Night Beat (19 page)

AFTER THE HARROWING scenarios of his 1978 masterwork,
Street Hassle,
Lou Reed began working to counteract his profligate image—or perhaps simply to reveal more of the real sensibility behind his songs. The first glimpses came in his 1979 album,
The Bells
(in some ways, his most resourceful work), during “Families”—a song about a son speaking to his hardened parents across a chasm of mutual heartbreak: “And no no no no no, I still haven’t got married,” Reed sang in a pain-filled quaver, “And no no no, there’s no grandson planned here for you. . . . And I don’t think I’ll come home much anymore.” With
The Bells,
Lou Reed fulfilled—maybe even laid to rest—a longstanding ethos: one of grim choices and unsparing accountability. A song like “Families” sounded as if it used up the whole of Reed’s emotional being. It didn’t seem possible that either his art or his life could ever be the same again. In fact, they couldn’t.

Reed moved deeper into the theme of familial fatalism—the fear, hate, and defeat that parents too often bequeath upon their children as their most lasting and bitter legacy—on the following year’s album,
Growing Up in Public.
But
Growing Up in Public
was also an album about summoning up high-test courage: the courage to love, and along with it, the will to forgive everybody who—and everything that—ever cut short your chances in the first place. On
Growing Up,
Reed’s material bridged the difficult chasm between moral narrative and unadulterated autobiography. In part, the new compositions were about Reed’s decision to marry again—a decision that flabbergasted many of the people who’d pegged him as a middle-aged, intractable gay—but they were also seared recollections of the prime forces that almost fated him. In “My Old Man,” he railed at the memory of a Karamazov-like father in a burst of near-patricidal rage: “And when he beat my mother/It made me so mad I could choke . . . /And can you believe what he said to me/He said, ’Lou, act like a man.’ ” And Reed
did
act like a man. He shattered the album’s claustrophobic web of hatred and self-defeat—perhaps the most frightening he’d ever constructed, because it was also the most universal—by choosing to run the same risk at which his parents failed: the risk of the heart. “When you ask for somebody’s heart,” he sang in that album’s most tender moment, “You must know that you’re smart/Smart enough to care for it.” It was hardly a detached lyric: On Valentine’s Day, 1980, Reed married Sylvia Morales, and for a time, both his life and music seemed deepened by the union.

Indeed, several of the records that Reed made during that marriage—including
The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts,
and
New Sensations—
were tough-willed statements of personal love as the only remaining act of defiance, and as such, they also worked as a reexamination of his earlier mores. In “Heavenly Arms,” he made the act sound like nothing less than an urgent and vital good fight: “Lovers stand warned/Of the world’s impending storm.” But in such songs as “Legendary Hearts” and “Home of the Brave,” Reed fully expressed the difficulty of trying to integrate the frustrations and limitations of his distant past and the reality of his fiery temperament with the knowledge that real love requires constant recommitment—demands, in fact, a daily renewal to a struggle of uphill faith. “The thing about love,” he told me back during our 1979 and 1980 conversations, “is that it isn’t logical. You don’t necessarily love what’s logical or good for you. Believe me,
I
know. At the same time, that’s the beauty of love—when you’re passionately caring for the welfare of somebody beyond yourself.” Then he laughed. “Maybe what we’re talking about is the touch of an angel’s wing. And the possibility of transcendence.”

In time, Reed’s marriage to Morales ended, and as I write these words in 1997, it is reported that he has recently been quite happy with artist and singer Laurie Anderson (talk about a meeting of the minds). In the 1990s, Reed has continued to make strong, vital, and imaginative records—including
New York, Songs for Drella
(an elegy to Andy Warhol, co-written with former Velvets partner John Cale),
Magic and Loss,
and
Set the Twilight Reeling.
He also briefly re-formed the Velvet Underground in the early 1990s, making—oddly enough—for the only truly unaffecting music that remarkable group ever produced.

After all my years of listening to and loving popular music, I can say that—along with Bob Dylan—Lou Reed remains my favorite rock & roll artist; indeed, along with Dylan, he is probably the only artist who has grown and weathered so well, and whose lapses are even something to pore over, time and again, in wonder. If I had to pick my favorite lines he has ever written, they would be these: “It was good what we did yesterday/And I’d do it once again/The fact that you are married/Only proves you’re my best friend/But it’s truly, truly a sin” (from 1969’s “Pale Blue Eyes”). Also, these: “With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of hell/Everybody’s going to look for a bell to ring” (from 1979’s “All through the Night”). It seems to me that in his best music—even in his darkest, most brokenhearted reveries—Lou Reed has always rung a bell, loud and clear, pealing a clarion call of hope that the glory of love, despite (or
because
of) our daytimes of sin and nighttimes of hell, might see us all through yet.

brothers: the allman brothers band

S
ome say there was a ghost. Some unkind spirit, the rumor went, had clambered up out of a dark legacy of death and bad news, and had attached itself to the Allman Brothers Band, like a mean dog trailing its quarry, until it had dragged the band down into the dust of its own dreams.

Maybe the group had attracted the spirit on one of those late nights more than a generation before, when various band members would gather in the Rose Hill Cemetery, not far from where the Allman Brothers lived in Macon, Georgia. The story is, they drank wine and whiskey there, smoked dope, took psychedelics, played and wrote dark, obsessive blues songs, and laid their Southern girlfriends across sleek tombstones on humid, heat-thick Southern nights, and made love to warm, twitching bodies that were laying only a few feet above other bodies, long prone and long cold. Maybe on one of those occasions, in some ungodly moment in which sex and hallucinations and blues all mixed and formed an unwitting invocation, an insatiable specter was raised, and decided to stay close to the troubled and vulnerable souls that had summoned it. Or maybe it was something even older and meaner that trailed the Allmans—something as old as the hellions and hellhounds that were said to haunt Southern rural crossroads on moonless nights.

Yes, some say there was a ghost. Some even say they witnessed that ghost—or at least, witnessed how palpable it was for those who had to live with the effects of its haunts. There are stories about late night reveries in the early 1970s, when the band’s most famous member would sit in darkened hotel rooms, watching early morning TV, brooding. By this time, the Allman Brothers Band was the most successful pop group in America—in fact, the band had played for the largest audience ever assembled in the nation’s history. But perhaps that success was never enough to stave off fears that there was yet more that this band was destined to lose.

In those postmidnight funks, the blond blues singer sat and watched TV, sometimes horror movies with the sound down. An empty chair was sometimes close by. To at least one visitor, the singer insisted that a spirit sat in that chair—and that he knew that spirit well. In fact, he said, he and the ghost were on a first-name basis. He and the ghost even shared the same last name.

WALK INTO A room to meet the surviving members of the original Allman Brothers Band, and you walk into the midst of a complex shared history. It is a spooky, gothic story of family ties—of both blood brotherhood and chosen brotherhood—and it is also a story of amazing prodigies, dogged by amazingly bad fortune. Indeed, the four men seated in this room—keyboardist Gregg Allman, guitarist Dickey Betts, and drummers Jai Jaimoe and Butch Trucks—are people who helped
make
history: They once personified what rock & roll and blues could achieve in those forms’ grandest moments of musical imagination, and they also once played a significant role in the American South’s social and political history. But like anybody who has made history that matters, the members of the Allman Brothers were also bruised by that history. They do not seem like men who are unduly arrogant or proud; rather, they seem like men who have learned that proud moments can later form the heart of indelibly painful memories.

It has been several years since these musicians have recorded together, but on this sultry afternoon in mid-spring, as they gather in the lounge at Miami’s Criteria Studios, they are beginning the final work on
Seven Turns—
a record that they boldly claim is their most important and accomplished work since 1973’s
Brothers and Sisters.
In many ways, this is an adventure they never thought they would share. In 1983, after a restive fourteen-year history, the Allman Brothers dissolved into the caprices of pop history. The band had broken up before—in the mid-1970s, on rancorous terms—but this time they quit because the pop world no longer wanted them. “We had been credited as being a flagship band,” says Dickey Betts, pulling nervously at his mustache, his eyes taking a darting scan of the other faces in the room. “All of a sudden managers and record company people were telling us that we should no longer use terms like ’Southern Rock,’ or that we couldn’t wear hats or boots onstage, that it was embarrassing to a modern audience. We finally decided we couldn’t meet the current trends—that if we tried, we were going to make fools out of ourselves playing disco music, and ruin any integrity we had left. Looking back, splitting up was the best thing we could have done. We would have ruined whatever pleasant images people had of us by trudging along.”

The band members went separate ways. Allman and Betts toured with their own bands off and on, playing mainly clubs and small venues, and even teamed up for a tour or two. Butch Trucks went back to school, opened a recording studio in Tallahassee, raised his family, and involved himself in the difficult fight to stop record labeling in Florida. Jai Jaimoe packed a set of drums in his Toyota and spent years traveling around the South, playing in numerous jazz, R & B, and pop bands. Occasionally, the various ex-Allmans would come together for the odd jam or gig, but nobody spoke much about the collective dreams they had once shared. Clearly, the glory days were behind them, and there wasn’t much point in talking them to death.

Then, toward the late 1980s, pop music began going through one of its periodic revisionist phases. Neo-blues artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray began attracting a mass audience; plucky country singers like Lyle Lovett and k. d. lang had started attracting a broad spectrum of alternative and mainstream fans; and the long-suffering, brandy-voiced Bonnie Raitt enjoyed a major comeback with her surprisingly straightforward renditions of blues and R & B music. As a result, Dickey Betts received a call from Epic Records: Was he interested in making a Southern Rock LP? Betts thought Epic was joking, but nope—the label even wanted him to assemble a band with a twin-guitar frontline, and yes, if he really wanted, he could wear his cowboy hat onstage. Betts put together a solo act, and eventually he and Trucks received calls from Epic that led to an invitation to re-form the Allman Brothers. At first, both were wary—Gregg Allman’s drug and alcohol problems remained legendary, and they weren’t sure about touring or playing with him under those circumstances. But Betts, who had seen Allman often in recent years, said that Gregg was in good shape and better voice than ever, and that like the rest of them, he had missed the music they had made together. So Betts called Epic back and asked: For a Southern Rock band, how would the label like to have
the
Southern Rock group, the Allman Brothers Band? Epic was thrilled—until it was learned that the band planned to tour before recording.

“They were afraid we would
break up
again before we ever finished the tour,” says Betts, laughing. Actually, touring was reportedly part of the deal the bandmembers had struck about Gregg Allman: Before entering a studio to work on new material, or before committing themselves to spending a few more years together, they wanted to see how Gregg would handle the road; in fact, they wanted to see how
everybody
would handle working together again. Mainly, they wanted to see if they could still play like the Allman Brothers, rather than as a once-removed imitation.

“It would have been pitiful to have put this band back together, just to be an embarrassment,” says Betts. “I don’t think we could have dealt with that. The trouble is, we’d already been compared to ourselves a lot, and not always in a good way.”

As it turned out, the timing was good: Numerous other older acts—including the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney were hitting the road in 1989 with largely retrospective tours, and PolyGram was also preparing a multidisc historical overview of the Allmans for imminent release. For the first time in nearly a decade, the Allmans had a context to work in. Betts and Allman recruited some new members—guitarist Warren Haynes, bassist Allen Woody, and keyboardist Johnny Neel—and the Allman Brothers Band was reborn. More important, they were once again a forceful live band, playing their hard-hitting brand of improvisational blues with the sort of vitality the band had not evinced since the early 1970s. “Once more, we were getting compared to ourselves,” says Betts, “but this time in a positive way. The ideal, of course, would be to have all the original members of the band still alive and with us, but that can’t be. But I’ll say this: This is the first lineup we’ve had since Duane Allman and Berry Oakley were in the band that has the same spirit that we had in those days.”

Butch Trucks—who can be the most paternal and also the saltiest-talking member of the band—puts it differently. “It feels like the Allman Brothers again,” he says, “and it hasn’t felt that way in a long, long time. I like it. It makes my sticker peck out.”

Periodically, as Betts and Trucks talk, Gregg Allman tries to seem interested in the conversation. He will lean forward, clasp his hands together, look like he has something to say . . . but he never voluntarily fields a single question. After a bit, he settles back into the sofa and simply looks as if he’s in his own world. He seems to spend a lot of time inside himself, staring into some private, inviolable space. In the entire conversation, he will say only one complete sentence: “It’s hard to live those ten or twenty years, and then try to start all over again with another band.”

Abruptly, Gregg is on his feet, excusing himself. He is scheduled to begin final vocals today, and he is restless to get started. When asked if it’s okay to watch him record at some point, he visibly freezes. “Um, Gregg won’t let
anybody
in there when he’s singing,” says Betts, coming to Allman’s rescue. “Vocals are real personal, you know. You’re just standing there naked.”

“Yeah, with your dick hanging out,” says Trucks. After Gregg leaves, Trucks adds: “I’ve never seen anybody so nervous about letting others listen.”

Recently, there had been some concern about Gregg’s vocals. Reportedly, producer Tom Dowd—the owner of Criteria Studios, and the producer of the band’s early classics,
At the Fillmore East
and
Eat A Peach—
was worried that he might not get workable complete performances from Allman, and would have to paste the final vocals together from earlier rough tracks. Nobody knows at the moment whether Gregg can sing as well as they are hoping he will sing—indeed, any Allmans reunion effort would fall flat without Gregg’s trademark growly vocals—and nobody’s sure how Gregg’s current unease bodes for the band’s upcoming summer tour.

“It’s hard to be sober again after all these years,” says Trucks, who went through a drying-out period of his own. “At a time like this, Gregg probably doesn’t even know if he can talk to people, much less sing. But the thing is, he did it for too many years
not
to go for it now.”

AROUND MIDNIGHT, a warm spring storm is dropping heavy sheets of rain all over north Miami. Drummer Jai Jaimoe (who was once known as Jai Johanny Johanson, but now prefers to be called simply Jaimoe) stands in the main hallway at Criteria Studios, unpacking a crate of new cymbals, caressing their nickel-plated gleam with obvious affection. He is wearing a pink, blue, and green knitted African cap; bright green baggy pants; and knee-length black T-shirt bearing the statement, “The objects under this shirt are smaller than they appear.”

Down the hall, Gregg Allman is taking passes at his vocal on “Good Clean Fun,” and from what one can hear, he is sounding more confident, more vibrant by the moment. A few feet away, Dickey Betts is strumming an acoustic guitar for some friends, singing “Seven Turns”—a haunting song he has written about the Allman Brothers’ hard losses and renewed hopes. In the main lounge, Butch Trucks sits watching a golf tournament, trying to explain the Zen principal of the sport to his wife, who does not seem to be buying the idea. Various Allman wives and girlfriends—including Gregg’s new wife, Danielle—sit around talking or reading true-crime books, and Dickey and Gregg’s dogs wander in and out of the action, sniffing empty food cartons and looking perplexedly at the downpour outside. Also drifting in and out are producer Tom Dowd—who wears a perpetually rumpled professorial manner—and the legendary Allmans roadie Red Dog, a notorious but charming womanizer, a terrific dirty-joke teller, and plainly the band’s most devoted fan. It must seem a bit like old times here, only considerably more easygoing. “I missed playing with these people,” Jaimoe will say at one point. “We had something together that I could never find with other bands.”