One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (2 page)

Given the rancor and turmoil that has often surrounded the group, it’s easy to scoff at the notion of a musical brotherhood. But I believe that in its earliest years, the members and crew shared a bond that sustained them through perilous times. Since the early, devastating deaths of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, the band has also managed to find brilliant new musical voices to keep them moving forward, including Chuck Leavell, Warren Haynes, and Derek Trucks.

The Allman Brothers’ long history is equally tragic and uplifting, heroic and sad. I have spoken to virtually every living person who had a hand in this tale. When two people’s recollections of an event differed, I present them here side-by-side.

Cast of Characters, in Order of Appearance

GREGG ALLMAN:
Singer/keyboardist, founding member of the Allman Brothers Band (ABB); younger brother of guitarist Duane Allman.

JOHNNY SANDLIN:
Longtime Allman friend and colleague. Bassist in the Allman Joys and Hour Glass. Produced
Brothers and Sisters
and other Allman Brothers releases.

RICK HALL:
President, Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

JON LANDAU:
Writer for
Rolling Stone
and
Crawdaddy
; Bruce Springsteen’s manager since 1978.

JAIMOE:
Drummer and founding member of the ABB.

JACKIE AVERY JR.:
Songwriter, friend of Jaimoe.

JOHN HAMMOND JR.:
Guitarist/singer. Good friend of Duane Allman.

DICKEY BETTS:
Guitarist/singer and founding member of the ABB. Has performed with his band Great Southern since an acrimonious 2000 departure from the ABB.

REESE WYNANS:
Keyboardist in the Second Coming, with Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley. Participant in original jams that led to the ABB. Later a member of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble.

THOM DOUCETTE:
Harmonica player, Duane confidant, and unofficial member of the ABB.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Drummer and founding member of the ABB.

RICHARD PRICE:
Florida bassist; played with Betts and Oakley and was there for the Jacksonville jams that birthed the Allman Brothers Band.

LINDA OAKLEY:
Wife of Berry Oakley.

PHIL WALDEN:
Original manager of the ABB and president of Capricorn Records. Died April 23, 2006.

KIM PAYNE:
One of the band’s original crew members; with the ABB 1969–73.

JOHN McEUEN:
Founder, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, brother of Bill McEuen, Hour Glass manager.

MIKE CALLAHAN:
One of the band’s original crew members; with the ABB 1969–73. Died September 2007.

RED DOG:
One of the band’s original crew members; with the ABB 1969–2000. Died February 21, 2011.

A.J. LYNDON:
Twiggs’s little brother, ABB crew member 1973–76.

MAMA LOUISE HUDSON:
Cook and owner, H&H Soul Food Restaurant; mother figure to the band.

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON:
Founder of the Hampton Grease Band, who often played with the ABB in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park; friend of Duane Allman.

W. DAVID POWELL:
Partner in Wonder Graphics, the duo that designed the ABB’s mushroom logo and the iconic cover of
Eat a Peach.

BUNKY ODOM:
Vice President, Phil Walden and Associates; day-to-day management contact.

JOHN LYNDON:
Twiggs’s brother.

GARY ROSSINGTON:
Lynyrd Skynyrd founder/guitarist.

DON LAW:
Manager of the Boston Tea Party; major New England promoter for forty-five years.

STEPHEN PALEY:
Photographer who took the pictures on the debut album cover.

WARREN HAYNES:
Guitarist/singer who joined the ABB in 1989. Left in 1997. Rejoined in 2001.

SCOTT BOYER:
Guitarist in the band Cowboy, friend of Duane Allman.

TOM DOWD:
Producer of many ABB albums, including
Idlewild South, At Fillmore East
, and
Eat a Peach.
Also worked with Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Derek and the Dominos, and many others. Died October 27, 2000.

BOBBY WHITLOCK:
Derek and the Dominos keyboardist; also worked with Duane in Delaney and Bonnie.

ERIC CLAPTON:
Guitarist, rock legend. Worked with Duane Allman on Derek and the Dominos’
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

JONNY PODELL:
ABB booking agent since 1969.

WILLIE PERKINS:
ABB Road Manager, 1970–76.

BOB WEIR:
Grateful Dead guitarist.

STEVE PARISH:
Grateful Dead crew member.

DR. JOHN:
Pianist, friend of Duane Allman.

DICK WOOLEY:
Capricorn Vice President of Promotion, 1972–76.

CHUCK LEAVELL:
Pianist, member of the ABB 1972–76.

SIDNEY SMITH:
Photographer.

LES DUDEK:
Guitarist, played on “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica.”

DAVID “ROOK” GOLDFLIES:
Bassist, member of the ABB 1979–82.

MIKE LAWLER:
Keyboardist/producer. Member of the ABB 1980–82.

JOHN SCHER:
Promoter; ABB manager, 1981–82.

BERT HOLMAN:
ABB manager since 1991.

MICHAEL CAPLAN:
Epic Records A&R man who signed the Allman Brothers Band in 1989.

DANNY GOLDBERG:
ABB manager 1989–91; has also worked with Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, and other rock icons.

JOHNNY NEEL:
Keyboardist, member of the ABB, 1989–91.

ALLEN WOODY:
Bassist, member of the ABB 1989–97. Died August 26, 2000.

MATT ABTS:
Gov’t Mule drummer.

DEREK TRUCKS:
Guitarist, member of the ABB since 1999; nephew of Butch Trucks.

MARC QUIÑONES:
Percussionist, member of the ABB since 1991.

KIRK WEST:
ABB “Tour Magician” and logistical coordinator, 1989–2009.

DAVID GRISSOM:
Guitarist. Toured with the ABB for nine shows in 1993, subbing for Dickey Betts.

ZAKK WYLDE:
Ozzy Osbourne guitarist who played with the ABB for one gig, filling in for Dickey Betts in 1993.

JACK PEARSON:
Guitarist, member of the ABB, 1997–99.

OTEIL BURBRIDGE:
Bassist, member of the ABB since 1997.

JIMMY HERRING:
Guitarist, summer tour 2000.

BILLY GIBBONS:
ZZ Top guitarist.

BUDDY GUY:
Blues guitarist.

Foreword by Butch Trucks

Early in 1969, I was living on the St. John’s River with my first wife and on the verge of quitting what was, at the time, a very unprofitable and unsatisfying career in music. My not-too-well-thought-out plan was to return to college and get my degree in math, since that was what I seemed to be best at doing. My first attempt at “higher education” ended in 1966 when Florida State University asked me not to return for the fall trimester. It seems that the nonattendance that led to a great deal of F’s was unacceptable even at the great party school of FSU. I joined up with two of my buddies from high school who happened to land in the same dorm as me and we decided to start a band and play this new stuff by the Byrds and the newly electric Bob Dylan among others, such as the Lovin’ Spoonful. We called ourselves the Bitter Ind. and somehow going to class just didn’t seem as important as rehearsing and playing for every frat at FSU.

In the summer of 1966 we packed our gear in the back of our guitar player and singer Scott Boyer’s car and headed to Daytona Beach to make it big. Well, that bombed big-time. We auditioned at all of the clubs there and they all thought we were the best band they had ever heard, but the universal rejections came because “you can’t dance to it.” We were doing our last audition at a place called the Martinique when in walked the Beatles. Of course, it wasn’t actually John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but the way people acted it may as well have been. It was a band called the Allman Joys, and walking in the lead was this dude with long blond hair followed closely by another dude with even longer and blonder hair. This was of course, Duane and Gregg Allman.

We played our set and got the usual “you guys are great but they can’t dance to it” from the club owner. Waiting for us backstage, however, were those two blond guys, and they were blown away with what we had just played. We explained our predicament and got an invite to come hang out at 100 Van Avenue where they lived with their mother, Momma A.

After a few days we packed it up, stuck our tails between our legs, and headed back to Jacksonville, where a few weeks later I got a call from Duane asking me to come to a club in downtown Jacksonville, because their drummer had just quit. I, of course, said, “I’m on my way.” I played with them for a night or two and Duane, knowing that this club’s owner was a huge Dylan fan, got our band an audition and we took over the Allman Joys’s gig. That lasted for around eight months. Then we hit the Southern club circuit, where we would run into Duane and Gregg from time to time.

Sometime in, I believe, 1967, we were in Daytona and stopped by 100 Van Avenue and found Duane and Gregg fresh from a run at the big time in L.A. as the Hour Glass. We decided to join forces and played for the next few months as the Bitter Ind., the Hour Glass, or the 31st of February. (We had signed a record contract with Vanguard Records and the Bitter End club in New York would not let us use that name).

We took this version to Miami to record our second record for Vanguard. You can hear two of those recordings on Duane’s retrospective,
Skydog.
One of them was the very first recording of “Melissa.” When we finished there, Gregg flew back to L.A. and found out that the Hour Glass’s record company, Liberty, which has no relation to the current label of the same name, would release the rest of that band from their contracts if he would stay and record solo. I was with Duane in Daytona when he got the call from Gregg. I believe if Duane could have gotten through the phone he would have strangled Gregg on the spot. Well, Duane had been offered a gig as a studio player in Muscle Shoals and without Gregg he just didn’t feel like our band was going to go anywhere, so he packed it up and headed to Alabama.

Back to my opening sentence: Luckily for me, before I enrolled in college again, there came a knock on my door and there was Duane with an incredible-looking black man. Duane, in his usual way, introduced us to each other as Jaimoe, his new drummer, and Butch, his old drummer. He hung around for a while and then took off to meet up with Berry Oakley at the house on Riverside Drive where Berry’s then-band, Second Coming, was living. He left Jaimoe at my house and, for the first time in my middle-class white life I had to get to know and deal with a black man. It changed me profoundly. Over forty-four years later, Jaimoe and I are still best of friends and I am very proud to call him my brother.

I could go on with this story for several hundred pages, but that is what Alan Paul has written, and that is what I am writing a foreword for. I will let Alan tell the story of the Allman Brothers Band as he has been able to uncover it from many long interviews with me and everyone else that he could get to who was there during many of the band’s incarnations.

There have been several attempts to write
the
epic rock and roll story but so far, I haven’t read anything that really “gets it.” They tend to be written by newspaper writers and the books wind up being very long articles that deal with who did what, where, and when. None have delved into the
how
and
why.

I’ve read Alan Paul’s articles about us going back many years. I’ve read his book
Big in China
, and the one thing that jumps from those pages is
how
and
why.
In
Big in China
Alan finds himself in as alien an environment as possible and still finds a way to assemble an extremely good band that he educates in American blues/jazz rock as exemplified by the Allman Brothers Band. Alan does an incredible job of telling his story from the very uneasy beginnings, when even communicating was difficult, other than through the music, up through the day that his group was selected as the top band in Beijing.

Alan has a way with narrative that just draws you in without using the single-level storyline used by other writers who have attempted telling the Allman Brothers Band’s story. He gets right to the
how
s and
why
s that give his narrative real substance.

Enjoy and become enlightened.

—West Palm Beach, Florida

PROLOGUE

Duane Allman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 20, 1946. Baby brother Gregg arrived just over a year later, on December 8, 1947. Their father, Willis Turner Allman, an Army first lieutenant, was murdered on December 26, 1949, shot by a stranger whom he and a friend had met playing pool in a bar and offered a ride home. The widowed Geraldine Allman moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, where Duane and Gregg grew up as exceptionally close sole siblings.

It was thirteen-year-old Gregg who first brought music into the Allmans’ Daytona, Florida, household when Geraldine bought him a Sears Silvertone guitar.

“I got the guitar and Duane got a motorcycle, a Harley 165, one of those tiny little ones where you mix the gas with the oil,” Gregg recalls.

Before long, Duane, eleven months older, was stealing the instrument and trying to steal his little brother’s licks as well. Countless fights ensued until Duane traded in the remnants of the wrecked Harley for his own guitar.

“As soon as I got the guitar, he’d look at it and go, ‘Now what you got there, baby brother?’” Gregg recalls with a laugh. “And I’d go, ‘Now, all right, Duane, that’s mine.’ He would slip into my room and play it. We had more fights over that guitar than you’d believe. He drove the damned motorcycle into the ground and brought it home in a bag. Finally, to stop all the fights, my mom got him his own guitar in exchange for whatever was left of that motorcycle. Then there was not only peace in the family but we started playing together; we had a twosome. Within a few weeks, he could play it really good. It was pretty amazing.