by Paul, Alan
He calls his doctor, hands the phone to Gregg, they go back and forth, and the guy says he’ll call it in, and Clive gets back on the phone and tells him what drugstore and it’s all done. Suddenly, Gregg asks, “Clive, what size refill did he get?”
He says, “I’m not sure.”
So they call the pharmacy and it was just a couple of ounces to get him through until he sees a doctor, which did not please Gregg at all. He tried to get Clive to call the pharmacy back and get more. As the manager I was so embarrassed. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
LAWLER: They got a name producer, John Ryan, who had hits with Styx and the Doobie Brothers and tried to really go there, and he took them even further away from their roots. That album did not even have an instrumental and the single was [the light, poppy] “Straight from the Heart.”
GOLDFLIES: “Straight from the Heart” was an odd little tune and it was an odd decision to record it, much less release it as a single. The Allman Brothers swung, playing a lot of triplets with Butch’s great shuffle feel, and suddenly we were playing straight eights and everyone felt weird. Their rhythmic feel had swing and polyrhythms—rock with jazz and cool country overtones—and when we played the straight beats on a song like “Straight from the Heart,” it felt lifeless. We all tried to make it come alive, but it was an experiment that failed.
LAWLER: They were trying to get a hit: Dickey co-wrote “Straight from the Heart” with Cobb for a reason. He allowed it to happen; it’s not like the two of us came in and dictated to the Allman Brothers Band what they should do and how they should sound.
GOLDFLIES: There were a lot of forces at work: the label, management, the people in the band and their own desire to have a hit. Looking back, that obviously wasn’t the best thing to do. The band was kind of countercultural the whole time, and attempting to become cultural was a little death, but they got swept up in the prevailing moods.
ALLMAN: Arista tried to throw us into doing something that we weren’t. The whole music scene of the ’80s just wasn’t conducive to our music at all. We cut two albums and … it was very frustrating. Embarrassing, really. All that led us to go on a big hiatus. We backed out before it got too bad.
TRUCKS: We compromised and tried to write hit songs and wound up with the two worst records we ever did. They were a huge embarrassment. It just wasn’t fun. We didn’t like the music we were making.
SCHER: I tried to get Chuck Leavell, who I thought was a great creative force, back in the band, but Gregg would hear nothing of it. Those kinds of things got them at loggerheads, along with the drugs, personal lives, marriages, who got along with what wife. Butch and his wife were actually moderating forces, but I thought the biggest problem was that Dickey and Gregg had different advisers giving them bad advice, especially Gregg.
His lawyer was adamant that Gregg would not accept Chuck as a member of the band. He would intimate that Gregg would have a major problem with Chuck being brought in, saying things like, “What are you going to do if Gregg leaves, call it the Brothers Band?” I thought he had a lot to do with the tensions that existed.
BERT HOLMAN, who assisted Scher in day-to-day management and has been the ABB manager since ’91: There were lingering business issues with Chuck related to Capricorn royalties, which became an issue within the band because of the manner in which Chuck handled it. I think at the time Dickey, Butch, and Gregg were on the same page about not playing with Chuck. That would obviously change.
SCHER: Jaimoe was not in the band. He would have been a very steadying hand because he was not only a great drummer but was and is a great guy. To this day I don’t have an explanation for why he wasn’t, but rarely does a spouse representing a husband or wife work well in a band setting, which should be a democratic process, where everyone can speak his mind. It was a shame and definitely did not help the overall situation.
The band found themselves banging heads with Arista as they discussed ideas for a third album on the label. Davis did not have approval rights on material, but he did have final say on producers and rejected everyone the band suggested, including Tom Dowd and Johnny Sandlin.
BETTS: We broke up in ’82 because we decided we better just back out or we would ruin what was left of the band’s image. In some ways it was easier for Gregg and me to go out with our own bands because that didn’t have the same weight of expectations. We could do things a little differently—get good players and play without people comparing us to the history of the Allman Brothers Band. And doing that with the support of our great, hard-core fans allowed us to keep our tools sharp and to get great new players, so we were ready when the time was right to try the Allman Brothers again.
SCHER: The best thing I did for the band was getting their royalties from Polygram bumped from 6 percent—which continued the original deal with Capricorn—to 12 percent. It really should have gone to 18 percent, but that wasn’t in the cards and 6 percent was unconscionable, though horrible contracts and royalty rates were not uncommon in early rock and roll. I don’t think what Phil did was really different than what Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun, and other music entrepreneurs did at the time; if they could get away with a small royalty, they did.
Even one person [Walden] being their manager, record company, and publisher is not that weird in the context of the times. They were a generation after guys like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard were completely screwed—they had some protection. But Phil was a very smart guy—smart enough to know that he had to raise their royalties after they started selling millions of records. Unquestionably, he should have done so, and the minute Polygram got the masters, they should have upped the royalties, but there’s a lot of greed in the record business. It went on way, way too long.
The band’s final performance was on Saturday Night Live, on January 23, 1982. They played a double-time version of “Southbound” and the appropriately titled “Leavin’,” which seemed likely to be the last song the group would ever play together.
SCHER: Gregg’s lawyer was convinced that he could do just as well as a solo act, which is why he pushed everything so hard. And he was totally wrong.
PERKINS: Gregg called me in ’83 and asked me to come help him get his solo career back up and running. I eventually took over managing him along with Alex Hodges. The first time I went to see Gregg, he was playing a dive bar in Jacksonville and I couldn’t believe where he was. He was playing and singing great, but commercially he had fallen so far. It was a tough time for this kind of music. Southern rock was a bad word, and everyone was suddenly in vastly changed circumstances.
He wanted a record deal and the gigs were not great. He was basically playing clubs and it was a grind, but Gregg was cool with it, because he’d rather be gigging on a dime than not gigging. He likes to play and used to tell me he wanted to be like B.B. King and keep playing until an advanced age and, “I want to play every gig like it’s my last one.” He worked hard.
ALLMAN: It wasn’t quite like starting over, but it sure was close, after all those years. That was the age of electronic music and disco and there wasn’t much of a calling for us or what we did. It was hard. It really was, for all of us.
BETTS: We were trying to survive the disco thing by playing in beer joints. Remember that group BHLT [Betts, Hall, Leavell, and Trucks]? It sounded like a deli sandwich but it was a pretty good band. But it died; nobody would even let us record an album.
SCHER: When the band split up, Gregg went his way, and we got Jimmy Hall from Wet Willie, and got Chuck back with Dickey and Butch and that [BHLT] was a really good band. But Dickey and Butch were still signed to Arista and Clive did not want to do a record and it kind of drifted apart.
CHAPTER
21
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
THE MEMBERS OF the Allman Brothers Band toured with different groups throughout the ’80s, most of them needing to stay on the road to pay their bills. In 1986, Betts and Allman mounted a joint tour in which Betts opened, A
llman and his band performed, and then the pair joined forces for a set. The Allman Brothers Band also performed together twice in 1986, at Charlie Daniels’s Volunteer Jam and Bill Graham’s Crack Down on Crack benefit at Madison Square Garden.
PERKINS: Things started to look up a little bit. The joint tour was successful and, after having no record company interest—and I mean no interest from nobody—Epic suddenly called after hearing the “I’m No Angel” demo. We knew as soon as we heard that song what Gregg could do with it; it was autobiographical, though he had not written it.
MICHAEL CAPLAN, Epic Records A&R: I found Gregg’s four-song demo cassette in my bosses’ garbage and picked it up. I was new in A&R and looking for my first project and I was a longtime, serious Allman Brothers Band fan. This was the height of the record industry with CD money rolling in and most label higher-ups were only interested in potential megahits. The Allman Brothers were not sexy. I listened to that demo and the first song was “I’m No Angel,” which I thought was great. So I got in touch with Willie Perkins and Alex Hodges and signed Gregg to Epic.
PERKINS: I thought the Allman Brothers reunions for the Volunteer Jam and the Crack thing in New York went well, but Gregg was also busy working on I’m No Angel and the timing didn’t seem right to try a full-fledged reunion. I actually tried to beg off the crack show because I didn’t think Gregg would do well. He was drinking heavily and I just thought, “How am I even going to get him to this thing?” We were in Florida recording and he was barely coherent.
But he got up there and did his job perfectly. He could play through that stuff remarkably well. Offstage, it was sometimes a different story, but Gregg very rarely embarrassed himself onstage regardless of his condition.
Gregg’s first solo album in a decade, I’m No Angel, was released in February 1987 and was a surprise hit. The title track garnered heavy airplay and rose to the top of Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart.
Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts, joint solo tour, 1986.
CAPLAN: Once we got it rolling with Gregg, I thought, “Let’s get Dickey.” I knew the way they had always worked and figured they would eventually make up and want to play together again. So I signed Dickey, who was just putting this great band together with Warren, Johnny Neel, and Matt Abts, and we started working on Pattern Disruptive. We did it at Butch Trucks’s studio in Tallahassee and Butch hadn’t been playing and we got him to guest. I told Dickey that he should do an instrumental and he was like, “No one does that anymore,” and then recorded one [“Duane’s Tune”].
I enjoyed working on these records, but I was just waiting for the natural thing to happen.
Allman’s second Epic album, 1988’s Just Before the Bullets Fly, fell flat despite a strong title track written by Warren Haynes, then in the Dickey Betts Band and soon to be a major figure in the revival of the Allman Brothers. The following year, Betts’s Pattern Disruptive also failed to make a mark.
A new radio format—classic rock—had given the Allman Brothers’ catalogue songs renewed prominence. The four-album Dreams career retrospective box set also shined a light on their legacy and the band was celebrating their twentieth anniversary; the time was ripe for a reunion.
BETTS: Classic rock stations really brought the Allman Brothers back, and Stevie Ray Vaughan opened the whole thing up. He just would not be denied and kept making those traditional urban blues records. He just shoved blues down people’s throats and they got to likin’ it. He kicked the door open. I remember how beautiful it made me feel to hear him on the radio. And I think that a lot of other people felt the same way and were more ready for us to reappear.
ALLMAN: Disco went out and good old blues came back around. If you notice, the blues always seem to come back eventually, because that’s the basis for good, honest rock and roll.
Jonny Podell, who had booked the band since the beginning and was recently back on his feet after his own bouts with drug and alcohol addiction, saw an opportunity.
PODELL: I was representing the Dickey Betts Band, ICM was booking the Gregg Allman Band, and I thought, “Wait a second; I know everyone and have everyone’s trust and respect and this had been the greatest band in America.” I got everyone together and came up with a manager that I thought everyone could agree to: Danny Goldberg.
DANNY GOLDBERG, manager, 1989–91: Johnny Podell called me up and said, “You are the guy to help get the Allman Brothers back together again.” He thought Dickey would trust me because I was managing the music career of his friend Don Johnson, who was at the apex of his Miami Vice fame, and Gregg would like me because I knew some people in the movie business.
PODELL: Gregg always had that little love of Hollywood. I knew it would be appealing. I had my own admitted agenda—I knew we could do great business and it seemed crazy not to do a twentieth-anniversary tour.
Jaimoe was back behind his kit when the group reformed.
JAIMOE: I knew that the best route to express myself musically was through the Allman Brothers Band, the best door to reach the people I need to reach is through the Allman Brothers Band, and the best door to make the money and live the way I want to live is through the Allman Brothers Band. I’m no dummy about any of that.
GOLDBERG: Obviously, the key to the whole thing was Gregg and Dickey and whether they could exist together, so I met with each of them before I even spoke to Butch or Jaimoe. They both had been touring solo and had not been doing remotely as well as they could together, so they had financial incentives to do it and it became clear pretty quickly that they were ready and able to work together again and the band came together pretty quickly after a few meetings.
In June 1989, the band took to the road for a twentieth-anniversary tour, featuring guitarist Warren Haynes and pianist Johnny Neel, both from the Betts Band, and bassist Allen Woody, who was hired after open auditions held at Trucks’s Florida studio.
The Allman Brothers Band, 1990 (from left) Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes, Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks, Allen Woody, Jaimoe, Johnny Neel.
BETTS: The Who were touring, and the Stones were getting ready to hit the road. Epic wanted us to get back together because everyone else was doing it—but it wasn’t that simple. We had to go slow, to see if the music was up to snuff and whether we really wanted to do it.
ALLMAN: We knew we had to tour before we recorded, to make sure it was there.
BETTS: The release of Dreams [a 4-CD box set summing up the band’s career] really worked out well for us, because we were in a Catch-22. We did not want to record without touring first, but it was hard to tour without a record to support and generate some interest. The box set took care of that for us, and allowed us to go out on a twentieth-anniversary tour.
PODELL: I approached that with the beginner’s mind: the possibilities are endless. I was hopeful, because there was a tremendous legacy to build on, but there were also drug problems and personality conflicts that I knew were going to be challenges. They had a great band together but who knew how long it would last?
CAPLAN: I wasn’t thinking short-term, but who would have thought it would turn into the longest-lasting incarnation of the band? We all knew it was volatile and not to look too far down the road.
TRUCKS: We weren’t sure we’d even get through the first tour. We all had agreed that if the band wasn’t solid and we weren’t a good representation and couldn’t live up to our legacy, then we weren’t going to keep doing it. But we started playing good music and doing those old, classic songs proud. Then I figured maybe we could get a three-to-five-year run in.
GOLDBERG: The music was good and they were making money from the start. And one of the greatest things about working with them was they had this great crew that was thrilled to be back on the road with them. This guy Red Dog came up to me and said, “Thank you for giving me my life back. I was dead and now I’m alive again.”
JOHNNY NEEL, keyboards, 1989–91: I did one tour with Gregg’s band and then he told me that the Allman Brothers were re-forming and
he wanted me to go with them. He was kind of emphatic about it. He really wanted me to be in the band, but I’m not sure about everyone else.
TRUCKS: We had open auditions for bass at my studio in Tallahassee. Allen Woody just came in and kicked butt.
ALLMAN: I hated having to have open auditions after all those years, but it became clear fast that Allen was the guy.
ALLEN WOODY, bassist, 1989–97: I had listened to the band for fifteen years and thought I knew what made it tick, but I had no idea what my role would be. The day I auditioned there were ten bass players. I played last, because I wanted to see if I could pick up anything I was doing wrong. What I figured out was that the other bassists honed in on one or the other of the drummers and tried to catch a pocket with him, but to make the rhythm section work, it has to be every man for himself.
HAYNES: Everyone else who auditioned walked in with one bass and plugged into the rig on stage. Woody brought a boatload of instruments and his own SVT [amp] rig. When he walked in and put all these basses on stands and plugged in that rig, some people thought that it was kind of over the top. Everyone was scratching his head about all those basses because the Allman Brothers were generally a group where someone played one bass all night, but Woody was bound and determined to bring his personality with him and part of that was, “I’m over the top. I’m a gear freak instrument collector and I have all these great basses to choose from.” And in hindsight, him having his SVT there was probably a plus, because it gave a hint of his tone and approach, which were both totally unique.