One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (8 page)

BETTS:
Duane and Gregg had a real “purist” blues thing together, but Oakley and I in our band would take a standard blues and rearrange it. We were really trying to push the envelope. We loved the blues, but we wanted to play in a rock style, like what Cream and Hendrix were doing. Jefferson Airplane was also a big influence on us; Phil Lesh and Jack Casady were Oakley’s favorite bassists. We liked to take some of that experimental stuff and put a harder melodic edge to it.

Duane was smart enough to see what ingredients were missing from both [of our previous] bands. We didn’t have enough of the true, purist blues, and he didn’t have enough of the avant-garde, psychedelic approach to the blues. So he tried to put the two sounds together, and that was the first step in finding the sound of the Allman Brothers Band. When the two things collided, by the grace of God it was something special. You can’t say someone conceived of it all. It just happened and we all played a big part.

JAIMOE:
We never tried to sound like anyone else and were always forging our own sound. I know for a fact that one of the greatest things that the Allman Brothers did was open that door for a lot of musicians, who thought, “If they can do that, we can do that.” A whole lot of musicians wanted to do something original but were afraid to really try.

GARY ROSSINGTON,
Lynyrd Skynyrd founder/guitarist:
You can go way back to the Allman Joys playing in Daytona and they were different and a step above. They were unbelievable, playing the Yardbirds, Beatles, and Stones when everyone else was playing the Ventures and “Mustang Sally.” They were like rock stars—skinny guys with long blond hair and leather jackets—and Duane and Gregg could both play the hell out of their guitars. We’d just stand there with our mouths open. They were that much better than everyone else, so it did not surprise me at all when they reappeared with the Allman Brothers Band and were so good. It was like we had been waiting.

Me and Allen [Collins, Skynyrd guitarist and co-founder] would go stand right in front of Duane. He was mesmerizing, and it’s hard to describe the impact it had on us as young guitarists to stand there and see that guy play. They were all just tearing it up.

JAIMOE:
The reason that Duane and Dickey played the way they did was because of who they had playing behind them, which was Butch and me. We wrote the book on double drumming, and we did things differently than anyone else—and then you had Berry, who was a guitar player who started playing bass because he had a chance to get a gig [with pop singer Tommy Roe] and get out of Chicago and onto the road. Nobody played bass like Berry. He, Butch, and I were just as important as Dickey or Duane in terms of what was going on in that band. That was fully appreciated when Duane was around.

RED DOG:
Butch and Jaimoe and Dickey and Duane each played together like no one else ever had to my ears. You put those two combinations—drums and guitars—together with Oak moving around all of them, weaving musically and physically, roaming all over the stage and stomping his foot, and the results were magical and powerful. Then you have Gregg over there wailing away, which was just the icing on the cake. The combination of all this was religious—very spiritual and very deep.

JAIMOE:
No one else was doing something similar to what Butch and I did. I had never heard the Grateful Dead until we did some gigs with them. We just played and played and worked stuff out that way.

TRUCKS:
Jaimoe and I studied a bit of what [Bill] Kreutzmann and Mickey [Hart] were doing in the Dead, but it was much more contrived than what we did. I’m not criticizing, because it worked for them really well, but not for us. Our styles mesh in a way where we don’t talk about it. We don’t work it out. Jaimoe plays what he wants to play, I play what I want to play, and it just works.

JAIMOE:
When we got to Jacksonville I lived over at Butch’s house. My drums were set up in there, along with Gregory’s organ once he finally came. I would sit in there and start practicing, Butch would come in, and we’d just play. We never said, “You play this part and I’ll play that one.”

Butch Trucks.

Living together in Macon, a new city, the group and their road crew forged an intense brotherhood, rehearsing for hundreds of hours and hanging out endlessly, as they continued to play local gigs. The group spent hours hanging out together and alone in Rose Hill, a hilly, Civil War–era cemetery overlooking the Ocmulgee River.

BETTS:
Rose Hill is a beautiful, peaceful old place on the Ocmulgee River looking over the railroad tracks—trains would come by every now and then and rattle you. And there was an old part that was well kept and beautiful and had graves dating back to the 1800s. I know it sounds sappy romantic, but I would go down there day after day to the same spot and meditate and hang out and play my guitar because it was so quiet and peaceful.

The Allman Brothers Band’s first performances outside the South were two nights opening for the Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party on May 30 and 31, 1969. Led Zeppelin had played their first Boston shows the preceding three nights.

DON LAW
,
Tea Party manager:
That whole thing was really an off-shoot of my friendship with Jon Landau, who wrote for
Crawdaddy
and
Rolling Stone
and became good friends with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. They told him they had a relationship with Otis Redding’s ex-manager to start a label in Macon, Georgia, and the first band included a guy who had done great session work in Muscle Shoals. They wanted to get them some exposure in the Northeast and Jon said, “Let me call my friend Don Law, who has the Boston Tea Party.” Jon called me and said, “Ahmet and Jerry are really enthusiastic and feel this band has promise.” I said, “Fine, let’s bring them up.”

LANDAU:
Phil actually told me about the Allman Brothers and asked for help in getting them some exposure in the Northeast. I recommended them to Don, saying, “This guy Duane Allman is great. I don’t know the band, but I’m sure it’s very good.”

They were still totally unknown up there when they played the Tea Party. Phil came up and he got Frank Barsalona, the head of Premier Talent, which was
the
rock and roll agency, to come up to check them out, which was something he did quite often. Phil wanted them to have that kind of agent.

LAW:
We had them come up as support and the first thing available was the two nights with the Velvet Underground. It was not a great musical fit, but the Velvets were very popular in Boston, so we did get them a weekend in front of two sold-out crowds.

LANDAU:
It wasn’t them at their best. It didn’t click. I knew when the set was going on that it was good but not great—that they could do better. I had led Frank and Don to believe that they were going to be knocked on their asses and it wasn’t happening.

Afterwards, Frank, Phil, Don, and I went out. Frank was a great diplomat, with a very smooth style. Phil was a likably egotistical guy who believed in himself and had a charming way. Frank was saying that he sees potential but it’s not quite there. He said, “Why don’t I see what other shows I can get for them while they’re up here?” They are going round and round and Phil was slightly defeated. Then he just said, “I would like you to work with this band. Do you want to or not?” Frank was not the kind of guy people spoke to in that way. I was amazed—both taken back and impressed—at how direct Phil was.

Wanting to put them on a more appropriate bill, Law booked the Allman Brothers Band for three nights opening for Dr. John on June 19–21. Unable to afford lodging, the band took over a squat, with many members also staying with Law at his apartment. Law, who has remained a major lynchpin of the Boston music scene for 40-plus years, helped the Allmans establish themselves in the market by playing free shows at the Boston and Cambridge commons during the long wait between Tea Party gigs.

JAIMOE:
We stayed some nights at the crib of the promoter, sleeping on the floor, on whatever beds he had. A lot of it was just sitting up all night talking and listening to records. That’s basically what we did wherever we went—them playing records for us and us playing records for them.

LAW:
It was really exhilarating. I think it’s the only band that I had live in my apartment. I certainly had friendly relationships with most bands we presented, but this was different and it was one of the great experiences of my life. We were all young and ready for anything and fueled by passion for the music.

JAIMOE:
The way we lived, going around meeting all these great people who loved music like we did and sitting up listening and rapping about it, it was just the greatest thing in the world, man. It was like having your masters degree and you’re working on your PhD—and you’re doing it with Einstein. That was the Allman Brothers Band. We just hadn’t got there yet. We were on the path, but we hadn’t figured out what
E
=
MC
2
was.

LAW:
One night they all got the itch to rehearse in the middle of the night and wanted to get into the club but couldn’t find me. Someone got the brilliant idea to go over to [progressive rock radio station] WBCN and put out an All Points Bulletin for me. They got the on-air guy to announce that the Allman Brothers Band was looking for Don Law, this is an APB, please meet them at the club. And it worked! Someone I knew heard it and found me and I met them and unlocked the club for them to rehearse.

TRUCKS:
We had taken some kind of poison and we were up raging all night long. We were squatting in a real slum, with no electricity, no furniture, no hot water, floors covered thick in dirt. One of the roadies had talked to the girl across the way and she slipped an extension cord through our window so we could put on some music and her husband came home and saw that cord and just raised hell. He ripped it out and he threw a cherry bomb through the window, which, given our state of mind, was not well received.

We wandered the street for a while and were out messing around Boston and decided we should go to the Tea Party and rehearse. Duane gets on a pay phone, calls the radio station, and tells them to put out the word for Don Law to come to the club and let in the Allman Brothers Band, they want to rehearse. We just walk down there and stood waiting, oddly sure he would show up. He got out of his car, walked over, unlocked the door, turned around, got back in his car and left without saying a word or even looking at us. He was pissed, and I don’t blame him.

And this is why we felt such an urgent need to rehearse: we went in and spent hours working up the sound of a Harley cranking up and going through its gears, which was going to kick off our shows as an introduction to “Don’t Want You No More/Cross to Bear.” We were deadly serious about it, too. Once we straightened up, everyone realized how absurd it was. After we finished, we were walking across the Tea Party and this damn four-by-four fell from the roof and smashed Jaimoe’s seat. If we had played for ten or fifteen minutes more, he would have been killed.

LAW:
I felt privileged to have them there in that room. It was exciting and exhilarating. There was something magical happening and I think anyone who saw them realized that it was going to be pretty big. It was amazing to play them for free on the Commons. That was tremendously fun and it was a great way to expose somebody.

Duane’s guitar playing was extraordinary. In my exposure to him, he was a very gentle, bright guy, and everybody understood that he was an incredible, unique talent. That was just obvious. He had a passion to play. He went and sat in with Frank Zappa and several other people at the Tea Party while they were in Boston.

CHAPTER

4

Dreams

I
N AUGUST
1969
,
the band went to New York City to record their self-titled debut. Their trip north was not without drama with their equipment truck breaking down in South Carolina. Lyndon rented a van
.
In New York, the band was to work with Cream’s producer, Tom Dowd, but he was unavailable and Atlantic house engineer Adrian Barber was assigned to record the new band. Barber was an experienced engineer, having worked on sessions with Cream and a range of jazz greats, as well as with the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany, in 1963. This was his first producer’s credit. A year later he would engineer and play most of the drums on the Velvet Underground’s
Loaded.

The entire seven-song
Allman Brothers Band
album was cut and mixed in two weeks, and virtually no outtakes exist from the sessions. The Brothers also played three nights at Ungano’s, a Manhattan club; these were their first shows in the city that was to become their second home.

JAIMOE:
The best way to prepare to go into the studio is to play the songs you’re going to record on gigs and then you should know if they’re ready or not and judge from the crowd reaction what’s clicking and what needs more work. We played them songs hard from May to August and walked into the studio having them down cold. We were not intimidated, even though me, Dickey, and Berry were not that experienced in studio work. Butch had more experience and Gregg and Duane had cut a few albums, in addition to all of Duane’s session work.