One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (5 page)

THOM DOUCETTE,
harmonica player, Duane confidant, and unofficial member of the ABB
:
Duane had his arms wide open, and he was so fucking magnetic. This was a connected guy—connected to the higher order of the world. Just incredibly tuned in, and with absolute self-confidence but no ego. None. It was never about “me.” That combination of total self-confidence and lack of ego with that kind of talent and fire is unheard of.

JAIMOE:
The day after we got to Jacksonville, Duane took me over to meet Butch and said, “Butch, this is my new drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. We’re gonna jam tonight. Anyone who can be here, be there.”

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Duane called me when he came back to Jacksonville and was jamming with lots of different people. We played and it just worked and Jaimoe told Duane I was the guy they needed, because he wanted two drummers like James Brown had.

JAIMOE:
I asked Duane why he wanted two drummers and he said, “Because Otis Redding and James Brown have two,” and I never asked again.

BETTS:
Jaimoe was a real good drummer, but more of a pocket guy, and once we all got in there, it was bigger and he wasn’t really able to handle the power. It just wasn’t his style and the drummer from Second Coming wasn’t right. His name was “Nasty Lord John” [Meeks] and he played like Ginger Baker, hardly ever playing a straight beat. We needed Butch, who had that drive and strength, freight train, meat-and-potatoes thing. It set Jaimoe up perfectly.

RICHARD PRICE,
Florida bassist; played with Betts and Oakley and was there for the Jacksonville jams that birthed the Allman Brothers Band:
Jaimoe was always a great drummer in Duane’s mind and that was clear from the minute they arrived together in Jacksonville. Butch was well known as a strong in-the-pocket player, while Jaimoe was more of an embellisher. He had great stick control and jazz chops and could do outside-the-box tempos up against the pocket.

AVERY:
Duane loved Jai and Jai loved Duane. They were brothers first and more than anyone else.

PRICE:
We had these big jams with a lot of drummers coming and going, but things started happening with Jaimoe and Butch as soon as they played together. Butch was doing the really strong foot/snare thing driving the beat and Jaimoe would do all these strange swells and fills in the open spaces that Butch left. They’re not that similar and they could hear where to complement one another, which is what made them a great rhythm section. Right out of the box they listened really close to each other and tried to stay out of each other’s way. They formed this strange symbiotic thing and melded into a terrific unit. Over a series of nights you could see something very substantial developing there.

BETTS:
All of a sudden the trio had five pieces. We all were smart enough to say, “This guy’s special” about one another.

AVERY:
I’m agnostic, so I don’t think I can call it the hand of God, but these people were meant to be together. I don’t know how that all happened, but it had to happen.

DOUCETTE:
You take any one of the guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist.

TRUCKS:
I don’t think Duane wanted me in the band. I fit musically but I was a bundle of insecurity and he didn’t want that. He was such a strong person—very confident and totally sure of himself—and that’s the kind of people he wanted around him.

BETTS:
It says a lot that Duane’s hero was Muhammad Ali. He had Ali’s type of supreme confidence. If you weren’t involved in what he thought was the big picture, he didn’t have time for you. A lot of people really didn’t like him for that. It’s not that he was aggressive; it was more a super-positive, straight-ahead, I’ve-got-work-to-do kind of thing. If you didn’t get it, see you later. He always seemed like he was charging ahead and it took a lot of energy to be with him.

DOUCETTE:
I couldn’t get enough of that Duane energy. If Duane put out his hand, you had a hand. There was no bullshit about him at all. None.

GREGG ALLMAN:
My brother was a real pistol. He was a hell of a person … a firecracker. He knew how to push people’s buttons and bring out the best.

SANDLIN:
He was a personality you only see once in a lifetime. He could inspire you and challenge you, with eye contact, smiles … little things. It would just make you better and I think anyone who ever played with him would tell you the same thing. You knew he had your back, and that was the best feeling in the world.

TRUCKS:
One day we were jamming on a shuffle going nowhere so I started pulling back and Duane whipped around, looked me in the eyes, and played this lick way up the neck like a challenge. My first reaction was to back up, but he kept doing it, which had everyone looking at me like the whole flaccid nature of this jam was my fault. The third time I got really angry and started pounding the drums like I was hitting him upside his head and the jam took off and I forgot about being self-conscious and started playing music, and he smiled at me, as if to say, “Now that’s more like it.”

It was like he reached inside me and flipped a switch and I’ve never been insecure about my drumming again. It was an absolute epiphany; it hit me like a ton of bricks. I swear if that moment had not happened I would probably have spent the past thirty years as a teacher. Duane was capable of reaching inside people and pulling out the best. He made us all realize that music will never be great if everyone doesn’t give it all they have, and we all took on that attitude: Why bother to play if you’re not going all in?

WYNANS:
Dickey was the hottest guitar player in the area, the guy that everyone looked up to and wanted to emulate. Then Duane came and started sitting in with us and he was more mature and more fully formed, with total confidence, an incredible tone and that unearthly slide playing. But he and Dickey complemented each other—they didn’t try to outgun one another—and the chemistry was obvious right away. It was just amazing that the two best lead guitarists around were teaming up. They were both willing to take chances rather than returning to parts they knew they could nail, and everything they tried worked.

PRICE:
Dickey was already considered one of the hottest guitar players in the state of Florida. He was smoking in the Second Coming and always had a great ability to arrange.

WYNANS:
I remember one time Duane came up to me with this sense of wonder and said, “Reese, I just learned how to play the highest note in the world. You put the slide on the harmonic and slide it up and all of a sudden it’s birds chirping.” And, of course, that became his famous “bird call.” He was always playing and pushing and sharing his ideas and passions.

JAIMOE:
Duane had talked about a lot of guitar players and when I heard some of them I said, “That dude can’t tote your guitar case” and he was surprised. He loved jamming with everyone.

DOUCETTE:
None of them could hold Duane’s case except Betts.

PRICE:
Berry basically told Duane that he would only form a new band with him if Dickey could be in it, too. After these jams, I don’t think it was an issue because Duane and Dickey just hooked up in incredible ways. Their styles were so different and, like Jaimoe and Butch, they were able to complement one another.

LINDA OAKLEY,
Berry Oakley’s wife:
Berry really liked playing with Dickey and felt bad about breaking up the Second Coming, but I don’t recall him making any demands. It was up to Duane who would be in the new band. Berry had met Duane and thought, “This is my path right here.”

JAIMOE:
Duane loved guitar players. I only knew two people Duane didn’t like: Jimmy Page and Sonny Sharrock. He played on the Herbie Mann
Push Push
sessions [in 1971] with Sonny and he hated him and the way nothing he played was ever really clear. He also didn’t like Led Zeppelin, though I don’t know why. Anyhow, Duane liked Dickey and the two of them clicked and started working on songs and parts immediately.

WYNANS:
Berry was very dedicated to jamming and deeply into the Dead and the Airplane and these psychedelic approaches and always playing that music for us—and it was pretty exotic stuff to our ears, because there were no similar bands in the area. Dickey was a great blues player with a rock edge; he could play all these great Lonnie Mack licks, for instance. And then Duane arrived, and he was just on another planet. The power of all of it combined was immediately obvious.

BETTS:
All of us were playing in good little bands, but Duane was the guy who had Phil Walden—Otis Redding’s manager!—on his tail, anxious to get his career moving. And Duane was hip enough to say, “Hey, Phil, instead of a three-piece, I have a six-piece and we need a hundred thousand dollars for equipment.” And Phil was hip enough to have faith in this guy. If there was no Phil Walden and no Duane Allman there would have been no Allman Brothers Band.

The unnamed group began regularly playing free shows in Jacksonville’s Willow Branch Park, joined by a large, rotating crop of musicians. They went on to play in several local parks.

PRICE:
It was Berry’s idea to play for free in the parks for the hippies.

TRUCKS:
The six of us had this incredible jam and Duane went to the door and said, “If anyone wants to leave this room they’re going to have to fight their way out.” We were playing all the time and doing these free concerts in the park and we all knew we had something great going, but the keyboard player was Reese Wynans, not Gregg, and we didn’t really have a singer.

Duane said, “I need to call my baby brother.” I said, “Are you sure?” Because he was upset that Gregg had stayed out in L.A. to do his solo thing and I was upset that he had left when I thought we had something going with the 31st of February project the year before. He said, “I’m pissed at him, too, but he’s the only one strong enough to sing with this band.” And, of course, he was right. Whatever his issues, Gregg had the voice and he had the songs that we needed.

PHIL WALDEN,
original ABB manager; founder/president of Capricorn Records
: They had this great instrumental presence but no real vocalist. Berry, Dickey, and Duane were all doing a little singing. That was a lot of a little singing and no singer. So Duane called Gregg and asked him to come down.

JAIMOE:
Duane was talking about Gregory being the singer in the band from the beginning. Very early on, Duane told me, “There’s only one guy who can sing in this band and that’s my baby brother.” He told me that he was a womanizer. He said Gregg broke girls hard and all the rest of it, but that he’s a hell of a singer and songwriter—which obviously was accurate and is to this day.

LINDA OAKLEY:
We were all sitting in our kitchen late one night after one of these jams. They were all so psyched about what they were building and Duane said, “We’ve got to get my brother here, out of that bad situation. He’s a great singer and songwriter and he’s the guy who can finish this thing.”

WYNANS:
For a while, we were all just jamming and guys from other bands would be there singing, or Berry would sing, Duane would sing a little, “Rhino” Reinhardt would sing. [
Guitarist Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt, who was in the Second Coming and went on to play with Iron Butterfly.
] Then there was talk of this becoming a real band, and Duane was talking about getting his brother here to sing. Everyone was excited about it, but I knew Gregg played keyboards and figured that might be the end of it for me. It was personally disappointing, because the band was really going somewhere and obviously had a chance to do something great. It was kind of a drag but this was Duane’s brother, so what can you say? You wish them good luck and move on to the next thing. It was a thrill to be a part of.

BETTS:
We had all been bandleaders and we knew what we now had.

Gregg was still in Los Angeles, having stayed there after the breakup of the Hour Glass. Liberty Records had recorded and released a second album with Gregg backed by session musicians after Duane, Sandlin, and the rest of the band left California.

ALLMAN:
I didn’t have a band, but I was under contract to a label that had me cut two terrible records, including one with these studio cats in L.A. They had me do a blues version of Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which can’t be done. It was really horrible. I hope you never hear it. They told us what to wear, what to play, everything. They dictated everything, including putting us in those clown suits. I hated it, but what are you gonna do when they’re taking care of all your expenses? You end up feeling like some kind of kept man and it was fuckin’ awful.

I was excited when my brother called and said he was putting a new band together and wanted me to join. I just wrote a note that said, “I’m gone. If you want to sue my ass, come on after me.”

BETTS:
We were all telling Duane to call Gregg. We knew we needed him. They were fighting or something, which they did all the time—just normal brotherly stuff.

JAIMOE:
Duane finally called Gregg when he got everyone that he thought would work, because he needed to give him as much time as possible to resolve the contract issues with Liberty. Once everyone else was in place, Duane called him and said, “You’ve got to hear this band that I’m putting together. You need to be the singer.”

KIM PAYNE,
one of the ABB’s original crew members:
I met Gregory in L.A. when I was working for another band that played with him, and we became good friends, running around, staying with chicks until we got kicked out, and drinking cheap wine. Almost every day we were together, Gregg would bitch about his brother. He’d say, “He’s calling me again asking him to join his band, but there ain’t no way because I cannot get along with my brother in a band.” He said that to me countless times.