by Paul, Alan
JAIMOE: Duane had talked about a lot of guitar players and when I heard some of them I said, “That dude can’t tote your guitar case” and he was surprised. He loved jamming with everyone.
DOUCETTE: None of them could hold Duane’s case except Betts.
PRICE: Berry basically told Duane that he would only form a new band with him if Dickey could be in it, too. After these jams, I don’t think it was an issue because Duane and Dickey just hooked up in incredible ways. Their styles were so different and, like Jaimoe and Butch, they were able to complement one another.
LINDA OAKLEY, Berry Oakley’s wife: Berry really liked playing with Dickey and felt bad about breaking up the Second Coming, but I don’t recall him making any demands. It was up to Duane who would be in the new band. Berry had met Duane and thought, “This is my path right here.”
JAIMOE: Duane loved guitar players. I only knew two people Duane didn’t like: Jimmy Page and Sonny Sharrock. He played on the Herbie Mann Push Push sessions [in 1971] with Sonny and he hated him and the way nothing he played was ever really clear. He also didn’t like Led Zeppelin, though I don’t know why. Anyhow, Duane liked Dickey and the two of them clicked and started working on songs and parts immediately.
WYNANS: Berry was very dedicated to jamming and deeply into the Dead and the Airplane and these psychedelic approaches and always playing that music for us—and it was pretty exotic stuff to our ears, because there were no similar bands in the area. Dickey was a great blues player with a rock edge; he could play all these great Lonnie Mack licks, for instance. And then Duane arrived, and he was just on another planet. The power of all of it combined was immediately obvious.
BETTS: All of us were playing in good little bands, but Duane was the guy who had Phil Walden—Otis Redding’s manager!—on his tail, anxious to get his career moving. And Duane was hip enough to say, “Hey, Phil, instead of a three-piece, I have a six-piece and we need a hundred thousand dollars for equipment.” And Phil was hip enough to have faith in this guy. If there was no Phil Walden and no Duane Allman there would have been no Allman Brothers Band.
The unnamed group began regularly playing free shows in Jacksonville’s Willow Branch Park, joined by a large, rotating crop of musicians. They went on to play in several local parks.
PRICE: It was Berry’s idea to play for free in the parks for the hippies.
TRUCKS: The six of us had this incredible jam and Duane went to the door and said, “If anyone wants to leave this room they’re going to have to fight their way out.” We were playing all the time and doing these free concerts in the park and we all knew we had something great going, but the keyboard player was Reese Wynans, not Gregg, and we didn’t really have a singer.
Duane said, “I need to call my baby brother.” I said, “Are you sure?” Because he was upset that Gregg had stayed out in L.A. to do his solo thing and I was upset that he had left when I thought we had something going with the 31st of February project the year before. He said, “I’m pissed at him, too, but he’s the only one strong enough to sing with this band.” And, of course, he was right. Whatever his issues, Gregg had the voice and he had the songs that we needed.
PHIL WALDEN, original ABB manager; founder/president of Capricorn Records: They had this great instrumental presence but no real vocalist. Berry, Dickey, and Duane were all doing a little singing. That was a lot of a little singing and no singer. So Duane called Gregg and asked him to come down.
JAIMOE: Duane was talking about Gregory being the singer in the band from the beginning. Very early on, Duane told me, “There’s only one guy who can sing in this band and that’s my baby brother.” He told me that he was a womanizer. He said Gregg broke girls hard and all the rest of it, but that he’s a hell of a singer and songwriter—which obviously was accurate and is to this day.
LINDA OAKLEY: We were all sitting in our kitchen late one night after one of these jams. They were all so psyched about what they were building and Duane said, “We’ve got to get my brother here, out of that bad situation. He’s a great singer and songwriter and he’s the guy who can finish this thing.”
WYNANS: For a while, we were all just jamming and guys from other bands would be there singing, or Berry would sing, Duane would sing a little, “Rhino” Reinhardt would sing. [Guitarist Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt, who was in the Second Coming and went on to play with Iron Butterfly.] Then there was talk of this becoming a real band, and Duane was talking about getting his brother here to sing. Everyone was excited about it, but I knew Gregg played keyboards and figured that might be the end of it for me. It was personally disappointing, because the band was really going somewhere and obviously had a chance to do something great. It was kind of a drag but this was Duane’s brother, so what can you say? You wish them good luck and move on to the next thing. It was a thrill to be a part of.
BETTS: We had all been bandleaders and we knew what we now had.
Gregg was still in Los Angeles, having stayed there after the breakup of the Hour Glass. Liberty Records had recorded and released a second album with Gregg backed by session musicians after Duane, Sandlin, and the rest of the band left California.
ALLMAN: I didn’t have a band, but I was under contract to a label that had me cut two terrible records, including one with these studio cats in L.A. They had me do a blues version of Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which can’t be done. It was really horrible. I hope you never hear it. They told us what to wear, what to play, everything. They dictated everything, including putting us in those clown suits. I hated it, but what are you gonna do when they’re taking care of all your expenses? You end up feeling like some kind of kept man and it was fuckin’ awful.
I was excited when my brother called and said he was putting a new band together and wanted me to join. I just wrote a note that said, “I’m gone. If you want to sue my ass, come on after me.”
BETTS: We were all telling Duane to call Gregg. We knew we needed him. They were fighting or something, which they did all the time—just normal brotherly stuff.
JAIMOE: Duane finally called Gregg when he got everyone that he thought would work, because he needed to give him as much time as possible to resolve the contract issues with Liberty. Once everyone else was in place, Duane called him and said, “You’ve got to hear this band that I’m putting together. You need to be the singer.”
KIM PAYNE, one of the ABB’s original crew members: I met Gregory in L.A. when I was working for another band that played with him, and we became good friends, running around, staying with chicks until we got kicked out, and drinking cheap wine. Almost every day we were together, Gregg would bitch about his brother. He’d say, “He’s calling me again asking him to join his band, but there ain’t no way because I cannot get along with my brother in a band.” He said that to me countless times.
LANDAU: When I was in Muscle Shoals I was sitting in the office with Duane, Rick, and Phil, and Duane picked up the phone, dialed a number, and said, “Brother, it’s time for us to play together again.” I was a fly on the wall and could obviously only hear one end of the conversation, but it seemed very positive.
ALLMAN: My brother only called me one time and I jumped on it.
JOHN MCEUEN: As I recall, Duane kept calling Gregg, saying, “You got to get down here. The band has never sounded better.” He called enough times and Gregg went. I have to give Duane credit for having the vision to do this thing. I know the L.A. years were not great ones for them, but I think it was something they had to go through to discover their path.
PAYNE: Gregg kept telling me, “I’m not going down and getting involved with that.” You have to remember he was coming off a very bad band experience; he hated the way the Hour Glass went and how it ended up and he may have connected that with being Duane’s fault. I think he also felt like Duane and the other guys turned on him and blamed him for staying in L.A., when he thought he had to.
SANDLIN: It kind of bothered me that Gregg stayed out in L.A., but I didn’t k
now if he wanted to, or was being forced by management.
PAYNE: At the same time, he was looking at his future—he was driving an old Chevy with a fender held on by antenna wire. Whenever we ran out of money, he’d go down and sell a song. We were living hand to mouth.
ALLMAN: My brother said he was tired of being a robot on the staff down in Muscle Shoals, even though he had made some progress, and gotten a little known playing with great people like Aretha and Wilson Pickett. He wanted to take off and do his own thing. He said, “I’m ready to get back on the stage, and I got this killer band together. We got two drummers, a great bass player, and a hell of a lead guitar player, too.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he said, “Wait’ll you get here and I’ll show you.”
I didn’t know that he had learned to play slide so well. I thought he was out of his mind, but I was doing nothing, going nowhere. My brother sent me a ticket, but I knew he didn’t have the money, so I put it in my back pocket, stuck out my thumb on the San Bernardino Freeway, and got a ride all the way to Jacksonville, Florida—and it was a bass player I got a ride from.
PAYNE: I know that Gregg remembers hitchhiking across the country, but the thing is, I’m the guy who drove him to the airport.
MCEUEN: My brother bought a Chevy Corvair for Gregg to drive around L.A.—the most unsafe car ever invented. One day Gregg comes by the house, a little duplex in Laurel Canyon, looking for my brother, who wasn’t there. He said, “Hey, John, the man pulled me over. You know how they are. He doesn’t believe this is my car and is going to impound it. I got to take the pink slip to the judge.” So I said, “I know where the pink slip is.” I gave it to him and he took it and sold that car and bought a one-way ticket to Jacksonville. Maybe I’m responsible for the Allman Brothers Band! Gregg came back about six years later when the Brothers were playing the Forum, and gave my brother a check for the car.
TRUCKS: I don’t know how he got there but a few days after Duane said he was calling Gregg, there was a knock on the door and there he was.
ALLMAN: I walked into rehearsal on March 26, 1969, and they played me the track they had worked up to Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and it blew me away. It was so intense.
BETTS: Gregg was floored when he heard us. We were really blowing; we’d been playing these free shows for a few weeks by that point.
ALLMAN: I got my brother aside and said, “I don’t know if I can cut this. I don’t know if I’m good enough.” And he starts in on me: “You little punk, I told these people all about you and you don’t come in here and let me down.” Then I snatched the words out of his hand and said, “Count it off, let’s do it.” And with that, I did my damnedest. I’d never heard or sung this song before, but by God I did it. I shut my eyes and sang, and at the end of that there was just a long silence. At that moment we knew what we had. Duane kinda pissed me off and embarrassed me into singing my guts out. He knew which buttons to push.
The group played their first gig on March 30, 1969, at the Jacksonville Armory. Gregg had been in town for four days. The ABB on stage, with Dickey and Duane on guitar.
MIKE CALLAHAN, one of the band’s first crew members: The original name of the band was Beezlebub. That’s what the guys were calling it, or just “the band.” When we played that first gig in Jacksonville, there was no name. It was just, “The boys are playing.”
PRICE: We did a few shows with my band the Load, the Second Coming, and then what was becoming the Allman Brothers. Berry and Dickey would do double duty. At one of the first shows after Gregg arrived, Duane said, “I’m glad you really liked that. This is a new band. We don’t have a name but we might be calling it Beezlebub.” I don’t think anyone liked it and it lasted about five minutes …
JAIMOE: Beezlebub was one name that was talked about, but it was never “the name.” Lots of things were talked about. I do remember Jerry Wexler being worried because he said every brother band he had ever worked with had great conflicts over everything.
TRUCKS: I think we all knew that Beelzebub wasn’t it, but we were at a loss as to what it should be—what it was. Phil Walden came up with the Allman Brothers due to the fact that Duane was the driving force. Duane absolutely would not allow it to be called the Duane Allman Band, but once Gregg joined the band, Phil sold the Brothers concept. Duane was at first very much against it. He felt that this was a band of equals and he did not want himself and his brother to become the focus of attention.
RED DOG, early crew member: The Allman Brothers Band name really was because of Duane, and Gregg used to say, “I’m lucky my name is Allman.”
Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell was one of the band’s first hardcore fans. A disabled Marine vet just home from Vietnam, he fell in love with Duane’s playing after hearing the band play for free in a Jacksonville park, was drawn in by the guitarist’s charisma, and begged for a job. Duane told him he could set up the drums, and Red Dog began hanging around the group, actually donating his monthly disability checks to the cause. He moved with the band to Macon and became their fourth crew member, hired as a driver and drum tech once the band started touring in earnest. He would remain with the group for more than thirty years.
JAIMOE: Red Dog loved Duane and started hanging around when we were playing in the park in Jacksonville. He was a vet who could score you a woman or some weed or whatever. He just wanted to be a part of what we were doing, so Duane said, “Go set up the drums.” I would tell him to just take mine out of the case and I would set them up and he’d be kind of offended and ask to set them up and I’d say, “It’s like waxing your car—some things you want to do yourself.” After about six months, I said, “Go ahead and set them up,” and he was so happy. Red Dog was a good man and he loved the band.
CHAPTER
3
Georgia on a Fast Train
BY MAY 1, the band had relocated to Macon, Georgia, where Walden was establishing Capricorn Records; his new band would be the label’s first act. Walden’s dual role as label head and band manager would eventually cause the members to complain about a serious conflict of interest, becoming the source of much rancor. Initially, however, it seemed to make everything much easier.
The band moved together into Twiggs Lyndon’s apartment on 309 College Street, which became the communal home of all six band members, as well as their original crew of Mike Callahan, Kim Payne, and Red Dog. Lyndon had worked for Walden as a trusted road manager of soul acts like Arthur Conley and Percy Sledge and was now given the job of shepherding this new band. Living on very little money, the group quickly found a patron of sorts in Louise Hudson, cook and proprietor of the H&H Soul Food Restaurant.
PAYNE: When I dropped Gregg off at the airport, he said, “If this turns out to be a good thing, I’ll give you a call.” I said, “Yeah, right,” and never expected to hear from him again, but a few weeks later, he called me on the pay phone of the flophouse where I was staying and said, “This is just going to be an ass-kicking band and we need you. Come on down.”
I didn’t have any money so I asked if he could get me one of those plane tickets and he said he didn’t think so. Eventually, he said the best he could do was some gas money so I could ride my bike. He sent me 50 dollars. I spent $37.50 getting my bike repaired and took off on the most insane three-thousand-mile trip anyone has ever taken. The $13.50 I had left got me to my parents’ house in Alabama, where I almost collapsed in the driveway. My mother gave me five dollars to make it to Macon. I arrived at the pad, walked into a living room lined with end-to-end mattresses, collapsed on one of them, and slept for twenty-four hours.
RED DOG: We had mattresses across the floor and we had this Coke machine that had three beer selections and one Coke and it cost you a quarter.
A.J. LYNDON, Twiggs’s younger brother, ABB crew member 1973–76: Everyone called that place the “Hippie Crash Pad.” It was actually Twiggs’s apartment and then everyone moved in as they arrived in town. One wall was painted purple, another bright yellow.
TRUCKS: We all moved into Twiggs’s apartment when we arrived. He had the walls painted various psychedelic colors, including one that was squares of different colors. We bought some mattresses and threw them down and that was all that we ever had in there, along with the Coke machine.
A.J. LYNDON: I was just a kid in high school and I would go over there at lunchtime and they’d all be sleeping. I remember seeing a little blond head on Jaimoe’s chest and thinking, “Well, this is different.” I’d get my mom to give me four quarters for lunch, go over there, step over bodies sleeping end to end, get four PBRs out of the Coke machine, drink them for lunch, and head back to school.
TRUCKS: There were nine of us living in this little one-bedroom apartment, which made it real easy to spend all day rehearsing.
PAYNE: One of the first things I noticed was that no matter what Gregg said about Duane when he was away from him, when I saw them together, their love and closeness was immediately apparent.
RED DOG: Duane and Gregg lived separate lives and I don’t think Duane had to ride herd on Gregg. I can only recall one time with Duane actually screaming and hollering at Gregg.
HAMMOND: What I admired about Duane is he was fearless. He had this vision of a mixed-race band in the Deep South in 1969. He was very adamant about including everyone. He didn’t care what anyone said. He had his own vision of what was the right thing to do and he did it.
MAMA LOUISE HUDSON, cook and owner, H&H Soul Food Restaurant: Macon was just barely integrated. We didn’t really have any white customers. And nobody around here had seen guys who looked like them. I had not. A lot of the white folk around here did not approve of them long-haired boys, or of them always having a black guy with them.