"My Cross to Bear," Gregg Allman's Memoir Peter Tarnoff/Retna Ltd, via Corbis Gregg Allman, left, and his brother, Duane, in 1971. Reading this book is like sitting on a porch with a garrulous scalawag who gives equal time to his dumb decisions and fantastic luck. Only the rascal talking your ear off is Gregg Allman, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band. When you first pick up this autobiography (written with Alan Light), you might think the title "My Cross to Bear" more than a little self-pitying; after all, martyrdom is best conferred by others. But after you finish reading it, you'll probably think that, while it's unlikely anyone will base a religion on the sufferings of a millionaire rock star, Gregory LeNoir Allman passed a night in Geth­semane and then some. As boys, Allman and his brother, Duane, were electrified by an Otis Redding concert and started making music themselves. As the Allman Joys (really), they played on bandstands protected by chicken wire so that bottles bounced off harmlessly. They learned how to set a hook, though. "I realized that if we did things right, we could grab people with the first eight bars of a song, and we wouldn't have to worry about the rest of the night," Allman says. With "so much energy, so much drive and so much want-to," the penniless Allmans and their bandmates began to cut best-selling albums and fill clubs. Then came the hard times: the deaths of Duane Allman and the bassist Berry Oakley in eerily similar motorcycle accidents, the failed relationships, the hepatitis C that Gregg Allman attributes to an unsanitary tattoo needle. At the height of their success, the band members walked onto the jet they'd just acquired to find "Welcome Allman Bros" spelled out in cocaine on the bar. Yet there's none of the Dionysian cackling you hear below the surface of "Life," Keith Richards's monumental recounting of the Rolling Stones" story. And while "My Cross to Bear" isn't the most degrading account of a musician undone by narcotics (that honor belongs to "Three Dog Nightmare," by the former Three Dog Night frontman Chuck Negron), Allman reckons he went into treatment 18 times before getting clean. The band that gave us "Whipping Post" and "Ramblin" Man" broke up in 1976, at least partly because of a bust in which he was spared after agreeing to testify against the road manager who'd bought drugs for him. Drinking up to two quarts of vodka a day didn't help, and in 2010 Allman underwent a liver transplant. "I have had my fun when it comes to women," he writes - O.K., but he married and divorced six of them, three by the time he was 30. "My Cross to Bear" has all the earmarks of a text dictated by its subject and cleaned up by someone else, meaning it has too many ho-hum moments but also the charm of a real voice. In Allman's case, that's a lot of correct Good Old Boy usages ("you didn't want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on") that may challenge readers not conversant with that tongue. In the end, Allman comes across as sort of sweet and baffled; of his ex-wives, he says, "It's not like I want to have a big reunion, but I don't hardly ever hear from any of them." There's information here about how to write a song (match the bridge to the final verse the way you'd match your pants with a shirt) and sing (it's easier on your vocal cords if you throw your head back when you're belting one out). But you get the impression that his main goal is to do for potential addicts what Angelina Jolie does for the children of Africa. He finds God, at which point you expect him to say the whole thing's been worth it, as survivors often do. Instead, his last words are "I don't know if I'd do it again." Who would? David Kirby is the author of "Little Richard: The Birth of Rock "n" Roll."