One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (15 page)

Phil Walden (left) and Jonny Podell at a Capricorn picnic.

JON LANDAU:
Jonny Podell was a fabulous booker. A crazy man, but a great, great agent.

PODELL:
This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band and management provided them with first five, then six crew, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.

ODOM:
It got pretty hairy there for a while. We had a lot of money sunk into the band. When you’re in the management business, you’re in it to develop and that’s what we were doing. When you have a band making $1,000–$2,000 a night, you can’t reach out and take a 15 percent commission, but you can put it on the book and that’s what we did. A lot of the money invested was just keeping them alive and on the road. In the course of a year, $100 here and $300 there adds up with a band and crew.

PAYNE:
Getting the Winnebago was a real big deal, like, “Oh, happy day!” But it turned out to be not so great. The damn thing was a 27-footer, designed for a guy and his wife and two little kids to go fishing for a weekend, not to have ten guys and all their stuff living in it for months of coast-to-coast traveling. Technically, it could sleep ten people, but being on the road for two months we were just constantly stepping over each other’s stuff and banging into one another.

ALLMAN:
That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass but we were sure getting better.

ODOM:
That Winnebago kept them together. They needed it, and it was a big investment at the time.

RED DOG:
I really think that kind of life led to a lot of the drug problems. It was tough. You had to have something to get you up and something to get you down. The coke would work: bingo, you’re up! And the heroin would work: bingo, you’re down! And there were always pills—blues, reds, yellows—to perk you up or calm you down.

PODELL:
The business was just becoming somewhat professional and they were certainly one of the first to approach it from the management down as an investment, as a business. That was also reflected in the very nice Winnebago that Phil got them. It was a significant investment at the time for a band not yet making any money. For a bunch of six undisciplined hooligans road-crewed by six more undisciplined hooligans, they responded to the management and the booking in a very professional way. Obviously, in later years that began to unravel with the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, but at the beginning, there was a true sense of brotherhood between those twelve guys and everyone working with and for them.

The touring helped the band slowly grow a fan base, but they were still struggling to make a living. Their 1970 tax returns show every band member with an income of $8,764.01, except for Gregg, who made over $5,000 more from royalty payments, and Duane, who made an additional $1,080, presumably from session work, including $300 he received for recording with Delaney and Bonnie in May 1970. Every band member was paid a per diem of $7.50 for every day on the road.

The grueling road trips and constant touring took a toll on the band and crew and may have played a part in what happened on April 30, 1970, at Aliotta’s Lounge in Buffalo, New York. Payne and Mike Callahan arrived at the club to pack up the gear and collect the money for the previous night’s performance. The band had been paid a $500 advance on a $1,000 guarantee but had left the club without receiving full and final payment, which the venue’s owner, Angelo Aliotta, refused to make. He wanted them to play another night and refused to let them load out their gear. The band was planning on driving to Cincinnati to play a benefit for Ludlow Garage, one of their favorite venues.

JOHN LYNDON:
Twiggs was very proud that he’d never not gotten paid. They had played until three a.m. and ended up leaving without the money. The booking agent said, “Forget it. We’ll sue them and get it. Don’t worry about it.” Clearly, Twiggs was sleep deprived, eating speed to stay awake, and he didn’t have any emotional resources left to deal with things.

DOUCETTE:
Twiggs had road managed for Little Richard, Percy Sledge, and other guys on the chitlin’ circuit—the toughest environments you can imagine—and he was very, very proud of the fact that he had always gotten paid. He treated that like Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games-played streak.

It’s been widely believed that Aliotta’s rationale for not paying the group was that they had been fifteen minutes late after driving all day from the previous evening’s show in Stony Brook, Long Island, 450 miles away, but John Lyndon says this was not likely the case.

JOHN LYNDON:
There’s nothing in any of the notes I’ve read that being late was a justification for not paying the band. When they arrived, someone at the club actually told them, “We’ve got another band that’s gonna open so y’all are not going on until ten or eleven. It’s no problem that you’re late.”

The next day the band had a rare off day, but they were planning on playing the Ludlow Garage benefit, followed a day later by a show in Cleveland. In the morning, Aliotta again refused to pay the money owed when Payne and Callahan arrived to complete the load-out. They called Twiggs at the hotel.

RED DOG:
It was a strange deal because the guy was messing with us from the start. It was, “I’ll pay you … I ain’t gonna pay you … I’ll pay you.” We left the club without being paid, which was not good, and the next morning the guy said on the phone, “Come over, Twiggs. I got the money.” Before he left, Twiggs said to me, “If this guy says he ain’t gonna pay us, I’m gonna off him.” I said, “Don’t talk like that,” but I didn’t take him seriously.

JOHN LYNDON:
I never heard that Twiggs said that and it’s not consistent with the notes in the investigation.

Duane was sleeping and Twiggs took his fishing knife. Maybe he took the knife for protection because he thought it might get rough down there. Then he meets with Aliotta, who’s this fifty-five-year-old nice guy and he was trying to reconcile the difference. Then Twiggs gets in an argument and stabs this guy and he had no recollection of having done so.

PAYNE:
Callahan and I were the only members of the troop there with Twiggs. We were on the stage and Twiggs went behind the bar and got in the man’s nose. They started tussling and we thought Twiggs was just beating the hell out of him. We kind of took our time getting over there because we didn’t know he had a fucking knife. Callahan jumped over the bar and I just went over to where it opened and as I got nearer I saw all the blood.

Twiggs was holding the knife out, saying, “Take this, son of a bitch.” I was shocked and I grabbed the old man—he seemed old at the time—and stood him up. He had on a Navy-style tunic with all this blood spreading out on his lower right side. I pulled up his shirt and there were five little holes shaped like the five on a dice and the man was yelling in a weak voice, “Call the police. Call the police.”

There were seven or eight people at the bar and someone did go call. Twiggs just walked over and sat down at a table. I went over and asked him if he stuck that man and he said, “I stuck him several times.” I said, “You better run,” and he said, “I ain’t running no more.” He just sat there and waited for the police to come.

JOHN LYNDON:
He went to the police station and signed a confession.

RED DOG:
We went to eat, opened the door, and Duane said, “I just got a call and Twiggs killed a guy,” and someone said, “Oh, come on now.” And Duane said, “No, man. He stabbed him.”

He said he was going to do it and he did it. Twiggs did not bullshit. Obviously, some people could say that’s premeditated murder, but I thought it was just one case where smack talking actually came to pass because of circumstances. I do not believe he set out to do this, but it freaked me out. Before he left, when I told him to calm down, he said, “Just make sure you get my camera equipment,” and I couldn’t even do that. I couldn’t find it in all the commotion and I felt really terrible about that.

Lyndon was arrested, booked for first-degree murder, and held in jail. Callahan and Payne had to stay behind as material witnesses, while the rest of the crew and band managed to load up their gear and move on to Cleveland, skipping the Ludlow benefit.

CALLAHAN:
It was some deep, bad serious bullshit. Me and Payne got left behind. We were told we can’t leave town and we should assume another name when we checked into the hotel.

PAYNE:
We had to load out. We were not going to leave our equipment unguarded and unprotected in that club. We just didn’t want to leave our shit there and we insisted and they couldn’t really come up with a reason that we couldn’t do that. The cops were not happy about it, or about having to protect us while we worked. But first they cordoned everything off as a crime scene and took Callahan and me to the station to get our statements and the cops there were not shy about their feelings either. One came up to the guy interviewing me and said [about Twiggs], “We took that bastard’s belt, but if you ask me, we should let him hang himself and save the state a whole lot of money.”

They took us through all kinds of protective precautions—like they were hiding away John Gotti. They had five cars behind us and five ahead of us and drove us to another hotel, where we checked in under assumed names, as witnesses. They were paying for all this and Callahan decided to see how far he could push it, so he asked if we could stop by a liquor store for a little something, and the guy said, “Well, I don’t see why not.”

RED DOG:
Twiggs loved that band so much that he killed a man over five hundred dollars. That was all it was, but it might as well have been five million to us at the time. It broke the law, obviously, but I think it abided by the code of the land: “I’m gonna have to do this to you because you are hurting my family.”

One night we were driving on the Beltway around Washington, D.C., and I was lost in sadness. Duane was sitting up there with me, as he often did, and he asked me what was wrong. I said, “I’m thinking about Twiggs and where he is,” and Duane said, “I didn’t think you liked Twiggs.” I said, “I love him. Just because we argue a lot, that don’t mean nothing.”

Twiggs educated me about gear. I had never known anything except the military and the hustle. I didn’t know anything about music or equipment, and he taught me everything.

The group continued with their tour in Cleveland and called Willie Perkins, who was Lyndon’s handpicked successor. After one more show, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, the band returned home to Georgia.

WILLIE PERKINS,
ABB road manager, 1970–76:
Twiggs was an old friend of mine and I had seen the band in the park in Atlanta and become converted. I thought they were the greatest thing I had ever seen and I asked Twiggs for a job and he said, “We don’t have any money but the next time we have a slot, it’s yours.” He wanted to get out from being the road manager and move over to dealing with gear, and he knew that he could trust me. He gave the guys my number and said to call if anything ever happened to him.

ODOM:
When Twiggs recommended somebody, Duane didn’t hesitate or doubt.

PERKINS:
Butch called me from Cleveland and said Twiggs was in jail and they needed me. They were on their way back to Macon. About a week later, they had a gig in Atlanta, at Georgia Tech, and I met them there. I got onto the Winnebago and Duane came and sat down in the lounge and said, “Man, we are a handful. We will sure enough drive you crazy.” I knew that he was shooting straight and telling me the truth but I was in. I told him I needed two weeks to give notice and then I’d start.

I was a suit-and-tie-wearing auditor for the Trust Company of Georgia in Atlanta and everyone thought I was absolutely insane. My colleagues and friends and families could not understand what I was doing. They all said, “You are throwing away a promising career to go run around with a bunch of crazy hippies who make no money.”

LINDA OAKLEY:
I saw Willie go through such a transformation from a guy in a tie with neatly combed hair to a guy with eyes spinning around in his sockets from dealing with this group.

PERKINS:
I tried to impose a little bit of business sense on them and started cutting down on expenses, doing things like sharing one hotel room so we could have a shower, but forcing everyone to sleep in the Winnebago. Guys went to Duane and complained I was too strict, that I was like a father, and he said, “Believe me, he’ll be an asset to the band.”

As Perkins quickly learned, the Allman Brothers Band was almost as well known for their beautiful, plentiful groupies as they were for their lengthy, high-quality shows.

PERKINS:
I met with Phil Walden and he said, “You won’t make much money, but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.”

MAMA LOUISE:
They had so many women. And Gregg was the lover boy. Oooh!

HAMPTON:
I remember seeing them at American University real early and there were probably a hundred people there, all of them going nuts. Half of them were women in the front staring up lustfully.

RED DOG:
One promoter from up North once said, “Someone in the Allman Brothers has slept with every woman in the South,” because he was down there doing shows and anywhere he went, he’d meet all these women who told him they knew us, they had dated us, asked him to say hi to someone from the Allman Brothers Band. He said, “You guys must be fucking yourself to death.” We attacked it all full blast. Wild music, wild women, wild times. We were living hard and fast.

LINDA OAKLEY:
There were always a million girls hanging out backstage and we would go to shows and look at them and wonder who was doing whom. And they had their on-the-road parties, which were like marathon things, with everyone sharing everyone. Such fun, those bad boys were having. I knew about it and understood it, but it didn’t really make it any easier. That’s showbiz!