Gregg Allman (third from left) with brother Duane and band in 1969; and Gregg with Cher in 1975 (opposite). (GETTY IMAGES)
My Cross to Bear
by Gregg Allman
with Alan Light
William Morrow
Rock stars, they’re sad, lonely and pathetic — just like us!
The recent glut of rock ’n’ roll memoirs have titles like “How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It” (David Crosby), “It’s So Easy: And Other Lies” (Duff McKagan) and “My Journey Through Heaven and Hell” (Tony Iommi).
The latest entry is Gregg Allman, with the depressing title “My Cross to Bear” (an inversion of his song “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” released in 1969).
Life was tough for the “Ramblin’ Man.” There’s the murder of his father, the tragic death of his brother and bandmate Duane Allman, his ill-fated marriage to Cher (and four other divorces), the time he helped put his own roadie away for selling drugs to him, his struggle with hepatitis C and the subsequent liver transplant.
Allman begins the book with the induction of the Allman Brothers Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
“I felt nothing. I had just won the highest award there is in my profession, and I didn’t give a damn. I just wanted another drink,” he writes.
Allman was so drunk that he flubbed his acceptance speech and slurred through the song “One Way Out.” (Though given how much he drank, he did a pretty kicking job. Check out the YouTube clip.)
Gregg Allman was born Dec. 8, 1947 in Nashville, Tenn. His older brother Duane was born a year and 18 days before him. The day after Christmas 1949, his father was gunned down in cold blood by a hitchhiker. From there on out, Duane became the surrogate father figure.
“He was my hero, even while he was beating me,” Allman writes.
Though it was Gregg who bought his first guitar with pocket change at a local Sears, it was his brother who mastered the instrument. Duane then also came up with the idea of forming a band.
They called themselves the Misfits, the Escorts, the Allman Joys and then Hour Glass, and they stuck mainly to covers of blues and R&B hits.
The brothers were momentarily estranged as Gregg stayed in Los Angeles with another band and Duane went off to pursue a career as a studio musician. But in 1969, Gregg got a life-changing call from his older brother, inviting him to front his band in Florida.
This was the creation of the Allman Brothers Band as we know it now, with Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe. Their unique sound — with two drummers and two guitarists — coined that bluesy, laid-back Southern sound that would inspire many future acts.
Gregg settled in fast, playing keyboards and writing “Whipping Post,” “Black Hearted Woman” and “Every Hungry Woman” shortly after he joined the band.
Within less than two years, during their second album “Idlewild South” and relocation to Macon, Georgia, the Allman Brothers Band hit it big with concertgoers — selling out arenas like the Fillmore East in the East Village (a live album of one of their shows would become one of the band’s best-selling albums).
Meanwhile, Duane was making inroads with other famous musicians and even laid down the guitar track for Eric Clapton’s hit “Layla.”
But this would all come crashing down on Oct. 29, 1971 when Duane suffered massive head injuries in a motorcycle crash, dying at 24.
“When people talk about him, all they remember is the good stuff. Well, there was some s–t parts to my brother as well,” Gregg Allman writes. “I looked at him like Merlin the Magician because he had so much charisma. He had his weaknesses too, but I had the deepest, closest personal relationship with him I’ve ever had with anyone.”
Though Duane’s death signaled the beginning of a drawn-out end for the Allman Brothers Band, the band members penchant for heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs had already harkened their downfall. And this only worsened after the band lost its leader.
“The only thing that would stop these thoughts from racing through my head was heroin. Heroin would bring me some peace from my thoughts,” Allman writes.
The band released the album “Eat a Peach” in 1972 — the last album to feature Duane’s characteristic slide guitar, and their first album to hit gold.
Later that year, bass player Oakley crashed his own motorcycle bizarrely just three blocks from where Duane had wrecked, suffering head injuries and eventually succumbing to a lethal brain hemorrhage.
The remaining members of the band followed up with their fifth album “Brothers and Sisters” in 1973 that had their biggest single to date “Ramblin’ Man.”
Though they were doing well commercially, the band was falling apart from infighting and drug use.
In 1976, Allman’s roadie Scooter Herring — whose primary job was supplying Allman with drugs — was arrested for distribution. Allman was called by the prosecutor to testify against his friend and colleague.
“F— me, man — I didn’t have no choice,” he writes.
Based on Allman’s testimony, his roadie was sentenced to 75 years in prison for supplying Allman with a half-gram of cocaine a day (according to Allman, he only served 18 months). The judge allegedly remarked that it was Allman who should be facing prison.
Allman became a pariah in the rock world. People hurled insults at him, and Jerry Garcia even referred to him as “narc.”
Allman took refuge in a deluge of women (another drug for the singer). He slept around pathologically — after a gig he would have women in four or five different rooms at the same time — earning the nickname “Coyotus Maximus.” The sleeping around earned him other things: gonorrhea, for one.
In 1973, he met Cher at one of his shows. She was far from a fan, only ever having heard the song “Ramblin’ Man.”
Allman had a serious crush on the singer,
“She smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell,” he writes.
He convinced a friend to ask her out for him by bribing him with the promise of a white Cadillac. She agreed.
After a terrible first date, when Allman took Cher to a fellow drug addict’s house and shot up in the bathroom, they hit it off on the second date when they went out dancing. She wore a thousand-dollar, beaded Bob Mackie that just covered her breasts.
After dancing all night, he accompanied her back to her 36-room mansion.
“She started ripping my f—ing clothes off,” he writes. “She was hot to trot, man, and we made some serious love.”
The relationship blossomed fast, even though his bandmates disliked the coupling. Over time, however, she won them over.
“She had the filthiest mouth in show business, and the guys in the band thought she was quite a trip,” he writes.
All the while, Allman was thinly veiling his heroin addiction. Cher, whose own father was a drug addict, he writes, was “naive” about it. Then, in 1975, after two years of dating, Cher casually mentioned, “Well, listen — Mr. Harrah, who’s a good friend of mine, has sent us down his private jet. I was thinking we’d fly over to Vegas and get married.”
“Well, why not?” he replied.
It was rough sailing from the beginning. He continued to use behind her back, and both threatened to file for divorce during the first year of marriage (Cher actually did file four days after their wedding when she found his stash).
The band broke up in 1976, right after the birth of his son Elijah Blue, prompting people to call Cher the Allman Brothers Band’s Yoko Ono.
Living with Cher wasn’t easy, he writes. When he’d want to go out for a quiet dinner, there would almost always be “at least 35 f—ing photographers waiting for us when we got there,” implying Cher had called the paparazzi on herself.
But it wasn’t easy living with the moody, difficult and drug-addled Allman, either.
When Chaz Bono — then Chastity, Cher’s daughter who underwent a sex change in 2008 — was interviewed by Howard Stern recently, she explained how bizarre living with a rock-star drug addict was. “He picked me up from school once and got lost on the way home,” Chaz said.
But for Allman the last straw with Cher was about the music. “I was really glad she never asked me what I thought of her singing, because I’m sorry but she’s not a very good singer,” he writes.
The year the couple split, the Allman Brothers Band reunited in 1979 with several new members.
But the 1980s wasn’t kind to the aging hippie rockers — synthesizers and electronic music was edging out hard rock.
“I was just too drunk most of the time to care,” he writes. “I was drinking a minimum of a fifth of vodka a day.”
He indulged in dangerous drug and alcohol binges until that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995. After he saw a video of himself, he agreed to get sober and has been clean since.
He has continued touring on-and-off with what remains of the Allman Brothers Band.
In 2007, years of mistreating his body caught up to him when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which he says was due to his extensive tattoos. In 2010, he had a liver transplant.
But don’t count the singer out for good. Despite increasing health issues, Allman released a critically acclaimed album “Low Country Blues” produced by T. Bone Burnett in 2011.
He’s the “Ramblin’ Man” — he might be down, but he’s still not out.