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

by Paul, Alan

  PERKINS: Oh boy. That was another Nightmare on Elm Street. His equipment wasn’t going right and Dickey just walked out the door, with Joe Dan running after him. Gregg was far from being on his game that night either.

  LEAVELL: As I recall, Dickey was upset because the whole idea was for the cameras to come down and catch us as we are, the way we lived and played. There had been some direction from the Kirshner people that they wanted certain things certain ways, and Dickey got upset about it, feeling like they were supposed to be staying out of our way and recording it, not interfering with what we were doing. Did recreational items accelerate that? I don’t know, but he flew off the handle and just left. We played a little bit without him, then took a break and waited. It was a very unusual and uncomfortable situation.

  SANDLIN: Phil ran out and got him, stopped him walking down the street and eventually brought him back. It was awful. I was sitting there all ready to capture a great recording and they just didn’t have a great performance in them.

  LEAVELL: We were really upset. I guess Dickey had always been somewhat volatile and moody, but walking off the stage was a first for me. It was like, “Dude, what are you doing? We’re all brothers here. If there’s a problem, let’s talk about it.” At the end of the day, the important thing was to try and salvage the show and make it as good as it can be, but we were all looking at each other like, “What is this all about?” We were happy that he came back, but …

  An obviously tense and unpleasant night may have clouded people’s memories of this concert. The performance, while certainly not peak ABB, was stronger than most recall, though it featured only five live Allman Brothers songs, “Southbound” being the only track from Brothers and Sisters. The Allmans segment of the TV show ended with the album version of “Ramblin’ Man” playing over footage of an outdoor crowd that never shows the stage.

  PERKINS: I remember after the show Bill Graham and the director sitting on the stage discussing whether or not they had enough usable material for a show. They were not sure, so the decision was made to film Wet Willie down in the park and turn what was supposed to be an Allman Brothers concert into “Saturday Night in Macon.”

  SANDLIN: They were a great band, so even on a bad night they were good, but it was just sad—just like Gregg being whisked from the studio to rehab. There was often a sadness because they were so talented but they were their own worst enemy at times. I’ve thought about it a lot and I have no idea of just what happened or how it could have been different.

  RED DOG: I still don’t understand what happened, starting with Duane’s death. I feel cheated, damn it. Somewhere, somehow … that wasn’t supposed to happen. It was like giving a little kid candy and then taking it away. Somehow we ain’t done something right and we’re paying for it. Someone wasn’t dealing from the top of the deck. We had something so good building and growing and then Duane and Berry were gone and everything got so hard. That’s why a lot of us had to use drugs even more; for me, I always wanted something before I went to sleep so I didn’t dream—because I knew they would be there.

  As their tour grosses picked up radically, the Allman Brothers began to play arenas and stadiums almost solely. As travel became easier and the shows bigger, the brotherhood seemed ever more frayed and the drug use escalated.

  TRUCKS: Brothers and Sisters took off and we became big rock stars and were the number one band in the country but the music became secondary to everything else and it felt hollow. Of course, having all these gorgeous women falling over us and everything else was fun. It was a big party, but the music and everything that had been all-important became secondary.

  PERKINS: With Duane, and then for the first couple of years after he died, the band always seemed to play with one mind. Nobody got left behind. It was never rote and they were never on cruise control. That began to change.

  RED DOG: When Duane was alive, everybody had their job. The band would sit down and discuss things and be on the same page, but Duane just knew what was happening. He knew what he wanted the band to sound like and where he wanted the band to go, and everyone understood their role and how to get there. They all wanted the same thing in the original band; they just sat down and played and what came out was what they wanted. I don’t know who the leader was after that. It should have just been one person: Dickey.

  JAIMOE: After Duane died, a lot changed. Everyone wanted to be Duane, but no one knew how to do shit except play music.

  LEAVELL: There was no leader after Duane. As far as I can tell, Duane made a lot of decisions on behalf of the band. That changed and it became more of equal partners and there might have been some pull between Dickey and Gregg at times, but in terms of musical decisions, everyone seemed comfortable. It was more of a committee; the band as a whole made decisions.

  DOUCETTE: With Duane around, the Dickey/Gregg rivalry was never an issue. Nothing was an issue. People respected Duane so much that there was no room for anything else. Duane laid it down and it was done, but that happened without him ever once saying, “This is my band.” Never ever.

  Back in Macon, Payne, now unemployed, began worrying more about receiving regular payments for his contribution to “Midnight Rider.”

  PAYNE: I was aware there were royalty checks coming in and before I got fired Gregg would sometimes just give me some cash for my assistance on “Midnight Rider.” After that, I was a junkie with a five-hundred-dollar-a-week habit running around selling dope and hustling to survive and I wasn’t seeing Gregg every day anymore. I knew that checks were quarterly and I knew when they were due and I’d have to chase Gregg down and twist his arm a little.

  I wasn’t signed up with a contract or nothing, and once it was way past time I should have gotten some money and I showed up at Jaimoe’s house, where they were practicing. Gregg was sitting at the organ and when I asked for my money, he said, “I’ll get back to you later.” That was about the third time he blew me off, so I went outside, jumped on his custom chopper and went out and hid it. I told him when he got me straightened out with my money, he’d get his bike back. He went down to Phil’s office, had a contract drawn that gave me five percent of the song, dropped it off to me, and said, “Now this is between you and BMI.” I’ve been getting royalty checks ever since.

  The Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead never shared a bill again after Watkins Glen. Five months after the landmark concert, however, the Brothers played the Cow Palace in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, 1973, in a performance nationally broadcast on radio. The Dead were off that night, and Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzmann sat in for much of the second set and encore, with Kreutzmann taking over for Trucks, who was dosed and unable to continue playing.

  The band’s take continued to grow; by 1974, they were regularly making more than $100,000 in guarantees. On June 1, 1974, the Allman Brothers headlined the Georgia Jam at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, which also featured Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Joe Dan Petty’s Grinderswitch. The ABB cleared nearly $150,000 for that date. They continued to tour stadiums, including Denver’s Mile High and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers, before crossing the Atlantic for the first time in July for shows in Amsterdam and London.

  By the time of the stadium tour, the Allman Brothers were renting the Starship, a customized Boeing 720B made famous by Led Zeppelin and also used by the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Elton John, Peter Frampton, and others.

  PERKINS: The Starship had a bar, a huge couch, a fake fireplace, and a bedroom, which Gregg always managed to get in. But the most decadent thing about that plane was just flying it around. In the middle of a fuel crisis so bad that people couldn’t even get gas to come to the show, we were flying around on a big ol’ Boeing airliner. “The people’s band.” I used to think about that and ponder what Berry Oakley would have thought if he were alive. It was expensive, man. I can remember making $50,000 bank transfers to the owners.

  A guy Gregg used to know in L.A. was involved in that operation and he told Greg
g and Butch about it, and I knew that once it was in their ears, there was no way we wouldn’t be climbing on board. They tried to use it to go to Europe but it wasn’t certified to do so.

  ODOM: The main reason we had the Starship was we didn’t have to put up with missing flights and all this nonsense. We could get to a gig and get back home. We tried to make it as easy as possible for them, because Willie was just being driven crazy trying to get everyone together. It was like moving the military.

  PERKINS: When the Starship came to Macon to pick us up they couldn’t shut it off because they didn’t have the generator they used to crank it up. Sometimes that thing would be sitting out there idling for six hours until I could get Gregg on the plane. It was just ridiculous, but it sure solved our problem of getting everyone onto commercial flights.

  ODOM: The band members were not getting along. They’d meet on the steps of the plane, get on, and go play a gig. That carried over to the studio.

  PERKINS: There started to be tensions and issues and stresses in ’73 and it was always a concern, but I thought they held it together and continued to mostly put on really good shows through the big stadium tour of 1974. That was the pinnacle commercially and also the last time that edition of the band was really on its game.

  * * *

  Southern Men

  The members of the Allman Brothers Band are the undisputed founders and kings of Southern rock. Too bad they hate the term.

  Though the original members of the Allman Brothers Band have spent years trying to distance themselves from the term “Southern rock,” they are the mountain stream from which this musical river flows. They started it all, a fact Dickey Betts acknowledges, even as he dodges the tag.

  “We may have inspired the whole Southern rock thing, but I don’t identify with it,” says Betts. “I think it’s limiting. I’d rather just be known as a progressive rock band from the South. I’m damned proud of who I am and where I’m from, but I hate the term ‘Southern rock.’ I think calling us that pigeonholed us and forced people to expect certain types of music from us that I don’t think are fair.”

  The Allmans’ breakthrough album, 1971’s At Fillmore East, not only established them as rock’s greatest live band, but also shored up a struggling Capricorn Records, leading the label to start signing more bands. Soon, albums were coming out of Macon at a furious pace, and the first great era of Southern rock was underway. And while they all shared a certain sensibility, the Capricorn acts were all considerably different: The Marshall Tucker Band, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, tempered their rock with country, blues, and jazz influences; Wet Willie, from Mobile, Alabama, mined Southern soul and kept the guitars relatively toned down. The second wave of Southern rock followed the massive commercial success of the Allman Brothers’ 1973 Brothers and Sisters and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 breakthrough with “Sweet Home Alabama.” That song and Skynyrd’s subsequent use of a giant Confederate flag stage backdrop helped establish the term “Southern rock.” Record company A&R men were soon scrambling through Southern bars in search of the next big thing.

  Among the groups who benefited were the Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, and Blackfoot. Charlie Daniels, a longtime presence on the Southern rock and country scenes, had his biggest hit in ’79 with the fiddle-driven novelty tune “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

  “Southern rock became a parody of itself,” says Warren Haynes. “I think the reason the original [Allman Brothers] members always had a problem with it is they look at it as someone coined the phrase so they would have a way to describe them and to lump a bunch of bands together and they wanted to be considered as their own entity.

  “If the connotations that get conjured when you hear the term are positive, and especially if they are musical connotations, then I don’t really have a problem with it. The problem I have is a lot of people associate it with rednecks and rebel flags and backward mentality. That has never been representative of the Allman Brothers Band.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER

  19

  End of the Line

  THE TENSIONS AND divisions within the band fully manifested themselves in early 1975 as they began to record their fifth studio album. Win, Lose or Draw was cut in noncohesive sessions from February to July, while Gregg was mostly living in Los Angeles and dating Cher, whom he married on June 30, 1975. Gregg and Cher’s on-again, off-again relationship was big news, as he became more famous for being famous than for his music.

  ALLMAN: When we recorded Win, Lose or Draw, we were barely ever in the studio at the same time. I recorded most of my vocals from Los Angeles.

  SANDLIN: I had to fly out to L.A. and cut a lot of Gregg’s vocals at the Record Plant, because he wasn’t around.

  LEAVELL: Gregg was spending a lot of time in California and was not in Macon much. A lot of the music was recorded with him being absent, and there was definitely less interaction than there had been.

  PERKINS: It was basically each person going in individually, or sitting around waiting for someone. All the issues that had been percolating became out in the open in the studio.

  SANDLIN: That’s probably the hardest record I’ve ever done, beginning simply with just getting everyone together. It was so weird. It wasn’t fun at all. It was rough for me, and it was rough for them. Jaimoe and Chuck always seemed to enjoy playing, but the other guys seemed to be struggling just to put anything into it. It was just sad.

  JAIMOE: We had so many rehearsals where the only three there were me, Lamar, and Chuck and we would just play and we started joking that we should start a band called We Three.

  SANDLIN: We usually started sessions at nine p.m., except for the night that Kung Fu was on, because Dickey had to be in front of the TV for that. Weird stuff like that would happen all the time. There was the Gregg faction and the Dickey faction and you could just walk into the studio and feel all this tension. There might as well have been an electric sign warning you: “Things could get rough in here.”

  Sometimes you’d have two guys sitting there and sometimes you’d get everyone but one there, and it just doesn’t work. Up to that point the band had recorded almost everything live—most of the guitar solos and all the rhythm tracks. This is not a band you cut one piece at a time, so we spent a lot of time waiting for someone to show up.

  LEAVELL: Just think about everything that the band had gone through: the early days when it was very tough and they were traveling in a van, not making any money. All of a sudden you become successful, then go through the success, making good money, playing arenas and stadiums. Then you lose the leader of the band, grieve, pick it back up again—and lose another founding member. And pick it up again—and have even bigger success. By the time of the Win, Lose or Draw sessions everyone was exhausted. They were just tired. And when people get tired, other emotions can go along with it—anger, being upset. I just think the band had enough at that point.

  The cover of Win, Lose or Draw features the interior of an Old West saloon and is appropriately devoid of people. A poker table topped with half-empty whiskey bottles, cards, and chips sits front and center, surrounded by six empty chairs representing the then-current members. Two empty chairs lean against a small, empty table in the background representing Duane and Berry.

  TRUCKS: Twiggs designed the whole thing and there’s no doubt he was honoring Duane with those empty chairs. The border features cut-outs of each of our profiles. Of course, Jaimoe and I are on the back—the drummers’ lot.

  SANDLIN: I never exactly understood that cover. I’ve heard a lot of interpretations and each one went deeper and deeper. All I know for sure is it’s kind of alarming.

  TRUCKS: The main problem with Win, Lose or Draw is simply that none of us were really into the music. Everyone was into getting fucked up and fucking. We were into being rock stars and the music became secondary. When we heard the finished music, we were all embarrassed.

  SANDLIN: Win, Lose or Draw wasn’t well received but I thought there were some
really good cuts on it, especially “Can’t Lose What You Never Had” and “High Falls.” I wish we had been able to come up with a well-received album that could have helped them stay together, but it just wasn’t happening.

  PERKINS: Everyone kind of knew right away that Win, Lose or Draw was not up to what they had done, that it did not have any classics or that same spark of life. And it didn’t do that well, and when we went on the road in support, we had some bad losers, shows where the promoters lost their ass. They didn’t work from January ’76 into the summer, and by that time the Gregg and Scooter Herring thing was going on.

  Though the band was clearly drifting apart, the breaking point came when Gregg testified in the drug trial of the band’s security man Scooter Herring. The testimony was regarded as a breach of brotherhood and many in and around the band labeled him a “snitch.” He received well-publicized death threats and received law-enforcement protection. The derision grew when Herring was convicted on five counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and received a seventy-five-year prison sentence. Jerry Garcia reportedly called Gregg a snitch, fueling what became a permanent split between the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead.

  Allman had been threatened with prosecution himself if he did not testify and has always maintained that Herring told him to take the deal and offered to take the fall. The convictions were overturned on appeal and Herring pled guilty to a lesser charge in 1979, working out a deal with federal prosecutors, and was sentenced to thirty months in a federal penitentiary. He ended up serving fourteen months in jail and sixty days in a Macon halfway house. This news received a fraction of the attention accorded to Herring’s conviction and initial sentence.