One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (29 page)

Jaimoe and Dickey Betts, RFK Stadium, June 1973.

WOOLEY:
Backstage, the Grateful Dead roadies dosed the food and drinks of as many people as they could with LSD. Bunky Odom warned us in advance so we didn’t partake of anything. However the ABB road crew already had.

PAYNE:
Any time you were around Owsley Stanley [Dead soundman and legendary acid creator who was known as Bear], you were in danger of being dosed, but I don’t think we were that time. After our first few encounters with them, we were careful. We kept our hands over our beer cans, never left food or drinks unattended or consumed anything we hadn’t opened. If you didn’t take these precautions, you were likely to be dosed, which I was not fond of and I really think is a cruel thing to do—remember we were looking at driving six hundred miles after most gigs.

WEIR:
That would have been a common practice in those days. Some of the folks with our crew, especially Bear, were evangelical about LSD and had no compunction about dosing people. All I can say is, I had to deal with that, too. I stopped taking LSD willingly in 1966 because as far as I was concerned, I had seen enough. I still got dosed numerous times, because a lot of those evangelicals did not think I had seen enough—that anyone possibly could see enough.

PAYNE:
I remember the first time we played with the Dead, I was filling “Garg” afterwards—that was short for gargantuan, because it was a huge airline case filled with cables of all sorts. I opened it up and they were all moving and looked like snakes, which freaked me out because I have a fear of snakes.

PARISH:
That was definitely something that people had to deal with around us, but I think by that time we were pretty careful with the bands we worked with, and there wasn’t much of that kind of thing going on.

ODOM:
It’s always intense on stage and the road crew has to watch this and that, and I think Dick Wooley came on stage with some people and they didn’t want him there. And Dick liked to fight himself, so when they got in an argument, things got out of control.

JAIMOE:
The stage was really crowded and everyone there was specifically told not to come up without clearance from the tour manager.

PAYNE:
I probably shouldn’t have even been there. I had badly injured my foot in a bike crash about a month earlier and was limping around on painkillers. The stage was constructed on the field and it was not all that stable. The Dead had an entourage that must have been 300 people. We were playing and there were probably 150 people on stage, which was not designed to hold so many, and I could see the whole thing shaking and swaying. I was really worried about the thing falling.

I had already told Tuffy [Phillips, driver], “Nobody else gets on this stage,” when he came over and said there was a guy who says he’s with the label and wants to come up. So I hobbled over and there was this guy I had never seen before, with short hair wearing a suit and holding a briefcase. He said he was with the label and he was coming up and I just said, “No you’re not,” and punched him in the nose.

WOOLEY:
I was in pretty good shape. I still competed in karate tournaments and was no pushover in any street fight.

JAIMOE:
I think that Phil and Bunky were getting tired of the whole situation and since Wooley dabbled in martial arts, they were going to have him kick Tuffy’s ass and Wooley fell for that. Tuffy told him to get the fuck off the stage and Dick Wooley got into this karate stance.

WOOLEY:
When a dosed-up ABB driver blocked me from returning to my seat I looked to find the road manager and the driver sucker-punched me with a beer bottle. Stunned, I instinctively began punching and quickly got the better of the fight. But some cowardly ABB roadie saw this and began kicking me in the face with the heel of his boot.

PAYNE:
He tumbled down the stairs. The Dead’s security was Hell’s Angels and when they looked up and saw it was me who hit him, they figured he was a bad guy and kicked the shit out of him.

PARISH:
Not one Hell’s Angel ever set foot in RFK Stadium as our security, though there certainly might have been a few stray Angels who were someone’s friends. I don’t know what happened because it was their business and we didn’t get involved. We wouldn’t have wanted them involved in our business and we returned the favor.

WOOLEY:
Luckily, the Grateful Dead’s roadies saw this and jumped in to separate the churning pile. I was bleeding from the kicks, but still swinging when a very large Grateful Dead roadie pulled me out of the pile using a police-type stranglehold. He picked me up and deposited me in the promoter’s limo. So thank you, Big Grateful Dead Roadie.

A fuming Walden demanded that whoever was responsible for injuring Wooley be fired. Kim Payne, Mike Callahan, and Tuffy Phillips all lost their jobs.

JAIMOE:
It was just, “Tuffy, Callahan, and Kim Payne have to go.”

ODOM:
Phil had to make a stand. After all, Dick Wooley worked for him, and it wasn’t a good situation. The way a record company looks at it is simple: “We need these people. You need to be nice to them.” Dick was very good at his job.

PERKINS:
That was a culmination of everything falling apart. There was just a general malaise going on. It wasn’t like anyone thought, “Everything’s fine except for these three guys.” They were a symptom of the problem—not the problem itself. On the other hand, the road crew had gotten pretty demanding, driving the promotions people crazy and controlling access to everything and everyone.

The word was Kim had saved Gregg from an OD just before. People said he saved the guy’s life on Friday and got fired on Saturday.

PAYNE:
I had saved his life from an OD, no doubt, but not the day before. We were back in Macon and I don’t think anyone wanted to tell me I had been fired, so Dickey volunteered and he called me over to his house and told me I no longer had a job.

PERKINS:
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do was tell those guys about them losing their jobs and that it was a final decision—that they couldn’t go back to the members of the band and try to get it back.

PAYNE:
That kind of broke my heart. How do you fire a family member? It was a brotherhood from the minute we pledged it until the minute I was fired.

PERKINS:
Well, you ain’t gonna fire the band.

RED DOG:
Drugs fucked up Kim and Callahan badly—especially Kim. It was more or less a domino thing—knock one down and they all go.

PAYNE:
I can’t doubt any of the charges against me because I was so full of drugs, between what the doctor prescribed for my foot and street drugs.

WOOLEY:
In our organization everyone was out of control. Phil and Dickey were featured most in the local Macon paper.… Everyone back then was on a high, some could handle it, some couldn’t. Everyone dealt with drugs in their own way, but it took its toll on everyone.

JAIMOE:
Everything started to change one way or another. The message was “Look at all the dollars you’re making now. Do you want to keep making them?” There were various ways of saying that to you, trying to make you realize so you will change your behavior. A lot of things started to change. One thing I can say is I still hold a lot of things I always felt and believed … I just do what I do and when I see things going on I don’t like I just stay away from those kinds of people.

BRUCE HAMPTON:
Jaimoe has never wavered. He’s been the same forever.

WOOLEY:
Being with Atlantic for many years, on the road with top talent like Eric Clapton, gave me the opportunity to observe how professional artist managers, artists, and crews acted and how they handled themselves both onstage and backstage.

I anticipated the same high standards at Capricorn because Twiggs Lyndon was a longtime friend and a backstage professional I’d worked with. Soon after settling in Macon I saw that Twiggs’s influence over the ABB had waned and Duane was, of course, gone. Now leaderless and demoralized, the band was influenced mostly by the road crew that surrounded them. By industry standards the road crew was a cluster-fuck of drugged-out hangers-on that seemingly kept their job by keeping the ABB supplied with drugs and high most of the time. It was crazy and out of control.

CHAPTER

17

Mountain Jam

O
N
J
ULY
28
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1973, the month after the debacle at RFK Stadium, the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead teamed up again, for what was then the largest rock concert ever, at Watkins Glen Speedway in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The Allman Brothers were paid $117,500 for what their contract stipulated would be one 150-minute set beginning at 10 p.m.

With three crew members suddenly gone and the largest gig in rock history fast approaching, the band needed some new employees. Among those quickly hired was Twiggs’s kid brother A.J., then twenty-two years old.

A.J. LYNDON:
When Twiggs called me, I was excited and my wife was not. She started crying, both because she didn’t want me gone and because she knew what life was going to be like out there. I said no, and my mother told me I was foolish for not going on the road with the band. I signed on and my first two gigs were at Madison Square Garden.

PERKINS:
Whenever we had a personnel change, it felt like, “We can’t get along without that guy.” But we never had a real problem. We never missed a beat.

A.J. LYNDON:
After one of the New York nights, I came back and saw Dickey trashing his room and threatening his wife and he tried to beat me up, and I went to Twiggs and quit. I said I wasn’t cut out for this work. Then Willie came and asked me to please stay through Watkins Glen because they needed all hands on deck.

Here’s how things were in the rock and roll world in 1973: they taught me how to drive an eighteen-wheeler pulling a 45-foot trailer on the highway, with no special license, and my teacher sitting next to me drinking whiskey and snorting cocaine. Off to Watkins Glen!

RED DOG:
We loved playing with the Dead, starting with the Fillmore shows. Duane loved sitting in with them—like, “We’re gonna play all night!”

WEIR:
We always loved playing with the Allman Brothers. We developed a close relationship with Duane that unfortunately never had the time to blossom because he was gone so soon. Over the years, I got closer with Dickey as well and have always enjoyed playing with him.

ODOM:
Sam Cutler of the Grateful Dead and I put Watkins Glen together. I made twelve trips to San Francisco to meet with him and he came to Macon twice. It started with two dates we had booked together in Athens, Georgia, and Houston, which got canceled because of Berry’s death. We wanted to work together more, kept talking and talking, and eventually decided to do three dates: the two at RFK and one at Watkins Glen.

PARISH:
After the death of Duane we really tried to support them, to get them through that tough time. We scheduled some shows together and on the way to one in Houston, I crashed our truck and I was almost killed and our PA was all over the road and the whole thing was just a mess. I was lucky to be alive and we didn’t know how we were going to make the show, but we were thinking, “At least we have the Allman Brothers there to pick up any slack.” We got there and found out that Berry Oakley had died and they, of course, weren’t coming. What a weird and horrible day.

Jerry Garcia and Dickey Betts, Cow Palace, San Francisco, December 31, 1973.

WEIR:
A joint show with the Allman Brothers was an opportunity to play to at least a partially new audience, which would always make it more of an adventure for us. We also looked forward to the cross-pollination; we would play with them, they would play with us, and that was always fun.

ODOM:
We invited the Band to open Watkins Glen, which Sam and I decided on together, because we thought those three bands represented America. They were the three best American bands and they related to each other, the music related, they knew each other. It was just a great fit.

LEAVELL:
It was very exciting to think about those three bands playing together. We knew it was going to be a big draw and the figure of 100,000 people was being thrown around in the weeks prior, which seemed incredible.

One hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold for ten dollars each, but the crowd exploded to many times that number. The rest got in for free, though many people certainly never got within sight of the stage. The small country roads leading to the concert site became parking lots—first figuratively, then literally, as many drivers abandoned their vehicles and walked up to ten miles to the concert.