Book Review: Gregg Allman, My Cross To Bear

So it’s 1988, I’m twenty-one, summertime’s in full humid swing in rural (back then) Illinois and my buddies and I, home from college, are shooting pool at the Penny Road Pub, situated all by its lonesome on a back road that runs through a forest preserve about  fifty miles northwest of Chicago.  Though a “foofy” club today, in ’88 Ronnie Ray-guns is in the White House and our hangout of choice is a true biker bar.  A row of pristinely maintained and noise-enhanced Harleys adorned with black leather studded saddle bags line the dimly-lit parking lot.  Plastic pitchers of cheap beer slide across the weathered bar as darts fly through the air (so does the occasional fist as my crooked nose can attest).  The backdrop soundtrack resonating from the jukebox of this dive bar is the signature electric guitar power A5, G5, D5 chords and variations thereof that are the hallmarks of Southern Rock and its missionaries: Molly Hatchet, .38 Special, Charlie Daniels, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, and the father of them all, The Allman Brothers Band.  This is the sound of my young adulthood…a foot-stompin’, beer swillin’ blue- jeans and T-shirt wearin’ concoction of black Delta blues, Gospel, country twang and heavy metal all cuisinarted into a uniquely American music.  Of all its pioneers, it was the Allman brothers—Duane and baby bro’ Gregg—who are most responsible for unleashing their unique genre upon a USA thirsty for a sound all its own.  What the Allmans and others created was a vehicle through which we could recapture the pentatonic-based blues that the British artists of the 1960s brilliantly electrified, refined and exported back to us.  Southern Rock was our reflexive response to The Rolling Stones, Cream, The Who, Led Zeppelin and others.

I offer this preamble only to give you a flavor for why I felt compelled to pick up the autobiography of the afore mentioned Gregg Allman called My Cross To Bear.  Allman’s 2012 memoir (I get to them when I can) is penned in a style more akin to telling a story over a beer at the kitchen table, complete with the country boy vernacular and profanity.  It is a no holds barred reflection of a life replete with the ups of musical triumph, the downs of terrible personal tragedy and addictions, while having a front row seat to the genesis and then explosion of the phenomenon of Southern Rock.  (This is a term Allman himself derides as he feels each band is unique, but you know it when you hear it.)

He was born on December 8, 1947 in Nashville, TN, the second son in thirteen months to parents Willis and Geraldine (his mom is still alive as of the book’s publication).  Tragedy struck early.  When Gregg was just two his father was murdered by a casual acquaintance to whom he’d offered a ride.  The older Duane then stepped in as a father figure and mentor and it is clear that to this day his kid brother dearly misses him: “He knew that much more than me.  If we had lived to be 96 and 95 I would still be ‘baby brother’.”

While in his early teens, Gregg picked up a guitar and fell in love with music; he soon discovered he had a gift for composition. His older brother picked up the guitar soon after, and while Gregg was good, Duane would go on become an exalted guitar god, at one point ranked #2 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 100 list of greatest guitarists of all time, second only to Jimi Hendrix. 

By high school Gregg had developed a fascination for the Hammond organ.  Duane, whose guitar prowess and passion for music couldn’t be contained, dropped out of school in 10th grade while Gregg practiced keyboards/vocals and graduated high school.  Although he planned to become a dental surgeon, Gregg fell in with his brother’s plans that they should become musicians, intending to go to dental school after a short while; it never happened.

They then toured the deep South as The Allman Joys, landing a recording deal in the late 1960s with Liberty Records.  They moved to LA and were re-packaged as The Hour Glass.  Unsatisfied with the label’s control, The Hour Glass disbanded and the brothers returned to Florida but Gregg went back to LA to fulfill contractual obligations to Liberty.

After landing a spot as a session musician at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Duane assembled what would become his eponymous band.  But he needed a singer.  In March 1969, he called his “bay-brah” who left LA behind to join up and The Allman Brothers Band was born.

Though based out of Macon, Georgia, The Allman Brothers Band tore up the road playing over 300 shows  in 1970 including famous gigs at the Fillmore East and West—yet earning so little money Gregg had nary a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out.  “I’d lie in bed at night wondering…was this whole thing going to blow up in our face?”  But the band’s musical virtuosity and unique blues/rock/country fusion sound earned them the reputation as the one to see.  Their first studio album flopped, but Live At The Fillmore East released in July 1971 launched them to superstardom and is a standard against which live albums are judged to this day. 

Then Gregg’s world caved in.

Just three months later, on October 29, 1971, Duane Allman, the young prince of Southern Rock, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Macon.  He was 24. Though devastated Gregg decided the band should soldier on or “none of us would amount to anything.”  They released the break-out hybrid studio and live album Eat A Peach with some Duane tracks still on it then the hugely successful Brothers And Sisters.   Then tragedy hit him again while recording the latter when, just thirteen months after Duane, bassist Berry Oakley was also killed—also on a motorcycle and  just a few blocks from where Duane died.  Still Allman’s band struggled on. 

In his book Gregg relays in candid detail his emotional turmoil as the band struggled to continue and record, his decades of heavy drug use and alcoholism, his many trips in and out of rehab, near deaths by overdose, federal drug charges against a one-time manager and his growing estrangement with guitarist Dickey Betts who was coming into his own and asserting band control having written and/or sung on some of their biggest hits like “Ramblin’ Man” “Jessica” and “Blue Sky”.   Their personality clash would tear the original band apart.  (Betts’ drug use and irascibleness would eventually get him booted out of the ABB permanently in 2000.) 

His book is intimate and personal and he holds nothing back.  In the span of his raucous life Allman reflects on having been married—and divorced—eight times producing five children about whom he writes with genuine fatherly love and seems to keep close in his life.  His most famous marriage was, of course, to Cher in 1975 which lasted four years and produced son Elijah. 

Like many rock icon memoirs, Allman’s recollections of interactions present to the reader a  laundry list of the some of the most famous artists of their day.  Just pull up any list of blues/rock legends over the past forty years and the odds are they crossed paths with Gregg Allman.  His has been a prolific career no doubt.

The book’s prologue is what hooked me in.   He takes us back to 1995 the week The Allman Brothers Band was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.  He admits that he was so blind drunk that he could barely speak clearly enough to accept the award and offer his terse tribute to his brother.  (Youtube it.  It is, to use his own word, pathetic.)  “You are better than this,” he said to himself.  He headed off to his eleventh and last stint in rehab and has been clean ever since. And he has re-discovered his Christian faith, as many a wayward soul will do when the empty promises of superficial stardom and all its vile temptations are exhausted, leaving one hollow inside.

But the hard rock life runs a hefty tab on the body and will eventually present the bill.   Allman’s check arrived in 2007 in the form of Hepatitis C which he attributes in the book to a dirty tattoo needle.   In June 2010 he underwent a successful liver transplant.  He’s touring again now.  You just can’t keep the man down.

All in all, My Cross To Bear is a fascinating read as Gregg Allman has lived the life of several men, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows the world can hurl at you.  Like other aging rockers who outlived so many of their contemporaries, he is a survivor. When in 2012 the ABB received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award the exhausting quest that Duane sent him on so long ago seemed to be fulfilled.   Indeed, Allman’s book is a 378-page monument to staying power.  “I think I am proudest of the way the Brothers hung in there during the hard times,” he reflects.  Allman’s character, which was always in there somewhere at the core when you strip away the sex, drugs and rock and roll, was what kept fire burning even in his darkest nights, of which there were many.  I think it helps to be a genuinely nice guy. 

So I neared the final sentence of the final chapter of My Cross To Bear and found myself wondering, as many mid-forties men do when all alone with only our thoughts, what could have been for me.  What if I had taken my music seriously in my teens?  What if instead of grooving  to “Midnight Rider” or “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” or “Whippin’ Post” while shooting pool and chugging watered-down beer at the Penny Road Pub, trying not to make eye contact with the Outlaws motorcycle gangster at the bar sneering at us and pounding shots of Jack, I was in a studio trying to make my own mark?  Hell, I could feel my head nodding in furious assent as I read what could be Gregg Allman’s epitaph: “Music is my life’s blood.  I love music, I love to play good music, and I love to play music for people who appreciate it. And when it’s all said and done I’ll go to my grave and my brother will greet me saying: ‘Nice work little brother—you did alright.’”

But before I find myself wondering too hard over what might have been, in his parting words Gregg Allman offers a clue as to the heavy costs incurred by the rock star life: “If I died today I’ve had me a blast. I really mean that—If I fell over dead right now, I have led some kind of life.  I wouldn’t trade it for nobody’s.”  But then he candidly admits: “But I don’t know if I’d do it again.  If somebeody offered me a second round, I think I’d have to pass on it.”  

Yeah, one round of Gregg Allman’s life is enough for any man. 

                             ___________

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6up076lSH8

Check out this performance of "Whipping Post" from Live At The Fillmore East, September 23 1970

Gregg Allman - Vocals, Hammond Organ

Duane Allman - Guitar

Dickey Betts - Guitar

Berry Oakley - Bass

Jai "Jaimoe" Johanson - Drums

Butch Trucks - Drums