By DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times
Gregg Allman’s close friends have always called him
Gregory. His brother, the guitarist Duane Allman, who died in a motorcycle
accident in 1971, called him “baybrah,” a contraction of “baby brother.”
MY CROSS TO BEAR
By Gregg Allman
With Alan Light. Illustrated. 390 pages. William Morrow.
$27.99.
But on tour in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the
heyday of the Allman Brothers Band, when he wrote songs like “Midnight
Rider,” “Melissa” and “Whipping Post,” Mr. Allman’s nickname was Coyotus
Maximus. Women threw themselves at him, and he devoured them. He didn’t have the
heart to turn many away.
One of the great virtues of “My Cross to Bear,” his
slightly better-than-average rock memoir, is how frank Mr. Allman is about the
perks of being a tall, blond, intricately bewhiskered white rock god in skinny
jeans who can bellow the blues like a black man. “Foxy ladies,” he recalls,
wheezily, “there was oodles of them.”
Mr. Allman’s book is so wriggling with amorous women
that it can resemble a Feydeau
farce performed mostly in panties. The band’s early road manager made a
chart with the legal age of consent in every state, and made sure each member
had a copy.
“I would have women in four or five different rooms,”
Mr. Allman says about hotels. “Mind you, I wouldn’t lie to anybody; I’d just
say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ ”
“My Cross to Bear” has a lot of absurd tour stories,
so many that you’re not surprised to learn that the Allman Brothers were, in no
small part, the inspiration for the band in Cameron Crowe’s excellent and fond
rock film, “Almost Famous.” These tales,
tall and small, have been untangled and crisply ironed by Mr. Allman’s
co-writer, the music journalist Alan Light (who often writes for The New York
Times).
Mr. Allman’s story, like his singing voice, has a lode
of heartbreak in it. When Mr. Allman was just 2, growing up in Nashville, his
father, a man who had stormed the beaches of Normandy during World
War II, was shot in the back and killed by a stranger to whom he’d offered a
ride home from a bar.
The death of his brother, Duane, was a bigger blow. A
year apart, they were best friends. They attended military school together, and
both learned to play guitar on a Silvertone that Gregg purchased for $21.95 at
Sears. Duane was the preternaturally talented one. In 2003 Rolling Stone
magazine voted him the second-best guitarist of all time, after only Jimi
Hendrix. One of their early bands, founded in 1965, was named the Allman Joys. A
few months earlier, Gregg Allman had dodged fighting in Vietnam by (a) studying
a foot chart; (b) getting drunk; (c) drawing a target on his moccasin; and (d)
blasting a hole in his foot with a shaky pistol. His aim was perfect.
When the musicians that became the Allman Brothers
came together, Mr. Allman wanted to call the band Beelzebub. Duane wanted to
name it after something trippy from “The Lord of the Rings.” Cooler heads
prevailed.
The band adopted an early mushroom logo, a reference
to the members’ early fondness for psychedelic mushrooms; these seriously
loosened up the creative process. “That music,” he writes, “would come oozing
out of our band.”
Duane Allman died just as the Allman Brothers’ third
album, “At Fillmore East,” was climbing the charts, putting them permanently on
the map. (They’d already recorded a bit of their classic 1972 LP, “Eat a
Peach.”) Mr. Allman is bereft that his brother missed most of the band’s ride.
“We were like Lewis and Clark, man — we were musical
adventurers, explorers,” he writes. “We were one for all and all for one.”
Not all of the comedy and excess in “Cross to Bear” is
sexual. When the band walked for the first time onto its biggest touring
airplane, a Boeing 720, someone had spelled out “Welcome Allman Bros” in cocaine
on the bar.
There’s comedy, too, for us, if not for Mr. Allman, in
watching him sign away the publishing rights to some of his own songs. This is
such a stalwart cliché of rock stardom that you wonder, how does anyone still
fall into this particular hole? It’s like watching the cute girl in the horror
movie decide to go down into the basement to see what that hideous thumping is.
There are good cameos by other musicians. Aretha
Franklin appears long enough to drop a five-gallon jug of pickled pigs’ feet on
a hotel lobby floor while wearing a mink coat. The musician Dr. John ruins Mr.
Allman’s Hammond organ by throwing handfuls of “this New Orleans voodoo stuff
called gris-gris” into it.
Mr. Allman fell in love with Cher, the third of his
six wives, to whom he was married from 1975 through 1979, because, he writes,
“she smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell.” I gather the sex was
O.K. too. “She was hot to trot, man,” Mr. Allman drawls, “and we made some
serious love.”
The author is aware that he is a difficult man, one
who has behaved at times like a jackass. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict
who finally got clean in the late 1990s. “Every now and then,” he admits, “I’ll
think of all the hell I caused other people over the years.”
One man he’s not interested in apologizing to is
Dickey Betts, the Allman Brothers’ mercurial longtime guitarist, who left the
band (or was fired, depending on whom you believe) in 2000. Mr. Allman and Mr.
Betts battled for control of the band after Duane Allman died, and bruised
feelings linger. “Dickey ain’t no devil,” Mr. Allman writes. “He’s just a
mixed-up guy.”
“Cross to Bear” has interesting things to say about
racism and being a Southern rock band in the 1970s. One of the group’s longtime
drummers, Jaimoe, is black, and together they’ve witnessed their share of racial
tension.
Mr. Allman has advice for musicians. The Allman
Brothers play loud, and he’s kept his hearing by staying stage right, which he
calls “out of the line of fire.” He’s learned to take care of his voice too. He
took notes when a mentor, the musician Floyd Miles, said to him: “When you know
you’re going to scream, you lay your head back, which spreads your vocal cords
real wide, and when the scream comes out, it barely nicks your vocal cords. You
don’t want to do too much of that, because there’s soft, tender meat down
there.” In 2010 Mr. Allman had a liver transplant. He has hepatitis C. He’s got
arthritis. These days the women mostly ask for Derek
Trucks, the Allman Brothers’ young ponytailed guitarist. But Mr. Allman
sounds at peace with himself.
“If I fell over dead right now,” he says, “I have led
some kind of life."
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