by Gregg Allman
The Brothers went to Japan in ’91, and that was good. I was still one of those twenty-four-hour drinkers, though, with a pint under the bed because the next morning I would have the shakes so bad. In Japan they had vending machines on the damn sidewalk; you got a pint of vodka in there and you just put the dough in, if you can figure out which coin is which.
During the day, I would try not to drink too much, and some days I would get it just perfect. The band tried every way in the world to help me, but it’s something a person’s got to do on their own. I’d go on these benders and then I’d come down—to come down off alcohol is rough, man. You see spiders and all kinds of stuff. I don’t know if it’s as bad as heroin; it’s just different. I don’t think it’s any less scary.
It finally got to the point where, right before I quit drinking, the other guys were gonna throw me out of the band. That just crushed me, to think that the only reason I was in the band was because of my last name. But they were like, “Man, you let us down,” and I can’t say that I blame them. I started having intro-itis—I would forget intros. I would know the song, I probably wrote it. But they’d call “Black Hearted Woman” and I’d think, “How does that damn thing start?”
Which brings me back to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. I was totally disgusted with myself for letting myself get drunk that day. I knew I shouldn’t have gone out of the room. I was so repulsed. But I didn’t stay long at that rehab in Pennsylvania either. I caught the plane back to California, and I might have had three drinks on the plane just to make it back. It was a nightmare; it really, really was.
A few days later, somebody came over and showed me the footage of me accepting the award. When I saw that, I was just mortified, to the point where I hired a male nurse to come into the house. Now I was bound and determined to get released from booze, and I thought the best way of doing it was by myself, in my digs, in the familiarity of my house.
At the time, I’d been seeing a woman named Stacey Fountain, who I eventually ended up marrying. She was so proud of me then, saying, “You’ve got to stop wearing this chain—you look bad, you smell bad.” Then she grabbed me and said, “But I love you anyway. I don’t want to lose you, not to that fucking bottle.”
She was right, and she had a lot to do with saving my life, not only with my drinking, but also during my treatment for hep C several years later. But the one it started with is me; a person has to want to be set free from that shit.
Mind you, I’d been to, like, eleven rehabs, but I always had that little spark back there saying, “All right, go ahead and dance for ’em, get ’em off your back for a while. I’ll meet up with you later.” Not this time. This time, I didn’t go to any rehab. I just called in a nurse—actually two guys, who switched twelve-hour shifts. Now it seems like I just kinda blacked out, but for about the next three or four weeks I was just limp. I didn’t have any want though; the more time that passed, the stronger I got.
And then it was all over. I mean, it was over, man. It was flat over. I quit drinking, I quit smoking, I quit snorting anything—I quit all that. I had prayed to God, “Man, get me off of this shit,” and he did. I thought, “I have been released.”
First, you’re just so glad that it’s over. For weeks, that’s the only thing on your mind. Your mind is free. You want to go out and tell everybody. Then I realized that people started saying, “Man, you’re looking good.” You know, they never said, “Hey, you look bad.”
But then you wonder, how the fuck did all this happen? Did I get any positive anything out of all that? And you’ve got to admit to yourself, no, I didn’t. You can see what happened and that by the grace of God, you finally quit before it killed you.
When you’re an alcoholic, you don’t ever stop to think, “I wonder how much my body can take?” And you don’t really think about death. But as soon as it’s over, you start thinking about how close you came to actually killing yourself. You hear of people having esophageal hemorrhages, when that big vein in your esophagus just pops. My blood pressure was always way up there. Now it’s like 120/65, which is like someone in the NFL.
It takes over your brain. There’s not much left to think with, it’s all floating in booze. It’s not something you can really imagine—it’s like nobody knows what it’s like to be locked in a cage with two big grizzlies until they do it. And even then they probably wouldn’t know what to tell about it, anyway.
I only went to AA once, and it was years before I quit. I walked in, and these three girls dragged me in the corner and asked me if I’d sign this and that. One of them was hitting on me pretty heavy. I looked at them and said, “Anonymous, my ass.” I walked down the street and got drunk. I showed them, didn’t I?
Because AA didn’t work for me, I thought I was weird until I talked to Waylon Jennings about it. Waylon told me, “Me and Johnny”—meaning Johnny Cash—“we can’t go to the AA meetings or NA meetings either. But I’m gonna tell ya, brother, all you need to have an AA meeting is two drunks and a coffee pot, and that big book.” And that’s basically what I did.
Now I look around at my beautiful house on the water, and part of me says, “I don’t deserve this,” but I realize that’s just an alcoholic’s way of thinking. Alcoholics don’t believe they deserve anything, which is a reason to have a drink. “I’m not good enough for this house, I’m not good enough for this woman, I’m not good enough for my cars and motorcycles.” I’ve fallen off the wagon after I received a gold record—I don’t know if it was because I didn’t feel worthy of it or “Hey, let’s celebrate, just for one day.”
The truth is, I worked hard for all of this and I love having it, but every now and then I’ll think of all the hell I caused other people over the years. To some people, I was just a little pain in the ass, but, next to myself, I was roughest on the band and my loved ones. That’s the thing about being an addict—people say, “I’m only hurting myself.” Well, that’s bullshit, because you’re hurting all the people around you. They haven’t done anything wrong; all they’ve done is love you.
I always thought my alcoholism was punishment for what I had done in the past, only I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was I had done. I guess it was feeling like a failure after my brother died, and he was still kicking my ass from up there. It was like he was saying, “Baybrah, I leave you, and then you go and get fucked up.”
I was trying to be as a good a person as my brother, because he set the pattern for my life to follow. The way people try to be like their dads, I tried to be like my brother. The thing is, he was such an outrageously confident man and I’m just the opposite, so there was no way for me to match up to him. It made me feel like I was a failure, so I drank.
I wonder if someday they will find an answer to addiction. If they don’t get an answer to this crack stuff, somebody’s going to invade us, and ain’t nobody going to be ready, especially if they got that pipe in their hand. That shit is like taking a hit of paranoia, man. I only tried it once, and it was awful. Crack is a terrible waste of money and brain cells—at least that’s one drug that never got me.
The bottom line is that drugs are a nasty trap. All I can say is don’t do it—don’t fucking do it. Don’t anybody do it, for any reason. If I can get through to one cat who has tried heroin once and knows that groove, and if I can convince him to stay away from that second hit, then cool. I believe in my heart that over the last few years I have saved a few people from making that mistake.
In most every interview I do, they ask me what I would change if I had it to do all over again, and I tell them that the one thing would be the drug use.
R.J. Capak
The Allman Brothers Band in New York City, 2006
Danny Clinch
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
One Way Out
THE ALLMAN BROTHERS KEPT ROLLING THROUGH THE ’90s. We recorded Where It All Begins in 1994, which was a solid album overall and eventually went gold. The best part of it was recording up at Burt Reynolds’s
ranch in Jupiter, Florida, with cypress trees all around; it’s just a gorgeous place.
And once I’d gotten sober, man, for the first time in years I was able to just sit back and enjoy it. Marc Quiñones let me know how proud he was of me for getting sober. So did Butchie, and Jaimoe too, in his own way. When we’d play shows, it was a sweet sight—the fans, the crowds. We were playing huge shows in front of packed houses. The best part was that now I was actually aware enough to appreciate them. Once we got that momentum going, we never looked back.
Still, there were problems—only this time they didn’t have a thing to do with me. Now it was Dickey heading off the tracks. Where It All Begins was the last studio album we ever did with Dickey because both his behavior and his playing were becoming more erratic, and issues developed between him and Allen Woody.
Basically, Woody was tired of taking Dickey’s shit, and it got pretty ugly between them. Warren too had grown weary of Dickey’s subpar playing and the fact that Dickey’s solution was to just crank it up and play even louder. The volume certainly had something to do with his drinking, which he was doing a lot of. At one point, we outlawed any kind of alcohol onstage, since I was sober. Suddenly, he didn’t have anybody to drink and play with, because nobody else in the band drank.
The end result was that Warren and Allen were through. They’d wanted to devote more time to Gov’t Mule anyhow, so they decided to split the band after the ’97 Beacon run. I was bummed to see them go, but I completely got it.
Even after Warren and Allen left, we still tolerated Dickey, and instead of doing something to try and get him to change, we once again went through the tough process of replacing two premier musicians. Thankfully we got lucky. Jack Pearson was one of the best guitar players in Nashville, and an old friend of Warren’s. We knew right away he was the guy. Jack Pearson is tops—he can do it all. There’s no question that he’s one of the most accomplished cats I’ve ever played with; Jaimoe said that Jack’s playing is the most like Duane’s of anyone who has ever been in the band. High praise, indeed.
Finding a bass player was a bitch. We had two or three guys we really liked, but we ended up going with Oteil Burbridge, who had played with the Aquarium Rescue Unit with Bruce Hampton and in Butch’s band, Frogwings. Oteil is like two clicks away from Stanley Clarke, and he and Jack and are both salt of the earth, so they fit right in.
As good as Jack was, it soon became clear that he couldn’t handle the volume level Dickey played at, but Dickey continued to refuse to turn it down. He wouldn’t do it for Warren, and he wouldn’t do it for Jack; he just didn’t give two shits. Finally Jack couldn’t take it anymore, so he left after the Beacon in ’99. In the years since, Jack has played a lot in my solo band, and I truly enjoy that man’s company.
By then, Derek Trucks had kinda come of age, so we brought him on board for the summer tour. Derek brought this new energy with him. Everyone was like, “Oh, boy, who’s your new guitar player?” And here come the girls too. God, it was like the old days—only they weren’t asking for me!
I think Dickey loved it when Derek came on, because he learned a lot of shit off Derek, though he would never admit it. From where I sat, it would come time for Derek’s solo and Dickey would get back, almost drop his hands, and play very little and watch Derek like a hawk. At first I think he tried to outdo him, and then he must have realized—what’s that thing about old dog, new tricks?
But not even Derek, talented as he is, could make up for all that Dickey was doing wrong. Finally, I’d had it. Getting clean was like having my windshield washed, and it felt like me, Jaimoe, and Butchie were all too caught up with Dickey’s bullshit. In the spring of 2000, we did an eight-show run that ended in Atlanta on May 7; during this stretch, Dickey was drinking a ton of beer, and God only knows what else he was doing. He was in rare form, blowing song after song, and the worse he got, the louder he played. It was a total train wreck, and just embarrassing to the rest of us.
As I walked off the stage, I had it in my mind that I was going to resign from the Allman Brothers Band. As it turns out, Butch was thinking the same thing, and told his wife, Melinda, and our manager, Bert Holman, that he would never play with Dickey Betts again.
Butch and I talked the next day, and I told him, “Man, I cannot take, and will not take, any more of this shit from Dickey. I’m better than this, and I cannot live another day with that son of a bitch trying to lord his bullshit all over us. Fuck this. I’m really pissed at myself for not quitting five years ago.”
Butch said, “Well, shit, man—why should we all have to leave, if he’s the one who’s doing it? Let’s just fire the bastard.”
“Contractually, can we do that?” I asked. I mean, I hadn’t read the contract in a while.
“Man, in the scheme of life, we ain’t got no contract,” Butch said, and that was it. We both agreed that a line had been crossed and that he had embarrassed us for the very last time.
We got a conference call set up with Jaimoe, and he agreed that Dickey was out of control. The three of us felt he needed to get into rehab and that we should play the summer tour without him, but Jaimoe would not agree to saying he would never play with Dickey again. I remember Jaimoe saying something like “The only way out of the Allman Brothers Band is to quit or die.”
It stuck with me, because Jaimoe was right—it was a brotherhood and those were the rules—and it speaks volumes about Jaimoe’s character too, after what Dickey had done to him back in 1980. But we agreed that we could not let Dickey’s demons take away what we had worked so hard for. We decided to look for another guitar player to play the 2000 summer tour with us.
I wrote a letter to Dickey, and boy, it was a stinger. I faxed it up to Bert Holman, and Bert said, “Well, that’s a little harsh. Let’s try to ease out of this thing, let’s make it as easy as possible and not entice a lawsuit.” He said, “Let me try to rewrite it.”
That draft was rewritten by Jerry Weiner, the band’s lawyer, and we all signed off on it. Then it was eventually faxed to Dickey by Bert. Bert and Jon Podell called Dickey and told him to check his fax machine. And that’s when the shit hit the fan.
In the years since then, Dickey has said that we fired him by fax. We never fired him; we said nothing about not working with him ever again. We all had Jaimoe’s voice in the back of our heads—“the only way out of the Allman Brothers Band is to quit or die”—and we chose our words carefully. What we told him was this: “Dickey, we’ve been together a long time—we love you and respect you—but you’re getting way off base here, and you’re bringing your worldly crap onstage with you. It’s been going on so long that we would like to inform you that this next year we’re going to be playing with another guitar player, so you can go into rehab, go do whatever you need to do to get yourself fixed. Then hopefully at the end of the year, we can get back together.” That is not firing him.
Sure enough, as soon as he got the fax, my phone rang. I knew who it was, and I said, “Dickey, don’t even start. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“What the hell is this?” he asked. “You’re firing me out of my own band?”
“Man, this ain’t your band no more—you done pissed it away,” I said.
He kept going on and on, and I finally said, “Dickey, I don’t care to talk to you at all. You can talk to me through my attorney,” and that was the last time I spoke to Dickey Betts.
The next thing that happened was not that Dickey got medical help as we had hoped; instead he hired lawyers and sued us. I was afraid it was going to go to court, but it didn’t. It went to arbitration, and we had to spend a lot of time in New York in front of an arbitrator named Mark Diamond.
We all met at the hearing, and I have to say, of all the situations we’d been in together since this whole thing began, we’d never been in a setup like that. It’s hard to be in a situation like that and not find yourself thinking about the very beginning of it all and how the hell it came to this. When Dickey got there, he b
rought with him a cassette of every single thing the Allman Brothers had ever recorded. It took up a whole big duffel bag. He unzipped that thing, dumped it out on the floor, pointed to it, and said, “Brilliant.”
The arbitrator asked him, “Are you speaking of the Allman Brothers?”
He said, “No—me.”
And once he started that shit in there, of all places, I thought, “Well, we don’t have to worry about this. He’s not going to do himself any favors.” We all had to hold back the snickers, and then we started talking about it. We let him know, one by one, that he was not brilliant. We went through this and that, and a whole lot of legal bullshit—it was just a drag. It was kind of embarrassing going around the room telling this guy, this arbitrator, who doesn’t even know us, all this real private stuff that we’d been through. I felt like we were kids sitting in front of Mom and Dad, saying “Well, he did this” and “No, he did that to me!” I thought, “Man, is this how it’s done?” I couldn’t believe the process.
In the end, we were happy with the ruling, but it was all so much energy wasted on such a cold fucking thing. I was so glad when it was finally over. That was when Jaimoe said, “Well, I guess Dickey quit.” We did not then, nor have we at any time since then “fired” Dickey. His favorite line that he was “fired by fax” is just bullshit, plain and simple.
Now I don’t feel any anger when I think of Dickey. I don’t feel much of anything. It’s over.
DICKEY WAS FINALLY GONE, BUT WE STILL HAD A TOUR TO DO. WE needed a great player with a thick skin who was willing to deal with the “Where’s Dickey?” bullshit and the inevitable comparisons. We found absolutely the right guy in Jimmy Herring. Jimmy had played with Oteil in the Aquarium Rescue Unit and was very good friends with Derek, so that helped a lot. He stepped up to the plate and got us through the summer, but he never wanted to be Dickey’s permanent replacement.