One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (24 page)

LEAVELL:
I thought going on with no replacement was incredibly brave; it took a lot of gumption for the entire band, but especially for Dickey. Imagine the pressure on him. He was not known as a slide player but slide parts were so essential to those songs that they had to be played and I thought he did a really admirable job. He didn’t necessarily play it like Duane would; he played it like Dickey.

BETTS:
I completely lost my taste for playing electric slide after Duane died and I was forced to play his parts on “Statesboro Blues” and all these songs. That soured me on it. I always felt comfortable playing it before that but I totally lost my comfort zone once I had to play things in Duane’s style. I couldn’t find my own voice because I had to copy his licks, which I hated doing, and it really kind of spoiled electric slide playing for me.

The band resumed touring in earnest as a five-piece, with Gregg and sometimes Berry taking over Duane’s job of introducing songs and Betts generally doing yeoman’s work as the sole guitarist and primary soloist. They performed about ninety shows in the next year, including a West Coast tour that featured a special guest in their entourage.

MAMA LOUISE:
Red Dog came in one day in ’72 and said, “How would you feel about going to California?” I had a niece that Red Dog always liked because she had big legs, and when I said I didn’t know about that traveling, he said she could come, too. And she did.

They said it was for cooking—that I’d be working for them—but when we got there, Dickey said, “No cooking for you, Mama. Have a good time.” I looked over at Gregg with this beautiful woman and I said, “That’s why y’all came out here.”

On the way back from California, I was sitting on the plane with Red Dog and Joe Dan. A real proper white woman heard Red Dog call me “Mama Louise” and said, “Oh, is that your mama?” She didn’t like it one bit. He said, “Yep. I call her Mama.” She says, “Oh, is that so?” and looks at ’em with disgust. They were so mad they wanted to jump on her, but I told them to sit down and be quiet.

Finally making some money, the band fulfilled one of Oakley’s communal dreams on May 3, 1972, when they closed the purchase of 432 acres in Juliette, Georgia, about 25 miles north of Macon. They paid $160,000 for the land in Jones and Jasper counties, which immediately became known as “the Farm” and became a group hangout.

At “the Farm” (from left) Kim Payne, Dickey Betts, Buffalo Evans, Tuffy Phillips. Dickey Betts’s father is standing behind him.

SWEET MELISSA

How one of rock’s most beloved songs was written and recorded.

A teenaged Gregg Allman spent years struggling to find his musical voice, writing and rejecting songs. He says he tossed away more than three hundred.

“They were just ‘I wanna swoon with you under the moon in June’ or they were a few good licks that didn’t really belong together,” he says. “My brother and I were struggling with finding any sense of originality. Songwriting is not something you’re born with.”

Late in 1967, still struggling to write a keeper song, Allman found himself sitting in a room in Pensacola’s Evergreen Motel, holding Duane’s guitar, which was tuned to open E.

“I picked up the guitar and didn’t know it was natural-tuned,” Allman recalls. “I just started strumming it and hit these beautiful chords. It was just open strings, then an E shape first fret, then moved to the second fret. This is a great example of the way different tunings can open up different roads to you as a songwriter. The music immediately made me feel good and the words just started coming to me. I started singing but stumbled on the name.”

Years later, Allman, relaxing in a dressing room at New York’s Beacon Theater following one of the Allman Brothers Band’s landmark shows, starts singing a familiar melody: “
But back home he’ll always run to sweet…”

He stops and guffaws at the memory. “Nancy? Sweet … Stella?
What the fuck is her name?
”

Allman lets out a long, loud laugh before continuing: “I had the melody and the chords and the idea, but no name. That drove me nuts for about a week. Then I was in a grocery store late at night when a beautiful Spanish lady came in with a gorgeous little girl with black hair down her back, who took off running down the aisle, and the mother called out, ‘Oh, Melissa, come back!’”

Allman leans back on the couch, lets his long blond hair out of a thick ponytail, shakes it free, and looks up with a sparkle in his eyes decades later.

“When I heard her yell ‘Melissa,’ I knew I had it and I just sung out, ‘
But back home he’ll always run to sweet Melissa.
’ I wanted to hug that lady, but I just dropped my milk and ran home to my guitar and played it through and it was perfect. I just knew that was it.

“I made a little recording and played it for my brother and he said, ‘It’s pretty good—for a love song. It ain’t rock and roll that makes me move my ass.’ He could be tough that way. But we recorded a little version of it together.”

That rough version was released on
One More Try
, a solo compilation heavy on outtakes and demos released in 1997 but quickly pulled from the market and now out of print.

“I had that song in my pocket for years and after a while my brother started telling me how much he liked it,” Gregg says.

A year after writing the song, the brothers Allman recorded it as part of a Florida demo session with Butch Trucks’s band the 31st of February. That version is thought to feature Duane’s first recorded slide playing. The sessions were eventually released under the misleading title
Duane and Gregg Allman.

When Liberty Records, who had the Allmans’ band the Hour Glass under contract, demanded that Gregg return to Los Angeles to fulfill a contract, he did not have enough money to buy an airplane ticket. He says that he sold “Melissa” and “God Rest His Soul,” which he wrote in tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., to the producer Steve Alaimo for $250.

Recalls guitarist Scott Boyer, “Gregg came to me after Vanguard Records turned down the demos and asked what to do about needing money and having an offer to buy these songs so he could fly back. I didn’t know what to do and told him so and he just went, ‘Hell, I can always write another song.’”

Years later, while recording
Eat a Peach
, Allman Brothers manager Phil Walden arranged to buy back half the publishing rights for Gregg.

“I think Alaimo figured half of a song on an Allman Brothers album was better than 100 percent of nothing,” notes Trucks.

Allman says he never brought the song to the Allman Brothers Band, in part because he no longer owned the rights and in part because he thought it too soft for the band. When Duane died, Gregg sang “Melissa” at his brother’s funeral, and when the band reconvened to finish recording
Eat a Peach
, the song was an appropriate tribute to his fallen brother. While everyone recognized the song’s appeal, it lacked an instrumental component as compelling as its chords, lyrics, and vocals.

“I knew it needed something and told Gregg I would come up with a lead line,” recalls Dickey Betts. “I took a recording home and started playing around and I came up with that entire lead guitar portion that night, which was actually Gregg’s birthday [December 8].

“I walked into the studio the next day and said, ‘Happy Birthday, Gregg,’ and laid that on him. Then we cut the song.”

Allman has called Betts’s melodic lead line on “Melissa” the “finest guitar work” he ever heard his longtime partner play. Four years after it was written, “Melissa” entered the rock pantheon, quickly becoming one of the Allmans’ most beloved songs, used in movie soundtracks and commercials and forever a crowd favorite.

“I knew it was good but never could have guessed it would impact so many people for so many years,” Allman says. “I’ve met a lot of Melissas named after the song.”

PERKINS:
At that point we had some money and we were going to make an investment. That property was the first major expenditure and Berry was the driving force behind the purchase. He wanted a place for the people. At one point it was going to be called ABBville and everyone was going to live there. No one thought about logistics like: How would everyone have their property deeded to them? How are we all going to build houses?

But when you walked down the main road into that place, it felt magical, like, “This is the place we need to be.” Dickey built a beautiful rustic cabin and moved in—before that he was often going back to Florida or Love Valley when we came off tour. Butch had a trailer and grandiose plans to build a house and stables. Everybody else was also thinking about building a place.

LINDA OAKLEY:
We had dreamed of getting this big piece of land where everyone could build a house and then it happened. I remember driving out there in our new cars. It was like, “Yes, it’s all happening. Our dreams are coming true.”

CHAPTER

14

Drunken Hearted Boy

I
N THE FALL
of 1972, Gregg began recording his first solo album even as the ABB was recording a follow-up to
Eat a Peach
in the same Capricorn Studios. Sandlin produced both projects, and brought the pianist Chuck Leavell in to play on the solo album, which became
Laid Back.

LEAVELL:
I had toured with the Allman Brothers when I was playing with Dr. John and we opened a lot of shows. I loved the band and I would stay to hear them whenever I could and would often sit down and play my piano behind the curtain, playing along with the band and just finding my place. Apparently, the road crew heard me and thought it sounded good and told the guys in the band, but I’m not sure how much impact that made on anyone.

But I was around and Johnny [Sandlin] asked me to work on
Laid Back.
The Brothers were recording
Brothers and Sisters
at the same time, the sessions often overlapped, and we all hung around the studio an awful lot. Before I knew what was going on, I was working on that, too.

SANDLIN:
I was recording Chuck for
Laid Back
and he was just an amazing player, one of the best I’d ever heard. He came to some Allman Brothers sessions and he just seemed to fit. It did not start out with a plan for him to audition for the band or anything.

LEAVELL:
Things were pretty loose and I just found myself in the Allman Brothers. People were still grieving over Duane’s death. It had been almost a year but the grieving process was still very much under way. I think perhaps these sessions offered the way forward.

SANDLIN:
Chuck added another very strong voice, and another harmony instrument—and it wasn’t replacing Duane. They did
not
want to replace Duane.

BETTS:
Replacing Duane with another guitar player was out of the question.

LES DUDEK,
guitarist, played on “Jessica” and “Ramblin Man”
: I originally came to Macon because the keyboard player in my Florida band was friends with Dickey and heard that he wasn’t sure after Duane’s death if the Allman Brothers would continue and he was looking for musicians to play with him. After a weekend spent jamming, I went home and Dickey called and asked me to come back to Macon. I started jamming with the guys all the time and everyone liked the way I played with Dickey and with the band.

TRUCKS:
Les Dudek came to Macon, Georgia, within weeks of Duane’s death and word got out that there was this guy walking around telling everyone that he was there to replace Duane. We went looking for this dude to kick his ass. Nobody was going to replace Duane and the very thought of it was infuriating to us.

SANDLIN:
Les was a really good guitar player, but he really knew it. He just pissed me off from the start, going around town telling everyone, “I got the gig.” If he had been the second coming of Duane he couldn’t have impressed me. I didn’t have anything to do with the discussions but I’m glad they did what they did.