My Cross to Bear (21 page)

This cat let me keep enough for about two more little tastes, and then we hit the road for about a month, so I didn’t see him. When we got back to town, I ran into him, and the same thing happened again—same amount, same result. It was just as much of a groove, because it hit and I went, “There’s that feeling again!”

After that, this cat would kinda be around all the time. After about a month or so, all the band and all the roadies were participating. It wasn’t long until everybody associated with the Allman Brothers Band, with the exceptions of Twiggs Lyndon and later Joe Dan Petty, from our road crew, was addicted to opiates. The thing is, no one ever used the word “heroin.” The only word that was ever said was “doojee.” If I’d had any idea of what it really was, I don’t think I would have done it. I honestly didn’t know that this doojee stuff was heroin. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.

Heroin is a musician’s drug, because you work till you drop, and this stuff would just ease you down off the mountain. You don’t think people sneak around and put needles in their arms for nothing, do you? You’ve never been high till you’ve been high on heroin. A lot of people who try heroin for the first time will barf up a lot of air and have the dry heaves for about four hours, and it’s so terrible that it stops them from taking it again. That didn’t happen to us, because we must have taken just enough not to get sick.

At first, there were no needles. We were just snorting it, and we didn’t have any accidents. Oakley just loved that stuff. He was an Aries, a fire sign, and the doojee brought him down just enough, but he had enough smarts to never do it two days in a row. Duane liked doojee all right, but blow was much more his thing, and he did a
lot
of it. Me, I had to learn the hard way about doojee; that shit brought me nothing but pain and agony, and it almost took me from this world about six times.

In the beginning though, I never thought we were real junkies—we were just trying to keep a buzz going. We never got too high to play, at least while my brother was alive. Even though those drugs are real habit-forming, it does take a while for the shit to really get into the marrow of your bones, to the point where you wake up and that’s the first thing you think of. Thank God that didn’t happen but to two of us, but the money we laid down for that shit was unbelievable.

S
OMETIMES
I’
LL SEE AN OLD POSTER, AND IT WILL SAY
“$3.50
FOR
tickets,” and I’ll think, “How in the hell did we make it?” Because the promoter took about half, the booking agent took off another 10 percent, and then Phil Walden took his cut.

But by the summer of 1970, we did have some money coming in, and even though that’s a good thing, it also separated us some. What I mean is, with money, if you’ve got a hobby or an interest or whatever, you can go do it or go buy it. If skydiving is what you like to do, well, now you can go do it. If you wanted to fly down to Jamaica, now you could go. Whereas before one of the band members might call and say “Let’s go shoot pool” or “Let’s get a watermelon and go down to the rock quarry,” and you’d go without thinking, now the answer was “I’m fixing to close on this house.”

The thing is, we had absolutely no financial direction. Not that we needed Phil Walden to sit us down on his lap one at a time and explain to us how to invest, but he could have done something. When you’re someone who never had any money, and then all of a sudden, you do—whew! Plus, it was never-ending money. All we had to was go out and play and make some more. Come back, spend it, it’s gone, fuck—go out and make some more.

That July, we played the second Atlanta Pop Festival, which was actually held in Byron, about twelve miles outside of Macon. It was so fucking hot out there, it was good that we could get back home, because we didn’t have no freezing-cold tour buses back then. We had the Winbag out there, and that helped some, but not enough.

The backstage area was pretty nice; they went to a lot of trouble to keep it nice. They kept the mud under control by piling hay on it, and there were plenty of lounge chairs for us to spread out on. There was even a naked chick riding around on a motorcycle, which we were all very happy about.

One thing I’ll never forget about that day was getting to see Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t see that much of him, and I don’t have anything to compare it to because that’s the only time I ever saw him, but in all honesty, I thought he could have done better. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t always all that much when he played live.

It must have been about four thirty in the morning, and I was asleep on the cold-ass hard ground, when somebody came by and said, “Showtime! It’s time to play.” I’m going, “Show what? What? We got to do it now?” But we got up and did the best we could. As it turned out, we were the first band to play, and the last one to play, and the only band that got to play twice. Just the chance to play in front of so many people—three or four hundred thousand—was great exposure for us. I haven’t heard the tape of the show lately, but I remember hearing it right after we did it. I thought we sucked, but people tell me it really sounds good.

I was so critical of the band, always. We were too loud, but every now and then it would get just right. Just when I was I about to say, “Fuck this, I don’t need it,” a perfect show would come along. One perfect one could make up for a whole bunch of loud ones.

There are a lot of our shows that I haven’t listened to yet, and the reason is simple: one day, I’m going to be a fucking jaded old man, and if I can listen to some shit from back in the day that I ain’t never heard before—well, shit, do you know how happy that will make this old man’s heart? If I could hear something my brother played, it will take me right back in time to that moment. That’s why I always used to save me a taste—I was the ratholing-est son of a bitch around.

A couple of weeks later, we played the Love Valley Festival up in North Carolina, and I’m not sure we ever got paid. Love Valley was the idea of this old man named Andy Barker, who was always bragging, “I ain’t never smoked a cigarette nor tasted no liquor!” After I’d heard that line enough, I started asking him, “Hey, have you ever had any pussy?”

The local sheriff tried to put my brother in jail, because Duane got a ticket for speeding on his way in there. My brother said, “Fuck you, and your town too. We’ve come to play—do you want us to play, or do you want to fuck around?” Andy Barker told him, “As soon as you’re done playing, boy, you have to go into that jail.” Duane told him to get the fuck out of there, and we just started playing. We were playing good too; we were way into this real heavy fucking thing, and somebody threw mud up on my brother’s guitar. Big mistake, because that was it. He finished the set, walked off the stage, got in his car, and left.

It was during this time that a guy named Joe Dan Petty joined the road crew. I met Joe Dan the first time we went down to Sarasota. Dickey was from down there, and he introduced us to this skinny little friend of his who he called J. D. Petty. I always thought it was cool to have a name like that—J. D. Souther, F. Lee Bailey, or what have you—though G. L. Allman, I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t fly.

Right away, Joe Dan and I got along. For the longest time, I had no idea that he was a musician. (I also have no idea where he learned how to make boots, but I still have the four pairs that he made for me, and they’re still like brand-new.) One day we were in rehearsal, and Oakley wasn’t there; he was sick or something. So J. D. went over and picked up that Fender Jazz Bass and started laying it down, with perfect timing. He didn’t play a lot of notes like Oakley did; Oakley was a very instinctive bass player, because he knew when to just sink into the repetition of a song, so the bottom was there for the rest of the band.

I’ve played with many bass players, and Berry Oakley was the perfect bassist for the Allman Brothers Band. If you wanted him to get crazy, he could, but only if everybody else did. He didn’t go off on tangents in the middle of “Melissa,” and Joe Dan was like that too. He could bring down the band when he had to, because if the bass player or the drummer shuts down, the other guys got to.

The right hand of the bass player and the right foot of the drummer are the main beam of the whole damn cabin; without that, the whole thing collapses. The bass player and the drummer have to constantly think about what they’re doing, whereas a guitar player can have his mind in South Georgia somewhere, thinking about being home.

After a while, I asked, “Joe Dan, why are you here?”

He told me, “Well, I’m one of the roadies.”

“No, seriously, bro,” I said. “You’re not really here for that, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re here to watch Oakley, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, you got it.”

“Then there’s going to be a day that you’re going to leave and form your own band, right?” But Joe Dan was an excellent roadie, and he was there for us when we needed him. He really was great to have around, because when the shit got too heavy, he knew how to make everybody laugh, and the more you would laugh, the more he would laugh. When Joe Dan laughed, his whole body would shake; that man loved to laugh. And he was truthful. You couldn’t beat a lie out of that guy with a ball bat—he would have died first. You couldn’t have gotten him to fuck over somebody if his life depended upon it. He was a good man, and it was such a tragedy when he died in a plane crash in January 2000.

Another cat that came along about this time was the Buffalo, Gerald Evans. I spent many a night sitting with him and a bottle of Remy Martin, just sipping away. He was a real sweetheart, and he was the only guy who could ever look at me after I had done something wrong and say, “Do you really want to know what I think about it?”

“Yes, I would,” I’d say.

And he’d tell me, “You did wrong, and it ain’t right to do that to people.”

He had no problem pointing out when I had hurt somebody and didn’t realize it. Buffalo wasn’t afraid to do that because he was older than everybody else, and he’d been around the block way more than we had. He was as street smart as anyone I knew. He’d look you right in the eye when he spoke to you, and I’ll never forget that stare as long as I live. I learned so much from that old man, and he had a big influence on me.

Eventually, Buffalo got a case of the come and go blues. He would go up to Martha’s Vineyard a lot and be by himself, because he loved it up there. Buffalo was very wise, too wise to be humping amps. Later on, he became more of an advisor, more of an advance man, for the band. He was like a jack-of-all-trades, and very intelligent, especially when it came to geography. He knew where every place was—not that he’d been to all of them, but he was on his way. Unlike Red Dog, who had been in the Marines but was the most lost son of a bitch in the band. Yet he was the one at the helm of the Winnebago, and he’d get lost in the parking lot.

O
N
A
UGUST
26, 1970,
WE WERE DOWN IN
M
IAMI
B
EACH, PLAYING
a free gig on a stage that the city set up on a big median on Collins Avenue. We were playing “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” which was the next-to-last song of the night. It would segue with a little jam into “Whipping Post,” and I looked out over the crowd, and the people were all standing on the grass, listening. Nobody was doing the damn Grateful Dead waltz, and there weren’t no spinners.

I looked over, and I saw this set of beautiful burnt sienna suede boots on this cat who was sitting on the grass with one leg out in front of him. I followed that boot up the pants, up the body to the head, and there was Mr. Eric Clapton. Next to him was Tommy Dowd, grinning like a fucking mule eating in the briars. Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, and Bobby Whitlock were there too—all of the Dominos, but I didn’t recognize them.

After I shit myself, I looked over to Duane, thinking, “I hope to Christ he doesn’t see him, because this will either be the finest ‘Whipping Post’ we’ll ever play, or this fucker’s going to fall apart.” But Duane didn’t notice anything, so we finished the show with a real good “Whipping Post,” and then Duane eases over to me and said, “Baybrah, dig who the fuck is sitting over there.”

“Man, I saw him two songs ago,” I said.

“Do you see them fucking boots, man?” Duane had a real thing for clothes back then—we both did.

Tommy Dowd, who was Atlantic’s house producer, introduced all of us to each other, and then we headed over to Criteria Studios, where Derek and the Dominos were working on
Layla
. We were all hanging out in the lounge, with drinks and food all set up for us. The English people do that, which is something that I admire.

Duane asked Tommy if he could come and just watch some of the sessions, but it turns out that Eric was just as much in awe of my brother as Duane was of him. Eric didn’t play no slide at the time, and he loved my brother’s slide work. The way I heard it, when Tommy asked if Duane could come watch the sessions, Eric said, “Watch? Hell no. If he shows up, he has to play.”

That first night, we all went into the studio together and did that jam thing. The next day, all the other guys left, but I stayed. I watched about three days of the session, and one of the first things they did was “Layla.” They played what they already had, and it didn’t sound like much. It didn’t have that intro on it yet, but once they added that, the song took off. Duane just fit right in, man—from the very first note, it just blended. His guitar and Eric’s sounded so good together; it was the perfect blend of a Gibson and a Fender. You could tell that history was being made.