My thought when I was going to read this book was to learn about the Allman Brothers. Being that they were a southern rock band, I thought at the very least that I would hear stories about Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels, or my favorite southern rock band, The Outlaws. None of that happened. It was one of the many reasons that I was disappointed in this book.
Much of the book was nothing more than Greg rambling with various quick stories about himself and his life with The Allman Brothers. The book would get off to a sad start when I learned that his father was killed by a mugger. Years later, the man who killed Greg Allman’s brother was in jail when he found out that he was th eone who killed his father. He asked for forgiveness but never got it from Greg.
As you can expect, there were some stories about Allman’s life with drugs and some groupies. In one example, he was in bed with one of the groupies when someone broke into the house and stole a lot of things while Greg and the woman were in the bedroom. Onde the man was out of the house, they couple decided to resume having sex before calling the police later on that night.
Yes, there were some stories about some other popular rock bands. In one case, Allman was with John Densmore’s girlfriend at her house when Densmore, Krieger, and Morrison appeared at the door. The funny part of the story was that Densmore thought that Greg Allman was the houssitter.
Greg would also share some thoughts about the Grateful Deaad. Bascially, both of them said that they didn’t get their music and that all the people do in the audience is get drunk or high or both and then do a Grateful Dead waltz which would mean spinning around while lsitening to their music in concert. I saw an old interview in Rolling Stone and when the writer asked Allman about this, he said that he didn’t want to talk about it and to stop brining it up.
The rambling continued throughout the story. Greg was married five times and he talked about Cher for maybe five pages. Again, just his thoughts on their marriage as well as how he talked about his other wives as well as his bout with cancer.
If there was ont good thing that came out about this book, it was Greg Allman’s thoughts on racism. Early on, he was performing in the deep south in the early 60’s and he met a lot of people who were racist. His feelings wer ethat he didn’t get it and he didn’t like it even when his mother made remarks about African Americans. Allman also liked Martin Luther King JR. so much that he wrote a song about him after he was killed.
With all that said, I would say that thsi book rambled from Chapter to Chapter just like their hit Rambling Man. All in all, this was not a very good book and that’s the reason I would give it 2 stars.
Ron Hummer
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