My Cross to Bear (43 page)

That record is just solid, and it brought a whole new breath of life into the band. Since then, we’ve built on that momentum and chemistry. Right now, the Allman Brothers is as good as we want to be on any given night. The only thing that can stop us is us, and that ain’t no lie.

W
HEN
I
WAS TWENTY OR TWENTY-ONE,
I
GOT MY FIRST
tattoo. There weren’t many laws governing tattoos back then. I was in San Francisco, and I went to one of those old houses. I walked up these really steep steps and there was a sign on the door that said, “Welcome, art lovers.” I thought I was so grown-up—bullshit.

The guy was sitting there behind an old desk that was turned sideways so he could look out the window. He had two big galvanized buckets, with these long things sticking out of ’em. In one bucket, it was just clear—might have been water, might have been kerosene, who knows? The fluid in the other one was red. I walked in there and he said, “What can I do for ya, son?” I should have said, “Show me the door,” but I said, “I’d like a tattoo.”

He reached in the red bucket, pulled out two of these things, put ’em in the clear bucket, swished ’em around real hard, and then slung the extra fluid on the wall. I could tell it was blood just by the way it was dripping, but it didn’t dawn on me that those were two used needles.

I guess there was something that they loaded into the needles, and they had little covers over them when they were laying in the bucket. He picked them up and
bzzt, bzzt
—“Okay, son, what do you want and what color?” I said I wanted a centaur, for Sagittarius. And that was it.

Nowadays, if the law walks in there, your books had better rhyme with the number of needles you have, since a certain amount of them come in a package. If you don’t have a record of each tattoo, you’re out of business right there, license taken. But that didn’t happen back then.

I think that’s where I got hep C. It lay dormant in my liver until the drinking days started. I’d done so much drinking that I had a little cirrhosis, and they’d started watching my liver closely. Around the time I first moved to Savannah in 1999, I went in and got a total physical, and they said I had a spot on my liver.

“Well, what are you gonna do?” I asked.

They said, “We’re just gonna watch it.”

So we watched it for, like, nine years. In 2006, it had become the size of a dime, but we kept watching. A couple years later it was the size of a quarter, but this time it had real depth to it—it was a tumor. Not only that, but there was another one next to it.

I went to New York, where my manager, Michael Lehman, had gotten me an appointment with Dr. Ira Jacobson—he’s a hepatologist and he’s like the man to see. He took a biopsy and said what I had was malignant. I’m going, “Oh no, it’s the old C word—oh God, I’ve got cancer.”

Between my doctors; my wife, Stacey; and Michael; we all decided I should go on a regimen of interferon. I felt like shit for about six months and we canceled the Beacon shows in 2008, and I didn’t play at the Wanee Festival that the Allman Brothers had started organizing in Florida a few years before. I began to feel better for a while, but then it went downhill again, and my viral load shot back up.

By now, there were three visible tumors. Little did they know that on the bottom of my liver, in an area that’s nearly impossible to photograph, there was another big one. That motherfucker was older than all the rest of them. It was only later, when they took it out, that they discovered it. Dr. Steve Carpenter in Savannah looked after me real well during this time.

In 2009, Dr. Jonathan Sussman did what they call an ablation. That’s when they go in the femoral artery and go up through that, up to the liver, and they shoot it with a big dose of chemotherapy. I felt like dogshit, but at least my hair didn’t fall out.

They got that cleared up, and soon after that I went back to Jacobson to get a biopsy, but they couldn’t get one. They tried four times, but my liver was too fibrous. I was awake for all this biopsy stuff, and they just kept shooting my liver with lidocaine. He tried and tried until he was getting red in the face and sweating. He couldn’t get it, and finally he said, “You ever heard of the Mayo Clinic?”

“Yeah, hasn’t everybody?” I said.

“Well, when it comes to transplants, they’re one of the best,” he said.

“Transplant?” I was confused. This was the first time anybody had mentioned that. I started thinking back to the first heart transplant, which was like a hundred years ago; the guy lived for a week and everybody was all excited.

In early 2010, I went down to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville on the recommendation of Dr. Carpenter. Down there, I met Dr. Denise Harnois, who is an incredible doctor and has always had my back. Physically, I still felt good. All the chemo had worn off, so when I showed up, I was in the pink. They examined me, gave me an MRI and a CT scan—the whole shit—and afterwards they said, “Well, because of those tumors, you’ve qualified for the liver list.”

I said, “Yeah, put me on it, for sure,” but I asked them, “What if I said I don’t want this operation? What would happen then?”

“Well, for about two years, you’ll live like you’re living now,” they told me. “You’ll have about two good years, and then you’ll start to falter and you’ll have a slow, agonizing, painful death—it’ll take anywhere from two to five years.” So I got on the list at New York Hospital, where Jacobson is associated, and also the Mayo, because I was told they have the shortest waiting list, plus it’s only a couple of hours away from home.

While I was waiting, we went on tour—we did the Beacon run and Wanee, and then I did some solo dates—so we contracted with a private jet company. You pay a flat rate, and anywhere you are in the United States, if a liver became available, they would pop over and pick me up within two hours.

It took five months and five days for me to get a liver, and let me tell you it was a tough wait. When I was busy playing gigs it wasn’t so bad, but when I came off the road, I spent four or five weeks at home trying not to think about things. I was laying out by the pool one day, and I called my manager and said, “Michael, I’m fucking bored to death. I’ve ridden all my motorcycles, I’ve been here, I’ve been there, I’ve seen all my friends. When are they gonna fucking call me?”

“Gregory,” he said. “People die waiting for a liver.”

That hit me real strong. I was on my cell phone, and it took me a minute before I said, “I don’t know—I don’t wanna die, but all this just seems like bullshit to me.”

“Just have another dip in the pool, lay in the sun, have something to eat, and chill,” he said.

I hung up, and just a couple of hours later Michael called back all excited. He said that the Mayo had a liver for me.

I was just speechless. “The Mayo has a liver for you.” I didn’t wanna hear that—but then again, I did! I got in a great mood, and I was real joyous and feeling healed.

I called Judy Lariscy, my house manager, and I said, “Judy, they found me a liver.”

She said, “Well, that’s great. I already got a bag packed. Throw some stuff together and split.”

I got from Savannah to the Mayo in two hours and twenty-two minutes, and it was the twenty-second of the month, so I thought maybe all those twos were a good sign. I got there and they said, “All right, here’s your waiting room.” We waited and waited and waited—and at four thirty in the morning on the twenty-third they said, “All right, let’s get you in your gown.”

A guy came in with two shots. I already had the IV in, and he shot them in there. Whew—I was stoned, but I was still conscious. There were television screens all around this one bed in the operating room. A guy came in and he’s got a syringe about this long, the plunger’s over here, pulled back. The thing was full of what looked like milk. Turned out it was propofol, the stuff that killed Michael Jackson.

“Say hello to your main surgeon,” I heard someone say behind me, right as a guy popped into view.

“How are y’all doing today?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “You ain’t gonna hurt me, are you?”

“I’m most certainly going to try not to. You might be a little sore when you wake up, but this too shall pass.” You hear that a lot around the hospital.

They hooked up the milk thing, the main doctor tapped his finger, and I went, “Ooohhh.” I felt like I weighed nine hundred pounds. And then nothing. No dreams, no nothing. There were about eight people around, all of ’em matched up with the hoods and the gowns; if they had any facial hair, it was all covered. It seemed like I had just dozed off for a few minutes.

I woke up and said, “When are you gonna start?” Then I saw I had a big peace sign on my belly—one big cut down and then two coming off of that. I looked at my fingernails and they’d already started to turn real pink. A little while later, they came in and said, “Man, when we opened the gate, the main artery, that liver just came alive. It turned the most beautiful color red. Usually, we have to give people a few units of blood, but not you.”

It went real smooth, it really did. It was great that the first person I saw was my ninety-two-year-old mother, and she had knitted some psychedelic purple booties for me. I was up walking around within twenty-four hours.

This kind of operation is like building a ship inside a bottle: part of the challenge is making more room to work in. They’ve got one machine that comes down from the ceiling and it goes on either side and spreads your whole rib cage open. Oh, and all the bones back in your spine, they’re all in cartilage, right? They need to see back in there, so they pull those, and that’s going right down into your backbone, right into your spinal cord, which goes to your brain.

Cutting, suturing, whatever with skin—yeah, that’s all painful—but the bone pain was unbearable. I stayed awake for the first four days because the pain was so bad. I got zero sleep for about two weeks, because you just feel it whenever you breathe.

In the end, I stayed in the hospital maybe three or four weeks. It was an ordeal, but it was done.

I
GOT THE TRANSPLANT IN
J
UNE, AND WHILE
I
WAS HEALING UP
, I spent a lot of time thinking about the solo album that I’d finished making the previous December. It had yet to be released, but I knew I had this record in the can, as they say, and that was something to really look forward to. Actually, it was a lifesaver—when things got real bad, real painful, I would just think about this record and it was kind of a life support system. It greatly helped in my healing. As a matter of fact, it might have gotten me mentally ready to start working before I really should have gotten out there and started kicking again.

Before I’d started on the album, it had been a long time since I’d made a record. I had been dodging the words “new album,” cringing when they came along, since 2002, when Tommy Dowd passed away. He was the guy, he did it all. After he passed away, I thought, “What are we gonna do when it comes time to record?” I didn’t want to meet any new producers, because it felt like going backwards.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the end of a Brothers tour—we were somewhere way north, up around Detroit or Minneapolis—and Michael, my manager, called me and said, “On your way home, I want you to stop by Memphis and meet somebody.” Reluctantly I said okay, because this “somebody” turned out to be T Bone Burnett.

I went down there and checked into the old Peabody Hotel. T Bone’s reason for being in Memphis was one of the hippest things ever—he was there with a couple of architects and carpenters, and they were looking at the Sun Records studio and measuring it board by board. You wonder what happened to those old rooms—Motown’s Hitsville studio had the best rhythm guitar sound in the world, and now they sell T-shirts there, at most. The old movie theater that was the Stax studio, they just let the rent go on that building or something. T Bone’s plan was to re-create Sun Records on a piece of land next to his house. I thought that was the coolest thing I ever heard.

Me and T Bone got to talking, and we seemed to have a lot in common in terms of techniques of recording, our likes and dislikes of music itself. He had some great ideas. He said, “Somebody gave me this modem that has thousands of old old blues songs on it”—old album cuts, like Billie Holiday-old and older; you could see in some of them how swing went into the blues, all done with horns, just amazing. “I’m gonna peel off about twenty-five of these, and I want you to pick out about fifteen that you think we could, not cover—I hate that word, ‘cover’—but kind of resurrect.”