One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band

by Paul, Alan

  PAYNE: Having Jaimoe in the band was a very big issue in 1969 in the Deep South, where segregation was still pretty strict. That was one of the things that tightened up the brotherhood. It was us against the world, especially when we were traveling. Day-to-day life, you can live on your own, in your own world, but not on the road, where you have to stop and eat and sleep and get gas—where you have all this exposure to society. The long hair was enough to start shit in most places, but Jaimoe … that was enough to spark the gasoline.

  COL. BRUCE HAMPTON, founder of the Hampton Grease Band, who played many early shows with the ABB: It was a different world. It was life or death. You’d stop at a gas station and you’d wonder if you were going to die. That’s no joke. If you had long hair, you were a target.

  MAMA LOUISE: One day I looked out the window and saw these long-haired boys walking around, looking in. Finally, Dickey and Berry came in. Dickey told Berry, “Ask that lady for some food.”

  He said, “I don’t know nothing about her. You ask the lady.” He said, “I don’t know her. You ask the lady.”

  They got embarrassed and walked out. Then they came back in and started up again and I just said, “May I help you all, darlings?”

  And one of them said, “May we please have two plates of food? We don’t have any money, but we’re going out on the road and when we come back, we’ll pay you.” I often helped people who didn’t have no money, so I gave it to them, and they did come back and pay when they returned. Most people who said that never came back. Then they did that again, another time or two, and then one day they asked for those two plates and I said, “Well, there’s five of y’all. Take five plates.”

  The band at the H and H restaurant, 1969.

  And they said, “Oh, thank you, ma’am. When we come back, we’ll pay you.” And they did—and we just got to be friends. They always treated me real respectful.

  Fueled by Mama Louise’s soul food and a steady diet of various drugs, the group began rehearsing for hours a day at Capricorn’s new studio and rehearsal space. By July, Johnny Sandlin, Gregg and Duane’s old Allman Joys and Hour Glass bandmate, was overseeing the studio.

  The Allman Brothers Band was performing regularly around Macon, beginning with their first local show, May 2 at the College Discotheque. They often drove eighty miles north to perform free shows in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, where they grew their fan base and continued to perfect a unique, blues-based sound.

  TRUCKS: We were busting to get out of that warehouse where we were rehearsing all the time and play for people. We loaded ourselves and our equipment into our Econoline and what other rides we could glom and headed to Atlanta. We went straight to Piedmont Park and found a perfect spot to set up. It was a large flat space at the top of some stairs with electrical outlets within reach. We didn’t ask permission, we just set up and started pouring out all of this music.

  There were a few hundred people within earshot and they all came running. Apparently many of them also went running to get friends and before long those few hundred turned into a few thousand. We played and played and it was amazing. It was church, it was electrifying, it was inspiring. It was so much fun that, if we hadn’t formed the brotherhood of music before, that day galvanized it.

  HAMPTON: They started coming up and playing these free shows in Piedmont Park and there started to be more and more of a local following. From the first time, they were just fantastic, and Duane especially was very supportive of many, many musicians and bands, including ours.

  TRUCKS: The next Sunday we went back and there was a shitload more folks than were there the week before, as well as a couple of other Atlanta bands that wanted to play. This grew into a weekly event that went from that little place to a big flatbed stage set up on the end of a very large field that someone provided complete with a massive generator. The crowd grew to the level of around ten thousand after a few weeks, and a lot of other bands started coming and playing as well.

  The band shared everything, including drugs, and legends have grown about the importance of psychedelic mushrooms. The Wonder Graphics team of Jim Flournoy Holmes and W. David Powell designed a mushroom logo for the band, which every original member had tattooed on their leg in 1971. The psychedelic ’shroom thus took on a legendary, mystical status, credited with helping the band forge both their music and their brotherhood. Not all agree with the drug’s importance.

  JAIMOE: To me, the mushrooms didn’t really play that big a part in anything. It was just a cool thing that became a logo. We all lived together and I often stayed across the hall with this nice lady…, because the pad was too crazy to sleep. One morning, Duane came over and knocked and he was bouncing off the wall—full of energy, as he always was, but more so. He said, “What’s up, my little chocolate drop?” He often called me that.

  I said, “Nothing. Just waiting around until it’s time to practice.” And he said, “You want one of these?” He had a little container of something that I thought were blackberries, which were a kind of speed we took with some regularity. I said I was all right and he laughed and said, “Okay,” and dashed off on his bike.

  TRUCKS: Someone picked up a massive bag of psilocybin and it ended up getting us all in a very strange frame of mind.

  JAIMOE: I went over to the pad to use the commode and sitting on the back of it was a little bottle of those pills—anytime someone got a little something they stored it there so that if the police came it could be flushed away. I looked at them and thought, “This is what Duane had. The way he was bouncing around, I’m gonna give it a try,” and I popped three of them. God damn! They were psilocybin tablets and they slowly came on. They were real natural and earthy and pleasant, but I should not have taken three.

  We got something to eat at Mama Louise’s and went to practice like we did every day, but rehearsal was a waste. It had to be canceled because we had all taken some of those things. Butch couldn’t play the drums because he said they were flying away. Gregory wasn’t really into psychedelics so maybe he didn’t take any, but the rest of us were flying, so we just called off practice and the day finally came to what it should have been: hanging out. There’s been a lot of stories told about how we had this incredible jam, but we couldn’t even play.

  TRUCKS: We could not play on that stuff, which I don’t think were real mushrooms. It was very, very intensely psychedelic. We had that failed rehearsal and I think that was the incident that led to us imposing a rule that we’d all stay straight until after rehearsal, because we knew we had work to do. After we’d come back, we’d take them and start raising hell all night. We’d be out front playing corkball at two or three in the morning. [Corkball is a variant of baseball using a small ball and bat.]

  W. DAVID POWELL, partner in Wonder Graphics: I am pretty sure that the mushroom logo was our first paying job for Capricorn. I can’t remember ever being given any real “art direction” by the label or the band. They certainly didn’t specifically request a mushroom. It seems as though it didn’t require much of a flight to land on the subject. Drug culture was pervasive throughout the music industry and the “hippie movement.” Really, the Brothers were no more identified with it than other bands. The mushroom we rendered also has a strong reference to male and female genitalia.

  TRUCKS: The real mystery is how we avoided ending up in jail or just having serious problems during that time and I can offer no explanations. There were five or six occupied apartments in the building with the Hippie Crash Pad and you would expect they would call the police on us because we were constantly raising hell at three or four in the morning, but they all just moved out. We came home from rehearsal one day and there was this family moving out. We lined up in the hallways and applauded, and boy they were pissed off. That guy wanted to kill us. I don’t know how we got away with it.

  I know that after we hit it big the police [received a memo] that basically said, “Keep these guys out of jail. Just keep them from killing themselves, they’re bringing too much mon
ey into the local economy.” But how we got away with it at the beginning when we had no money or influence and no one knew who we were … I have no idea.

  While the band focused on making music and building their brotherhood, Twiggs Lyndon tended to their day-to-day business, making sure they made their gigs and that the gear was always top-notch and ready to go. Lyndon was a Macon native and a trusted Walden employee. It was Lyndon whom Walden sent to Wisconsin to identify Otis Redding’s body following the December 10, 1967, plane crash that killed him and four members of his band.

  BUNKY ODOM, Vice president, Phil Walden and Associates; day-to-day management contact: Twiggs Lyndon was the most intense, detail-oriented person I’ve ever met in my life. He came to the band through Phil Walden, whom he had been working for. He was somebody that Phil could absolutely trust. Twiggs and Duane understood each other and the intensity. Duane surrounded himself with good people and Twiggs fit right in with him.

  Macon, Georgia, Spring 1969.

  JOHN LYNDON, brother of Twiggs: Twiggs was so excited from the moment he heard Duane. He said, “These guys love to play. It’s all about the music.” He had grown disillusioned with the R and B acts, who he said would walk off stage the second their allotted time was over. If they were contracted for forty-five minutes, they would not play forty-six.

  JAIMOE: I’m not sure, but I think it was Twiggs who came up with the idea of “the Allman Brothers Band.”

  HAMPTON: To me, they were as good then as they ever got. They were on fire. The intent and the essence were there. It was just pure as hell. You could feel the purity and the fire and intensity: Nobody was playing checkers or talking business. This was music for music’s sake. The chemistry of putting all those guys together took them to a different level.

  RED DOG: I said from the beginning that the band would be bigger than the Beatles. The music was just super hot. A live gig in the early days of the Allman Brothers was smoking.

  Gregg was initially the band’s sole songwriter, which was part of the reason they remade blues songs like “Trouble No More” and “One Way Out”; they needed more material. The band also began playing soaring, open-ended tunes like “Mountain Jam,” an extended improv built off the melody of “There Is a Mountain” by the Scottish folksinger Donovan, which they were playing by May 1969 and which continued to be an open-ended highlight of their shows, even as their original repertoire quickly grew.

  WALDEN: Aside from a true vocal presence, Gregg brought these really important foundation songs that the band was built around.

  ALLMAN: They asked if I had any songs and I showed them twenty-two and they’d just go, “OK, what else you got?” They rejected them all and I got up to about the twelfth one and said, “Here’s one I wrote on a Hammond organ” and that was “Dreams.” Then I showed them “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” and I was in like Flynn, but they told me to get busy writing.

  MCEUEN: I recorded Gregg’s first demo of “Cross to Bear.” It was in his apartment in L.A. I dragged over this giant ConcertTone tape recorder and said, “Hey, you want to hear what that song you just wrote sounded like?” He played it on a Wurlitzer piano with bass, drums, and guitar behind him and I thought it was incredible; to me, it was his first truly original direction. It was about half the tempo the Brothers eventually recorded it at, just almost painfully slow and very cool.

  I had never heard a song like that, a very adult-sounding song from such a young person. It sounded as good as something you’d hear from Scrapper Blackwell or Robert Johnson. The lyrics were incredible, and that voice! It was probably the shittiest recording you could do, just totally bare in the room, but it’s a master vocal. It was the sound of Gregg really finding himself.

  ALLMAN: I remember years before having heard that Steve Winwood wrote “Gimme Some Loving” when he was sixteen, and that used to piss me off when I was struggling to write. Now I finally got it going.

  After they told me to get busy, within the next five days I wrote “Whipping Post,” “Black-Hearted Woman,” and a few others. I stayed up night and day and got on a real roll there. That was a great summer, where I wrote one after another. Oakley had an old blue piano that he bought from some church for like fourteen bucks. I think he had to pay us more to carry it than he paid for the thing. And I wrote a lot of songs on that thing, let me tell you.

  TRUCKS: Gregg would just come in with completed songs and we would work them up at rehearsal, and sometimes add whole instrumental sections.

  ALLMAN: Before that, I’d only messed around a little on the electric piano, and I had a little Vox organ in the Allman Joys because the English guys had ’em, but I had mainly played rhythm guitar. That was my instrument, but the Allman Brothers had too many guitars, so they blindfolded me, took me in this room, sat me down, took the blindfold off and there sat a brand-new, 1969 B-3 Hammond and a 122-RV Leslie, with a few joints on it, and they said, “OK, we’ll see you in a few days! Good luck! We’ll bring you food and check back with you now and then. Learn how to play this thing.”

  That’s only a slight exaggeration. The truth is, my brother knew I really, deep down, always wanted a Hammond. I always admired them when I saw them with blues bands and whatnot. But then I stayed up day and night, hour after hour, learning how to really play it.

  BETTS: Duane and Gregg had a real “purist” blues thing together, but Oakley and I in our band would take a standard blues and rearrange it. We were really trying to push the envelope. We loved the blues, but we wanted to play in a rock style, like what Cream and Hendrix were doing. Jefferson Airplane was also a big influence on us; Phil Lesh and Jack Casady were Oakley’s favorite bassists. We liked to take some of that experimental stuff and put a harder melodic edge to it.

  Duane was smart enough to see what ingredients were missing from both [of our previous] bands. We didn’t have enough of the true, purist blues, and he didn’t have enough of the avant-garde, psychedelic approach to the blues. So he tried to put the two sounds together, and that was the first step in finding the sound of the Allman Brothers Band. When the two things collided, by the grace of God it was something special. You can’t say someone conceived of it all. It just happened and we all played a big part.

  JAIMOE: We never tried to sound like anyone else and were always forging our own sound. I know for a fact that one of the greatest things that the Allman Brothers did was open that door for a lot of musicians, who thought, “If they can do that, we can do that.” A whole lot of musicians wanted to do something original but were afraid to really try.

  GARY ROSSINGTON, Lynyrd Skynyrd founder/guitarist: You can go way back to the Allman Joys playing in Daytona and they were different and a step above. They were unbelievable, playing the Yardbirds, Beatles, and Stones when everyone else was playing the Ventures and “Mustang Sally.” They were like rock stars—skinny guys with long blond hair and leather jackets—and Duane and Gregg could both play the hell out of their guitars. We’d just stand there with our mouths open. They were that much better than everyone else, so it did not surprise me at all when they reappeared with the Allman Brothers Band and were so good. It was like we had been waiting.

  Me and Allen [Collins, Skynyrd guitarist and co-founder] would go stand right in front of Duane. He was mesmerizing, and it’s hard to describe the impact it had on us as young guitarists to stand there and see that guy play. They were all just tearing it up.

  JAIMOE: The reason that Duane and Dickey played the way they did was because of who they had playing behind them, which was Butch and me. We wrote the book on double drumming, and we did things differently than anyone else—and then you had Berry, who was a guitar player who started playing bass because he had a chance to get a gig [with pop singer Tommy Roe] and get out of Chicago and onto the road. Nobody played bass like Berry. He, Butch, and I were just as important as Dickey or Duane in terms of what was going on in that band. That was fully appreciated when Duane was around.

  RED DOG: Butch and Jaimoe and Dickey and
Duane each played together like no one else ever had to my ears. You put those two combinations—drums and guitars—together with Oak moving around all of them, weaving musically and physically, roaming all over the stage and stomping his foot, and the results were magical and powerful. Then you have Gregg over there wailing away, which was just the icing on the cake. The combination of all this was religious—very spiritual and very deep.

  JAIMOE: No one else was doing something similar to what Butch and I did. I had never heard the Grateful Dead until we did some gigs with them. We just played and played and worked stuff out that way.

  TRUCKS: Jaimoe and I studied a bit of what [Bill] Kreutzmann and Mickey [Hart] were doing in the Dead, but it was much more contrived than what we did. I’m not criticizing, because it worked for them really well, but not for us. Our styles mesh in a way where we don’t talk about it. We don’t work it out. Jaimoe plays what he wants to play, I play what I want to play, and it just works.

  JAIMOE: When we got to Jacksonville I lived over at Butch’s house. My drums were set up in there, along with Gregory’s organ once he finally came. I would sit in there and start practicing, Butch would come in, and we’d just play. We never said, “You play this part and I’ll play that one.”

  Butch Trucks.

  Living together in Macon, a new city, the group and their road crew forged an intense brotherhood, rehearsing for hundreds of hours and hanging out endlessly, as they continued to play local gigs. The group spent hours hanging out together and alone in Rose Hill, a hilly, Civil War–era cemetery overlooking the Ocmulgee River.

  BETTS: Rose Hill is a beautiful, peaceful old place on the Ocmulgee River looking over the railroad tracks—trains would come by every now and then and rattle you. And there was an old part that was well kept and beautiful and had graves dating back to the 1800s. I know it sounds sappy romantic, but I would go down there day after day to the same spot and meditate and hang out and play my guitar because it was so quiet and peaceful.