Night Beat (21 page)

ANOTHER DAY into the new sessions, Dickey Betts is seated on a worn sofa in the foyer at Criteria Studios. Down the hall, Gregg Allman is still working on his vocals, and it is apparent from his and Tom Dowd’s improved moods that the work is going well.

Betts had stayed up late the night before, listening to a cassette of an Allman Brothers show from a 1970 venue at Ludlow Garage in Cincinnati. PolyGram’s Bill Levenson (who compiled the 1989 Allmans retrospective,
Dreams)
had recently remastered the session for commercial release, and last night was the first time Betts had heard the performance in twenty years. “I knew if the quality was anywhere above being embarrassing, that it would be good,” he says with a fast smile. Betts can seem the edgiest member of the group—he gets up and moves around while he talks, his eyes move constantly, and he is wary about how he phrases things—but behind that manner, he is amiable and honest, and he clearly possesses a remarkable breadth of intelligence. For many years now, he has been regarded as the real heart of the Allman Brothers Band, though he often tends to downplay his leadership role. Right now, he seems to enjoy talking about the revolutionary music the band began making in its early days. “If I recall,” he says, “Ludlow was like a dungeon: a cement floor, with a low ceiling, kind of like a warehouse garage. Real funky. As I remember, it was recorded around the time of our first album, way before we started getting anywhere. We were still underground at that point. We had a private, almost cultlike following.”

The Allman Brothers may have been relatively “underground” in 1970, but they had already developed their mix of bedrock aggression and high-flown invention that would become their hallmark fusion. Like many bands of the time, the group was trying to summarize a wide range of rock, blues, and jazz traditions, and at the same time extend those traditions in new unanticipated directions. In contrast, though, to the Grateful Dead or Miles Davis (both of whom often played improvisatory blues in modal formats and freewheeling structure), the Allmans built tremendously sophisticated melodic formations that never lost sight of momentum or palpable eroticism. For one thing, the band was genuinely attuned to the emotional meanings of blues and the stylistic patterns of rock & roll—that is, group members not only found inspiration in the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson, they also understood how that music’s spirit had been extended and transmogrified in the later music of Chuck Berry, James Brown, and other rock and soul pioneers. At the same time, the Allmans loved jazz, and had spent many hours marveling at not only the prowess of musicians like Davis, Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, and Roland Kirk, but at how these visionaries had taken the same primitive blues impulses that had thrilled and terrified Robert Johnson and Louis Armstrong and turned them into an elaborate art form, capable of the most intricate, spontaneous inventions. Plus, there was an exceptional confluence that resulted from the Allmans’ collective talents. In its straightahead blues mode, the band could barnstorm and burn with a fervor that even such white blues trendsetters as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, and the Rolling Stones were hard-pressed to match. And when the Allmans stretched their blues into full-scale, labyrinthine improvisations—in the largely instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” “Whipping Post,” and “Mountain Jam”—the band was simply matchless.

“Duane and Gregg were students of the urban blues,” says Betts. “Their thing was like a real honest, truthful, chilling delivery of that music, whereas Oakley and I may have been influenced by the blues and were students of it, but we were more innovative. We would try to take a blues tune and, instead of respecting the sacredness of it, we would go
sideways
with it. But on our own, Berry and I were always missing something—a certain foundation—while Duane and Gregg didn’t quite have the adventurous kind of thing. So when we all came together, we gave each other a new foundation.”

It proved to be a unique amalgam, with Allman and Betts’ twin-lead guitars often locking into frenzied and intricate melodic flights, and Jaimoe and Butch Trucks’ double drumming forming a webwork of rhythm that both floated and pushed the drama of the guitars. The only other band in rock that attempted such an adventurous lineup was the Grateful Dead, though in the Dead’s case, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann’s rhythms too often pulled apart and lost momentum, and guitarist Bob Weir was never quite inventive enough to engage Jerry Garcia’s considerable skill. Likelier prototypes were the double-saxophone and double-drum sextets and octets led by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman in the mid-1960s, as well as the twin-guitar and guitar-fiddle lineups of numerous western-swing and country-western bands. “I was always real fond of the twin guitars that Roy Clark and Dave Lyle played in Wanda Jackson’s band,” says Betts. “But it wasn’t that we consciously copied any of these sources. It was just that later we realized that people like Clark and Lyle, and Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, had been pursuing the same idea many years before. For a rock & roll band, though, it was a pretty new adventure. I mean, one of the good things about the Allman Brothers, we listened to jazz and were influenced by it without ever pretending we were jazz players.

“But make no mistake: It was a matter of Duane being hip enough to see that potential and responding to it. He was absolutely in charge of that band. Had he missed that possibility or that chemistry, there would have been no Allman Brothers Band.”

Betts also cites Berry Oakley as a key shaper of the Allmans’ early sound. Certainly, Oakley was a singular bassist. Like such jazz hero-bassists as Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton, Ray Brown, or Scott LaFaro, Oakley had a profound melodic sense that combined fluently with a pulsing percussive touch; and like the Dead’s Phil Lesh or Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Cassady, he knew how to get under a band’s action and lift and push its motions. “There were times,” says Betts, “when Berry would be playing a line or phrase, and Duane would catch it, then jump on it and start playing harmony. Then maybe I’d lock into the melodic line that Duane was playing, and we would all three be off. That kind of thing was absolutely unheard of from a rock bassist. I mean, Berry would take over and
give us
the melody.”

In fact, says Betts, it was Oakley who came up with the arrangement for “Whipping Post,” the Allmans’ most famous jam vehicle. “Oakley heard something in it that none of the rest of us heard—this
frightening
kind of thing. He sat up all night messing around and came back in the next day with a new opening in eleven/four time, and after that, ideas started flying from every direction. That sort of thing always happened with him.”

By the end of 1970, the Allman Brothers had acquired a formidable reputation. They had recorded two critically praised LPs of blues-rock, interlaced with classical- and country-derived elements, and Duane had gained pop renown for his contributions to Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos project,
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
But it was as a live unit that the band enjoyed its greatest repute, and in the year or so ahead, they would play somewhere around two hundred concerts. In part, to sustain their energy during the incessant and exhausting tours, and in part as a by-product of a time-old blues and jazz tradition (and a by-product of rock culture), the Allmans used an increasingly wide range of drugs—at first, primarily marijuana and occasional psychedelics and, in time, cocaine and heroin. It was a habit that bought the band some short-term potency, maybe even inspiration, but it would also eventually cost them their fraternity. Looking back, Betts has misgivings about the whole experience, and its legacy. “The drugs that were being done back in the sixties and seventies,” he says, “were a lot easier to have fun with and be open about, and to find acceptable, because they were drugs to enhance your awareness, instead of an escape into some blackness. I’m not saying those drugs had any redeeming qualities, but at least that was the idea that people had at the time: It was an effort to open the mind up and go even further.

“Today, though, the drugs are so damn deadly, so absolutely dangerous. There’s nothing about them that’s trying to enhance your awareness at all. The whole idea is to
kill
your awareness, to escape. It’s just a perverted thing, and that’s why I think that nowadays it’s absolutely irresponsible and ignorant to sing in a positive way about doing drugs.”

It was in this period that the Allman Brothers singlehandedly pioneered a style and demeanor that would become popularly known as Southern Rock: music that was aggressive yet could swing gracefully, played by musicians who were proud of their region and its musical legacies. Though later bands would reduce Southern Rock to a reactionary posture and a crude parody of machismo, the Allmans began the movement as a blast of musical and cultural innovation. In fact, their outlooks and music were emblematic of the American South’s ongoing struggle for redefinition, and for its mounting desire to move away from its violently earned image as a region of fierce racism and intolerance. But while the South of the early 1970s was less like the land of fear and murder that had destroyed the lives of so many blacks and civil rights activists, Betts acknowledges that the territory could still live up to its vulgar notoriety. “There were times,” he says, “when you would go out for breakfast after you finish playing a club and just have to accept the chances of getting in a damn fist fight with somebody. But what are you gonna do: sneak home? I mean, you’d just go out and somebody starts calling you some kind of faggot or something about your long hair. I guess we
were
shocking in those days, and some of those damn cowboys are pretty quick to show their feelings. Now half of them have hair as long as mine. Also, there were a few times in some real ignorant little towns where we’d have trouble going into a restaurant with Jaimoe.” Betts pauses and shakes his head with remembered exasperation. “Those were isolated incidents, but they stick out in my mind. I was horrified at that kind of thing.

“But you know, things just changed tremendously in the seventies, at least in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and the other Southeastern states. The South just got new attitudes.”

By the early 1970s, Macon—which had once been troubled by Phil Walden’s championing of R & B music—regarded the Allmans as homegrown commercial and regional heroes. Indeed, nearly all the acts that Walden signed to Capricorn had strong Southern identities, and some observers believed it was Walden’s aspiration to build a personal and political empire, based on the ideal that “the South Will Rise again.” Betts, though, disavows this ambition. “We had
nothing
to do with that whole ideal, ’the South will rise again,’ ” he says. “That was somebody else’s idea. The thing is, we
did
appreciate our culture, and a lot of people in the South were proud of the Allman Brothers, because we were typically and obviously Southern. That was part of our aura. But beyond that, I don’t think we were part of what was changing the South. It was people like Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Kennedy who helped affect Southern attitudes. We were just a good thing for some people to identify with, and obviously, we influenced the music from the South a great deal. A lot of musicians thought, ’Hey, they’re speaking for or representing the way
I
feel’—and that was a cool thing.”

It was a heady time. In 1971, the Allmans toured the country relentlessly, and in March they recorded two of their three performances at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York, for a two-record set,
At the Fillmore East—
still widely regarded as the finest live recording that rock & roll has ever produced. In its August 1971 review of the album,
Rolling Stone
described the Allmans as “one of the nicest things that ever happened to any of us,” and as the band’s popularity grew, the rock mainstream seemed finally ready to share this estimation. In concert, the Allmans earned every inch of their adulation. Night after night, Duane Allman would stand centerstage, and bouncing lightly on his heels, he would begin constructing meditative, rhapsodic solos that ended up going places that rock had never gone before. An unschooled musician, Allman thought in perfectly formed complete lines, that had all the grace and dynamics of a carefully considered composition. He was perhaps the most melodically inventive and expressive instrumentalist that rock would ever witness.

But on October 29, 1971, as the band was at its creative peak and was recording a new work that promised to be both a commercial and creative leap forward, bad news made its first fateful visit to the Allmans. That afternoon, Duane had visited the band’s “Big House” in Macon to wish Berry Oakley’s wife a happy birthday, then mounted his motorcycle to head back to his own home. Some have speculated that Duane was overtired from relentless touring and was less attentive to his driving than usual. In any event, in the early evening darkness of a Southern night, Duane swerved his bike to avoid a truck that had turned in front of him. His cycle skidded, pinning Allman underneath and dragging him fifty feet. Duane’s girlfriend and Oakley’s sister had been following in a car, and stayed with Duane until an ambulance arrived. After three hours of emergency surgery, he died at Macon Medical Center. He was twenty-four years old. Like the young deaths of Charlie Parker, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, the loss of Duane Allman was the loss of a tremendous musical promise. There would be bright days to come for the Allmans, but clearly, the band’s creative center and emotional driving force had been extinguished.

“We
knew
what we had lost,” says Betts. “We even thought seriously about not going out and playing anymore. Then we thought, ’Well, what can we do better? We’ll just do it with the five of us.’ We had already risen to great heights by that point. But Duane didn’t experience the highest point—he didn’t experience being accepted across the board.” Betts pauses for a long moment, and his intense eyes seem to be reading distant memories. It’s as if, after all these years, he can still sense deeply all the potential joy and invention that were obliterated on that day.