My Cross to Bear (18 page)

When it comes to soloing, I’ve always felt you should get in, say what you have to say, and get out. One thing I love about Warren Haynes, who plays with us now, is that he’s always trying to get me to solo. Even though them two guitar players can solo from now until the fucking cows come home, he still wants me to take one.

Duane was the bandleader onstage, but he really let the band lead itself. When he held up his hand, the band stopped, because he wanted those door-slamming stops. He really believed in everybody stopping at exactly the same time, just like he wanted to start at the same time. We had some great door-slamming stops in the studio, and they need to be that way, more so than when you’re playing live, because live you can kind of trickle down to a stop and let the song just kinda die.

We’d gotten everything down to the point where we were ready to go into the studio, but our trip to New York City to record the first Allman Brothers album was a bittersweet situation. After doing three nights at a club called Ungano’s to get warmed up, we went into the studio. We were staying at the closest Holiday Inn to 1841 Broadway, which was the Atlantic Records offices. Most of Phil Walden’s acts were signed to Atlantic—everything that he had was either on Atlantic or Stax. Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, and Phil were real tight.

A man named Adrian Barber, a well-dressed gentleman from England, was going to produce the record in one of the most famous studios ever. Ray Charles had recorded on the house Hammond organ, but I set up mine instead, because I couldn’t bring myself to play on the same Hammond he’d used.

They told us, “Make good use of your time, because you have enough money for two weeks.” I remember looking at the board, and it was so antiquated and small. A red light would go on when we were recording, and it made me so nervous that I’d fuck up. Mr. Barber couldn’t understand what bugged me about that red light, but I finally unscrewed the damn thing.

No sooner do we get in there than Dickey set his guitar down and said, “Man, there ain’t no windows in this place—it’s like a padded cell.” He got his 335 unpacked, took it out, and hit a few licks. Of course it sounded dead, because there were all these baffles around. I’m not sure what song we started with, but I know “Dreams” was up toward the front, because Dickey Betts isn’t on the recording of “Dreams.” He finally packed up his guitar, didn’t say a thing, and walked out.

Butch stood up and said, “What in the hell is he doing?”

“Just leave him alone,” Duane said.

I couldn’t see what the turn-off was for him, but maybe Dickey was such a country boy that at first the studio technology was too much for him. Duane played all the guitar that you hear on “Dreams,” and then he left. Duane got Dickey to come back, and then we did the instrumental piece, “Don’t Want You No More.” My brother must have really liked Dickey, because there weren’t too many people that he would take that kind of time with.

Dickey finished the record, because he wasn’t going to be whipped, not in front of the whole group. I mean, it does happen to people—it’s like taking a little kid out of Sri Lanka and throwing him into a Publix.

I was very unhappy with the vocal sound on the first record. I’ve always wanted to recut the vocals. They were recorded with the regular old tape echo “Heartbreak Hotel” setting. That was the one thing where me and Adrian Barber—who was actually an engineer and had never produced a record before—did not see eye to eye, but I didn’t want to rock the boat, so it’s my own fault.

Overall, I felt that we had been rushed through an artistic piece that was only about halfway done. The songs were all written, but we hadn’t road-tested all of them, so I wasn’t sure about all the different phrasings. When you’re that new at it, two weeks is just not long enough—especially if you’ve got a couple of guys in the band who have never been in a studio. It really slows things down, because you’ve got to explain so much and it’s confusing at first. I’ve never seen anybody go into a studio who didn’t think it was a weird way to go about recording music.

I knew that record wasn’t going to make it. We didn’t spend enough time on it, we didn’t refine it enough, and we were better than that. Phil Walden gave us a pocketful of change, enough for hot dogs and recording, pinned it to our shirts, and sent us on our way. When it came out at the end of 1969, it just barely grazed the charts—No. 188 with an anchor.

We went back up to the Tea Party four or five more times later in the year, and after the last time, we stopped off for three shows back in New York at Ungano’s, and then did a gig at Ludlow Garage in Cincinnati. They had rocking chairs in there and a concrete floor. That first time, the fucking place was empty, but eventually we saved that club from going under two or three times.

It was in the last week in December 1969 that we played the Fillmore East for the first time. Man, that venue was something special, and we always had a special connection to it. The acoustics in there were incredible—the kind of perfect sound you almost never get. There was this large, open main floor area where you could just look out at the crowd, and then up above was this killer balcony—all together the place could fit a couple thousand people. Once upon a time it had been a Yiddish theater, but I can’t think of a better place to play music.

Having been to the Village a few times by then, I loved it there, and I loved this guy Bill Graham because he was such a straight shooter with us. There were never any confrontations, and he always came back and shook our hands, telling us that we had put on a hell of a great show. He would ask us if we thought the light show was okay, and if there was anything he could to make the show better.

Sometimes it ain’t what somebody does for you, it’s just the fact that they remember you. We owe so much to Bill Graham. Here we were, out on the road, working our asses off, and the competition looked so tough. Hendrix and Clapton were doing all this incredible shit, and here we were, with one record that had just come out and was going nowhere. At times, I really had doubts about myself, because I was the only writer and I thought I might be holding everybody back. I felt pressure to write songs that were better than the last ones and good enough to compete with all the great songs that were coming out at that time.

What Bill Graham really gave us—and so many other bands—were places to play where you didn’t need to know Top 40 hits or Beatles songs. You could play your own tunes, and that’s what we needed. Think of the talent that Bill found just by giving bands a place to set up and play their own music. He wouldn’t pay you that much, but if you were good enough he’d invite you back, and he was about that matter-of-fact about it too.

That first run at the Fillmore was three nights with Blood, Sweat & Tears, who had just replaced Al Kooper with David Clayton-Thomas and were just starting to make it. They had that big, powerful horn thing going. I loved horns, and Duane did too, but only in their proper place. Their music was very different from ours, and some of the people there weren’t ready for blues like we played, so it was altogether brand-new to their ears, but Bill loved us.

When we arrived in New York for that stretch at the Fillmore, one of the first things we did was head up to 134th Street and Lenox, to the S&G Diner. Jaimoe and Twiggs had been there many times, and they turned us on to it. Good soul food, man—collard greens, smothered steak, black-eyed peas, candied yams, all kinds of good shit. It was the funniest place, because the lady behind the counter was as Chinese as she could be, and the people back there, with the pots and the pans, they was as black as the ace of spades. She would take your order and yell it out in Chinese at the top of her lungs. There was one dude back there—I guess he was the interpreter—and he’d translate for everyone. That was the most mixed-up bunch of shit I’ve ever seen in my life, but let me tell you, the food was dynamite.

When we were in New York, we’d sometimes hang with other musicians, like John Hammond, but we mostly hung with each other back then. New York was a big old scary place, but we found a few clubs to go to, like the Bottom Line down in the Village. I remember talking to Oakley about New York, and I said, “Man, if we could just get New York City by its gonads like we have Atlanta, we’d really have it made,” but playing for free in Central Park—oops, we flat-out hit a brick wall there. We figured we best ask before we did it, seeing how that’s the only patch of grass they have to share amongst all them poor folks up there. We didn’t think we could just plug in and play like we did in Piedmont Park.

The guy who started booking us was named Jon Podell, and he came to us through Phil. Jon was very tight with Bill Graham, and like Bill, he has always looked out for our best interests, which I appreciated so much. From the very beginning, I can honestly say that Jon has never taken a dime from us that he didn’t deserve. He has always been very good to us, and he’s like me in that he doesn’t like to spend money that he hasn’t made yet.

After the Fillmore East, we came back to Macon and had a hell of a New Year’s Eve party at Idlewild South, a cabin on a lake with about twenty acres outside of town where we would rehearse and hang out from time to time. The party got real psychedelic, and there was a whole lot of wine and beer. It was a good time, and back then we had so much energy, so much drive, and so much want-to.

In early 1970, we made our way out to California for the first time. It was so cold in our van that we had to duct-tape a long pipe to the heater under the dash and push it back to the guys in the rear of the van, since there was literally ice forming inside the van. We were all stacked in there like firewood, head to foot, and it was really freezing. I remember looking up at the ice on the window and asking myself, “Why? Why? How did I let this happen? What the fuck do I think I’m doing? If this is being a damn rock and roll star, I hope I burn out quick!”

We did have our share of comic relief on the road. We loved to make fun of Red Dog and his “Red Dog–isms,” as we called them. We would be talking about Carnegie Hall, and he would say, “Oh, that’s where they have all those sympathies.” We’d say, “Yeah, Red Dog, that’s where they have all those symphonies.” He’d go, “Yeah, that’s what I said—where they have all the sympathies. Sympathy, right? Ain’t that it?” We’d tell him again, “No, man—it’s
symphony
,” but he would never get it right.

We used to write them things down because they were so funny. Another time, someone was reading
In Cold Blood
, and I guess the Hound had heard of it, because he said, “That’s the one that was written by that real funny-talking sissy dude, Thurman Capole.” Thurman Capole—God, you talk about laughing, that man cracked us up.

California was a bummer, because we were still strangers in a strange land. We got out there, and we didn’t have enough money to pay the damn toll across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. We ended up having to panhandle to get enough change so we could go play the Fillmore, and Oakley got these pretty girls to give us a whole fistful of quarters.

We played four nights at the Fillmore West, where we opened for B.B. King and Buddy Guy. My brother and I got to meet B.B. when we opened for him, and that was really something. Between the two of us, we had worn out three of his records—played those LPs until they turned white. I couldn’t believe we were going to play with him. Buddy was sitting in his dressing room, wearing them old overalls—even way back then, he was wearing them damn overalls.

We played real well at the Fillmore, and the crowd liked it. The thing about San Francisco back then, and I think it’s still pretty much like that, is that if you ain’t got them by the end of the intro and the first verse, you ain’t never going to get them.

After the Fillmore run, we played a free afternoon show at Cal-Riverside University. I met me a nice little honey, smoked me a couple of doobies, drank a little wine, and had some good eats. Next we headed down to L.A. for four nights at the Whisky A Go Go. All I wanted to do was mow everybody down musically with this bad-ass band, but I caught terrible strep throat. I was really hurting, but I kept singing. I felt like I had let the band down, but my brother came to me and said, “You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out. Tomorrow’s another day, and we’ll come back and get them.”

That was when I got the first review that mentioned me specifically, and it said, “Although he sounded somewhat like a black man, he only had a four-note range.” I was so upset that I called back home to my family, because I had never had any bad press before and I didn’t know what it felt like. They told me, “Son, bad press is better than no press at all—at least they mentioned your name.”

My brother did a recording session with Delaney and Bonnie while we were in L.A. It was the album called
Motel Shot
, because it was recorded on the cheap in a motel room, and it was a real acoustic-sounding thing. I was just kind of a bystander to that whole Delaney and Bonnie thing, but God bless Bonnie Bramlett. I thought that Delaney was just out there trying to make some bucks—he had dollar signs in his eyes. I was never impressed with his songwriting; that scored about a four out of ten with me. I was real good friends with Bonnie, but since the day my brother died, I never set eyes on Delaney Bramlett again.

When we weren’t playing shows, we found other ways to entertain ourselves. Back then, “What happens on the road stays on the road” was our attitude. The rule was that what you did on the road, whether you were married or unmarried, was nobody else’s business. If you wanted to take seven ladies up to your room, and you had the dough, by God, go for it. Nobody was going to say nothing—that was the rule of the road, and anybody who broke it was really a pussy.