by Paul, Alan
BETTS: A lot of Duane’s harmony lines are not the correct notes you would choose if you sat down to write it out, but they always worked. Our band came around at a wonderful time for improv and we felt free to just play and work things out on the fly. I usually set the melody and if I played it twice then the third time he would be right on it with the harmony and it would sound great. We didn’t usually sit down and figure out parts. Doing them on the fly gave it all a certain spark and sound.
HAYNES: The Allman Brothers Band is based on the fact that no one on stage can rest on his laurels; you have to bring it. That’s where that fire comes from and it certainly emanates from the intensity of having two great lead players like Dickey and Duane throwing sparks off of each other. Jazz and blues musicians have been doing this for decades, but I think they really brought that sense that anyone onstage can inspire anyone else at any given time to rock music.
BETTS: Duane and I were very conscious of the snare-drum type approach to playing rhythm. It was a lot of counterpoint and interplay. I could set something with a push on the 2 and 4 and he would play on the beat. We were very aware of letting each person’s downbeat appear in different spots so they didn’t tangle up, because Berry was really busy, too. That generates a back-and-forth machine thing similar to playing snare drum with the right hand. It was all question and answer, anticipation and conclusion. You build up the anticipation with the first part of the phrase and answer it with the second. Duane was really more adept at that type of thing than I was, but we worked it out together.
DOUCETTE: I would play my solos then stand behind the line, behind Duane’s and Dickey’s amp—moving to whomever was playing rhythm guitar, because you could hear the leads fine from anywhere. I wish everyone could hear what I heard back there—and I would kill to have a cut of that stuff—because it was just spectacular. They were two wildly different rhythm players and they were so good, both just laying down beautiful rhythm parts.
HAYNES: Another cool thing about Dickey and Duane that stuck out to any guitar player was how identifiable each of their styles and sounds were; it was easy to tell them apart.
BETTS: The dream guitar sounds that we heard in our heads were opposite. He liked a spitfire, trebly sound with staccato phrasing and using the bridge pickup and my thing was more of a rounded-tone sound using the neck pickup.
Duane’s melody came more from jazz and urban blues and my melodies came more from country blues with a strong element of string-music fiddle tunes. I had more looping phrasing and Duane was more cutting. We were almost totally opposite except we both knew the importance of phrasing. We didn’t just ramble about.
* * *
CHAPTER
5
One More Try
IN JANUARY 1970, Berry Oakley’s wife, Linda, and his sister, Candace, rented a large Victorian house at 2321 Vineville Avenue while the band was on the road. They moved into the place in March, along with Duane, Donna, and Galadrielle. Others would move in and out over the next several years, as the communal home became widely known as the Big House.
DOUCETTE: Candy Oakley, Linda Oakley, and Donna Allman made a huge, unbelievable difference in the band’s life. We came back to the Big House and it was truly a home, which contained all the heart, feeling, and togetherness of the band. I had played in a lot of bands that had hangouts, but this was a different deal, made possible by those three women, and I was taken away by it and greatly admired it.
For their second album, the Allman Brothers worked for the first time with producer Tom Dowd, who had already recorded artists ranging from Ray Charles and John Coltrane to Cream. Due mostly to their hectic touring schedule, Idlewild South was recorded in fits and starts in Macon, Miami, and New York, from February to July 1970.
It included “Midnight Rider” and “Revival,” which was Betts’s first songwriting credit with the band. They also recorded Betts’s masterful instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” for the first time, opening up vast new terrain for the band to explore.
SANDLIN: I spent a whole lot of time with the Allman Brothers doing demos in the Capricorn studio for their second album. We recorded a version of “Statesboro Blues” and a first take on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” I thought it was phenomenal when Dickey brought that in; he introduced a whole new side to the Allman Brothers Band, a very unique instrumental approach which would, of course, become very important to their success.
BETTS: It’s hard for me to even pinpoint where “Liz Reed” came from. It’s jazz, but not really, and it was different than anything I had done before. The original version we recorded is awfully sparse compared to where we’d be taking it soon.
SANDLIN: I thought things were going well and I was overjoyed when they said they wanted me to produce their second album.
TOM DOWD, producer of Idlewild South, at Fillmore East, Eat a Peach: The first time I heard the Allman Brothers Band was in Macon. I was there to visit Capricorn and I walked by the rehearsal space and heard the most incredible sounds coming out. I got to Phil’s office and asked him who in the hell was rehearsing in the studio. He said, “That’s the Allman Brothers,” and I said, “Get them the hell out of there and give them to me in the studio. They don’t need to rehearse; they’re ready to record.”
SANDLIN: As it got closer, Phil said they wanted me to do it with Tom Dowd. This is very embarrassing to me, but Tom came to the Capricorn studio and I was acting like the co-producer, making suggestions, with Tom looking at me oddly. When I realized that no one had told him about me co-producing, I couldn’t even go into the studio because it was such an embarrassment, but that didn’t last long, because they went down to Miami to record at Criteria, where Tom was more comfortable. He wasn’t happy with the state of our studio—and he was right. It was still a work in progress.
ALLMAN: Tommy wanted us to go to Miami because that was his sandbox and where he knew how to play best.
BETTS: “Revival” was supposed to be an instrumental, and when I was writing the thing, I kind of got going and started singing, just screwing around, and the words came almost as an afterthought, but that was not typical. Usually, I’m definitely going to write an instrumental. You have to have an altogether different approach; an instrumental has to be real catchy and when you succeed it’s very satisfying because you have transcended words and communicated with emotion. I don’t really have a specific technique, but I put in hours of deliberation as to what note should follow each other in order to get the best phrase.
And I wrote this instrumental in Rose Hill for a woman I was involved with. I finished it and loved it but I didn’t know what to call it and it couldn’t have anything to do with her name, because it was all cloak and dagger, as she was Boz Scaggs’s girlfriend. She was Hispanic and somewhat dark and mysterious—and she really used it to her advantage and played it to the hilt. I thought, “Well, where did the song come from?” And there was a grave right by “my spot” that said, “In Memory of Elizabeth Jones Reed, mother of…” and listed all of her children. The spot had provided me with so much peace and inspiration that I decided to name the song after her. Duane told some crazy shit about that graveyard. I don’t wanna tell all—but that’s the part that matters.
ALLMAN: “Midnight Rider” hit me like a damn sack of hoe handles. It was just there, crawling all over me. And about an hour and fifteen minutes later I had the rough draft down and before the sun set that day I was in the studio putting it on tape, bing-bang, just like that. They happen that way sometimes. Have you ever wondered where a thought comes from? Comes from nowhere. There’s just something you see or hear or something you remember and it triggers a thought that will just hit you: “Pow!”
I couldn’t find anybody in the band, so I went and found Twiggs Lyndon, put a bass in his hands, and said, “I want you to go right here,” and I put his hands on the bass and showed him to play, “duhn duh-duhn duhn, duhn duh-duhn duhn.” He did it over and over and he finally had it, and I said, “Whe
n I hold up my hand, by God, you stop!” And he says, “What do I play then?” And I said, “Just stop! Don’t play nothing.” Then I found Jaimoe and had him come in. So I had a twelve-string guitar and a bass and a drum and I cut me a demo of it and I just laid that on the band and bam that bad brother’s done. We recorded it proper.
PAYNE: Phil bought a whole block that was falling down. Right next to the studio he had an old warehouse where we stored our equipment and had some practice sessions. Anyone could walk up there, kick down a board, and steal everything, so one of us roadies had to spend the night there every night the gear was in there.
I was on duty one night, in this little guard shack we had, and Gregg showed up in the middle of the night with this half-done song and he said he was having trouble with it. We were getting high and, honestly, he was starting to irritate me—because he was singing this song over and over and I got sick of hearing the band play the same shit over and over again until they got it right. So I just threw out the line, “I’ve gone past the point of caring / some old bed I’ll soon be sharing.”
Then we had it and Gregg loved the song and wanted to record it before it was gone, but we didn’t have a key to the studio. We tried [studio musicians and managers] Paul Hornsby and Johnny Sandlin and they both told us to go to hell, come back in the morning.
SANDLIN: Something like that was not unusual. I remember several crazy nights with them waking me up at three in the morning and wanting to go in the studio to work and I never wanted to. I had worked all day and would be back in the morning and you never knew what they wanted to work on.
PAYNE: Gregg was intent on getting this on tape before he forgot it all. So we went back down there and just broke in; I smashed a window on the door and reached in to unlock it.
Then I was running around trying to figure out how to turn the board on and he was running around yelling into mics looking for a live one. I finally found what looked like a wall light switch hidden under the board, and boom, all these lights came on, microphones are live, and needles are jumping. We laid down one track with Gregg just playing an acoustic guitar and singing and he went back the next day and added some more. I would imagine that tape is somewhere.
JAIMOE: All I remember is Gregg came in one night hot to get the song down. Twiggs was playing bass, Gregory was playing guitar, and I played congas and we laid that down.
PAYNE: Afterwards, Gregg was leaving and I was going back on guard duty and he said, “You really helped me out with this song. If this thing does anything and it’s a success, I’ll cut you in and give you a percentage,” and I laughed that off.
JAIMOE: We cut “Please Call Home” in New York, with [jazz producer] Joel Dorn. We did it in two takes. He said, “Play the song so we can get a feel,” and we played it. I think I was playing with brushes and Joel suggested I try it with a mallet. We played it for a second time and Joel said, “Come on in [to the control room] and listen to it,” and that was it. It was over.
* * *
BLUE SUEDE
A look inside Gregg’s softer side—how he was influenced by acoustic singer-songwriters, including Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, and Neil Young.
“A certain side of me has always viewed myself as a folksinger with a rock and roll band,” says Gregg Allman. “I developed that perspective when I lived in Los Angeles and saw people like Tim Buckley, Stephen Stills, and Jackson Browne, who was my roommate for a while. All I had known was R and B and blues and these guys turned me on to a more folk-oriented approach and it’s always stuck with me, even if a lot of Allman Brothers fans never realized it.”
Gregg and Duane Allman moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 1967 with their band the Hour Glass, after Bill McEuen discovered the band, then called the Allman Joys, in a St. Louis club. McEuen managed his brother John’s Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, whose debut was just being released on Liberty Records, which also signed the Hour Glass.
“Everything was cross-collateralized,” Allman says, a financial arrangement which allowed them a small level of comfort, compared with other struggling musicians, including Jackson Browne, who had briefly been a member of the Dirt Band.
“Basically, our situation meant we had apartments,” Allman says with a chuckle. “And that’s why Jackson was crashing with me; he was from Long Beach and he was too proud to go home, and I really admired that. Jackson had been drifting around in this old broken-down Volkswagen, and he’d get a job every now and then in some shithouse coffee-folk place, where he might play for a tip jar or ten or twenty bucks.
“I really admired the way he picked guitar and wrote songs about stuff that I would think about and had gone through—stuff that hurts you. He already had different ways of saying things people were thinking and feeling, which is what I learned from him. It’s knocking thirty-five words down to four and having ’em really mean something. That, to me, is being a poet. A real poet might read this and laugh but I think it’s the art of saying something we all understand in a different way.
“Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would be as sweet’ and many people consider that profound; well, I think that people like Jackson Browne have said things just as profound. He really touched a soft side of me and I enjoyed every minute I ever spent with him, which inspired me to really get serious about songwriting.”
Allman had been attempting to write songs for years. But exposure to Browne and other L.A. songwriters pushed his ambitions. Remarkably, the Eagles’ Glenn Frey also credits Browne with inspiring his songwriting when the two had apartments atop each other. Allman’s time in Southern California also helped him stretch his artistic potential on the acoustic guitar, an instrument he had played since he was a kid.
“I thought of an acoustic guitar as something you lightly strummed or picked the blues on, which I often heard my brother do,” he says. “I didn’t view it as something you could make art with until guys like Jackson, Buckley, and Neil Young showed me otherwise.
“Neil’s ‘Expecting to Fly’ and ‘Broken Arrow’ inspired me more than I can say. Last time I saw Neil, I looked him right in the eye for his undivided attention and said, ‘Man, are you ever gonna play those songs? God, they’re good.’ ‘Expecting to Fly’ is a piece of art like The Lovers or The Kiss or anything Rembrandt or Michelangelo have ever done. It is certainly just as potent to me as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Allman says that his view of the acoustic guitar as a utilitarian tool reached back to his early days in Nashville, where the Allman brothers lived until moving to Daytona Beach, Florida, when Gregg was twelve and Duane thirteen. Nashville remained a second home, with the brothers returning every summer to stay with their grandmother.
“I had country music shoved down my throat and I couldn’t stand it,” he says. “At the time, it was String Bean and the Foggy Mountain Boys and all this crying-in-your-beer stuff and the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium had these horrible, uncomfortable pew seats just filled with rednecks. I’m sorry to speak ill of such a place, but it’s the truth, and because of all that, the last thing I wanted to see was a Tennessee flattop box, which is what they called the Martin-style guitar down there.”
With his view that acoustic guitars were tied to corny, old-fashioned music, Allman focused on his electric rhythm playing, not realizing that his songwriting might benefit from a nonamplified, resonant instrument.
“I was trying to write songs on an electric,” he says. “But being on the road, I was often in hotel rooms and whatnot without an amp and the electric didn’t sing to me. I didn’t realize the deficiency but my brother did and I’ll never forget what he did to get me my first real acoustic guitar. He traded his favorite road axe—a ’56 Telecaster body with a ’53 hogback Stratocaster neck with some kind of crazy booster on the side—for a Gibson J45. I couldn’t believe he did that for me, because he loved that guitar, but he had seen legitimate signs of successful songwriting and he knew I needed a boost. And, sure enough, I commenced to just p
ouring out songs, though most of them were crap.”
Allman says he wrote close to four hundred songs that he tossed aside before writing his first keeper in 1967: “Melissa.” He did not begin to write consistently until he was immersed in California singer-songwriters and acoustic guitar playing, developing a distinctive style of open tunings with steel fingerpicks.
“I learned to Travis pick, which I found really interesting, and then I really developed my songwriting style,” says Allman. “I learned so much and met so many wonderful people out there and it really broadened my musical horizons. I wrote ‘Midnight Rider’ and ‘Come and Go Blues’ by Travis picking in natural [open] G, and I don’t think I ever would have written songs in that vein had I not gotten involved in a more serious way with the acoustic guitar. When I first got out to L.A., all I had known was R and B and blues and those guys’ more folk approach really turned my head. Then I developed my style from combining these things together—folky songs with soulful vocals.”
Though Allman lost touch with Browne, he remained enamored of his old friend’s songs, recording “These Days” on his 1973 solo album Laid Back. A year earlier, Browne had made his album debut, which was packaged in a brown paper bag with the words “Saturate Before Using” across the top.
“I lost track of Jackson after my brother moved back down South [in 1968],” says Allman. “I moved in with some broad and he went his own way and got a girlfriend. I didn’t know whatever happened to him. I didn’t hear of him again until I was going by a record store in Macon one day and saw his name on a paper bag in the window and said, ‘Jackson! I’m a son of a bitch.’ I was so happy I went inside and bought one just as fast as I could. ’Cause if your friends won’t buy ’em, who the hell will?”