My Cross to Bear (42 page)

Still, there were problems—only this time they didn’t have a thing to do with me. Now it was Dickey heading off the tracks.
Where It All Begins
was the last studio album we ever did with Dickey because both his behavior and his playing were becoming more erratic, and issues developed between him and Allen Woody.

Basically, Woody was tired of taking Dickey’s shit, and it got pretty ugly between them. Warren too had grown weary of Dickey’s subpar playing and the fact that Dickey’s solution was to just crank it up and play even louder. The volume certainly had something to do with his drinking, which he was doing a lot of. At one point, we outlawed any kind of alcohol onstage, since I was sober. Suddenly, he didn’t have anybody to drink and play with, because nobody else in the band drank.

The end result was that Warren and Allen were through. They’d wanted to devote more time to Gov’t Mule anyhow, so they decided to split the band after the ’97 Beacon run. I was bummed to see them go, but I completely got it.

Even after Warren and Allen left, we still tolerated Dickey, and instead of doing something to try and get him to change, we once again went through the tough process of replacing two premier musicians. Thankfully we got lucky. Jack Pearson was one of the best guitar players in Nashville, and an old friend of Warren’s. We knew right away he was the guy. Jack Pearson is tops—he can do it all. There’s no question that he’s one of the most accomplished cats I’ve ever played with; Jaimoe said that Jack’s playing is the most like Duane’s of anyone who has ever been in the band. High praise, indeed.

Finding a bass player was a bitch. We had two or three guys we really liked, but we ended up going with Oteil Burbridge, who had played with the Aquarium Rescue Unit with Bruce Hampton and in Butch’s band, Frogwings. Oteil is like two clicks away from Stanley Clarke, and he and Jack and are both salt of the earth, so they fit right in.

As good as Jack was, it soon became clear that he couldn’t handle the volume level Dickey played at, but Dickey continued to refuse to turn it down. He wouldn’t do it for Warren, and he wouldn’t do it for Jack; he just didn’t give two shits. Finally Jack couldn’t take it anymore, so he left after the Beacon in ’99. In the years since, Jack has played a lot in my solo band, and I truly enjoy that man’s company.

By then, Derek Trucks had kinda come of age, so we brought him on board for the summer tour. Derek brought this new energy with him. Everyone was like, “Oh, boy, who’s your new guitar player?” And here come the girls too. God, it was like the old days—only they weren’t asking for me!

I think Dickey loved it when Derek came on, because he learned a lot of shit off Derek, though he would never admit it. From where I sat, it would come time for Derek’s solo and Dickey would get back, almost drop his hands, and play very little and watch Derek like a hawk. At first I think he tried to outdo him, and then he must have realized—what’s that thing about old dog, new tricks?

But not even Derek, talented as he is, could make up for all that Dickey was doing wrong. Finally, I’d had it. Getting clean was like having my windshield washed, and it felt like me, Jaimoe, and Butchie were all too caught up with Dickey’s bullshit. In the spring of 2000, we did an eight-show run that ended in Atlanta on May 7; during this stretch, Dickey was drinking a ton of beer, and God only knows what else he was doing. He was in rare form, blowing song after song, and the worse he got, the louder he played. It was a total train wreck, and just embarrassing to the rest of us.

As I walked off the stage, I had it in my mind that I was going to resign from the Allman Brothers Band. As it turns out, Butch was thinking the same thing, and told his wife, Melinda, and our manager, Bert Holman, that he would never play with Dickey Betts again.

Butch and I talked the next day, and I told him, “Man, I cannot take, and will not take, any more of this shit from Dickey. I’m better than this, and I cannot live another day with that son of a bitch trying to lord his bullshit all over us. Fuck this. I’m really pissed at myself for not quitting five years ago.”

Butch said, “Well, shit, man—why should we all have to leave, if he’s the one who’s doing it? Let’s just fire the bastard.”

“Contractually, can we do that?” I asked. I mean, I hadn’t read the contract in a while.

“Man, in the scheme of life, we ain’t got no contract,” Butch said, and that was it. We both agreed that a line had been crossed and that he had embarrassed us for the very last time.

We got a conference call set up with Jaimoe, and he agreed that Dickey was out of control. The three of us felt he needed to get into rehab and that we should play the summer tour without him, but Jaimoe would not agree to saying he would never play with Dickey again. I remember Jaimoe saying something like “The only way out of the Allman Brothers Band is to quit or die.”

It stuck with me, because Jaimoe was right—it was a brotherhood and those were the rules—and it speaks volumes about Jaimoe’s character too, after what Dickey had done to him back in 1980. But we agreed that we could not let Dickey’s demons take away what we had worked so hard for. We decided to look for another guitar player to play the 2000 summer tour with us.

I wrote a letter to Dickey, and boy, it was a stinger. I faxed it up to Bert Holman, and Bert said, “Well, that’s a little harsh. Let’s try to ease out of this thing, let’s make it as easy as possible and not entice a lawsuit.” He said, “Let me try to rewrite it.”

That draft was rewritten by Jerry Weiner, the band’s lawyer, and we all signed off on it. Then it was eventually faxed to Dickey by Bert. Bert and Jon Podell called Dickey and told him to check his fax machine. And that’s when the shit hit the fan.

In the years since then, Dickey has said that we fired him by fax. We never fired him; we said nothing about not working with him ever again. We all had Jaimoe’s voice in the back of our heads—“the only way out of the Allman Brothers Band is to quit or die”—and we chose our words carefully. What we told him was this: “Dickey, we’ve been together a long time—we love you and respect you—but you’re getting way off base here, and you’re bringing your worldly crap onstage with you. It’s been going on so long that we would like to inform you that this next year we’re going to be playing with another guitar player, so you can go into rehab, go do whatever you need to do to get yourself fixed. Then hopefully at the end of the year, we can get back together.” That is not firing him.

Sure enough, as soon as he got the fax, my phone rang. I knew who it was, and I said, “Dickey, don’t even start. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“What the hell is this?” he asked. “You’re firing me out of my own band?”

“Man, this ain’t your band no more—you done pissed it away,” I said.

He kept going on and on, and I finally said, “Dickey, I don’t care to talk to you at all. You can talk to me through my attorney,” and that was the last time I spoke to Dickey Betts.

The next thing that happened was not that Dickey got medical help as we had hoped; instead he hired lawyers and sued us. I was afraid it was going to go to court, but it didn’t. It went to arbitration, and we had to spend a lot of time in New York in front of an arbitrator named Mark Diamond.

We all met at the hearing, and I have to say, of all the situations we’d been in together since this whole thing began, we’d never been in a setup like that. It’s hard to be in a situation like that and not find yourself thinking about the very beginning of it all and how the hell it came to this. When Dickey got there, he brought with him a cassette of every single thing the Allman Brothers had ever recorded. It took up a whole big duffel bag. He unzipped that thing, dumped it out on the floor, pointed to it, and said, “Brilliant.”

The arbitrator asked him, “Are you speaking of the Allman Brothers?”

He said, “No—me.”

And once he started that shit in there, of all places, I thought, “Well, we don’t have to worry about this. He’s not going to do himself any favors.” We all had to hold back the snickers, and then we started talking about it. We let him know, one by one, that he was not brilliant. We went through this and that, and a whole lot of legal bullshit—it was just a drag. It was kind of embarrassing going around the room telling this guy, this arbitrator, who doesn’t even know us, all this real private stuff that we’d been through. I felt like we were kids sitting in front of Mom and Dad, saying “Well, he did this” and “No, he did that to me!” I thought, “Man, is this how it’s done?” I couldn’t believe the process.

In the end, we were happy with the ruling, but it was all so much energy wasted on such a cold fucking thing. I was so glad when it was finally over. That was when Jaimoe said, “Well, I guess Dickey quit.” We did not then, nor have we at any time since then “fired” Dickey. His favorite line that he was “fired by fax” is just bullshit, plain and simple.

Now I don’t feel any anger when I think of Dickey. I don’t feel much of anything. It’s over.

D
ICKEY WAS FINALLY GONE, BUT WE STILL HAD A TOUR TO DO.
W
E
needed a great player with a thick skin who was willing to deal with the “Where’s Dickey?” bullshit and the inevitable comparisons. We found absolutely the right guy in Jimmy Herring. Jimmy had played with Oteil in the Aquarium Rescue Unit and was very good friends with Derek, so that helped a lot. He stepped up to the plate and got us through the summer, but he never wanted to be Dickey’s permanent replacement.

Jimmy was happy to be onstage with us, but it was bittersweet for him to get the gig at someone else’s expense; he was concerned about the karma of the whole thing. When the summer run was over, so was Jimmy’s time with us—but he came through for the Allman Brothers Band, no doubt. I’m tickled pink that he has gone on to such great success with Widespread Panic, and that he’s the same friendly, humble guy he’s always been.

With Dickey gone and Jimmy Herring not coming back, there was only one person to turn to: Warren Haynes. Sadly, in September 2000, not long after our summer tour ended, Allen Woody died, and that was quite a blow for everyone, especially me. I think about Allen every single day of my life. I don’t know what it is, but the boy got under my skin. Obviously, Warren took Woody’s death incredibly hard, and given everything that had happened, I thought his returning to the band just made sense.

I picked up the phone, called him, and said, “Brother, it’s time to come home.” Warren agreed, and we all tore it up at the Beacon in 2001. It was a great run; Warren and Derek had it going on, and Chuck Leavell showed up for four shows, so we gave the New York fans something to remember.

The next logical step was to get this lineup into the studio, which we did in 2003. On that album, Warren and I wrote some songs that I’m so proud of. As a songwriter, Warren makes me feel brand-new. We get on the same wavelength as well as two people can; writing with Warren is kind of like writing with yourself. He’s really good at finishing ideas and getting to the end result. When something repeats itself twice, on the third time he’ll change the music; it sounds like a whole new thing, but you’re still singing the same lines. It’s really amazing to watch him do that.

I’ve never written with anybody else as closely as I’ve written with Warren. I don’t know why that is, but I could just never get it going with someone else. We usually begin with something I’ve already started. I’ll show him where I got stuck, and he’ll say, “Okay, let’s see,” and throw out an idea. Then we’ll build on it. We see eye to eye on most everything, and there’s total courtesy between us. We both get so into it; it’s really intense.

Warren came down to my house in Savannah, and the first thing we did was “Desdemona,” which raised the bar for the entire album. We also finished “High Cost of Low Living” and “Old Before My Time,” which is a very personal song; I’ve been through some pretty tough times in my life. “Old Before My Time”—no truer words were ever spoken, man. Butch really loved that song; he felt it was me at my absolute best, which was nice of him to say.

The end result of all this writing was
Hittin’ the Note
, and I honestly believe it’s the best thing we’ve cut since my brother was around. We did it in ten days, and it has a lot of spontaneity to it. Everybody was smiling, and there was so much communication—the kind of communication without talking. That good vibe was captured on tape, and it was all because that big dark cloud had been lifted off of us.

For the first time in as long as I could remember we were a group who all liked each other. No more dictators, no more drunks. It was like it had been way back at the start all those years ago, an attitude that Butch, Jaimoe, and I hadn’t felt since Macon. On that record, we rekindled something that had been lost for so long—that feeling of what this band was really supposed to be about. The groove was back in the Allman Brothers.

Naming an album is like naming a hound dog—it’s not easy. “Spot” and all the other good ones have been used already. We were really floundering, and one day Butch called and said he had come up with “Victory Dance.” We all went round and round on that one for a while, and then Butch called again and said, “Dig it man—how about using Oakley’s old saying, ‘hittin’ the note’?”

Back in the old days, I thought that “hittin’ the note” was a Chicago phrase that Oakley had picked up on, but I found out that it was actually his own saying. When my brother and Oakley were alive, “hittin’ the note” always meant the band was having a great night, with everybody totally on the same page—just right in the pocket, man. It made sense, and
Hittin’ the Note
became an easy choice.