by Paul, Alan
RED DOG: There was such sadness, and no one wanted to accept the truth. I thought we needed to go to work right then. I thought we needed to get out there and play. Sitting around, we’d probably go nuts. It’s hard to put into words what it’s like for someone you spend every day with to suddenly be gone, especially someone with a talent like that.
TRUCKS: We thought about quitting because how could we go on without Duane? But then we realized: how could we stop? We all had this thing in us and Duane put it there. He was the teacher and he gave something to us—his disciples—that we had to play out. We talked about taking six months off but we had to get back together after a few weeks because it was too lonely and depressing. We were all just devastated and the only way to deal with it was to play.
ODOM: We never doubted that they would continue. Never. How well it went was up to them. We can arrange things as best we can and set them up, but when they get on stage, they have to do it themselves.
PODELL: I was terrified of what would happen when the band walked onto the stage at CW Post. I just didn’t know if they could do it—and truthfully, neither did they. They only knew like nine songs to play without Duane. The band was built around Skyman, the legendary Duane Allman. When you build a team around someone and they’re suddenly gone, who’s to say what will happen?
They stepped up. I called Phil, ecstatic about what they had done, and then I went home and asked my girlfriend to marry me—a week after explaining why I didn’t think we should do that. That performance just changed my whole perspective on life. Everyone was pulling in the same direction and was riding high on what they had done.
Three days after the C. W. Post show, the band performed at Carnegie Hall, then did another two weeks of shows.
PERKINS: There were intensely mixed feelings at these shows. It was so painfully obvious that Duane wasn’t there, which created such an empty feeling. You missed him so damn bad, but you also really wanted to prove that it was going to be OK, that there was still a reason to be out there, that the band could do it. There was a tremendous sense of pulling together.
ODOM: I can’t imagine what Dickey went through. Here you’ve got Duane in Dickey’s ear all night long and all of a sudden it’s not there anymore. How do you fill those shoes? It was just horrible.
JAIMOE: I really can’t remember anything about any of those shows. We just had to play and everyone played and you really didn’t know what you missed more about Duane—being on stage with him or just life in general.
RED DOG: The day after we’d come back from being on tour, living on top of each other for weeks on end, we’d be home and I’d miss Duane and be banging on his door to say hello. Realizing I couldn’t bang on that door hurt, man. It was stunning.
When the band returned to Miami in December to complete work on their fourth album, Twiggs Lyndon was with them, freed after serving 90 days in the psychiatric hospital.
A.J. LYNDON: I picked him up at the Atlanta airport, and he slid right back into it with the Allman Brothers Band.
Going forward, Twiggs would be the production manager, dealing with gear and logistics, while Perkins remained as road manager.
The band recorded four more outstanding tracks with Dowd, including “Melissa,” Betts’s instrumental “Les Brers in A Minor,” and “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More,” Gregg’s defiant response to his brother’s passing.
ALLMAN: I wrote “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” for my brother right away. It was the only thing I knew how to do right then.
TRUCKS: Of course, the music we recorded was all about Duane. Gregg wrote “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” and that was obviously about how to deal with this tragedy, but I think “Les Brers in A Minor” is about Duane just as much. We did everything we could to try and fill the gap and “Les Brers” was Dickey’s response—starting with the title, which is bad French for “less brothers.”
Five-man band promo shot, taken at actor James Arness’s California ranch.
BETTS: When I wrote “Les Brers” everyone kept saying they had heard it before, but no one could figure out where, including me. But it’s in my solo on “Whipping Post” from one night. It was just a lick I was playing in there, and years later it showed up in a bootleg, which was kind of amazing. I mean, none of us knew where it came from until that tape surfaced years later. It just sounded familiar.
TRUCKS: We were all putting more into it, trying so hard to make it as good as it would have been with Duane. We knew our driving force, our soul, the guy that set us all on fire, wasn’t there and we had to do something for him. That really gave everybody a lot of motivation. It was incredibly emotional.
BETTS: It was difficult to suddenly have to play slide and I put in some time to get my part down for “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More.” I’ve always enjoyed playing acoustic slide and would even often play it with Duane; when the two of us played acoustic blues I was often the one with the slide, but I never cared as much for playing electric slide.
The band also recorded “Melissa,” a song Gregg had written in 1967—he says it was the first tune he ever considered a keeper after several hundred—but had never recorded.
ALLMAN: When we were finishing Eat a Peach, we needed some more songs and I knew my brother loved “Melissa.” I had never really shown it to the band. I thought it was too soft for the Allman Brothers and was sort of saving it for a solo record I figured I’d eventually do.
The double album Eat a Peach was completed with three live songs: “One Way Out” from the June 27, 1971, final concert at the Fillmore East, and two songs recorded during the March At Fillmore East performances: “Trouble No More”—the Muddy Waters track that had been the first song Gregg sang with the band—and the epic, 33-minute “Mountain Jam.” The latter, which took up both sides of a vinyl album, had been an evolving staple of their performances almost since the beginning.
DOWD: When we recorded At Fillmore East, we ended up with almost a whole other album’s worth of good material, and we used [two] tracks on Eat a Peach. Again, there was no overdubbing.
ALLMAN: We always planned on having “Mountain Jam” on this album. That’s why you hear the first notes of the song as “Whipping Post” ends on At Fillmore East.
TRUCKS: That “Mountain Jam” is only on there because it’s the only version we had on multitrack tape and it was such a signature song of the band with Duane that we simply had to have it on a record. We played it many times so much better, but better a relatively mediocre version than nothing at all.
BETTS: That was probably the worst version of “Mountain Jam” we ever played. When we were recording live, we really were still focused on the crowd rather than the recording.
With recording done, the album had to be mixed. Dowd started the process, but the album had run over time and he had other commitments, so Sandlin was called to Miami.
SANDLIN: I think Tom had to work with Crosby, Stills and Nash. I went down to Miami the last day Tom was still working on it, and sat with him, and he showed me what he was doing and discussed some aspects of recording. As I mixed songs like “Blue Sky,” I knew, of course, that I was listening to the last things that Duane ever played and there was just such a mix of beauty and sadness, knowing there’s not going to be any more from him.
I was very proud of my work on Eat a Peach but really pissed because I did not receive credit, only a “special thanks.” It was the first platinum record I’d ever worked on and it meant a lot to me, so that felt like a slap.
TRUCKS: After we were all done and the album was being finalized, I walked into Phil’s office and they showed me the beautiful artwork, with this title on it: The Kind We Grow in Dixie. I said, “The artwork is incredible, but that title sucks!”
W. DAVID POWELL, artist, partner in Wonder Graphics, which designed the Eat a Peach cover: I saw a couple of old postcards in a drugstore in Athens, Georgia, which were part of a series called “The Kind We Grow in Dixie”; one had the peach on a truck and one ha
d the watermelon on the rail car. I thought they were perfect for an Allman Brothers album so I pasted them up and bought cans of pink and baby-blue Krylon spray paint and created a matted area to make the cards on a twelve-by-twenty-four LP cover. I envisioned this as an early-morning-sky feel.
Then I hand-lettered the Allman Brothers name and photographed it with a little Kodak camera and had it developed at the drugstore, then cut the letters out and pasted them on the side of the truck, under the peach. Duane was still alive and the album had not been titled. We figured we’d go back and add that.
TRUCKS: Duane didn’t like to give simple answers so when someone asked him about the revolution, he said, “There ain’t no revolution. It’s all evolution.” Then he paused and said, “Every time I go South, I eat a peach for peace.” That stuck out to me, so I told Phil, “Call this thing Eat a Peach for Peace,” which they shortened to Eat a Peach.
It didn’t occur to me until decades later that Duane’s comment was a reference to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” though I knew Duane was a big fan. I was reading “Prufrock” and came across the reference to eating a peach and was blown away. The symbolism is obvious. Prufrock was totally anal and didn’t want to do anything that would get messy and there’s nothing messier than eating a peach. Duane would have loved that metaphor.
POWELL: The cover was kind of a new approach, a soft sell, because it did not say the name of the album—and the name of the band was just in tiny letters. We left that to a sticker on the shrink-wrap. When we showed it to someone at the label, he said, “They are so hot right now, we could sell it in a brown paper bag.”
The double album opened up as a gatefold filled with another Wonder Graphics piece of art: an entire universe that seemed to promise some kind of psychedelic paradise. It told a story of happy, mystical brotherhood that was receding ever further into fantasy as the band grappled with the tragedy of Duane’s death.
POWELL: That was really a cooperative venture between Jim and I, completed with almost no planning or discussion. We were working on a large piece of illustration board, on a one-to-one scale—it was the size of the actual spread—and we just started drawing, with Jim’s work primarily on the left and mine on the right. This work was profoundly influenced by [Hieronymous] Bosch.
The whole thing was done over the course of one day while we were in Vero Beach, Florida. While one of us was drawing or painting, the other was out swimming in the ocean. We swapped off this way with virtually no conversation about the drawing, just fluid trade-offs.
DICK WOOLEY, Capricorn vice president of promotion, 1972–76: I had been the head of Atlantic Records promotion for the Southeast and Midwest and quit to take a break. I took my family to Europe and North Africa for six months, and when I came back I was looking for new opportunities and [Capricorn president and co-founder] Frank Fenter, whom I had worked with at Atlantic, invited me to a meeting with him and Phil Walden.
Over lunch, Frank and Phil did a dog-and-pony show pitching me on helping them grow the label and launch the new album by the ABB. They needed help because the buzz in the record business and on the street was that the ABB was finished as a band and would never survive without Duane. All I heard anywhere else in the biz was negative talk about the ABB’s demise. I wanted time to think it over but then Johnny Sandlin played me some tracks from Eat a Peach and I took a flier and said yes—at half my usual salary. I was blown away and knew we had a winner. I was happy when radio programmers remembered me from Atlantic and took my calls. Some, I’m sure, picked up the phone out of morbid curiosity about Duane, but it did give me the opportunity to promote Eat a Peach.
To help promote the album, Wooley arranged to have the band’s New Year’s Eve appearance at New Orleans’ Warehouse—one of their favorite venues and one of the last of the smaller halls they were still playing—to be live simulcast on radio. The Guy Lombardo Orchestra had played New Year’s Eve since 1928, and there was a long tradition of broadcasting these shows nationally, first on radio and later on TV. Wooley sensed the time was right for a new kind of broadcast, a Rock and Roll New Year’s Eve.
WOOLEY: I took a gamble and cobbled together a network of radio stations in the Southeast via Ma Bell phone lines. It was the first of its kind, and it got national attention and helped launch Eat a Peach.
The album was an instant classic and an immediate hit, peaking at number four on the album charts. As the band returned to the road, however, they all profoundly felt the absence of their guiding light.
WOOLEY: Everyone at the label kept up a good front, but I’m sure they had doubts. Dickey was the one who rallied the band members into action for tour support of the new album.
TRUCKS: We played gigs as a five-piece, but there was a big hole there. How could you not miss such a personality? But we were up there playing the music that he started. We were playing for him and that was the way to be closest to him. Duane had put this thing inside all of us and we couldn’t walk away from it. We’re musicians and musicians deal with their emotions by playing music.
CHUCK LEAVELL, pianist, ABB member, 1972–76: There was all kind of speculation amongst fans and other musicians around town about who was going to replace Duane and a lot of rumors flying around.
SIDNEY SMITH, photographer: There were a lot of rumors about who would be replacing Duane, including Eric Clapton. I asked Gregg about this and he said, “We have a guitarist who can play circles around Clapton. His name is Dickey Betts.”
LEAVELL: I thought going on with no replacement was incredibly brave; it took a lot of gumption for the entire band, but especially for Dickey. Imagine the pressure on him. He was not known as a slide player but slide parts were so essential to those songs that they had to be played and I thought he did a really admirable job. He didn’t necessarily play it like Duane would; he played it like Dickey.
BETTS: I completely lost my taste for playing electric slide after Duane died and I was forced to play his parts on “Statesboro Blues” and all these songs. That soured me on it. I always felt comfortable playing it before that but I totally lost my comfort zone once I had to play things in Duane’s style. I couldn’t find my own voice because I had to copy his licks, which I hated doing, and it really kind of spoiled electric slide playing for me.
The band resumed touring in earnest as a five-piece, with Gregg and sometimes Berry taking over Duane’s job of introducing songs and Betts generally doing yeoman’s work as the sole guitarist and primary soloist. They performed about ninety shows in the next year, including a West Coast tour that featured a special guest in their entourage.
MAMA LOUISE: Red Dog came in one day in ’72 and said, “How would you feel about going to California?” I had a niece that Red Dog always liked because she had big legs, and when I said I didn’t know about that traveling, he said she could come, too. And she did.
They said it was for cooking—that I’d be working for them—but when we got there, Dickey said, “No cooking for you, Mama. Have a good time.” I looked over at Gregg with this beautiful woman and I said, “That’s why y’all came out here.”
On the way back from California, I was sitting on the plane with Red Dog and Joe Dan. A real proper white woman heard Red Dog call me “Mama Louise” and said, “Oh, is that your mama?” She didn’t like it one bit. He said, “Yep. I call her Mama.” She says, “Oh, is that so?” and looks at ’em with disgust. They were so mad they wanted to jump on her, but I told them to sit down and be quiet.
Finally making some money, the band fulfilled one of Oakley’s communal dreams on May 3, 1972, when they closed the purchase of 432 acres in Juliette, Georgia, about 25 miles north of Macon. They paid $160,000 for the land in Jones and Jasper counties, which immediately became known as “the Farm” and became a group hangout.
At “the Farm” (from left) Kim Payne, Dickey Betts, Buffalo Evans, Tuffy Phillips. Dickey Betts’s father is standing behind him.
* * *
SWEET MEL
ISSA
How one of rock’s most beloved songs was written and recorded.
A teenaged Gregg Allman spent years struggling to find his musical voice, writing and rejecting songs. He says he tossed away more than three hundred.
“They were just ‘I wanna swoon with you under the moon in June’ or they were a few good licks that didn’t really belong together,” he says. “My brother and I were struggling with finding any sense of originality. Songwriting is not something you’re born with.”
Late in 1967, still struggling to write a keeper song, Allman found himself sitting in a room in Pensacola’s Evergreen Motel, holding Duane’s guitar, which was tuned to open E.
“I picked up the guitar and didn’t know it was natural-tuned,” Allman recalls. “I just started strumming it and hit these beautiful chords. It was just open strings, then an E shape first fret, then moved to the second fret. This is a great example of the way different tunings can open up different roads to you as a songwriter. The music immediately made me feel good and the words just started coming to me. I started singing but stumbled on the name.”
Years later, Allman, relaxing in a dressing room at New York’s Beacon Theater following one of the Allman Brothers Band’s landmark shows, starts singing a familiar melody: “But back home he’ll always run to sweet…”
He stops and guffaws at the memory. “Nancy? Sweet … Stella? What the fuck is her name?”
Allman lets out a long, loud laugh before continuing: “I had the melody and the chords and the idea, but no name. That drove me nuts for about a week. Then I was in a grocery store late at night when a beautiful Spanish lady came in with a gorgeous little girl with black hair down her back, who took off running down the aisle, and the mother called out, ‘Oh, Melissa, come back!’”