One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band Page 19

  JAIMOE: Lamar was a hell of a bass player. I had missed playing with him so much; no other bass player ever felt right to me until I met Berry. Everyone else in between … just nope! I learned how to play the bass drum by listening to Lamar play. I had studied jazz drumming, not rhythm and blues, and there was nothing definitive about where to put the beat. Lamar explained that to me and he could play so much like [Motown bassist] James Jamerson it was ridiculous, and playing along with him as he did that, it hit me and I just understood how to make the bass drum work. Playing with him again felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  LEAVELL: It was a feeling of brotherhood with two new brothers coming in. The band had been through these traumas and major changes and now they had a chance to be the Allman Brothers Band 2.0. There was a certain sense of freshness, with Lamar and me there.

  PERKINS: When Lamar and Chuck came in, it seemed like it gave the band a kick in the butt musically.

  Lamar Williams (left) and Chuck Leavell at the Farm.

  BETTS: We did what we had to do—we were forced to bring new people into the band because two of our guys were killed. We added Chuck, and it changed the whole direction of the band—and you can hear it on “Jessica.”

  SANDLIN: “Jessica” was different but it worked. It was like, “The guy who was driving the bus is gone. Let’s go down this different road.” It’s the happiest song I’ve ever heard. It still makes me smile every time I hear it. It gave Chuck a chance to stretch out and shine immediately.

  LEAVELL: My attitude was to relax, play the best I could, and find the right places to contribute. No one could have replaced Duane and I think it was a good call not to have another guitarist come in, to take another direction. I wanted to make the most of it.

  BETTS: I really need to have an image in my head before I can start writing an instrumental because otherwise it’s too vague. I get an emotion or an idea I want to express and see what I can come up with. With “Jessica” I was experimenting, trying to write something that could be played with just two fingers on my fretting hand in honor of Django Reinhardt [the Gypsy jazz guitar master who played with just two left fingers due to severe burns].

  I came up with the main melody, but it was still just a bunch of notes going nowhere until I was sitting there and my baby daughter Jessica came crawling in smiling and I started playing along, trying to capture musically the way she looked bouncing around the room. And then the song came together. That’s why I named it after her.

  Dickey Betts and his daughter, Jessica.

  DUDEK: I co-wrote “Jessica” with Dickey. We had been jamming a lot and he called up and invited me and my girlfriend over to have some steaks with him and Blue Sky, and he told me to bring my acoustic guitar. I grabbed my Martin and while the ladies were in the kitchen, he said, “Let me show you this song I’ve been working on, but I’m stuck and haven’t been able to finish.” He had the opening rhythm for “Jessica” and the main verse riff. It sounded great but didn’t go anywhere.

  We played it for a while, then Dickey became frustrated and went in the kitchen to check on the steaks. I stayed with it. The verse section Dickey had was in the key of A. I felt the song needed a bridge, so I took it to G and came up with the bridge section. I yelled for Dickey to come back, and said, “Try this; after the verse section, go to the G chord and play this melody.” So he did, and then he said, “Now what?” I said, “At the end of the phrase keep going up, up, up all the way to the top.” Dickey said, “Then what?” I said, “Just stop, and start over again on the verse section and repeat.”

  And when we played it like that, Dickey lit up like a lightbulb he was so happy, because now we had the new section the song desperately needed. Dickey was so excited, we ran out and threw our guitars in the back of his pickup truck, because he wanted to go play it for everyone we could find in the band, to show them we finally had the instrumental song for the new record. We went by Jaimoe’s house and played it for Jaimoe and Lamar that night and they loved it, but we couldn’t find Gregg or Butch. I’ll never forget, right when we got in Dickey’s truck, it started to lightly, almost mystically, snow, as if it was Duane sending us a message: “Hey, you guys finally got that tune.”

  JAIMOE: It wouldn’t surprise me if Les wrote that with Dickey because they were definitely playing together a lot and Dickey’s songs often were kind of incomplete and worked up together. But I don’t remember Dickey ever coming by my house. He’s the only guy who never was there.

  LEAVELL: We had put down three or four tracks before Dickey came into the studio with Les Dudek to play “Jessica” for us, so he could present the rhythm guitar and melody at the same time. He explained that he was paying tribute to Django and we could hear that. Earlier instrumentals were more serious in nature. This was more lighthearted and presented a challenge: How do we make this a little more intense and make it work as an Allman Brothers song? That presented a unique opportunity to make it special.

  DUDEK: Dickey and I had worked out harmonies and I thought I’d be recording them with him, but the first day we started recording “Jessica,” he said, “I know you wrote this song with me, but you already played all those harmonies on ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ so if you play the harmonies on ‘Jessica,’ the critics might think you’re gonna be in the band. So I want you to play the acoustic rhythm guitar part instead, and Chuck will play the harmonies on the piano.” I was very disappointed, but there was nothing I could say about it, so I played the acoustic guitar part.

  SANDLIN: Les played acoustic on “Jessica,” which you can hear very clearly on the opening.

  LEAVELL: I would not really agree that Les co-wrote it. I could say I co-wrote it, because I made a lot of suggestions, but I don’t think that’s fair. Dickey wrote the melody and he had the rhythm. Songwriting always has some gray areas, because if someone plays a particular riff does that mean it’s part of the song or part of the arrangement? We all contributed to the arrangement of the piece, but it was Dickey’s song.

  DUDEK: Well, that’s what Chuck saw, but he was not in the room when Dickey and I wrote the song. I agree that what we did in the studio was arrangements. It was all working out the solos and the links between them, and it took us about six days until we had it in a cohesive whole. That’s arrangement—like what I did on “Ramblin’ Man.” That’s not what I’m talking about; when I sat down with Dickey, he did not have a completed song, just the verse section, until I came up with the bridge. Dickey marched me right into Phil’s office and told him I had co-written the song and should get some points. I didn’t understand all that exactly at the time, but in retrospect, I should have got 50 percent. Because it wasn’t a completed song until I gave him the bridge section, the part that goes to the G chord.

  TRUCKS: I know Dickey came up with those melodies and I wasn’t there, so I can’t say what Les did or didn’t do, but I take that with a grain of salt. Look at the track records of what else each has written. I do know that Dickey brought the song into the studio in pieces; he had some beautiful lines, but it really wasn’t a song. He sat on the floor playing acoustic guitar and showing us these melodies, which we worked into a song. We spent a lot of time—several days—all putting together “Jessica.”

  JAIMOE: Dickey would often come in with an idea or a really nice melody and we’d all play our parts and make it into a song. I don’t know how much you have to put in a song to have a credit, but that’s not how we did things. Dickey always kept them.

  TRUCKS: I think it could be a group credit almost, and if any one person would have a writing claim it would be Chuck Leavell, who added a tremendous amount to “Jessica.”

  BETTS: “Jessica” wouldn’t be the same tune without Chuck, who is just a great, great player.

  LEAVELL: We started working through it and then the next question was “How do we get from the piano solo to the guitar solo?” I came up with the transition phase that leads into Dickey’s solo. We worked our way through the song and establishe
d the arrangement. One of the things I found really interesting was the three-part harmonies with the two keyboards and the guitar; it showed how the band could build on its legacy while changing.

  TRUCKS: I’ve always said that Dickey Betts is one of the most lyrical guitar players in rock and roll. He plays beautiful melodies and always did, and a lot of those melodies ended up being the basis for a lot of those songs, like “Liz Reed” and “Jessica,” but we worked those songs up together as well. The melodies are way superior and it’s fair to say that no one but Dickey could have come up with them, but there’s a hell of a lot more to a song than just a melody. I think Dickey was the first of us to really understand the value of songwriting credits.

  LEAVELL: While Dickey was doing more songwriting, it’s not at all true to say that Gregg was not musically involved in what was going on. He was very involved and “Jessica” was a great example, as we replaced the traditional Allman Brothers two-part guitar harmonies, with three-part harmonies, featuring two keyboards and one guitar. They were very difficult to work out—and he had to figure his parts out on a Hammond B3, which is not easy and points out a simple fact: Gregg is a great B3 player. He’s not known for hot solos, but his use of the instrument is magnificent. He finds the right colors, knowing when to make them dark, when to brighten them up, and he exhibits excellent use of the Leslie [rotating speaker], with an innate sense of when to keep it slow and when to crank it up and add intensity.

  JAIMOE: Gregory has been insecure about his musicianship over the years, but he is a very great organ player. What he plays, he plays very, very well, he’s always in the groove and he sticks to things he knows—which does not stop you from growing. You can take something deeper and deeper and that’s what he has always done with his organ playing.

  BETTS: Writing a good instrumental takes months, which makes them totally unlike a solo, though people often think a song with no vocals is just a bunch of solos put together. It’s a completely different process. Slow blues solos are just your heart coming out, but all the solos happen too fast to even think about. They’re the closest thing to Zen that I do. If I think about it, it’s gone. It’s ruined. If I’m stuck or I need a mental rest, I’ve got licks that I can hang there until I get my mind together to start something else, but it’s mostly instantaneous and instinctive. It’s like touching a hot stove; you don’t think you’re gonna jerk your hand back. You just do it.

  The instrumentals, on the other hand, are very studied. It’s called architecture, and for a good reason. It’s much like somebody designing a building. It’s meticulously constructed, and every aspect has its place. Writing a good one is very fulfilling, because you’ve transcended language and spoken to someone with a melody. My instrumentals try to create some of the basic feelings of human interaction, like anger and joy and love. Even instrumentals that are just for fun, like Freddie King’s “Hideaway,” talk to you.

  Brothers and Sisters ends with another musical departure, the acoustic back-porch country blues “Pony Boy,” where Betts displays his fluid, easy mastery of acoustic slide playing.

  Dickey Betts at home, late 1973.

  BETTS: “Pony Boy” has a real strong Robert Johnson influence where you strum the 2/4 in with the notes, building a rhythm even while you pick. And lyrically, Willie McTell inspires the humor. It’s based on a true story about my uncle. When I was a kid, the family lore was he would take his horse out when he went drinking to avoid DUI charges and the horse knew just how to take him home.

  That musical style is based on what used to be called “Black Bottom Blues.” The term refers to the fertile black soil of the Mississippi Delta and “bottoms” is just a term country people have always used. Unfortunately, people misunderstood “Black Bottom” as having racial or minstrel show overtones, so it’s fallen out of favor. But I’ve always enjoyed playing in that style and back in the early days of the Brothers we used to hang out with John Hammond Jr. quite a bit, and he taught us a lot about traditional country blues playing.

  LEAVELL: Lamar played upright bass on “Pony Boy,” which we wanted to be all acoustic.

  SANDLIN: Butch played percussion by banging on a piece of plywood on the floor; there’s no drum kit on there.

  LEAVELL: I thought it was a neat touch to end with an acoustic song that helped balance things out, just as Eat a Peach had with “Little Martha.” I thought then—and still do—that Brothers and Sisters had a really great balance, with the instrumental “Jessica,” the deep blues of “Jelly Jelly,” the countryish rock of “Ramblin’ Man,” and everything else.

  ODOM: It was obvious there was a great album happening. Dickey did take the musical lead—not as a leader but as a musician, and there’s a difference. In the studio, Dickey’s influence on Brothers and Sisters was incredible. It was a very, very difficult situation, and Dickey just rose to the occasion.

  The final track recorded for Brothers and Sisters was the blues “Jelly Jelly,” which was credited to Gregg though it features lyrics to Bobby Bland’s song of the same name with a very different vocal melody and arrangement.

  SANDLIN: They needed one more song to finish the album and Gregg said he had something. He said he’d written new words to a blues based around this great arrangement they had of Ray Charles’s “Outskirts of Town” [which the Brothers sometimes performed; a live version was captured on Live at Ludlow Garage 1970]. That was one of the earliest songs I ever heard the Brothers play and it was great. So we cut the track and Gregg kept not bringing in the rest of the words he supposedly had. He just didn’t have the lyrics finished. Everyone was calling up, pushing me. Capricorn and Warner Brothers wanted that album. So finally, out of desperation, Gregg just sang the words to “Jelly Jelly,” an old blues song, and some of the early presses actually listed “Early Morning Blues,” the title of his new song.

  LEAVELL: I didn’t know any of the drama. I thought it was a classic Allman Brothers deep-blues-with-a-twist song and I loved recording it and was honored just to play a solo.

  SANDLIN: As soon as he finished that vocal, people were waiting to take Gregg to rehab. He didn’t pass Go before heading off to get help.

  DUDEK: I went on the road with Boz Scaggs and then Steve Miller offered me a gig and I told him that I was tied up with Phil, but didn’t know what was happening, and he said, “Go back to Macon and ask Phil if he intends to do something with you, and if not, ask for your release and move out here and join my band.” He had his lawyer draw up a release and I got a cashier’s check for the money I owed Phil that he had been advancing me for living expenses.

  I parked myself in front of Phil’s office for a week until he called me in and eventually I handed him the release and he signed it, very surprised and maybe offended that I came in there ready with a release and a check. And that also let me out of the publishing deal, which meant that there would be no cut going in for any credit I had on “Jessica” and since I had no written contract about that, I believe they just decided to leave me off. Years later, Dickey apologized about “the whole ‘Jessica’ thing” and said “they” told him he didn’t have to pay me. Of course, I didn’t accept that, but there was nothing I could do.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Demons

  WITH BROTHERS AND Sisters in the can and being prepped for a late summer release, the Allman Brothers Band returned to the road. They were playing larger venues, making more money, and dealing with increasing drug problems, with less friendship and communication among the members.

  PERKINS: A combination of everything—drugs, money, the expanding size of it all—led to everyone feeling separate and distant.

  PAYNE: We were going through an airport one time and these three suits had fallen in behind us. They were walking behind us making fun of Gregg, just saying the kind of things we would hear all the time like, “Look at that long blond hair … looks like a girl to me.” We were ignoring them, but when we went to get in a cab, these three guys tried to take it. Gre
gg had already gotten in and one of them was trying to pull him out, and in the flash of an eye, Dickey was on them and all three of them were lying on the ground bleeding. He and Gregg were not even getting along at the time. I’d hate to see what he would do to someone who messed with someone he loved.

  RED DOG: Separation set in. I think management pushed Gregg a little bit away as the front man. Gregg and Dickey both had solo albums out or coming out … things just changed. And I watched money change everyone, including myself.

  The feeling that the band was spiraling out of control came to a head on June 9 and 10, 1973, when the Allman Brothers played with the Grateful Dead at Washington’s RFK Stadium on a co-headlining bill, with the Allmans opening the first show and closing the second.

  Jaimoe and Dickey Betts, RFK Stadium, June 1973.

  WOOLEY: Backstage, the Grateful Dead roadies dosed the food and drinks of as many people as they could with LSD. Bunky Odom warned us in advance so we didn’t partake of anything. However the ABB road crew already had.

  PAYNE: Any time you were around Owsley Stanley [Dead soundman and legendary acid creator who was known as Bear], you were in danger of being dosed, but I don’t think we were that time. After our first few encounters with them, we were careful. We kept our hands over our beer cans, never left food or drinks unattended or consumed anything we hadn’t opened. If you didn’t take these precautions, you were likely to be dosed, which I was not fond of and I really think is a cruel thing to do—remember we were looking at driving six hundred miles after most gigs.

  WEIR: That would have been a common practice in those days. Some of the folks with our crew, especially Bear, were evangelical about LSD and had no compunction about dosing people. All I can say is, I had to deal with that, too. I stopped taking LSD willingly in 1966 because as far as I was concerned, I had seen enough. I still got dosed numerous times, because a lot of those evangelicals did not think I had seen enough—that anyone possibly could see enough.