One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (11 page)

HAYNES:
Dickey had a deep western swing influence. He learned a lot of guitar from Dave Lyle, who had played with Roy Clark in Brenda Lee’s band and the two of them had played a lot of harmony lines. That’s where Dickey got the concept from and I don’t think Duane had ever done anything like that before.

REESE WYNANS,
keyboardist in Second Coming, Betts and Oakley’s pre-ABB group:
Dickey’s whole thing from the first time I met him was harmonies. He would come up with these great melodies and he wanted to get harmonies going for them; he always wanted Rhino and me to follow him and play harmony parts. [Guitarist Larry “Rhino Reinhardt] Duane obviously got on the bus with that and took it to a new level. Having played with them in the earliest stages, it was no surprise at all that their pairing would work so well.

BETTS:
It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or they stay out of each other’s way because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. It was real, real natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. Our system was not exactly technique. Duane would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony. Very seldom would Duane start the riff.

HAYNES:
They worked out harmonies, but some of the stuff in Dickey’s solos just came about in an impromptu way and you can tell when you hear Dickey play a melodic line and then the harmony comes in on top of it. That’s why it has a few loose ends and unparalleled harmony parts; they were just winging it. Maybe all the notes weren’t exactly parallel or perfect, but the vibe and feel were right on.

BETTS:
A lot of Duane’s harmony lines are not the correct notes you would choose if you sat down to write it out, but they always worked. Our band came around at a wonderful time for improv and we felt free to just play and work things out on the fly. I usually set the melody and if I played it twice then the third time he would be right on it with the harmony and it would sound great. We didn’t usually sit down and figure out parts. Doing them on the fly gave it all a certain spark and sound.

HAYNES:
The Allman Brothers Band is based on the fact that no one on stage can rest on his laurels; you have to bring it. That’s where that fire comes from and it certainly emanates from the intensity of having two great lead players like Dickey and Duane throwing sparks off of each other. Jazz and blues musicians have been doing this for decades, but I think they really brought that sense that anyone onstage can inspire anyone else at any given time to rock music.

BETTS:
Duane and I were very conscious of the snare-drum type approach to playing rhythm. It was a lot of counterpoint and interplay. I could set something with a push on the 2 and 4 and he would play on the beat. We were very aware of letting each person’s downbeat appear in different spots so they didn’t tangle up, because Berry was really busy, too. That generates a back-and-forth machine thing similar to playing snare drum with the right hand. It was all question and answer, anticipation and conclusion. You build up the anticipation with the first part of the phrase and answer it with the second. Duane was really more adept at that type of thing than I was, but we worked it out together.

DOUCETTE:
I would play my solos then stand behind the line, behind Duane’s and Dickey’s amp—moving to whomever was playing rhythm guitar, because you could hear the leads fine from anywhere. I wish everyone could hear what I heard back there—and I would kill to have a cut of that stuff—because it was just spectacular. They were two wildly different rhythm players and they were so good, both just laying down beautiful rhythm parts.

HAYNES:
Another cool thing about Dickey and Duane that stuck out to any guitar player was how identifiable each of their styles and sounds were; it was easy to tell them apart.

BETTS:
The dream guitar sounds that we heard in our heads were opposite. He liked a spitfire, trebly sound with staccato phrasing and using the bridge pickup and my thing was more of a rounded-tone sound using the neck pickup.

Duane’s melody came more from jazz and urban blues and my melodies came more from country blues with a strong element of string-music fiddle tunes. I had more looping phrasing and Duane was more cutting. We were almost totally opposite except we both knew the importance of phrasing. We didn’t just ramble about.

CHAPTER

5

One More Try

I
N
J
ANUARY
1970
,
Berry Oakley’s wife, Linda, and his sister, Candace, rented a large Victorian house at 2321 Vineville Avenue while the band was on the road. They moved into the place in March, along with Duane, Donna, and Galadrielle. Others would move in and out over the next several years, as the communal home became widely known as the Big House.

DOUCETTE:
Candy Oakley, Linda Oakley, and Donna Allman made a huge, unbelievable difference in the band’s life. We came back to the Big House and it was truly a home, which contained all the heart, feeling, and togetherness of the band. I had played in a lot of bands that had hangouts, but this was a different deal, made possible by those three women, and I was taken away by it and greatly admired it.

For their second album, the Allman Brothers worked for the first time with producer Tom Dowd, who had already recorded artists ranging from Ray Charles and John Coltrane to Cream. Due mostly to their hectic touring schedule
, Idlewild South
was recorded in fits and starts in Macon, Miami, and New York, from February to July 1970.

It included “Midnight Rider” and “Revival,” which was Betts’s first songwriting credit with the band. They also recorded Betts’s masterful instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” for the first time, opening up vast new terrain for the band to explore.

SANDLIN:
I spent a whole lot of time with the Allman Brothers doing demos in the Capricorn studio for their second album. We recorded a version of “Statesboro Blues” and a first take on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” I thought it was phenomenal when Dickey brought that in; he introduced a whole new side to the Allman Brothers Band, a very unique instrumental approach which would, of course, become very important to their success.

BETTS:
It’s hard for me to even pinpoint where “Liz Reed” came from. It’s jazz, but not really, and it was different than anything I had done before. The original version we recorded is awfully sparse compared to where we’d be taking it soon.

SANDLIN:
I thought things were going well and I was overjoyed when they said they wanted me to produce their second album.

TOM DOWD,
producer of
Idlewild South, at Fillmore East, Eat a Peach: The first time I heard the Allman Brothers Band was in Macon. I was there to visit Capricorn and I walked by the rehearsal space and heard the most incredible sounds coming out. I got to Phil’s office and asked him who in the hell was rehearsing in the studio. He said, “That’s the Allman Brothers,” and I said, “Get them the hell out of there and give them to me in the studio. They don’t need to rehearse; they’re ready to record.”

SANDLIN:
As it got closer, Phil said they wanted me to do it with Tom Dowd. This is very embarrassing to me, but Tom came to the Capricorn studio and I was acting like the co-producer, making suggestions, with Tom looking at me oddly. When I realized that no one had told him about me co-producing, I couldn’t even go into the studio because it was such an embarrassment, but that didn’t last long, because they went down to Miami to record at Criteria, where Tom was more comfortable. He wasn’t happy with the state of our studio—and he was right. It was still a work in progress.

ALLMAN:
Tommy wanted us to go to Miami because that was his sandbox and where he knew how to play best.

BETTS:
“Revival” was supposed to be an instrumental, and when I was writing the thing, I kind of got going and started singing, just screwing around, and the words came almost as an afterthought, but that was not typical. Usually, I’m definitely going to write an instrumental. You have to have an altogether different approach; an instrumental has to be real catchy and when you succeed it’s very satisfying because you have transcended words and communicated with emotion. I don’t really have a specific technique, but I put in hours of deliberation as to what note should follow each other in order to get the best phrase.

And I wrote this instrumental in Rose Hill for a woman I was involved with. I finished it and loved it but I didn’t know what to call it and it couldn’t have anything to do with her name, because it was all cloak and dagger, as she was Boz Scaggs’s girlfriend. She was Hispanic and somewhat dark and mysterious—and she really used it to her advantage and played it to the hilt. I thought, “Well, where did the song come from?” And there was a grave right by “my spot” that said, “In Memory of Elizabeth Jones Reed, mother of…” and listed all of her children. The spot had provided me with so much peace and inspiration that I decided to name the song after her. Duane told some crazy shit about that graveyard. I don’t wanna tell all—but that’s the part that matters.

ALLMAN:
“Midnight Rider” hit me like a damn sack of hoe handles. It was just there, crawling all over me. And about an hour and fifteen minutes later I had the rough draft down and before the sun set that day I was in the studio putting it on tape, bing-bang, just like that. They happen that way sometimes. Have you ever wondered where a thought comes from? Comes from nowhere. There’s just something you see or hear or something you remember and it triggers a thought that will just hit you: “Pow!”

I couldn’t find anybody in the band, so I went and found Twiggs Lyndon, put a bass in his hands, and said, “I want you to go right here,” and I put his hands on the bass and showed him to play, “duhn duh-duhn duhn, duhn duh-duhn duhn.” He did it over and over and he finally had it, and I said, “When I hold up my hand, by God, you stop!” And he says, “What do I play then?” And I said, “Just stop! Don’t play nothing.” Then I found Jaimoe and had him come in. So I had a twelve-string guitar and a bass and a drum and I cut me a demo of it and I just laid that on the band and bam that bad brother’s done. We recorded it proper.

PAYNE:
Phil bought a whole block that was falling down. Right next to the studio he had an old warehouse where we stored our equipment and had some practice sessions. Anyone could walk up there, kick down a board, and steal everything, so one of us roadies had to spend the night there every night the gear was in there.

I was on duty one night, in this little guard shack we had, and Gregg showed up in the middle of the night with this half-done song and he said he was having trouble with it. We were getting high and, honestly, he was starting to irritate me—because he was singing this song over and over and I got sick of hearing the band play the same shit over and over again until they got it right. So I just threw out the line,
“I’ve gone past the point of caring / some old bed I’ll soon be sharing.”

Then we had it and Gregg loved the song and wanted to record it before it was gone, but we didn’t have a key to the studio. We tried [studio musicians and managers] Paul Hornsby and Johnny Sandlin and they both told us to go to hell, come back in the morning.

SANDLIN:
Something like that was not unusual. I remember several crazy nights with them waking me up at three in the morning and wanting to go in the studio to work and I never wanted to. I had worked all day and would be back in the morning and you never knew what they wanted to work on.

PAYNE:
Gregg was intent on getting this on tape before he forgot it all. So we went back down there and just broke in; I smashed a window on the door and reached in to unlock it.

Then I was running around trying to figure out how to turn the board on and he was running around yelling into mics looking for a live one. I finally found what looked like a wall light switch hidden under the board, and boom, all these lights came on, microphones are live, and needles are jumping. We laid down one track with Gregg just playing an acoustic guitar and singing and he went back the next day and added some more. I would imagine that tape is somewhere.

JAIMOE:
All I remember is Gregg came in one night hot to get the song down. Twiggs was playing bass, Gregory was playing guitar, and I played congas and we laid that down.

PAYNE:
Afterwards, Gregg was leaving and I was going back on guard duty and he said, “You really helped me out with this song. If this thing does anything and it’s a success, I’ll cut you in and give you a percentage,” and I laughed that off.

JAIMOE:
We cut “Please Call Home” in New York, with [jazz producer] Joel Dorn. We did it in two takes. He said, “Play the song so we can get a feel,” and we played it. I think I was playing with brushes and Joel suggested I try it with a mallet. We played it for a second time and Joel said, “Come on in [to the control room] and listen to it,” and that was it. It was over.

BLUE SUEDE

A look inside Gregg’s softer side—how he was influenced by acoustic singer-songwriters, including Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, and Neil Young.