by Paul, Alan
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.
TRUCKS: The thing is all those guys had been sitting in that freezing water and I had been standing up, which worked to my advantage. Duane said the next day he went and visited Jerry Wexler at Atlantic and he had that picture sitting on his desk and said, “There’s one thing for sure; you ain’t the natural leader of this band.”
JAIMOE: Everybody had their records that they listened to and we just shared them. I had no idea who the Grateful Dead or Rolling Stones were, though I had heard some of their songs on the jukebox. Butch turned me on to all that stuff. Dickey was into country and Chuck Berry. Duane, Gregory, Berry, and myself were the rhythm and bluesers—and to this day I consider Gregg an R and B singer.
BETTS: I always loved jazz—guitarist Howard Roberts, for instance—but once the Allman Brothers formed, Jaimoe really fired us up on it. He had us all listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane and a lot of our guitar arrangements came from the way they played together.
JAIMOE: Thank God I figured out that music is music and there are no such things as jazz, rock and roll, country, and blues. I got caught up in that mess earlier. I wanted to be the world’s greatest jazz drummer and didn’t want to play rock and roll or funk. I used to say, “That shit’s easy.” Then I got a chance to do it and what a surprise: I couldn’t play what needed to be played. That turned my head around and opened my mind. Everything has to be played right.
ALLMAN: The main initial jazz influence came from Jaimoe, who really got all of us into Coltrane together, which became a big influence. My brother loved jazz guitarists like Howard Roberts, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, and Kenny Burrell. I brought the blues to the band, and what country you hear comes from Dickey. Butchie was more the technician; he taught drums. We all dug different stuff, and we all started listening to each other’s music. What came out was a mixture of all of it and that’s what you hear when you put on an Allman Brothers song.
JAIMOE: I’m absolutely certain that Duane had listened to Miles and Coltrane before he met me, but we did spin those a lot. His two favorite songs were Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” and Miles’s “All Blues.” Those two songs were the source of a lot of our modal jamming, without a lot of chord changes.
ALLMAN: Duane was all about two lead guitars. He loved players like Curtis Mayfield and wanted the bass, keyboards, and second guitar to form patterns behind the solo rather than just comping.
BETTS: Duane and I had an immense amount of respect for each other. We talked about being jealous of each other and how dangerous it was to think that way, that we had to fight that feeling when we were onstage. He’d say, “When I listen to you play, I have to try hard to keep the jealousy thing at bay and not try to outdo you when I play my solo. But I still want to play my best!” We’d laugh about what a thin line that was. We learned a lot from each other.
DOUCETTE: Dickey and Duane didn’t hang out a lot, but the level of respect and musical love between them was profound. They were very tight and they had a lot of unspoken communication. They were both very smart, very intuitive guys, and what they wanted was to be the best they could be, not in relation to one another, but together.
HAMPTON: Dickey and Duane had a very close musical relationship, and Dickey is one of the top three or four musicologists I’ve ever spoken to. I’ve always been blown away by his knowledge of a wide range of music. He is a very humble, nice cat with a thirst for musical knowledge. He’s always been able to talk about music he loves for hours.
PAYNE: Dickey’s personality and ego were pretty powerful in themselves and I think he sometimes really objected to Duane being in the spotlight, but he bit his tongue. I never saw any conflict or fighting between Dickey and Duane, though there was healthy competition there. I remember hanging out with Duane and I’d say, “Let’s go riding,” and he’d look over in the corner at Dickey practicing and say, “I think I’ll just stay here and work on things with Dickey.”
BETTS: Duane and I used to laugh at each other all the time and say, “You sure don’t give me a break.” It was the healthy kind of competition, where you push each other, but no one loses. Duane and I talked about how scared we got whenever the other played a great solo and then he said, “Well, this isn’t a contest. We can make each other better and do something deep.”
RED DOG: Duane played guitar better than anybody out there—except maybe Dickey Betts. Many nights Duane walked off stage and said to me, “God damn, he ran me all over the stage tonight. He kicked my ass.” It’s not that they were trying to outdo each other, but Dickey would come up with off-the-wa
ll shit and Duane would be like, “God damn!” and have to keep up.
WARREN HAYNES: I discovered when I was just a kid that it was an equal partnership, but a lot of guys didn’t get that. Because of the name and the fact that Duane did most of the talking between songs, people assumed that he was the lead guitarist and Dickey was the support. Many people attributed some of Dickey’s great solos to Duane.
BETTS: A lot of people assumed Duane was the lead player and I was the rhythm guy because of the name of the band and because he was so charismatic and I was more laidback. He would really get upset about that and he went out of his way to make sure people understood we were a twin-guitar band, saying, “This cat played that, not me. There’s two guitar players in this damn band!” We were both damn good, but I didn’t believe in myself the way Duane did.
HAYNES: Dickey plays awesome straight, traditional blues, but he also has this Django Reinhardt–on-acid side of him that is very unique, and, of course, he has that major pentatonic, “Ramblin’ Man”/“Blue Sky” side. All those sides of Dickey’s musical personality played a big part in the Allman Brothers’ sound. And most cats that can play blues as convincingly as Dickey cannot stretch out to that psychedelic thing like he can. He’s very unique.
BETTS: My style is just a little too smooth and round to play the blues stuff straight, because I’m such a melody guy that even when I’m playing the blues, I go for melody first.
RED DOG: The way Dickey and Duane played, it was like … Fuck it. It was just so human, so emotional, like letting things out of you. It was like making love, caressing each other, but anger coming out at the same time. It was a little raunchy here, a little nasty there, a lot of love here. I thought Butchy and Jaimoe had the same thing going with the drums.
DOUCETTE: I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that fucking organ and singing and I went, “Whoa. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am.” He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.
MCEUEN: The magic of Gregg Allman was and is an ability to sing anything like it’s his. He can sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” like it was just written by him. Duane had the magical ability to play anything in a way that made you think, “Well, that can’t be any better.”
DOUCETTE: One time at the Fillmore East, Albert King came out to jam with us on a slow blues. He’s up there in a lime green suit sucking on his pipe and doing his thing. Then Gregg starts singing and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing and he sees the skinny-ass blond behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.
Though the debut album heralded the arrival of a new voice on the American music scene, few were listening.
WALDEN: The first album sold less than 35,000 copies when it was released.
ALLMAN: My brother and me did not get discouraged when it didn’t go anywhere. Hell, we had already had two Hour Glass records eat dirt.
JAIMOE: We were just playing music and it was going great. We didn’t think about how great it was going to sound in a month or what we would do next. I guess Duane did, but there were no other thoughts in my head except how great the music we were playing was. The whole world closed out.
TRUCKS: I did not have any doubts about the band. I don’t think any of us expected to become truly successful. We had all been in bands before where that was all there was. We were trying to be rock stars and all we came out of it with was garbage. Then we started playing this music that was making us feel like this and that became so much more important than fame or fortune. We would just kind of drop a curtain in front of the stage and play for ourselves. We didn’t give a damn if people liked it or not. We were not going to play “Louie Louie” just to get applause. We all had done that enough.
BETTS: We were just so naive. All we knew is that we had the best band that any of us had ever played in and were making the best music that we had ever made. That’s what we went with. Everyone in the industry was saying that we’d never make it, we’d never do anything, that Phil Walden should move us to New York or L.A. and acclimate us to the industry, that we had to get the idea of how a rock ’n’ roll band was supposed to present themselves.
TRUCKS: They thought a bunch of Southern guys just standing there playing extended musical jams was absurd. They wanted Gregg out from behind the organ, jumping around with a salami in his pants. They wanted us to act “like a rock band” and we just told them to fuck themselves. We were playing music for ourselves and for each other.
BETTS: Of course, none of us would do that, and thankfully, Walden was smart enough to see that would just ruin what we had. We just stayed in Macon and stayed on the road, playing gigs and getting tighter and better.
SCOTT BOYER, guitarist in the band Cowboy: Macon became known as a place to go if you were a musician in the South looking to get something going. It started because the Allmans were there and Capricorn was headquartered and it built on itself.
ALLMAN: Over the years, players from the South would find their way to New York or Los Angeles and break out of there. We elected to stay down South and do it from there rather than going where all the damn competition was. Everyone told us we’d fall by the wayside down there.
HAYNES: I grew up in North Carolina and it was a big deal for Southern musicians to feel like they could stay in the region and succeed, that they didn’t have to move to the East or West Coast, which had been presumed. We all identified with and felt a connection to the music because it was made by people who looked like us, acted like us, and lived like we did. It was the first time the South was taken seriously as a place for great rock music to come from. It let us know that we could make it without changing, that it was cool to make rock music that sounded like it was from the South.
HAMPTON: The Allman Brothers transformed Macon from this sleepy little town into a very hip, wild, and crazy place filled with bikers and rockers. Every time you went down there, it was like mental illness in the streets: fights, bikes …
MAMA LOUISE: I started seeing them boys around town on their motorcycles, and Red Dog and Kim would pick me up and give me rides home after work. I always felt safe with them, especially Red Dog. He was a sweet man.
* * *
DOUBLE TROUBLE
Inside the revolutionary dual-lead-guitar approach of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.
The Allman Brothers Band’s first real musical breakthrough was the extensive use of guitar harmonies. This new concept in rock music was a natural outgrowth of having two lead guitarists, rather than one who primarily stuck to rhythm playing. Duane Allman’s dynamic slide playing is revered, but he was a fully formed, well-rounded guitarist. Betts was also already a wide-ranging, distinct stylist by the time he and Allman joined forces, and he was almost certainly the driving force behind the duo’s landmark harmony playing.
Though closely associated with guitar harmonies, the pair also had a wide range of complementary techniques, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with each other and with the bassist, Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised melodies. The precision with which the musicians landed together back on their riffs also elevated them above their peers.
WARREN HAYNES: Their guitar tandem came about naturally because Dickey was such a strong melodic player and Duane’s ear was so good and he could play complementary harmony or counterpoint on the fly. Most of the dual-guitar stuff that they did was Dickey playing melody and Duane playing harmony.
DICKEY BETTS: From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that. We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from both jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane an
d fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele, and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.
HAYNES: Dickey had a deep western swing influence. He learned a lot of guitar from Dave Lyle, who had played with Roy Clark in Brenda Lee’s band and the two of them had played a lot of harmony lines. That’s where Dickey got the concept from and I don’t think Duane had ever done anything like that before.
REESE WYNANS, keyboardist in Second Coming, Betts and Oakley’s pre-ABB group: Dickey’s whole thing from the first time I met him was harmonies. He would come up with these great melodies and he wanted to get harmonies going for them; he always wanted Rhino and me to follow him and play harmony parts. [Guitarist Larry “Rhino Reinhardt] Duane obviously got on the bus with that and took it to a new level. Having played with them in the earliest stages, it was no surprise at all that their pairing would work so well.
BETTS: It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or they stay out of each other’s way because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. It was real, real natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. Our system was not exactly technique. Duane would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony. Very seldom would Duane start the riff.
HAYNES: They worked out harmonies, but some of the stuff in Dickey’s solos just came about in an impromptu way and you can tell when you hear Dickey play a melodic line and then the harmony comes in on top of it. That’s why it has a few loose ends and unparalleled harmony parts; they were just winging it. Maybe all the notes weren’t exactly parallel or perfect, but the vibe and feel were right on.
