by Gregg Allman
Not long after I met Julie, in the summer of ’78, Dickey tried to call me a couple of times, because he knew that Daytona wasn’t too good for me in terms of drugs and alcohol. When we were in Macon together, Dickey had always been afraid of me going back to Daytona. He’d tell me, “Go see your mother, fine; but why don’t you just bring her up here?”
One day I was taking a shower at my mother’s house, and I was actually planning to call Dickey that night to find out what he wanted. I got the towel wrapped around me and I walked out into the living room, and there sits Dickey Betts. He had actually rented a prop plane from his home in Sarasota to fly over to Daytona, and he asked, “Did you get my messages?”
“Man,” I said, “you’re not going to believe this, but I was going to call you back this evening.” Of course he didn’t believe that, but I really was going to call him. I said, “You don’t have a car with you, so what’s the deal? Did somebody die or something?”
He told me, “No, nothing like that. I wanted to come down here and talk to you about re-forming the band.”
I just said, “Oh,” and the words hung there for a minute. I wasn’t sure what to say about getting the band back together. I was pretty strung out, because I had been doing Dilaudids and drinking vodka, so I wasn’t in no shape to go anywhere at that moment, but I told Dickey I would get back to him.
Thanks to my good friend Bob Merrill, I got into the hospital and went through detox, and within a few weeks I had straightened myself up. The four of us—Butch, Jaimoe, Dickey, and I—got together and agreed to play together again. I’m sure the specific reasons were different for all of us, but my sense was that we all just needed this in our own way. No one was pleased with how things had ended back in ’76, and the combination of the passing of time, missing each other musically, and money all made it easier for us to put the past behind us.
In the years since the breakup, all of us had been doing our own thing. Dickey had formed his own band, called Great Southern, which consisted of two guitars, two drummers, bass, and keyboards—go fucking figure. Jaimoe, Chuck, and Lamar had started a pretty hip band called Sea Level, which did this cool jazz-fusion thing; and I had recorded Playin’ Up a Storm. We had all gone our own ways, but none of us had ventured so far from home that we couldn’t find our way back.
As we had been doing all that, Capricorn had been splintering. The year before, we hadn’t been getting our royalty checks, and an audit showed that Capricorn was deeply in debt. Phil had borrowed $4 million from PolyGram Records and wasn’t even close to paying it back. As we started to work together again, I didn’t talk to Phil Walden at all, but we did call Willie Perkins; at that point, none of us were sure if we would work with Phil again.
It was decided that Butch, Jaimoe, and I would join Dickey’s band, Great Southern, for a few songs at their concert in Central Park in New York on August 16. As Great Southern was wrapping up that show, Dickey said, “For my last song, I’m going to have to call out some friends to help me.” They brought us up one by one, and I was the last one to be called. When we walked out there, the place went apeshit. New York has loved us for so many years, I’m telling you.
We did five songs—“One Way Out,” “You Don’t Love Me,” “Stormy Monday,” “Statesboro Blues,” and “Blue Sky”—and we just stomped. We ran late and the sky got pretty dark. It seemed like they weren’t prepared to have to use lights; maybe they were onstage, but they weren’t prepared for the gig to go on into the night. But it did, lights or no lights. That day reminded me how much I enjoyed playing music, and what a fan base we still had, because them people went crazy. Leaving the park, there were people jumping up and down on my damn limo, and they ruined it, man.
The first thing people wanted us to do was get right in the studio, but we said hell no. We had learned to stand up for ourselves, and we knew that heading into the studio right away could put the brakes on this whole thing if we weren’t careful. We were going to see how everybody got along, musically and spiritually, and then we’d decide if and when we would go into the studio.
About a week later, I drove up to Macon in my Trans Am for the 1978 Capricorn barbecue. Everybody was there, and we jammed a lot, which eased the tension down even more. The other guys had forgotten how I sang, and I had forgotten how it was to play with them. I don’t think any of us had realized how much we missed it all until right then. Now we all knew for sure that we were getting back together for the music as much as for the money.
At this point, Chuck and Lamar had decided to stay in Sea Level, so we added Dan Toler on guitar and David Goldflies on bass, who had both played with Dickey in Great Southern. We went into rehearsals in Sarasota, and we all stayed at the Pirates Den, on Anna Maria Island.
I had been living with my friends Chuck and Marcia Boyd. They had a house with an extra room built on, and it had its own private entrance and carport, so that was perfect for me. I had a piano in my room, which was a nice touch, and that’s where I wrote “Just Ain’t Easy.” That song is about Hollywood, and how bad I wanted out of that place. It’s about defeat and resignation, being on the bottom, and I think it turned out pretty good. But we decided we’d all stay together at the Pirates Den because we wanted to see if we could get along with each other, and we worked up “Just Ain’t Easy” and a few other tunes before we went to Criteria in Miami to record.
The more we played together, the more I kept coming back to something Duane said a long time ago. My brother read all the time. His head was in the books, and his arm was either around a fine girl or around that Les Paul, but that’s all he did. I remembered that he had told me about some poet from way back that he’d read. He said, “Gregory, this sounds like you could make a song out of it—it goes, ‘The world is made of two great schools, enlightened rogues and religious fools.’”
I told this to the other guys, and I said, “What do you think about calling this record ‘Enlightened Rogues’? Because that’s basically what we are.”
Everyone liked that, so we got in the studio and we cut that damn thing.
It was a pretty interesting little record to cut—and once again there was a house that brought us all together. Criteria had this row of houses along Biscayne Bay that you could stay in. One of them was the title for Mr. Clapton’s album 461 Ocean Boulevard. We stayed about three doors down from there when we were cutting Rogues, and we had a huge dinner table in there. We would all sit around that table, and a cook would come in to make breakfast and dinner for us every day. We were all still using and drinking, but everything was more in control that it had been in a long time. That place just calmed us all out—really helped us travel back in time. It was just a groove, man, one big family again. The house was huge, so there was plenty of room for all of us.
It wasn’t just the house that was a flashback. I also brought Twiggs back as my manager, advisor, protector, friend, confidant—all good things, but it didn’t last too long. Dickey had warned me to not have anything to do with Twiggs. He told me Twiggs was crazy and that I shouldn’t bother with him.
One day I was at the studio, and it was getting kind of late. I had to sing something the next day, and I was walking down the hall to my room, and Twiggs was with me. A door opened, and Don Johnson popped out. I said my hellos to him, and he was with Dickey, of course, so we went into the room to talk. We’d met Don in Macon when he was shooting Macon County Line, but I hadn’t seen him since.
I was having a conversation with Don, and the whole time Twiggs was in my ear, telling me, “Hey, man, it’s time you got into bed.” I gave him a couple of looks and went on talking. Then Twiggs said, “Hey, man, it’s really time for you to get into bed. You’ve got to be in the studio early.”
I told him, “Man, why don’t you go to bed? I’ll go to bed when I think it’s time to go to bed.”
That’s when he snapped. “Look, motherfucker,” he said, grabbing my arm and pushing me. Then he hit me in the back and told me, “Okay, now I will go
to bed, and I’ll leave this motherfucking place tomorrow.”
“Well, shit, you don’t have to go away mad, just go the fuck away,” I said.
This whole thing went down in front of Betts and Don Johnson and a few other people, so Twiggs was way out of school. He should have taken me outside if he had something like that to say to me. It really pissed me off, and after he hit me he got that look on his face like, “Oh shit. I better go up and pack.”
I hated how that all went down, because I loved Twiggs, but I think he had done gone over the edge. What he had pictured for this whole thing had changed. It had been a long time since he’d been involved. Two of the guys were gone, and everybody else was fucked up. This band had more baggage than Twiggs could manage. It was more than anyone could manage, but the man couldn’t handle it when things didn’t go exactly the right way—he was just wrapped way too tight.
That was the last time I worked with Twiggs. Later on in 1979, he was killed in a skydiving accident. He was in upstate New York working for the Dixie Dregs, and on November 16, near a small town called Duanesburg of all things, he went for a jump and his chute never opened. A few months later, I got a manila envelope in the mail. In it was a picture of Twiggs walking into the woods with his head down. He’s wearing his jumpsuit, with “Allman Brothers” and “Dixie Dregs” running down either side and “Harley-Davidson” across the back.
It freaked me out, man, because it was obviously premeditated. He had somebody mail it for him, because it was postdated after his death. Like I said, the world was just not perfect enough for Twiggs Lyndon.
It was hard letting Twiggs go—almost like it was proof that things weren’t what they once were, or what we wished they would be—but at the same time we were working with Tom Dowd again, and he was a real treat. We hadn’t worked with him since he produced Eat a Peach, and just like back then, he did his job so well. We had communication, and I mean the utmost communication. Tom was a master at getting everyone’s attention focused on one little item, and I picked up so many little ways to go about things from him, and to keep from wasting time.
One thing I learned from Tom was the importance of beats per minute, and it’s more important to me than it is to anybody else in the Allman Brothers Band. That might sound pretty strange, and it might sound like I’m insulting three very good percussionists, but I’m not. I’m not a drummer, but I know tempo, and I know that the longer a note rings, and the more of it that you hear, the more of it you get to enjoy. The only thing that’s going to keep you from doing that is if another note comes right on top of it and cuts it off.
A note has to have enough time, even if it’s in a fast song, to start nasty, get nasty, stay nasty, and end nasty—and do it all in a millisecond. That’s easy to do on a guitar, and possible to do with the human voice. You need a certain length of time to allow a note to come up from out of your soul and have it emanate to the microphone, and every now and then you know that you’ve really touched a nerve.
One night, many years later, I heard Derek Trucks go, “Sing that son of a bitch!” He just couldn’t hold it in, and that made me feel good, because it was a note I really tried for, and as you get older it’s harder to hit those notes of real emphasis. At the end of “Whipping Post,” where I sing, “Like I’ve been tied to the whipping post,” that word “tied” gets a little more difficult every year. The ending of “One Way Out” is starting to get pretty hard, but I won’t give up on it.
I’m afraid of the day when my throat just isn’t going to let me do all the little loop-the-loops that I can do now. I know it’s going to happen, because you can’t do it forever. I’ll do what I can for the rest of my life; I might be able to croon for quite a while. You can always take a different route when it gets to the high note, and sometimes it comes out almost as good.
If your music doesn’t have dynamics, you might as well get another job. Just like the rising and falling of a poem, the music also travels, and you have to feel it. It’s like traveling on a train, rolling through the hills. It’s a journey with your partners, and they’re all going with you, and some of them make the same turns, and a couple may go a different route, but they all meet you on the other side. I know that’s a strange way of describing how the arrangement to a composition works, but it’s like a musical journey.
The main thing a producer does—and Tom Dowd did it better than anyone—is to be the other guy in the band and listen to how the music all meshes together, and hear better than you do because you’re busy playing. His job is to make sure it all jibes together properly, and Tom had the incredible ability to make our songs sound exactly the way we wanted them to. Tom was omnipresent, man. He had his headphones and his little beats-per-minute machine, and he kept them right with him. I never saw that man lose anything; he was so organized.
Between Tom producing and all of us playing together, everything went pretty smoothly. The only thing I didn’t like about recording that album was David Goldflies, the new bass player. His playing wasn’t in the toilet, but it wasn’t very good either. The guy must have thought he was getting paid by the note, the way he would play those banjo notes on the bass.
Despite all that, Enlightened Rogues was a good record, and I liked it a lot. Looking back, though, I can’t believe we did it through Capricorn and Phil Walden, especially since we knew they were in a bad way financially and we’d had issues with them paying us royalties.
In the end, I think we signed a new contract with Capricorn because of Phil himself. Despite the money he owed me, Phil was still one of the most intelligent people in the music business. He knew more about getting a record played than just about anyone, and I guess we thought he had one more miracle in him. Phil was able to worm his way into any situation; he was one of those people, kinda like my brother in a way, only my brother wouldn’t lower himself to chicanery. And it was that which finally did in Phil and Capricorn.
In late 1979, after Enlightened Rogues was released, the final chapter of Capricorn Records was written when Phil lost Capricorn to PolyGram Records. He’d taken out one loan after another from PolyGram and they finally called all those tabs in. Not even the strong performance of Enlightened Rogues or our tour that followed was enough to save that label.
Ultimately, Phil Walden didn’t use the right judgment when managing Capricorn, which was so strong and could have been such a good thing. He only thought of himself, and in doing so, he broke the damn company. He borrowed all this money, and I don’t know all the whys or what-fors past that, but I know they put a big balloon payment on it, so he took the money out of the till. All the money from all the bands came to one spot—and I’m talking about Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, everybody. He borrowed a big amount of money against all the income all these bands were bringing in, and he couldn’t pay it back, so they took Capricorn Records away from Phil Walden.
Courtesy Big House Museum Archives
I’m No Angel, 1986
Brian Hagiwara
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
No Angel
THE FAILURE OF CAPRICORN BEGAN THE ’80S ON A DOWN NOTE, but in many ways it set the tone for what was my hardest decade in music and the hardest decade for the Allman Brothers. Looking back on it now, there wasn’t much that went right for us during these times. The hangover was long and it was bleak. These were some rough years, and the end of Capricorn was just the start.
When the dust settled with Capricorn, we signed a deal with Arista Records, but the honeymoon phase that had enabled us to record and promote Enlightened Rogues did not last long. We did two insipid albums on Arista—Reach for the Sky and Brothers of the Road—and you won’t find a copy in this house, and I doubt that any of the other guys have those records either. It was like a whole different band made those records. We had background singers, songwriters, synthesizers—fuck me, man.
In truth, though, I was just too drunk most of the time to care one way or the other. After Enlightened Rogues, I just fell off the deep en
d. Before then, my drinking and drug use had been more or less in check. I’d have my bad days, but most were pretty good. By the early ’80s, those good days were hard to come by.
I was drinking a minimum of a fifth of vodka a day, and even though I knew things had gotten out of hand, it didn’t feel like there was a damn thing I could do about it. I remember one time around then; I was living on the west coast of Florida, and I was visiting my neighbor. She was watering her flowers. I didn’t have a driver’s license at this time, so I asked her if she would give me a ride down the street. She said, “Sure,” so we got in the car and I told her to turn in at the ABC liquor store. I got a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two pint bottles of Smirnoff Red.
I got back to the car, and I poured about half the orange juice out, and I took one of the pint bottles of vodka, poured it in, and shook it up. She’s just looking at me, and by the time we drove the six blocks, I had pulled out the second bottle of vodka and dumped it in.
My neighbor asked me, “My God, Gregory, you like to do this often?”
I told her, “Honey, I don’t like to do this at all, but I have to do it. If I don’t, my muscles will start cramping up on me, and I’ll get the sweats and vomit. It’s just terrible.”
Of course, she couldn’t understand, and looking back on it, I can’t say that I blame her. That was my morning regimen for years and years, but it was at one of its worst points in the early 1980s. I was so out of it, man. I wasn’t listening to the music or really paying attention to what was going with the band—I was just a total fucking mess. Those two awful albums for Arista were the price I had to pay for that drinking—and unfortunately all our fans had to pay that price too—but the real crime was how I lost sight of the music.