My Cross to Bear (14 page)

Thank God they had a real good sound system set up, so when I started singing, they could hear me, and everything came together at that moment. We played “Trouble No More,” and it wasn’t much different than it is today.

The first thing I noticed was that my brother and Berry Oakley were locked—kinda like my brother and Shepley had been. Oakley reminded me of Shepley a little bit. A skinny little guy with a twenty-four-inch waist, Berry was the bass player my brother had always been looking for. He and Duane had these certain little sarcasms that they shared. They were so tight—spiritually, musically, brotherly—they really had a thing going. Since one of them was a bassist and one of them was a guitarist, they could have easily had a three-piece band—that is, if one of them could have sung. They could have had a good little trio with Butch, but that’s not what they wanted.

I thought that my brother must have taken on Dickey Betts so as to get Berry Oakley, because it meant busting up their band, the Second Coming. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted Dickey as a guitarist, because Dickey’s playing was nothing like my brother’s. Dickey’s style was much more abrupt. It was loud, and it came in little spasmodic bursts, whereas Duane’s playing would just flow, like an angel flying through the air.

That would all change—Dickey’s playing and my perception of it—because after he was with my brother for a while, I knew he would either get better or my brother would fire him. I’ve come to see that he must have been a good guitar player; he wouldn’t have stayed in the band if he hadn’t been.

The first thing I do when I meet someone is look at their clothes. You can tell a lot about a person by their clothing, and at first look Dickey’s clothing was fine, until I got to his shirt. Them ruffled shirts—I just didn’t understand that. They didn’t fit the person, they didn’t fit the occasion, and they made me wonder a little bit. I looked at Oakley, who had a real look going, and then I would look at Betts, who was wearing that damn white-ruffled tux shirt, without a coat, and with the sleeves rolled up. Despite that, I felt accepted by him, as I did by everyone.

They asked me if I had any songs with me, and I told them I had twenty-two, so they told me to play them. I’d get through with one, and they’d ask me, “What else you got?” I’d play ’em another one and they were like, “That was kinda neat, a little potential; what else you got?”

After twenty of them, I’m going, “Oh fuck, I might be without a job here in a minute.” I had two songs left—“Not My Cross to Bear” and “Dreams.” I showed them “Dreams” first, and let me tell you, they joined right in. We proceeded to sit down, learn that song the same way you hear it today, and I was in, brother. They loved it. I bet we played that thing eleven times in a row, and the more we played it, the better it got.

I told them that it kind of hopped, and back on the drums, Jaimoe got that right off. I’m thinking, “This Jaimoe guy is the hippest cat in the whole crowd,” and he still is. It’s like my brother always said, “I started with Jaimoe, and then we put the band together.” Jaimoe is all right, man. Nothing has changed with him—he’s the same cat who came from Gulfport, Mississippi, and happened to be in Muscle Shoals at the same time my brother was. It was fate.

Jaimoe is the strangest man I’ve met in my life, but I don’t mean strange in a bad sense at all. He certainly didn’t belong in any institution, but he was just so different, mostly because I was used to hearing people running off at the mouth all the time. Jaimoe never said anything unless it really needed to be said, and the way he would go about saying it would usually end up being so funny.

Jaimoe is very, very intelligent, and eventually I came to realize that he’d been fooling us the whole time, just taking it all in while we’d been running our mouths. The world could use some more Jaimoes, but there’s only one. I came to love Jaimoe real quick, and the fact there was a black guy in the band knocked me out. His musical heart comes from jazz, but to get a gig he had to play R&B, which was his second choice. It was amazing how much he knew about music and the depth of his passion for it.

Now, the two drummers confused the shit out of me—and on top of that, there were two guitar players. I kept thinking, “This is going to be bedlam, just pure torture,” but of course, it was quite the contrary. I must say, that arrangement had a nice little kick to it. They had all been playing “Don’t Want You No More” before I got there, which Berry and Dickey had brought in from the Second Coming. It was scary the power they played it with, and my brother came up with the riff that tied it into “Not My Cross to Bear.” Right then and there, I knew we had something special.

I’ve asked myself many times why my brother was so insistent that I come back and be part of this band. I’m sure they sat down one day and said, “All right, who are we gonna get to sing?” I always wondered if they got me just because they couldn’t find anybody else, because back then everybody was a guitar player. Singers were few and far between, and maybe the ones that were real good were taken.

Still, I always took it as quite a compliment, because it’s not the sentiment, it’s who it comes from that really makes a difference. Compliments from Duane weren’t necessarily verbal—not saying he was a man of few words, but as far as giving me the okay or singing my praises, he would do it in little subtle ways, like he’d wink at me onstage after I sang a verse or did a solo or something. He watched me go up to different levels, and he was always pulling for me.

I was pretty knocked out that first day. March 26, 1969, was one of the finer days of my life. It was a long day, but a great day. I was starting to feel like I belonged to something again.

We spent the first few days just getting to know one another. There was a bunch of beer and a bunch of food, so we partied there for a bit. A couple of filthy jokes always help dudes to get to know one another, and we told some good ones. I’ve never seen my brother so relieved. He knew we had something, because all the pieces had come together and fit perfectly.

I remember thinking, “Jesus Christ, do other bands have to search the world over to find the right combination, and how many get as lucky as we did? You can have the right group of guys but the wrong drummer, so everyone in that band is a truck driver today.” Our thing was so perfect, and on paper it shouldn’t have been—we had two drummers, not to mention that one of them was a black man and we were in the Deep South, 1969. The way I saw it, fate brought a certain group of musicians together who just blended perfectly.

One thing that was painfully obvious to me was that while we had this kick-ass band, it came about because we smashed the shit out of this other band, the Second Coming. For a while, I sat around waiting for the bomb to go off, because it seemed to me that everybody else in the Second Coming was vying to be an Allman Brother. I might have been wrong, but it sure seemed that way.

Right after I got to Jacksonville, the Second Coming had a gig at the Jacksonville Beach Auditorium. Toward the end of the gig, Oakley said, “We got a little surprise for you,” and my brother and I joined them onstage. We played a few songs, including “Trouble No More” and “One Way Out,” and that place went berserk. I had heard a crowd before, but I ain’t never heard nothing like that. Those people were howling—that night changed them. It was clear; this was fucking working.

I felt bad for the rest of the Second Coming guys, because they knew what time it was, but I couldn’t wait to play again. On the drive back home, all we did was talk about this or that, and this part right here going over there—it was just lined up, man. We could see our destiny, and we set out to get it.

O
NCE
I
GOT SETTLED IN, MY MAIN ORDER OF BUSINESS WAS TO
write songs. After showing them those two songs, I became the writer for the Allman Brothers Band. On some of the early songs that I wrote after I got to Florida—like “Black Hearted Woman,” “Every Hungry Woman,” and “Whipping Post”—my experience with that girl Stacy was probably in my head, but I can’t say I was specifically thinking about her while I was writing them. Honestly, I don’t know where they came from. The words just appeared.

My brother was staying with this artist chick named Ellen Hopkins, who lived down the street from Butch, so I had a place to stay too. This was in Arlington, which is a suburb of Jacksonville. Berry Oakley, his wife, Linda, and their little baby daughter, Brittany, were also staying there, so I was staying up in the very top of the house, in this sitting room with a real nice couch in it. I was up there, laying on that couch, and I was just exhausted.

I wrote “Whipping Post” the first night I was at Hop’s house. It was a huge place that must have been built around the turn of the century, and the house was real squeaky. Despite that, I was told more than once that after a certain time I was not to make a sound.

“If that baby wakes up,” Duane told me, “man, we’re outta here. Ya dig?” (That was my brother’s saying—“Ya dig?”)

So that first night, I laid me down to go to sleep on my attic couch, and I dozed off for a while. All of a sudden I woke up, because a song had me by the ass. The intro had three sets of three, and two little steps that allowed you to jump back up on the next triad. I thought it was different, and I love different things. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I wish the rest of them had come like this—it was all right there in my head, all I had to do was write it down so I wouldn’t forget it by the morning.

I started feeling around for a light switch, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. I was in my sock feet; I just had on my drawers and a T-shirt. I found my way into the kitchen and it was pitch-dark. I had my hands out and I touched an ironing board—thank goodness, instead of tripping over it, which would’ve made a terrible noise.

I was feeling all around the counters for a piece of paper. I couldn’t find any paper or a pencil anywhere, but I did find a box of kitchen matches. A car happened to go by, and its lights flashed long enough to allow me to see that red, white, and blue box. I knew I could use the matches to write with, because I had diddled around enough with art to know that charcoal would work.

I figured the ironing board cover would work as a pad, so I’d strike a match, blow it out, use the charcoal tip to write with, and then strike another one. I charted out the three triads and the two little steps, and then I went to work on the lyrics:

“I’ve been run down, and I’ve been lied to …”

I got it all down on that ironing board cover, in the closest thing to shorthand as I could muster up. I was really proud that I didn’t wake Brittany up. The next morning, Hop raised so much fucking hell with me about that ironing board cover, but it worked out, and we got “Whipping Post” down that day.

This guy down the road was letting us rehearse in his nightclub, which was called the Comic Book Club. They had black lights and girls in little sailor suits dancing on the tables. They smelled terrible! He let us use it until like four o’clock, time enough for us to get our shit offstage before they opened.

The next day I wrote “Black Hearted Woman,” and the day after that I wrote “Every Hungry Woman.” I wrote most of that whole first record in that one week. I had total peace of mind. L.A. and all its changes didn’t even cross my mind. I felt like I was starting all over, which I was.

One rainy day, the guys came over and got me, and my brother said, “We’re going for a ride.” They took me over to Dickey’s old place, because I remember his motorcycle was parked behind it. They put a blindfold on me and led me into this room. They told me, “You can take it off now,” so I took the blindfold off, and there it was—they had got me a brand spanking new 1969 B3 Hammond organ. It cost $1,883, and another $1,295 for the 122RV Leslie. They didn’t have the money, but somehow Duane had gotten it.

It was plugged in and turned on, and there were four joints rolled—big, big phatties—a nice big ashtray, a garbage can, plenty of paper, and a lot of pencils. They told me, “We’ll see you in a few days, brother,” and, man, that’s when the writing came on. Getting that Hammond helped to finish those songs like “Black Hearted Woman” and “Every Hungry Woman,” because although “Dreams,” “It’s Not My Cross to Bear,” and another song called “Demons” are the only songs I’ve ever completely written on the Hammond, I got images in my mind of what the band would do with these songs, and the Hammond helped a lot.

Writing those songs was work, but it was so gratifying, because it was a true labor of love. Everybody had their minds so nicely open, and we worked so well together. We’d get to one part of a song, and my brother would say, “Well, what about doing this?” and one thing would lead to another. Duane was really encouraging me with my songwriting. He would compliment me, pat me on the ass, or actually kiss me on the mouth, right in front of the other guys. He let me know how much he loved my singing and how proud he was of me.

We were also learning some other songs, like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” which Berry sang. We’d also jam on all kinds of stuff, like “Crossroads” and “Rock Me Baby”—we played whatever came to mind. We also worked up “Stormy Monday,” which me and my brother had done for years, as well as “Outskirts of Town,” which I never really liked playing because it’s really a horn song.

“Mountain Jam” was my brother’s thing. He just started playing it one day. It’s not that he had a thing for Donovan—it’s just a happy little melody, and it makes for a really nice jam. You hear a song, and you can just tell if you can jam on it or not.

We weren’t in Jacksonville very long, because Twiggs Lyndon arrived not long after I did. Twiggs worked for Phil Walden at Capricorn Records in Macon, and Phil had signed on as Duane’s manager while he was doing sessions in Muscle Shoals.