One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (18 page)

BETTS:
There’s nothing too complicated about what makes
Fillmore
a great album: that was a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like. I think it’s one of the greatest musical projects that’s ever been done in any genre. It’s an absolutely honest representation of our band and of the times.

JAIMOE:
Fillmore
was both a particularly great performance and a typical night. That’s what we did!

ALLMAN:
You want to come out and get the audience in the palm of your hand right away: “One-two-three-four, bang! I gotcha!” That’s what you gotta do. You can’t be namby-pamby; you can’t be milquetoast with the audience. There’s a lot of good music out there. It’s like what B.B. King did on
Live at the Regal
[1965], which is like one big long song, a giant medley. He never stopped. He just slammed it. The second big live record for me was James Brown,
Live At the Apollo
[1963] and that was the same thing. Those records are what got me into doing everything so meticulously—paying attention to arrangements, the order of the songs. The little things are important.

WALDEN:
Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double live album. Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, not recording, that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.

Walden won his fight to release
At Fillmore East
as a double album “people-priced” for the cost of a single LP.

ALLMAN:
I still listen to
Fillmore.
Those licks that my brother plays are so fresh still and he has such a tone—and Oakley, too. That boy was one of a kind, just like Duane. Just the chance that we would all meet up and form a band is amazing—everything seemed to fall right into place and you can hear it on this record.

HAYNES:
At Fillmore East
was a dream come true for a young guitar player—a double record of guitar licks. You could go for a year without leaving your room, just running the needle back over and over saying, “How did they do that?” A lot of us wore multiple copies out, picking up and dropping needles trying to learn the licks.

ALLMAN:
The release date came up real quick and everyone was wondering what to do for the cover. We wanted to come up with something cool because left to their own devices the people at Atlantic did horrible things. I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle! [This was the cover of the soul duo’s
Hold On I’m Coming
album.] We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band and would do what the music would do. So someone said, “Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley with our gear waiting to go onstage.”

BETTS:
We took that in Macon. We were up at daylight out there to take the photo and we were all real grumpy. Jim Marshall, the photographer, wanted us out there then and we thought it was dumb—we figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it.

This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk and Duane jumped up and ran over and scored from this guy, then came back and sat down and we were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin on his face.

ALLMAN:
It was a collective decision, but my brother’s idea to have the crew on the back of the cover. He wanted to do that because they were the unsung heroes. He really had a lot of respect for the people that make the shows possible, and set up the equipment just perfect every night. The crew always played a special role in our band and we were quite the tight family. Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do.

PAYNE:
They borrowed me out of the hospital for that photo. I had been shot off my motorcycle by a local cop and was in the hospital going through physical therapy every day, just to be able to bend my leg.

RED DOG:
I would have given my life for any of them. If you had messed with Duane, Dickey, any of those guys, I would have said, “You’re gonna have to kill this little dude first.” I gave my disability check from being injured in Vietnam as a Marine to them—all the money I had in the world. I loved the band.

JAIMOE:
How do you say thank you to a guy for giving up his disability check? He supported us at the beginning before we were making any money.

ALLMAN:
We lived off the [government] disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs. It was like, “Want a job? Great. You got any money?”

JOHN LYNDON:
Twiggs was in the Navy but he was never injured and didn’t get disability checks. He did often donate his own salary back to the band when they were first in Macon.

Twiggs was still in jail awaiting trial at the time of the photo shoot. An individual photo of him was superimposed on the wall above the crew.

PAYNE:
We felt like we were part of the band. It was truly indeed more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal. I heard through the grapevine that Duane put out a presidential law that the roadies would get paid before the band when money was tight—which was always in the first few years. He was just that kind of a guy.

RED DOG:
The brotherhood was so strong. I can’t talk for the musicians, though I truly believe that in Duane’s heart it was just as strong as it was for us in the crew—especially Twiggs and me. I had only been back from Vietnam for less than a year when I met up with them, and I was pretty messed up from the heavy shit I did and saw over there. I lost a lot of friends. I couldn’t hold a decent job. My marriage was breaking up. All that probably made me very open to this group of guys. They gave me a home.

PERKINS:
Everyone, band and crew alike, got paid $90 a week. When I started, the band was advancing the road manager an extra $50 salary. I pointed that out and Duane said, “You deserve it!” And his ironclad rule was, “If everyone can’t get paid, the crew gets paid first.” Once, on my birthday, he asked for a hundred-dollar advance. I said, “Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,” and he said, “I’m sure.” So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him a hundred, and he handed it to me and said, “Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.”

JAIMOE:
Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle. We all play together and every part is equally important and that goes for the bus driver, too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus?

I remember one time Walden tried to get him to have a meeting and said he didn’t need the rest of us in there, and Duane said, “Wait a minute, this is our band and there’s nothing else to talk about. You can talk to all of us.” They were trying to get it to be the Duane Allman Band and he said, “No. We’re all equal in this band.”

RED DOG:
Duane would often bring us all into meetings and I’m sure Phil didn’t quite understand what me and Kim and Callahan were doing in there. He wanted to talk to Duane and he had ten people in his office and was no doubt thinking, “Not only do I have talk to the other musicians, but I’ve got these road bums in here.”

ALLMAN:
They were part of the band, no doubt about it. We were always a little closer with them than the average band.

STEVE PARISH,
Grateful Dead crew member:
From the time we started running into each other at the Fillmore East we had a kindred spirit with the Allman Brothers and their crew—and a big part of it was that they were the only other group we came across where we saw a similar relationship and dynamic between the crew and the band members. We were very similar in the sense that we all hung out as equals. Most others we came across, there was a clear line and there was no doubt that the crew were employees.

PERKINS:
The band was like a family, with a hierarchy, and Duane was the father.

JAIMOE:
Berry was maybe like the big brother of the band. He was my man and the three of us had quite a bond going back to the time jamming in Muscle Shoals. He was a little bit more lenient than Duane. If someone started some shit, Duane wanted to knock him down. He couldn’t have hurt a fly, but he’d go up against anyone who challenged him. Berry would be more like, “Let’s work it out, bro.”

DOUCETTE:
Duane and Berry were so close. Their relationship was unbelievable. Duane would say, “It would be nice if we could do this … I was thinking we should get that…” and Berry would just nod his head—and do it. Duane had the vision. Berry got it done.

Big Brother Berry Oakley.

RED DOG:
I called Berry “the Deacon.” He was a remarkable person also. He had a grip on things and was a great philosophizer, with a way of putting things that made sense to everyone. He helped keep things together in the rough days, always saying, “We’ll weather this storm.”

BETTS:
Berry was also a huge personality. He was the social dynamics guy: he wanted our band to relate to the people honestly. He was always making sure that the merchandise was worth what they were charging, and he was always going in and arguing about not letting the ticket prices get too high, so that our people could still afford to come see us.

Berry Oakley, Alabama bust, 1971.

Just after the Fillmore photo shoot, the band was back on the road traveling from a gig in New Orleans to one at the University of Alabama, when they were arrested at a truckstop near the town of Jackson, on March 22, 1971. A police officer reported that he saw one member—Betts—behaving oddly, so he searched the car, where he found a pharmaceutical cornucopia. Every member of the band, along with Perkins, Joe Dan Petty, and Tuffy Phillips, was arrested and faced various charges, including possession of marijuana, heroin, and phencyclidine (PCP). They spent a night in jail before being released on $2,000 bail.

Butch Trucks, Alabama bust, 1971.

The charges hung over their head for months. The Buffalo defense attorney John Condon, who was retained to defend Lyndon, flew to Alabama to meet with the district attorney and assist in the case of
State of Alabama v. the Members of the Allman Brothers Band.