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

by Paul, Alan

  HOLMAN: It was a risk and an unknown. We realized pretty quickly we would be OK musically, but it was a challenge keeping it together on a business level. There were questions about the viability, and certainly some big Dickey fans who were very vocal about it.

  QUIÑONES: A lot of the press was really negative and a lot of fans were saying they wouldn’t come out because the Allman Brothers are not the Allman Brothers without Dickey Betts. I really did not know what would happen.

  Jimmy Herring.

  HOLMAN: Derek was still very young and didn’t have the maturity to take a leadership role.

  DEREK TRUCKS: When I first heard what they were doing, I thought, “Here’s this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band, one of the legendary rock institutions, and I am the only guitarist in the band.” I was like, “You guys have an inflated sense of confidence that I can do this, but let’s go!”

  PODELL: For me, it was like when Duane died—I just really did not know if it was going to work. I had some real doubts, but I work for the band and do my best. Just like thirty years before, I put everything I knew into play, positioned it, and hoped for the best. And then I prayed.

  DEREK TRUCKS: When Jimmy’s name came up, I knew it would be musically great, but does that make it the Allman Brothers? Even I didn’t know.

  JIMMY HERRING, guitarist, 2000 summer tour: It was a great honor to even get the call. The Allman Brothers were the reason I started playing guitar. I got on a plane and listened to Allman Brothers songs all the way there. Just because you’ve played all those songs doesn’t mean you really know them. I took the obligation to do them right very seriously.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Jimmy Herring really was great, but he was never comfortable being known as “the guy who replaced Dickey Betts.”

  HERRING: It was bittersweet and bizarre. I was really excited to be a part of that great band and to play with Derek, who is one of my best friends and favorite players. But this wonderful opportunity happened at someone else’s expense and I don’t want to benefit from someone else’s demise, especially someone I revere as much as Dickey. I stepped into Dickey’s place and I’m a huge Dickey fan. I felt real strange about being there without him. It was such a mix of emotions. You can feel the history and it makes you want to do your best. Gregg is an icon—my idea of the perfect rock star—and then you have the incredible rhythm section. It’s a machine that is just a pleasure to play with.

  ALLMAN: Man, Jimmy Herring is a great player and he got us through that summer beautifully.

  HERRING: Being up there with my friends Derek and Oteil balanced out my star-struck feelings about playing with Gregg. The amazing thing is he never told me what to play. He actually said, “I don’t want you to be hung up playing what you think the Allman Brothers is. Just play what your heart tells you.”

  WEST: We anticipated it being musically spectacular, but we all knew there could be some issues. For one thing, Jimmy doesn’t sing and Gregg had never not had another singer in the band. He’s not going to sing every song, so it had to be a much more instrumental show, and you just knew those boys wouldn’t be able to help themselves, that they’d get out there in a hurry.

  BURBRIDGE: It was totally impossible to contain our “out” impulses. Hey, you are who you are. It got us in trouble with Gregg once.

  DEREK TRUCKS: We would take it off the rails from time to time. One night we just couldn’t help ourselves and we took “Mountain Jam” to Mars, which is what Red Dog was always urging us to do. He’d say, “The original band took the song out! It was different every night. You can’t play the record.” But after the show, we get on the bus, Gregg walks on and goes, “OK, who’s the fucking Phish fan? That was too much.” And he goes to the back of the bus with all of us looking at each other a bit stunned. After about ten minutes, he came back up and apologized. He said, “I used to go ’round and ’round with my brother on that same stuff. You play whatever you want. You guys are a part of this.”

  BURBRIDGE: Gregg said, “It’s your band, too. You guys do your thing.” He confessed that Duane used to love to go out like that, too.

  DEREK TRUCKS: My take on this was Duane from thirty-five years ago whipped his ass again. He did not have to apologize to us, that’s for sure.

  “The Allman Rescue Unit,” 2000: Butch Trucks, Jimmy Herring, Oteil Burbridge, on the bus.

  BURBRIDGE: Duane loved Col. Bruce Hampton, who was my and Jimmy’s professor of out. Duane was responsible for the Hampton Grease Band getting a record deal with Phil Walden, who then sold it to Clive Davis at Columbia Records, supposedly for $300,000! Funny how things come to pass over a long period of time.

  BUTCH TRUCKS: We knew Jimmy was not entirely comfortable so no one was surprised when he told us he was moving on.

  HOLMAN: I think Jimmy felt very emotionally guilty about replacing someone who was very much alive. He was hoping that Dickey would get it together and come back.

  After months of testimony, Dickey Betts received a cash award, the details of which are subject to a confidentiality agreement. The arbitrator also ruled that the band could continue to perform without Betts, who remained a partner/shareholder in the Allman Brothers Band merchandising and existing recording partnership, which was never really in dispute.

  Now out of the Allman Brothers Band, the guitarist soldiered on. Within a year, he had released Let’s Get Together, an album of new material with a new band. It included several songs the Allman Brothers had played live over the previous few years, including the instrumentals “Rave On” and “One Stop BeBop.” The Allman Brothers had not released a studio album in seven years.

  BETTS: I’m not mad at anyone and I’m not carrying any kind of grudge. I’m not happy with what happened or the way things went down, but I’m also not bitter because I’m moving on. I’m just going with the changes that happened beyond my control and some great things have come about as a result. I have seven new original compositions on this album. A few are tunes we were working on with the Allman Brothers but were never completed or recorded for one reason or another, in some cases because no one else really showed any enthusiasm to work them up. But I wrote four in the three months before recording. I really got energized and came up with some great new material.

  While we don’t like things to change, they do anyway. We want things to stay more or less how they are and that’s not the natural way of the world. You just have to be grateful for having thirty years with a band that accomplished all the things the Allman Brothers did and now it’s over and it’s time to change. I didn’t change it myself, but I’m just going with what is naturally happening.

  I briefly considered just retiring when this thing with the Brothers came about, but I’m not ready for it. I have too much music left. I’ve got a lot more to say before I put my guitar down. The Allman Brothers operation was so well oiled that there wasn’t much you had to worry about; I just showed up for the gigs. That’s good in some ways but it has its downside. You get a little cushy and tend to be less creative than you are when you really have to do it yourself. I had to build something new from the ground up. Special things happen when you find yourself needing a knockout punch in the fifteenth round. That’s when you have to dig down deep and see what you’ve got. That’s when you can surprise yourself.

  CHAPTER

  27

  One More Ride

  THE ALLMAN BROTHERS Band had performed twenty-seven shows with Herring on August 26, 2000, when Allen Woody, who had been struggling with substance abuse problems and was scheduled to enter rehab in a few weeks, died in his sleep in a New York hotel room.

  Though he had been out of the band for over three years, it felt like an exclamation point on the fact that an era of the Allman Brothers was over. Betts was home, Woody was dead, and no one knew what would happen next.

  Haynes was grieving his best friend and musical collaborator, unsure of what his next move would be. Scheduled to fly to California to rehearse for ten days with Phil Lesh for an upcoming t
our at the time of Woody’s death, Haynes contemplated backing out.

  “Phil was one of the first people to call me after Woody’s death,” Haynes says. “He said, ‘I know what it means to lose someone whose musical connection is too profound for anyone else to ever understand.’ Unfortunately, a lot of people in this business understand that. I knew I had to get out there and play music.

  “I flew to rehearsal right from Woody’s funeral and I didn’t know if I would be able to rise to the occasion. But for the first time since Allen died, I was able to momentarily forget some of the negative feelings, which is a huge part of the healing process.”

  Allen Woody, 1955–2000.

  While rehearsing with Lesh, Haynes began lining up a tribute for his late friend to benefit Woody’s daughter, Savannah. “One for Woody” took place just over a month after the bassist’s death at New York’s Roseland Ballroom and featured the Allman Brothers Band and the Black Crowes and a final set featuring Gov’t Mule’s surviving core of Haynes and Abts joined by an endless stream of guests, including Phil Lesh, the blues great Little Milton, Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools, and Mountain’s Leslie West. Haynes was on stage for over six hours.

  With Derek Trucks unavailable, Haynes and Herring played with the Allman Brothers Band; it was just the third time Haynes had appeared with the band since leaving three years earlier. When Herring accepted an offer to tour the next year with Lesh, the Allman Brothers Band again had just one guitarist. Haynes agreed to return for their annual March run at New York’s Beacon Theater, billed as a special guest, along with Chuck Leavell.

  HAYNES: No one knew what I was going to do, including me. I had some concerns about coming back to the Allmans but Gregg’s phone call asking me to play at the Beacon was a saving grace. I needed to stop wallowing in my misery over Woody’s death and plunge into something. It’s human nature to want to wallow in the mire of your own depression, so you have to pull yourself out of it.

  At the time, I’d sometimes be feeling fine and suddenly a darkness would descend upon me. I was regularly having dreams where Woody came to me and was not dead. He was very much alive and it felt more real than any dream you’ve ever had. I told Gregg about that, and without missing a beat, he said, “Those will never go away.”

  BUTCH TRUCKS: Warren was the guy we needed. I’m not sure we would have continued at all if Warren hadn’t taken the job. I simply can’t imagine who else could have done this gig.

  HAYNES: I agreed to play some shows and see if the vibe and the music were good.

  QUIÑONES: The band needed Warren and Warren needed the band. He was mentally and emotionally in limbo after Woody’s death and didn’t know what was going to happen. He had needed a break from the Allman Brothers, and it was four years and now he needed a breath of fresh air from the Mule.

  HAYNES: It was my first time with the band in four years and it was very comfortable. I took on a different role than people were used to seeing me with the Allman Brothers, playing with Derek instead of Dickey. It was very strange to play in the Allman Brothers without Dickey and I knew it would be. Dickey’s sound is a big part of what we all grew up loving, so it is definitely strange for it to be absent.

  I wouldn’t have done the shows if I thought I was holding up him playing in the band, but I spoke to Dickey and also the other guys about the situation, and it was pretty obvious that no one wanted to resolve it. That being the case, I just did the best I could.

  Haynes’s return was a success in the eyes of all concerned: himself, the rest of the band, and the fans who filled the theater. When the Allman Brothers Band kicked off their summer tour on June 15, 2001, in Alabama, Haynes was on stage, no longer a “special guest,” once again a key member, helping to revive an American institution for the second time.

  Warren Haynes: Has guitar, will travel.

  DEREK TRUCKS: It took Warren getting back into the fold for it to make sense again without Dickey. He had logged so much time with Gregg and Dickey that he had total legitimacy and, of course, knew and understood the music from the inside as well as anyone.

  QUIÑONES: After Warren left, we went through all these guitarists and none of them were Warren Haynes. He brings things to the table that no one else does, including his singing and his overall understanding of the band and ability to pull it all together. It was so great to have him back.

  ALLMAN: It was such a kick to play with Warren again. I love his guitar playing and it’s also great for me to have a second lead singer—and he’s great to sing harmony with, either part, lead or harmony. He phrases quite a bit like me, so it’s just really a pleasure.

  DEREK TRUCKS: Warren and I playing together without Dickey is an entirely different beast. First of all, because we were both playing the same role—the “Duane” role opposite Dickey—for so long, we both had to relearn the Allman Brothers catalogue so that we could switch parts with each performance. I had never played the nonslide parts to songs like “Statesboro Blues” and “Done Somebody Wrong,” and learning the catalogue both ways has deepened my understanding of everything. And the fact that no one is playing Dickey’s role means we both have to establish our own voices to a greater extent.

  HAYNES: It’s a little strange because when I left the band, Jack Pearson and then Derek inherited the parts that I used to play, whether they were Duane’s parts from the old days or my parts from the latter-day records. Derek and I played the same parts, so one of us was going to have to learn the other parts—Dickey’s parts. To be fair, we decided to split it up. And since Derek and I are both slide players, we decided the best thing to do would be to split the slide duties up as well, even to the point where one night I played slide on a given song and the next night Derek did. We did that a lot at those first shows, and it was a good thing. It was a lot of fun and it allowed us to take a different approach every night, which allowed things to be more open-ended.

  Instead of it being automatic, I really had to think about what to play. That is challenging, but it’s always good to keep yourself fresh.

  DEREK TRUCKS: Before, we were both tipping our hats to Duane and then putting our own thing on top of that. Now we just have to play ourselves while keeping in mind that it’s the Allman Brothers Band. When you know music so well and have lived with it and listened to it as much as Warren and I have, you can re-create the feel without playing the same notes.

  Derek Trucks playing with Warren Haynes.

  HAYNES: The band has certainly undergone a strange transformation. This particular unit plays great together and probably listens more intently than any band I’ve ever been in, which makes it easy to go someplace different every night. And that is the goal: to take this venerable institution someplace new without ever losing touch with the four-decade tradition that makes the Allman Brothers Band something really special.

  DEREK TRUCKS: It’s just an underlying respect for the history and legacy of the band, which Warren and I share. You want to make music that can stand on its own, and you want to be able to listen to it in twenty years and be proud. It’s a big obligation to make music as the Allman Brothers and both of us want to make sure that the name is back in a very positive way. You don’t want to be the guy who let it slip! And there’s a responsibility to being in the group in bigger ways, as well. You don’t want to be the guy who played a part in ending this great institution.

  JAIMOE: It’s funny to hear people say, “Listen to what Derek is playing compared to what Warren is playing.” Same way I’ve always felt about people comparing me and Butch. It’s about the big picture, the whole picture. Can Derek play all of that and also direct a band? No. I don’t count songs off. That don’t mean I’m not playing. Everyone has his role and that’s what makes a band.

  PEARSON: Jaimoe is one of my all-time favorite drummers. I can tell his playing in three notes. He always sounds like him no matter what drums he plays.

  Jaimoe playing the drums.

  ALLMAN: Warren is a master. As great as he is,
he serves the song, and he has a knack for pulling everyone together because he is about the group, which is not always the case with lead guitarists. He doesn’t put a fill in every phrase, or play just to hear himself; everything he does says something and has a purpose.

  HAYNES: The direction of your solo changes as soon as someone plays something different than expected. If Oteil or Jaimoe play a riff or Derek plays a rhythm figure in a hole I left, then my response changes the direction I was previously headed. To open yourself to the music reaching its full potential you cannot have a predetermined solo that you play regardless of what anybody else does.

  DEREK TRUCKS: It’s the nature of improvising. For me, it’s different with this lineup because there is a whole new level of comfort among the three guys up front. With Dickey in the band, it was follow the leader. Now it really is three guys tossing ideas back and forth.

  HAYNES: The example I always use is the Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter. No matter who’s soloing, as soon as they take a breath, someone plays something really cool in the hole and that changes everything. The next thing that came from the soloist would be based upon what that person played in the pause. It wouldn’t be preconceived; it would be responding. We’re trying to open ourselves in the same way, knowing it may be a little less Allman Brothers–ish at times. But that’s cool, because we’re here to grow.

  DEREK TRUCKS: A lot of time that leads to it being more of a band solo than a soloist front because everyone is both following the stream and directing it.