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

by Paul, Alan

  HAYNES: While we were recording Seven Turns in Miami, we had a night off and Butch said, “Hey, man, we ought to go out and hear my nephew play. He’s amazing.”

  Somebody said, “Cool. How old is he?”

  And Butch goes, “Oh, he’s ten,” and interest immediately waned and turned into snickers. But Woody said, “No, man, I’ve heard this kid. He is amazing. We should go check this out. You’re not going to believe it until you see him.” So me, Woody, and Butch grabbed Gregg and headed down there.

  ALLMAN: I didn’t know anything. Butch said, “Come on, guys, I want to show you something in South Beach.” So we go down there and it’s just starting to get dark and there’s all these beautiful girls with nothin’ on—I loved it down there, man. We’re walking up to this nightclub on the strip and there’s these two boys throwing a ball back and forth and Butch walks up to one of them and says, “Gregory, this is Derek. Derek, this is Gregg.” He looked up at me—a cute little kid—and smiled and I guess we shook hands. I still didn’t know what we were doing there.

  Derek Trucks, 1991.

  We walk in and the club has a stage behind the bar, with the band standing up there like a go-go dancer might. They had a keyboard and a place for two guitars, bass, and drums. Much to my surprise the little kid from the street who Butch had introduced us to gets up, picks up a Gibson that I swear was bigger than him, and just starts burning. He played only slide and he wailed. And that’s the first time I met Derek Trucks. That was him and his brother Duane playing catch and they had to go outside the club when they weren’t playing due to their ages.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Derek’s my brother’s kid but I really can’t explain him. He blew my mind and I needed to show the other guys; there was no point in trying to explain. He started out listening to Duane and at that point that style was all he could do, but I mean he nailed it.

  ALLMAN: Warren looks over at me and says, “Why don’t we have him step down and we’ll play?” I said, “Is the kid making you sweat, man?” Ha-ha!

  HAYNES: I don’t remember that but what I know is we got up there and played some songs and there was what Woody would call a little TV tray keyboard, a little synthesizer thing that Gregg would normally not be caught dead playing, but he liked the idea of us all playing together so he got over it. We were all having fun and Gregg would turn to his left, look at Derek, and just shake his head and wonder and smile. Derek was really small. The SG was bigger than him.

  DEREK TRUCKS: I was a kid so it’s all pretty blurry to me, but I certainly remember how thrilling it was playing with them all for the first time. Even more exciting was what happened after—there was a hotel pool in the back and I was out there with Gregg and Red Dog and they gave me one of Duane’s Coricidian bottles. He was my musical hero and that was a musical relic holy grail.

  ALLMAN: I think starting with slide was a great way to approach it, because it’s hard for little fingers to fret. He was about the same age that I was when I started playing. By the way, he was a real whiz kid at school and everything, with incredible grades. He’s quite an intelligent customer.

  DEREK TRUCKS: I kind of did everything backwards. I started with slide; at nine or ten that felt more natural because my fingers were so small. Ever since, I’ve been trying to work my way up to being a regular player.

  HAYNES: Derek is just amazing and always has been. From the time he was a kid, he was fearless—he would play anything you called out, with no idea what it was.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: By the time Derek was fourteen or fifteen he had already gone past the Duane licks and was headed to new places.

  As the band continued their comeback, preparing to record a follow-up to Seven Turns, they let their contract with Goldberg and Gold Mountain lapse and set out on their own. Gold Mountain would soon be managing Nirvana.

  GOLDBERG: When our initial contract ran out in 1991, they told me that they had decided to move on. You always hope to continue these things, but I had sort of accomplished the purpose I had in their life, helping them get up and running again, and I could understand going forward why they would want to do what they did and it worked out pretty well for them. It wasn’t a big drama, and working with the Allman Brothers is still one of the things I’m most psyched about when I look at my career. The music was amazing, they were making money, and they were very professional.

  PODELL: Bert Holman was the road manager and when the band decided they wanted to “manage themselves” they designated Bert to be in the position. It was very important that they be “self-managed,” but it quickly became obvious that Bert was the manager.

  HOLMAN: They wanted to manage themselves with me as the manager. I’m an employee; they are not signed to my management company. We created a very unique situation where I’m an equity participant. The goal, as created by [lawyer and ex-ABB manager] Steve Massarsky, was to create a situation where there’s an incentive for me to help them make more money and at the same time it’s costing them less than a traditional manager.

  Memphis, 1991, during the Shades of Two Worlds sessions.

  * * *

  March Madness

  How the Allmans at the Beacon became a Manhattan tradition.

  The newly reformed Allman Brothers Band made their first appearance at New York’s Beacon Theater in 1989, when they played four September shows as part of a run of theaters that included Boston’s Orpheum, Philadelphia’s Tower, and Fort Lauderdale’s Sunrise.

  “The band was just back together, had come off a successful summer tour, and wanted to do a series of shows to help reestablish themselves in some key markets and to make some decent money,” says booking agent Jonny Podell. “I put two shows up and quickly went to four. I thought it was a pretty safe bet: the return of the Allman Brothers to Manhattan. The drama had been played out in Rolling Stone and everywhere else. It was like putting a toe in the water.”

  The next run of ABB Beacon shows came in 1992. Wanting to record a live album, the band had captured a four-show run at the Macon City Auditorium, December 28–31, 1991, which did not go well. They would have to try again.

  “We were looking to book a few shows in theaters in strong markets, where we knew the crowd would be good and we could feed off the energy, and where we could settle in for a few days to get comfortable and get a good recording,” recalls Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman. “Boston and New York were the obvious places to try this.”

  The band sold out two shows at Boston’s Orpheum, added appearances in Poughkeepsie and Wilkes-Barre in between, and put two Beacon shows up for sale, with the idea of announcing two or three more if and when the first ones sold out. When tickets went on sale in January, the band was in Japan for a nine-show tour. It was less than two months before the first Beacon dates, which were scheduled for a Tuesday and Wednesday, with a tentative plan to announce weekend dates if those sold.

  “I woke up in Japan and checked my messages and Jonny had been trying to get hold of me,” says Holman. “This was, of course, pre-Blackberry and instant access. I called him and he said, ‘We’re putting Tuesday and Wednesday up for sale!’ I said, ‘You mean, Friday and Saturday’ and he said, ‘No, I put those up, along with Sunday, and they sold out in an hour. We’re into the next week!’”

  The 1992 Beacon run ended up being ten shows, starting on March 10. The first song they played was “Statesboro Blues,” featuring their old jamming buddy Thom Doucette on harmonica. The number of sold-out shows astounded everyone, including the band.

  “We thought doing five would be incredible,” says Holman. “Ten was not even on our radar. At the time, no one was doing these long stands in the States, but they were popular in England, and it seemed like a great concept.”

  Adds Podell, “I heard about Eric Clapton playing for a month at the Royal Albert Hall in London and I thought that was the coolest thing, that he would do that rather than playing two nights at Wembley.”

  The group ended up recording An Evening with the Allman Brother
s Band, First Set, at the Beacon and Orpheum shows. They were just getting started. The Allman Brothers Band did not play the Beacon in ’93, but returned for eight shows in ’94. They moved to Radio City Music Hall for six shows in ’95, before returning to the Beacon in ’96, when they sold out thirteen shows and firmly established themselves as a New York rite of spring. They peaked with nineteen shows in March 1999.

  “The Beacon has become something very special,” says Allman. “We will be back there for as long as we can.”

  The group took 2008 off as Allman underwent treatment for hepatitis before returning to the Beacon the next year with a guest-star-laden fifteen-show fortieth-anniversary celebration. They were forced out of their home in 2010, heading uptown to the United Palace Theater when MSG, newly managing the Beacon, absurdly booked Cirque de Soleil in March. The Brothers returned to the Beacon in 2011 and have sold out more than 222 consecutive shows there as of this writing.

  “This whole amazing thing happened because we needed a place to record some shows,” Holman says. “No one could have anticipated it becoming such an institution, including any of us.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER

  23

  Second Set

  JOHNNY NEEL LEFT the band in 1990 and percussionist Marc Quiñones joined the following year. The Brothers followed Seven Turns with Shades of Two Worlds in 1991. It was a strong, diverse album that seemed to indicate that the Allman Brothers were truly back.

  MARC QUIÑONES, percussionist, ABB member since 1991: I was a member of Spyro Gyra, and Butch and his wife came to a show in Tallahassee. Afterwards, the manager says, “Butch Trucks from the Allman Brothers wants to meet you.” I’m like, “I don’t know who he is or they are, but OK.”

  He comes in and goes, in front of the whole band, “Man, my wife and I couldn’t stop watching you. You were the fucking show. You’re exactly what we’ve been looking for for years and we’re going to steal you!”

  I’m a Puerto Rican from the Bronx who didn’t grow up listening to rock and roll and I’m thinking, “I don’t even know who this dude is.” We exchanged numbers and a few months later he called and invited me to Memphis to “play on a couple of tracks.” That was my introduction to the Allman Brothers. I see Jaimoe sitting on a cooler and think he might be one of the roadies. I see Allen Woody and think he’s Charles Manson’s brother—some crazy dude. I record a few tracks and go home—just another session. They liked it and asked me to go on the road for a run and see how it worked. I’ve been there ever since.

  BETTS: I was real pleased with Seven Turns, but thank goodness we moved ahead a little bit. Shades is much more open musically. We were more used to each other, and we got rid of the second keyboardist, which was important. The band had headed off the path of what the original players had envisioned from the first day. And with [Shades of Two Worlds] we returned to the sound that we’ve always had in our heads.

  Chuck Leavell and Johnny Neel are probably the best blues pianists around, but the band with them was never true to the original members’ vision, which we had before we even started the band. I think this band sounds like what we would’ve sounded like if we had the original players together—if we’d stayed together, which I think we would’ve. Sure, we’d have broken up from time to time. You have to, for God’s sake. Even the Dead break up. They just have enough sense not to talk about it. But this was the first time I felt that way—that we sounded like we would have—since Duane died.

  NEEL: I was disappointed that they did not want me to continue when my contract ran out, but I wasn’t quite playing like they wanted me to play. I think I was experimenting a little bit too much. I was hardheaded and wanted to make my mark, do my own thing. I thought I was bringing something to the table that they didn’t have, but they didn’t want that. I think I made some mistakes.

  BETTS: It was kind of frightening for Gregg to see Johnny go because he hadn’t been stuck out there having to shoulder everything for a long time. But he plays great blues piano. It’s not complex, but it’s exciting. He’s not expected to be a virtuoso; he’s the singer and the piano is mostly coloring—and it fits in great with the guitars.

  NEEL: I know that Gregg was the one who really wanted me in the band in the first place.

  BETTS: Warren was also really coming into his own.

  HAYNES: I had been trying my whole life to establish my own voice as a guitar player. I never wanted it to be obvious to a listener exactly where I was coming from; you want to spread your influences out enough so that you can hear a little bit of this and a little bit of that but it still sounds like you. Then suddenly I was in the Allman Brothers and had to struggle with hitting those notes. It was a challenge to do that and retain and develop my own personality, but being in the Allman Brothers taught me a lot. Being on stage with people who have had their own voice for a long time kind of puts it front and center what that means—in search of the elusive original tone.

  I played with Dickey Betts for eleven years, so of course my playing leaned more towards that school. If I had spent those years playing with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, I’d probably play more like Hendrix—but I still wanted my own personality in there at all times. I would try to forget how I listened to a song originally and the way they first played it and take it to another place, while still making it sound natural and not forced, which is hard to do. I do feel like I got much better at it after a few years; it helped to write more original music together.

  BETTS: It takes a lot of time to get up to the level where you can really improvise together. Warren co-wrote these last two instrumentals “True Gravity” [from Seven Turns] and “Kind of Bird” [from Shades] with me. That’s something I’d never done before; I could collaborate on [songs with] lyrics, but I wrote instrumentals strictly on my own because I never wanted to give anyone a chance to mess with my babies. But I really enjoyed writing these two with Warren.

  HAYNES: “Kind of Bird” is such a complicated song, and writing it with Dickey was such a fun challenge. We would work during the day composing and that night we would rehearse whatever we had written, then write another section the next day. That went on throughout two weeks.

  BETTS: Duane and I used to play “Come On in My Kitchen” all the time and we made up that arrangement. Robert Johnson’s original version doesn’t move off the one chord much, so we put the chords for “Key to the Highway” to it and I made up a vocal melody. Duane recorded a similar version with Delaney and Bonnie [on 1971’s Motel Shot].

  Going from Robert Johnson–style acoustic, dirt-road blues on “Come On in My Kitchen” right through the urban blues things into an abstract, lyrical thing like “Nobody Knows” and a Charlie Parker tribute, “Kind of Bird”—that covers a hell of a lot of ground, a giant spectrum. It is shades of two worlds: from real life to the imaginary world. I think that is also implied by the cover, with the real down-to-earth picture on the front and the very mystical thing on the back.

  During the recording sessions, Dowd suggested that while the group had a strong set of songs, they lacked a single track that would become the album’s centerpiece. “Write something like ‘Whipping Post,’” he suggested.

  Betts returned with the mystical “Nobody Knows,” written for Gregg to sing. The song became a point of contention, ratcheting up tensions between Betts and Allman. Gregg objected to the song’s similarity to “Whipping Post,” the relatively wordy lyrics, and Betts’s insistence on telling him how to sing it. When Dowd finally told the song’s composer, after repeated interruptions, to quit telling the singer how to phrase the lyrics, Betts stormed out of the studio. Despite these creative differences, the final version of the song became a centerpiece of the album and subsequent shows.

  Shades of Two Worlds sessions, Ardent Studios, Memphis. Tom Dowd is on the right.

  The band toured hard behind Shades and released the live An Evening With the Allman Brothers Band, First Set in 1992. Once again, things were less calm than t
hey may have appeared to fans seeing consistently strong performances by a band with a fairly ambitious touring schedule. The Allman Brothers Band played sixty-eight shows in 1990, eighty-seven in ’91, and seventy-seven in ’92, but there was growing tension during the ’93 summer tour and on July 31 Betts was arrested at a Saratoga Springs, New York, hotel the morning after a show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center when he shoved two police officers responding to a call from his wife saying he was drunk and abusive.

  The Saratoga show had been part of the HORDE Festival, also featuring Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and the same bill would be repeating the next night in Stowe, Vermont. The Allman Brothers did not know whether or not Betts would be joining them there.

  HOLMAN: Jonny Podell happened to be there and I immediately pulled together some cash and gave it to him along with a tour bus and told him to go bail Dickey out while the rest of us went on to the gig in Stowe. He paid the bail, but Dickey insisted on being driven to the airport, where he got on a plane to Sarasota. This was before cell phones and Jonny could not get ahold of us. We arrived at four or five and were going on at nine and we did not know whether or not Dickey was going to make it until Jonny pulled up in an empty bus at about seven. We were talking about the alternatives and possibilities and Warren was going around seeing who was there and could help us out.