One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (9 page)

TRUCKS:
The whole experience of making the first album was absolutely wonderful. I felt comfortable in the studio, having recorded a bunch before, as did we all, and the music was great. We had played these songs so much and we were all just busting to get them down on record.

JAIMOE:
They booked two weeks for us in Atlantic Studios—and that was just supposed to be laying down basic tracks, with overdubs coming later. We went in on Sunday night to get sounds, went back Monday night to start cutting, and came out Thursday with the whole thing done, overdubs and all. We went in there, played our asses off, and that was it; we were done in four days and they spent the rest of the time mixing.

TRUCKS:
It all happened so fast. We did that whole record in two weeks beginning to end, from the time we set up to the time we mastered, and the only thing we got stuck on wound up being the high point of that whole record: Duane’s solo on “Dreams.” We tried playing it several times and couldn’t get it to where it felt right to him. Finally, he said, “Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s record the song and leave a good long opening for me to solo.” We were just jamming to give him some movement to play along with, and he was playing rhythm, leading us where he wanted to go, setting the track just how he wanted it.

And at the end of every day’s sessions, he would go and give “Dreams” a shot, but never felt like it was happening. One night, we had finished what we were doing and he said, “Turn off all the lights,” and he went way to the back corner, where his amp and baffle were, and sat down—on the floor, I think—and they rolled the track and he started playing that solo that’s on the record. All of a sudden he was playing slide, which he had never done on the song before. He said that he just saw the slide sitting there, stuck it on, and played a lot of the same licks he had played, redone with the slide. Then he got to the end and started that rolling lick and built to an incredible climax. By the time he finished everybody in there was in tears. It was unbelievable. I still have a hard time listening to that solo without getting emotional. It was just magic. It’s always been that the greatest music we played was from out of nowhere, that it wasn’t practiced, planned, or discussed.

Just after the band returned to Macon from recording the album, Walden and Associates purchased them a Ford Econoline van from Riverside Ford, paying $2,751.55 for it on September 4, 1969. The members felt like they had hit the big time.

As they waited for the album to come out, Duane continued to travel to Muscle Shoals to play sessions, cutting great tracks with Ronnie Hawkins and others.

HALL:
After Duane was in Macon and his band was going, he would keep driving in for sessions when he could, and talk about how excited he was about the band. He would drive up here in his little Ford and I was always happy to see him.

JAIMOE:
It’s unbelievable how much Duane accomplished, how many dates he played. One problem that a lot of us have is thinking about why we can’t do something. Duane just did it. So many musicians will say, “Oh, I can’t play with that guy.” Well, why not? It’s music—listen and play. That’s what Duane did. He never, ever thought he couldn’t play with someone, or didn’t have time to do something.

DOUCETTE:
He just never stopped. We’d be up until five in the morning, and at ten he was dressed and ready to go.

In November 1969, Duane showed up at Fame, excited to meet John Hammond Jr., one of his favorite blues guitarists.

HAMMOND:
I was working with the Muscle Shoals session guys to record
Southern Fried
for Atlantic. No one there had heard of me and I was trying to forge some relationship with the band and it wasn’t going well. Before I arrived, I thought they were all black and they thought I was black and we were both surprised and a little stand-offish. We were stumbling along together without much chemistry. Then Duane showed up after two days and said, “I want to meet John Hammond.” They were so knocked out that he wanted to play with me. It earned me so much respect.

Eddie Hinton, the guitarist on the session, told me, “You got to hear this guy play.” When I did, I flipped out. Duane was just a phenomenal guitar player and a really nice guy. I asked him to play on some of the songs and it brought a whole new life to the sessions. It was just incredible.

Berry came with him to at least one of our sessions. Over that week’s time Duane and I became friendly and he told me about his new band, with Berry, Dickey, Butch, Jaimoe, and Gregg. He had a lot of energy and excitement about this.

The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut was released in November 1969, featuring five Gregg Allman originals, as well as Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and Spencer Davis’s “Don’t Want You No More.” The latter was transformed from a light pop song into a hard-driving, organ-fueled instrumental, which opened the album and led directly into the pained majesty of Gregg’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear.” That song, which had heralded the singer’s emergence as an original songwriter, now signaled his band’s emergence as a powerfully original entity. The band had thrown down a gauntlet of musical precision and deep blues feeling, even if the production somehow tamped down the fire.

Though the group had been together less than six months and the members ranged in age from twenty-one (Oakley and Gregg Allman) to twenty-five (Betts),
The Allman Brothers Band
sounds like the product of a veteran unit with a fully formed vision. They were perhaps the only group to pull off what every hippie with a guitar and a Muddy Waters album talked about in 1969: reinventing the blues in a manner both visionary and true to the original material. The entity’s ability to keep their feet firmly planted on terra firma while blasting into outer space was unparalleled.

All of this instrumental virtuosity was tied to a terrific batch of Gregg Allman compositions that captured the weary existentialism of the finest blues, expressing a fatalism profound enough to border on Southern Gothic. They were remarkably mature lyrical conceptions for such a young man, expertly executed in a minimalist, almost haiku style.

ALLMAN:
Those songs on the first album came out of the long struggle of trying so hard and getting fucked by different land sharks in the business. Just the competition I experienced out in L.A. and being really frustrated but hanging on and not saying, “Fuck it,” and going on to construction work or something.

JAIMOE:
From the minute Gregory arrived in Jacksonville, we started working on these early songs, and he kept writing them, and we played them damn near every day. We very seldom “rehearsed”; rehearsal for us was just playing: “The song goes like this. Let’s go.” And we played it. No other shit, no talking, no messing around. We played the songs into shape. Those blues tunes that we copied, starting with “Trouble No More,” they were just songs that were so good they couldn’t be left off the album.

BETTS:
Berry played a huge role in the band’s arrangements. “Whipping Post” was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us; it was a real melancholy, slow minor blues, along the lines of “Dreams.” Oakley came up with the heavy bass line that starts off the track, along with the 6/8-to-5/8 shifting time signature.

JAIMOE:
“Whipping Post” sounded just like “Stormy Monday Blues.” It would go into the 6/8 feel on the “sometimes I feel” section. Berry came up with that bassline that made you pay attention.

BETTS:
Oakley called a halt to the rehearsal and said, “Let me work on this song tonight and let’s get back to it tomorrow.” By the next day, he had that intro worked out. When he played that riff for us, everyone went, “Yeah! That’s it!” Oakley morphed a lot of those songs into something different.

DOUCETTE:
Berry played a huge role in the songwriting. A lot of those feels that are at the core of the Allman Brothers’ sound are Berry. He was huge within the band, and he was such a hip guy.

BETTS:
A lot of the arrangements came about from jamming. For instance, we were all messing around with the theme from
2001: A Space Odyssey
and that morphed into “Dreams,” which Gregg had written, but which didn’t really have an arrangement yet.

JAIMOE:
Gregg brought most of his songs pretty well done, but we really worked up “Whipping Post” and “Dreams,” which is basically “My Favorite Things” with lyrics. I played the exact licks and fills on there that Jimmy Cobb played on Miles’s “All Blues,” which is something I would do all the time. I did a lot of copying, but only from the best.

ALLMAN:
“Dreams” is the only song I ever wrote on a Hammond organ. It belonged to some dude out in California.

There’s no songwriting process. I wish there was, but there are as many ways to write songs as there are songs. You have to feel comfortable. Once you get in a groove, you flow along with the tune, but it’s finding that groove that’s the hard part.

BETTS:
For such young cats that band was really mature. I listen back to the early stuff now and it’s hard to explain. Duane and Oakley had incredible leadership qualities, but it’s really amazing that guys at twenty-two, twenty-three had that much seasoning and were such good players. One reason is that we weren’t a garage band. We were a nightclub band. We had brought ourselves up in the professional world by actually playing in bars and that really gives you a lot more depth. We all had a lot of miles under our wheels when we first met despite our ages.

Duane had done that studio work, Gregg had been in L.A. and recorded. My first road gig came when I was sixteen playing in a band that traveled with “The World of Mirth” shows, to state fairs and such. We had a tent show called Teen Beat we put on in the midway. We sometimes did fifteen thirty-minute shows a day, playing Little Richard and Chuck Berry. I did splits and duckwalks and we would get on each other’s shoulders and slide across the stage on our knees wearing kneepads hidden under our pants. All those gigs pay off.

DOUCETTE:
This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility—and most of us had either lost our fathers young or had absent fathers. These are things you have to understand.

SANDLIN:
The first time I heard them live, they were really powerful—just incredible. I sat there amazed. They had the blues thing down and then it went off in so many directions. The music went on and on but it seemed like an instant. When I heard the record, I thought it was good, but not as good as they were live.

DOUCETTE:
Everything was there to make the first record a great one—it has so much blood and guts and meat and bone—but it doesn’t come through the speakers.

JAIMOE:
I love the way the drums sound on the first album, panned hard right and hard left. You can hear both sets of drums as distinctively as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They sound so natural, like they’re in your living room.

TRUCKS:
When Duane finally relented on the name, it was with the caveat that there be no pictures of just Duane and Gregg separate from the rest of us. Of course, they put a picture of Duane and Gregg on [the back of] our first album. Duane went nuclear when he saw that.

STEPHEN PALEY,
photographer who took the pictures on the debut album cover:
I had shot Duane a few times for Atlantic and got along with him really well, and the label hired me to shoot the cover for the first Allman Brothers Band album. I went down to Macon and hung out for about a week. I never liked a band more. I was one of them. I hung out with them, they got me girls, they gave me drugs. It was like being a rock star. I hung out with a lot of rock stars but no one ever did that to the same extent. There was just an ease to the whole thing. They really were the kindest, most fun band I ever worked with.

We spent a few days going all over Macon and shooting anywhere that looked photogenic: fields, old houses, railroad tracks, the cemetery. We shot a lot. They looked scary but they were sweethearts and they would do anything. I even went with Duane when he had oral surgery and shot him there—and, of course, they posed full-frontal naked! That wasn’t my idea. I would not have had the guts to propose it. It was Phil Walden’s idea. They trusted him and he said to do it, so they did. [
Rolling Stone
editor/publisher] Jann Wenner happened to be there, with Boz Scaggs, who he was producing. We were outside near a brook on Phil’s brother’s property and it just seemed like a natural thing to do.

TRUCKS:
It was preplanned, because we had a bunch of soap bubbles, the idea being we’d put them in to generate bubbles to cover us up, but it was a pretty free-flowing stream so that didn’t cut it. Luckily I had sliced my leg open the day before and had about thirteen stitches, which is why I’m standing up; I couldn’t get that water in the cut, so I kind of positioned myself behind Oakley.

PALEY:
Phil knew the band was special musically and I think he was trying to exploit every aspect of their image to draw attention. It’s like being a street musician; you want to draw a crowd any way you can.

TRUCKS:
After we took those pictures of everyone sitting down, Phil said, “Let’s take some pictures of everyone standing up for posterity.” And we all said, “Hell, no!” And he goes, “No one will ever see ’em.” So we did it. The first time we played the Fillmore East [
December 26, 1969
], I’m walking around looking at everything and just feeling good and sort of amazed that here we are. I walk in the lobby and hanging up there is a double gatefold from
Screw
magazine of us standing up naked, full hanging and everything.

PALEY:
That wasn’t
Screw.
It was a broadsheet alternative newspaper that was the size of the
New York Times
and that picture was there full-size for all to see. It wasn’t pornographic, though.