I was given Gregg Allman’s book My Cross To Bear for Father’s Day and finished it a few days ago. I saw him interviewed on The Colbert Report and like a lot of Sixties rock stars he’s one hell of a character. Old rock stars aren’t like other people, they become caricatures of themselves, distilled down to their individual essence. It must be this uniqueness of personality and of the ability to express it that makes their music so appealing. If they were like everybody else they wouldn’t be stars.
Gregg Allman has had quite a life with five children from five different women and five wives, not necessarily the same women as the baby mothers, and a liver transplant due to Hep C he blames on an early tattoo. Of course there is the drug and alcohol problems, the overdoses and the personal and professional hell those problems cause and a shocking number of suicides. His brother Duane and Allman Brother Band bassist Berry Oakley both died young from motorcycle accidents and their road manager killed a promoter who stiffed the band before he killed himself, much later in a skydiving “accident”.
He had some real tough times but when you stop and consider that the Allman Brothers Band never really became obsolete or passé and he always had a way to generate a living it becomes clear that almost all of the bad parts of his life were caused directly by his own decisions.
I guess if when I was in my early twenties I suddenly became rich, had beautiful women throwing themselves at me, traveled the country with my friends and had people giving me free dope all the time I would have developed a very strange sense of reality. Actually, except for the free and easy access of all those things, I kind of did have that reality, just not enough to write about. Obviously.
Gregg Allman has had quite a life with five children from five different women and five wives, not necessarily the same women as the baby mothers, and a liver transplant due to Hep C he blames on an early tattoo. Of course there is the drug and alcohol problems, the overdoses and the personal and professional hell those problems cause and a shocking number of suicides. His brother Duane and Allman Brother Band bassist Berry Oakley both died young from motorcycle accidents and their road manager killed a promoter who stiffed the band before he killed himself, much later in a skydiving “accident”.
He had some real tough times but when you stop and consider that the Allman Brothers Band never really became obsolete or passé and he always had a way to generate a living it becomes clear that almost all of the bad parts of his life were caused directly by his own decisions.
I guess if when I was in my early twenties I suddenly became rich, had beautiful women throwing themselves at me, traveled the country with my friends and had people giving me free dope all the time I would have developed a very strange sense of reality. Actually, except for the free and easy access of all those things, I kind of did have that reality, just not enough to write about. Obviously.
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