One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (33 page)

“After the successful formation, they split apart. He was one of the last ones to get his chute out. The wind was strong, and his chute opened, but he appeared to be swinging back and forth, due to turbulence or a line being fouled. He cut away and tried to go to his reserve chute, then tumbled with no signs of movement. I’m absolutely convinced that he lost consciousness due to shock and hypothermia. If Twiggs had wanted to kill himself, he would have gone out in style, freefalling onto a target or something. He never would have limply tumbled over and disappeared into some trees as he did.”

On April 2, 1990, Twiggs’ brother Skoots Lyndon met Galadrielle Allman’s mother, Donna, at Duane’s Macon grave and presented her with the Les Paul, which Morse and the Lyndon family had safeguarded for eleven years. Galadrielle has since lent the guitar to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where it remains on display.

CHAPTER

20

Can’t Spend What You Ain’t Got

F
OLLOWING THE BREAKUP,
Betts formed Great Southern, Gregg put together the Gregg Allman Band, and Jaimoe, Leavell, and Williams added guitarist Jimmy Nalls and became Sea Level. All three of these bands put out fairly strong albums in 1977. Still, the following year Allman and Walden approached Betts and broached the idea of a reunion.

Their first joint appearance in almost three years was on August 16, 1978, in New York’s Central Park, when Gregg, Butch, and Jaimoe came out and joined Great Southern for five songs. They quickly decided to reunite. When Williams and Leavell declined to leave Sea Level, the group added two Great Southern members: guitarist “Dangerous” Dan Toler and bassist David “Rook” Goldflies. The headline to a
People
magazine article about the reunion summed up the public perception of the band:
“The Allman Brothers Band Finally Buries the Hatchet—and Not in One Another.”

LEAVELL:
Jaimoe had left our band, partly because of back problems, but Lamar and I were moving on with our career in Sea Level and were in the middle of doing an album when the possibility of doing an Allman Brothers record occurred. We were contacted and said, “Look, we don’t think it’s fair to throw the guys we just hired out in the cold. Let us finish this record, get three months to tour, and we’ll come back.” Well, they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to start immediately and we had to make a decision—which was that it did not seem right.

PERKINS:
Chuck and Lamar were invited to go back and it was pretty much an ultimatum. I don’t think anyone expected them to say no.

LEAVELL:
I would have liked to be a part of it, but I have no regrets. I was with the band during a very difficult and very productive period. I’m very proud of it and I’ll always consider myself an Allman Brother.

DAVID “ROOK” GOLDFLIES,
ABB bassist, 1978–82:
We, the other guys in the band, didn’t know the reunion was going to happen in Central Park until just before. Those guys came out and the crowd went bonkers and it hit us all for the first time just what we were part of. You can understand something intellectually but not fully get it until you experience it, and that was the case here. It was very exciting.

JAIMOE:
We were a little rusty—maybe a lot rusty—and we were playing with some different guys, but it felt good to be together.

Eight days later, the reformed Allman Brothers Band made a surprise appearance at the annual Capricorn picnic, performing four songs. They then returned to Miami’s Criteria Studio to work with Dowd on what became
Enlightened Rogues,
a term Duane used to describe the band. The album was released six months after the Central Park show, and the band promptly returned to the road.

The band had renegotiated their deal with Capricorn Records, but many questions about royalties lingered. An audit was undertaken and Dickey Betts filed suit against Walden, alleging nonpayment of record and publishing royalties. Betts’s lawyer Steve Massarsky was managing the group.

DOWD:
We tried very hard to reach the classic sound on
Enlightened Rogues.
We worked our fingers to the bone, but it was laborious.

TRUCKS:
That band just didn’t work. The chemistry wasn’t there. The only reason the first album was half successful was that Tom Dowd produced it and worked so hard.

BETTS:
Some of the groups we had around that time just could not measure up to the original band. We did not have a slide guitarist, so I had to do it. Not only did I not enjoy this, but it altered the sound of the band, which needs to have my sound and the slide working together. Even when we had some great players, there was a pull, a tension—the unity was lacking. We used to say it was like having two trios on stage.

GOLDFLIES:
What I saw many times, especially towards the beginning, was a real effort from both Gregg and Dickey to be really gracious to each other. I sensed there was a real effort to make it work. They tried to make it happen.

I think the “two trios” thing became more apparent towards the end of this stint. Then it did often feel like there was a Gregg band and a Dickey band onstage at the same time. Danny Toler, a wonderful guy and guitarist, came in as Dickey’s right-hand man and ended up being Gregg’s guy. I was considered “Dickey’s guy” and I never really got in Gregg’s boat.

In his book, Gregg said that I played too many notes. But I never once remember Gregg asking me to play any specific way. I would have loved some feedback from a musician of his caliber! Conversely, Dickey and I spoke all the time about music and he was like, “Jazz it up … rip it out.” I was playing the way Dickey wanted me to, and he was very patient and gracious with his time, showing me what he wanted. We spent a lot of time on buses and in hotel rooms playing together and working things out. It became a mentor/mentee relationship.

“Dangerous” Dan Toler, 1986.

JAIMOE:
I’d like to say I was optimistic heading into this reunion. Since this band began, I’ve been excited to go back on the road after a break. It might fade very quickly at times, but the initial excitement is always there—but it wasn’t then. Sometimes I’d be walking off stage and see Rook or one of the guys and it was almost like I had forgotten they were there. It was like seeing your neighbor pull into his driveway and thinking, “Oh, that guy still lives here?” It’s not a good way for a band to operate.

There’s a lot of things I’ve learned in life and it’s not gonna be that you don’t know what you need to do. We would have known if we would have been looking.

Capricorn Records was teetering by the time
Enlightened Rogues
was released, and filed for bankruptcy in October 1979. By that time, Betts had won a substantial arbitration settlement, and the rest of the Allman Brothers’ members were next in line, likely to be followed by a litany of other Capricorn artists.

“It went down like a greased safe,” says Dick Wooley, who had left the label in 1976.

Massarsky steered the Allman Brothers Band to Clive Davis’s Arista Records, which had put out two Great Southern albums. Arista also signed the Grateful Dead and the label pushed both bands to modernize their sounds.

For their Arista debut, the Allman Brothers started working with Nashville songwriters Mike Lawler and Johnny Cobb in search of a hit. The duo ended up producing the album and Lawler was soon a member of the touring band, playing keyboards and eventually coming center stage to play keytar solos that most fans consider the band’s nadir.

MIKE LAWLER,
keyboardist/producer:
I was writing songs in Nashville with my partner Johnny Cobb for Acuff/Rose Publishers and I got to know Dickey when he recorded one of my songs for a solo album that never came out. I got him onto the Grand Ole Opry, where he played “Ramblin’ Man” with the Opry band, and he was thrilled about that and bam, we became best friends. He asked me to fly down to Florida to write together for the next Allman Brothers album. Then Johnny and I started hanging around and would often play keyboards with the Brothers when they were rehearsing and doing preproduction.

Butch walked in one day and said, “We have a problem; Tom Dowd is caught up with Rod Stewart and isn’t going to be available for a while.” Johnny said, “Why don’t we produce you?” And Dickey went, “Great idea!” And just like that, I was producing the Allman Brothers, a few years from being the biggest band in the country, at age twenty-four. I couldn’t believe it and frankly they all should have said no!

We rented this studio on [Georgia’s] Lookout Mountain, to keep everybody out of trouble, out of the way of the city and various bad influences. We were living in a giant old mansion on the mountain.

TRUCKS:
That drum ensemble in the middle of “From the Madness of the West” is the only piece of music that was ever put down in written form by the Allman Brothers Band. I wrote that damn thing, but look at the record and see who gets credit for the song: Dickey Betts alone. I should have known better and understood publishing by that point and I really don’t have any excuse.

Butch Trucks, 1979.

JAIMOE:
“From the Madness of the West” is the only time we did real drum arranging. Butch sat down and wrote out about a sixteen-bar drum solo and we played it together along with a session percussionist. That’s really the only time we did that. We were trying to create a stereo effect. Every other song we’ve ever recorded we just listened to and started playing and our parts fell into place.

LAWLER:
As a guy making a living playing on people’s records, I felt like they hated to record. It just wasn’t high on their agenda. They wanted to play live. We were getting started and they came in and said, “Hey, guess where we’re going? We just booked a bunch of dates. We got a good offer. We’ll be back when that’s done.” And I went, “Well, what am I gonna do? I blocked out this time.” And they went, “Come with us and play!” They had this Fender Rhodes they were dragging around since Chuck was in the band, and Gregg wasn’t really playing it. So I played that run and just like that, I was in the Allman Brothers Band.

PODELL:
Drugs and alcohol got really bad for all of us in the late ’70s and people got nuts. This is what happens with substance abuse, and all of us were in deep. There was real disgusting, horrible things being said behind people’s backs. It was like tribal feuds in Afghanistan. You could feel the drug influence transforming this band of beautiful hippies who just wanted to play music: jealousies, resentments, rivalries … most of it directed at management, but sometimes at one another.

LAWLER:
It’s hard to talk about the Allman Brothers and not discuss drugs. Their entire story is altered by that stuff. It just is. With those guys at that time it was a crapshoot just about every night. You showed up for the gig having no idea what might go down.

GOLDFLIES:
I saw some excesses that were pretty creative. It was like living inside a Hunter S. Thompson story. It’s no news flash that the Allman Brothers were part of a drug culture. We all got caught up in it to some extent, but I always felt like an amateur compared to those guys. And, yes, any situation becomes less stable when you add a lot of chemical stuff.

LAWLER:
One night, during “Blue Sky,” Gregg got up from his organ, crouched down, walked all the way behind the amps and back line, came out by my keyboards, and jumped into the audience—because a security guard was hassling the guy holding his dope. He gives the guy his laminate, goes down the foyer, all the way back behind the stage, and sits back down at his organ—all before the song was over. He was back for the final flourish and the band just played right through.

Another time, Dickey disappeared with some guys for a few days, then resurfaced at a gig. Dickey had been up for days and had amphetamine psychosis. He came out there, karate kicked his SG because he couldn’t get it in tune, ran off, then came back and started screaming, “I’m having a nervous breakdown.”