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

by Paul, Alan

  The Allman Brothers Band’s first performances outside the South were two nights opening for the Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party on May 30 and 31, 1969. Led Zeppelin had played their first Boston shows the preceding three nights.

  DON LAW, Tea Party manager: That whole thing was really an off-shoot of my friendship with Jon Landau, who wrote for Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone and became good friends with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. They told him they had a relationship with Otis Redding’s ex-manager to start a label in Macon, Georgia, and the first band included a guy who had done great session work in Muscle Shoals. They wanted to get them some exposure in the Northeast and Jon said, “Let me call my friend Don Law, who has the Boston Tea Party.” Jon called me and said, “Ahmet and Jerry are really enthusiastic and feel this band has promise.” I said, “Fine, let’s bring them up.”

  LANDAU: Phil actually told me about the Allman Brothers and asked for help in getting them some exposure in the Northeast. I recommended them to Don, saying, “This guy Duane Allman is great. I don’t know the band, but I’m sure it’s very good.”

  They were still totally unknown up there when they played the Tea Party. Phil came up and he got Frank Barsalona, the head of Premier Talent, which was the rock and roll agency, to come up to check them out, which was something he did quite often. Phil wanted them to have that kind of agent.

  LAW: We had them come up as support and the first thing available was the two nights with the Velvet Underground. It was not a great musical fit, but the Velvets were very popular in Boston, so we did get them a weekend in front of two sold-out crowds.

  LANDAU: It wasn’t them at their best. It didn’t click. I knew when the set was going on that it was good but not great—that they could do better. I had led Frank and Don to believe that they were going to be knocked on their asses and it wasn’t happening.

  Afterwards, Frank, Phil, Don, and I went out. Frank was a great diplomat, with a very smooth style. Phil was a likably egotistical guy who believed in himself and had a charming way. Frank was saying that he sees potential but it’s not quite there. He said, “Why don’t I see what other shows I can get for them while they’re up here?” They are going round and round and Phil was slightly defeated. Then he just said, “I would like you to work with this band. Do you want to or not?” Frank was not the kind of guy people spoke to in that way. I was amazed—both taken back and impressed—at how direct Phil was.

  Wanting to put them on a more appropriate bill, Law booked the Allman Brothers Band for three nights opening for Dr. John on June 19–21. Unable to afford lodging, the band took over a squat, with many members also staying with Law at his apartment. Law, who has remained a major lynchpin of the Boston music scene for 40-plus years, helped the Allmans establish themselves in the market by playing free shows at the Boston and Cambridge commons during the long wait between Tea Party gigs.

  JAIMOE: We stayed some nights at the crib of the promoter, sleeping on the floor, on whatever beds he had. A lot of it was just sitting up all night talking and listening to records. That’s basically what we did wherever we went—them playing records for us and us playing records for them.

  LAW: It was really exhilarating. I think it’s the only band that I had live in my apartment. I certainly had friendly relationships with most bands we presented, but this was different and it was one of the great experiences of my life. We were all young and ready for anything and fueled by passion for the music.

  JAIMOE: The way we lived, going around meeting all these great people who loved music like we did and sitting up listening and rapping about it, it was just the greatest thing in the world, man. It was like having your masters degree and you’re working on your PhD—and you’re doing it with Einstein. That was the Allman Brothers Band. We just hadn’t got there yet. We were on the path, but we hadn’t figured out what E=MC 2 was.

  LAW: One night they all got the itch to rehearse in the middle of the night and wanted to get into the club but couldn’t find me. Someone got the brilliant idea to go over to [progressive rock radio station] WBCN and put out an All Points Bulletin for me. They got the on-air guy to announce that the Allman Brothers Band was looking for Don Law, this is an APB, please meet them at the club. And it worked! Someone I knew heard it and found me and I met them and unlocked the club for them to rehearse.

  TRUCKS: We had taken some kind of poison and we were up raging all night long. We were squatting in a real slum, with no electricity, no furniture, no hot water, floors covered thick in dirt. One of the roadies had talked to the girl across the way and she slipped an extension cord through our window so we could put on some music and her husband came home and saw that cord and just raised hell. He ripped it out and he threw a cherry bomb through the window, which, given our state of mind, was not well received.

  We wandered the street for a while and were out messing around Boston and decided we should go to the Tea Party and rehearse. Duane gets on a pay phone, calls the radio station, and tells them to put out the word for Don Law to come to the club and let in the Allman Brothers Band, they want to rehearse. We just walk down there and stood waiting, oddly sure he would show up. He got out of his car, walked over, unlocked the door, turned around, got back in his car and left without saying a word or even looking at us. He was pissed, and I don’t blame him.

  And this is why we felt such an urgent need to rehearse: we went in and spent hours working up the sound of a Harley cranking up and going through its gears, which was going to kick off our shows as an introduction to “Don’t Want You No More/Cross to Bear.” We were deadly serious about it, too. Once we straightened up, everyone realized how absurd it was. After we finished, we were walking across the Tea Party and this damn four-by-four fell from the roof and smashed Jaimoe’s seat. If we had played for ten or fifteen minutes more, he would have been killed.

  LAW: I felt privileged to have them there in that room. It was exciting and exhilarating. There was something magical happening and I think anyone who saw them realized that it was going to be pretty big. It was amazing to play them for free on the Commons. That was tremendously fun and it was a great way to expose somebody.

  Duane’s guitar playing was extraordinary. In my exposure to him, he was a very gentle, bright guy, and everybody understood that he was an incredible, unique talent. That was just obvious. He had a passion to play. He went and sat in with Frank Zappa and several other people at the Tea Party while they were in Boston.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Dreams

  IN AUGUST 1969, the band went to New York City to record their self-titled debut. Their trip north was not without drama with their equipment truck breaking down in South Carolina. Lyndon rented a van. In New York, the band was to work with Cream’s producer, Tom Dowd, but he was unavailable and Atlantic house engineer Adrian Barber was assigned to record the new band. Barber was an experienced engineer, having worked on sessions with Cream and a range of jazz greats, as well as with the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany, in 1963. This was his first producer’s credit. A year later he would engineer and play most of the drums on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded.

  The entire seven-song Allman Brothers Band album was cut and mixed in two weeks, and virtually no outtakes exist from the sessions. The Brothers also played three nights at Ungano’s, a Manhattan club; these were their first shows in the city that was to become their second home.

  JAIMOE: The best way to prepare to go into the studio is to play the songs you’re going to record on gigs and then you should know if they’re ready or not and judge from the crowd reaction what’s clicking and what needs more work. We played them songs hard from May to August and walked into the studio having them down cold. We were not intimidated, even though me, Dickey, and Berry were not that experienced in studio work. Butch had more experience and Gregg and Duane had cut a few albums, in addition to all of Duane’s session work.

  TRUCKS: The whole experience of making the first album was absolutely w
onderful. I felt comfortable in the studio, having recorded a bunch before, as did we all, and the music was great. We had played these songs so much and we were all just busting to get them down on record.

  JAIMOE: They booked two weeks for us in Atlantic Studios—and that was just supposed to be laying down basic tracks, with overdubs coming later. We went in on Sunday night to get sounds, went back Monday night to start cutting, and came out Thursday with the whole thing done, overdubs and all. We went in there, played our asses off, and that was it; we were done in four days and they spent the rest of the time mixing.

  TRUCKS: It all happened so fast. We did that whole record in two weeks beginning to end, from the time we set up to the time we mastered, and the only thing we got stuck on wound up being the high point of that whole record: Duane’s solo on “Dreams.” We tried playing it several times and couldn’t get it to where it felt right to him. Finally, he said, “Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s record the song and leave a good long opening for me to solo.” We were just jamming to give him some movement to play along with, and he was playing rhythm, leading us where he wanted to go, setting the track just how he wanted it.

  And at the end of every day’s sessions, he would go and give “Dreams” a shot, but never felt like it was happening. One night, we had finished what we were doing and he said, “Turn off all the lights,” and he went way to the back corner, where his amp and baffle were, and sat down—on the floor, I think—and they rolled the track and he started playing that solo that’s on the record. All of a sudden he was playing slide, which he had never done on the song before. He said that he just saw the slide sitting there, stuck it on, and played a lot of the same licks he had played, redone with the slide. Then he got to the end and started that rolling lick and built to an incredible climax. By the time he finished everybody in there was in tears. It was unbelievable. I still have a hard time listening to that solo without getting emotional. It was just magic. It’s always been that the greatest music we played was from out of nowhere, that it wasn’t practiced, planned, or discussed.

  Just after the band returned to Macon from recording the album, Walden and Associates purchased them a Ford Econoline van from Riverside Ford, paying $2,751.55 for it on September 4, 1969. The members felt like they had hit the big time.

  As they waited for the album to come out, Duane continued to travel to Muscle Shoals to play sessions, cutting great tracks with Ronnie Hawkins and others.

  HALL: After Duane was in Macon and his band was going, he would keep driving in for sessions when he could, and talk about how excited he was about the band. He would drive up here in his little Ford and I was always happy to see him.

  JAIMOE: It’s unbelievable how much Duane accomplished, how many dates he played. One problem that a lot of us have is thinking about why we can’t do something. Duane just did it. So many musicians will say, “Oh, I can’t play with that guy.” Well, why not? It’s music—listen and play. That’s what Duane did. He never, ever thought he couldn’t play with someone, or didn’t have time to do something.

  DOUCETTE: He just never stopped. We’d be up until five in the morning, and at ten he was dressed and ready to go.

  In November 1969, Duane showed up at Fame, excited to meet John Hammond Jr., one of his favorite blues guitarists.

  HAMMOND: I was working with the Muscle Shoals session guys to record Southern Fried for Atlantic. No one there had heard of me and I was trying to forge some relationship with the band and it wasn’t going well. Before I arrived, I thought they were all black and they thought I was black and we were both surprised and a little stand-offish. We were stumbling along together without much chemistry. Then Duane showed up after two days and said, “I want to meet John Hammond.” They were so knocked out that he wanted to play with me. It earned me so much respect.

  Eddie Hinton, the guitarist on the session, told me, “You got to hear this guy play.” When I did, I flipped out. Duane was just a phenomenal guitar player and a really nice guy. I asked him to play on some of the songs and it brought a whole new life to the sessions. It was just incredible.

  Berry came with him to at least one of our sessions. Over that week’s time Duane and I became friendly and he told me about his new band, with Berry, Dickey, Butch, Jaimoe, and Gregg. He had a lot of energy and excitement about this.

  The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut was released in November 1969, featuring five Gregg Allman originals, as well as Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and Spencer Davis’s “Don’t Want You No More.” The latter was transformed from a light pop song into a hard-driving, organ-fueled instrumental, which opened the album and led directly into the pained majesty of Gregg’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear.” That song, which had heralded the singer’s emergence as an original songwriter, now signaled his band’s emergence as a powerfully original entity. The band had thrown down a gauntlet of musical precision and deep blues feeling, even if the production somehow tamped down the fire.

  Though the group had been together less than six months and the members ranged in age from twenty-one (Oakley and Gregg Allman) to twenty-five (Betts), The Allman Brothers Band sounds like the product of a veteran unit with a fully formed vision. They were perhaps the only group to pull off what every hippie with a guitar and a Muddy Waters album talked about in 1969: reinventing the blues in a manner both visionary and true to the original material. The entity’s ability to keep their feet firmly planted on terra firma while blasting into outer space was unparalleled.

  All of this instrumental virtuosity was tied to a terrific batch of Gregg Allman compositions that captured the weary existentialism of the finest blues, expressing a fatalism profound enough to border on Southern Gothic. They were remarkably mature lyrical conceptions for such a young man, expertly executed in a minimalist, almost haiku style.

  ALLMAN: Those songs on the first album came out of the long struggle of trying so hard and getting fucked by different land sharks in the business. Just the competition I experienced out in L.A. and being really frustrated but hanging on and not saying, “Fuck it,” and going on to construction work or something.

  JAIMOE: From the minute Gregory arrived in Jacksonville, we started working on these early songs, and he kept writing them, and we played them damn near every day. We very seldom “rehearsed”; rehearsal for us was just playing: “The song goes like this. Let’s go.” And we played it. No other shit, no talking, no messing around. We played the songs into shape. Those blues tunes that we copied, starting with “Trouble No More,” they were just songs that were so good they couldn’t be left off the album.

  BETTS: Berry played a huge role in the band’s arrangements. “Whipping Post” was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us; it was a real melancholy, slow minor blues, along the lines of “Dreams.” Oakley came up with the heavy bass line that starts off the track, along with the 6/8-to-5/8 shifting time signature.

  JAIMOE: “Whipping Post” sounded just like “Stormy Monday Blues.” It would go into the 6/8 feel on the “sometimes I feel” section. Berry came up with that bassline that made you pay attention.

  BETTS: Oakley called a halt to the rehearsal and said, “Let me work on this song tonight and let’s get back to it tomorrow.” By the next day, he had that intro worked out. When he played that riff for us, everyone went, “Yeah! That’s it!” Oakley morphed a lot of those songs into something different.

  DOUCETTE: Berry played a huge role in the songwriting. A lot of those feels that are at the core of the Allman Brothers’ sound are Berry. He was huge within the band, and he was such a hip guy.

  BETTS: A lot of the arrangements came about from jamming. For instance, we were all messing around with the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey and that morphed into “Dreams,” which Gregg had written, but which didn’t really have an arrangement yet.

  JAIMOE: Gregg brought most of his songs pretty well done, but we really worked up “Whipping Post” and “Dreams,” which is basically “My F
avorite Things” with lyrics. I played the exact licks and fills on there that Jimmy Cobb played on Miles’s “All Blues,” which is something I would do all the time. I did a lot of copying, but only from the best.

  ALLMAN: “Dreams” is the only song I ever wrote on a Hammond organ. It belonged to some dude out in California.

  There’s no songwriting process. I wish there was, but there are as many ways to write songs as there are songs. You have to feel comfortable. Once you get in a groove, you flow along with the tune, but it’s finding that groove that’s the hard part.

  BETTS: For such young cats that band was really mature. I listen back to the early stuff now and it’s hard to explain. Duane and Oakley had incredible leadership qualities, but it’s really amazing that guys at twenty-two, twenty-three had that much seasoning and were such good players. One reason is that we weren’t a garage band. We were a nightclub band. We had brought ourselves up in the professional world by actually playing in bars and that really gives you a lot more depth. We all had a lot of miles under our wheels when we first met despite our ages.

  Duane had done that studio work, Gregg had been in L.A. and recorded. My first road gig came when I was sixteen playing in a band that traveled with “The World of Mirth” shows, to state fairs and such. We had a tent show called Teen Beat we put on in the midway. We sometimes did fifteen thirty-minute shows a day, playing Little Richard and Chuck Berry. I did splits and duckwalks and we would get on each other’s shoulders and slide across the stage on our knees wearing kneepads hidden under our pants. All those gigs pay off.

  DOUCETTE: This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility—and most of us had either lost our fathers young or had absent fathers. These are things you have to understand.