One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (46 page)

ALLMAN:
Having a band is like having a relationship with a woman. If you’ve ever been in a real bad relationship, you know how little by little you learn to live with somebody who’s absolutely dragging you down and your whole environment is kind of twisted and you don’t even realize it until it’s stopped. It’s definitely hard to maintain a band for so many years for many, many reasons. It’s a give-and-take thing, so similar to a marriage or relationship. It has to maintain a balance or everyone suffers.

BETTS:
I’m just real disappointed in the way this all went down, but I’m not going to bad-mouth anybody in print. No matter how nasty those guys can get, I won’t do that to them. But I think the band broke up in 2000 and I think it’s just been a copy band ever since. If you enjoy going to see Derek and Warren play my and Duane’s stuff, that’s fine. You don’t have to feel guilty … I’m trying to be a gentleman, but all I can say is they still play my songs, but if you come hear my band, you will not hear “Melissa.”

ALLMAN:
I don’t think anything could have kept us all together at that point. There comes a place where there’s just a line and we were already way past crossing that line.

HOLMAN:
They didn’t really ask me. I caught wind of what was going on and I couldn’t stop it. They had made up their minds. They had had enough. The train was off the tracks.

PODELL:
They didn’t consult me, maybe because they knew I would have tried to talk them out of it. After the whole thing went down, I went and visited Dickey because I’m not a fair-weather friend. I thought the whole thing was a mistake and wished I had had a chance to try to help them work through it.

BURBRIDGE:
I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard what the partners were doing. The band was going to break up.

Manager Bert Holman (center) with Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman.

ALLMAN:
You can say, “Look who’s talking about drinking problems,” and that’s fair. I had the alcoholism real bad, but at least I showed up for gigs and I didn’t take my problems on stage with me and torment everyone else with them. Somehow I kept eking it out.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Yes, Gregg struggled with alcohol for years, but when he had problems, he tended to get real quiet and almost shrink away. When Dickey drank, he got louder and more difficult to deal with … just very mean.

HOLMAN:
Dickey felt he had more power and say because in his mind he had held the whole band together and had stepped up when no else could or did. The problem is, to be a leader you have to lead by attraction, and Dickey was leading by intimidation. His implication was “If you don’t do this, I’ll quit, and are you gonna let him lead it? You gonna play with this drunk?”

The reality is none of them are good leaders. Dickey was the best of the bunch, but his personal issues got to be too much and undermined his ability to lead. He’s a very charismatic, committed, passionate guy, but he’s not willing to embrace what other people have to say. He’d bully them into doing things his own way rather than making everyone feel a part of it, which is what I think Duane did.

JAIMOE:
When Butch and Gregg told me what they were thinking, I was surprised and then I wasn’t at all, because Dickey has always been unpredictable and difficult since day one. We’d be playing somewhere or rehearsing and he didn’t feel right or didn’t like what he was playing and he’d pack up his guitar and just go walking, or sit and listen to the band, and Duane would say, “What’s the matter, hoss? Why you not feeling good?” Duane could deal with him, but for so many years without him …

PAYNE:
From the very beginning, Dickey could get very introverted and not even speak to anybody for days. He was very moody. He could be a wonderful, sensitive guy or he could be brooding and silent—or angry and scary.

JAIMOE:
When Duane was there, it was one thing, but without him it was something else.

PERKINS:
I never saw a mean streak in Dickey until Duane was gone. Around the time of
Brothers and Sisters
he started to be hard to handle and have a tempestuous relationship with Gregg.

HOLMAN:
Duane had charisma and vision and he didn’t put people in conflict. He made decisions that were popular. They all emotionally agreed with what he wanted to do. We try to make decisions in the Allman Brothers that are unanimous and not have situations where you have to say, “You were outvoted.” They try to do things by consensus and if someone feels really strongly, they can often turn the consensus around.

BETTS:
It was a real family for so long and we took care of brother Gregg, we took care of brother Butch. And, yeah, they took care of me. We always tried to avoid a competition thing. If one guy was down, the rest of the guys didn’t try to run him into the stage; they tried to carry him. We’d look at each other and say, “I’m flying with one wing tonight,” and carry each other in those situations. That’s the way this band always tried to be. Unfortunately, at certain times drinking and drugs and crooked managers and thievery and other things have caused us to lose sight of that. But that was our essential thing. And I think it kept us playing the way we did for so long.

Then after thirty years with our two big brothers gone, it finally flew apart, and it’s kind of OK. You see, what’s so complicated about the band is we had three bandleaders, three visionaries: Duane Allman, Berry Oakley, and me. And we had a very gifted singer/songwriter who didn’t quite see the whole picture: Gregg. The fact that the band carried on for another twenty-five years after Duane’s and Berry’s deaths is amazing. It’s sad that I happened to be in the position of being the one that it came down on, but I think they had to execute somebody to carry on.

PODELL:
At one point I told the whole band, “You know, your income is very possibly going to be reduced by 25 percent or more.” No one argued with me, but Gregg said, “I don’t care. Every day, when it’s time to go to the gig, I get agita. I get tense. It’s no longer fun. If you’re telling me I have to make less, so be it. I’ll vote for serenity.” That was a very valuable lesson for me. And Gregg coming up with that? Out of the mouths of babes …

BURBRIDGE:
Quality of life is important. Time is as important as money at a certain point in your life. Maybe more important. The partners didn’t want to spend any more of their time in preventable turmoil and disability.

ALLMAN:
The Brothers can be so lead-weight, so draining. Bands have their psychodramas, and for all those years we had four people trying to drive one truck, and it could get really fucking frustrating. But it’s something inside me. It’s just part of my skin, part of my metabolism. It’s part of my nervous system, and I dearly love it. It’s like, I can’t be me without you.

CHAPTER

26

Walk On Gilded Splinters

G
UITARIST
J
IMMY
H
ERRING
joined the band for the 37-date 2000 summer tour, which kicked off on June 16 in Virginia Beach and continued through September. Herring had played with Burbridge in the Aquarium Rescue Unit and is close friends with Derek Trucks. It was jarring to see the Allman Brothers Band with the three young friends on the front line—and without Betts, who had for so long been the center-stage focus. The music, however, was strong from the start.

HOLMAN:
It was a risk and an unknown. We realized pretty quickly we would be OK musically, but it was a challenge keeping it together on a business level. There were questions about the viability, and certainly some big Dickey fans who were very vocal about it.

QUIÑONES:
A lot of the press was really negative and a lot of fans were saying they wouldn’t come out because the Allman Brothers are not the Allman Brothers without Dickey Betts. I really did not know what would happen.

Jimmy Herring.

HOLMAN:
Derek was still very young and didn’t have the maturity to take a leadership role.

DEREK TRUCKS:
When I first heard what they were doing, I thought, “Here’s this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band, one of the legendary rock institutions, and I am the only guitarist in the band.” I was like, “You guys have an inflated sense of confidence that I can do this, but let’s go!”

PODELL:
For me, it was like when Duane died—I just really did not know if it was going to work. I had some real doubts, but I work for the band and do my best. Just like thirty years before, I put everything I knew into play, positioned it, and hoped for the best. And then I prayed.

DEREK TRUCKS:
When Jimmy’s name came up, I knew it would be musically great, but does that make it the Allman Brothers? Even I didn’t know.

JIMMY HERRING,
guitarist, 2000 summer tour:
It was a great honor to even get the call. The Allman Brothers were the reason I started playing guitar. I got on a plane and listened to Allman Brothers songs all the way there. Just because you’ve played all those songs doesn’t mean you really know them. I took the obligation to do them right very seriously.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Jimmy Herring really was great, but he was never comfortable being known as “the guy who replaced Dickey Betts.”

HERRING:
It was bittersweet and bizarre. I was really excited to be a part of that great band and to play with Derek, who is one of my best friends and favorite players. But this wonderful opportunity happened at someone else’s expense and I don’t want to benefit from someone else’s demise, especially someone I revere as much as Dickey. I stepped into Dickey’s place and I’m a huge Dickey fan. I felt real strange about being there without him. It was such a mix of emotions. You can feel the history and it makes you want to do your best. Gregg is an icon—my idea of the perfect rock star—and then you have the incredible rhythm section. It’s a machine that is just a pleasure to play with.

ALLMAN:
Man, Jimmy Herring is a great player and he got us through that summer beautifully.

HERRING:
Being up there with my friends Derek and Oteil balanced out my star-struck feelings about playing with Gregg. The amazing thing is he never told me what to play. He actually said, “I don’t want you to be hung up playing what you think the Allman Brothers is. Just play what your heart tells you.”

WEST:
We anticipated it being musically spectacular, but we all knew there could be some issues. For one thing, Jimmy doesn’t sing and Gregg had never not had another singer in the band. He’s not going to sing every song, so it had to be a much more instrumental show, and you just knew those boys wouldn’t be able to help themselves, that they’d get out there in a hurry.

BURBRIDGE:
It was totally impossible to contain our “out” impulses. Hey, you are who you are. It got us in trouble with Gregg once.

DEREK TRUCKS:
We would take it off the rails from time to time. One night we just couldn’t help ourselves and we took “Mountain Jam” to Mars, which is what Red Dog was always urging us to do. He’d say, “The original band took the song out! It was different every night. You can’t play the record.” But after the show, we get on the bus, Gregg walks on and goes, “OK, who’s the fucking Phish fan? That was too much.” And he goes to the back of the bus with all of us looking at each other a bit stunned. After about ten minutes, he came back up and apologized. He said, “I used to go ’round and ’round with my brother on that same stuff. You play whatever you want. You guys are a part of this.”

BURBRIDGE:
Gregg said, “It’s your band, too. You guys do your thing.” He confessed that Duane used to love to go out like that, too.

DEREK TRUCKS:
My take on this was Duane from thirty-five years ago whipped his ass again. He did not have to apologize to us, that’s for sure.