by Paul, Alan
LINDA OAKLEY: I agree that things were looking up for Berry. He was always honest with me and didn’t want to hurt me, but I wasn’t surprised when he told me that Julia was pregnant. When I reminded him that he already had a daughter, he said, “This might be my son.”
He was really excited, as difficult as it was for me. It kind of gave him a new love and new hope for a fresh start. And Berry felt some new musical life with Chuck and what was happening with the band. He had come out of the period where he would be so incoherent they had to have people sit in for him. I think he had turned the corner and I don’t think he had a death wish. He was miserable with the business and he knew they were getting ripped off. He was talking to his dad about getting an attorney and was starting to look into the deals.
PAYNE: He may have put on a show to get someone off his back but I didn’t see any signs of improvement and I was with him all the time. He was headed for a cliff and there was no stopping him.
On November 11, 1972, Oakley woke up filled with excitement; he was going to finally lead a giant jam session he had been talking about for several years: B.O.’s Jive Ass Review featuring the Rowdy Roadies and the Shady Ladies.
SANDLIN: He called me in the early afternoon and said, “Man, I’m having a jam session tonight. Why don’t you come?” I asked him what time and said sure.
LINDA OAKLEY: He was out late jamming the night before, and he woke up early and was very happy. He said he had gotten this thing together that he had wanted to do for years, BOJAR, B.O.’s Jive Ass Revue, with the Rowdy Roadies and the Shady Ladies! He said it was finally happening and he was going to get all the musicians who were in town to come down to the club and they were going to have the big jam. It was my mission to go round up all the old ladies. Donna was in town to take care of getting Duane buried. She was going to drive me to see Linda Trucks, Joanie Callahan, Blue Sky, Little Judi … all the chicks, and get them to come down and practice our moves. We were going to be back-up singers and shake our maracas and our tail feathers. He was going out to spread the word. Berry told me I looked pretty before riding off on the bike.
PAYNE: We got on our bikes to go out to the Cowboy guys’ house and tell them about the jam and Big Linda was not happy about it, because we were not straight when we left and we were involved in getting more and more not straight as the day went on.
LINDA OAKLEY: I don’t recall knowing that, but I would have been neither happy nor surprised.
PAYNE: Nobody had a phone and if you wanted to get word to them, you had to go their house. He was so excited about that jam.
LEAVELL: He and Kim came out to Idlewild South, where I was living with Scott Boyer and a couple of other guys, to make sure we were going to show up at this jam. We all told him that we were going to come and he said if we wanted to rehearse, they’d be getting together at the Big House. It was very exciting, especially for me, because I was still new to the whole world and I loved playing with Berry so much.
PAYNE: We were riding home from Idlewild and he just rode smack into the side of a damn bus. I went back to him and he was lying there conscious, with just a little bit of blood trickling out of his nose. He otherwise looked fine and said he felt OK. I knew a cop would be arriving soon and I knew Berry had a bag of heroin on him, because we had been dipping into it all day, so I asked him where it was and he said, “It’s in my hand,” which made no sense. I kept asking and he kept saying that. I found it in his pocket and got it off of him and he started standing up, saying, “I want to go home.” An ambulance had arrived and I tried to get him in there, but he refused. These two girls came riding by: “Hey, there’s B.O. from the Allman Brothers.” He said, “Hey there, give me a ride,” and jumped in the car for a lift back to the Big House.
I got his motorcycle off the pavement, then I rode home and came in the back door. Big Linda was there, and she asked me what the hell happened. She wondered if he had gotten in a fight and been hit, saying, “He’s upstairs talking crazy shit.” I went running up there and he was in bad shape. He started turning blue. Chuck showed up and had a station wagon. We managed to drag him down and put him in there and, hell, he died forty-five minutes later in the hospital.
Oakley had fractured his skull in the crash, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. Like Duane, he was twenty-four years old. His son, Berry Duane Oakley, was born four months later.
DUDEK: Dickey, Joe Dan, and I were out at the farm getting ready to ride horses when Willie called and said Berry had been in an accident and was at the hospital. We jumped into my Cougar and hauled ass into town. We walked into the emergency room and a nurse came out and said, “Are you related to Mr. Oakley?” Dickey said, “Yeah, we’re his brothers.” And she said, “Well, I regret to tell you that he didn’t make it. He is deceased.”
SANDLIN: I got a call from another musician: “Did you hear about Berry?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m gonna go down there to the jam.”
And he said, “No, man, it’s not that.”
And they told me what had happened and that he was in the hospital—that same hospital where we had all gathered for Duane a year earlier—and I went down there, and there we all were again.
PAYNE: Candace blamed me 110 percent for B.O.’s death and a lot of it was my fault. I should never have let him ride, but even today I don’t know what I could have done to stop him. I guess everyone has a day in his or her life they wish they could redo and this is it for me. I think about it all the time. I wish I had never gotten on a bike with him, but there was no arguing. He’d have just said, “Well, fuck you,” and gone without me.
But God, I’ve often wondered if I could have handled that whole thing differently. I could have wrestled him to the ground with one arm and tied him to a tree if he insisted on riding, but that’s not a solution; what would happen the day after?
PERKINS: Kim carries that with him, but we all saw what was happening. Nobody would have wanted to be the one with him when it happened. I always felt like Berry died the same day Duane did. It just took him a year to go down.
LINDA OAKLEY: I never blamed Kim or anyone else. Berry wasn’t a very experienced rider—I never got on the bike with him—and that bike was too big for his skinny ass. But everybody had a bike, so he wanted to have one to join his brothers burning up the road.
PAYNE: This doctor at the hospital talked to me a week or so later. I was feeling pretty guilty and down, what with his sister kicking me out and accusing me of having killed her brother. He said, “If there had been a neurosurgeon on the scene he couldn’t have saved that man.” He said he was a dead man the second he hit the bus. It was just a matter of time. He told me about an identical accident about two weeks earlier on I-75 where a guy suffered the same injury. He said, “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have done anything.” That did make me feel a bit better, but I still don’t feel good about letting him get on the bike in the first place.
Berry Oakley, 1948–1972.
LINDA OAKLEY: I always had this feeling that Berry wasn’t going to live a long time and I think his mother did, too. This is why I stuck around. I would go away and then come back. I was losing my mind but I couldn’t leave him because I had this fear that his time was coming. I know that sounds odd, but it was an ethereal sense, this haunted thing. Maybe he had it, too, but he was not looking for it. He did not have a death wish and he was so happy the day he died.
SANDLIN: It was like when Duane died; suddenly you’re just going through the motions of daily life. I remember going to his memorial service at the Catholic church and it was just heartbreaking. Berry was such a great guy and a great bass player. He had a style that was totally his own. I’ve never heard anyone else play like him.
PERKINS: Berry was like Duane’s lieutenant. He always seemed like second in command. It was a given that they would be buried together. Berry did not have a will either, but there was no question about who was in charge: Linda.
ODOM: It was horrible when Duane died and
then Berry’s death came along and made it worse. Just as Duane was the leader, Berry was the family man. But the Allman Brothers Band are survivors and somehow they have held it together. You have to respect that.
SANDLIN: I really didn’t know how much more any of us could deal with.
RED DOG: It was like two kings had died.
Following Oakley’s death, a decision was quickly reached that he and Duane would be buried side-by-side at Rose Hill Cemetery, where the band had spent so much time. Their final resting place is just around the corner and up a hill from that of Elizabeth Jones Reed, the Victorian mother whose name graces one of the band’s greatest songs.
Their graves sit on a small bluff overlooking the river. Duane’s headstone includes an epitaph taken from his journal entry of January 1, 1969: “I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can. I will take love where I find it and offer it to everyone who will take it … Seek knowledge from those wiser … and teach those who wish to learn from me.”
Oakley’s gravestone contains a Hindu proverb, selected by Linda: “Help thy brother’s boat across, and Lo! Thine own has reached the shore.”
LINDA OAKLEY: It was the hand of fate: Donna had come back to Macon to see that Duane was at last laid to rest. She was at the house with me when the thing happened with Berry. We later went together to Rose Hill and found this peaceful place in a valley; then to the mortuary where we chose tombstones of white marble. Donna wanted the thing from his diary to be inscribed and I drew a phoenix design for Duane and a ram’s head for Berry and chose that proverb.
Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, brothers to the end.
* * *
The Big House
How a house became a home … and so much more.
The Big House, a three-story Grand Tudor at 2321 Vineville Avenue in Macon, Georgia, was the Allman Brothers Band’s communal home from 1970 to 1973. “It was the band’s logistical and spiritual center,” says road manager Willie Perkins.
First and foremost, the Big House was a home, primarily to bassist Berry Oakley and his family: wife Linda, baby daughter Brittany, and sister Candace.
“A lot of us lived there at different times, but it always felt like Linda and Berry’s house,” says crew member Kim Payne. “Berry and Linda were a force for good, flower children who loved everybody and had extremely positive outlooks, and that was the vibe at the Big House in the beginning.”
Linda and Candace Oakley saw a newspaper listing for 2321 Vineville in early 1970. “We had to get out of the little one-bedroom apartment where we were living,” Linda recalls. “We were looking through the newspapers for a little house and we saw the listing and thought we’d just go look.”
Linda, Candace, and Donna Roosman Allman, Duane’s “lady” and the mother of his baby Galadrielle, stopped by without an appointment. Standing in the yard, peering through the leaded windows, they began to fantasize about moving into this grand old home.
“We fell in love,” Oakley says. “We were standing amidst the blooming wisteria peering in at the chandeliers and sweeping stairs and it felt like a fairyland. We wanted this house, so we called for an appointment, and dressed up in our finest clothes to meet the realty people.”
The $225 rent was beyond the Oakleys’ reach, almost $100 more than they had been paying for their loft above Butch Trucks’s apartment. Then, Linda recalls, Donna had an idea: “She said, ‘It’s so big that there’s room for all of us. I can talk to Duane and see if he wants to move in.’”
When Duane agreed, a communal house was born. The original tenants were Donna, Duane, and Galadrielle and the extended Oakley family, along with Gregg Allman, who was dating Candace.
“I went to Florida for a few days and got a call from Duane and Donna saying they had already moved in,” Linda Oakley recalls. “Duane and the roadies were storming around; they broke into these loft rooms in the attic that we were not supposed to mess with and pulled out and set up a bunch of furniture stored up there, including a huge dining room table.”
Shortly after moving in, Gregg and Candace split up and Kim Payne moved in. Many other band members and associates moved in and out, including Perkins, who stayed there when he first arrived in Macon in May 1970.
“When I arrived, [a guest] showed me around,” says Perkins. “She opened the fridge and said, ‘Here’s the iced tea. The one with the silver tape around it has LSD in it. If you just want iced tea, have the other one. If you don’t have anything you need to do for the next couple of days, drink the duct tape.’ Right away, I knew this was not a normal household.”
The Big House was also the scene of some significant heartbreak. On October 29, 1971, Duane had just dropped flowers off for Linda’s birthday—a party was planned for that night—when he jumped on his motorcycle and never returned. Berry Oakley came back to the Big House following his own crash on November 11, 1972. He went from there to the hospital, where he died.
After Berry’s funeral, Linda took Brittany to her parents’ home in Florida to try and heal. When she returned in early January 1973, there was an eviction notice on the door. She moved out and the Big House became just another Macon house.
It turned into a boardinghouse with rooms for rent, then a new owner moved in and turned the ground floor into a hair salon, before eventually going into foreclosure. A family bought it from the bank in 1987 and lived there for six years until ABB “tour magician” Kirk West knocked on the door and said, “I want to buy your house.”
West and his wife, Kirsten, moved into 2321 Vineville in July 1993 and the house became the Big House once again. West created a stealth museum, displaying his considerable memorabilia collection for pilgrims who began to show up from around the world.
In June 1994, Warren Haynes, Allen Woody, and Matt Abts moved into the Big House, set up their instruments and equipment in what had been the original band’s music room, and rehearsed for eight days before heading out to do their first shows as Gov’t Mule.
In 2009, the Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House was opened, filled with memorabilia from the band’s forty-five years and re-creating the feel it had when it was the Oakleys’ home.
* * *
I used to come across all these little words of wisdom and I found that message and showed him. He just loved it because of the brothers thing. That’s really how he lived his life. It was not an illusion. Sometimes I feel it was something I made up. Then I see some evidence in a photo or video or a letter and I realize, “This is for real. No one can take this away. I didn’t imagine it.” We all really loved each other.
CHAPTER
15
Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad
JUST A YEAR after rallying together and moving on from Duane’s death, the band found itself at another tragic crossroads. Berry died on November 11, 1972. On November 15, the group played at his memorial service at Hart’s Mortuary, then once again had to make decisions about a cloudy future.
LEAVELL: There was a meeting with Phil, which basically amounted to “What are we going to do?” The answer was immediate and unanimous: “Carry on. Let’s arrange some auditions, get a new bass player, and keep moving.” We didn’t want to take a lot of time off and be dwelling on the negative. It was maybe a two-week period before we were back to work.
PODELL: It was exactly like when Duane died—no one knew if the band could pull it off again. But this time there was no doubt that they would try.
PAYNE: When Duane died, it was like, “We’ve got to go on. Duane wouldn’t have it any other way.” When Berry died, it felt like such a dirty deal, and the sense was “We’re not going to let anyone or anything stop us.” I had serious doubts about what would happen, as did everyone else, but there was never really a question about quitting.
Several bassists came to Macon to audition, including Lamar Williams, an old friend of Jaimoe’s from Gulfport, Mississippi, two years removed from an Army stint in Vietnam.
JAIMOE: Lamar made his own p
icks, cutting them out of Clorox bottles, so what does he do? Cuts his freaking finger, man. He had to audition with a big cut on his finger and there were good players there; a guy came in from L.A. and another cat that used to be in a band with Gregg and some dude Dickey knew.
SANDLIN: Lamar came in and auditioned without Jaimoe being in the room because he didn’t want any home cooking. And it was like Lamar had been waiting for the gig.
LEAVELL: We had auditioned three or four other bass players. Once Lamar came in, we all looked at each other and said, “This is the guy.” He just got it. He had a good understanding of Berry’s style as well as bringing his own unique style to the table and he was an easy guy to be with.
JAIMOE: After two songs, Butch asked Lamar, “Hey, man, have you ever played any of these songs?” and Lamar said, “No.” Butch turned to everyone and asked if we could have a meeting. Lamar left and Butch said, “He doesn’t even know these songs and he’s playing them like he knows them inside and out. Let’s get this audition stuff done and make this a rehearsal.” That was the greatest thing I ever saw Butch do!
TRUCKS: His groove was just so rock solid that absolutely no one could miss it or deny it. It just felt too good to waste any more time.
Lamar Williams, 1973.
LEAVELL: Lamar slid right into the sessions and the band.
The band not only returned to work on the album, but to touring as well, appearing on December 9 at Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena, Williams’s first gig with the Allman Brothers Band.