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

by Paul, Alan

  LEAVELL: Gregg was put in the unenviable position of having to testify. Let us remember that he was given immunity that forced him to testify or be jailed until he did so. That had to be an excruciating position to be in.

  TRUCKS: We were told that Gregg just copped a plea and sold Scooter out and we found out several years later that Gregg was actually given immunity. We didn’t bother talking to Gregg, because we didn’t really talk to each other at that time. Gregg was out in L.A. with Cher, we weren’t communicating, and we got our news from the newspapers, which made Gregg out to be a fake who just sold Scooter out and that’s what we believed. We made our decisions based on that and I think everyone is sorry that was done and that all these comments were made without Gregg at least having a chance to tell us the truth.

  He actually went to Scooter and said, “I don’t give a shit if I go to jail. I ain’t gonna sell you out…” And Scooter said, “No, the buck stops here. I did it and they’re not offering you any other options.”

  LEAVELL: The outcome was very unfortunate not only for Scooter but for the band. It helped to sever the ties, but I think there was a lot of misunderstanding of what Gregg was facing.

  TRUCKS: This whole damn thing was set off by a group of Republicans in central Georgia who wanted to take down Jimmy Carter and knew that Phil Walden was very involved in his campaign and that Phil was closely associated with Gregg, who was one of the most notorious druggies in the world.

  Walden was active in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, helping the former Georgia governor raise money, in part by having his acts put on fund-raising concerts. The Allman Brothers Band played a benefit at the Providence Civic Center on November 25, 1975, that was crucial to the campaign, raising much-needed funds for the upcoming Democratic primaries. “There is no question that the Allmans’ benefit concert for me in Providence kept us in that race,” Carter told People magazine in September 1976.

  SANDLIN: When the band finally broke up, it seemed kind of inevitable. There just wasn’t a lot of joy left in the music. There were a lot of other things blamed for the breakup, including the drug trials, but it just felt like it had to happen at that point.

  TRUCKS: The bottom line is it was time for us to quit because all we were doing was destroying an incredible legacy.

  JAIMOE: It had to end. We went through two deaths and the only thing that kept us from going crazy was the fact that we had something to do, something very intense to fill our time. If not, it could have really been a mess. What happened was, it just became a mess later on—and not as great a mess as it could have been. When you go through stuff like that, you need time to sit and think about things clearheaded and we never had that. We just plowed forward, which is what we had to do then … but it could only continue for so long.

  Every one of us had things that just piled up, piled up, piled up. That trial was just the straw that broke the camel’s back and it all fell on Gregg.

  LEAVELL: We had a meeting, and Jaimoe, Lamar, and I definitely wanted to continue the band, but Dickey and Butch were adamant that they would not play with Gregg again. At that time it felt very much like a definitive breakup. There was no sense that the band would ever play together again and there were at least three of us who viewed it as very unfortunate. We would have preferred to go through a few meetings and say, “Can’t we work this out?”

  Butch and Dickey seemed very determined to sever the ties; they had very strong opinions about what Gregg was doing, and Gregg was going through his own very difficult times and may well have felt that it was time to move on as well. It became apparent there was not going to be a resolution.

  JAIMOE: I actually wrote a letter to the Macon Telegraph saying I wasn’t going to work with Gregory anymore, which was really just Gregory becoming the sacrificial lamb for all of us.

  ODOM: Both Capricorn Records and Phil Walden and Associates desperately wanted and needed the Allman Brothers to stay together, but what are you going to do when you’ve got Dickey, Jaimoe, and Butch saying, “I’ll never play with Gregg again”?

  JAIMOE: It’s easy to look back now and say it was obvious that splitting up for a while was something we needed to do and we just put it all on Gregg. It would be easy to say I regret writing that letter, but you can’t try to get out of shit. If you did it, you did it. I did it.

  BETTS: After Duane died, it was still very dynamic at first, but it just slowly slipped away and then we lost Berry and it was very hard to continue. I’m not weighing Duane’s loss against Berry’s loss—but losing two members was just so tough.

  SANDLIN: Duane kept everybody together. When he said something everyone listened, and then there wasn’t anyone to take that authority. You’d think Gregg would be the natural one, but that’s not how he is. There’s a lot of things Gregg doesn’t want to be involved with.

  WOOLEY: Dickey did his best to pull it all together, but he was not equipped to handle such responsibilities and Gregg was too far into the drug culture to organize anything but getting high twenty-four/seven. They are both great talents, but sadly missing a stabilizing compass to control a high-powered juggernaut like the ABB.

  TRUCKS: The whole lifestyle had become so destructive that we were all killing ourselves. And it got to where we didn’t like each other. We just couldn’t keep it going. When we split up, we were the top-grossing band in the country and I was in debt. Phil Walden was the guy who ended up with all our money and when that all set in, it was just mind-blowing and depressing.

  BETTS: The whole thing probably wouldn’t have even lasted as long as it did if it weren’t for Chuck Leavell. He was just such a strong player.

  LEAVELL: I remember going into what was supposed to be a band meeting and just three of us showed up; the three who wanted to focus on the music and not worry about other things. At that meeting, we looked at each other, said, “This is reality; the Allman Brothers are no more. What do we want to do?” Obviously, what we did is form our own band—Sea Level—because we all loved playing together.

  By the time the oddly named live album Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas was released, the Allman Brothers Band was already broken up and Capricorn Records was foundering. The two-LP record, with nary a new song that had never been released before, met a lukewarm reception, seen as the last gasp of a dying band.

  JAIMOE: When that record came out, I said, “Why do we keep putting out these songs over and over?” A few years ago, a guy I know told me Wipe the Windows was really good. That got me to finally listen to the thing for the first time in years, and man, there’s some unbelievable playing on it.

  At the time, I felt like it was almost ripping people off to put out new versions of songs we had just done a few years earlier. I used to get annoyed with how many Coltrane and Miles records did that. It just didn’t make sense to me. Now I get it.

  LEAVELL: I think the fans felt, “Why would you attempt to redo the songs, some of which were on At Fillmore East?” I get that, because that was a landmark record, cut when the band was musically peaking. But when you go back and study Wipe the Windows, it’s a lot better than it was given credit for. I’m very proud of it, actually.

  JAIMOE: In Gregory’s book [My Cross to Bear], he says that in this era you could tell what kind of drug was going down because of the way everyone played and that’s exactly true and you can hear it on this album: if it was coke, it was edgy and fast. If it was jazzy and kind of groovy, it was codeine. I can listen to it and say, “That’s a syrup song … That’s a pot song.” But that’s a hell of a record and I’m glad we captured the Chuck and Lamar era. It didn’t last all that long.

  * * *

  Organization Man

  Twiggs Lyndon’s wild life and eerie death.

  In 1969 when Phil Walden heard about Duane Allman, the hot session guitarist burning up Muscle Shoals, he sent Twiggs Lyndon to investigate. A trusted employee who had worked as a road manager for many of Walden’s soul acts, Twiggs was already on the case
thanks to his old friend, drummer Jai Johanny Johanson (Jaimoe).

  “Twiggs and I worked together with Percy Sledge and pledged that we would bring each other onto any good gigs we found,” recalls Jaimoe. “When I met Duane, he asked if I knew any other guys and I said, ‘I know a great bassist [Lamar Williams], but he’s in the Army. I’ve got a tour manager, though.”

  By the spring of 1969, Walden had signed Duane Allman and his band to management and recording contracts. When the Allman Brothers Band moved to Macon, Georgia, in May 1969, they moved into Twiggs’s apartment, turning the one-bedroom flat into a den of iniquity known to all as the “Hippie Crash Pad.”

  Twiggs quickly became an indispensible part of the operation, overseeing gear procurement, rehearsal space, and transportation and becoming the road manager once the group started touring.

  Twiggs’s devotion to the ABB was returned. The band appreciated his attention to all details, including a carefully curated list of the age of legal consent for sexual activities in each state. A sharp-minded, creative tinkerer, Twiggs was also an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist with a violent temper that could flare up suddenly and unexpectedly. “He was kind and thoughtful and would do anything for a friend, but he also kept people on edge,” says John Lyndon, the eldest of three surviving Lyndon brothers.

  Willie Perkins, a longtime friend of Twiggs’s who was his handpicked successor as ABB road manager adds, “I remember many times telling Twiggs that he was seeking perfection in an imperfect world. He could be driven bonkers by anything that wasn’t exactly as he felt it should be.”

  On April 30, 1970, Lyndon stabbed club owner Angelo Aliotta to death in Buffalo, New York, in a dispute over $500 owed to the band. Lyndon was eventually found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity; his lawyer, John Condon, essentially argued that life on the road with the Allman Brothers had driven him crazy.

  “Twiggs was a thin-line-between-insanity-and-genius kind of guy,” says Jaimoe. “I loved him as much as I’ve ever loved anyone.”

  Lyndon’s trial was delayed until September 1971, and he was still serving mandated time in a Buffalo mental hospital when Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident on October 29. About a month later, Lyndon returned to Macon and promptly went to Miami where the Allman Brothers Band was finishing Eat a Peach. When the group resumed touring, Perkins remained the road manager and Lyndon became the production manager, overseeing logistical coordination and gear.

  “They assigned Twiggs to me and I found him to be absolutely fascinating,” says Chuck Leavell. “He was full of energy and he was a problem-solver with a superlogical common sense approach.”

  Lyndon relished fixing problems, such as building a case to cushion the transport of Leavell’s Steinway grand piano, based around four VW shock absorbers, and devising a heating element that blew hot air above the keyboard to keep Leavell’s hands warm for cold outdoor performances. Lyndon’s perfectionism also sometimes led to conflict.

  “Things could get testy,” says Perkins. “When anything didn’t precisely match the rider, something was one minute late, or the ice in the cooler wasn’t to his liking, Twiggs would go through the roof and create some very tense situations.”

  After the Allman Brothers split up in 1976, Twiggs discovered the instrumental band the Dixie Dregs in Nashville, and helped get them signed to Capricorn Records. Lyndon had bought the ABB’s smaller equipment truck, known as Black Hearted Woman, and was retrofitting it as a mini tour bus when he offered his and its services to the Dregs.

  “He said. ‘I’ll be your road manager and show you how it’s done,’” says guitarist Steve Morse. “He was an incredible asset and friend—super hardworking, loyal, and competent at everything he tackled.”

  Twiggs, a classic car aficionado, traded a 1939 Ford Opera coupé to Gregg Allman for Duane’s 1959 darkburst Les Paul, determined to hold it for Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle, until she was “old enough not to give it to the first guitar player she dated.” He took the guitar on tour with the Dregs, using it for the one song he performed each night—the ABB’s “Don’t Want You No More.”

  When the Allman Brothers reunited in 1978, Twiggs joined them at Miami’s Criteria Studios as they worked on Enlightened Rogues, but things soon turned ugly when Lyndon suggested to Betts that the band should re-sign with ex-manager Phil Walden.

  “Dickey thought Twiggs was a Phil Walden man and when things got bad between the band and Phil, Dickey didn’t want Twiggs around,” Red Dog Campbell recalled in 1986. “It broke Twiggs’s heart … I am certain that anything Twiggs did was because he thought that was the best thing for the band.”

  Lyndon returned to the road with the Dregs and in the midst of a tour on November 16, 1979, he met up with a group of skydivers in upstate New York to participate in a choreographed formation dive. He died when his chute did not properly deploy, leaving some to conclude that he had committed suicide. It was unthinkable to those who knew Twiggs that such a perfectionist would have made an error packing his chute. Twiggs had often discussed suicide, according to John Lyndon. And the name of the tiny town from which the plane had taken off was striking: Duanesburg.

  Morse, who witnessed the death, rejects the notion that it was intentional.

  “I watched Twiggs rehearse with the group for over an hour outside in bone-chilling temperatures, with him wearing only a lightweight jumpsuit better suited for Southern temperatures,” says Morse. “He also kept a terrible diet, didn’t sleep properly, and was running on coffee and other stimulants. The combination proved lethal.

  “After the successful formation, they split apart. He was one of the last ones to get his chute out. The wind was strong, and his chute opened, but he appeared to be swinging back and forth, due to turbulence or a line being fouled. He cut away and tried to go to his reserve chute, then tumbled with no signs of movement. I’m absolutely convinced that he lost consciousness due to shock and hypothermia. If Twiggs had wanted to kill himself, he would have gone out in style, freefalling onto a target or something. He never would have limply tumbled over and disappeared into some trees as he did.”

  On April 2, 1990, Twiggs’ brother Skoots Lyndon met Galadrielle Allman’s mother, Donna, at Duane’s Macon grave and presented her with the Les Paul, which Morse and the Lyndon family had safeguarded for eleven years. Galadrielle has since lent the guitar to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where it remains on display.

  * * *

  CHAPTER

  20

  Can’t Spend What You Ain’t Got

  FOLLOWING THE BREAKUP, Betts formed Great Southern, Gregg put together the Gregg Allman Band, and Jaimoe, Leavell, and Williams added guitarist Jimmy Nalls and became Sea Level. All three of these bands put out fairly strong albums in 1977. Still, the following year Allman and Walden approached Betts and broached the idea of a reunion.

  Their first joint appearance in almost three years was on August 16, 1978, in New York’s Central Park, when Gregg, Butch, and Jaimoe came out and joined Great Southern for five songs. They quickly decided to reunite. When Williams and Leavell declined to leave Sea Level, the group added two Great Southern members: guitarist “Dangerous” Dan Toler and bassist David “Rook” Goldflies. The headline to a People magazine article about the reunion summed up the public perception of the band: “The Allman Brothers Band Finally Buries the Hatchet—and Not in One Another.”

  LEAVELL: Jaimoe had left our band, partly because of back problems, but Lamar and I were moving on with our career in Sea Level and were in the middle of doing an album when the possibility of doing an Allman Brothers record occurred. We were contacted and said, “Look, we don’t think it’s fair to throw the guys we just hired out in the cold. Let us finish this record, get three months to tour, and we’ll come back.” Well, they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to start immediately and we had to make a decision—which was that it did not seem right.

  PERKINS: Chuck and Lamar were invited to go back and it was pretty m
uch an ultimatum. I don’t think anyone expected them to say no.

  LEAVELL: I would have liked to be a part of it, but I have no regrets. I was with the band during a very difficult and very productive period. I’m very proud of it and I’ll always consider myself an Allman Brother.

  DAVID “ROOK” GOLDFLIES, ABB bassist, 1978–82: We, the other guys in the band, didn’t know the reunion was going to happen in Central Park until just before. Those guys came out and the crowd went bonkers and it hit us all for the first time just what we were part of. You can understand something intellectually but not fully get it until you experience it, and that was the case here. It was very exciting.

  JAIMOE: We were a little rusty—maybe a lot rusty—and we were playing with some different guys, but it felt good to be together.

  Eight days later, the reformed Allman Brothers Band made a surprise appearance at the annual Capricorn picnic, performing four songs. They then returned to Miami’s Criteria Studio to work with Dowd on what became Enlightened Rogues, a term Duane used to describe the band. The album was released six months after the Central Park show, and the band promptly returned to the road.

  The band had renegotiated their deal with Capricorn Records, but many questions about royalties lingered. An audit was undertaken and Dickey Betts filed suit against Walden, alleging nonpayment of record and publishing royalties. Betts’s lawyer Steve Massarsky was managing the group.

  DOWD: We tried very hard to reach the classic sound on Enlightened Rogues. We worked our fingers to the bone, but it was laborious.

  TRUCKS: That band just didn’t work. The chemistry wasn’t there. The only reason the first album was half successful was that Tom Dowd produced it and worked so hard.

  BETTS: Some of the groups we had around that time just could not measure up to the original band. We did not have a slide guitarist, so I had to do it. Not only did I not enjoy this, but it altered the sound of the band, which needs to have my sound and the slide working together. Even when we had some great players, there was a pull, a tension—the unity was lacking. We used to say it was like having two trios on stage.