Night Beat (20 page)

Between storm bouts, Jaimoe suggests taking a walk across the parking lot to a nearby studio, where it will be possible to talk with less distraction. People in and around the Allmans will often joke about Jaimoe—they say that for over a generation, he has been perpetually reclusive, inscrutable, even spacey. But they also make awed references to the drummer’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and rhythm & blues artists and styles, and certainly, nobody can imagine attempting a reunion at this time without his involvement. In fact, it is often joked that Jaimoe was
the
original member of the Allman Brothers—or at least that he was the one who had always been waiting for a band like the Allmans to come along. “All my life I had wanted to play in a jazz band,” says Jaimoe, settling into a sofa in an empty, dimly lighted studio control booth. “Then I played with Duane Allman.”

Like Allman, Jaimoe had harbored a special passion for Southern-based musical styles. By the mid-1960s, he had served as a regular session drummer at the Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—where some of the most renowned Southern soul music of the period was recorded—and he performed with numerous R & B and blues artists, including Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, and Clifton Chenier. “I think I had been preparing to play in this band without really knowing
what
I was preparing for,” says Jaimoe, shifting his weight on the sofa. “I think it was from playing with all those other musicians that I got all that fiery stuff that people hear in my playing.”

In the course of his studio work, Jaimoe met the two people who would become among the principal driving forces behind the Allman Brothers Band: Duane Allman and a fledgling entrepreneur named Phil Walden. Walden was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, a middle-sized town that still relied on agriculture for much of its economy, and that still maintained much of its pre-Civil War architecture (General Sherman had considered the town too insignificant to plunder or ravage). In the 1950s, Walden had grown enamored of Memphis-style rock & roll and, in particular, black R & B of singers like Hank Ballard and the Five Royales, and by the mid-1960s he was managing numerous black stars, including Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Al Green, Johnny Taylor, Joe Tex, Arthur Conley, and, most famously, Otis Redding.

Walden’s affection for black music was anathema to many of Macon’s leading businessmen and church officials. Walden didn’t present himself as a civil rights activist, but he
did
bristle at provincial racism, and he refused to kowtow to local pressures. The South, he often told his critics, would have to change its attitudes, and what’s more, the popularity of the new Southern soul was a harbinger of that change. “I think rhythm and blues had a hell of a lot to do with turning the region around on race relations,” he would later tell an interviewer. “When people get together and listen to the same music, it makes hating kind of harder.”

But Walden’s involvement in R & B was cut suddenly and brutally short. In December 1967, Otis Redding—a few months after his triumphant appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on the verge of a long-anticipated mass breakthrough—was flying a small twin-engine plane from Cleveland to Madison, Wisconsin, when the plane went down in a Wisconsin lake, killing Redding and four members of his backup band, the Bar-Kays. Walden was known as a proud, ambitious, and clever man—even indomitable—but for him, Redding’s death was more than the loss of a prize client, and more than the termination of one of the most brilliantly promising artistic careers of the period. It was also a devastating personal loss, and according to many of the people who knew him, Walden thereafter kept a greater emotional distance from his clients.

Duane Allman had also had his life and sensibility transformed by sudden death. In 1949, when Duane was three and his little brother Gregory was two, the Allman family was living in Nashville, Tennessee. That Christmas, the boys’ father, an Army lieutenant, was on holiday leave from the Korean War. The day following Christmas, he picked up a hitchhiker, who robbed and murdered Duane and Gregg’s father. The Allmans’ mother, Geraldine, eventually enrolled her young children in a military academy in Lebanon, Tennessee, and then, in 1958, relocated the family in Daytona Beach, Florida. As young teens, the Allman brothers rarely talked about their father’s death—they were too young to know him well—and in many ways, they were like other boys their age: Duane hated school, and quit in a hot temper several times, then spent his free time attending to his favorite possession, a Harley-Davidson 165. Gregg, meantime, stuck through school and was reportedly a fair student and athlete, though he regarded it as a thankless ordeal.

Early on, both Duane and Gregg found themselves drawn to music of loss and longing—particularly the high-lonesome wail of country music, and the haunted passions of urban and country blues. Gregg had been the first to leap in: He had listened to a neighbor playing old-timey country songs on an acoustic guitar, and at thirteen, Gregg worked a paper route and saved money to buy a guitar at the local Sears and Roebuck. While Gregg was slogging his way through school, Duane started playing his brother’s guitar—and to his surprise and Gregg’s initial annoyance, discovered that he had a gift for the instrument. Soon, Duane and Gregg each owned electric guitars, and Duane would hole up with his instrument for days, learning the music of blues archetype Robert Johnson and jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell. Around that time, Duane and Gregg saw a B. B. King show during a visit to Nashville, and Duane’s mind was made up: He and his brother were going to form a blues band of their own; in fact, they were going to make music their life. Duane continued studying numerous guitarists, including King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf’s Hubert Sumlin, Elmore James, and French jazz prodigy Django Reinhardt, as well as the emerging British rock guitarists—especially a young firebrand named Eric Clapton—and the guitarists who were playing for soul artists like James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Duane also began paying attention to saxophonists like John Coltrane, to hear how a soloist could build a melodic momentum that worked within a complex harmonic and rhythmic structure. Meantime, Gregg began favoring jazz organists like Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond, and developed a special passion for sophisticated blues and R & B vocalists like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ray Charles, and Roy Milton.

But there was more to the brothers’ quest than a mere attraction for music that took painful feelings and turned them into a joyful release. The Allmans—in particular, Duane—seemed intent on forming bands as an extension of family ideals, and they often invested these bands with the same qualities of love and anger, loyalty and rivalry, that they had practiced at home. In a way, this family idealism was simply a trend of the era: The 1960s were a time when rock bands were often viewed as metaphors for a self-willed brand of consonant community. But in the Allmans’ case, the sources of this dream may have run especially deep. Their real-life family had been tumultuously shattered, and forming a band was a way of creating a fraternity they had never really known.

But the Allmans were also forming musical bonds in a time when the South was being forced to reexamine some of its cultural and racial traditions, and Duane and Gregg were unusually open to ideals of interaction and equality. To their mother’s initial displeasure, the brothers preferred the music being played by local black talents, and in 1963, they helped form one of the area’s first integrated bands, the House Rockers. It was a period of fierce feelings, but the Allmans, like Phil Walden, would not back off from a belief that their culture was starting to undergo radical and deeply needed social change.

In any event, Duane and Gregg went through a rapid succession of blues-oriented rock bands, including the Allman Joys, who toured the Southern teen circuit and recorded two albums’ worth of material (including several Yardbirds and Cream covers). By 1967, the group had been overhauled into the Hour Glass and had relocated to Los Angeles, where they recorded two LPs for Liberty. Both were better than average cover bands, and they gave Duane a chance to hone his flair for accompaniment and improvisation, and also helped Gregg develop as a sultry organist and an unusually inventive modern blues composer. But none of these groups matched Duane’s boundless ambitions, and in 1968, the bossy and restless guitarist quit the Hour Glass and accepted an invitation from Fame Studios’ owner-operator Rick Hall to work as a sideman on an upcoming Wilson Pickett session. Duane left Gregg in L.A. to fulfill the Liberty contract, and in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he played sessions with Pickett, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Arthur Conley, and Ronnie Hawkins; in New York, he played with Aretha Franklin. By 1969, Duane Allman had gained a reputation as one of the most musically eloquent and soul-sensitive session guitarists in contemporary music.

It was in this time that Jai Johanny Johanson met Allman. “I had a friend who was doing session work with Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin,” says Jaimoe. “He came home to Macon one day and told me, ’Jai, they got a white boy down in Alabama by the name of Duane “Skydog” Allman. He’s a hippie with long, stringy hair,’ he said, ’but you’ve
got
to hear him play.’ I remember listening to the radio late one night in Macon—there wasn’t anything else to do there; everything was closed up—and this Aretha Franklin thing, ’The Weight,’ came on the radio, with this stand-out guitar solo, and I thought, ’That’s got to be “Skydog” Allman, man.’ I thought he was a cool guitarist, but he wasn’t any Barney Kessel or Tal Farlow, and those were the only Caucasian cats that I heard who could really play the instrument.”

A bit later, Jaimoe visited Muscle Shoals during a King Curtis session and sought out Allman. The two musicians became close friends, and between sessions, they would hang out in one of Fame’s vacant studios, jamming for hours head-on. Then one day, another skinny, long-haired white boy—a bassist named Berry Oakley, whom Duane had met in Jacksonville, Florida—started joining on the jams. “Man,” says Jaimoe, “when Berry joined us, that was some incredible shit. I remember that people like [bassist] David Hood, [pianist] Barry Beckett, and [drummer] Roger Hawkins [all among Muscle Shoals’ most respected session players] would come into the room when we were playing, and we were trying to get them to join in. But
none
of them would pick up an instrument. We scared the shit out of them guys.”

Somewhere around this time Allman attracted the attention of Phil Walden, who was in the process of forming his own label, Macon-based Capricorn Records, to be distributed by Atlantic. One day, Rick Hall played for Walden a new album he had just recorded with Wilson Pickett, including a cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Walden was transfixed by the work of the guitarist on the session, and after traveling to Muscle Shoals, he eventually made a deal to manage Duane Allman. Walden thought he had found his Elvis Presley: a white musician who could play black, blues-based forms in a way that would connect with an entire new mass audience.

There had been talk of Allman, Jaimoe, and Oakley forming a trio based on the sparse but furious improvisational dynamics of the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream, but Walden encouraged Allman to seek his own mix of style and texture. Allman knew he wanted to work with Jaimoe and Oakley, but he had also been drawn to a few other musicians, including lead guitarist Dickey Betts (who had played with Oakley in a band called the Second Coming, and with whom Allman had played several twin-lead jams), and drummer Butch Trucks (with whom Gregg and Duane had played in Jacksonville). One day, these five musicians gathered at Trucks’ home in Jacksonville, and began playing. It turned into a relentless jam that stretched for four hours and left everybody involved feeling electrified, even thunderstruck. When it was over, Duane stepped to the entrance of the room and spanned his arms across the doorway, forming a human blockade. “Anybody who isn’t playing in my band is going to have to
fight
their way out of this room,” he said.

Duane told Walden and Atlantic vice president Jerry Wexler—who had advanced Walden $75,000 to form Capricorn—that he wanted to bring his brother Gregg back from L.A. to sing in the newly formed group, but the company heads initially balked. Says Jaimoe: “I remember Duane saying, “Man, Jerry and them, they don’t want me to have my brother in the band. They don’t want no two brothers in the band. It’s always been trouble. I mean, me and my brother, we don’t get along that much—I don’t like him. You know how it is: Brothers don’t like each other.’ And then Duane would say, “But Jaimoe, there ain’t
no
body else that can sing like my brother. In fact, I can’t think of another motherfucker who can sing in this band
except
my brother. That’s who I really want.’ ”

In the end, Duane Allman got his way—and it proved to be a brilliant choice. Gregg Allman had been lonely in Southern California, had endured a troubled love affair and had even, he would later report, contemplated suicide. When Duane called him to join his new band, Gregg saw the invitation as deliverance from a grim reality. And what he brought with him would amount to one of the band’s signature attractions: a powerfully erotic, poignant, and authoritative blues voice. When Gregg Allman sang a song like “Whipping Post,” he did so in a voice that made you believe that the song’s fear and pain and anger were the personal possessions of the singer—and that he had to reveal those dark emotions in order to get past the bitter truths he was singing about.

Phil Walden moved the band to Macon, and then put it on the road year-round. He and Duane didn’t always see eye to eye on matters, weren’t always close, but they agreed on one thing: The Allman Brothers Band was going to be both the best and biggest band in the country—or die trying.