One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band Read online

  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.”

  These are extreme examples of the type of thing that would happen a lot. You just didn’t know. You’d invite your parents or somebody to a gig and be scared to shit of what might go down.

  GOLDFLIES: Dickey was a gem when he was straight—a super-intelligent, artistic guy who would sit at his house and paint beautiful pictures. There was a lot of good there and the bad wasn’t a deal killer and mostly came about through alcohol.

  LAWLER: Butch seemed to hold it together, and Jaimoe was always a lovely man who was just out of it sometimes. I love him, but I once saw him nod out over a bowl of black walnut ice cream and cut his eye on a walnut. The real unpredictability came from Gregg and Dickey. Would Gregg make the gig? Would Dickey get mad and hit someone?

  GOLDFLIES: Dickey was a powerful force in that band. His guitar playing was so absolutely melodic and beautiful—like Jascha Heifetz beautiful. His improvisations were excellent. They went places and they made sense. I watched him take 100,000 people on a ride
with his solos.

  Dickey Betts and David “Rook” Goldflies.

  Bonnie Bramlett, who had appeared on Enlightened Rogues and toured with the band from April 1979 through mid-1980, was also to be featured on the first Arista album, even singing lead vocals on one song. Lawler says he went to sessions one morning and found out she was gone.

  LAWLER: Their egos were on fucking Mars. I came into the studio ready to record Bonnie and she was nowhere to be seen, so I ask where she is and someone says, “Hell, she left the mountain. She was in her bed and Gregg came in with his wife and said it was his bed and they got into an argument and she left.”

  I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with all these people?” They were playing big concerts, riding around in limousines, first-class everything. When they signed to Arista, they figured they were going to just take right back off and be stars.

  TRUCKS: Clive Davis destroyed any hope that we had that we could make the thing work again. He wanted us to be a Southern American version of Led Zeppelin and brought in outside producers and it just kept getting worse.

  LAWLER: I wasn’t alone in fucking up the worst part of their career but I have to take some credit or blame. But as much as I loved the Allman Brothers, we all knew that Southern rock was on its way out.

  Mike Lawler, 1981.

  JAIMOE: People wanted the band to go in the direction where all the money was. It was like, “You’re supposed to be the biggest band in America, so write some songs like this.” It’s not really that big a deal to do that, but what’s the cost?

  BETTS: When the music trend started turning away from blues-oriented rock towards more simple, synthesizer-based, dance music arrangements, the record company started to dictate what type of record we could make, and we got caught up in that whole thing.

  Eric Clapton has a way of being a chameleon, of finding songs that keep him in the forefront and surviving through times when the kind of music he loves to play isn’t popular. The Allman Brothers Band was never able to do that. We either sounded like our band or we didn’t. We never really had anything special when we were not able to do the instrumental jams and improvisation, which were taken away from us for a while. We were even asked not to mention Southern rock in interviews or to wear hats on stage.

  LAWLER: Anything that we played or did that sounded like traditional Allman Brothers, it would be, “Oh man, they just sound like the same old Allman Brothers. What’s new with that?” Clive Davis wanted them to have a newer sound—and most other bands of their era were trying to do the same thing. One thing people did not know in 1980 was that the baby boomers would have all the power a few years later and would say, “We want the Allman Brothers and the Doobie Brothers and the Grateful Dead to be just like they were and we’re fucking rich and we can get anything that we want.” I didn’t know that in the late ’70s/early ’80s—and neither did anyone else. All those bands were trying to modernize. Anything we did that didn’t sound like the good old Allman Brothers was applauded.

  RED DOG: The band got so far apart from one another. It was like a big canyon opened up. It just got out of hand and broke my heart. I was irritable and frustrated because I saw it falling apart and couldn’t do nothing about it. That was driving me up the wall.

  Red Dog himself would soon be fired after getting into a fight and punching his roommate—Rook Goldflies.

  RED DOG: That fight with Rook was the end, but sometimes the new guys on the crew thought I was ego-tripping. Even if I was, I had earned that right to stick my little chest out because I hustled and busted my ass and gave my heart and everything I had to be in that position. I was even lucky to be hired back, probably. Maybe I was a bad memory for some of them—seeing me brought back too much. Even when I knew it was over, I wouldn’t leave. Butch had to come tell me.

  Any illusion that the brotherhood had not been strained to the point of breaking by this time was shattered by the band’s decision to fire Jaimoe and replace him with Toler’s brother Frankie, who had been a member of Betts’s Great Southern. The key issue, Jaimoe says today, was his insistence on having his then-wife and manager Candace Oakley, Berry’s sister, handle all of his business affairs.

  JAIMOE: Dickey didn’t fire me, as has been said. The band fired me because they said that Candace was gonna break up the band. She was doing pretty much what I asked her to—I play the drums and you take care of the business—and they didn’t like that. So I get this call one day from Butch, who said, “Jaimoe, we’re not thinking alike, like we used to. You need to get Candy out of your business or we’re gonna break up the band.” That’s what he said, not that they’re gonna fire me. So they started right away with bullshit, because I knew the band was not going to break up, because when people are making money they will keep doing whatever they need to. But when he said, “It’s either her or us,” I said, “Well, it’s been great working with you” and hung up the phone.

  TRUCKS: I had many conversations with Jaimoe and said, “Go to New York and get yourself the meanest, nastiest lawyer you can get and we’ll deal with him but we can’t deal with your wife.”

  What finally triggered it is we had a European tour and at the last minute Candy said, “Jaimoe’s not going.” That put us in a terrible position. It’s something I’ve always hated—hated it then, hate it now—but we really had no choice. We couldn’t function as is, so in order to continue functioning, we had no choice but to do so without Jaimoe.

  JAIMOE: There was a gig in New Orleans at the Saenger Theater and I get this call from the road manager and he told Candy not to let me miss that gig. It was a setup for me not to show because I would have broken my contract. So I got on an airplane, went to New Orleans, and when they were coming out of baggage claim, walking along having a good time, I said, “Hey, fellas, how you doing?” Frankie Toler was so uncomfortable. He said, “Jaimoe, I got hired to play this gig. I don’t know what’s going on…” And I said, “You were hired to do something, go do it. It’s not about you.”

  GOLDFLIES: Frankie was a very good drummer, so musically we were OK in that transition, but there’s no doubt that something bigger was lost with Jaimoe gone. I sometimes felt like I could feel Duane onstage with us. There was this thing that would happen with Gregg, Dickey, Jaimoe, and Butch. They would do stuff all together that wasn’t rehearsed or talked about and it was an echo of Duane. They had all shared something very intense, something that was a bond that no matter how much I played with them I would remain outside of, because I had not shared it. They did real musical things that were very subtle, just a way of playing together that was really remarkable to witness. Musically speaking, when they were on, it was as good as it gets—even during this era no one really likes now. But without Jaimoe, a piece of that chemistry and vibe was gone.

  Frankie Toler.

  JAIMOE: That whole thing hurt me, but I was kind of a tough character. My father got killed when I was seven years old and that instilled in me something about just hanging in there and doing what you need to do. I remember telling my mother, who was crying, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” And I did that until the day she died.

  Allman Brothers’ mothers: Mrs. Allman (left) and Mrs. Johnson.

  LAWLER: I feel like I got blamed for trying to take them in a place where they didn’t need to go. Well, I was only twenty-five and sort of going with the program and bringing what was wanted. I believe now that I could have made a record that I’m not ashamed to put on today.

  Before recording their second Arista album, Brothers of the Road, the band changed managers, hiring the promoter John Scher after Massarsky eased himself out, reportedly saying, “It’s a million-dollar headache and a quarter-million-dollar job.” Bert Holman, who would become the band’s manager a decade later, worked for Scher running day-to-day ABB operations.

  JOHN SCHER, manager, 1981–82: I didn’t feel like it was more hassle than it was worth at all, and Steve said he wanted out, but remained very much in the loop as Dickey’s a
ttorney. This was an extraordinary band. They were trendsetters. They created a style of music that was uniquely American and I think they were still capable of being very good. During my time managing them, there were issues with Dickey that could get a little scary, but he was generally good and he was reliable when you needed him to be. Gregg was often barely functioning.

  One time, we had a meeting with Clive Davis about the next record, in the middle of the afternoon. They were staying at a hotel in New Jersey and I met them there to go to New York. Dickey and Butch were dressed, ready to go, but nobody could find Gregg. We kept calling his room and knocking on the door, and then calling everyone we could think of who he might be with or who might know where he is. We’re still in New Jersey at the time the meeting is supposed to start and I’m on the phone with Clive’s assistant, saying something came up and we’re late.

  We finally got hotel security to let us into his room in case there was a clue there, and Gregg was passed out on the bed, completely fucked up. Butch and Dickey pulled him up, threw him in the shower, and we filled him up with coffee and within an hour, we were on the way. We go into Clive’s office and start talking about the record and Gregg has a little bit of a cough and Clive asks, “Are you sick?”

  He goes, “Yeah, I got this really bad cough.” He saw that he got Clive’s attention and he really starts coughing a lot and Clive says, “You want me to get you a doctor? I’ve got a great guy.” Now it’s probably six at night and Gregg says, “Nah, I just need my cough medicine refilled.” He pulls out a bottle from his pocket—something with codeine—and Clive says, “Well, you need to see my doctor if he’s going to write a prescription,” but Gregg is going, “No, no, this is what I need.” And Clive goes, “Let me see what I can do.”