I was barely 18 and a few of the boys and I drove down to my Uncle's place in Myrtle Beach to play some golf and just get loose. We knew it would be difficult to score booze so we bought fifty cases of beer and loaded them in the back of a Ford Ranger pickup. Two boys were in that ride and the other two rode down in another friend's Jetta that would eventually be crashed at 65 miles per hour around a telephone pole on a road in Jersey. Miraculously the friend driving it at that time walked away from the accident drunk, waited it out at a diner and then headed back to the scene of the crime with no injuries and no ramifications from the law.
It was an excellent trip, one for the records, especially when we left South Carolina at midnight and drove down to Key West for another week without planning. I sang Karaoke at Rick's and we left with three older women who took us around town including "Teaser's" Strip club and eventually ended at "Barefoot Bob's" which was a Deadhead bar that was eventually closed down because of the drug trade they were operating out of the back room. We drove home from Key West straight back to NJ and dizzy with hangovers, lulled into the malaise of the night I remember locking up the brakes to a dead stop on 95 because I thought the reflectors in the middle of the road were headlights. The whole trip: an experience? You bet your ass.
One night I remember we were on The Strand in Myrtle Beach and wandered into a bar that accepted our fake IDs. We were slamming beers when this big hulk of a man came by and asked for a dip from a tin of Copenhagen that was on our table. He asked for a pinch and said he'd buy us a round. We gave it to him and then bought him a round. Back and forth we traded rounds until he and his group of equally massive men asked us to roll with them to another place where there was some "trim". These guys were all over six four and three hundred pounds, they were the O line from NC's football team and were in a mood to rage. We followed and rolled into this bar running the show with no consequences. No one was a problem with these boys and we certainly took advantage of the back we had.
Of course we went home alone and drunk to our cases of beer we had stashed in the fridge. As a group we had done Allman shows throughout high school. I'll never forget seeing my 15 year old sister shitfaced wandering though the crowd when I never knew she was even attending. I'll never forget walking out of the bathroom in jean, cowboy boots and a skin tight black t-shirt and this biker chick grabbing me to stick her tongue down my throat and telling me how hot I was....at seventeen this was a big deal.
But the music was the real reason we were there and while the Allman's setlists became banal over the years and one could usually expect what was going to be played there was this one time when they ripped out this gem and brought then entire house down.
Greg was sitting there at his Hammond B-3 organ with the three Solo cups atop, from what I was told by a roadie he would not step out on stage without them. Two cups were straight Vodka and the other was ice water. With his long hair flowing in the hot New Jersey night he laid down this track while we stood there on the lawn aghast at the phrasing and sincerity of a song about a bad woman and the ramifications of her and his departure.
Flash back to South Carolina and the post NC linemen at the bar activities. We slid out of a DUI on the drive back home and of course for some reason had our Awia machine installed at the residence, put that thing on Karaoke setting and my boy Bobby belted out this song. He drew out that first "Sat down and wrote you a long letter..." screaming it from the top of his lungs. We were dying of laughter and that sense that comes around so few times of the world being at one's fingertips. The cops were called and we talked our way out of it, we slammed more Shafers that were dripping with ice cold water from the cooler and sat out on the balcony with the muggy lowland humidity steaming up the windows dipping Copenhagen and bullshitting about what we were gonna do and how the world was going to bow at our fingertips.
I never knew what Gregg was singing about until I sat down and wrote her a long letter, and the one after that. I never knew that there were crosses to be borne and what the hell he was singing about when we screamed it that night before the cops came. But with time the blues speaks to you in ways that you never though possible.
In the end it was a trip of a lifetime and eventually we would all fall apart. The Allmans would as well, Dickey would leave as well as Warren Haynes. The way of the world it may be but it was a lot better before we were nailed to that cross and stepped through that door in the floor that is experience.
