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

by Paul, Alan

  HAYNES: My solo band was on the bill and playing at about noon. We drove overnight to Stowe and were staying in a bed-and-breakfast. We got there and crashed at about seven a.m., and an hour later there was banging on my door and someone saying I had an emergency phone call from Bert Holman. There was no phone in our little bungalow and I had to walk all the way up this hill to the main house to talk to Bert, who said Dickey was in jail and probably wouldn’t be there. I had to start thinking about what to do—and my solo band was due on stage in just hours.

  KIRK WEST, ABB “Tour Magician” and logistical coordinator, 1989–2009: I had traveled with Warren and we were there trying to figure out who could help out, but Warren was going on before most of the bands had arrived, so there was no one to talk to yet. There was a lot of scrambling going on, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what we were going to do about it.

  Amid the scramble, Haynes managed to not only perform his own set, but to sit in with Widespread Panic for two songs. That night, Aquarium Rescue Unit guitarist Jimmy Herring subbed for Betts and the band was also joined by Blues Traveler harmonica player John Popper for seven songs and Warren Haynes Band keyboardist Danny Louis for two. While these guest musicians helped to plug a gaping musical hole, they were all going their separate ways with the HORDE tour, and the Allman Brothers had a gig the next night at Boston’s Great Woods Amphitheater. They started looking for a replacement, for what was originally presumed to be a single gig. Herring was continuing his tour with the ARU and was not available.

  HAYNES: I said that we should bring in Chuck Leavell. I said that the fans love Chuck, he’s a big part of the history, he sounds great, he’s contributed so much to the band’s music through the years, and he knows all the material. Bert and Jonny [Podell] were concerned that there needed to be two guitar players on stage, which I disagreed with.

  They were saying, “This is a guitar band. People want to hear the two guitars.” I was assuming we were talking about one night and I thought, “No, the best way to get through this show is gonna be with Chuck Leavell. We’ll have a blast. People will love it.” There was concern about people demanding refunds, but I figured that while people would surely be disappointed that Dickey wasn’t there, in that situation you stay to see what happens, because what happens is probably going to be really cool. Worst-case scenario is it’s going to be one to remember. When it became obvious they wanted another guitarist, I said, “Well, let’s get Jack Pearson.”

  Pearson, a Nashville-based friend of Haynes, had a run of festival dates booked and did not want to break his commitments, particularly with no guarantee that the Allmans gig would go on for more than one or two shows. The search for a sub continued.

  DAVID GRISSOM, Austin, Texas, guitarist: I was out playing gigs with John Mellencamp and was on my way home. I called my wife from O’Hare and she said, “Someone from the Allman Brothers called and they want to know if you can come out and play some gigs.” Um, yeah! This was all pre-cell-phone-in-every-pocket, so I called and left a message for Bert, then got on a plane, and by the time I got back home they had already gotten someone else.

  HAYNES: I called Jack, but he couldn’t make it, then I called David and couldn’t reach him, and the decision was made—not by me—to bring Zakk Wylde in.

  HOLMAN: By the time Grissom called back, we had gotten ahold of Zakk and I think he was literally on the red-eye to Boston to join us. We told David, “We’ve got this covered, but we’re going to put you on deck.”

  Zakk Wylde had been playing with Ozzy Osbourne since 1987 and was known to be a fan of Southern rock, performing Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers with a band dubbed Lynyrd Skynhead. He also had some connections to the Allman Brothers: Jonny Podell booked him, and Michael Caplan worked with Ozzy at Epic.

  ZAKK WYLDE, Ozzy Osbourne guitarist, 1987–95: I was in the studio recording with Ozzy when I got a call from the Allmans’ manager, who knew that I was a big fan. He called at six and said that Dickey couldn’t make the next night’s show, and that they’d like me to sit in but I’d have to fly out that night—at eleven on the red-eye. I grabbed my guitar and headed for the airport. I was pumped.

  WEST: It was clear this was a bad idea before he ever walked on stage—from the moment he got there. He had a rebel flag Les Paul with Budweiser bottle caps nailed into it, and the target Les Paul and he looked wrong and acted wrong for the Allman Brothers.

  WYLDE: I got there at seven in the morning, listened to the tape they had for me, and jammed a couple tunes. Warren and I went through some stuff before the show, but no one told me much about what we would do. We just had a soundcheck/rehearsal, which was hilarious. Butch Trucks asked if I knew how to play “Dreams” and I said, “What, that Molly Hatchet song?” And they all cracked up. Gregg said, “Brother Zakk, keep talking like that and we’re gonna have to send you home.”

  HAYNES: We had a long soundcheck to rehearse. He had been given a list of songs to learn, and part of their selling point convincing us to bring Zakk in was that he played in an Allman Brothers cover band in his spare time and knew all the material. For me, who the other guitarist on stage is going to be is a sensitive topic, especially in the Allman Brothers. Zakk is great at what he does, but I don’t think until he got there he understood what makes that music click—and maybe he still doesn’t.

  HOLMAN: Zakk loved the music, but the problem is, he had never really seen the band play. He thought they were Lynyrd Skynyrd. He’s a nice-enough guy and he plays well, but he was not really attuned to what we do and wasn’t ready to listen to what anybody else was playing. His idea was “Everybody vamp and I’ll solo.”

  WEST: He was out there with his Ronnie Van Zant hat on running all over stage, fanning Warren with a towel and trying to put his hat on Warren’s head. He was very excited and had no clue how the Allman Brothers Band behaved onstage.

  HAYNES: It’s not something that’s obvious—how to take a jazzy improvisational approach to what most people would consider rock music. In order for us to play our best, we have to listen to each other like a jazz band does and most rock musicians are not geared for that.

  WYLDE: They were way fuckin’ cool, man. But it was hysterical, ’cause when we played “Dreams” I must have soloed for twenty minutes. I’d died and gone to heaven and I wasn’t going to stop. I was just jamming. But I almost gave Butch a coronary, ’cause every time we got to where the band was repeating the same lick, preparing to come out of the jam, I’d just keep soloing. I came over to Butch in between songs and he goes, “Zakk, fuck, man! Calm down a little bit, brother.” And I go, “But this is my favorite band.” And he goes, “Yeah, it’s mine, too, but just fuckin’ relax!”

  We even did an acoustic set; we did “Melissa” and “Midnight Rider.” Warren was really helpful. I spent a lot of time standing next to him, staring at his hands and saying, “Dude! What the fuck?” Warren’s a killer guitar player, which made it a lot easier on me. I had the time of my life. It was just awesome.

  While Wylde enjoyed himself and allowed the band to fulfill their gig, the Allman Brothers were not amused by his antics, which included spitting mouthfuls of beer in the air and standing atop his front stage monitor—normal behavior in his world, which did not translate to theirs.

  CAPLAN: I worked with Ozzy and made the connection to Zakk, who said he knew all the music and was very excited to do it. I was at the show watching him jumping off the amps and thinking, “Boy, am I in trouble.”

  HOLMAN: Everybody said, “This ain’t working. Thank you very much.”

  WEST: That was one of the biggest mistakes in Allman Brothers history. There were guys in the parking lot at Great Woods who could have played a better Allman Brothers show than Zakk Wylde. It was an embarrassment, but it was just one night. Zakk’s behavior was no more obscene than the behavior that got him on that stage in the first place, but clearly we were going to have to try something different.

  GRISSOM: I was back in Austin
in a music store trying out some guitars and I got paged. My wife was on the phone and said the Allman Brothers had called back. She said, “It didn’t work out last night and they want to know if you can be on a plane in two hours.” I didn’t even know where my guitars were, because they hadn’t arrived back from tour.

  I got a guitar and my reverb unit, put it in an Anvil case, and flew out to D.C. They picked me up at the curb at midnight in the tour bus. The next day we had an hour or so rehearsal at soundcheck, then played a full gig to a sold-out Merriweather Post Pavilion. And that was the last rehearsal or soundcheck we had.

  HOLMAN: We basically dropped Zakk off at the airport and picked Grissom up.

  HAYNES: David is a great player, he’s a sweetheart of a guy and he’s a quick study. He kind of saved the day, really, because we had no idea how long this was going to last.

  GRISSOM: It was like a fantasy experience. When I was sixteen, I’d jam with two drummers and play a lot of those tunes, and to be standing up there next to Gregg playing “Dreams” was surreal. I played about ten shows, and it was a total joy from the minute I got there until the minute I left. I felt the joy of music flooding back into me. It was such a different experience from my other big rock tours. There was so little drama or pretense and so little instruction or pressure to play someone else’s licks. The only ones who said anything to me were Warren and Woody, who basically said, “You can stretch out longer if you want.”

  We’d all amble out, make sure we were in tune, and just let ’er rip. I felt like I had played a jazz gig, but in front of a giant, totally appreciative crowd. Having a crowd that size really listening to every note was phenomenal. The audience is such a huge part of the deal with that band. I was sad to come back to my real life, but I returned with a renewed sense of purpose and love of music, and a keener understanding of why I do this.

  WEST: We went through a few days of literally not knowing where Betts was and then he surfaced and Grissom settled in and everyone relaxed. The music was good, the tension was gone, and the shows were fun.

  Following Grissom’s nine shows, the band finished the tour with Pearson playing nine more.

  JACK PEARSON, sub guitarist, 1993; ABB member, 1997–99: I had learned Duane’s and Dickey’s parts when I was a kid and I knew every note they played on At Fillmore East and Eat a Peach by heart, so I was ready to go. I flew to Dallas with no rehearsals. Warren and I spent a little time in a hotel room and I just said, “Which part are you playing?” and then I played the other one. We just went out and played. Gregg liked it and said, “Hey, man, come play with me and come out to my house and write.” I went to his place and we wrote “Sailing Across the Devil’s Sea.”

  “Sailing” would appear on the ABB’s next album, 1994’s Where It All Begins. Pearson also joined Gregg Allman and Friends, playing with Gregg’s solo band for most of the next three years and appearing on his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity. Betts, meanwhile, returned to the Allman Brothers Band in November 1993, seemingly refreshed.

  BETTS: I got on about a three-year drunk there. The first two years was a lot of fun, and the last year got to be a living hell. But then—at least I was intoxicated. The other guys had to put up with it sober.

  After Betts’s return, Allman’s own struggles with drugs and alcohol worsened. The pair seemed to be locked in a strange, destructive dynamic in which if one went up, the other went down.

  QUIÑONES: It was like a roller coaster with those two. When one was raging, the other was kind of cool. They were never really fucked up together. It was one or the other, which was kind of strange.

  CAPLAN: Gregg and Dickey had this weird dynamic. I always felt like they were Clark Kent and Superman, but you never knew who was which.

  HAYNES: It was difficult on the rest of us.

  WEST: When Gregg was absolutely insane, Betts would have it reasonably together and vice versa. From a show perspective, it was better when Dickey had his shit together, because you could roll Gregg down in the mix and he’d sit in the dark and usually be able to sing halfway decently. But when Betts was feeling his oats, he was the loudest guy onstage. It was very hard to ignore Dickey when he was fucked up, and it created some bad scenes and a lot of tension.

  QUIÑONES: Dickey could really lash out and be unpredictable and violent. Gregg is more passive-aggressive, and when he was in bad shape, he was more like the passive drunk. Nobody was scared of him.

  HAYNES: I was becoming the person that Dickey could talk to when he couldn’t talk to Gregg, and that Gregg could to talk when he couldn’t talk to Dickey. I was like, “push me, pull you,” trying to be neutral, trying on a moment-by-moment basis to keep the peace and also figure out what was best for the band musically and creatively. It was a tough spot to be in. It was very frustrating and it made me feel more and more like maybe I’m doing the wrong thing, maybe I need to be concentrating on my own stuff.

  CAPLAN: They looked to Warren more and more to do things—because he did them.

  WEST: Dickey and Gregg talked very little to each other. There were very few band meetings. When things had to get done, Bert would make the rounds, one by one, saying, “Here’s what we need to decide. What do you think?” And when it was a musical decision or question, they often would go through Warren. He was always in the middle.

  Warren has always held the entity of the Allman Brothers Band in extremely high regard, as did Woody. They thought it was their responsibility to hold it up and take it further. They took that seriously and it was not always an easy job.

  Even as Haynes was becoming ever more indispensible to the band, he was tiring of the stress and uncertainty. He considered leaving when Tales of Ordinary Madness, his first solo album, was released in 1993. He stayed and the Warren Haynes Band opened for the ABB for much of the ’93 Summer Tour—the one that was shaken by Betts’s sudden departure and the scramble to find replacements. Haynes was performing double duty through many of these shows, opening with his own band before taking the stage again with the headliners, bearing much of the responsibility for keeping the Allman Brothers Band on track.

  HAYNES: When I joined the band in ’89 I was in the middle of starting to pursue my solo career, which I had put on the back burner to join the Dickey Betts Band a couple of years earlier. Things were starting to come to fruition for me and I had a lot of opportunities that I didn’t want to pass up, but I also had this amazing opportunity to be in the Allman Brothers.

  The more the communication would break down and the overall vibe and positive aspect of the band, especially the original members, would start to deteriorate, the more it would push me to concentrate on my own music. I would almost take it as a sign that that’s what I should be doing. As the vibes got more and more negative, I would wonder what I was doing there.

  Despite his misgivings, Haynes stuck with the band, Betts returned, and the band reached another period of relative stability, returning to the studio to cut their third post-reunion album, which became 1994’s Where It All Begins, recorded live on a soundstage at Burt Reynolds’s Florida ranch.

  HAYNES: Dickey and I mentioned to each other a bunch of times over the years how nice it would be to record without headphones, because your guitar never sounds like your guitar through headphones or small speakers. So you play to the tone of the amp and trust that they’ll make it sound good later. On Where It All Begins, we just set up our live gear and played. It was a big pleasure to play without headphones on.

  BETTS: Our playing together is just so different live. There’s an eye contact and body language thing we do with one another. For instance, often when I’m playing rhythm, my rhythms turn into kind of sympathetic chord solos. And I’ll be watching his body language much like a boxer would watch for the counterpunch. I can kind of see where he’s going and react to it. You can’t do that kind of thing in a studio setting, even if you’re playing all of your parts more or less “live.”

  HAYNES: We always recorded with everyone tracking l
ive, but on WIAB we set up like we were on stage, with monitors, lights, and everybody in the same room, and I think we were able to re-create more what we did on stage because that’s how we were seeing and hearing things. I think any time you can record like that, whatever you lose from a technical standpoint, you more than make up for in music and feel.

  BETTS: I actually wrote “No One to Run With” ten years earlier with a hometown friend of mine named John Prestia. It was during the ’80s when no one would give us the time of day. Having that song return from the grave points out how much things [had] changed in the music business.

  HAYNES: We were ahead of schedule, which was rare. We basically recorded everything slated and had more time booked. Dickey went home and Gregg said, “Why don’t we do your song ‘Soulshine’?” I knew Gregg had heard it, but the suggestion came out of the blue. I never really thought of it as an Allman Brothers song until I heard Gregg sing it. We recorded it and left space for Dickey’s parts and sent the tracks to him to finish. I left him a lot of space to fill but he played very little.

  Maybe because it was the one song on the album we didn’t play everything together live, I never was really satisfied with how that version of “Soulshine” turned out. It sounds too sparse.

  TRUCKS: Warren brought in “Rocking Horse,” originally intended for Gregg to sing, and I think we cut a version of it, but Gregg didn’t want to sing those lyrics. Warren’s response was, “OK. I’ll sing it,” and we cut it, but Dickey refused to finish the song. He wanted another one of his songs on it, and said, “We’re doing ‘Mean Woman Blues’ instead.” “Rocking Horse” was a much stronger tune.

  HAYNES: I somewhat like my playing on Seven Turns, and somewhat more on Shades of Two Worlds, but when I listen back, I know that I’ve learned a lot since then. I like my playing on the live records and on Where It All Begins much more. I feel like we were really starting to come into our own with our own sound and approach.