by Gregg Allman
“Yes, I would,” I’d say.
And he’d tell me, “You did wrong, and it ain’t right to do that to people.”
He had no problem pointing out when I had hurt somebody and didn’t realize it. Buffalo wasn’t afraid to do that because he was older than everybody else, and he’d been around the block way more than we had. He was as street smart as anyone I knew. He’d look you right in the eye when he spoke to you, and I’ll never forget that stare as long as I live. I learned so much from that old man, and he had a big influence on me.
Eventually, Buffalo got a case of the come and go blues. He would go up to Martha’s Vineyard a lot and be by himself, because he loved it up there. Buffalo was very wise, too wise to be humping amps. Later on, he became more of an advisor, more of an advance man, for the band. He was like a jack-of-all-trades, and very intelligent, especially when it came to geography. He knew where every place was—not that he’d been to all of them, but he was on his way. Unlike Red Dog, who had been in the Marines but was the most lost son of a bitch in the band. Yet he was the one at the helm of the Winnebago, and he’d get lost in the parking lot.
ON AUGUST 26, 1970, WE WERE DOWN IN MIAMI BEACH, PLAYING a free gig on a stage that the city set up on a big median on Collins Avenue. We were playing “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” which was the next-to-last song of the night. It would segue with a little jam into “Whipping Post,” and I looked out over the crowd, and the people were all standing on the grass, listening. Nobody was doing the damn Grateful Dead waltz, and there weren’t no spinners.
I looked over, and I saw this set of beautiful burnt sienna suede boots on this cat who was sitting on the grass with one leg out in front of him. I followed that boot up the pants, up the body to the head, and there was Mr. Eric Clapton. Next to him was Tommy Dowd, grinning like a fucking mule eating in the briars. Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, and Bobby Whitlock were there too—all of the Dominos, but I didn’t recognize them.
After I shit myself, I looked over to Duane, thinking, “I hope to Christ he doesn’t see him, because this will either be the finest ‘Whipping Post’ we’ll ever play, or this fucker’s going to fall apart.” But Duane didn’t notice anything, so we finished the show with a real good “Whipping Post,” and then Duane eases over to me and said, “Baybrah, dig who the fuck is sitting over there.”
“Man, I saw him two songs ago,” I said.
“Do you see them fucking boots, man?” Duane had a real thing for clothes back then—we both did.
Tommy Dowd, who was Atlantic’s house producer, introduced all of us to each other, and then we headed over to Criteria Studios, where Derek and the Dominos were working on Layla. We were all hanging out in the lounge, with drinks and food all set up for us. The English people do that, which is something that I admire.
Duane asked Tommy if he could come and just watch some of the sessions, but it turns out that Eric was just as much in awe of my brother as Duane was of him. Eric didn’t play no slide at the time, and he loved my brother’s slide work. The way I heard it, when Tommy asked if Duane could come watch the sessions, Eric said, “Watch? Hell no. If he shows up, he has to play.”
That first night, we all went into the studio together and did that jam thing. The next day, all the other guys left, but I stayed. I watched about three days of the session, and one of the first things they did was “Layla.” They played what they already had, and it didn’t sound like much. It didn’t have that intro on it yet, but once they added that, the song took off. Duane just fit right in, man—from the very first note, it just blended. His guitar and Eric’s sounded so good together; it was the perfect blend of a Gibson and a Fender. You could tell that history was being made.
Everybody in the band was so proud of Duane for playing on Layla, even though I’m sure that Dickey was green with envy. If I was a guitar player, I’m sure that I would have been too. It goes without saying that everybody in the Allman Brothers has always greatly admired Clapton. Aside from being a fantastic guitar player, he’s the same boy his grandmother raised, a true gentleman, very levelheaded, and he really devotes a lot of time to trying to get other people straightened out. Because, like all the rest of us, he was into it pretty heavy.
Many years later, we had a nice moment when he came out during our fortieth anniversary shows at the Beacon. We’d only had a very short rehearsal the afternoon of the show. Up on the top floor, we had a couple of small amps and an electric piano set up and we went over all the stops and starts to “Layla,” which are the important parts. Then that night he came out and tore the place up. Backstage, my manager, Michael Lehman, introduced Eric to Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle, and everyone got tears in their eyes.
We played the Fillmore East again in September 1970, on a bill with Van Morrison, Sha Na Na, Albert King, and the Byrds. Each act did four or five songs, because this was a made-for-TV event. At the end of the whole thing, they told us that they were sorry, but Oakley’s amp was at such a low frequency that it shook the filaments in the cameras and distorted the picture.
They were lying through their teeth, because what really happened is they fucked up my vocal input into the camera, so it’s totally missing during “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’” and two-thirds of “Dreams,” and that’s why it was never televised. Boy, we were mad, and my brother was fucking flaming, because this was going to be our first time on TV. He knew we were getting better, and all people needed to do was hear us.
We were evolving, we were growing, we were maturing in our music and in our lives. Things were getting more refined, tighter, and the set was starting to click. It was exciting, it was fresh, and it was always new. No matter what you felt like during the day, you knew that night we were going to be great.
We rarely talked onstage. We talked to each other, but as far as saying something to the crowd, my brother might say something like “You all sure are quiet,” but we really didn’t say much. Just like me, my brother could play for a crowd, but talking to them just wasn’t part of it. He talked to them through his guitar.
We went to Nashville to play Vanderbilt University in October 1970, and we were staying right across the street from the hospital where Duane and I were born. We had a day off, and my brother was out looking to score some doojee. He didn’t find any, but he did find a guy who had some Tuinals and he took one. Then here comes a dude, and he’s got a ball of opium with him that’s about the size of a baseball. Tuinals and a narcotic do not mix; that’s what killed Allen Woody and many, many others. It almost got me a couple of times, until I got wise to it.
As soon as the opium got there, my brother bought a piece about the size of a golf ball and took a big chunk of it off and ate it. A while later, the rest of us were down in the Winnebago getting ready to go, and no one had seen Duane. Red Dog went up to the room to check on things, and he came back down and said, “Man, he won’t wake up, and half of his body is turning blue,” because his blood was settling—he was almost dead.
“Oh my God, he’s going to die, right here where he was born.” I was freaking.
I’m getting ready to spring like a damn black panther, and Dickey goes right over the top of me. When that guy needed to run, he could really move. He was over me, through me, and past me, up to the third floor. He loved Duane—I’ve got to say that about Dickey Betts. I also have to say that he probably saved Duane’s life that night. You’ve got to give the devil his due, but the thing is, Dickey ain’t no devil. He’s just a mixed-up guy.
Dickey got to Duane first, with Payne and Callahan right behind him. I was just standing there, frozen in prayer. I got down on my knees in prayer, probably for the first time in my life. They got him downstairs, and he was not moving. The lights were on, but no one was home—hell, the lights weren’t even on. Thank God we were parked right across the street from the hospital, because they got him over to the emergency room, and he was in there for the longest fucking time, but they were able to revive him.
God was look
ing down on us, man, and so were his Angels of Mercy. They say you got two guardian angels; well, I think Duane borrowed both of mine, and a few more from everybody else. My brother must’ve stayed high for three days, but he actually played the gig the next night in Atlanta. It’s too bad we don’t have those tapes, because that was a rather slow night.
The whole thing really scared my brother, man. He had the fear of God in his eyes after that, and he didn’t do drugs again for a long time. He might have drunk a beer now and then, beer or cheap wine, but that was it.
The first time I got dosed with acid was in January 1971 at the Fillmore West, where we were playing four nights with Hot Tuna. I set my drink down, and some Prankster dosed it. I didn’t know where I was—it was like Alice in Wonderland. There were these big fuzzy things floating around, and everything looked like something out of an R. Crumb comic, I guess because I had gotten turned on to Zap Comix right around that time. These R. Crumb images were coming out of my brother’s amp, right along with the notes, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on here?” But it didn’t take me long to realize what had happened.
Acid is a brain douche, if you ask me; I’ve got no use for it, because it just scrambles your brain. It would take me three days before I could even think straight, so I haven’t tripped in over thirty years.
WE WERE AWARE OF WHAT WAS GOING ON IN SOCIETY AT THAT time, and we cared about what was happening with the war in Vietnam and what happened at Kent State. The original title of Eat a Peach was Eat a Peach for Peace, but it got shortened. In truth, though, we were sheltered by the music and the traveling, and, especially for myself, by the songwriting. Writing throws your whole and complete attention into the process, and you get into it so deep, nothing distracts you. Someone would have to inform you that your house was ablaze.
Still, sometimes things would happen that you couldn’t ignore. We didn’t have any run-ins with the law in Macon, but it seemed like every time we went to Alabama, we got in trouble. One time, when Twiggs was still with us, we were in the Winnebago heading through the hills of northern Alabama, and I had just got done smoking a joint. We heard the sirens and saw the blue and red lights, and this guy pulled us over.
He opened the door and said, “All right, who do we have here?”
“Sir,” Red Dog said, “we’ve got the Allman Brothers Band, a rock and roll band on Atlantic Records, thank you.”
The cop said, “Then let me see Mr. Allman, in the back of my car—now.”
So my ass got up, and I got my wallet, and I go and get in the back of the car. He asked me a bunch of questions—where we had been and where we had played, where we were going, where we were planning on staying—and this was back when I was up on everything, so I spit it right out to him. He looked over at me, moved his clipboard, and pulled out a big old syringe and started flipping it up and down, catching it.
Then he said, “You know what, Mr. Allman? The judge would absolutely go crazy out of his mind if he knew what you fuckers was out here doing.”
“How much, man?” was all I asked.
“Don’t rush me—I’m not through with my story.” So he finished his lecture. Then he said, “As for the price, I think $300 would be fine. Just drop it over the seat, and I’ll give you back your license. And please, be discreet.”
I went back to the Winbag, and Twiggs was waiting. He just asked, “How much?” I told him it was $300, and he said, “Man, that’s almost going to clean us out.” That’s when I should have written that song: “That’s just the way it is, some things will never change.”
Then there was the time we were on our way from Macon to the Warehouse in New Orleans, and we were in a real hurry. We were driving in two rental cars, and Jaimoe was sitting in the back of one of them—keep in mind, this was 1971. We passed through Grove Hill, Alabama, and we were all hungry, so we pulled off the road and went to a restaurant. All of us—that is, except for Dickey, who’d had too much to drink, so he stayed in one of the cars. We sat down, and we were looking pretty rough. Right away, you could tell that people were checking us out.
While we were inside, I looked out the window, and there’s Dickey—he’s gotten out of the car, and he’s barfing like crazy, and the whole place can see him. I thought, “Oh shit,” but said, “Okay, guys, I’ll have pancakes, and cook the bacon well.”
I went to the bathroom and flushed the four or five reds I had on me. I had one bag of doojee, and I wasn’t going to throw that away, so I put it in my wallet and walked back out and sat down. When I got back out, I noticed that one of the waitresses was talking on the damn phone and glancing over in our direction. By this point, Dickey was back in the car, horizontal in the backseat, but the door was still open. I told everyone, “Guys, let’s eat up, pay the check, and get out of here.” So that we did.
We were riding along, and I was in the back with Jaimoe, while Willie Perkins was driving and my brother was up front with him. Suddenly Duane said, “Goddamn it, they’re coming after us. Everybody eat what you got, or throw it out, but do something.”
Jaimoe pulled out this bag of reefer that would have choked a mule, and he starts to eat it. It was this big bag of green that looked like a beer you get on St. Patrick’s Day—there was no way he could finish it, and the more he ate, the bigger it got in his mouth. Then he couldn’t spit it out, so it was like, “Hey, here I am!” Here he is with a bunch of long-haired white guys, and one of them is throwing up.
When I saw they were behind us, I took out that bag of doojee and, instead of snorting it and cooling my jets and making everything easy, I threw it out the back window, and them sons of bitches found it. They saw it in the sunlight when I threw it, and we could hear them going, “Well, it looks like hair-o-win to me, boy. Hey, look out now—don’t spill it. You asshole, you’re about to spill it.” This one guy must have touched the bag, and half of it went out.
They arrested us all and threw us in jail, and I’m in the same cell as Red Dog, so he gets over in the corner and quietly takes off all his clothes. He’s got a nut sack that hangs way far down, and legs that are no bigger than a pair of pool cues—I don’t know how the hell they hold his body up. He’s up on the bars and he looks like the damn Wild Man from Borneo with all that red hair, and that big old dick and them balls. A bunch of old ladies had gathered around the jail, and they just knew he was a heathen!
I knew there was safety in numbers, so I wasn’t sweating shit while we were in there. I was hoping that it wouldn’t hit the news, but sure enough, that town was so small that word spread right away. We got out of there after one night, charged with disturbing the peace, and we were only fined twenty-five dollars, because Mr. John Condon, the lawyer who’d helped us out when Twiggs stabbed that guy, came to the rescue again. At one point, we stopped playing in Alabama—except for Birmingham, and even that was pretty rare.
Another time we were playing New Orleans. We were staying at the Pontchartrain Hotel, and I had the bottom suite. I had an eight ball in my Levi’s, and I had on a blue velvet coat, a white silk shirt with black roses on it, and a pair of blue velvet boots. I had taken my boots and socks off and was having a glass of wine. All of a sudden, here come six guys, banging on the door. “Let us the fuck in, this is the law.”
I opened the door and jumped back as they came pushing in. All of them start going through the suite, and one of them got in my face and said, “We’re going to sit here and bust you, and then we’re going to let you watch us go upstairs and bust all your little Allman friends.”
One of them came over and said, “All right, where’s the shit?”
I started to say, “If you bust your head open, man, we can dip it out,” but I just went, “Where’s what? We’re not smoking anything in here but cigarettes.”
“You just stay here,” he ordered, and they never even looked in my pocket—they never shook me down.
Then they went up to Jaimoe’s room, and Jaimoe has on a dress! His friend Juicy Carter was there with h
im, but I don’t know why he had on a dress. The cop opened the door, took one look at him in that dress, and turned around. He just walked away and didn’t bother to fuck with him.
Butch had half an ounce of blow, and he put it under the mattress. Boy, how original can you get? This cop picked up the mattress, and if he had picked it up half an inch more, he would have seen it, so Butch got really lucky. Dickey was in bed with his wife, Sandy Bluesky, and as soon as they busted the door open, he jumped up and popped the first guy who came in the room. Another one pulled out his billy club and bapped Dickey across the head and knocked him out cold.
This whole thing happened because the promoters had changed. One promoter had fucked us, so we found a new one, and the first promoter made a call to the police. You should have seen what this fucking warrant said: “Possible possession of barbiturates, amphetamines, hallucinogens, hallucinogenic mushrooms, peyote, heroin, cocaine and marijuana.” They also listed some shit I’ve never heard of, but all they ended up getting us for was Dickey taking that swing at them. It was a dirty, dirty trick, man—somebody really tried to set us up.
Outtake from the At Fillmore East cover shoot, 1971
© Jim Marshall Photography LLC
CHAPTER EIGHT
Uppers and Downers
IN MARCH 1971, WE WENT TO THE FILLMORE EAST TO RECORD A live album. We had the recording trucks set up outside, and we knew we had more than one night to do it, so we weren’t uptight about it. That was good, because I would have been the first one to make the first mistake, to be the uptight one. Our attitude was to go in there and play our shows, let Tom Dowd figure out the rest, and then we’ll have us a record. We played two shows each day, we played for a long time, and the audience was just whupped by the time we were done.
The funny thing is, Tom Dowd almost missed the recording of the album. He was supposed to be on vacation in Europe, but the weather was shitty, so he decided to head back to New York on a red-eye flight. He checked into a hotel and slept until the afternoon of the show. He didn’t even know we were recording that night, and we didn’t know he was back in town. Tom barely made it into the truck before the music started, but he got it all down on tape. If he hadn’t made it in time, the rest of our career might have been very different.