Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  The band members went separate ways. Allman and Betts toured with their own bands off and on, playing mainly clubs and small venues, and even teamed up for a tour or two. Butch Trucks went back to school, opened a recording studio in Tallahassee, raised his family, and involved himself in the difficult fight to stop record labeling in Florida. Jai Jaimoe packed a set of drums in his Toyota and spent years traveling around the South, playing in numerous jazz, R & B, and pop bands. Occasionally, the various ex-Allmans would come together for the odd jam or gig, but nobody spoke much about the collective dreams they had once shared. Clearly, the glory days were behind them, and there wasn’t much point in talking them to death.

  Then, toward the late 1980s, pop music began going through one of its periodic revisionist phases. Neo-blues artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray began attracting a mass audience; plucky country singers like Lyle Lovett and k. d. lang had started attracting a broad spectrum of alternative and mainstream fans; and the long-suffering, brandy-voiced Bonnie Raitt enjoyed a major comeback with her surprisingly straightforward renditions of blues and R & B music. As a result, Dickey Betts received a call from Epic Records: Was he interested in making a Southern Rock LP? Betts thought Epic was joking, but nope—the label even wanted him to assemble a band with a twin-guitar frontline, and yes, if he really wanted, he could wear his cowboy hat onstage. Betts put together a solo act, and eventually he and Trucks received calls from Epic that led to an invitation to re-form the Allman Brothers. At first, both were wary—Gregg Allman’s drug and alcohol problems remained legendary, and they weren’t sure about touring or playing with him under those circumstances. But Betts, who had seen Allman often in recent years, said that Gregg was in good shape and better voice than ever, and that like the rest of them, he had missed the music they had made together. So Betts called Epic back and asked: For a Southern Rock band, how would the label like to have the Southern Rock group, the Allman Brothers Band? Epic was thrilled—until it was learned that the band planned to tour before recording.

  “They were afraid we would break up again before we ever finished the tour,” says Betts, laughing. Actually, touring was reportedly part of the deal the bandmembers had struck about Gregg Allman: Before entering a studio to work on new material, or before committing themselves to spending a few more years together, they wanted to see how Gregg would handle the road; in fact, they wanted to see how everybody would handle working together again. Mainly, they wanted to see if they could still play like the Allman Brothers, rather than as a once-removed imitation.

  “It would have been pitiful to have put this band back together, just to be an embarrassment,” says Betts. “I don’t think we could have dealt with that. The trouble is, we’d already been compared to ourselves a lot, and not always in a good way.”

  As it turned out, the timing was good: Numerous other older acts—including the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney were hitting the road in 1989 with largely retrospective tours, and PolyGram was also preparing a multidisc historical overview of the Allmans for imminent release. For the first time in nearly a decade, the Allmans had a context to work in. Betts and Allman recruited some new members—guitarist Warren Haynes, bassist Allen Woody, and keyboardist Johnny Neel—and the Allman Brothers Band was reborn. More important, they were once again a forceful live band, playing their hard-hitting brand of improvisational blues with the sort of vitality the band had not evinced since the early 1970s. “Once more, we were getting compared to ourselves,” says Betts, “but this time in a positive way. The ideal, of course, would be to have all the original members of the band still alive and with us, but that can’t be. But I’ll say this: This is the first lineup we’ve had since Duane Allman and Berry Oakley were in the band that has the same spirit that we had in those days.”

  Butch Trucks—who can be the most paternal and also the saltiest-talking member of the band—puts it differently. “It feels like the Allman Brothers again,” he says, “and it hasn’t felt that way in a long, long time. I like it. It makes my sticker peck out.”

  Periodically, as Betts and Trucks talk, Gregg Allman tries to seem interested in the conversation. He will lean forward, clasp his hands together, look like he has something to say . . . but he never voluntarily fields a single question. After a bit, he settles back into the sofa and simply looks as if he’s in his own world. He seems to spend a lot of time inside himself, staring into some private, inviolable space. In the entire conversation, he will say only one complete sentence: “It’s hard to live those ten or twenty years, and then try to start all over again with another band.”

  Abruptly, Gregg is on his feet, excusing himself. He is scheduled to begin final vocals today, and he is restless to get started. When asked if it’s okay to watch him record at some point, he visibly freezes. “Um, Gregg won’t let anybody in there when he’s singing,” says Betts, coming to Allman’s rescue. “Vocals are real personal, you know. You’re just standing there naked.”

  “Yeah, with your dick hanging out,” says Trucks. After Gregg leaves, Trucks adds: “I’ve never seen anybody so nervous about letting others listen.”

  Recently, there had been some concern about Gregg’s vocals. Reportedly, producer Tom Dowd—the owner of Criteria Studios, and the producer of the band’s early classics, At the Fillmore East and Eat A Peach—was worried that he might not get workable complete performances from Allman, and would have to paste the final vocals together from earlier rough tracks. Nobody knows at the moment whether Gregg can sing as well as they are hoping he will sing—indeed, any Allmans reunion effort would fall flat without Gregg’s trademark growly vocals—and nobody’s sure how Gregg’s current unease bodes for the band’s upcoming summer tour.

  “It’s hard to be sober again after all these years,” says Trucks, who went through a drying-out period of his own. “At a time like this, Gregg probably doesn’t even know if he can talk to people, much less sing. But the thing is, he did it for too many years not to go for it now.”

  AROUND MIDNIGHT, a warm spring storm is dropping heavy sheets of rain all over north Miami. Drummer Jai Jaimoe (who was once known as Jai Johanny Johanson, but now prefers to be called simply Jaimoe) stands in the main hallway at Criteria Studios, unpacking a crate of new cymbals, caressing their nickel-plated gleam with obvious affection. He is wearing a pink, blue, and green knitted African cap; bright green baggy pants; and knee-length black T-shirt bearing the statement, “The objects under this shirt are smaller than they appear.”

  Down the hall, Gregg Allman is taking passes at his vocal on “Good Clean Fun,” and from what one can hear, he is sounding more confident, more vibrant by the moment. A few feet away, Dickey Betts is strumming an acoustic guitar for some friends, singing “Seven Turns”—a haunting song he has written about the Allman Brothers’ hard losses and renewed hopes. In the main lounge, Butch Trucks sits watching a golf tournament, trying to explain the Zen principal of the sport to his wife, who does not seem to be buying the idea. Various Allman wives and girlfriends—including Gregg’s new wife, Danielle—sit around talking or reading true-crime books, and Dickey and Gregg’s dogs wander in and out of the action, sniffing empty food cartons and looking perplexedly at the downpour outside. Also drifting in and out are producer Tom Dowd—who wears a perpetually rumpled professorial manner—and the legendary Allmans roadie Red Dog, a notorious but charming womanizer, a terrific dirty-joke teller, and plainly the band’s most devoted fan. It must seem a bit like old times here, only considerably more easygoing. “I missed playing with these people,” Jaimoe will say at one point. “We had something together that I could never find with other bands.”

  Between storm bouts, Jaimoe suggests taking a walk across the parking lot to a nearby studio, where it will be possible to talk with less distraction. People in and around the Allmans will often joke about Jaimoe—they say that for over a generation, he has been perpetually reclusive, inscrutable, even spa
cey. But they also make awed references to the drummer’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and rhythm & blues artists and styles, and certainly, nobody can imagine attempting a reunion at this time without his involvement. In fact, it is often joked that Jaimoe was the original member of the Allman Brothers—or at least that he was the one who had always been waiting for a band like the Allmans to come along. “All my life I had wanted to play in a jazz band,” says Jaimoe, settling into a sofa in an empty, dimly lighted studio control booth. “Then I played with Duane Allman.”

  Like Allman, Jaimoe had harbored a special passion for Southern-based musical styles. By the mid-1960s, he had served as a regular session drummer at the Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—where some of the most renowned Southern soul music of the period was recorded—and he performed with numerous R & B and blues artists, including Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, and Clifton Chenier. “I think I had been preparing to play in this band without really knowing what I was preparing for,” says Jaimoe, shifting his weight on the sofa. “I think it was from playing with all those other musicians that I got all that fiery stuff that people hear in my playing.”

  In the course of his studio work, Jaimoe met the two people who would become among the principal driving forces behind the Allman Brothers Band: Duane Allman and a fledgling entrepreneur named Phil Walden. Walden was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, a middle-sized town that still relied on agriculture for much of its economy, and that still maintained much of its pre-Civil War architecture (General Sherman had considered the town too insignificant to plunder or ravage). In the 1950s, Walden had grown enamored of Memphis-style rock & roll and, in particular, black R & B of singers like Hank Ballard and the Five Royales, and by the mid-1960s he was managing numerous black stars, including Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Al Green, Johnny Taylor, Joe Tex, Arthur Conley, and, most famously, Otis Redding.

  Walden’s affection for black music was anathema to many of Macon’s leading businessmen and church officials. Walden didn’t present himself as a civil rights activist, but he did bristle at provincial racism, and he refused to kowtow to local pressures. The South, he often told his critics, would have to change its attitudes, and what’s more, the popularity of the new Southern soul was a harbinger of that change. “I think rhythm and blues had a hell of a lot to do with turning the region around on race relations,” he would later tell an interviewer. “When people get together and listen to the same music, it makes hating kind of harder.”

  But Walden’s involvement in R & B was cut suddenly and brutally short. In December 1967, Otis Redding—a few months after his triumphant appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on the verge of a long-anticipated mass breakthrough—was flying a small twin-engine plane from Cleveland to Madison, Wisconsin, when the plane went down in a Wisconsin lake, killing Redding and four members of his backup band, the Bar-Kays. Walden was known as a proud, ambitious, and clever man—even indomitable—but for him, Redding’s death was more than the loss of a prize client, and more than the termination of one of the most brilliantly promising artistic careers of the period. It was also a devastating personal loss, and according to many of the people who knew him, Walden thereafter kept a greater emotional distance from his clients.

  Duane Allman had also had his life and sensibility transformed by sudden death. In 1949, when Duane was three and his little brother Gregory was two, the Allman family was living in Nashville, Tennessee. That Christmas, the boys’ father, an Army lieutenant, was on holiday leave from the Korean War. The day following Christmas, he picked up a hitchhiker, who robbed and murdered Duane and Gregg’s father. The Allmans’ mother, Geraldine, eventually enrolled her young children in a military academy in Lebanon, Tennessee, and then, in 1958, relocated the family in Daytona Beach, Florida. As young teens, the Allman brothers rarely talked about their father’s death—they were too young to know him well—and in many ways, they were like other boys their age: Duane hated school, and quit in a hot temper several times, then spent his free time attending to his favorite possession, a Harley-Davidson 165. Gregg, meantime, stuck through school and was reportedly a fair student and athlete, though he regarded it as a thankless ordeal.

  Early on, both Duane and Gregg found themselves drawn to music of loss and longing—particularly the high-lonesome wail of country music, and the haunted passions of urban and country blues. Gregg had been the first to leap in: He had listened to a neighbor playing old-timey country songs on an acoustic guitar, and at thirteen, Gregg worked a paper route and saved money to buy a guitar at the local Sears and Roebuck. While Gregg was slogging his way through school, Duane started playing his brother’s guitar—and to his surprise and Gregg’s initial annoyance, discovered that he had a gift for the instrument. Soon, Duane and Gregg each owned electric guitars, and Duane would hole up with his instrument for days, learning the music of blues archetype Robert Johnson and jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell. Around that time, Duane and Gregg saw a B. B. King show during a visit to Nashville, and Duane’s mind was made up: He and his brother were going to form a blues band of their own; in fact, they were going to make music their life. Duane continued studying numerous guitarists, including King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf’s Hubert Sumlin, Elmore James, and French jazz prodigy Django Reinhardt, as well as the emerging British rock guitarists—especially a young firebrand named Eric Clapton—and the guitarists who were playing for soul artists like James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Duane also began paying attention to saxophonists like John Coltrane, to hear how a soloist could build a melodic momentum that worked within a complex harmonic and rhythmic structure. Meantime, Gregg began favoring jazz organists like Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond, and developed a special passion for sophisticated blues and R & B vocalists like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ray Charles, and Roy Milton.

  But there was more to the brothers’ quest than a mere attraction for music that took painful feelings and turned them into a joyful release. The Allmans—in particular, Duane—seemed intent on forming bands as an extension of family ideals, and they often invested these bands with the same qualities of love and anger, loyalty and rivalry, that they had practiced at home. In a way, this family idealism was simply a trend of the era: The 1960s were a time when rock bands were often viewed as metaphors for a self-willed brand of consonant community. But in the Allmans’ case, the sources of this dream may have run especially deep. Their real-life family had been tumultuously shattered, and forming a band was a way of creating a fraternity they had never really known.

  But the Allmans were also forming musical bonds in a time when the South was being forced to reexamine some of its cultural and racial traditions, and Duane and Gregg were unusually open to ideals of interaction and equality. To their mother’s initial displeasure, the brothers preferred the music being played by local black talents, and in 1963, they helped form one of the area’s first integrated bands, the House Rockers. It was a period of fierce feelings, but the Allmans, like Phil Walden, would not back off from a belief that their culture was starting to undergo radical and deeply needed social change.

  In any event, Duane and Gregg went through a rapid succession of blues-oriented rock bands, including the Allman Joys, who toured the Southern teen circuit and recorded two albums’ worth of material (including several Yardbirds and Cream covers). By 1967, the group had been overhauled into the Hour Glass and had relocated to Los Angeles, where they recorded two LPs for Liberty. Both were better than average cover bands, and they gave Duane a chance to hone his flair for accompaniment and improvisation, and also helped Gregg develop as a sultry organist and an unusually inventive modern blues composer. But none of these groups matched Duane’s boundless ambitions, and in 1968, the bossy and restless guitarist quit the Hour Glass and accepted an invitation from Fame Studios’ owner-operator Rick Hall to work as a sideman on an upcoming Wilson Pickett session. Duane left Gregg in L.A. to fulfill the Liberty contract, and in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he played sessions wi
th Pickett, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Arthur Conley, and Ronnie Hawkins; in New York, he played with Aretha Franklin. By 1969, Duane Allman had gained a reputation as one of the most musically eloquent and soul-sensitive session guitarists in contemporary music.

  It was in this time that Jai Johanny Johanson met Allman. “I had a friend who was doing session work with Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin,” says Jaimoe. “He came home to Macon one day and told me, ’Jai, they got a white boy down in Alabama by the name of Duane “Skydog” Allman. He’s a hippie with long, stringy hair,’ he said, ’but you’ve got to hear him play.’ I remember listening to the radio late one night in Macon—there wasn’t anything else to do there; everything was closed up—and this Aretha Franklin thing, ’The Weight,’ came on the radio, with this stand-out guitar solo, and I thought, ’That’s got to be “Skydog” Allman, man.’ I thought he was a cool guitarist, but he wasn’t any Barney Kessel or Tal Farlow, and those were the only Caucasian cats that I heard who could really play the instrument.”

  A bit later, Jaimoe visited Muscle Shoals during a King Curtis session and sought out Allman. The two musicians became close friends, and between sessions, they would hang out in one of Fame’s vacant studios, jamming for hours head-on. Then one day, another skinny, long-haired white boy—a bassist named Berry Oakley, whom Duane had met in Jacksonville, Florida—started joining on the jams. “Man,” says Jaimoe, “when Berry joined us, that was some incredible shit. I remember that people like [bassist] David Hood, [pianist] Barry Beckett, and [drummer] Roger Hawkins [all among Muscle Shoals’ most respected session players] would come into the room when we were playing, and we were trying to get them to join in. But none of them would pick up an instrument. We scared the shit out of them guys.”