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

by Paul, Alan

  PAYNE: I remember the first time we played with the Dead, I was filling “Garg” afterwards—that was short for gargantuan, because it was a huge airline case filled with cables of all sorts. I opened it up and they were all moving and looked like snakes, which freaked me out because I have a fear of snakes.

  PARISH: That was definitely something that people had to deal with around us, but I think by that time we were pretty careful with the bands we worked with, and there wasn’t much of that kind of thing going on.

  ODOM: It’s always intense on stage and the road crew has to watch this and that, and I think Dick Wooley came on stage with some people and they didn’t want him there. And Dick liked to fight himself, so when they got in an argument, things got out of control.

  JAIMOE: The stage was really crowded and everyone there was specifically told not to come up without clearance from the tour manager.

  PAYNE: I probably shouldn’t have even been there. I had badly injured my foot in a bike crash about a month earlier and was limping around on painkillers. The stage was constructed on the field and it was not all that stable. The Dead had an entourage that must have been 300 people. We were playing and there were probably 150 people on stage, which was not designed to hold so many, and I could see the whole thing shaking and swaying. I was really worried about the thing falling.

  I had already told Tuffy [Phillips, driver], “Nobody else gets on this stage,” when he came over and said there was a guy who says he’s with the label and wants to come up. So I hobbled over and there was this guy I had never seen before, with short hair wearing a suit and holding a briefcase. He said he was with the label and he was coming up and I just said, “No you’re not,” and punched him in the nose.

  WOOLEY: I was in pretty good shape. I still competed in karate tournaments and was no pushover in any street fight.

  JAIMOE: I think that Phil and Bunky were getting tired of the whole situation and since Wooley dabbled in martial arts, they were going to have him kick Tuffy’s ass and Wooley fell for that. Tuffy told him to get the fuck off the stage and Dick Wooley got into this karate stance.

  WOOLEY: When a dosed-up ABB driver blocked me from returning to my seat I looked to find the road manager and the driver sucker-punched me with a beer bottle. Stunned, I instinctively began punching and quickly got the better of the fight. But some cowardly ABB roadie saw this and began kicking me in the face with the heel of his boot.

  PAYNE: He tumbled down the stairs. The Dead’s security was Hell’s Angels and when they looked up and saw it was me who hit him, they figured he was a bad guy and kicked the shit out of him.

  PARISH: Not one Hell’s Angel ever set foot in RFK Stadium as our security, though there certainly might have been a few stray Angels who were someone’s friends. I don’t know what happened because it was their business and we didn’t get involved. We wouldn’t have wanted them involved in our business and we returned the favor.

  WOOLEY: Luckily, the Grateful Dead’s roadies saw this and jumped in to separate the churning pile. I was bleeding from the kicks, but still swinging when a very large Grateful Dead roadie pulled me out of the pile using a police-type stranglehold. He picked me up and deposited me in the promoter’s limo. So thank you, Big Grateful Dead Roadie.

  A fuming Walden demanded that whoever was responsible for injuring Wooley be fired. Kim Payne, Mike Callahan, and Tuffy Phillips all lost their jobs.

  JAIMOE: It was just, “Tuffy, Callahan, and Kim Payne have to go.”

  ODOM: Phil had to make a stand. After all, Dick Wooley worked for him, and it wasn’t a good situation. The way a record company looks at it is simple: “We need these people. You need to be nice to them.” Dick was very good at his job.

  PERKINS: That was a culmination of everything falling apart. There was just a general malaise going on. It wasn’t like anyone thought, “Everything’s fine except for these three guys.” They were a symptom of the problem—not the problem itself. On the other hand, the road crew had gotten pretty demanding, driving the promotions people crazy and controlling access to everything and everyone.

  The word was Kim had saved Gregg from an OD just before. People said he saved the guy’s life on Friday and got fired on Saturday.

  PAYNE: I had saved his life from an OD, no doubt, but not the day before. We were back in Macon and I don’t think anyone wanted to tell me I had been fired, so Dickey volunteered and he called me over to his house and told me I no longer had a job.

  PERKINS: One of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do was tell those guys about them losing their jobs and that it was a final decision—that they couldn’t go back to the members of the band and try to get it back.

  PAYNE: That kind of broke my heart. How do you fire a family member? It was a brotherhood from the minute we pledged it until the minute I was fired.

  PERKINS: Well, you ain’t gonna fire the band.

  RED DOG: Drugs fucked up Kim and Callahan badly—especially Kim. It was more or less a domino thing—knock one down and they all go.

  PAYNE: I can’t doubt any of the charges against me because I was so full of drugs, between what the doctor prescribed for my foot and street drugs.

  WOOLEY: In our organization everyone was out of control. Phil and Dickey were featured most in the local Macon paper.… Everyone back then was on a high, some could handle it, some couldn’t. Everyone dealt with drugs in their own way, but it took its toll on everyone.

  JAIMOE: Everything started to change one way or another. The message was “Look at all the dollars you’re making now. Do you want to keep making them?” There were various ways of saying that to you, trying to make you realize so you will change your behavior. A lot of things started to change. One thing I can say is I still hold a lot of things I always felt and believed … I just do what I do and when I see things going on I don’t like I just stay away from those kinds of people.

  BRUCE HAMPTON: Jaimoe has never wavered. He’s been the same forever.

  WOOLEY: Being with Atlantic for many years, on the road with top talent like Eric Clapton, gave me the opportunity to observe how professional artist managers, artists, and crews acted and how they handled themselves both onstage and backstage.

  I anticipated the same high standards at Capricorn because Twiggs Lyndon was a longtime friend and a backstage professional I’d worked with. Soon after settling in Macon I saw that Twiggs’s influence over the ABB had waned and Duane was, of course, gone. Now leaderless and demoralized, the band was influenced mostly by the road crew that surrounded them. By industry standards the road crew was a cluster-fuck of drugged-out hangers-on that seemingly kept their job by keeping the ABB supplied with drugs and high most of the time. It was crazy and out of control.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Mountain Jam

  ON JULY 28, 1973, the month after the debacle at RFK Stadium, the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead teamed up again, for what was then the largest rock concert ever, at Watkins Glen Speedway in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The Allman Brothers were paid $117,500 for what their contract stipulated would be one 150-minute set beginning at 10 p.m.

  With three crew members suddenly gone and the largest gig in rock history fast approaching, the band needed some new employees. Among those quickly hired was Twiggs’s kid brother A.J., then twenty-two years old.

  A.J. LYNDON: When Twiggs called me, I was excited and my wife was not. She started crying, both because she didn’t want me gone and because she knew what life was going to be like out there. I said no, and my mother told me I was foolish for not going on the road with the band. I signed on and my first two gigs were at Madison Square Garden.

  PERKINS: Whenever we had a personnel change, it felt like, “We can’t get along without that guy.” But we never had a real problem. We never missed a beat.

  A.J. LYNDON: After one of the New York nights, I came back and saw Dickey trashing his room and threatening his wife and he tried to beat me up, and I
went to Twiggs and quit. I said I wasn’t cut out for this work. Then Willie came and asked me to please stay through Watkins Glen because they needed all hands on deck.

  Here’s how things were in the rock and roll world in 1973: they taught me how to drive an eighteen-wheeler pulling a 45-foot trailer on the highway, with no special license, and my teacher sitting next to me drinking whiskey and snorting cocaine. Off to Watkins Glen!

  RED DOG: We loved playing with the Dead, starting with the Fillmore shows. Duane loved sitting in with them—like, “We’re gonna play all night!”

  WEIR: We always loved playing with the Allman Brothers. We developed a close relationship with Duane that unfortunately never had the time to blossom because he was gone so soon. Over the years, I got closer with Dickey as well and have always enjoyed playing with him.

  ODOM: Sam Cutler of the Grateful Dead and I put Watkins Glen together. I made twelve trips to San Francisco to meet with him and he came to Macon twice. It started with two dates we had booked together in Athens, Georgia, and Houston, which got canceled because of Berry’s death. We wanted to work together more, kept talking and talking, and eventually decided to do three dates: the two at RFK and one at Watkins Glen.

  PARISH: After the death of Duane we really tried to support them, to get them through that tough time. We scheduled some shows together and on the way to one in Houston, I crashed our truck and I was almost killed and our PA was all over the road and the whole thing was just a mess. I was lucky to be alive and we didn’t know how we were going to make the show, but we were thinking, “At least we have the Allman Brothers there to pick up any slack.” We got there and found out that Berry Oakley had died and they, of course, weren’t coming. What a weird and horrible day.

  Jerry Garcia and Dickey Betts, Cow Palace, San Francisco, December 31, 1973.

  WEIR: A joint show with the Allman Brothers was an opportunity to play to at least a partially new audience, which would always make it more of an adventure for us. We also looked forward to the cross-pollination; we would play with them, they would play with us, and that was always fun.

  ODOM: We invited the Band to open Watkins Glen, which Sam and I decided on together, because we thought those three bands represented America. They were the three best American bands and they related to each other, the music related, they knew each other. It was just a great fit.

  LEAVELL: It was very exciting to think about those three bands playing together. We knew it was going to be a big draw and the figure of 100,000 people was being thrown around in the weeks prior, which seemed incredible.

  One hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold for ten dollars each, but the crowd exploded to many times that number. The rest got in for free, though many people certainly never got within sight of the stage. The small country roads leading to the concert site became parking lots—first figuratively, then literally, as many drivers abandoned their vehicles and walked up to ten miles to the concert.

  WEIR: It was hard to get in and out of that place. It got way, way bigger than we intended for it to get. We thought maybe if we’re lucky we’d get 100,000 people; 60,000 to 70,000 would be nice and handle-able.

  LEAVELL: We were staying in Horsesheads, New York, in a small motel, and I remember being awoken by noise and commotion the day before, when we were supposed to have cars drive us up the road for soundchecking, then seeing this mass of people, like an exodus, out on the little highway. People were abandoning their vehicles in huge traffic jams and there was total confusion and mayhem.

  PERKINS: When we first got there we were able to drive in and out of the site, but then the road became like Armageddon overnight. It was like there had been a nuclear attack and people had just abandoned their cars.

  A.J. LYNDON: We were staying at a Holiday Inn thirteen miles away and cars were abandoned around there, that far away.

  WEIR: As it turns out, the news reported there were 600,000 there and maybe two million people in the area and it was declared a disaster area. As disaster areas go, it was a pretty nice one, but people who were interested in going home, for instance, well, they couldn’t. If they wanted to leave, it just wasn’t possible. People had to be peeled away layer by layer.

  PARISH: All the stuff like transportation just broke down. Amenities were impossible to maintain, fences were broken down. It became a serious security situation for the crowd, but the stage was secure. The Allman Brothers were a little more disorganized than us. We were hard at work building a tremendous PA system. Because of the crowds pouring in, the soundcheck day became a day of free music; it ended up being two days of music instead of one.

  TRUCKS: The afternoon rehearsal ended up being my most powerful memory because in daylight you could see 600,000 people stretched out in front of you and … My God! Everyone should get up in front of 600,000 people some time in their life. It’s sort of intimidating but also very, very inspiring.

  LEAVELL: It became obvious that we weren’t taking cars up there, so helicopters were summoned and as we got close, we asked the pilot to circle around so we could soak it in and it was absolutely stunning, exhilarating, and exciting to see this incredible mass of human beings. It was an ocean of bodies. We were all just really buzzed by the whole scene and situation.

  A.J. LYNDON: We rode a helicopter there and we came over a hill and there was this sea of humanity and we all just went, “Oh, Jesus.” It was like nothing anyone had ever seen or could even imagine, and someone asked the helicopter to circle around so we could take it all in.

  ODOM: There were so damn many people. Cars were backed up forty or fifty miles, and people just got out and walked. There were a lot of problems but we got it done. We had the promoters fly Bill Graham in to be the stage manager, because both bands had total faith in Bill and that paid off.

  PERKINS: We made it up there and found this little idyllic backstage that Bill Graham had set up, with palm trees and everyone having their own RV and everyone had a grand old time hanging out back there.

  PARISH: We shared three days of hang time together. The guys were jamming on music together the whole time, mostly in the trailers set up in the back.

  A.J. LYNDON: I was in one of the trailers and Dickey came into the room and asked others to leave. He sat down, apologized for his actions in New York and asked me to please stay with the crew. I was touched, and I knew it was a sign of how much he respected Twiggs. I never had any other problems with him.

  LEAVELL: I was a fan of the Grateful Dead and was really excited about the opportunity to watch them and meet them.

  WEIR: The music itself … well, typically for us, we didn’t play our best show in front of our largest crowd. We got the short stick on who would open and who would close. As I recall, it was essentially determined by drawing cards out of a hat because it was impossible to rank the bands. It would have been nice to have the lights and we didn’t get them because we played in daylight. I do remember the jam at the end was pretty spectacularly wiggy.

  LEAVELL: It rained like hell and people didn’t seem to mind. There’s always something endearing about everyone getting wet and hanging tough that can bond everyone. I don’t think we had the best show in the world, but it was just so exciting to be there. At the end, we had a long jam, and it was not exactly picture perfect—but there were interactions.

  TRUCKS: One of the reasons that we had such a massive crowd is everyone was coming to hear the three best jam bands in the country jam together. But the jam was just ridiculous, because by the time we all got together everyone was fucked up—and fucked up on different drugs. The Band was all drunk as skunks and sloppy loose, the Dead were full of acid and wired in that far-out way, and we were all full of coke and cranked up. You put it all together and it was just garbage. While we were playing, we thought it was the greatest thing the world had ever heard, but then we listened to the playbacks and it was really horrible.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Shine It On

  BROTHERS
AND SISTERS was released in August 1973, with artwork that emphasized the band’s family approach just as the title did, with Butch’s young son Vaylor pictured on the front and Oakley’s daughter Brittany on the back. The album opened up to an inside spread of the band and their extended families and friends taken at the Juliette farm.

  Brothers and Sisters became the band’s first number one album and “Ramblin’ Man” rose to second on the singles charts. Almost two years after their guiding light had been killed, the Allman Brothers were the most popular band in the country.

  WOOLEY: Being the only one in daily contact with radio stations, I saw the potential of “Ramblin’ Man” first. Stations were reporting to me that was the track they wanted to play as a single, so Frank, Phil, and I just went with it.

  On September 10, 1973, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert show came to Macon to tape the Allman Brothers Band and the Marshall Tucker Band at the Grand Opera House. Billed as “Saturday Night in Macon,” the show was being recorded for national TV just a month after the release of Brothers and Sisters and was a major promotional event. Bill Graham was in town serving as the show’s MC.

  SANDLIN: We set up to record, with a very nice truck from Nashville. It was a beautiful setting and seemed like a perfect thing. But Dickey was off from the start—supposedly someone dosed him. Gregg would say, “Now we’re going to play a song off our new album,” introducing “Ramblin’ Man,” and Dickey would kick off “You Don’t Love Me” or something. That happened two or three times. Then in the middle of the show, Dickey put his guitar down and walked off stage.

  JAIMOE: He put his guitar in his case, walked out of the theater, and started walking home—and I think he was living on the farm. He left us there on stage with no lead person. We basically had nothing but a rhythm section—two drums, two keyboards, and bass. That’s fine if you play like that, but someone has to take over for what’s absent.