My Cross to Bear (10 page)

When we left New York, I came back home with one of those tall instant iced tea jars full of the brown, which I bought for about forty dollars. We turned on all our buds, like Shepley and them.

B
Y THE TIME WE GOT BACK HOME
, M
AYNARD WANTED TO GET OFF
the road, so we got Billy Connell, a drummer we knew from Montgomery, to take over. We came back through Nashville to play the Briar Patch for a second time in the summer of 1966, and that’s when we met a songwriter named John Hurley, who was a friend of Buddy Killen, a local producer. John Hurley really liked some of the shit he heard at the Briar Patch, and he liked some of the songs I had written. He told Buddy Killen about us, and Buddy was impressed enough to book us into a studio outside of Nashville called Bradley’s Barn, which the famous producer Owen Bradley had built.

The Barn was a great place. They had isolation booths, baffles, Ampegs, MCIs—anything you wanted, they had it. It was a very impressive place, and the sound was really good. It was nice to be in a studio, but I didn’t feel like we were lucky or we had made it to the big time, because of one thing: we weren’t doing our own songs.

We did stuff like “Spoonful” and “Crossroads,” but they changed the arrangements, because they wanted to hear something that sounded like the Rascals. There was an endless supply of Blackbirds—speed—so it’s no wonder “Spoonful” sounded like it did.

I spent countless hours, whenever we had time off from the Briar Patch, trying to write some shit with Hurley. Let me tell you something—anyone who thinks that writers are born, bullshit. Writing is hard work and nothing else. Nothing came out of that time, nothing worth a damn, anyway.

So you can imagine how I felt years later, when those half-ass demos came out as an album on Dial Records. We made it clear to them that we never wanted those songs released, that we were way too stretched out on those goddamn pills when we did them, but they proceeded to put that motherfucker out anyway.

It was called
Early Allman
, and it came out in 1973. If you bought it, little did you know that you were buying some songs that weren’t even close to being finished, because the time hadn’t come for them to be finished. We had to live a little bit longer, experience a little bit more, and just keep playing and playing. I had to get better as a songwriter, and stay at it for a while, and finally some really good songs came out of us. But at that particular time, we didn’t have it in us. I’d scribbled the outlines of “Melissa,” but I hadn’t even played that for the band. We weren’t capable of completing any songs worth releasing to the public, and that’s why that Dial record should never have come out.

That record had a bunch of songs that I wrote either by myself or with Hurley or Loudermilk. “Gotta Get Away” and “Oh John” were my songs, as was “Bell Bottom Britches,” but that’s actually a Loudermilk song. Then there’s “Dr. Phone Bone” and “Changing of the Guard” and “Forest for the Trees,” which were all written by me and John Hurley. They were terrible songs, just awful.

But Loudermilk had inspired me to keep writing. I didn’t have much confidence, because so many of my songs had hit the round file. I didn’t want to be a jukebox anymore, so I kept writing, even though I didn’t have much to show for it by this point. But the first time I showed everybody a song and it jelled, they just forgot all them other tunes. Mass amnesia, I’m telling you.

That was an important day, because I can’t tell you how tired I was of singing about tears on my fucking pillow, of using up my throat to sing “Wooly fucking Bully.” I was sick of learning parts and making sure that they were right, especially to Byrds songs. I used to hate to see them coming, because they were rough. We did tunes like “The Bells of Rhymney,” but I think we only played that once. The club owner came up and told us, “If you play that song again, you’re fired!”

After we finished our second run at the Briar Patch, we moved on to Paducah, Kentucky. Duane and I rode our motorcycles there. It was October, and you could feel it on those bikes, man—we just about froze to death. Paducah was a shithouse of a town, and we weren’t there but for two weeks. We went straight on to St. Louis for our second run at Gaslight Square and ended up staying the winter in St. Louis. By that point, it was just me and Duane, because the draft took Bob Keller, who we replaced with Michael Alexander. But then Billy Connell got drafted, and that was it.

In the spring of 1967, we were still in St, Louis, and we crossed paths with Johnny Sandlin, Paul Hornsby, Mabron McKinley, and Eddie Hinton. They had a band called the Men-Its, and the draft had gotten their lead singer and their guitar player. We had known them from the club circuit, and it didn’t take long for them to get rid of Hinton and form a new band with us. We called it the 5 Men-Its—for about five minutes. Then it turned into the Almanac, and then we went back to the Allman Joys for the rest of the time we were in St. Louis.

The lineup was my brother on guitar, myself on keyboards and guitar, Paul Hornsby on keyboards and guitar, Johnny Sandlin on drums, and Mabron McKinley on bass. Paul and I would float back and forth from guitar to keyboards, depending on the song. Duane and Paul worked up the dual-guitar arrangement for “Dimples” that we later used in the Allman Brothers. We called Johnny “Duck,” because he kinda looked like one. His playing gave the band some funk, which is what me and Duane had been looking for.

In March 1967, we started rehearsing our butts off in St. Louis, and the owner of Pepe’s a Go Go really had a lot of faith in us. He’d let us stay in the club all night, and leave the heat on and bring in food for us, and we would rehearse. We were doing things like “Stormy Monday,” “Tell It Like It Is,” and “Neighbor, Neighbor.”

About this time, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band came through town. They had played the Kiel Auditorium and then dropped into Pepe’s for a beer, and we were smoking that night. They just sat there stunned—they were knocked out. We had never heard of them, but Bill McEuen, their manager, really talked us up. He was all about us going out to L.A.—“C’mon, let’s go to L.A. You guys will be stars”—and he actually gave us the money to drive out there.

Now, I was against going to L.A., because I didn’t like the pitch that McEuen gave us. When he told us he was going to make us the next Rolling Stones, I was just howling. It was so fucking lame, man. Johnny Sandlin was against going too, but my brother just told us to shut up. Anybody in their right mind would have said, “Hey, I ain’t never heard of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, so how the fuck are you going to make us the next Rolling Stones?” Duane bought into it, though. I think in part because he just wanted to get the fuck out of St. Louis.

So we went.

W
E DROVE OUT TO
L.A.
BY THE SOUTHERN ROUTE FROM
S
T
. Louis, and we were somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona when we stopped at a drive-in restaurant where they had those girls who would come out and take your order and bring the food out to your car. This little Latina girl comes out, and my brother says to her, “Hey, are you one of them damn Mexicans that we’ve been hearing about?” We’re all telling him to shut the fuck up, because there’s this big fat Mexican guy behind the counter who looked pretty pissed. But there was no controlling Duane. My brother would say just about anything he wanted, especially if there started to be too much of a lull. In the end, we didn’t care too much. We were having a blast because we were going to Hollyweed.

I didn’t know Johnny Sandlin, but he knew me. He knew everything that I was about, and he wanted to know everything else—that is, after I opened my mouth and started singing. After a couple of road trips with him, and taking a few pills and spilling out our life stories, we started talking about the people who turned us on to music, who our favorite singers were, and it turned out that we were talking about all the same people. Johnny had a good background in production and engineering, so when it came time to run any kind of machinery, like if we were recording ourselves, he would be the one to do it. He had the dexterity, and he knew why shit did what it did. Johnny and I saw eye to eye on just about everything, and he and Duane were real tight too.

So me and Johnny really got along well, but as for me and Hornsby, he stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. We didn’t have a lot in common. I guess he expected me to ask him to show me a bunch of licks, and I didn’t do it. It wasn’t because of him; I’ve just never done that with anybody. The licks I’ve learned, I’ve just kinda learned them on my own. It’s not that I’m above being taught better ways to play music, but I like to watch people and to listen—have it sort of rub off on you.

As for Duane and I, we were getting along pretty well, but we were both tired of just barely making ends meet. He was ready to stop fucking around and make some dough. I kept thinking that if we went back home, we could make some dough there. He sat me down and told me, “Dig it, we are not going home. You got that? I’m not going home, you’re not going home. You’ll thank me for this one day.”

The truth is, we’d almost parted ways in St. Louis before leaving for California. We were freezing to death, and we were filthy. I wanted some pussy, but I was too nasty to get any. I didn’t have money, I was as hungry as a son of a bitch, and to top it off, I had to sell the motorcycle that Loudermilk had bought for me. I was in a shit mood, but Duane had so much faith in the two of us. He just knew that if we stuck together, we’d come out on top, but I didn’t believe that at all.

Duane would have hung on until the last club owner in Tijuana fired our ass, and then he’d still look for another gig, whereas me, I would have been more like, “Why beat a dead horse?” I probably would have left after a couple of years if the powers that be didn’t make things happen as they did. I would have gone back to school, maybe gone that dentist route; Duane would have called me a pussy and hated me for the rest of my days, all while he became a real big star.

When we arrived in L.A., McEuen got us to sign a management contract with him and a record deal with Liberty Records. Pretty much straight away we located an apartment complex called the Mikado, which was right across from the Hollywood Bowl. The whole place was covered in bougainvillea and honeysuckle, and you could smell it everywhere. I met these beautiful women, and I would get them over there to my lair and let them smell that honeysuckle—boy, I’m telling ya.

My brother and I met these two little girls when we first got to Hollywood—God, I look back now and I wonder why we weren’t never in jail. One of them had long black hair past her elbows, and the other one had white hair that was the same length. They wore these little dresses, and I swear, their hair was longer than those dresses. I went out with the blonde, and my brother went out with the one with dark hair, and the first night we took them back to our place and took them to our respective bedrooms. There wasn’t any hors d’oeuvres, no wine or champagne, just some cold beer. We got them into our rooms, stripped them down, and fucked like you can’t believe. Talk about “Welcome to California.”

We became really good friends with these girls. Every now and then, we’d have a case of the hornies, so we’d just give them a call. We never really took them out on dates, because we didn’t have the money, but we’d bring them to a few gigs.

The first gig we did when we got out to L.A. was opening for the Doors at the Hullabaloo Club. Of course we knew who they were, because that was the summer of “Light My Fire.” Talk about some stage fright—there was like twenty-eight hundred people in that room. The damn Martinique held twenty-eight! There was a round stage in there, and it would turn clockwise when one band was through, and turn back the other way when the next band started up.

I’ll never forget it—we were doing “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and there was this damn catwalk, and I was going to walk out there. All these record company people were in the crowd, and just as I went, “I was born …” my throat cracked something terrible. The place got silent, and I couldn’t believe it happened, but we got out of it because I just went back, strapped on my guitar, and we kicked into “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Back then, not too many people had heard of Muscle Shoals or Otis Redding or anything like that, so they liked that a lot.

That goddamn Sam Cooke song. Do you know how many times I’ve relived that moment? Over and over again, man. It’s like the kick that was missed to lose the Super Bowl. You just torture yourself over something like that. That’s why I don’t listen to show tapes—I’ve never even watched the
Live at the Beacon Theatre
DVD, and it’s gone platinum now. I know that’s terrible, but all I’ll hear are the mistakes. You can pick your own stuff apart so much, so once something is done, it’s done. It’s easier for me that way.