One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (6 page)

LANDAU:
When I was in Muscle Shoals I was sitting in the office with Duane, Rick, and Phil, and Duane picked up the phone, dialed a number, and said, “Brother, it’s time for us to play together again.” I was a fly on the wall and could obviously only hear one end of the conversation, but it seemed very positive.

ALLMAN:
My brother only called me one time and I jumped on it.

JOHN M
C
EUEN:
As I recall, Duane kept calling Gregg, saying, “You got to get down here. The band has never sounded better.” He called enough times and Gregg went. I have to give Duane credit for having the vision to do this thing. I know the L.A. years were not great ones for them, but I think it was something they had to go through to discover their path.

PAYNE:
Gregg kept telling me, “I’m not going down and getting involved with that.” You have to remember he was coming off a very bad band experience; he hated the way the Hour Glass went and how it ended up and he may have connected that with being Duane’s fault. I think he also felt like Duane and the other guys turned on him and blamed him for staying in L.A., when he thought he had to.

SANDLIN:
It kind of bothered me that Gregg stayed out in L.A., but I didn’t know if he wanted to, or was being forced by management.

PAYNE:
At the same time, he was looking at his future—he was driving an old Chevy with a fender held on by antenna wire. Whenever we ran out of money, he’d go down and sell a song. We were living hand to mouth.

ALLMAN:
My brother said he was tired of being a robot on the staff down in Muscle Shoals, even though he had made some progress, and gotten a little known playing with great people like Aretha and Wilson Pickett. He wanted to take off and do his own thing. He said, “I’m ready to get back on the stage, and I got this killer band together. We got two drummers, a great bass player, and a hell of a lead guitar player, too.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he said, “Wait’ll you get here and I’ll show you.”

I didn’t know that he had learned to play slide so well. I thought he was out of his mind, but I was doing nothing, going nowhere. My brother sent me a ticket, but I knew he didn’t have the money, so I put it in my back pocket, stuck out my thumb on the San Bernardino Freeway, and got a ride all the way to Jacksonville, Florida—and it was a bass player I got a ride from.

PAYNE:
I know that Gregg remembers hitchhiking across the country, but the thing is, I’m the guy who drove him to the airport.

M
C
EUEN:
My brother bought a Chevy Corvair for Gregg to drive around L.A.—the most unsafe car ever invented. One day Gregg comes by the house, a little duplex in Laurel Canyon, looking for my brother, who wasn’t there. He said, “Hey, John, the man pulled me over. You know how they are. He doesn’t believe this is my car and is going to impound it. I got to take the pink slip to the judge.” So I said, “I know where the pink slip is.” I gave it to him and he took it and sold that car and bought a one-way ticket to Jacksonville. Maybe I’m responsible for the Allman Brothers Band! Gregg came back about six years later when the Brothers were playing the Forum, and gave my brother a check for the car.

TRUCKS:
I don’t know how he got there but a few days after Duane said he was calling Gregg, there was a knock on the door and there he was.

ALLMAN:
I walked into rehearsal on March 26, 1969, and they played me the track they had worked up to Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and it blew me away. It was so intense.

BETTS:
Gregg was floored when he heard us. We were really blowing; we’d been playing these free shows for a few weeks by that point.

ALLMAN:
I got my brother aside and said, “I don’t know if I can cut this. I don’t know if I’m good enough.” And he starts in on me: “You little punk, I told these people all about you and you don’t come in here and let me down.” Then I snatched the words out of his hand and said, “Count it off, let’s do it.” And with that, I did my damnedest. I’d never heard or sung this song before, but by God I did it. I shut my eyes and sang, and at the end of that there was just a long silence. At that moment we knew what we had. Duane kinda pissed me off and embarrassed me into singing my guts out. He knew which buttons to push.

The group played their first gig on March 30, 1969, at the Jacksonville Armory. Gregg had been in town for four days. The ABB on stage, with Dickey and Duane on guitar.

MIKE CALLAHAN,
one of the band’s first crew members:
The original name of the band was Beezlebub. That’s what the guys were calling it, or just “the band.” When we played that first gig in Jacksonville, there was no name. It was just, “The boys are playing.”

PRICE:
We did a few shows with my band the Load, the Second Coming, and then what was becoming the Allman Brothers. Berry and Dickey would do double duty. At one of the first shows after Gregg arrived, Duane said, “I’m glad you really liked that. This is a new band. We don’t have a name but we might be calling it Beezlebub.” I don’t think anyone liked it and it lasted about five minutes …

JAIMOE:
Beezlebub was one name that was talked about, but it was never “the name.” Lots of things were talked about. I do remember Jerry Wexler being worried because he said every brother band he had ever worked with had great conflicts over everything.

TRUCKS:
I think we all knew that Beelzebub wasn’t it, but we were at a loss as to what it should be—what
it
was. Phil Walden came up with the Allman Brothers due to the fact that Duane was the driving force. Duane absolutely would not allow it to be called the Duane Allman Band, but once Gregg joined the band, Phil sold the Brothers concept. Duane was at first very much against it. He felt that this was a band of equals and he did not want himself and his brother to become the focus of attention.

RED DOG,
early crew member:
The Allman Brothers Band name really was because of Duane, and Gregg used to say, “I’m lucky my name is Allman.”

Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell was one of the band’s first hardcore fans. A disabled Marine vet just home from Vietnam, he fell in love with Duane’s playing after hearing the band play for free in a Jacksonville park, was drawn in by the guitarist’s charisma, and begged for a job. Duane told him he could set up the drums, and Red Dog began hanging around the group, actually donating his monthly disability checks to the cause. He moved with the band to Macon and became their fourth crew member, hired as a driver and drum tech once the band started touring in earnest. He would remain with the group for more than thirty years.

JAIMOE:
Red Dog loved Duane and started hanging around when we were playing in the park in Jacksonville. He was a vet who could score you a woman or some weed or whatever. He just wanted to be a part of what we were doing, so Duane said, “Go set up the drums.” I would tell him to just take mine out of the case and I would set them up and he’d be kind of offended and ask to set them up and I’d say, “It’s like waxing your car—some things you want to do yourself.” After about six months, I said, “Go ahead and set them up,” and he was so happy. Red Dog was a good man and he loved the band.

CHAPTER

3

Georgia on a Fast Train

B
Y
M
AY
1
,
the band had relocated to Macon, Georgia, where Walden was establishing Capricorn Records; his new band would be the label’s first act. Walden’s dual role as label head and band manager would eventually cause the members to complain about a serious conflict of interest, becoming the source of much rancor. Initially, however, it seemed to make everything much easier.

The band moved together into Twiggs Lyndon’s apartment on 309 College Street, which became the communal home of all six band members, as well as their original crew of Mike Callahan, Kim Payne, and Red Dog. Lyndon had worked for Walden as a trusted road manager of soul acts like Arthur Conley and Percy Sledge and was now given the job of shepherding this new band. Living on very little money, the group quickly found a patron of sorts in Louise Hudson, cook and proprietor of the H&H Soul Food Restaurant.

PAYNE:
When I dropped Gregg off at the airport, he said, “If this turns out to be a good thing, I’ll give you a call.” I said, “Yeah, right,” and never expected to hear from him again, but a few weeks later, he called me on the pay phone of the flophouse where I was staying and said, “This is just going to be an ass-kicking band and we need you. Come on down.”

I didn’t have any money so I asked if he could get me one of those plane tickets and he said he didn’t think so. Eventually, he said the best he could do was some gas money so I could ride my bike. He sent me 50 dollars. I spent $37.50 getting my bike repaired and took off on the most insane three-thousand-mile trip anyone has ever taken. The $13.50 I had left got me to my parents’ house in Alabama, where I almost collapsed in the driveway. My mother gave me five dollars to make it to Macon. I arrived at the pad, walked into a living room lined with end-to-end mattresses, collapsed on one of them, and slept for twenty-four hours.

RED DOG:
We had mattresses across the floor and we had this Coke machine that had three beer selections and one Coke and it cost you a quarter.

A.J. LYNDON
,
Twiggs’s younger brother, ABB crew member 1973–76:
Everyone called that place the “Hippie Crash Pad.” It was actually Twiggs’s apartment and then everyone moved in as they arrived in town. One wall was painted purple, another bright yellow.

TRUCKS:
We all moved into Twiggs’s apartment when we arrived. He had the walls painted various psychedelic colors, including one that was squares of different colors. We bought some mattresses and threw them down and that was all that we ever had in there, along with the Coke machine.

A.J. LYNDON:
I was just a kid in high school and I would go over there at lunchtime and they’d all be sleeping. I remember seeing a little blond head on Jaimoe’s chest and thinking, “Well, this is different.” I’d get my mom to give me four quarters for lunch, go over there, step over bodies sleeping end to end, get four PBRs out of the Coke machine, drink them for lunch, and head back to school.

TRUCKS:
There were nine of us living in this little one-bedroom apartment, which made it real easy to spend all day rehearsing.

PAYNE:
One of the first things I noticed was that no matter what Gregg said about Duane when he was away from him, when I saw them together, their love and closeness was immediately apparent.

RED DOG:
Duane and Gregg lived separate lives and I don’t think Duane had to ride herd on Gregg. I can only recall one time with Duane actually screaming and hollering at Gregg.

HAMMOND:
What I admired about Duane is he was fearless. He had this vision of a mixed-race band in the Deep South in 1969. He was very adamant about including everyone. He didn’t care what anyone said. He had his own vision of what was the right thing to do and he did it.

MAMA LOUISE HUDSON,
cook and owner, H&H Soul Food Restaurant:
Macon was just barely integrated. We didn’t really have any white customers. And nobody around here had seen guys who looked like them. I had not. A lot of the white folk around here did not approve of them long-haired boys, or of them always having a black guy with them.

PAYNE:
Having Jaimoe in the band was a very big issue in 1969 in the Deep South, where segregation was still pretty strict. That was one of the things that tightened up the brotherhood. It was us against the world, especially when we were traveling. Day-to-day life, you can live on your own, in your own world, but not on the road, where you have to stop and eat and sleep and get gas—where you have all this exposure to society. The long hair was enough to start shit in most places, but Jaimoe … that was enough to spark the gasoline.

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON,
founder of the Hampton Grease Band, who played many early shows with the ABB:
It was a different world. It was life or death. You’d stop at a gas station and you’d wonder if you were going to die. That’s no joke. If you had long hair, you were a target.

MAMA LOUISE:
One day I looked out the window and saw these long-haired boys walking around, looking in. Finally, Dickey and Berry came in. Dickey told Berry, “Ask that lady for some food.”

He said, “I don’t know nothing about her. You ask the lady.” He said, “I don’t know her. You ask the lady.”

They got embarrassed and walked out. Then they came back in and started up again and I just said, “May I help you all, darlings?”

And one of them said, “May we please have two plates of food? We don’t have any money, but we’re going out on the road and when we come back, we’ll pay you.” I often helped people who didn’t have no money, so I gave it to them, and they did come back and pay when they returned. Most people who said that never came back. Then they did that again, another time or two, and then one day they asked for those two plates and I said, “Well, there’s five of y’all. Take five plates.”