“Oh my God, Bonnie. I promise, I never would have done that if I knew how upset you’d be,” Duane said. “Please just get back on the bike. I promise, I’ll be careful, just come on now.” And she climbed behind him with a wary look.
“Oh, all right, but you better not—” As soon as she was settled, Duane took off, top speed, full out, Bonnie screaming and laughing all the way back to the house.
“Oh, he could look so sincere. Shit. Gave me whiplash all the way home!”
“We used to play a club in Long Island, a real trendy club, and once we were playing with the Allman Brothers, and we were all staying on the sixth floor of our hotel, the whole floor. Duane hung with us, that was just the way it was if we were around; he was with us. But the second night, Delaney and I got burnt-out and went to our room and went to sleep after the gig. Then we hear Duane out in the hallway, looking for us. ‘Hey, you guys!’ He starts knocking. ‘Come on, you guys! It’s only three o’clock!’ Delaney whispers to me, ‘Be quiet and he’ll go away.’ And then, about ten minutes later, we hear Duane slinging his boot over our balcony! He had shimmied over on the edge of three rooms’ railings, on the sixth floor! He slid open our balcony door and said, ‘I knew you were in here! What are you doin’?’ ”
Duane had an easy time with them, playing and relaxing together, and it sometimes made it hard to return to his own life. Phil actually called him to remind him to come home once, afraid he was so caught up with the Bramletts he would miss a gig.
The Brothers had been touring steadily since the beginning of 1970, managing to get home for a week at the most each month from January to April, and the strain was starting to show on everyone, band and crew. They were completely tuned in to one another. The roadies would stand on either side of the stage and watch, responding when a string would break, a drum stand would shift, a cord would fritz out. They built up and tore down all the gear, day after day. It was hard work, and the crew didn’t have the thrill of performing to boost their energy. What they did have was immense pride. They carried the weight of making it happen, every night.
As soon as Twiggs pulled the Winnie into the parking lot behind Aliotta’s Lounge in Buffalo, New York, they all thought there must be some kind of mistake. It was just a little bar with a stage tucked in the back, a smaller venue than they usually played. Twiggs had gone twenty-two hours and counting without sleep and realized he hadn’t eaten anything other than a couple of Dexamyls when they left Stony Brook, New York, around 5 A.M., and it was now after six in the evening. They were late and the club owner wasn’t happy about it.
Twiggs figured that once he checked everyone into the Townhouse Motel, he might have time to catch an hour of sleep before the show started. He had arranged for three rooms, two adjoining for the band and one for him, Kim, Mike, and Red Dog to share. He needed to arrange a meal for everyone and make sure the gear was set up right. How it was all going to fit on that stage with room to play was a mystery, but they’d figure it out. Managing everything on the road was like trying to keep up on foot with a runaway train.
The show was just fine. It wasn’t very well attended, but they played their asses off as always, and met a few nice girls. They didn’t have to hit the road to Cincinnati for their next show until late the next afternoon, so they’d be able to catch a little sleep at the motel and eat a decent meal the next day. There was no sign of the owner, Angelo Aliotta, after they played, so Twiggs would go by the club in the morning and collect their five hundred dollars’ pay.
Things started to go wrong first thing the next day. When Twiggs called the club, Aliotta said he wasn’t happy with the gig and wanted the band to stay another night to make up for the small crowd and their late arrival. The band had been so loud, he said, people had left. Twiggs told Aliotta there was no way they could stay another night and he would be by to collect in a couple of hours. Twiggs called Jonny Podell, the band’s agent in New York, and asked him to back him up if this guy tried to screw them out of their money. Podell could hear how incensed Twiggs was, and told him not to worry about it too much; it wasn’t his fault if the guy dug in. They would get their money eventually. Twiggs was so very sick of these damn corrupt promoters and club owners trying to dick them around, especially once the music had been played. He wasn’t about to walk away and leave it to Podell to sort out.
Twiggs was driven and methodical. He excelled in everything he attempted, and that was his blessing and his curse. Collecting money for the band was a task he took very seriously. He carried a metal Halliburton suitcase with their cash and protected it with his life. He wasn’t going to walk away from a confrontation, if that was what it took to set things straight. The band had played, and they were owed. Right was right.
Twiggs tried to sleep in but he kept getting calls as soon as he’d drift off, from Walden, from Podell, from Bunky, so he gave up on sleeping. He was so tired his body ached, but he got up, dressed carefully, and combed his beard. The band went across the street to eat lunch at a joint called Gleason’s. Before he headed to the restaurant, Duane told Twiggs not to worry about the guy. They would get theirs somehow. He could feel the tension in Twiggs, and he noticed Twiggs was wearing Duane’s fishing knife in a leather sheath on his belt. Duane had looked for his knife the night before in the Winnebago, when he wanted to cut open an orange.
As Twiggs was about to leave for the club, Aliotta called again and said he had changed his mind; he would pay. Twiggs told him to give the money to Kim or Mike since they were already there packing up the gear. Within the hour, Kim called to say Aliotta wouldn’t pay. Twiggs said he had had enough. He was going to straighten this fool out.
Soon afterward, Mike and Kim saw Twiggs at the far end of the bar talking intently to Aliotta. They continued loading gear until they heard a scuffle starting and ran over to back up Twiggs. Kim jumped over the bar and tried to grab Aliotta from behind, and Mike got ahold of Twiggs. He grabbed Twiggs’s wrist and saw the knife buried up to its hilt in the bar owner’s belly.
Twiggs slid the knife out. “Take it,” he said, and Mike did. It was covered in blood. Aliotta staggered away from them and grabbed a bar towel to hold to his wound. Kim told a woman nearby to call a doctor. Aliotta held his belly and shouted for them to call the police. Twiggs sat calmly on a bar stool, saying, “Only God knows I’m sorry, but call the police.”
Aliotta fell to the ground before he made it out from behind the bar. He was dead.
When the police arrived, Twiggs was sitting alone at a small table and motioned to them. “I’m the one you’re looking for,” he said. When the police tried to question him, he said, “I’m very tired. I don’t want to talk right now. Can we go to jail so I can lay down?”
Twiggs had a volatile side everyone had seen, and there had been all sorts of small incidents, which rose up to the surface now that this horrible thing had happened. He has long been credited with being the first road manager to create a rider, the list of items the band needed to be present backstage at every venue as part of their contract, and his temper flared when the rider wasn’t honored. He had the ability to stop the show for the pettiest infraction. He quit many times over small annoyances. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was playing a show near where the band was staying one night, and Twiggs wanted everyone to go see him play. It was important to him, but everyone was high and lazy and he couldn’t get them out the door. He was furiously disappointed, so outraged that he quit for a day.
Twiggs called for constant meetings with the road crew. He planned everything, down to the minute, literally making schedules that started at 8 A.M. and spelled out how the night would go in half-hour increments. After a dozen or more meetings, Joe Dan Petty called a meeting of his own to say he couldn’t take any more meetings.
When Red Dog told me any one of them would take a bullet for any other, he wasn’t kidding. What happened in Buffalo in April 1970 was the most extreme example of dedication gone entirely too far. Twiggs would never have let himself quit his job
, but he knew it was making him crazy.
Red Dog pulled the Winnie away from Aliotta’s with tears in his eyes. Duane was sitting beside him in the front seat. He was surprised to see Red Dog so upset. Twiggs rode Red Dog harder than anyone. Red Dog wiped his face with the cuff of his denim jacket and turned to Duane. “I didn’t know nothing but the hustle before I met Twiggs. He taught me everything I know about this gig. And you never leave a brother behind.”
Duane couldn’t afford to cry. He had to keep his head together. A man was dead, and it was his knife in his friend’s hand, and his money his friend was fighting for. Duane couldn’t wrap his mind around it. The silence in the camper over his shoulder was heavy and he knew he wasn’t alone, trying to make sense of it.
Kim and Mike stayed in Buffalo with Twiggs. Everyone else went on to Cincinnati. Butch called in Willie Perkins, one of Twiggs’s oldest friends, to replace him as road manager. Twiggs always said Willie was the man for the job if something should ever happen to him. Willie met them in Cincinnati without hesitation, even though this job was about as different from his current position at a Macon bank as could be imagined. When he opened Twiggs’s suitcase to look through his paperwork for the tour, the total disarray shocked him. He had never known his meticulous friend to let things get so chaotic. It spoke volumes about the state Twiggs was in in Buffalo.
Berry called the Big House and told Linda the terrible news. No one was certain what would happen next. The band hired a masterful attorney named John Condon, who was recommended by Atlantic Records. A plan was in the works to have Condon interview the entire band a little farther down the road, in Washington, D.C. He would also travel to Macon to speak to Twiggs’s family, and he asked Twiggs to spend a portion of his time writing an autobiography of sorts, including anything that might help them understand his mental state leading up to the crime.
Berry asked Linda to get everyone to write to Twiggs every day. It was crucial that Twiggs stay connected to the family. He suggested they send him books, drawings, photos: anything that would remind him of the world beyond the walls he was locked behind.
Twiggs wrote more than three hundred letters to friends and family from the Erie County Jail, and he seemed very upbeat, almost happy. He taught algebra to fellow inmates and negotiated TV privileges for them. He had learned needlepoint and carved small animals out of soap with a tool he made by grinding down a plastic toothbrush on the rough concrete floor of the jail’s shower. Carving was his favorite diversion, until he heard the guards inspecting every cell for contraband and realized they might think of his tool as a weapon. He turned it in willingly, and wrote the warden directly afterward, asking for the tool back. He explained what it was for and assured him it was harmless, but he never got it back.
Not long after the incident in Buffalo, Duane once again retreated to Los Angeles to hang with Delaney and Bonnie. While he was there, he played on their new album, Motel Shot. The album was conceived as a loose jam in the spirit of the countless nights they had spent together in hotel rooms on the road, playing acoustic guitars and singing for fun with friends. In four or five hours at producer Bruce Botnick’s home, the whole album was captured live off the floor. In addition to the members of their own band, the album featured Joe Cocker, Bobby Keys, Leon Russell, Stephen Stills, Gram Parsons, and many others. They all sat with their instruments in a wide circle on sofas and on the floor. They thumped a couple of suitcases for percussion and rolled through songs together in a free and easy way. The songs flow directly from their pumping and buoyant hearts, a pure expression of fellowship. It was just what Duane needed, and you can hear the love in every song, a little piece of church that greatly soothed him.
But when Donna picked Duane up at the airport in Macon, he was in a dark mood. She hadn’t seen him since Twiggs’s arrest. He looked like he might be on the verge of tears, and when she encouraged him to let it out he looked at her and exclaimed, “They will close the schools the day I cry.” It wasn’t only the pain of losing Twiggs, or the layer upon layer of exhaustion. King Curtis won a Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for “Games People Play,” and no one thought to tell Duane. He knew his playing was an enormous part of what made the cut shine, and it hurt him not to hear it from Curtis. Much of his best playing put a feather in someone else’s cap and he was getting a little tired of it. He was going to step back from session work. He felt he was beyond it now, and he didn’t have the time.
There would be one major exception. Eric Clapton had recently joined forces with Delaney and Bonnie’s band and claimed them for his own. He was planning to record an album with Tom Dowd in Miami at Criteria, using the name Derek and the Dominos.
(photo credit 19.1)
The Allman Brothers Band album did not sell as well as everyone had hoped, but it was a critical success. Rolling Stone magazine’s legendarily tough and irreverent Lester Bangs called it “consistently subtle, and honest, and moving.” The band was utterly committed to playing; sales were not a serious consideration to them. They were already working on songs for their second album while playing more than three hundred shows in 1970. They were tireless.
On the road, the Brothers found parks to play for free on days between booked gigs. They traveled with a bin full of bright orange extension cords that connected into hundreds of feet of flowing current. They would find a willing neighbor who would let them plug in, and they’d find a hippie kid willing to stand by the point where the cords crossed the road and pay him a couple of joints in return. They were not always welcome to stretch out and play as long as they liked. Once in Audubon Park in New Orleans, the police came and unplugged Duane’s amp to stop the band from going over the park’s 7 P.M. curfew. Red Dog plugged him back in and ran like hell, to bait the cops into chasing him so the band could finish their set.
When they were home on a weekend, they’d go to Piedmont Park in Atlanta. The Piedmont Music Festival started out as a casual drop-in jam during the band’s first months in Macon. Folks gathered naturally, until there were hundreds of people spread out in the grass around the musicians. It became a steady weekend gig during the band’s first summer together in 1969, and the crowds swelled to the thousands. By the middle of 1970, it had grown into a proper festival with a stage, a generator, and dozens of other local bands.
To play with the sun on your shoulders, your friends sitting around, thousands of kids gathered peacefully together, was a beautiful thing. It was so chilled out, the police even seemed to enjoy it, and there were never any hassles. The wives and kids would come, too, and that was rare. Berry and Duane didn’t really want Linda and Donna out at concerts, never on the road. They wanted them to stay safely tucked away in Macon, taking care of their babies. But when they played in Georgia, it was a different deal and the wives got to share in the music.
Duane liked to check out other local bands, and one that really caught his attention around this time was the Hampton Grease Band, fronted by Bruce Hampton, a young man everyone called the Colonel. They looked fairly clean-cut, with side-parted hair and suit jackets, but once they started cooking, it was a wild show. Bruce would raise his arms to the sky and preach, dance, and play guitar in completely unpredictable and accomplished improvisations. The music was jagged and jarring one moment, fluid and bluesy the next. Duane saw the bravery and the musicianship in it. He introduced Bruce to Alan Walden, Phil’s brother, at Capricorn Records, and they inked a deal for a record. Duane didn’t give anyone a choice about it. He told Walden to sign them and he did, even though he didn’t have a clue where the Hampton Grease Band was coming from.
Duane was always keen to help musicians he believed in and he made good on his promises. “Duane made you want to give everything,” Thom Doucette said. “When he laid it down, it stayed down, and he was seldom wrong. He was twenty-three going on fifty. The vistas were huge, and it was never about money. Duane wouldn’t waste his energy on petty shit. If there was a problem, it was out in the open and over in a hot min
ute. Duane was right up in your face; there were no corners or dark spots. If there was a problem with Gregg, it could go on for years.”
Rock festivals were a growing venture in the summer of 1970, and the Brothers played two back-to-back in July: the second annual Atlanta Pop Festival and the Love Valley Festival in North Carolina. The events felt like natural extensions of the free park concerts, and they were often so overwhelmed with crowds, they became free by default when the gates were crashed.
The second Atlanta Pop Festival took place July 3–5 in a soybean field beside the Middle Georgia Raceway in a little town called Byron, about ninety miles from Atlanta. The promoter, Alex Cooley, was hoping for a crowd of 100,000, about the size of the first festival he had promoted the year before, but estimates of the crowd went as high as 400,000 people, making the festival one of the largest gatherings in Georgia history. For fourteen dollars you could spend two days seeing B. B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Procol Harum, and a dozen other bands, including the Hampton Grease Band. But soon the plywood fence that had been constructed to contain the festival was trampled as the crowd grew. From the stage, the crowd looked like a roiling, colorful sea. The summer sun was blazing, over one hundred degrees by late morning, and people wandered naked and jumped in the stream by the road to cool off. Tents were pitched under cover of a pecan grove beside the field.
By Friday morning the highway looked like a parking lot all the way back to Atlanta, and Duane was somewhere stranded in the middle of it an hour before he was supposed to be onstage. Willie Perkins was about to lose his mind when he saw Duane strut through the back gate and strap on his guitar moments before the music started. He had abandoned his Dogsled and convinced a guy on a motorcycle to ride the shoulder all the way to the gig. He barely had time to grin in Willie’s direction before taking the stage. There was only one problem. He didn’t have his Coricidin bottle. He must have left it in the car.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 26