CHER AND GREGG ALLMAN SEPTEMBER 8 1975

It is 5 a.m. and crickets drone in the dark Georgia pines. Candles flicker inside the spacious living room. The Chivas Regal is passed back and forth between the two young men, and then a big acoustic six-string Guild. Dicky Betts, lead guitarist of the Allman Brothers Band, picks out a country tune, and he and Gregg Allman harmonize on the lonely lyrics, drinking Scotch, grinning like schoolboys, as serene and hopeful as the coming dawn. For the moody, intense Allman, it is a rare moment between his band's grueling 25-city tour beginning this week and the emotional pummeling that followed his marriage to and publicized separation from Cher Bono. But have they really split? Gregg and Cher were together in Buffalo, and then again in New York City last week. Cher's delicate face had erupted into a moonscape of zits, threatening the scheduled tapings of her TV show, and she was consulting dermatologists. In order to remain by her side, Gregg delayed his return to the homestead in Macon, Ga. where his band nervously waited to rehearse for their opening concert in the 80,000-seat New Orleans Superdome. This is the strangely troubled band's first tour in more than a year, timed to hype their first new LP (Win, Lose or Draw) in more than two. Together the events signal the return of what is arguably the premiere rock band in America—and certainly among the most influential, with its unique southern-rock sound powered by Allman's growling vocals and twin guitar licks. As the group's lead vocalist, organist, composer and surviving Allman brother, Gregg is clearly the egalitarian group's mainstay. Keeping the band together has been a personal triumph for the 26-year-old. He did so against harrowing odds. In 1971, Gregg's older brother, Duane, the laid-back mover of the group and a guitar virtuoso, was killed on a motorcycle in Macon. Almost exactly a year later, eerily, the band's bassist, Berry Oakley, was also killed, also on a motorcycle, just a block away. Gregg was shattered by their deaths, and even today his voice thickens when he talks about Duane as "an incredible genius. I really dug him." Gregg wasted away to 125 pounds, down from 197, and found himself in a long nightmare. "I was a heroin addict for two years," he now admits, and the experience embittered him. "There are cats out there who are gonna hit on anybody with a guitar strapped around his arm. The guy says, 'Hey, baby, you wanna buy? Just poke some of this into your arm, or up your nose, or anywhere, and it'll feel better.' It was like a cat in my body. His air is used up, and his claws are out. And he's running around inside trying to get out. Then, bam, the old spike goes in and you can almost see the cat go to sleep at the bottom of your foot. But you know he'll wake up and try to get out again." Allman pauses, and then adds through clenched teeth, "But I beat it." The victory came when he was hospitalized last year in a private methadone program. His memory of the years of addiction is mercifully vague. "It's not that I want to forget," he observes, "it's just that I can't remember." What keeps him straight now, Gregg says, is his "beautiful butterfly" Cher. "She's helped me out of it," he explains. "There is a cure for heroin. It just takes somebody loving enough." Allman says, "The Cher you see on TV and the Cher I know are two different people." She was not yet a famous face in the crowd when he and Duane first saw her nearly a decade ago in L.A.'s Whiskey A Go-Go. "We were in the house band," Gregg recalls. "One night this woman in a leather beaded dress walks in with a short guy with a cigar. I turned to Duane and said, 'Isn't that the most beautiful woman you ever saw?' He said, 'Man, I hope someday you have what it takes to deserve a woman like that.' " Gregg's first two marriages floundered—"they had nothing in mind but fame and money." All along, like a lovestruck sophomore, he had been buying Cher's LPs. Even though Gregg "had just about lost faith in women," a friend finally introduced him to Cher at the Troubadour in L.A. late in 1974. She was then keeping company with record impresario David Geffen, but five weeks later Gregg had moved into Cher's heart and her Holmby Hills mansion. It is not instantly clear what she saw in this zonked-out kid 19 months her junior. Their union was an unlikely meld of prime time and road fever; even their musical styles are radically different. But for all his Georgia red-clay posturings, Gregg is actually a brain who was first in his class two years running at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tenn. He played linebacker on the football team, pumped iron as a championship weight-lifter and still boasts that he could do 17 one-arm push-ups. Gregg and Duane's father died when the boys were young (he was murdered by a hitchhiker, the first of the traumatic shocks of Gregg's life) and their mother eventually moved the family from Tennessee to Daytona Beach, Fla. Duane got a motorcycle one Christmas, Gregg a guitar. They began hanging around black R&B joints and eventually organized their first band, The Allman Joys, named after a candy bar. Gregg drifted to the West Coast in other groups, while Duane made his rep in recording sessions behind soul singers like Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. In 1969, Gregg recalls, "My life didn't have any point. I said the hell with it. Then I got a call from Duane that he had put a band together—two drums, bass, and two guitars. He said, 'Man, we need you to wrap it up.' " That call was the beginning of the Allman Brothers Band, five gold albums, three platinums and the tour this fall that's expected to reap between $15 and $18 million. Such formidable success only leaves Allman more jaundiced. "They see you signing autographs and making all that bread as a rock'n'roll star, but they don't realize that you are a piece of meat and blood and guts and feelings," he says, biting out the words. "I haven't sung a lot of happy songs. The memory of pain is always there." His marriage to Cher seems no guarantee against more such memories. He is lonely in Macon, has put up his house for sale and plans to move to L.A. With a kind of compulsive fatalism, he still roars around on his motorcycle and recently spilled badly enough to break a wrist. "But I want nothing to keep me apart from Cher," he murmurs. "Life is so short, man. 'You put your watch up to your ear and listen to how fast it's going by.' " div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">