One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (4 page)

Wilson Pickett and Duane Allman, Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

On one of his very first sessions, Allman had proven his value as both a guitarist and musical visionary, someone who could do much more than play his parts. He quickly began to be known as both “Skyman” and “Skydog.” The nicknames would last forever, but there have been conflicting stories about their origins. Hall says neither is a mystery.

HALL:
I called Duane “Dog” because he looked like an old hound dog with his big ears and hanging-down white hair. Then Wilson, who had a name for everyone, started calling Duane “Skyman” because he loved to have a toke. He’d go in the bathroom, then come back and play his ass off. “Skyman” and “Dog” kind of merged into “Skydog.”

Duane wanted to start his own band and get back to performing, while Hall was looking to start working with groups in addition to recording individual artists. With their needs and desires lining up, a partnership was struck.

HALL:
Given our relationship and the success we had, I signed Duane to a five-year recording contract, brought him into Studio B, and said, “Work up your songs and we’ll put something down.”

He was singing, too, though it was obvious to me that he was a guitarist, not a singer. When I’d say that, he’d go, “My brother’s a great singer. If I got him to come with me, we’d have a great band.”

And I said, “Well, get him here.” And he said, “Oh, he don’t want to come. He’s got another band out in California.” I just went, “Whatever.” I wanted to get to work, not talk about guys who weren’t there.

Hall could not quite see a way to turn his obviously talented charge into a successful recording artist, but Phil Walden immediately seemed to have a clearer vision. The manager of the late Otis Redding as well as several other R&B acts who had recorded in Muscle Shoals, Walden was looking to expand into rock acts when he visited Hall and discussed Allman.

HALL:
Phil said, “This guy is gonna make you a million dollars. You just go in there, turn on the machine for eight hours, smoke a cigarette, drink a Pepsi, and when you get done, you’ll have a million dollars. This guy’s gonna be a superstar.”

I said, “That’s bullshit, man. Come on.”

JON LANDAU,
then a writer for
Rolling Stone
and
Crawdaddy,
he has been Bruce Springsteen’s manager since 1978:
I was in Macon with Phil [Walden] writing an article for
Rolling Stone
on the soul music world after Otis Redding, who had died in December 1967. I also wanted to go to Muscle Shoals and Phil took me there; we got two seats on a very early-in-the-morning mail plane. Phil was talking a lot about Duane Allman and was very anxious for me to meet him and hear him play. When I got there he was overdubbing for some session and I went to the studio and he was standing there by himself with his guitar and amp.

HALL:
Duane had a little band together and they were sleeping in Studio B. I’d go wake them up and they would be high and covered in blankets. I’d say, “Let’s record something, Duane.” And he’d put his arm around me and say, “You know, Rick, the stars and moons are not lining up right. Let’s wait around a day or two and once the signs are right, we’ll be ready to go.”

I said, “Bullshit. I can’t put up with this crap.”

SANDLIN:
Hell no! We were all excited to record. Duane’s band was me, [keyboardist] Paul Hornsby, and Berry [Oakley]. We weren’t like Rick’s regular musicians who came in and worked on a schedule every day, but we weren’t sitting around. We were excited about this project; it just wasn’t what Rick was expecting or used to dealing with.

HALL:
I called Phil and said, “I can’t do it. It’s not me. I’m doing Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett and all these great people and I want to go in and get it on, not wait around for these guys. Do you want to buy the contract and the tracks we cut with him?”

LANDAU:
Rick was a brilliant record producer, but a very dark person, very intense, very old school, very straight. There was no cultural connection between him and Duane. Phil was clearly a more appropriate fit. He was a very charismatic guy who just had it. He wanted to be big in the pop/rock world, and he saw Duane as the means to do that.

HALL:
Phil and [Jerry] Wexler [of Atlantic Records] came down and asked how many sides I had cut. I said, “About seven or eight.”

Wexler said, “What will you take for them and the contract?”

I said, “What will you give me?”

He goes, “How about eight thousand?”

Being a negotiator myself, I countered with, “It’ll take ten.”

Wexler said, “Fine,” and wrote me a check for $10,000.

And the rest is history.

CHAPTER

1

Beginnings

P
HIL
W
ALDEN INTENDED
Duane’s new band to be the centerpiece artists on his new Atlantic-distributed label, Capricorn Records. He also signed Allman to a management contract. Duane now had a record label and a manager wrapped up in one charismatic figure.

The first member of his new band was the drummer born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, as Johnie Lee Johnson, then calling himself Jai Johanny Johanson and soon to be known by a single name: Jaimoe.

JAIMOE:
I had been playing with rhythm and blues artists like Clarence Carter, Percy Sledge, and Arthur Conley and I was done with that whole scene. The people who became stars treated their musicians just like they were treated—like dogs. I decided that if I’m going to starve to death, at least I’m going to do it playing what I love: jazz music. I was moving to New York City.

I had played on a songwriting demo of songs written by my friend Jackie Avery, and he got them to Duane to consider, having heard he had signed with Phil and was putting together a band.

JACKIE AVERY JR.,
songwriter:
I went to Muscle Shoals during a Wilson Pickett session and Duane was sitting in Studio B playing a dobro, with his legs crossed, one leg way up on the other kneecap, wearing big cowboy boots. I was struck by how different he was; he was a free spirit who just didn’t give a damn. I played him this demo, with Johnny Jenkins singing “Voodoo in You” and two other songs.

He listened to the whole thing, then spit in a cup—I think he had some snuff—and all he asked was, “Who’s the drummer?”

I went back to Georgia and Jai was playing at some roadhouse in the woods with [blues guitarist] Eddie Kirkwood and I told him that I thought he should get over to Muscle Shoals, that I thought this guy was going to be something.

JAIMOE:
Avery said, “I ain’t never heard nobody play guitar the way Duane does” and he had seen Guitar Slim and many other great ones, so that convinced me to go talk to Duane before going to New York and starving to death.

AVERY:
Jaimoe packed up his drums and he and I scraped together $28 for a bus ticket and put those drums on a bus and off he went.

JAIMOE:
I got to Muscle Shoals and rattling around my head was something my friend Honeyboy Otis had told me: “If you want to make some money, go play with those white boys. They’ll pay you.” I saw the guys getting ready to go to work. I knew them all from being there with Percy Sledge and I asked, “Hey, where’s Skyman?”

“Oh, he’s in Studio B getting ready to do a session.”

I walk in and see this skinny little white boy hippie with long straight hair, and I said, “Excuse me, you must be the guy they call Skyman.” He looked at me and said, “Yep, and you’re Jai Johanny Johanson,” and we shook hands. He went to do a session and I set up my drums in a little studio, playing along to albums on headphones. When Duane was free he rolled that [Fender] Twin in, cranked that bad boy up, and that was it, man. As soon as we played together I forgot all about moving to New York City. I moved into Duane’s place on the Tennessee River and we just played constantly. Then Berry came and joined us.

Berry Oakley was the bassist in the popular Jacksonville band Second Coming, with a unique, melodic style; his wife-to-be Linda had introduced Berry and Duane in a Jacksonville club. The pair quickly became fast friends and musical admirers of each other. Allman invited Oakley to Muscle Shoals to jam with him and Jaimoe and test the chemistry of his potential rhythm section.

JAIMOE:
I was excited when I started playing with Duane and more so when Berry joined us. As soon as the three of us played together, it was just, “Shit. This is all over with.” It was like I had found the bass player I had been searching for since my friend Lamar [Williams] had joined the Army. We were playing some wild stuff.

JOHN HAMMOND JR.,
guitarist/singer:
I asked Duane how he got so good and he said, “I took speed every day for three years and played every night all night.” I think this was partly true and partly apocryphal but he really couldn’t get enough. He was just phenomenal.

JAIMOE:
Honestly, at the time, there were only a few white people I thought could play music: guys like Stan Getz and Buddy Rich. The biggest problem white musicians had was they were trying to imitate this or that person instead of letting themselves come out. Berry and Duane were themselves and they had strong voices.

It’s been said that Duane was at first going to put together a power trio like Jimi Hendrix or Cream, but I would never have been the right guy for that—I was never a power drummer, and that’s not what Duane was thinking. Duane had the idea for a different band right away. He was talking about two guitars and two drummers from the start. It was about finding the right guys. Berry was going back and forth between Muscle Shoals and Jacksonville.

SANDLIN:
I didn’t understand the two-drummer thing and I didn’t want to do it. Jaimoe was there when we recorded those original sides for Rick, but I was playing, probably just because Duane and I had the history together and it was easier at that point to do things quickly, but Duane was talking about Jaimoe being in his band and me possibly as well.

JAIMOE:
I was there when Duane cut those solo sides, and the reason Johnny played instead of me was simple: he knew how to make a record and I didn’t. Johnny didn’t really improvise; he learned parts and songs and he played them really well. I could not keep a straight beat and could not play a song exactly the same multiple times in a row.

One day, Duane said to me, “We’re leaving. I’m sick of this. Pack up your stuff.” We went to St. Louis for a few days so he could see his girlfriend. [
Donna Roosman, who was soon to be the mother of Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle
.] Then we made a beeline to Jacksonville. Duane drove straight through. We got there at two or three in the morning and Duane went around waking people up. People just had to hear that Duane was in town and they started coming around like termites in the spring.

CHAPTER

2

Playing in the Band

D
UANE’S VISION QUICKLY
began to be realized after he and Jaimoe arrived in Jacksonville during the first week of March 1969. The next two additions to his band were guitarist Dickey Betts, who played with Oakley in Second Coming, and Butch Trucks, the drummer whose group Duane and Gregg had recorded demos with less than a year earlier. With Gregg still in Los Angeles, the Second Coming’s Reese Wynans, who would eventually join Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble, played keyboards. Duane, Oakley, and Betts handled most of the vocals.

JAIMOE:
Duane had been telling me about a lot of people he knew and thought would be good for the band and most of them were there, except Gregory. The whole thing was just about playing music—no agenda, no egos—and it was good.

DICKEY BETTS:
It was fun and exciting, and the band just sort of happened. It was supposed to be a three-piece with Duane, Berry, and Jaimoe. Duane had no idea that he would end up with this very different thing, but he was open to seeing what happened. I was playing with Berry, and Duane and Jaimoe kept coming and sitting in with us and exciting stuff started happening really quickly and naturally. We all felt like we had discovered the very thing that we’d been looking for, even if we didn’t know it beforehand. We all knew that something very, very good was happening.

REESE WYNANS,
Second Coming keyboardist:
I had never heard anything like Duane Allman and his slide guitar. He played it like a violin or saxophone. It was just the weirdest instrument and most unbelievable sound and his phrasing was impeccable and his ideas were over the top. When he sat in with us it lifted the whole thing up and I had an immediate, extremely positive reaction, as did everyone else.

JAIMOE:
He was always on and up and pulling everyone along.

WYNANS:
Sometimes when someone comes and sits in and they’re hot shit, they get an attitude. Duane didn’t have any of that; there was none of that diva attitude. He was one of us immediately. It became obvious in the jam sessions that something special was going on. We would play for hours and it was incredible. He was a really positive guy—outgoing, giving, and always handing out a lot of really positive thoughts and comments. Just hanging around him was exciting.

HALL:
Duane always was an upper. He never had anything but praise for everybody. He was totally confident, but he also always had that little boy, down-home modesty about him. He was a good, good guy, which is why in time the musicians down here all fell in love with him, despite being leery at first.

HAMMOND:
Duane was a phenomenal player, but the opposite of a headcutter. He wanted to include everyone and make him sound better. He had supreme confidence but he loved the music more than anything and was not on any kind of ego trip.