Graham introduced the Brothers on the next and final night of music at the Fillmore East:
In the years we’ve been doing this, the introductions have been short, and this one is going to be short but a little longer than usual. The last few days we’ve had the privilege of working with this particular group, and in the past year or so we’ve had them on both coasts a number of times, in all that time, I’ve never heard the kind of music that this group plays. And last night, we had the good fortune of having them get on stage at about 2:30 or 3 o’clock and they walked out of here at 7 o’clock in the morning, and it’s not just that they played quantity, from my amateur ears, in all my life I’ve never heard the kind of music that this group plays … the finest contemporary music. We are going to round it off with the best of them all, the Allman Brothers Band.
The band kicked into “Statesboro Blues.”
Joanie stayed in Macon long after we left, and Duane kept an eye out for her. He made sure she was included in the group of friends and family invited to New York for the closing shows at the Fillmore. It was her first time in the big city. She even had her own room at One Fifth Avenue, the hotel where everyone stayed. When Duane saw her walking up the stairs backstage in her short skirt and tall boots, he called her into the dressing room and scolded her. “Hey! What are you sniffing around for? If you want something, you ask us for it. Don’t you take anything from anybody you don’t know, hear me?” He waved her toward a little pile of brown powder on a mirror.
“I wasn’t looking for anything!” she insisted. “I was just walking around!”
Heroin was showing in their playing. At the Fillmore shows, the first night was great, the second night was stupendous, and the third night was a sweaty mess; they sounded like shit, as far as Big Linda was concerned. “I mean, they were always good, don’t get me wrong … better than good, but they were exhausted and they were starting to get sick. Drug sick. We all knew how incredible they could be, and that wasn’t it.”
Back at the hotel after the gig, Jo Jane sat sideways with her legs draped over the arm of a chair facing Duane, who was leaning against the headboard with his acoustic guitar in his lap. He played a lilting, delicate tune that rambled on for a while. “A song I wrote for my daughter,” he told her.
When Jo Jane shared this story with me years later, I immediately asked, “Was it ‘Little Martha’?” I knew that Duane had dedicated it to Dixie, but Linda and my mom always told me the tune was around long before he and Dixie met. The song moved me so much, I wanted it to be for me.
“No, it wasn’t. It was sweeter and lighter than that. Almost classical sounding. I wish I could remember it to hum it for you. I wonder if it would come to me under hypnosis. It’s still in my mind somewhere,” Jo Jane said.
Duane had a session at Atlantic the day after the Fillmore closing, with jazz flutist Herbie Mann. Mann had an apartment overlooking Central Park, and when Delaney and Bonnie played an outdoor concert there, he was lured across the avenue by the sound.
“Herbie Mann came up onstage to jam, along with Mitch Mitchell, King Curtis, and Duane,” Bonnie said. “Dave Mason was there and some unbelievable Afro-Cuban percussionist. But what I remember most about the show was Delaney. It started to rain a little bit. He gets up out there with his guitar on his shoulder and he started to invoke himself to the sky and throws his arms up and says, ‘Oh Lord, take this rain away, we need to do a concert.’ The rain stopped. He stopped the rain! Then I thought, I can never live with this man! He thinks he is Moses! He stopped the freakin’ rain!”
Duane and Mann made a connection that day that resulted in an invitation to play on Mann’s album Push Push.
In the stripped-down beginning of “Spirit in the Dark,” Duane explores melody lines like a storyteller slowly building a narrative. He slips right into a fluid interplay with flute and horns. Much is made of the fact that Herbie Mann was a jazz artist, and this was Duane’s foray into a new genre of music, but his approach is his own. The Brothers improvised in a jazz mode and Duane didn’t have to stretch very far to find his way into the music Mann was serving, a funky collection of songs elevated by the unlikely inclusion of Duane’s electric guitar. In the control room, listening to playbacks, Duane told Herbie that one of his dreams was about to come true. In a few days, his band was going to play the legendary Newport Jazz Festival on the Fourth of July, and what’s more, they were on a bill with Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, and Ray Charles … not to mention Rahsaan Roland Kirk! He could not wait!
At Newport, the day before the Brothers were supposed to play, the gates were rushed by a huge crowd wanting to get in for free. They overwhelmed the stage and destroyed equipment while Dionne Warwick was performing “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” The rest of the festival was canceled.
On July 5, the band traveled to Atlantic City to play a week of shows on the Steel Pier. It was pitched to them as a sort of working vacation. Everyone hoped staying in one spot by the ocean for a week would be conducive to a little healing and relaxation. There was talk of kicking drugs there. But Atlantic City was depressing even as they approached. The pier stretched way out into the ocean, covered with concession stands and arcade games that had seen better days. Half-drunk parents milled around with their sticky-faced, whiny kids. This wasn’t a crowd that gave two shits about music. By the first morning, Duane and Gregg were fighting over the last bag of dope. It was a bad trip.
A single day of drug sickness in the heat was enough to crush their collective spirits. Duane soon sent Red Dog and Kim to procure a little comfort in town.
The stage where the band set up was just one stop along the boardwalk, sandwiched between rides and games. The highlight of the Steel Pier was a tower fifty feet high set in front of a huge pool of water. The crowd was waiting for a girl in a bathing suit and goggles to climb on the back of her fearless horse and dive.
“You have got to be shitting me,” Duane said.
“No, sir. Come and see,” answered Red Dog.
Red Dog and Duane stood with their arms crossed and their heads tipped back, staring up at the little chute that jutted over the edge of the scaffold.
“She’s a pretty little thing,” Red Dog said. “How did she end up here doing this?”
“The horse or the chick?” Duane asked. Red Dog laughed.
“The question is, how the hell did we end up here?” Duane said.
The girl and her pony went down a short slide into thin air. It was strangely beautiful, the horse and rider hanging in the blue sky for a moment. Then there was a horrible splash.
“Sure as shit ain’t Newport,” Red Dog said with a grin.
(photo credit 23.1)
The Brothers were at the peak of their power now, as pure and searing as fire onstage. They only had one rule—play hard, bringing all of your strength, intuition, and knowledge to every performance. You can hear the quantum leap they took musically by listening to a song like “Dreams,” first from 1969 on their studio album, and then a later live version, like their show at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on September 19, 1971. The song, which was ambitious and haunting in the studio, has a new expansiveness two years later. It is the difference between a photograph and an action movie.
Jaimoe says their story was in the songs’ development over time. “What Ornette Coleman was doing in 1959 with Ed Blackwell was basically what we were doing and still do to this day,” he said. “A good example is, Twiggs came up with this thing, a Donovan song, ‘There Is a Mountain.’ Twiggs and Duane played it, then Dickey and Duane played it. He took the melody to ‘Mama’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread,’ and Dickey’s melody answered and made statements to Duane’s melody. It’s very, very simple. It’s like Ping-Pong. Which way is the ball going? That ball is going to go a lot of different places until you learn how to control it. Every which direction the ball is going is where you go; the ball controls the game. You have to learn how to control it. You have to learn how
to know where you’re going. When you learn how to do it, that’s when things get really interesting. Well, you think you know how to do it, and you have a pretty good idea but it becomes more and more interesting the more you know.” We were sitting in his hotel room after a show at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2013, talking and listening to jazz. I watched him arrange a pile of magazines on the coffee table in front of him, piling two and then three on top of one another, then placing a single one off to the side. He began playing a complex little riff with his drumsticks, hitting the different magazines and the edge of the table, and each surface made a slightly different tone. He said, “I’ve been working on this pattern for forty years.”
Playing live for two solid years was one source of their power, and the other was listening. The band listened to music all day every day, and drew from the most challenging and innovative players across the board. Listening to masterful musicians fed their imaginations and recharged their spirits when the road wore them down.
In August, word came that one of the great players who had inspired Duane and became his true friend had been killed. Curtis Ousley, the legendary saxophone player known as King Curtis, was stabbed to death in New York City when he tried to run off a couple of drug dealers on his stoop. Duane attended his funeral. Aretha Franklin sang and Stevie Wonder played. Jesse Jackson performed the service at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan.
A week or so after the funeral, Duane stepped up to the microphone, “About King Curtis, that was one of the finest cats there ever was. He was just right on top of getting next to the young people, you know. It’s a shame. If y’all get a chance to listen to that album he made out at Fillmore West, boy, it was incredible. It’s unbelievable, the power of that and the emotional stature that man had. He was an incredible human being. I hope that whoever it was that did it knows what they did, it’s a terrible thing.”
They played “You Don’t Love Me,” and during the solo Duane played unaccompanied, slowly building a lovely, subtle bridge into “Soul Serenade.” The band joined him in a tribute to King Curtis while the audience cheered, clapping along. They lingered inside the song Duane had recorded with his friend, the optimistic, sunny melody flowing out of him, then Dickey turned a phrase around and pulled them smoothly back into “You Don’t Love Me.” They created a heartbreaking, spontaneous tribute for a man they all admired in a way he would have loved.
The band had strong songs for the new album, but they felt a new kind of pressure, now that their live album was such a success. With Tom Dowd’s help, they wanted to record a studio album that could stand toe-to-toe with At Fillmore East, and they felt they were on the right track.
Dickey wanted Gregg to sing “Blue Sky,” the love song Dickey had written for his new wife, Sandy Wabegijig. Duane wouldn’t hear it. He told Dickey his voice would suit the song perfectly, and the beauty of the sentiment was all his to share. It was the first recording the Brothers released with Dickey singing lead, a taste of things to come.
“Stand Back” was a real barnburner with funky swagger to spare, and Duane loved it. It felt like something of a new direction for the Brothers, a tight groove they could easily imagine on the radio. As soon as he got back to Macon, Duane took it to the studio to play it for Johnny Sandlin. He stood by Johnny’s chair with his head bent and listened in the control room. They sat there, tapping their feet and listening with their eyes closed, so proud. This new album was going to be huge. They could feel it.
Albhy Galuten, who once again worked as an engineer on the album, regretted that they hadn’t kept the outtakes of these Eat a Peach sessions. “In those days they didn’t keep outtakes because tape was expensive, and so they would roll back over previous takes. I remember on ‘Blue Sky,’ there were three takes, and the reason we chose the take we did was because it had Dickey’s best solo and it was Dickey’s song. That was not official, it’s not like we said that, it was just an unspoken thing between me and Tommy: Hey wow, Dickey is really beginning to come into his own, because everybody was in Duane’s shadow. Clearly Duane was so much the leader of the band. ‘Stand Back’ was originally called ‘Calico’ before the words were written, and we did three takes on that, and every one of Duane’s solos were entirely different. Not like most musicians, who would improvise a little for a couple bars. Of course the Allman Brothers did that for all their orchestrated parts. Duane and Dickey would do harmonies, but Duane would just play stuff that was totally different every time.”
In late August, Duane returned to Muscle Shoals to record with Cowboy, a band that Scott Boyer, a member of the 31st of February, had formed with Tommy Talton, and which Duane had brought to Phil Walden’s attention.
“He played great on ‘Please Be with Me,’ ” Scott Boyer said. “There were jaws dropping all over the studio on Jackson Highway. Session players had to build a track and it would take hours and Duane didn’t have the patience to sit through all that. He wanted to come in and lay something on top of it. He was like, ‘Play the track and I’ll put something on it and then I’m out, I’ve got places to go.’ ” He wanted to play on something brand-new.
Duane told Scott, “I don’t want to add to a track you already have worked out, because you already have three guitars, and I’ll never find a place to play, so let’s start with a brand-new song.”
They tossed out four or five tunes before Scott said, “Well, I’ve got this one I wrote last night.”
Scott had stayed behind at the motel while the band went out to dinner the night before. He picked up his notebook.
“I wrote stream of thought. In about fifteen minutes I had eleven stanzas that didn’t rhyme and didn’t make sense, and it was like a puzzle. I threw the pad on the floor and went to bed.” Scott played Duane what he had worked out, and Duane thought it was a beautiful song.
“I thought it was stupid, the line ‘I sit here lying in my bed’? How can you sit and lie in bed at the same time?” Scott said.
Johnny Sandlin, who produced the session, said, “I thought it meant I’m sitting in my bed, lying to myself about the way things are.”
“Wow! That’s deep! That’s good! I like that!” Scott said.
“Duane and I sat side by side and played together, both facing Johnny. George [Clark] played upright bass, which he never did before, and he did it pretty well. We recorded that night, the night that Duane came into town. They overdubbed my vocal, along with Tommy and George Clark singing harmonies, and it was done.”
Duane’s Dobro was buzzing; the bridge was out of alignment or something and Johnny had someone come in and fix it. They recorded another take in the morning with it fixed. Scott didn’t think the new take was as good and he told Johnny he wanted to use the take from the night before.
“It’s buzzin’,” Johnny said.
“I don’t care. The buzzing doesn’t bother me. He played great on it,” Scott said, so they used the first version. (Years later, Johnny asked Scott if he could use the second take of “Please Be with Me” on the first Duane Allman anthology. “Fine. I’m over it,” Scott said.)
“I tried to get him to play on ‘All My Friends,’ ” Scott recalled. “The way I did it on the Cowboy album, there were seven-beat measures in the verse, and there were seven-beat measures in the solo, and Duane did that solo until he got so mad, he took his guitar off and threw it down on the floor and he stormed out of the studio. Then Eddie Hinton couldn’t do it and Tommy couldn’t either, so I finally put a violin part on it, and it wasn’t very good, but I had to put something there. They couldn’t get that extra beat to recycle in their heads. They kept losing the time. Duane was playing great stuff, but he couldn’t get from point A to point B. Somewhere along the way he’d mentally trip and it was hard to watch it.
“You never saw Duane unable to play. It was the only time I ever saw it.
“He was an emotional guy. He wore his feelings on his sleeve. He’d get excited about stuff, but not mad. Oh my God, I wished to God I never wr
ote that song, I felt so bad.”
The pace of the Allman Brothers’ touring didn’t let up for anything, not even the completion of their album. They were traveling to Miami whenever they had a few free days in a row. Duane, Dickey, and Berry recorded a little instrumental tune at Criteria. The melody had been growing inside Duane since they had first started playing together, little traces recognizable from a hundred nights spent with their acoustic guitars, Dickey with his Martin, Berry with his Hummingbird, and Duane with his Dobro. They had perched together on the edge of narrow hotel room beds, sat at the edge of the water at Idlewild, and rested on their amps in the music room at the Big House. Many of their songs had been born that way, letting a simple tune lead wherever it wanted to go. At first they cut a version with Berry playing bass, but they agreed that the little tune didn’t need the weight. “Little Martha” had a peaceful, rambling quality that only wanted the two guitars lightly rolling through.
It was the first song Duane had ever written for the Allman Brothers and it was the last song he ever recorded in a studio.
Twiggs had been in jail in Buffalo for a few months when John Condon decided to bring in Andrew Watson, a Michigan law professor, medical doctor, and psychiatrist. He felt they needed Watson to be there for the trial, but it would be a year before he had time in his calendar. They agreed to delay the trial for a year. The jail was rougher than prison. It operated on a shoestring and had no real facilities. Twiggs told his family the New York state prison at Attica would be better when he got there. All in all, Twiggs spent almost eighteen months in jail awaiting trial. The Brothers stayed in contact with his legal team and with Twiggs through letters. Twiggs’s brother Skoots brought him a copy of At Fillmore East. On the back cover, above the heads of the roadies who posed all together on the road cases was a picture of Twiggs. There was no way they would leave him out of their family portrait.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 32
