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

by Paul, Alan

  In 2008, Jorgen Carlsson replaced Hess and the band has kept on keeping on. In 2014, the band, which formed to record “one experimental album” celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

  * * *

  DEREK TRUCKS: No one’s ever taken slide guitar all the way, which is why I was drawn to it. Duane was heading there, but he never had a chance to fulfill his destiny; he only played slide for about three years! He had everything that the earlier guys, the blues masters, had, and then he took it somewhere else. I want to see where slide guitar can go, and it’s a great vehicle for expression, because of the way it can mimic the human voice, wavering on one note and playing melodies on one string. My voice really doesn’t work, so I use my guitar instead.

  WEST: Derek was special to both Dickey and Gregg from the start. He wasn’t just another guitarist; they saw Duane in him.

  ALLMAN: Where does Derek come from? I don’t know, man, but if you believe in reincarnation … I mean, sometimes I look over there [at Derek] and see my brother and … well, I can’t explain it, but I enjoy it.

  JOHN HAMMOND JR.: People sometimes talk about Duane being reincarnated in Derek and there’s something to that. Derek is phenomenal and he has that same sort of easygoing yet very intense style.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Lay Your Burden Down

  ON JANUARY 8, 2000, Joe Dan Petty, an Allman Brothers road crew member since 1970 and one of Dickey Betts’s oldest and dearest friends, died in a private plane crash. Petty was remembered with a memorial service at Macon’s Grand Opera House, featuring a stirring performance by the Allman Brothers Band, joined by Haynes for the first time in three years and Leavell, who had not played with the group in over a decade.

  HAYNES: Woody and I both loved Joe Dan, who was a wonderful, sweet guy. It took someone like that to bring together some people who had not even spoken in many years. It was an emotional and special day.

  WEST: After the memorial concert, everyone came back to the Big House, which was my home then, and it was very meaningful to everyone to all be together there. I remember looking out and seeing Dickey, Butch, Chuck, Bonnie Bramlett, and Leroy Parnell sitting together on the sunporch, gathered around a table and talking for hours. Everyone was so sad about Joe Dan but so happy to be together, especially in the Big House.

  A few days later, while he was still in Macon comforting Petty’s widow, Judi, Betts learned that his spiritual mentor, the Navajo medicine man Stewart Etsitty, had also passed away. Betts was still heavily grieving both losses when the band arrived at the Beacon for thirteen March shows.

  WEST: Joe Dan and Dickey were close friends since they were kids and the comfort zone that Joe Dan created for him onstage was gigantic. He also had his way of making a point with Dickey that other people who just tuned and handed him a guitar did not have and could not have. Losing Joe Dan hit him hard and losing Stewart so soon after knocked him off balance.

  The Beacon performances were shaky, as can be heard on the CD Peakin’ at the Beacon, a curious release that captured what was probably the band’s worst run ever at the theater. Things degenerated considerably in a month, however, and an eight-show spring tour of the Southeast that started on April 28 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was erratic and tension-filled.

  WEST: The spring tour was a fiasco from the first night and it just got ridiculous and it was consistently bad. It was a horrible situation. Red Dog was getting ready to quit. He was going around telling everybody good-bye in Nashville. We went from there to Memphis to Atlanta. Those shows were embarrassing to the legacy of the Allman Brothers. There was so much anger coming from everybody.

  BURBRIDGE: I had never worked in a situation where it was impossible to even get through a whole song without it going completely off the tracks. The crowds still cheered. I was bewildered. Rock and roll, celebrity, all that was new to me. It seemed like a surreal movie.

  WEST: The last show of the run was at a festival in Atlanta, so it was a big, cheering crowd; “Yay, the Allman Brothers!” But I thought, “This band’s breaking up right here.” I felt like I was standing on the side of the stage of the last show of the Allman Brothers Band.

  BURBRIDGE: It had probably been that bad in the past, maybe worse at times, but when it’s the umpteenth time and you can see it coming a mile away because you’ve lived through the cycle so many times before, then it’s harder to swallow.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: It wasn’t that the gigs were that bad. It’s that he was starting to go down that slope again and I wasn’t going with him this time.

  WEST: It was still light when we finished and I watched Butch and Dickey walk off the stage ten feet apart and the anger and hostility between them was so strong that you could feel it. I was certain it was the end of this thing, and it was all within spitting distance of Piedmont Park, where they had really begun.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: When I walked off that stage, I looked at my wife and said, “That’s the last time I’m gonna play with that motherfucker,” and I meant exactly what I said. I figured that’s the end of the Allman Brothers Band.

  DEREK TRUCKS: The year I was in the band with Dickey there was obviously a lot of other stuff going on, a lot of internal tensions that had nothing to do with my arrival and that I tried to steer clear of. There was never weirdness in my own relationship with Dickey. He was always very good to me, dating back to when I was ten years old and sitting in with the band.

  When they all returned home, Allman, Trucks, and Jaimoe sent a letter to Betts, the fourth partner in the Allman Brothers Band, informing him that they were going to tour without him that summer.

  ALLMAN: I just knew that either I was leaving or he was leaving. Honestly, my first thought was I was leaving. I was getting ready to walk because I could not stand the situation anymore. I even wrote a letter of resignation.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: I came close to quitting several times. The bottom line is, as bad as Dickey was fucking up and as difficult as some of the situations were, we were still making a lot of money. Had that been the case in 1982 we probably would have kept going then, too. We all needed the income, sad to say. We try to be as aesthetic as we can be and as true to our roots as we can be, but we’ve got to feed our families. Now it just reached a point where something had to give. And I was ready to quit before I spoke with Gregg.

  ALLMAN: I spoke with Butchie and he was thinking the same thing, and we just realized that was crazy. He asked me, “Are you through? Have you done all you can with the Brothers? Have you had enough?”

  I said, “To tell you the truth, no. I feel like he has spoiled something really good that belongs to all of us. He’s destroying it.” Butch said, “He doesn’t have to destroy it. Why should we leave if he’s in the wrong? Hell, let’s get rid of him.” And I said, “Let me sleep on that.” The next morning, I said, “Please, just let me write the letter,” and he wisely said, “Let’s get together and do it.” I was just really fed up. I had written this real stinger of a letter and I’m glad I didn’t send it.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Both Gregg and I were ready to say, “That’s it. Let’s walk away.” But Jaimoe said, “I’m not going to do that. I’ll agree that he has to get help. I’ll say we will tour without him this summer but the only way to leave the Allman Brothers Band is to die or quit; you can’t get fired.” We wrote Dickey a letter and said we would not tour with him that summer, but dates were already booked and we were going to honor them with someone else and we hoped he would get some help.

  JAIMOE: I said you can’t get fired and I meant it. I thought Dickey would take some time to clean up or whatever and come back to the band after we played some shows without him. He’d done that before and come back basically fine until the cycle started up again.

  ALLMAN: We did not fire Dickey. We laid him off for the summer tour. We made this decision for a simple reason: the music was suffering. It had ceased to be a band—everything had to be based around what Dickey was playing.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Dickey�
��s volume was so high that no one on stage could hear anything else. There was nothing to do but react to Dickey’s playing, or have a train wreck.

  HOLMAN: Everyone was out of sorts at the end of that tour, and the stage volume and how that impacted everything was a major sore spot. The other guys felt that Dickey was so loud that [they] had to follow what he did. I spoke to Dickey and said, “There are real issues with the volume on stage. They want you to use fifty-watt Marshalls.” And he said, “I’ll talk to Gregg. Don’t worry about it.”

  BETTS: I called Gregg and he said, “I don’t owe you an explanation. Listen to the fucking tapes [of the spring tour],” and hung up. A lot of things have been said about our relationship over the years, but we were actually the closest guys in the band.

  TRUCKS: He responded by hiring a lawyer and suing us and then we sat there in arbitration for weeks and after all the stuff that was said, there’s no way we can work together again. Once he filed against us, I spoke to Jaimoe, who said, “Well, I guess he quit.”

  JAIMOE: In reality, Dickey quit the band.

  ALLMAN: I don’t see playing with Dickey again unless something really major happened … No, I just don’t. No.

  HOLMAN: Dickey had the potential to come back. If he had come to a self-realization and stopped drinking, I really think that Gregg and Jaimoe would have done it. Instead, he filed arbitration. We had a meeting with a facilitator, which had the potential to be the start of reconciliation, but Dickey made a statement and then walked out. The band wanted it to be the five of us having a meeting, but he came with two lawyers so the band had to bring lawyers to protect themselves.

  When that didn’t turn out to be constructive, we were on a different path. It’s like going to couples therapy. You either put your marriage back together or it enables you to get divorced, which is what happened. The other three guys said, “You know what, this is not going in a positive direction.” Then the band entered into a very, very lengthy arbitration.

  ALLMAN: After so many years of drinking and abusing drugs, I finally cleaned up and I didn’t want to waste one minute of time for the rest of my life. God, I had wasted enough time! I was finally sober. That monkey was off my back. I even quit cigarettes and I quit it all at once. I realized I was on death’s doorstep and I was thankful to God that I had woken up before all the innings of the game were over. And I wasn’t gonna put up with nothing—not another minute of bullying or negativity mixed with music. I’d quit music first and I don’t think I’m ever gonna quit music.

  BETTS: I knew that there was tension that had to snap but I had no idea that it was all on me. I thought I was doing pretty good. I thought something would snap that I would have to take care of, like I had so many times before. I had no idea that I would be snapped out of the picture. I thought it was cruel and impersonal.

  ALLMAN: Having a band is like having a relationship with a woman. If you’ve ever been in a real bad relationship, you know how little by little you learn to live with somebody who’s absolutely dragging you down and your whole environment is kind of twisted and you don’t even realize it until it’s stopped. It’s definitely hard to maintain a band for so many years for many, many reasons. It’s a give-and-take thing, so similar to a marriage or relationship. It has to maintain a balance or everyone suffers.

  BETTS: I’m just real disappointed in the way this all went down, but I’m not going to bad-mouth anybody in print. No matter how nasty those guys can get, I won’t do that to them. But I think the band broke up in 2000 and I think it’s just been a copy band ever since. If you enjoy going to see Derek and Warren play my and Duane’s stuff, that’s fine. You don’t have to feel guilty … I’m trying to be a gentleman, but all I can say is they still play my songs, but if you come hear my band, you will not hear “Melissa.”

  ALLMAN: I don’t think anything could have kept us all together at that point. There comes a place where there’s just a line and we were already way past crossing that line.

  HOLMAN: They didn’t really ask me. I caught wind of what was going on and I couldn’t stop it. They had made up their minds. They had had enough. The train was off the tracks.

  PODELL: They didn’t consult me, maybe because they knew I would have tried to talk them out of it. After the whole thing went down, I went and visited Dickey because I’m not a fair-weather friend. I thought the whole thing was a mistake and wished I had had a chance to try to help them work through it.

  BURBRIDGE: I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard what the partners were doing. The band was going to break up.

  Manager Bert Holman (center) with Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman.

  ALLMAN: You can say, “Look who’s talking about drinking problems,” and that’s fair. I had the alcoholism real bad, but at least I showed up for gigs and I didn’t take my problems on stage with me and torment everyone else with them. Somehow I kept eking it out.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Yes, Gregg struggled with alcohol for years, but when he had problems, he tended to get real quiet and almost shrink away. When Dickey drank, he got louder and more difficult to deal with … just very mean.

  HOLMAN: Dickey felt he had more power and say because in his mind he had held the whole band together and had stepped up when no else could or did. The problem is, to be a leader you have to lead by attraction, and Dickey was leading by intimidation. His implication was “If you don’t do this, I’ll quit, and are you gonna let him lead it? You gonna play with this drunk?”

  The reality is none of them are good leaders. Dickey was the best of the bunch, but his personal issues got to be too much and undermined his ability to lead. He’s a very charismatic, committed, passionate guy, but he’s not willing to embrace what other people have to say. He’d bully them into doing things his own way rather than making everyone feel a part of it, which is what I think Duane did.

  JAIMOE: When Butch and Gregg told me what they were thinking, I was surprised and then I wasn’t at all, because Dickey has always been unpredictable and difficult since day one. We’d be playing somewhere or rehearsing and he didn’t feel right or didn’t like what he was playing and he’d pack up his guitar and just go walking, or sit and listen to the band, and Duane would say, “What’s the matter, hoss? Why you not feeling good?” Duane could deal with him, but for so many years without him …

  PAYNE: From the very beginning, Dickey could get very introverted and not even speak to anybody for days. He was very moody. He could be a wonderful, sensitive guy or he could be brooding and silent—or angry and scary.

  JAIMOE: When Duane was there, it was one thing, but without him it was something else.

  PERKINS: I never saw a mean streak in Dickey until Duane was gone. Around the time of Brothers and Sisters he started to be hard to handle and have a tempestuous relationship with Gregg.

  HOLMAN: Duane had charisma and vision and he didn’t put people in conflict. He made decisions that were popular. They all emotionally agreed with what he wanted to do. We try to make decisions in the Allman Brothers that are unanimous and not have situations where you have to say, “You were outvoted.” They try to do things by consensus and if someone feels really strongly, they can often turn the consensus around.

  BETTS: It was a real family for so long and we took care of brother Gregg, we took care of brother Butch. And, yeah, they took care of me. We always tried to avoid a competition thing. If one guy was down, the rest of the guys didn’t try to run him into the stage; they tried to carry him. We’d look at each other and say, “I’m flying with one wing tonight,” and carry each other in those situations. That’s the way this band always tried to be. Unfortunately, at certain times drinking and drugs and crooked managers and thievery and other things have caused us to lose sight of that. But that was our essential thing. And I think it kept us playing the way we did for so long.

  Then after thirty years with our two big brothers gone, it finally flew apart, and it’s kind of OK. You see, what’s so complicated about the band is we had three
bandleaders, three visionaries: Duane Allman, Berry Oakley, and me. And we had a very gifted singer/songwriter who didn’t quite see the whole picture: Gregg. The fact that the band carried on for another twenty-five years after Duane’s and Berry’s deaths is amazing. It’s sad that I happened to be in the position of being the one that it came down on, but I think they had to execute somebody to carry on.

  PODELL: At one point I told the whole band, “You know, your income is very possibly going to be reduced by 25 percent or more.” No one argued with me, but Gregg said, “I don’t care. Every day, when it’s time to go to the gig, I get agita. I get tense. It’s no longer fun. If you’re telling me I have to make less, so be it. I’ll vote for serenity.” That was a very valuable lesson for me. And Gregg coming up with that? Out of the mouths of babes …

  BURBRIDGE: Quality of life is important. Time is as important as money at a certain point in your life. Maybe more important. The partners didn’t want to spend any more of their time in preventable turmoil and disability.

  ALLMAN: The Brothers can be so lead-weight, so draining. Bands have their psychodramas, and for all those years we had four people trying to drive one truck, and it could get really fucking frustrating. But it’s something inside me. It’s just part of my skin, part of my metabolism. It’s part of my nervous system, and I dearly love it. It’s like, I can’t be me without you.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Walk On Gilded Splinters

  GUITARIST JIMMY HERRING joined the band for the 37-date 2000 summer tour, which kicked off on June 16 in Virginia Beach and continued through September. Herring had played with Burbridge in the Aquarium Rescue Unit and is close friends with Derek Trucks. It was jarring to see the Allman Brothers Band with the three young friends on the front line—and without Betts, who had for so long been the center-stage focus. The music, however, was strong from the start.