cause we didn’t like him, it was like he would ride and he would yell all the way to the gig. Like we’d drive from Tuscaloosa all the way to Auburn to play frat parties and he would take his car and nobody would ride with him down there. He’d yell the whole way.
Getting his throat right. He said, “I’m trying to get my voice right for tonight. I want to sound hoarse for tonight.”
Yeah, yeah. And it worked. All that screaming for all those years paid off I reckon.
One of the guys that played with him or from that era told me that they came up, the first time they met him, they came up and he was barking. He was in the parking lot of the studio barking like a dog and screaming and every- thing else and they thought he was crazy! And he was! (Both laugh) Harmless, but he was a little strange. He got . . . Eddie got real strange in the last several years of his life, he really did.
Yeah? Yeah.
I mean, all I’ve got to go by is videos and sto- ries and I got that video that John Wyker’s wife shot of Johnny and Eddie when Wyker had on all this makeup and everything and they were playing a guitar they borrowed from a music store because it had a price tag hanging off of the bas,s and Eddie was sitting there singing and even on that video he sounded like a million bucks but he looked like, his eyes looked like somebody that would cut you in half if you turned the wrong way.
He was medicated. He was highly med- icated during those years but musi- cally, he was all there.
Yeah, it’s amazing! Energy-wise was questionable, but musically, he was there. And of all things, Johnny Wyker was his manager! (Laughing)
Yeah, I mean, I loved ole John, he had some of the greatest . . .he called ‘em “cat tails,” all these stories that he’d tell, a lot of them were about Sailcat or Eddie, things that Eddie would do. Talking about being down at the Uni- versity of Alabama, some time they were on the football field and Eddie was running in these wing-tip shoes and just running like, he said, faster than any football player that ever went down there, just running. He said he just never knew what he was going to do at the last minute, you know. I wanna go for a run in my wing-tip shoes. Yep. (Laughs)
Okay, why not? Well, moving on, everyone knows that one of your big claims to fame was Hourglass with Duane and Gregg Allman. Just touch on that a little bit, how you hooked up with those brothers. Well, the Men-Its, we were friends with the Allman Joys, Duane and Gregg and they were trying to convince us we needed to go on the road, that life on the road was the next thing to Heaven - and they were lyin’ like a dog!
Yeah they were. It was Heaven when you were 18 years old like they were but…
It turned into that other place later. We signed up with their same booking agency out of Nashville and they sent us out on the road on the “Starvation Tour” and we were playing the same clubs and all that the All- man Joys were playing and so each band fol- lowed each other throughout the Southeast
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