My Cross to Bear (25 page)

I
REMEMBER WHEN IT HAPPENED.

I was home and I got a phone call. A woman’s voice said, “Your brother had a slight”—she used that word, “slight”—“motorcycle accident.” And the way she said it, I just knew. I threw on some clothes and I ran down the hill to where the hospital was. When I got there, Oakley, Dickey, and Jaimoe were already there, and Butch came in soon after.

They didn’t take us to the waiting room, they took us in the chapel—that’s when I really knew. And there wasn’t nothing “slight” about it. Another guy, a surgeon, came out, and he said, “We brought him back up for just a minute or two, but he’s gone.” He said Duane was just too busted up. I’m so glad that I didn’t see him like that, because I don’t have to live with that memory.

We set the funeral for the next day. Somebody came up with the notion of putting the casket in front of the band and having us play a gig, and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. I really thought that was ridiculous, the idea of having an audience in a chapel, with a casket covered in roses, and us playing rock and roll behind it. But all the other guys wanted to do it, so I went along with it.

The next morning, I got the news that my mother had arrived, and I was upstairs opening the closet door, getting ready to put on my black suit. There was a tap on my shoulder, and it was Deering Howe. He had been in St. Barts or St. Martin, and he hopped a Learjet and came right to Macon. Deering had a big beaker of the most kick-ass Peruvian flake, and you cannot cry when you do coke. That was the only way we were able to play at the funeral home.

We buried Duane with a silver dollar in one pocket, a throwing knife in the other, and his favorite ring on his hand—a snake that coiled around his finger, with two eyes made of turquoise. Chank told me that someone stuck a couple of joints in his shirt pocket along with a mushroom lighter, and Chank would know, because he went down there and saw him. I just couldn’t do it.

There were a whole lot of people at the funeral; people came in from everywhere. And even though it didn’t sit right with me, I got up there with one of his old guitars and played “Melissa.”

“This was my brother’s favorite song that I ever wrote,” I said, and it was hard, but I got through it.

After we played at the chapel, we all went out back to smoke a joint. We were standing together, and I think we were all wondering what we were going to do.

“Look, boys,” I said. “If you’re thinking about stopping, don’t. We need to get back to Miami, because we’ve got some unfinished business down there. If we don’t keep playing, like my brother would’ve wanted us to, we’re all gonna become dope dealers and just fall by the wayside. I think this is our only option.”

Some of them answered me, some of them didn’t, but they all got what I said planted in their heads. Of course, they all felt the same way. When you’re in a situation like that, it’s great if somebody speaks up and says what everybody is thinking. It’s not like I came up with some big profound statement, because I didn’t.

After we got home from the service, though, I just fell apart. One of the worst things I saw was, after giving the eulogy at Duane’s funeral, Jerry Wexler came back to the Big House and took the dimes out of the pay phone that Oakley kept in the kitchen. Berry kept eight or ten dimes in the little change thing on the phone, for people making calls. Wexler was making a call, and he opened the change thing and pocketed all those dimes. Callahan and I saw the whole thing, and we just started laughing at him—the fucking president of Atlantic Records, pocketing some dimes. Boy oh boy.

Chank hung with me the whole time, and then Deering decided to take me to Jamaica, just to get me away from the madness. Chank saw us off at the airport, and we headed off.

When I got back from Jamaica, it was rough. In my grief, I probably didn’t help the band too much at all. I tried to play and I tried to sing, but I didn’t do too much writing. In the days and weeks that followed, I began to wonder if I would ever get back that feeling of “Wow, let’s go play, man.” I wondered if I’d ever find the passion, the energy, the love of making music and making it better—all of that good old stuff.

You get real wicked after somebody dies, and you get pissed off. I was pissed off at Duane for dying, for leaving me behind with all that shit to deal with. Then you get pissed at yourself for being pissed, because you loved them so much. You snap at people for no reason—you just get basically pissed. When that finally gets out of your system, then you’re back in the human race. It takes some time, and probably a few glasses of spirits, but somehow the five of us got it together.

We had to take some time off because of our health and everything. We were skinny already, but after Duane died, we got down to nothing. As soon as we were able, though, we got back out there.

I had a lot of other doubts as well after Duane died. I was worried that the Waldens and such were going to take over the band, that it was going to become another McEuen and Dallas Smith situation, because Duane was the assertive one of the band—maybe “assertive” is a little too light of a word. He was the liaison between Capricorn Records and us, between Phil Walden and us. Walden knew better than to bluff my brother, but I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to have to play those games. The reality, though, is you have to—the world is full of it, and the music business is riddled with it.

Then, on top of all this, the week after Duane died, the
Fillmore
record blew the top off the fucking charts. To be clear, the record took off because of the music, not because Duane had died. In the weeks before his accident, it was already starting to go, but the volcano finally erupted right after he died. It was raining money. There were times when we had been getting by on three dollars a day, which is pretty hard to do, and then suddenly I started getting five-figure checks in the mail, twice a week. That was a real mindfuck, because my brother never got to live to see the big money start rolling in. What we had been trying to do for all those years finally happened, and he was gone.

It’s good to sit sometimes and wonder what would have happened if Duane had lived, but that’s a hard thing to ponder. Who knows? There might not even still be a band. We could have gone on, but we might not have been what he was looking for. I could say that about anybody else in the band as well, because in this band, nobody is an island.

I’m pretty sure that my addictions would have torn us apart, or his addictions, or both. But I think after we got straight, it’s possible we would have gotten back together. I don’t believe we would have stayed together continuously for more than forty years, but I know we would have made some great music.

Everybody talks so highly of Duane because he’s not with us anymore, and when people talk about him, all they remember is the good parts. Well, there were some shit parts to my brother as well. When he would wake up in the morning, his hair would be all over his head, and God help him if he ever got the damn flu. Nobody in the world had ever experienced a fever and feeling like shit but Howard Duane Allman. Nobody who had ever existed had ever had the shits and the barfs at the same time—nobody. “You don’t know what it’s like!” So we would just leave him alone. If Duane felt shitty, he wanted to make everybody else feel shitty too.

My brother was a Scorpio, through and through. When we were kids and went to the fair, there wasn’t a ride he wouldn’t get on. Good God, he was fearless. There was one ride called the Bullet, this thing that just went round and round, real fast. We were just little shavers, man, and I’m hollering, “Let me off this thing!” But my brother was just cackling. I knew I was going to die, but he was having the time of his life. Every time my grandma was around, she’d say, “That boy ain’t going to live to see twenty-five.”

Duane lived hard, fast, and on the edge, and if you ever heard any of his interviews, you could tell he had a little taste for speed. Somebody listening to my brother today might go, “That’s just some fucked-up, crazy hippie.” Wrong. He was so intelligent. It would be amazing to see what he would be into today.

When I got over being angry, I prayed to him to forgive me, and I realized that my brother had a blast. His footprints are so deep that he’s still being talked about today. In 2003,
Rolling Stone
voted him the number two guitar player of all time, behind Hendrix. That made me feel all warm inside. I wish there was some way I could’ve shown him, but I know he knows.

Not that I got over it—I still ain’t gotten over it. I don’t know what getting over it means, really. I don’t stand around crying anymore, but I think about him every day of my life.

It was my brother who got me through the first part of my life. Although he was only a year and eighteen days older than me, it seemed like he was much older than that. I looked at him like Merlin the Magician, because he had so much charisma. He had his weaknesses too, but I had the deepest, closest personal relationship with him I’ve ever had with anyone, because we went through heaven and hell together. Without him, there’s no telling how I would have turned out.

I admired my brother so much when I was a kid that it turned into fear—fear of losing him, more than anything else. I was afraid that he would get out of school, he’d take off, and I’d never see him again. They ought to have a mandatory class in school to teach kids how to deal with loss, because sooner or later, somebody dear to them leaves this earth. Children just don’t understand that, so they could tell them, “Look, your puppy is designed the way he is designed, and they just don’t live very long,” because kids don’t know that. They want to know why their doggie died, and they don’t understand that twelve years is a long time for a dog to live.

It took me a very long time to deal with grieving over anything. I didn’t learn to grieve until my brother had been dead for ten years, maybe longer. Before I learned to grieve, every day, every single day I would relive his death. Playing seemed to be the only thing that helped, and being on the road. When we went home and I had nothing to do, my mind would start to run away with itself.

That’s why I became addicted—to slow my fucking mind down. I can’t stand it when shit gets overwhelming, when you’ve got this and that happening, and the phone is ringing—I can’t deal with it. My brother’s way of dealing with that was to just say, “Fuck it, fuck all of you,” and he’d just cut. Not cut and run, he’d just cut. He figured out in his soul that life was much too precious to waste worrying about bullshit. That’s why he walked out of Castle Heights—he wasn’t going to take their shit.

Duane just refused to put up with anybody’s shit, and he didn’t dig any kind of violence. As for confrontations, they were real quick, and if they weren’t quick, he’d just cut out of the situation. Now me, I couldn’t do it the way he did. I didn’t like confrontations. Of course, I knew confrontations were a part of life, but I wanted to keep them down to a dull roar. I could do them when I had to; I could face the fire, and I could fire a motherfucker.

Whether it was worrying about confrontation or something else, there was always too much happening in my mind. I would get into bed, and I’d have about nine different thoughts spinning all through my head. I would have ideas of how to cut costs for the band, ideas to make the routing of the tour easier. Then there were the pending disaster thoughts: the wondering why you’re even bothering to plan shit, because you’re going to die anyway. Thoughts of what was I going to do without him, what all of us going were to do without him.

The only thing that would stop these thoughts from racing through my head was heroin. Heroin would bring me some peace from my thoughts. Someone might question why I didn’t go to see a psychologist, but fuck that—I could take a little shot of this powder up my nose and everything was all right. Better than all right, way better. The problem is, after a while, it stops working, and so you have to take more and more.

Maybe a lot of learning how to grieve was that I had to grow up a little bit and realize that death is part of life. Now I can talk to my brother in the morning, and he answers me at night. I’ve opened myself to his death and accepted it, and I think that’s the grieving process at work. It’s a matter of embracing it and not denying it—because there is no denying it. You’re doing nothing but fooling yourself if you think you can put it out of your mind like it didn’t happen. A lot of people do that, and they’re successful at it for a while, but it usually comes crashing down around them.

I fully believe that there’s more to it than just this life here on earth, and I’ve believed it for a very long time. Do I believe in reincarnation? After seeing Derek Trucks, how could I not? People ask me about Derek and my brother all the time, and I usually give them a little generic answer, because it’s a pretty heavy question. But I have very good peripheral vision, and sometimes I’ll catch him out of the corner of my eye, and the way he stands looks just like my brother.

Anybody who knows Derek Trucks will tell you that he would be the last one in line to be accused of trying to look like somebody else. Derek is Derek, man. He puts on a pair of Levi’s and a T-shirt, plugs his guitar into the amp, and plays. That was my brother, man.

Duane used to make faces when he played—he made the damnedest faces sometimes. You could tell when it was getting good for him. Duane wouldn’t have been very good at poker. Derek does it too—just a hint of it, but I catch it. I know when he’s really trying and when he’s on automatic pilot. I know what he’s doing, because he does it in such a similar manner to someone else I knew.