Allman Bio is My Cross to Bear

Speaking for Cher fans, I can say this "My Cross to Bear" is an apropos title: Allman has indeed always been our Cher-fan's cross to bear.

So finally husband #2 writes a book. Goody. Sonny’s book was factually flawed and he was sober during the creation of it. I'm not holding out much hope for a pristine account of events.

Here are some Cher-related excerpts as reviewed by Susannah Cahalan:

In 1973, he met Cher at one of his shows. She was far from a fan, only ever having heard the song “Ramblin’ Man.”

Allman had a serious crush on the singer, “She smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell,” he writes.

[Damp and sea-weedy?]

He convinced a friend to ask her out for him by bribing him with the promise of a white Cadillac. She agreed.

After a terrible first date, when Allman took Cher to a fellow drug addict’s house and shot up in the bathroom, they hit it off on the second date when they went out dancing. She wore a thousand-dollar, beaded Bob Mackie that just covered her breasts.

After dancing all night, he accompanied her back to her 36-room mansion.

“She started ripping my f—ing clothes off,” he writes. “She was hot to trot, man, and we made some serious love.”

The relationship blossomed fast, even though his bandmates disliked the coupling. Over time, however, she won them over. 

[Like when she saved their pitiful finances by encouraging them to pay attention to where their income was going?]

“She had the filthiest mouth in show business, and the guys in the band thought she was quite a trip,” he writes.
 
All the while, Allman was thinly veiling his heroin addiction. Cher, whose own father was a drug addict, he writes, was “naive” about it. Then, in 1975, after two years of dating, Cher casually mentioned, “Well, listen — Mr. Harrah, who’s a good friend of mine, has sent us down his private jet. I was thinking we’d fly over to Vegas and get married.”

“Well, why not?” he replied.

It was rough sailing from the beginning. He continued to use behind her back, and both threatened to file for divorce during the first year of marriage (Cher actually did file four days after their wedding when she found his stash).

The band broke up in 1976, right after the birth of his son Elijah Blue, prompting people to call Cher the Allman Brothers Band’s Yoko Ono.

Living with Cher wasn’t easy, he writes. When he’d want to go out for a quiet dinner, there would almost always be “at least 35 f—ing photographers waiting for us when we got there,” implying Cher had called the paparazzi on herself.

But it wasn’t easy living with the moody, difficult and drug-addled Allman, either.

When Chaz Bono — then Chastity, Cher’s daughter who underwent a sex change in 2008 — was interviewed by Howard Stern recently, she explained how bizarre living with a rock-star drug addict was. “He picked me up from school once and got lost on the way home,” Chaz said.

But for Allman the last straw with Cher was about the music. “I was really glad she never asked me what I thought of her singing, because I’m sorry but she’s not a very good singer,” he writes.

Sigh. Where to begin? First of all, I’m willing to concede that Cher is not one of the greatest singers but to say that she’s not very good at all is to say she can’t sing. Which is disingenuous. Please decide, rock and roll elite, if unflawed singing is an important component or not. Because there are plenty of flawed singers in the pantheon. Secondly, Cher, please write a rebuttal bio to these husband-tale-alls!

Excerpts from:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/rock_and_hard_place_QuHeXgBSoHEbbDh93ux67L