One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (12 page)

“A certain side of me has always viewed myself as a folksinger with a rock and roll band,” says Gregg Allman. “I developed that perspective when I lived in Los Angeles and saw people like Tim Buckley, Stephen Stills, and Jackson Browne, who was my roommate for a while. All I had known was R and B and blues and these guys turned me on to a more folk-oriented approach and it’s always stuck with me, even if a lot of Allman Brothers fans never realized it.”

Gregg and Duane Allman moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 1967 with their band the Hour Glass, after Bill McEuen discovered the band, then called the Allman Joys, in a St. Louis club. McEuen managed his brother John’s Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, whose debut was just being released on Liberty Records, which also signed the Hour Glass.

“Everything was cross-collateralized,” Allman says, a financial arrangement which allowed them a small level of comfort, compared with other struggling musicians, including Jackson Browne, who had briefly been a member of the Dirt Band.

“Basically, our situation meant we had apartments,” Allman says with a chuckle. “And that’s why Jackson was crashing with me; he was from Long Beach and he was too proud to go home, and I really admired that. Jackson had been drifting around in this old broken-down Volkswagen, and he’d get a job every now and then in some shithouse coffee-folk place, where he might play for a tip jar or ten or twenty bucks.

“I really admired the way he picked guitar and wrote songs about stuff that I would think about and had gone through—stuff that hurts you. He already had different ways of saying things people were thinking and feeling, which is what I learned from him. It’s knocking thirty-five words down to four and having ’em really mean something. That, to me, is being a poet. A real poet might read this and laugh but I think it’s the art of saying something we all understand in a different way.

“Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would be as sweet’ and many people consider that profound; well, I think that people like Jackson Browne have said things just as profound. He really touched a soft side of me and I enjoyed every minute I ever spent with him, which inspired me to really get serious about songwriting.”

Allman had been attempting to write songs for years. But exposure to Browne and other L.A. songwriters pushed his ambitions. Remarkably, the Eagles’ Glenn Frey also credits Browne with inspiring his songwriting when the two had apartments atop each other. Allman’s time in Southern California also helped him stretch his artistic potential on the acoustic guitar, an instrument he had played since he was a kid.

“I thought of an acoustic guitar as something you lightly strummed or picked the blues on, which I often heard my brother do,” he says. “I didn’t view it as something you could make art with until guys like Jackson, Buckley, and Neil Young showed me otherwise.

“Neil’s ‘Expecting to Fly’ and ‘Broken Arrow’ inspired me more than I can say. Last time I saw Neil, I looked him right in the eye for his undivided attention and said, ‘Man, are you ever gonna play those songs? God, they’re good.’ ‘Expecting to Fly’ is a piece of art like
The Lovers
or
The Kiss
or anything Rembrandt or Michelangelo have ever done. It is certainly just as potent to me as
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
”

Allman says that his view of the acoustic guitar as a utilitarian tool reached back to his early days in Nashville, where the Allman brothers lived until moving to Daytona Beach, Florida, when Gregg was twelve and Duane thirteen. Nashville remained a second home, with the brothers returning every summer to stay with their grandmother.

“I had country music shoved down my throat and I couldn’t stand it,” he says. “At the time, it was String Bean and the Foggy Mountain Boys and all this crying-in-your-beer stuff and the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium had these horrible, uncomfortable pew seats just filled with rednecks. I’m sorry to speak ill of such a place, but it’s the truth, and because of all that, the last thing I wanted to see was a Tennessee flattop box, which is what they called the Martin-style guitar down there.”

With his view that acoustic guitars were tied to corny, old-fashioned music, Allman focused on his electric rhythm playing, not realizing that his songwriting might benefit from a nonamplified, resonant instrument.

“I was trying to write songs on an electric,” he says. “But being on the road, I was often in hotel rooms and whatnot without an amp and the electric didn’t sing to me. I didn’t realize the deficiency but my brother did and I’ll never forget what he did to get me my first real acoustic guitar. He traded his favorite road axe—a ’56 Telecaster body with a ’53 hogback Stratocaster neck with some kind of crazy booster on the side—for a Gibson J45. I couldn’t believe he did that for me, because he loved that guitar, but he had seen legitimate signs of successful songwriting and he knew I needed a boost. And, sure enough, I commenced to just pouring out songs, though most of them were crap.”

Allman says he wrote close to four hundred songs that he tossed aside before writing his first keeper in 1967: “Melissa.” He did not begin to write consistently until he was immersed in California singer-songwriters and acoustic guitar playing, developing a distinctive style of open tunings with steel fingerpicks.

“I learned to Travis pick, which I found really interesting, and then I really developed my songwriting style,” says Allman. “I learned so much and met so many wonderful people out there and it really broadened my musical horizons. I wrote ‘Midnight Rider’ and ‘Come and Go Blues’ by Travis picking in natural [open] G, and I don’t think I ever would have written songs in that vein had I not gotten involved in a more serious way with the acoustic guitar. When I first got out to L.A., all I had known was R and B and blues and those guys’ more folk approach really turned my head. Then I developed my style from combining these things together—folky songs with soulful vocals.”

Though Allman lost touch with Browne, he remained enamored of his old friend’s songs, recording “These Days” on his 1973 solo album
Laid Back.
A year earlier, Browne had made his album debut, which was packaged in a brown paper bag with the words “Saturate Before Using” across the top.

“I lost track of Jackson after my brother moved back down South [in 1968],” says Allman. “I moved in with some broad and he went his own way and got a girlfriend. I didn’t know whatever happened to him. I didn’t hear of him again until I was going by a record store in Macon one day and saw his name on a paper bag in the window and said, ‘Jackson! I’m a son of a bitch.’ I was so happy I went inside and bought one just as fast as I could. ’Cause if your friends won’t buy ’em, who the hell will?”

In one magazine interview, Allman was asked who he would most like to record with. His surprising answer: Tim Buckley, the romantic folksinger and fingerpicking guitarist who had mesmerized Allman during a performance in Los Angeles that Browne had dragged him to. Shortly after the interview appeared, Gregg answered his Macon phone.

“Someone I could barely understand on this bad line said, ‘Could I speak to Gregg Allman?’” Gregg recalls. “I said, ‘Who’s calling?’ And I thought he said ‘Lord Buckley,’ the comedian from back in the old hippie days. And it took me a minute to realize it was
Tim
Buckley, who was such a gentleman, such a wonderful person. That guy might have had a twenty-one-inch waist but he had a heart as big as Alaska and he could write down his thoughts in a beautiful way and pick this twelve-string acoustic with three steel Nationals on his fingers, and a Dobro thumb pick, which I also use. I got this from him and it gave my music a lot of life.”

BETTS:
Duane played the acoustic on “Revival” and “Midnight Rider” and everything else where you hear it. Getting a good acoustic sound in the studio can be tough, and Duane could do it much more easily and quickly than me at that point. Duane was a lot more studio savvy than the rest of us because of his experience at Muscle Shoals. He was really, really good in the studio.

ALLMAN:
Even on the songs I wrote on acoustic like “Midnight Rider,” I never played it on the records. We had enough guitarists.

For years, Duane didn’t have a nice flattop [acoustic guitar], because he mostly played Dobros and National Steels, so he would rent an acoustic in the studio. But eventually he ended up with one of those old dark Martin D18s that looks almost like mahogany. He loved playing the steel guitars, and Dickey ended up with his favorite National—that’s it on the cover of his solo album [
Highway Call
]. I wound up with two of his Nationals. I knew I wasn’t going to play them properly and I knew I wasn’t going to sell them either, so I gave one to Clapton and I gave one to Ronnie Wood.

The band also recorded a rearranged version of Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” featuring Oakley on his only studio lead vocal.

BETTS:
That arrangement of “Hoochie Coochie Man” came right out of the Second Coming and was a really good example of what Berry and I were doing in that band.

Receipts show that the band stayed at the Chelsea Hotel in New York on April 26, 1970, in between gigs in Fallsburg and Stony Brook, N.Y., sharing rooms, mostly with a band member paired with someone from the crew. Room rates ranged from $13 to $22.50.

CHAPTER

6

Keep on Growing

W
ITH THEIR SECOND
album done, the band returned to the road. One of Dowd’s next clients was a hero of Dickey and Duane’s—Eric Clapton, recording with Derek and the Dominos, his new band of American musicians formerly with his friends Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. The band came to Miami to record their debut album with just a few songs written.

DOWD:
When I was working with the Allman Brothers on
Idlewild South
, I got a call from [Clapton manager] Robert Stigwood saying that Eric would like to record and asking if I could fit him in my schedule. Of course I said I’d be delighted. It became a lengthy conversation, which I normally would never have while I was working with someone. I put the phone down and apologized, saying to Duane, “You have to excuse me. That was Eric Clapton’s manager. They want to come here and record.”

He said, “You mean this guy?” and plays me an Eric solo note for note. I said, “That’s the one,” and he goes, “I got to meet that guy. Let me know when he’s gonna be here. I’d love to come by and watch. Do you think that would be possible?” And I told him I was sure it would be fine, he should call me and we’d work it out.

ERIC CLAPTON,
guitarist, rock legend:
I was very aware of Duane. I had become aware of him when I heard Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” That break at the end just blew me away and I immediately made a call to Atlantic Records to find out who it was. It was one of the few times in my life where I had to know who that was—now!

We went to Miami just to record with Tom Dowd. It’s where he was based, and he was raving about the studio and the musicians we could get if we needed anyone extra. Duane hadn’t even been talked about at that point. That was much more coincidental.

DOWD:
I was recording with Derek and the Dominos [at Criteria, on August 26, 1970], and Duane calls: “Is he there? We’re gonna be in Miami tomorrow for a concert. Can I come meet him?” I said, “I’m sure you can. Hold on.”

I grabbed Eric and said, “I have Duane Allman on the phone. His band is playing in the area tomorrow and he’d like to come meet you.” And he goes, “You mean this guy?” And he plays Duane’s solo off of Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude”’ note for note. I said, “That’s the guy.” And he goes, “I’ve got to see him perform. We’re going to that concert.”

CLAPTON:
When I heard they were playing nearby after we had been in the studio about a month, I immediately wanted to go.

DOWD:
Now I knew the two of them personally and they were both low-key, beautiful human beings and wonderful musicians, so I thought, “This is gonna be fun.” Sure enough, Saturday afternoon, we record for a few hours, and then head out to the limos Eric had waiting and go down to the Convention Center, where the Allman Brothers are playing. They snuck us in behind the photographer’s barricade, sitting on the floor with our backs to the audience, right in front of the stage. Duane’s in the middle of a solo, when he opens his eyes, looks down, sees Eric, and stops playing cold, in shock. Dickey starts playing to cover until Duane regains his equilibrium, and then he sees Eric and he freezes, too. That’s how big Eric was to them.

BOBBY WHITLOCK,
Derek and the Dominos keyboardist:
They were playing on a flatbed behind an eighteen-wheeler that had hay bales around the front to keep the crowd back and we crowded up under the trailer and put our backs to the bales and were sitting there looking up at them. Duane was wearing it out and he looked down and saw us—saw
Eric
looking at him—and he just stopped playing. He always had his mouth open when he was getting down on it, but he didn’t close it this time. Then Dickey was wondering what was going on and looked down and stopped playing, and I thought the whole band would stop, but they kept cranking and then the guitarists got back on it.

DOWD:
After the show they met and hung out and all of a sudden I had half the Allman Brothers and all of Derek and the Dominos crammed into a limousine going back to Criteria, where they jammed until two or three the next afternoon. I kept the tape running the whole time. There’s Duane playing Eric’s guitar and Gregg playing Bobby Whitlock’s organ and they were all in piggy heaven.

JAIMOE:
Everyone was really grooving, but I wasn’t all that knocked out by what Clapton was doing, or the whole scene, so I went out to the Winnebago, smoked some pot, and listened to Tony Williams’s
Emergency!

Many of these impromptu performances were eventually released on
The Layla Sessions,
a twentieth-anniversary expanded box set, which included five jams totaling over 70 minutes.