. They would hear us talk, and they’d be real amused. They used to say, “Wait, wait—sit here and talk a while.”

Playing for free in the parks was really starting to get to me. I hated busting our asses like that and just giving it away. Sure, we would pass the hat, but I thought that was ridiculous anyway. It made me feel weird, because I wasn’t some dude pounding on a guitar on a street corner in New Orleans, putting a quarter in the hat first. Of course, it did help us become the “people’s band,” so to speak, because we would go in there and kick all their asses for free. I can see now that it was the right thing to do, because back then we weren’t as polished as we are now, we weren’t as good as we are now, we weren’t as tight as we are now, and we didn’t have the songs that we have now. But, by God, we were there, and we were doing it for free. We were doing it for the people, and we were doing it for us, because we loved to play.

Our second gig at the Tea Party was opening for Dr. John, and let me tell you, I thought he was a dork. The way he talked, I thought he was jive, because I figured he was just putting it on. I mean, “They call me Doctor—Dr. John.” Well, I walked into this dressing room, and this one broad had two scarves, and she was behind him, and she had them boys tightened down, and these two other broads were popping him in the arm. I froze, and he said to me, “Well, shit, man, they’re just my get-together drops. Don’t have no kinda conniption on me.” “My get-together drops”—that’s when I knew he didn’t put on an act.

I had three or four reds on me, so I laid them on him, and later he told me, “That was real nice, man, because I couldn’t get to sleep. I took my dose”—his methadone—“and popped them reds afterwards, and I had a nice night’s sleep.”

Meanwhile I was thinking, “Fuck me running, man—that would kill my ass,” so I figured that even though I was doing drugs, I must be okay, because I didn’t do things in that quantity.

Dr. John also had a gris-gris situation going on too. Basically they were these bags that he had hanging around each shoulder which were leather or goatskin and smelled kinda funky. Inside the bags was this New Orleans voodoo stuff called gris-gris. He threw that gris-gris shit all in my brand-new Hammond—he was throwing whole handfuls of that shit. Gris-gris, my ass. It was gold glitter, and it went down through the keys, down into the stops, gumming the oil up. They had to take the organ apart and scrape down each piece. They said, “What is this crap?” and they charged me $190, which meant I could eat, but I couldn’t drink a cold beer for two weeks.

After the gig, Dr. John came up to us and said, “You all are pretty good. You all from down around Alabama? I’m from N’awlins. You know, you all got off to kind of a slow start tonight, and I was getting a little paranoid there, but after a while you all got it cookin’, Jack. Them folks were out there, boogying in the house, and they wasn’t leaving.” I thought the guy was all right.

Dickey, though, was
not
all right. Not long after, he got real sick with hepatitis, which he got from some nasty girl. We ended up having to take him to Twiggs’s aunt’s house, in Rye, New York. He was so sick, man. I remember we were driving to Twiggs’s aunt’s place, and it was raining like hell. I had Dickey by one leg, somebody had the other one, two guys held the doors open, and he just barfed right out the back, with the rain pouring down. The poor dude would drink a pint of water and barf a quart, and I’m thinking he might die.

We got to Twiggs’s aunt’s place, and it was real warm outside. I said to him, “Listen, Dickey, I ain’t no doctor, but it looks to me like you’ve got hepatitis. The whites of your eyes look like lemons, you’re barfing like hell, and when you crap, you tell me it’s white. To me, that spells hepatitis.”

I stayed there with him for the weekend. Twiggs’s aunt, Anne Watkins, was a real sweetheart, and she saved our ass, because Dickey was really shook up and so weak. We finally had to put him in the hospital, and we played a few gigs without him around the Rye area, because we weren’t going to go back to Macon without him.

We were playing at a place called Harlowe’s, in New York City, when Woodstock was going on. Of course we wanted to play, but the roster was full, and we couldn’t even go and watch, since we were booked at Harlowe’s. They had about nine customers that night because everybody was at Woodstock. To make it worse, we were opening for maybe the worst band of all time, Noel Redding’s Fat Mattress. Noel Redding playing guitar—oh Lord! Big buildup, a lot of hype and shit, and they were the fucking worst. Originally I’d wondered, “Why aren’t they at Woodstock?” but then I got my answer.

During this period of time, around the summer of 1969, Duane was still doing a lot of session work. He did his most famous sessions after the Allman Brothers had formed, like with Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. The list goes on forever—Clarence Carter, Irma Thomas, Boz Scaggs, Percy Sledge. He did a lot of things—some of them were big, and some should have been big. That song “Shake for Me,” on John Hammond’s
Southern Fried
? Boy, if you don’t move part of your body while listening to that song, then there’s something seriously wrong with you, way down in your soul.

We had never been to New Orleans before, but we were introduced to that city in the best way possible by playing a place called the Warehouse. During our first gig there, the two owners were on the side of the stage, and we must have done real good, because they just flipped over us. From then on, we pretty much had carte blanche, and we could come in and play just about anytime we wanted. The first few times we opened, but after those we only headlined.

The Warehouse was always a good gig for us, because it wasn’t that far, it paid pretty well, and we knew that we would have plenty of fun. There wasn’t a whole lot of work to playing New Orleans. Anytime you’d mention New Orleans, everybody’s eyes would light up—even the roadies, because they knew that after they were done hauling them amps, they could go pick up some good-looking filly, eat some red beans and rice, and have a good time.

I
DON
’
T WANT ANYONE TO EVER THINK THAT
I
WAS IN ANY WAY
the main draw of the band. I was the youngest guy in the group, I had blond hair down to my elbows, and I weighed a rockin’ 160 pounds. I’ve always kinda hoped that it was a group thing, that no one person carried it. But I guess if you do it long enough, you can front a band.

When you get down to it, I was, and probably still am, the least accomplished musician in the band. By accomplished, I mean as far as theory goes, and scoring and reading music—I do none of those. The other guys in the band know more than I do about that stuff, but most of them don’t know shit about singing. They’re better on their instruments than I am on the Hammond, but only if you don’t count my voice as an instrument.

Although I worshipped Jimmy Smith, God rest him, the way I play organ is much closer to Booker T. His style kind of rubbed off on me, because he pretty much puts the gravy on the meat, like I do in the Brothers. I just try to add texture and tone to the song. I try to put flowing notes behind the staccato notes, which is something I learned when we had the Allman Joys.

My brother was rarely critical of my playing, because he knew I was fragile about that sort of thing, and music is not something that I think needs any harsh words. If you want something from another musician, playing-wise, you sure as hell want to ask for it nicely.

Duane greatly respected the fact that I was a songwriter—he knew I was a songwriter before I knew it. When I would write something, and it would still be in its raw form, he could see all the other parts. That would help when we were rehearsing, because he would say, “You all listen to what my little brother has got here,” since he already knew what the song was all about.

My brother always listened closely to me: I’d hit a lick, he’d hit the same one. I’d sing, and he’d back it. I’d hit a good lick, and he’d drive it on home in a very complementary way. Nobody has done that since the day he died. With other people, they believe that there has to be a guitar fill before and after the vocal line. Well, I’m sorry, but if you play a note so fast just to fit it in there, it’s just going to be one of a multitude of notes; it’s not going to create a lot of emotion or feeling. The longer that note or musical passage has to ring or linger, the more impact it has. Less is more, man.