One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (40 page)

HAYNES:
It’s not something that’s obvious—how to take a jazzy improvisational approach to what most people would consider rock music. In order for us to play our best, we have to listen to each other like a jazz band does and most rock musicians are not geared for that.

WYLDE:
They were way fuckin’ cool, man. But it was hysterical, ’cause when we played “Dreams” I must have soloed for twenty minutes. I’d died and gone to heaven and I wasn’t going to stop. I was just jamming. But I almost gave Butch a coronary, ’cause every time we got to where the band was repeating the same lick, preparing to come out of the jam, I’d just keep soloing. I came over to Butch in between songs and he goes, “Zakk, fuck, man! Calm down a little bit, brother.” And I go, “But this is my favorite band.” And he goes, “Yeah, it’s mine, too, but just fuckin’ relax!”

We even did an acoustic set; we did “Melissa” and “Midnight Rider.” Warren was really helpful. I spent a lot of time standing next to him, staring at his hands and saying, “Dude! What the fuck?” Warren’s a killer guitar player, which made it a lot easier on me. I had the time of my life. It was just awesome.

While Wylde enjoyed himself and allowed the band to fulfill their gig, the Allman Brothers were not amused by his antics, which included spitting mouthfuls of beer in the air and standing atop his front stage monitor—normal behavior in his world, which did not translate to theirs.

CAPLAN:
I worked with Ozzy and made the connection to Zakk, who said he knew all the music and was very excited to do it. I was at the show watching him jumping off the amps and thinking, “Boy, am I in trouble.”

HOLMAN:
Everybody said, “This ain’t working. Thank you very much.”

WEST:
That was one of the biggest mistakes in Allman Brothers history. There were guys in the parking lot at Great Woods who could have played a better Allman Brothers show than Zakk Wylde. It was an embarrassment, but it was just one night. Zakk’s behavior was no more obscene than the behavior that got him on that stage in the first place, but clearly we were going to have to try something different.

GRISSOM:
I was back in Austin in a music store trying out some guitars and I got paged. My wife was on the phone and said the Allman Brothers had called back. She said, “It didn’t work out last night and they want to know if you can be on a plane in two hours.” I didn’t even know where my guitars were, because they hadn’t arrived back from tour.

I got a guitar and my reverb unit, put it in an Anvil case, and flew out to D.C. They picked me up at the curb at midnight in the tour bus. The next day we had an hour or so rehearsal at soundcheck, then played a full gig to a sold-out Merriweather Post Pavilion. And that was the last rehearsal or soundcheck we had.

HOLMAN:
We basically dropped Zakk off at the airport and picked Grissom up.

HAYNES:
David is a great player, he’s a sweetheart of a guy and he’s a quick study. He kind of saved the day, really, because we had no idea how long this was going to last.

GRISSOM:
It was like a fantasy experience. When I was sixteen, I’d jam with two drummers and play a lot of those tunes, and to be standing up there next to Gregg playing “Dreams” was surreal. I played about ten shows, and it was a total joy from the minute I got there until the minute I left. I felt the joy of music flooding back into me. It was such a different experience from my other big rock tours. There was so little drama or pretense and so little instruction or pressure to play someone else’s licks. The only ones who said anything to me were Warren and Woody, who basically said, “You can stretch out longer if you want.”

We’d all amble out, make sure we were in tune, and just let ’er rip. I felt like I had played a jazz gig, but in front of a giant, totally appreciative crowd. Having a crowd that size really listening to every note was phenomenal. The audience is such a huge part of the deal with that band. I was sad to come back to my real life, but I returned with a renewed sense of purpose and love of music, and a keener understanding of why I do this.

WEST:
We went through a few days of literally not knowing where Betts was and then he surfaced and Grissom settled in and everyone relaxed. The music was good, the tension was gone, and the shows were fun.

Following Grissom’s nine shows, the band finished the tour with Pearson playing nine more.

JACK PEARSON,
sub guitarist, 1993; ABB member, 1997–99:
I had learned Duane’s and Dickey’s parts when I was a kid and I knew every note they played on
At Fillmore East
and
Eat a Peach
by heart, so I was ready to go. I flew to Dallas with no rehearsals. Warren and I spent a little time in a hotel room and I just said, “Which part are you playing?” and then I played the other one. We just went out and played. Gregg liked it and said, “Hey, man, come play with me and come out to my house and write.” I went to his place and we wrote “Sailing Across the Devil’s Sea.”

“Sailing” would appear on the ABB’s next album, 1994’s
Where It All Begins.
Pearson also joined Gregg Allman and Friends, playing with Gregg’s solo band for most of the next three years and appearing on his 1997 album
Searching for Simplicity.
Betts, meanwhile, returned to the Allman Brothers Band in November 1993, seemingly refreshed.

BETTS:
I got on about a three-year drunk there. The first two years was a lot of fun, and the last year got to be a living hell. But then—at least I was intoxicated. The other guys had to put up with it sober.

After Betts’s return, Allman’s own struggles with drugs and alcohol worsened. The pair seemed to be locked in a strange, destructive dynamic in which if one went up, the other went down.

QUIÑONES:
It was like a roller coaster with those two. When one was raging, the other was kind of cool. They were never really fucked up together. It was one or the other, which was kind of strange.

CAPLAN:
Gregg and Dickey had this weird dynamic. I always felt like they were Clark Kent and Superman, but you never knew who was which.

HAYNES:
It was difficult on the rest of us.

WEST:
When Gregg was absolutely insane, Betts would have it reasonably together and vice versa. From a show perspective, it was better when Dickey had his shit together, because you could roll Gregg down in the mix and he’d sit in the dark and usually be able to sing halfway decently. But when Betts was feeling his oats, he was the loudest guy onstage. It was very hard to ignore Dickey when he was fucked up, and it created some bad scenes and a lot of tension.

QUIÑONES:
Dickey could really lash out and be unpredictable and violent. Gregg is more passive-aggressive, and when he was in bad shape, he was more like the passive drunk. Nobody was scared of him.

HAYNES:
I was becoming the person that Dickey could talk to when he couldn’t talk to Gregg, and that Gregg could to talk when he couldn’t talk to Dickey. I was like, “push me, pull you,” trying to be neutral, trying on a moment-by-moment basis to keep the peace and also figure out what was best for the band musically and creatively. It was a tough spot to be in. It was very frustrating and it made me feel more and more like maybe I’m doing the wrong thing, maybe I need to be concentrating on my own stuff.

CAPLAN:
They looked to Warren more and more to do things—because he did them.

WEST:
Dickey and Gregg talked very little to each other. There were very few band meetings. When things had to get done, Bert would make the rounds, one by one, saying, “Here’s what we need to decide. What do you think?” And when it was a musical decision or question, they often would go through Warren. He was always in the middle.

Warren has always held the entity of the Allman Brothers Band in extremely high regard, as did Woody. They thought it was their responsibility to hold it up and take it further. They took that seriously and it was not always an easy job.

Even as Haynes was becoming ever more indispensible to the band, he was tiring of the stress and uncertainty. He considered leaving when
Tales of Ordinary Madness,
his first solo album, was released in 1993. He stayed and the Warren Haynes Band opened for the ABB for much of the ’93 Summer Tour—the one that was shaken by Betts’s sudden departure and the scramble to find replacements. Haynes was performing double duty through many of these shows, opening with his own band before taking the stage again with the headliners, bearing much of the responsibility for keeping the Allman Brothers Band on track.

HAYNES:
When I joined the band in ’89 I was in the middle of starting to pursue my solo career, which I had put on the back burner to join the Dickey Betts Band a couple of years earlier. Things were starting to come to fruition for me and I had a lot of opportunities that I didn’t want to pass up, but I also had this amazing opportunity to be in the Allman Brothers.

The more the communication would break down and the overall vibe and positive aspect of the band, especially the original members, would start to deteriorate, the more it would push me to concentrate on my own music. I would almost take it as a sign that that’s what I should be doing. As the vibes got more and more negative, I would wonder what I was doing there.

Despite his misgivings, Haynes stuck with the band, Betts returned, and the band reached another period of relative stability, returning to the studio to cut their third post-reunion album, which became 1994’s
Where It All Begins,
recorded live on a soundstage at Burt Reynolds’s Florida ranch.

HAYNES:
Dickey and I mentioned to each other a bunch of times over the years how nice it would be to record without headphones, because your guitar never sounds like your guitar through headphones or small speakers. So you play to the tone of the amp and trust that they’ll make it sound good later. On
Where It All Begins
, we just set up our live gear and played. It was a big pleasure to play without headphones on.

BETTS:
Our playing together is just so different live. There’s an eye contact and body language thing we do with one another. For instance, often when I’m playing rhythm, my rhythms turn into kind of sympathetic chord solos. And I’ll be watching his body language much like a boxer would watch for the counterpunch. I can kind of see where he’s going and react to it. You can’t do that kind of thing in a studio setting, even if you’re playing all of your parts more or less “live.”

HAYNES:
We always recorded with everyone tracking live, but on
WIAB
we set up like we were on stage, with monitors, lights, and everybody in the same room, and I think we were able to re-create more what we did on stage because that’s how we were seeing and hearing things. I think any time you can record like that, whatever you lose from a technical standpoint, you more than make up for in music and feel.

BETTS:
I actually wrote “No One to Run With” ten years earlier with a hometown friend of mine named John Prestia. It was during the ’80s when no one would give us the time of day. Having that song return from the grave points out how much things [had] changed in the music business.

HAYNES:
We were ahead of schedule, which was rare. We basically recorded everything slated and had more time booked. Dickey went home and Gregg said, “Why don’t we do your song ‘Soulshine’?” I knew Gregg had heard it, but the suggestion came out of the blue. I never really thought of it as an Allman Brothers song until I heard Gregg sing it. We recorded it and left space for Dickey’s parts and sent the tracks to him to finish. I left him a lot of space to fill but he played very little.

Maybe because it was the one song on the album we didn’t play everything together live, I never was really satisfied with how that version of “Soulshine” turned out. It sounds too sparse.

TRUCKS:
Warren brought in “Rocking Horse,” originally intended for Gregg to sing, and I think we cut a version of it, but Gregg didn’t want to sing those lyrics. Warren’s response was, “OK. I’ll sing it,” and we cut it, but Dickey refused to finish the song. He wanted another one of his songs on it, and said, “We’re doing ‘Mean Woman Blues’ instead.” “Rocking Horse” was a much stronger tune.

HAYNES:
I somewhat like my playing on
Seven Turns
, and somewhat more on
Shades of Two Worlds
, but when I listen back, I know that I’ve learned a lot since then. I like my playing on the live records and on
Where It All Begins
much more. I feel like we were really starting to come into our own with our own sound and approach.

A lot of that was settling on a tone that blends in with what you’ve heard all your life without stealing anyone’s tone, because the last thing I want to do is cop Duane’s sound. That’s his tone and it’s very distinct. I faced the same challenge when playing with Phil [Lesh] and the Dead and dealing with Jerry Garcia’s legacy.

BETTS:
I don’t think I’d be nearly as good a guitar player today if I hadn’t been working with Warren. When I wanted to get Warren in the band, everybody thought I was crazy. All the business people said, “Are you sure you want him in the band? He … you know … I mean…” They wouldn’t quite say it, so I asked, “Are you afraid he’s going to blow me away?” And they said, “Well, he’s awfully good. Are you sure you want to deal with that?” And I said, “I don’t want to get some fucking lackey in the band.” If I had somebody in the band that I couldn’t get anything out of, we might as well not have another guitarist. Warren drives me to play things that I wouldn’t otherwise. And hopefully I do the same thing for him.