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BARNEY
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"THIS
AIN’T NO FASHION SHOW," Duane Allman
liked to say. "We came here to play." It was
a mission statement that summed up what his
band was about. It said: Take us as you find
us, six southern dudes in denim and
centre-parted hair, playing churchy white
soul and home-cooked rock’n’blues on Hammond
organs and Fender basses and Gibson Les Paul
guitars. Ain’t no make-up round these parts.
Like his baby brother Gregg, Duane had been
through a bogus Hollywood pop-star trip and
come out the other end determined never
again to be guinea pigs for someone else’s
hype. Adhering almost fanatically to a
purist vision of what came to be classified
as "Southern Rock", Brother Duane was
nothing less than an evangelist. "This is a
religion we’re spreading’," he would say of
tours by the Allman Brothers Band.
"Duane didn’t have to speak twice," wrote
legendary Allman’s roadie Red Dog in his
Book of Tails (2001). "He was the leader. He
was, and no disrespect intended, like our
Jesus Christ. We followed him and his word."
Duane Allman was a skinny peckerwood kid
with ginger-blond hair and Furry Freak
Brothers mutton chops, but when he jammed a
bottleneck on his left middle guitar and
burned up the frets on his sunburst Gibson
he could sear your soul with the livid
intensity of his touch. Wilson Pickett and
Aretha Franklin discovered this when he
played on sessions for them in Muscle Shoals
and New York, and so did Eric Clapton when
he asked the Pickett-dubbed "Skyman" to sit
in on Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other
Assorted Love Stories. Brother Duane it was
who cooked up the immortal twelve-note
phrase which that album’s title track so
urgently needed.
"He’d always work standing up, and he had to
have his amplifier turned wide open,"
remembered Rick Hall, who hired Allman to
play on the session that produced the Wicked
Pickett’s version of ‘Hey Jude’. "He’d have
the phones on and couldn’t hear the strength
coming out the amp and it’d be jumping off
the table. Like the bottleneck in Clarence
Carter’s ‘Road of Love’ – you’d swear the
world was coming to an end. He only did that
particular break one time, it was a first
take. He said, ‘That’s all I want to do.
I’ll never feel it again.’"
Maybe Duane Allman knew he didn’t have a lot
of time for second takes. Three years later,
with just three Allman Brothers albums under
his belt, he was dead.
"It’s really hard for me to believe that
what we accomplished with Duane happened in
two years – beginning to end," says Butch
Trucks, one of the Allman’s’ two drummers
and only one of three original members left
in the band today. "I still think of him as
being’ here. He had the most profound impact
on my life of ever person I’ve ever known."
Allman’s impact wasn’t just felt by the
brother and the band members he left behind,
either. His ghost haunts the whole history
of southern rock, from the sorrow-drenched
homage that was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’
through the Georgia rock’n’soul of the Black
Crowe’s to the North Mississippi Allstars
and the darkly funny new Drive-By Truckers
album Southern Rock Opera.
Just as it lit the way for all the Skynyrd’s
and Wet Willies of the ‘70s, so the Skyman’s
spirit infuses the music of contemporary
southern bands like Widespread Panic, the
Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies and Allman’s
offshoot Gov’t Mule. Duane was the walking’,
talking’ embodiment of New Southern Manhood
– the original Longhaired Redneck, the
Righteous Brother of blue-eyed blues and
moonshine soul.
"Duane Allman was probably more shook after
seeing Easy Rider than Jack Newfield or
Albert Goldman," wrote Jerry Wexler, the man
who put him together with manager and
Capricorn Records founder Phil Walden.
Anyone who recalls the climax of that 1969
countercultural classic, wherein Peter Fonda
and Dennis Hopper are shot dead by a couple
of grinning good ole boys, will understand
what Wexler meant.
"We got into some close ones," says Baby
Brother Gregg, thinking back to the days
when black drummer Jaimoe had just joined
the Allman Brothers. "There were places we’d
get turned away from eaten’: ‘What’re you
guys doing’ with a nigger in the band?’"
Thus the Allman Brothers, the original
southern hippies, started it all, playing
righteous R&B with hair down to their asses,
spreading their musical gospel of sonic
integration coast to coast with a retinue of
roadies and groupies in tow. They owned New
York’s Fillmore East and cut a classic live
album there. They tore up the Boston Tea
Party with their harrowing treatment of
T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday’. They
soothed Philly’s Electric Factory with
Dickey Betts’ dreamy instrumental ‘In Memory
Of Elizabeth Reed’.
But that was before Duane died, and before
Brother Berry Oakley, on the bass, followed
spookily – almost literally – in his tracks.
After those terrible losses – losses too
deep for such young men to bear – the Allman
Brothers unraveled on the grand scale. And
the greater their success, the deeper their
pain. Drugs, firings, lawsuits, further
deaths – just one more Behind The Music
special for your vicarious titillation.
Roadie Red Dog wonders to this day just how
wise Duane was when he originally named his
band Beelzebub.
"Looking back over the years, there seemed
to be this cloud over us," the Dog wrote one
dark day in 1994. "Everything that happened
just made us stronger and stronger until
this day, when the chips are down and dirty,
and we’re at the bottom of one of those
friggin’ traps. But the Brotherhood will
pull together, tighter and tighter each
time."
THE BROTHERS Allman were born in post-war
Nashville, Tennessee, Duane (1946) preceding
Gregg (1947) by scarcely more than a year.
Tragedy hit them while they were still
toddlers: on leave from the Korean War in
December 1949, the boys’ father was murdered
by a hitchhiker he’d picked up, leaving his
wife Geraldine to raise Duane and Gregg on
her own.
Tough and resourceful, "Mama A" – a revered
figure among fans to this day – went to
school to become a CPA, enrolling her boys
at Castle Heights Military Academy in
Lebanon, Tennessee. "Somebody suggested that
she put us in an orphanage," remembered
Gregg. "She politely told ‘em to **** off."
In 1958, in search of better work, Mama
moved south to Daytona Beach, Florida –
party town USA.
In Daytona, said Duane, "white cats surfed
and black cats played music". In November
1960, after saving up money from a paper
round, little Gregg Allman invested the
princely sum of $21.95 in a guitar at Sears,
Roebuck. Meanwhile Big Bro, in a harbinger
of things of come, put money down on a
Harley 165. Yet it was Duane who, dropping
out of Sea Breeze Senior High School,
mastered the art of rock’n’roll guitar.
"Duane was very, very intelligent," says
Gregg today. "He either had his head in a
book, his arm around a woman, or his arm
round his guitar. Those were the three
things he did, and they were pretty much all
he did."
By 1963, with Gregg shifting to keyboards,
the brothers were playing Chuck Berry and
Hank Ballard covers in a mixed-race band
called the House Rockers. "That's when the
trouble started in the family," Gregg told
Cameron Crowe. "’Goin’ to play with them
niggers again?’ We had to turn my mother on
to the blacks. Took awhile, but now she's
totally liberated."
Like every other hip kid south of
Mason-Dixie, the Allman’s soaked up the
blues, R&B and soul they heard on
Nashville’s WLAC station. "That was the
truth and light for sure," Duane recalled
with the fervor of a convert. Nor were the
brothers deaf to the new sounds – from the
Beatles to the Yardbirds – reaching them
from across the waters. "My brother was a
real big fan of Jeff Beck’s," says Gregg. "I
remember when we first heard ‘Over, Under,
Sideways, Down’, he said, ‘Man, is this guy
playing’ with thimbles on his left hand?!’"
In the summer of ’65, Duane and Gregg took
it up a notch. They formed the Allman Joys,
one of the tightest, toughest outfits on the
Florida circuit. "They were the best thing
I’d ever heard," says Johnny Sandlin, whose
Alabama-based band the Five Minutes found
themselves playing in Pensacola the same
night. "The Allman Joys played Yardbirds and
Bluesbreakers songs, but they played them
better than the Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers
did."
Spotted at one club by Joe Tex’s
Nashville-based manager Buddy Killen, the
Joys signed to his Dial label and released
what Duane himself admitted was "a terrible
psychedelic rendition" of Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful’.
But it was in Nashville that they
reconnected with Sandlin, whose Five Minutes
had just been deserted by singer Eddie
Hinton. "They were a strong outfit," Gregg
remembered. "It all fell together and we
started cooking."
A 1967 gig by the new band at Peppy’s a Go
Go in St. Louis proved to be another
watershed moment: in the crowd was Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band manager Bill McEuen, who
told the band afterwards he could get them
signed to Liberty in LA – provided they came
out to La-la land. Gregg had his doubts, but
the thought of blondes in convertibles was
enough to persuade them.
They quickly realized they’d made a horrible
mistake. Rechristened the Hour Glass by a
company that had no understanding or
appreciation of the Joys’ musical roots, the
group – Duane, Gregg, Sandlin (drums), Paul
Hornsby (keyboards), Mabron McKinney (bass)
and Jesse Williard Carr (guitar) –
reluctantly colluded with their makeover
into a psychedelic southern Rascals. Playing
blue-eyed pop soul midway between Dusty In
Memphis and bad Box Tops, the sextet was
stashed in gritty motels and togged out in
comical flower-power togs.
"I don’t think the company really knew what
the hell we were," Paul Hornsby told me in
1985. "They kept calling us a Motown band,
just because it sounded black. They didn’t
know anything about the southern black R&B
scene."
"My brother said, ‘Screw y’all, I’m outta
here’," Gregg remembers. "And they said,
‘Well, that’s okay if Gregg stays and sings
with our studio band’. And I did stay, and
my brother was really mad at me. But right
before he left Hollywood, on his birthday –
November 20th, 1968 – I took him a bottle of
pills for a cold he had, plus a copy of the
first Taj Mahal album with Jesse Ed Davis
playing’ slide. Well, about three hours
later he called me and said, ‘Baby brother,
git over here.’ And he’d dumped all the
pills out of the bottle, washed the label
off, and was playing’ bottleneck. The next
time I saw him, he was just burning’. It
really put a new charge in him. He entered a
new musical universe."
DUANE ALLMAN had barely gotten home when a
telegram arrived from Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
asking him to come play on a session at the
illustrious Fame studio. Studio boss Rick
Hall had remembered Duane’s playing from a
one-off Hour Glass date and wanted to spice
up a Wilson Pickett session.
"Rick liked my playing a lot," Allman
recalled of the 27 November date that
produced Pickett’s hit version of ‘Hey
Jude’. "He said, ‘Why don’t you just go home
and get your gear and move up here?’ So I
rented me a little cabin, lived alone on
this lake, with big windows looking right
out on the water. I just sat there and
played to myself and got used to living
without a bunch of jive Hollywood crap in my
head."
"Duane's whole career spun off that Pickett
session," said Muscle Shoals rhythm
guitarist Jimmy Johnson. "It's amazing how
one incident, one session, can change a
person's life."
"I used Duane as a session player with
virtually everyone," Jerry Wexler wrote in
his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues. "He
was always more than a sideman or soloist;
he had the mind of a producer and would come
up with scores of righteous suggestions..."
Wexler figured Duane Allman wouldn’t stay a
sideman for long, which was why he alerted
his friend Phil Walden to the guitarist.
Walden, who’d built up the biggest stable of
soul acts in the south on the back of
managing Otis Redding, was intrigued –
particularly when he got wind of the band
Skyman was forming down in Jacksonville,
Florida.
By March 1969, Skyman had the framework for
his new southern rock vision: Berry Oakley
on bass, country boy Dickey Betts on second
guitar, and Butch Trucks and Jai Johnny
Johanson ("Jaimoe") on drums. All that was
missing, once Eddie Hinton had turned him
down, was a singer. Time, then, to swallow
the ol’ pride and summon baby brother back
from La-la land. A single jam session in
Jacksonville was enough to convince everyone
involved.
Come summer ’69, bankrolled by Phil Walden,
the group moved to Macon, Georgia. Home was
a two-room crash pad at 309 College Street.
"We threw some mattresses on the floor,"
says Butch Trucks. "We’d come in after
rehearsing, take some Psilocybin and play
stickball in the main room at four in the
morning. I think the only reason we stayed
alive was that we were so goddamn weird that
nobody knew what the hell to do about us."
Settling for the name the Allman Brothers
Band after junking the inauspicious
Beelzebub, the entourage soon proved popular
with local lovelies. According to the Dog,
the first orgy at 309 College Street
occurred the night after the band posed
naked in the late Otis Redding’s creek for
the gatefold sleeve of their debut album on
Phil Walden’s Capricorn label.
For Walden the Allman’s represented a new,
enlightened Southern pride – the same pride
that tickled northerners like Wexler. ("The
phenomenon," Phil told writer Frye Gaillard,
"is that people are remaining in southern
communities to record and perform.") For all
the band’s subsequent bitterness towards him
over the bad deals they signed, Walden
believed in them enough to keep them on the
road through two disappointing sellers, The
Allman Brothers Band and Idlewild South.
"They can say what they want to about Phil,
but he went out on a limb for them," says
Johnny Sandlin. "I had the greatest respect
for Atlantic Records, but they didn’t think
they could sell this band. And Phil pushed
it through."
"We just said, Screw you," says Butch
Trucks. "We had found this religion. The
epitome was when we opened for Iggy and the
Stooges in Detroit, and when we got up and
played, maybe 15 or 20 of those kids got it;
the rest of ‘em just stood there with their
mouths open. And it was one of the best
shows we played on that tour. We had this
capacity, if the crowd wasn’t into it, to
just drop this barrier between us and them."
The orneriness paid off as the Allman’s
became, in Phil Walden’s words, a true "people’s
band". Like the Grateful Dead, with whom
they shared several stages, they brought the
rock’n’roll tribes together, often playing
for free when they didn’t have paying gigs
set up. Favorites from the first two albums
– Dickey’s ‘Elizabeth Reed’, Gregg’s epic
‘Whipping Post’ – became staples of a set
that was all about returning to primal
American roots after the late ‘60s years of
mind-warped psychedelia.
Twin guitars, twin drums, a gospel organ and
a roaring, gravelly monster of a voice
dredged from the bowels of the south’s
subconscious – ladies and gentlemen, the
Allman Brothers! The band played nearly 500
dates in two years, traveling in a Winnebago
that doubled as a mobile bordello.
Through Atlantic staffer Tom Dowd, who
produced 1970’s Idlewild South, Duane Allman
connected with another of his heroes.
Learning that Dowd was working at Criteria
in Miami on Eric Clapton’s Derek and the
Dominos project, Duane dropped strong hints
that he’d love to drop by. Next thing he
knew, he was an honorary Domino.
"I went down to listen, and Eric knew me,
man, greeted me like an old friend," Allman
gushed. "The cat is really a prince — he
said, ‘Come on, you got to play on this
record’ — and so I did." Some of Skyman’s
finest playing can be heard on the Layla
versions of blues staples like ‘Key To The
Highway’ and ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re
Down And Out’.
Back in Macon, Duane and the Allman’s lent
their services to Johnny Jenkins’ Capricorn
album Ton Ton Macoute, a swamp-rock classic
by a man who’d inspired Jimi Hendrix and
hired the young Otis Redding to be his
singer. Imagine Dr. John’s Gris Gris
transplanted to the pine forests of Georgia.
"Johnny lived down where they made what they
called stump liquor, and the guy had drank
so much, why he’s still alive I don’t know,"
says Gregg. "I remember drinking’ with him
one time and he spit out this big hunk o’
blood. So he just swallowed some ice cubes
real fast and said it didn’t feel so bad."
The Allman’s weren’t in such great shape
themselves. Class A substances had made
their inevitable entry into the brothers’
lives, and Duane’s exposure to the heroin
use around Clapton and the Dominos didn’t
help.
"The only big run-in Duane and I ever had
was about drugs," says Gregg. "In the
beginning, I don’t know, I guess somebody
turned me on, and then I turned him on. And
it got real crazy, and pretty soon the whole
band was doing’ it. Right there in Macon,
Georgia."
*
FEW MORE definitive notes exist in the
Allman’s’ repertoire than the ones that open
their live version of Blind Willie McTell’s
‘Statesboro Blues’, captured in mid-March
1971 at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New
York.
The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East
remains the key Allman’s artifact: with its
Jim Marshall cover portrait of the group in
front of their amplifier cases, the double
album underscored the point that this was
first and foremost a road band.
Somewhere between Cream’s Wheels of Fire and
the Dead’s "skull and roses" live double –
between blues pain and free-festival jam –
Fillmore East is all about interplay. "There
was really a certain degree of telepathy,
because we created a lot of things right on
the stage," Dickey Betts later said. Another
generous helping of this telepathy can be
found on the extended treatment of Donovan’s
‘There Is A Mountain’, aka ‘Mountain Jam’,
on Eat A Peach, the album the Allman’s began
in the summer of ’71.
Brother Duane would never see Peach’s
completion. Taking a brief sabbatical from
the group’s relentless touring schedule, he
spent the early part of October detoxing
from heroin before chilling out back in
Macon. On the night of 28 October, with
Fillmore East in the Top 10 on the album
chart, Skyman spoke to Red Dog. "We got it
made now," he told his favorite roadie. "We're
on our way. Ain't gonna be no more beans for
breakfast."
The next afternoon, Skyman stopped by Berry
Oakley’s house to wish the bassist’s wife,
Linda, a happy birthday. Leaving shortly
before 6 pm, he swerved to avoid an oncoming
truck, skidded and flipped over before being
dragged for fifty feet along the street.
Internal injuries killed him after three
hours of emergency surgery. He was 24 years
old.
The shock decimated the band and its
extended family. Mac Rebennack’s wife
Lorraine, who flew down for the funeral with
her husband and Jerry Wexler, called it "sad
beyond anything I had ever experienced". Wex
gave a grief-choked eulogy.
"Right at the beginning it was
incomprehensible, and unacceptable," says
Butch Trucks. "But I guess humans have a way
of denying the fact, and blocking it out. We
actually were gonna take about six months
off and think about what to do next, but
after about two or three weeks we were all
going’ stark raving’ bonkers. And for
musicians the only way to heal is to go play
music."
Just how much the band healed is a matter of
conjecture. "At that time, at our age, we
didn’t really know how to grieve," says
Johnny Sandlin. "Most of us had not lost
many people, and a lot of us didn’t grieve
properly."
Hardest hit of all was Berry Oakley, for
whom Duane had been a virtual mentor. "It
absolutely destroyed him," says Butch
Trucks. "The next year, for the whole year,
he was just a zombie – always just
completely **** ed up and unable to deal
with life."
Almost a year to the day after Duane’s
crash, and a mere three blocks from the site
of that accident, Oakley slammed his
motorcycle into the side of a Macon city
bus, dying hours later of a brain concussion.
He too was 24. "As much as I hate to say
this," says Trucks, "Berry’s death was
almost a relief, ‘cause it put him out of
his pain." With keyboardist Chuck Leavell
already added to the lineup, Oakley’s place
was taken by Lamar Williams.
The dynamic of the Allman Brothers Band had
already changed irrevocably. "Duane was a
very strong leader," Phil Walden told me in
1985. "After he died there was a real
struggle between Dickey Betts, who leaned
very strongly toward country, and Gregg, who
probably found country music offensive." One
can hear this tussle on Brothers and
Sisters, the 1973 album that represented the
group’s efforts to pull together in the wake
of its double tragedy – most obviously in
the tepid country rock of Betts’ ‘Ramblin’
Man’, a huge hit single.
"You get a hint of ‘Ramblin’ Man’ on Eat A
Peach with ‘Blue Sky’," says Johnny Sandlin,
who produced Brothers and Sisters. "Generally
their harmonies had been very pentatonic and
blues-based, and when Dickey wrote ‘Ramblin’
Man’ it was very major, very up-sounding,
and it took a while to enjoy that."
"After Brothers and Sisters, it did become
less of the Allman Brothers Band and more of
the Dickey Betts Band," admits Butch Trucks.
"It came to where he wasn’t just leading us
but to where he was dominating us. And most
of that was our fault: we were so **** ed
up, he was the only one doing anything."
The internal friction did little to stop the
Allman’s becoming one of the biggest acts in
mid-‘70s America. (With the Dead and the
Band, they were one of the three groups to
play 1973’s Watkins Glen, the 600,000-strong
gathering in upstate New York.) Not for
nothing were they one of the principal
inspirations for Cameron Crowe’s Almost
Famous.
"After Berry’s death, it just got completely
out of control," says Butch Trucks. "After
Brothers and Sisters came out, all hell
broke loose. All of a sudden we’re flying’
around in these goddamn chartered planes,
and everybody’s got their own hotel
suites... and everybody’s **** ed up 24
hours a day. Women everywhere, cocaine
everywhere. We absolutely lost sight of what
we were all about. In Bill Graham’s book, he
says he remembers the night the Allman’s
pulled up to Madison Square Garden and each
one of them had their own limousine, and he
said that’s the end of the Allman Brothers
right there. That was when we lost that
brotherhood – we became these **** ing rock
stars, we became what we had despised at the
beginning."
"I remember certain high spots, but what I
really remember is being’ afraid a lot,"
admits Gregg. "I don’t know, when my brother
went... you never know how much you’re
leaning’ on somebody ‘til they die. And that
pissed me off with myself, and pissed me off
with him for dying’. It was just a whole
circus of changes, man."
With both Gregg and Dickey tentatively
embarking on solo careers – Gregg’s with
1973’s Laid Back, featuring a soulfully
reworked ‘Midnight Rider’ – the Allman
Brothers became less fraternal with each
passing year. Win, Lose or Draw (1975), cut
during a year of fundraising gigs for Phil
Walden’s pal Jimmy Carter, was the sound of
stagnation.
"By the time we got to Win, Lose or Draw,
there wasn’t much togetherness left,"
concedes Johnny Sandlin. "It was the hardest
and most frustrating album I’ve ever
produced. Dickey didn’t want to start
recording till late, or Gregg would show up
two hours late. You could never get a
quorum. The original name of the band Sea
Level, the side project formed by Chuck and
Lamar, was Waiting For Gregg."
It didn’t help that a bunch of other
southern rock acts – notably Lynyrd Skynyrd,
but also ZZ Top, the Outlaws, .38 Specials
and others – were stealing the Allman’s’
thunder. Next to Skynyrd’s feisty Ronnie Van
Zant, standing up for ‘Sweet Home Alabama’
in a good-humored vendetta against Neil
Young, Gregg was a sad spectacle, ditched by
girlfriend Cher after nodding out in his
food one too many times.
Red Dog: "In 1976, we were back on the road,
but things were getting worse with the
Allman Brothers. It was more messed up than
ever and trickling down to the road crew...
There was a lot of pressure. We were arguing
among ourselves, and there was trouble
brewing deep."
When Gregg chose that year to testify
against Scooter Herring, a road manager
who’d been dealing drugs, it derailed the
band. Two years later the Allman’s reunited,
with Leavell and Williams axed, for
Enlightened Rogues. There was little to
suggest that it – or many of the albums and
tours that followed sporadically in the ‘80s
– was motivated by anything other than
money.
"I went into a big slump for years and
years," admits Gregg. "I came out of it
briefly with ‘I’m No Angel’ in the ‘80s, but
then I stopped writing altogether. Not
purposely, but there was nothing there. My
spirit was just kind of broken."
Although embraced by a new generation of
Deadheads and tie-dyed jam-band fans – their
annual run of shows at New York’s Beacon
Theatre is now the stuff of rock legend –
Baby Brother barely made it to the end of
the ‘90s. Fittingly, perhaps, his rock
bottom arrived the night the Allman’s were
inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame, in
early 1995.
"When Willie Nelson brought us up on stage,
he turned to me and said, ‘You alright,
boy?’ And I said, ‘Willie, I am not alright.’
I was about to fall down, I was so **** ed
up. I went into rehab the next day. And I
did it this time."
Five years later, with Gregg and Butch and
various other members of the Allman’s
entourage in recovery, another original
member was in trouble – Dickey Betts, whose
drinking and drugging were badly affecting
his playing. For Gregg, it was time (or a
convenient excuse) to yank out "the bad
tooth".
"Now it’s back to like it was when my
brother was there," claims Baby Brother,
beaming about the new album the band
recently finished recording in Hoboken. "You
just can’t have all that crap going’ on and
plan on gettin’ anything accomplished as far
as creation goes. When all this happened, it
lit up off me like I’d been cured of some
terrible disease. And I tell you what, there
ain’t a whiff o’ country in it anymore."
Others are unconvinced by the
rationalizations. "I would pose the question,
‘What in hell do you have to do to get
kicked out of the Allman Brothers Band?!’"
guffaws Johnny Sandlin. "I don’t see how on
earth Gregg can sit there and put Dickey
down. Talk about the pot calling the kettle
black!"
Last word, as the group readies itself for
another long slog on the road that never
ends, goes to a born peacemaker.
"I do not want to, in any way, shape or
form, denigrate Dickey Betts," says Butch
Trucks. "When it comes to melodic
rock’n’roll guitar, no one has ever done it
like Dickey did. But I think what happened
is that, little by little, the rest of us
came to our senses, and now it’s back.
"Right now I am just so happy about Gregg.
I’ve known him for 35 years, and it’s only
in the past three years that I could even
sit and talk to him. Two years ago I thought
the Allman’s were over. And now I think
we’ve just finished the best record we ever
made.