Gregg Allman: The Road DOES Go On Forever
(CBS) "Melissa" was a big hit for the Allman Brothers Band back in 1972. These days, Gregg Allman is still performing, and still on tour. Chip Reid offers this Sunday Profile:
By now, the songs are like old friends.
After 42 years, more than 30 albums, and thousands of concerts, Gregg Allman never gets tired of singing them.
Reid asked Allman why he loves singing so much.
"It's like going to an analyst and just spilling your guts," he said. "You know, something that's been bugging you for a long time and you finally tell this person, 'Look, here's the way it is.'"
There’s no question the Allman Brothers - the bluesy, jam-band pioneers who all but invented Southern Rock - have earned a special place in rock history...
Now they have their own museum to prove it.
They call it "The Big House" - the ramshackle home in Macon, Ga., that the band shared for two magical years, from1970-72.
At the ribbon-cutting opening of the house full of memories, Gregg Allman said, "It looks a lot different than it did when I lived here."
"What did it look like then?" Reid asked.
"It looked like a bunch of hippies lived here, right?"
While Macon was the turning point, the band's journey began in Nashville, Tenn.
Gregory Lenoir Allman was born on Dec. 8, 1947, a year and 18 days after his brother Duane.
Tragedy struck early: Their father was murdered by a hitchhiker when Gregg was just 2. Big brother Duane had to fill the void.
"He knew just that much more than me," Gregg said, "and if we’d lived to be 95 and 96, I’d still be 'little brother.'"
But it was Gregg who first discovered music, when as a 9-year-old he saw a neighbor with a guitar.
"I said, 'What you got here, Jimmy?' He said, 'Well, it's a guitar, boy!'" Gregg laughed. "And he played 'She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain.'"
"So did you fall in love with the guitar the first time you saw it sitting there?" Reid asked.
"Yeah, I did. I did. It was like sparks flying, it was," he said.
Gregg taught Duane, who quickly became a virtuoso. They played together until 1969 when Duane assembled what would become the Allman Brothers Band. Gregg was reluctant to sign on - having already been accepted into college to be a dental surgeon.
"My brother said, 'We gotta go out here and tear up the roads a while,' you know?" Gregg laughed. "I said, 'I'll tell you what, I'll go out there for two years. And I'm going on back to med school.' Well, I got out there, the two years I was so far in debt, man, I had to stay."
In debt, perhaps, but along the way Gregg found he had a gift for song-writing, such as "Melissa," written in 1967 with Steve Alaimo.
Crossroads seem to come and go, yeah.
The gypsy flies from coast to coast
Knowing many, loving none
Bearing sorrow, havin' fun
But back home he'll always run . . . to sweet Melissa.
Was there a Melissa, Allman was asked.
"No," he told Reid. "It was a person that I had dreamed up, and I had everything in the song written but the title. And I got, 'But back home I’ll always run with sweet Barbara . . .' 'With sweet Mary Jo. . . '
Allman laughed, "I was flabbergasted, you know?"
Inspiration came to him in, of all places, a grocery store.
"I was the only one in the store, except for this one Spanish lady and she had this little toddler with her," Allman said. "She was everywhere. And one time, she just took off down this one aisle, and the lady just freaked out. And she went, 'Oh, Melissa, Melissa come back!'"
"And I went, 'Oh! (snap) Lady, I could kiss 'ya," he laughed. "'Mlissa,' that's it!"
The band released 2 albums, gaining little attention until 1971, when they recorded a performance at New York’s legendary Fillmore East.
The album "At Fillmore East" (featuring "Whipping Post") was a sensation. To this day it is considered one of the greatest live albums of all times.
Their wildest dreams had come true. But just 3 months later, it all came crashing down..
On Oct. 29, 1971, Duane Allman was riding his motorcycle down Hillcrest Avenue in Macon, when a truck turned in front of him.
"He had two speeds, man - hundred, and parked," Gregg laughed.
Gregg will never forget the phone call: "I hung up the phone and I just ran down the hill to the hospital. And there's a guy there meeting me. And he takes me into the chapel. And I knew it right then: Oh no," he said.
Duane Allman was dead at 24. Thirty years later, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as the second greatest guitarist of all time.
The band carried on, with guitarist Dickey Betts shouldering more of the load.
But with his long blond hair and gritty, soulful voice, Gregg got most of the attention.
Sat down, wrote you a long letter,
Lord it seems just like the other day,
Said sure as the sunrise, baby,
Tomorrow I'll be up and on my way.
But I'll live on and try and be strong
'Cause it just ain't my cross to bear
("It's Not My Cross to Bear")
More than he bargained for, after his high-profile marriage in 1975 to Cher.
"I remember going to the grocery store and just seeing my face everywhere," Gregg recalled. "And I'm like, 'What is happening, you know?' She said, 'I told you this would happen!' Yeah, she warned me."
They were married for four years.
"There's still a friendship and a mutual respect there?" Reid asked.
"Yeah. I mean, we have a kid together and, you know, she's just - she's good people anyway.
There were a number of successful solo albums. And after breaking up, the Allman Brothers Band reformed in 1989.
These are good times for Gregg Allman, who said he loves living in the South. "It’s peaceful, it’s real quiet," he said. "If you’re born here, you never want to leave it."
Last year he underwent a successful liver transplant, and this week he’s releasing his first solo album in 14 years, "Low Country Blues."
At age 63 he’s back on tour.
It seems the man who first sang "The Road Goes On Forever" more than four decades ago wasn’t too far off.
"So, you're going to do it until you just can't do it anymore?" Reid asked.
"Oh, yeah!" Gregg chuckled. "Till they have to take my ass out there on a stretcher!"
Gregg Allman has lived the blues many times over
NEW YORK — Gregg Allman has earned the torment in his singing voice to a degree that's ridiculous even for a bluesman. Tragic deaths of family members and bandmates, drug and alcohol addiction and much more have seared his soul over 63 years.
Yet when he softly recounts his most recent torture, a liver transplant in June after a battle with hepatitis C, he punctuates it with a Southern-inflected half-chuckle that's endearing.
"It's the roughest thing I've ever been through," says the lead vocalist/organist of Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Allman Brothers Band. "I've been in military school, through six divorces, heh-heh — this is worse than all that."
The decision to seek a transplant was made soon after he had been cajoled into the recording studio last January to make his first solo album in 14 years, Low Country Blues, out Tuesday. Allman's reluctance (he'd last been in a studio in 2003, with the Allman Brothers) had stemmed from the death in 2002 of legendary producer Tom Dowd, who had guided Allman to most of his greatest successes. "It hit me hard. When recording would raise its ugly head, I would roll over and play dead."
But in 2009, Allman's manager lured him to Memphis to meet with 10-time Grammy-winning producer T Bone Burnett.
"I swear to God I had never heard of him," Allman says. "Has it ever struck you that the East Coast (Allman lives in Georgia) and West Coast (Burnett is based in L.A.) are shamefully divided?"
The two clicked. Allman says he was taken with a Burnett project to replicate Sun Studios at his home ("that was the hippest thing I had ever heard") and with Burnett's admiration for Dowd.
Says Burnett: "The place where we could relate most profoundly was in the blues. I didn't know how good a blues singer he was. He hasn't lost a thing — it just gets better with age."
The producer envisioned an album of lesser-known blues and R&B covers from artists who had inspired Allman, and gave him hundreds to sort through. The deal was almost scotched when Burnett insisted on using musicians other than Allman's touring band. "I almost slammed the door on him," he says. "I'm so glad I didn't. But that's two clicks from being an insult, you know?"
Allman softened when he saw that Burnett had assembled top-flight session veterans, including guitarist Doyle Bramhall II and Dennis Crouch on upright bass. Burnett sweetened the deal by bringing in longtime Allman friend Dr. John (Mac Rebennack).
"This is special," Rebennack says. "Gregg had been through health problems. And Duane (Allman's beloved guitar-legend sibling, who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971) had asked me to look out for his little brother, like he knew something maybe would happen."
Many of the songs Allman chose mirror themes in his life, most notably a harrowing Sleepy John Estes tune about a man who is rescued from drowning and considers mending his ways. "Floating Bridge definitely points to my life," Allman says. "It hits one of your sympathetic strings."
Knowing he had a solid album in the can gave him strength the past six months to recover from the transplant of his cancerous liver. "It did, it really did," he says. "Let me tell you, they put me through some pain."
He likens it to kicking his addictions in the mid-'90s. "Not as time-consuming, but as rough. I just kept saying and praying, 'This, too, will pass.' "
By October, he was playing solo dates and a few guest spots, including duets with Neko Case on Midnight Rider during Burnett's Speaking Clock Revue, and he's preparing for the Allman Brothers Band's annual March residency at New York's Beacon Theater. He'll play some festivals with his solo band (including Bonnaroo and New Orleans Jazz Fest) this summer and fulfill a few commitments with the Brothers, now in their 42nd year.
Though he wonders "how long the band will last," given the members' various side projects, he hopes for another studio album. "You've got to take care of the Brothers."
