My Cross to Bear (7 page)

I had a lot of respect for my throat and my ears, although I did smoke cigarettes. I used earplugs, I drank hot tea and honey, I gargled in the shower, and I let the hot water run down my throat. But the one thing that brings your throat back completely is sleep—lovely, peaceful sleep, and lots of it.

I think I’m singing better than ever, but I can’t do as much as I used to. I can’t sing as long and as hard, song after song. Still, when we play our annual shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York City every year, I get stronger as the run goes on. I’m not sure why that is, but I think opening night is so tough on my voice because I’m so nervous. It’s opening night, and you’ve got those butterflies.

T
HE
E
SCORTS WAS OUR FIRST REAL BAND
. W
E DID A WHOLE BUNCH
of old R&B love songs, stuff like “Pretty Woman,” “I’ve Been Trying,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which we butchered. “Are You Sincere,” by Lenny Welch, was one of my brother’s choices, and we did “This Boy” by the Beatles, because we had to play enough Beatles songs. We did some instrumentals as well, including “Memphis” and our version of the theme from
Goldfinger
. We’d also do “Wild Thing,” which got us real close to getting fired several times.

Most clubs just wanted us to be a jukebox onstage, and we were a great one. They wanted you to play this many Top 40 songs and this many Beatles songs, or you shouldn’t even bother calling them because they wouldn’t hire you. And we could do both. We played so many of ’em. I remember every Motown song was like that, with that great guitar sound they got. I will never know why they stopped recording in that studio in Detroit.

The songs we played were a collection of tunes that we all happened to know; if me and Duane and one of the other two guys in the band knew it, that song was in the bag. If there was a song that only one of us knew, that sometimes got learned and sometimes not. It was like taking a song apart and putting it back together like a model airplane, finding out what goes here and what goes there.

I tried my best to sound like Aaron Neville on “Tell It Like It Is.” If that man knew how many 45s I wore out trying to get his inflections down, and his emotion—but I never, ever came close to sounding like Aaron Neville. We were doing “Turn On Your Love Light,” because we had heard Bobby “Blue” Bland do it, and, man, you talk about an original talent—there will be, and can be, only one Bobby “Blue” Bland.

We bought as many records as we possibly could. We would save our money, borrow from others, whatever we had to do. Duane would take my dough to buy records, and he would say, “But, bro, we
need
this. Can’t you see you’re holding back progress?” “But, bro”—when I heard those words, I knew what was coming. “All I need is half of your money,” and then the next day he would need half more. But he would come back with something amazing and we would learn eight songs off of that.

We played shows constantly. I didn’t go to my high school graduation because I had a gig that night. As a matter of fact, I stood my date up for the prom because I had a gig. But I’ll tell you, none of the people I went to school with did a damn thing. At my high school reunions, I find out that this guy’s in jail, this guy’s dealing dope, some of them died in Nam—hell, there’s nobody successful, so I guess missing the prom wasn’t that big of a deal.

Around that time, this band called Sweet William and the Stereos came into town. They were headed down to Fort Pierce to play in this big club called the Shamrock, and they wanted to borrow my brother for a bit. Their regular guitarist, a guy named Jimmy Matherly, couldn’t leave town with them. He’d had a divorce in Daytona, and my understanding was that the judge made him stay in town to take care of certain financial obligations. Duane said, “Fuck it, I just wanna play,” so the switch was made. They took Duane and left Jimmy with us.

This cat could play—holy shit! He was a real country dude and a real nice guy. He played a full-blown Gibson 355, through one of those triangular Gibson amps, and it sounded like a million bucks.

Not long after we temporarily swapped Duane for Jimmy, word got out that I was still a virgin. Girls had never noticed me until I bought a guitar, and for a while I thought, “Well, is it because I play music? What if I sold insurance?” That bothered me for a long time, it really did. I was a pretty shy guy in high school, and I still have a certain amount of shyness today. It’s just something that you have. I’ve worked on it, and I’m much better today than I was. Back then, though, being shy made things difficult with the girls, and everyone had been giving me a hard time about being a virgin.

One day, Matherly pulled me aside and said, “Man, I heard that they’ve been bugging you about being a virgin?”

“Maybe so—what the fuck is it to you?” I said.

“Wait a minute, don’t get huffy,” he said. “Dig it, man, I got divorced recently, and I know what it’s like. They would bug me about her owning my dick, and the first hundred times it was funny, but then it got unfunny. Look, I got to sign some papers with her, and if you want, I’ll set you up with her, and I’ll tell her what’s happening.”

See, he was still friends with his ex, and he was going to tell her that I’d never had my hambone boiled. So he set it up with her and told me we were all set, and she said I should come over for dinner. She lived in one of those one-bedroom studio apartments, with one of those Murphy beds, and it was already down, so I’m thinking that everything is cool. Of course, he ain’t said nothing to her and ain’t said shit about my “situation.”

We had dinner, and she turned the lights down low, and we were sitting there watching TV, got a candle burning. I sort of put my hand on her tummy, then slid it up around her boob, and she said, “Oh, you came for that!”

“Nope—no, no!” was about all I could get out before I jumped up ready to bolt for the door.

“Wait just a minute, honey. Did Jimmy Matherly put you up to this? He did, didn’t he?”

And with that, she proceeded to show me what it was all about. I’m telling ya, it pretty much took a stretcher to get my ass out of there. I thought that was the finest thing I’d had since black-eyed peas. I think she later told Jimmy that I got the lay of my life—like he never did!

The Allman Joys, 1966

Courtesy SATV

I
T WAS ONE OF THOSE DISMAL, COLD, RAINY
J
ACKSONVILLE DAYS
in 1965 when I took Duane down to the induction center. He’d been up all night, drunk as shit, and his plan was to try and convince them he was a sissy. He had the swish going, and he had on these panties that ran up his ass. There were all these red-necks there, with that “I wanna get me a gun and kill a Commie for mommy” attitude.

A lot of guys we knew were getting drafted and sent to Vietnam—seemed like more were getting their draft cards every day. The way it worked was, you’d go to this old, terrible three-story army building in Jacksonville, right down the street from the WAPE radio station. You reported in the morning, and then around noon they gave you a break and you got a box lunch. I had taken Duane up there in my mother’s car, and he came back out to the car at the break, and he was crying—that was something the average person never saw my brother do. He hardly ever cried, and if he did, he went off somewhere alone to do it.

This day, though, he was really crying, and he told me, “Baybrah, I can’t pull it off, man. They ain’t buying this shit at all.”

“Man, just be as brave as you can,” I told him, “and fuck those motherfuckers. No matter what, do not get on that fucking bus.”

“I know, I know,” he said, adding, “Shut up, you little know-it-all prick.”

“Well, I’m just trying to give you some kind of help here,” I said. “Just tell them to take their war and stick it in their ass, and we’ll deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”

He went back in there, and the officer in charge said to Duane, “What’s this panties shit?” The guy took them off of him, threw them over in the corner, and told my brother, “Put your fucking pants back on. You’re fine,” and he stamped my brother 1-A. Then he said, “Now go into the room over there. We’re gonna take an oath.”

This asshole in a little fucking Smokey the Bear hat tells my brother, “Hey, blondie—raise your right hand,” and Duane put his hand in his pocket. That guy started going off on my brother, telling him that he was going to spend the rest of his natural life in Leavenworth, busting rocks. They told him to go on home, and that the marshal would be by to pick him up.

Duane came back down to the car, and he looked drained, man—he wasn’t the same person.

“I’m going to jail, man.”

Just joking, I said to him, “Knowing you, they’ll lose your fucking card.”

Well, guess what? They lost his card. They never came after him, never called him, nothing. As far as the United States Army was concerned, my brother was no longer in existence.

A year later, they called me with my “greetings.” Things were just going right with the band, and of course, that’s when they called me up. Man, the bottom just dropped out for me. I went to my brother, and I said, “What am I going to do?”

“Well,” he said, “like you told me—just don’t go.”

“Man, I don’t think that works but once,” I said. “And besides, you still might get a letter tomorrow.”

Then it came to me: I decided to shoot myself in the foot. It seemed like the thing to do, and when I told my brother, he was in complete agreement.

“Yeah,” he said, “that might just work. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do—we’re gonna have a foot-shooting party. We’ll get a bunch of whiskey and have a bunch of women come over. We’ll get you good and fucked up, and then you can take care of business. You can do it out in the garage, and then we’ll take you on down to the hospital, and then over to the induction center. It’s gonna work out fine, bro.”

The fateful day arrived, and my brother invited a bunch of friends and told them that we were going to have a foot-shooting party. We put a big box full of sawdust out in the garage, and my brother turned to me.

“Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah, I’m ready,” I said.

Now, I wasn’t slobbering drunk yet, but I wasn’t feeling any pain either. Then something occurred to me and I got Duane’s attention.

“Hey, genius, we forgot something.”

“What?” he asked.

“A fucking pistol, man.”

“Oh shit.”

There was a silent moment, and all the girls were crying, and I realized, “This really is a foot-shooting party. Somebody is fixing to shoot themselves, and that somebody is me.”

Duane, Shepley, and I got in the car and headed over to “Spadetown,” as we called it, to get a pistol. It wasn’t a racial thing at all, because we loved it there—it was just the name that everybody used back then. They had the best barbecue over there, they had the cheapest gas, and they had the best records, so we loved to go over there.

Now, I know this sounds like a bullshit story, but it’s all true, every word of it. We stopped one guy on the street, and he said, “Can I help you?”

One of us asked him, “Hey, man, you know where we can get a Saturday night special?”

“Oh,” he responded, “it’s a
pistole
he wants! Well, maybe I do.”

“How much is it?” I asked.

“Well, how much do you got?” he replied.