One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (42 page)

WEST:
In those days there were an awful lot of standing-room tickets sold and many, many people coming in the back door. There could be a few hundred people in there without seats and things could get unruly real fast.

PODELL:
It was extremely dramatic, because we all knew what was on the line—it wasn’t just a show. The whole credibility with the history of drugs, animosity, breakups—the whole Allman Brothers soap opera—was being played out and how it would end would determine their future. It was potentially not only Beacon-ending, but career-ending.

WEST:
Podell could talk straight to them, and say, “This is what’s going to happen to your career.” They would listen to Podell. They respected him as someone who knew them from the start and who was sober, too. You’re going to listen to somebody who’s been there and he told them exactly what time it was. He made the point that if they don’t do this, it’s the end of the line.

HAYNES:
After the word started spreading that the show might not happen, we were all thinking, “This could be it.”

BUTCH TRUCKS:
We were upstairs in our dressing rooms and had reached a point where we decided we’re probably going to have to cancel the show—and the rest of the Beacon. I’m sitting there thinking, “This is it. This is how it finally ends.” We had thirty cops out in the lobby just in case.

HAYNES:
There was nothing to do but sit and wait and see what happened, but those folks were quite confident it would work out.

PODELL:
I remember Delsener saying we have to start giving money back and I said, “Dude, do not. This show is going to play.” I was all bluster. I really didn’t know what was going to happen. I was totally bluffing. I just knew that if you give the money back, you are totally out of control.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Just as we’re about to make an announcement, Jonny called and said, “Gregg had a few drinks and we’re on the way.”

WEST:
Jonny Podell earned every penny he ever made from the Allman Brothers Band that night.

Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts in the
Late Show with David Letterman
dressing room celebrating their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, January, 1995.

This incident was more than a year after the band’s January 1995 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Allman remembers primarily for what he didn’t do: speak coherently. A drunk, bloated Gregg, looking exposed with his beard shaved off, took the podium after Betts gave a humorous, moving speech thanking Bill Graham, Tom Dowd, Steve Massarsky, Jonny Podell, and Bert Holman. Looking down at the notes in his hand, Allman paused and muttered a thank-you to “the greatest friend, brother, guitar player, and inspiration I’ve ever known, my brother Duane. He was always the first to face the fire.”

ALLMAN:
I could barely stand up. I meant to say something about my mother and something about Bill Graham. I meant to say a lot of stuff and I was too gone to say any of it. All day I tried to be really cool about it but you just cannot. Afterwards we played and I started feeling a little better so that night wasn’t a total loss, but I watched it on TV and I was mortified, and that’s what it took for me to get serious about cleaning up.

BETTS:
Substance abuse is an occupational hazard of being a musician. It’s like working in an industrial waste factory. That shit is around, and it’s so easy to get—and it’s so easy to get your energy where it should be anyway, but it ain’t. And you can go for three hours and feel like a king, but it doesn’t work in the long run. And, man, I’ve been there.

The morning after the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Allman got into a limo at his New York hotel and went to a Pennsylvania rehab facility. The stay got him over his acute illness, but his next, more significant step came the following year at his California home. With the support of his sixth wife, Stacey Fountain Allman, Gregg made a determined attempt to get sober, and was soon proclaiming that he had quit everything, including cigarettes.

“I hired a private nurse to come in to my house and it was rough … but I sure needed it,” Allman recalled in 1997. “There’s no way I can even explain it. It’s like having a five-hundred-pound weight lifted off me, or like I was blind in one eye and now I can see out of both. I can see better, taste better, smell better—all five of my senses are waking up and I’m appreciating them all.

“There’s a whole lot of stuff that I used to take for granted that I don’t anymore, and one of them is being alive. I’ve come so close that … That life of being wasted day in and day out all pretty much seems like a dream, or something that happened to someone else.”

Though Gregg’s road to sobriety would prove to be more winding and complicated, there was immediately a marked change in his appearance and onstage demeanor following this ’96 cleansing. Allman was in notably better condition for most of the next decade.

CHAPTER

24

Stand Back

A
S
A
LLMAN STRUGGLED
with sobriety, tensions with the band continued to simmer, boiling over on a late summer 1996 West Coast tour. On September 1, the band traveled from Las Vegas to San Francisco, where they had an off day followed by a performance at the Fillmore West that was a fund-raiser for the Bill Graham Foundation. (Graham died in a helicopter crash on October 25, 1991.)

QUIÑONES:
After a very long ride, Dickey wakes up and goes, “Where are we?” Bert says, “About an hour from San Francisco.” And Dickey goes nuts: “I need to go to Pebble Beach. I have a tee time there. I pay for this bus. Turn it around!” So we all grumble but have to go back down to Monterey to drop Dickey off to play golf. Then we drive back to San Francisco and enjoy a day off before the next night’s benefit gig at the Fillmore.

WEST:
Dickey loved Bill Graham and even thanked him in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, but he did not show up for this gig and everyone was embarrassed and furious at him. He arrived in San Francisco from Pebble Beach the night before in a limo with some new friends he had picked up and was a total mess and then he vanished again.

QUIÑONES:
We had to play without him again and this time we had no idea where he was. When he disappeared before, we knew he was sick, arrested, whatever. Now there’s no rhyme or reason and Bert is calling the airport and anyone he can think of; we’re putting out the search party for Dickey Betts.

WEST:
No one knew where he was and the next gig was in Idaho, and we get on the buses and start heading there.

QUIÑONES:
Eventually, Bert got Dickey’s wife on the phone and asked if she had heard from Dickey and she goes, “Oh, he’s here sleeping in bed.” And we were like, “What the fuck?” He went home to Sarasota without telling anybody.

WEST:
They got ahold of Derek, put him on a plane, and he flew out there to play for Dickey.

QUIÑONES:
He went home and we figured he’s staying home and Butch had Derek on the way to sub for Dickey. Butch was so angry. He called back Dickey’s wife, who refused to wake Dickey up, and Butch was yelling, “Wake that motherfucker up! I’ve got a few things to tell him. How dare he leave us in the middle of a run!”

Then, at some point, Dickey calls Bert and says, “I’m coming back out and we’re going to have a band meeting.” So in a day and a half Dickey flies home to Florida and back to the West Coast.

WEST:
After this long drive from San Francisco, like twenty-four hours, we get to the place in Idaho and Dickey shows up.

QUIÑONES:
We’re all in a normal double-bed room in the hotel that Bert had booked for this meeting and here comes Dickey Betts. He walks in with his hat pulled down so you can’t even see his eyes and sits down in the corner chair next to Butch. He looks around the room and says, “If you guys think this is a fucking intervention, you are highly mistaken.”

And we’re like, “Dude, you called the fucking meeting.”

He looks over at Butch and goes, “You got something you want to say to me?”

And he goes, “No, I don’t.” He said later he figured if he said anything else, it would be another broken nose.

Dickey goes, “Does anyone else have anything they want to say?” I raise my hand and he’s like, “What?”

I go, “I just want to know why you fucking left us without any notice.”

And he goes, “I’m not gonna fucking answer that!” So I’m thinking, “This is going to be very productive.”

Then Butch goes, “As a matter of fact, I do have something to say.” He starts to say that he was pissed off that Dickey would leave just like that and Dickey interrupts him and says, “No, you listen to me! You owe everything you have to me, Dickey Betts, motherfucker! That Jaguar you were driving in 1974 was because of me.”

And I’m thinking, “Nineteen seventy-four? This is some pent-up anger.” He starts throwing all this shit in Butch’s face.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
All I remember is a half-hour drunken tirade that didn’t make much sense but boiled down to “Butch Trucks owes me every penny he’s ever made.”

QUIÑONES:
He ends that tirade by walking to the middle of the room and saying, “Fuck you! Fuck you!”—pointing to every one of us and giving us the fuck-you. Then he goes, “I fucking quit this band. If you want Dickey Betts to play in the Allman Brothers Band, you’re going to have to pay me forty thousand a show.” Then he storms out.

We’re all dumbfounded, looking at each other like, “Wow. What just happened? What do we do now?”

Butch goes, “Derek’s on the way already. Let’s just finish this run and show the motherfucker this is not the Dickey Betts Band. He’s been holding us hostage for years. Fuck him.”

I’m going, “I think this is a bad idea. We should fold up the tent, go home, and assess the damage.” But they’re like, “I don’t think so.”

WEST:
It was an unworkable situation. Derek couldn’t play with Dickey sitting on a bus and no one would play with Dickey, because they were so pissed, even before that meeting.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Ever since Duane died, anytime anyone challenged anything Dickey said, he’d either threaten to beat you up or threaten to quit. If I heard it once, I heard it a million times.

QUIÑONES:
We’re still sitting in the room trying to figure this out, and there’s a knock on the door. “It’s Dickey! Open the fucking door!”

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Bert opened the door, Dickey came in, went, “Where’s that son of a bitch?” and came charging right at me.

QUIÑONES:
Allen Woody was sitting on one bed and I was sitting on the other. Woody gets up to block him and Dickey goes, “Woody, get out of my fucking way!”

And Woody goes, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

And Dickey cocks his arm back and punches Woody in the face. Woody was stunned. He was an intimidating figure but he was the sweetest guy that I knew. I never before saw a violent bone in Woody’s body, but the last thing he expected was to be punched in the face by one of his idols. He grabs Dickey by the throat and cocks his arm and I jump up and grab Dickey in this armlock from behind, telling Woody not to do it, it’s not worth it, and Woody’s holding him by the neck, screaming, “I was your fucking friend!” over and over. Dickey’s yelling at me to let him go and I’m going, “No, I can’t do that. This is not going to go down like this. The only way I’m letting you go is if you walk out of this room.”

I turn him around and inch him toward the door and he leaves. That moment for me was like, “What the fuck am I involved in here?” I grew up with relatives who drank and did hard drugs, so joining the band was like being back home, except with some crazy white guys. I thought I understood all that, but hearing the anger behind this old history was stunning. I couldn’t understand how these guys could make such fucking great music and be in that place personally. Gregg stayed out of the whole fray. It was almost like he wasn’t there. And I think he and Dickey went down to the bar and had a drink together, if you can believe that.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
They didn’t go to the bar together. Gregg went to the bar and started drinking and Dickey joined him and said, “You and me are the Allman Brothers, so fuck everyone else. Let’s go out and tour.” Gregg was thinking, “Yeah, right,” but saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” Gregg is not known for his confrontational abilities and never has been.

WEST:
The gig was canceled at show time, along with the next two, in Portland and Seattle. The next morning I was rounding up people to get on the bus and go to two different airports to fly home, and Dickey was milling around the lobby. Warren got on the bus, managing to do an end-around and not see Dickey.

QUIÑONES:
When Dickey showed up in the lobby, he called me over and goes, “Quiñones, I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. That was a little crazy.” I got along great with Dickey. He never messed with me and we respected each other, so I tried to give him some loving guidance: “Look, maybe you should take this time to try and get some help and clean up.” And he goes, “Fuck you, man! Don’t you ever talk to me like I’m a child!” So I just got on the bus.