One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (3 page)

“I just showed him the rudimentary map: E, A, and B, the three-chord turnaround, and he caught up with me very quickly. Then he started showing me some licks, and we would just help each other out. And that’s how we learned. Neither of us ever learned to read music really, just chord charts.”

The music bug bit Duane so hard that he dropped out of school after tenth grade and started playing constantly, Gregg recalls. “Then he passed me like I was standing still.”

The brothers formed a band, and while Gregg was still in school, they were playing clubs up and down the Daytona Beach strip as the Escorts and then the Allman Joys. The music evolved rapidly, and by spring 1965 the Escorts had cut their own respectable versions of R&B hits like Bobby Bland’s “Turn On Your Lovelight” and Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Young Gregg was still struggling to mimic his heroes, but he was already seizing his vocal identity.

Duane (left) and Gregg Allman, Seabreeze High.

“At first, we were playing what everyone else was—the Ventures and other surf music. You know, Surfer Joe stuff,” Gregg says. “Then we met up with a group of black guys in Daytona Beach, including Floyd Miles, one of my best friends to this day, and they turned us on to so much great music and it was clear right away that [the surf music] just didn’t have near the substance of the rhythm and blues stuff.

“When I was thirteen or fourteen, Floyd started taking me over across the tracks—literally. Blacks lived on the other side of the railroad tracks in Daytona. And it wasn’t cool for either of us. It wasn’t cool for me to be hanging out with him and going to that neighborhood and it wasn’t cool for him to bring me there. We both caught hell from our friends and families, but we didn’t care. He took me over there to this place, which was a convenience store/drug store/record store. I think you could have bought a car in there. And they had this big bin in the middle of the store just full of records. And he said, ‘This is James Brown and this is B.B. King and this is Sonny Boy Williamson and this is Howlin’ Wolf.’ I’d get whatever I could afford. Every time I’d get two dollars I’d pedal my bicycle over there with Floyd, grab me a record, and get the hell out as quick as I could.”

Back home, Duane was digesting the records his little brother brought home and learning to play the licks. By the time Gregg graduated in 1965, the brothers were already established as the best, most adventurous band on a burgeoning and competitive circuit.

“Duane was so confident we could make it and he always wanted me to drop out so we could just play all the time, but I was the Doubting Thomas,” Gregg recalls. “I’d say, ‘We’re never gonna make enough playing music to pay the rent.’ The Beatles had just come out and everybody had a band, so there was a lot of good competition out there. I wanted to finish school and become a dentist; I had my goal set to be a dental surgeon. And I was already accepted to college in Louisiana, so I figured I had that to fall back on. I graduated high school and thought, ‘I’ll give it a year. I’ll go out and play these clubs and then I’ll go on to college.’ But after a year, I was so far in debt from trying to buy amps and guitars and everything else, that I had to do another year.”

The brothers expanded their touring throughout the Southeast and began spending a fair amount of time in St. Louis, where they had established a following. The other members of the band changed with some frequency. By the spring of 1967, the group included two Alabama natives who would remain associated with the brothers for decades—drummer Johnny Sandlin and keyboardist Paul Hornsby. This group was
playing a month-long gig in St. Louis when the fledgling Nitty Gritty Dirt Band came to town. Their manager, Bill McEuen, happened upon the Allmans and was wowed, hearing tremendous potential in the blond brothers.

“He wandered into that bar and was so taken with them,” recalls Bill’s brother John, a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “I’ll never forget how excited he was after seeing them the first time.”

Recalls Gregg: “We were playing a filthy little place and this L.A. manager happened to be in town and he came in and was impressed by what he heard—enough that he wanted us to come west. He actually said, ‘Come to Hollywood and we’ll make you the next Rolling Stones.’ We laughed because this was the shit you see in the movies: ‘Aw, c’mon with me, chickadee, I’ll make you a big star.’ As if anyone has the capacity to do that. If you ain’t carrying your own fuel, I don’t care how big of a building they shove you off of, you aren’t going to fly.

“I would normally be the one to fall for this crap and my brother would be the one to slap me in the head, but I think he wanted to get out there and look at them pretty women in Hollywood and he said, ‘Hey, let’s do this.’ I said, ‘You’re out of your goddamn mind.’ He said, ‘Come on, you know this ain’t doing it.’ And he had a point. So I thought, ‘What the hell. If you do it, I’ll do it.’ It was one of them ‘You jump in the lake first and I’ll go in after you’ deals. So we go.”

They hoped that being discovered by McEuen was the big break they had been dreaming of, but the group did not find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Renamed the Hour Glass and signed to Liberty Records, they released an unsuccessful album, then found themselves bound by the label’s dictates.

“All along they wanted to cut Gregg like Gerry and the Pacemakers, with him out front and the band being inconsequential,” Sandlin says. “They hated anything we liked and we hated anything they liked.”

On stage, the Hour Glass came to life, drawing the attention of the California rock elite, opening for the Doors at the Whisky a Go Go and Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. None of this seemed to have any impact on the people at Liberty Records, who dictated that they not overexpose themselves by playing too often.

“It was an awful time in my life,” Gregg says. “I mean, they had us wearing these Nehru clown suits. When I look at that today, I have to tell myself, ‘Gregory, it was a long time ago, man. You were real naive and they were taking it from you hook, line, and sinker.’”

Lacking a strong identity to match their well-developed skills, the restless brothers were struggling to find their own musical voices.

“They didn’t know their position in the musical world yet—but they knew they were good,” recalls John McEuen. “They would open their sets with an instrumental version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ and close it with a song by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. It was all good, but all over the place. They were seeking their identity, but anyone who heard them understood how good they were. Duane had total command and authority of the guitar and Gregg was just a great singer who could make anything his own.”

Gregg had written only a handful of songs he considered possible keepers. Duane had not yet begun to play the bottleneck slide guitar with which he would soon be closely associated.

GREGG ALLMAN:
We had chops up the ass, but didn’t have the originality thing down yet. We were stuck out in L.A. and we couldn’t play anywhere because the label wanted to control everything we did. Duane wanted to split and go back south where we belonged and the label said, “You can’t do that. We’ll freeze you from signing anywhere or recording for anyone.” He was in bad sorts over that.

Around this time, most of the members of the Hour Glass went to see Taj Mahal at the Magic Mushroom, a club near their apartments.

JOHNNY SANDLIN,
longtime Allman friend and colleague; bassist in the Allman Joys and Hour Glass:
Taj was great and so was his band, which included Jesse Ed Davis, playing slide guitar. Duane was knocked out by that slide playing and by “Statesboro Blues,” which Taj had just cut on his first album.

I went by Duane’s apartment a few days later and Duane was playing slide on “Statesboro Blues” and he was very excited about it.

“Statesboro Blues” was written and originally recorded by Blind Willie McTell in 1928, but it was a retake of Taj’s version that would become intimately linked with the Allman Brothers. From the start, Duane was using an empty bottle of Coricidian cold medicine as a slide. Gregg says the original slide came from a bottle he had given his brother when Duane was suffering from a bad cold.

ALLMAN:
A few days later we split up when he had just had it and left to go do sessions in Muscle Shoals while I stayed to try and fulfill the contract. We were apart for almost a year—and it seemed like three years to me. It was the only time he and I ever split up.

Duane and Gregg met up again briefly months later in Miami, where they cut an album-length demo with drummer Butch Trucks’s band, the 31st of February, which included the first recorded version of “Melissa.” These tracks were eventually released as an album with the misleading title
Duane and Gregg Allman.

Following those sessions, Gregg returned to Los Angeles, while Duane made his way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which had a thriving recording scene. The Hour Glass had recorded some excellent demos at Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in April 1968—blues-heavy tracks that were quickly rejected by Liberty.

When Duane appeared again looking for work, Fame was in the midst of producing a string of hit records by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and other R&B greats.

RICK HALL:
Duane showed up and said, “I understand you’re cutting a lot of records. I’d like to be a studio picker.” I said, “I don’t need you. Guitar players are coming out my wazoo.” He said, “OK, boss. Do you mind if I just hang around and maybe you can listen to me play some time?”

I told him to do what he wanted, but I was skeptical about him; he kind of spooked me. He had long white hair and looked like a junkie and I wasn’t used to that type of person. But he put up a little pup tent on my property and slept there for two weeks. What turned me around on Duane was simply hearing him play; after seeing his determination, I thought I should give him a chance and I couldn’t believe what I heard, which was different than anything I had ever experienced. I don’t believe I had ever heard an electric bottleneck guitar and I know I had never recorded one.

Whatever reservations I had about Duane went away. I was a producer looking to make hit records and it was all about the music. I came to realize that Duane was actually a kind, courteous, gentle man, but his music was ragged and funky and dripping with sweat and stink. It smelled like it came out of the bottom of the Tennessee River. The other musicians were suspicious of him—they were clean-cut, clean-living guys and he was totally different, plus he was competition—but they had to put up with him because I wanted that funky guitar on my records.

SANDLIN:
Duane looked like an absolute wild person for that time and place. In north Alabama in 1968 when you saw someone with long blond hair you expected them to be a girl. A bunch of rednecks were sure to give him trouble, but the music transcended that. He looked out of place, but he played right where he ought to play.

HALL:
Duane did a Clarence Carter session and the next one was with Wilson Pickett. Wilson and I listened to every song the publishers had sent and agreed that we didn’t have a hit, then Duane spoke up: “Why don’t we do ‘Hey Jude’?”

I said, “Are you nuts? ‘Hey Jude’ is number four with a bullet and it’s probably going to be number one for the next month and you want to cover the Beatles with Wilson Pickett?”

Duane said, “That’s absolutely what we need to do.”

I said, “People will think we’re just a bunch of crazy people down here.”

But he stood his ground and argued with me and Pickett, who was also opposed. So I said, “Well, how are we going to do it?” He started plunking on his guitar like Chet Atkins playing one of those country-funk things and I said, “Hey that sounds pretty good. Wilson, why don’t you sing along?” He starts singing and I ask, “Pickett, what are you singing there?” And he goes, “‘Hey Jew.’ That’s what the record is, isn’t it?” And I said, “No, it’s Jude: J-U-D-E.” Some people think to this day he actually did sing ‘Jew.’”

When I sent it to Wexler, he called and said, “A fucking stroke of genius, Rick.”

I said, “Really? Well, it wasn’t my idea. It was Duane Allman’s idea.”

He said, “Whoever’s idea it was, you produced a great record. I do believe it’s going to number one.”