Night Beat (22 page)

A few minutes later, Gregg Allman walks in, smiling. “We got it,” he tells Betts, with obvious pleasure. Betts rushes off to the control booth, where Dowd plays back the finished vocal. After a few bars of Gregg singing with an uncommon ferocity about a man who just wants to feel some hard-earned pleasures before life cheats him again, Betts’ face lights up in a proud and relieved grin. Later, in a private moment, Betts corners Allman in the hallway and slugs him affectionately in the shoulder. “That was some good work,” he says. Gregg blushes and the two trade a look that speaks volumes. For all the disappointment they have shared, and all the anger that has passed between them, Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman are still brothers of the closest sort.

EARLY IN THE EVENING, as another storm seems to be closing in, Butch Trucks is conducting an impromptu tour of Criteria Studios. He is looking for some of Tom Dowd’s most prized trophies—the gold records he earned for engineering and producing countless legendary acts, including James Brown and Aretha Franklin—when, in one of the older studios, he stumbles across an ebony-colored grand piano. “That’s the “Layla’ piano,” he says, referring to the instrument on which Jim Gordon played pop’s most famous and rapturous coda. It is impossible to resist touching its still-shining white and black keys. It is not unlike touching something sacrosanct. Clearly, this is a room where essential modern cultural history was made—where American and British rock & roll met for its finest and most enduring collaboration.

Trucks settles into a nearby chair and begins to recount the story of the
Layla
sessions. Clapton had come to Miami to record with the Dominos (pianist Bobby Whitlock, drummer Jim Gordon, and bassist Carl Radle). Producer Tom Dowd, who had worked with the Allmans on
Idlewild South
and
At Fillmore East,
mentioned the visit to Duane Allman, a longtime Clapton fan, who asked if he could come by some night and watch the recording. During one of the Dominos rehearsals, Dowd relayed the request to Clapton, who replied, “Man, if you
ever
know where Duane Allman is playing, let me know.” A couple of days later, the Allmans were playing Miami, and Dowd took the Dominos to the show. Later that night, back at Criteria, Duane and Eric started jamming, and Clapton invited Allman to play twin-lead on the sessions. Together, Clapton and Allman found an empathy they had never experienced with any other players, and that they would never match. They played probing, deeply felt interweaving melodic lines like two strangers earnestly striving to discover and match each other’s depths—which turned out to be an ideal musical metaphor for the sense of romantic torment that Clapton wished to convey with
Layla.

On another night, Trucks says, Clapton invited the Allmans in for an all-night jam with the Dominos. “I don’t remember how good we were,” says Trucks, “but it was fun. It sure would be great to hear that music again.

“After we finished that jam,” he continues, “Eric and Duane were playing the song ’Layla’ back for us, and all of a sudden Duane said, ’Let me try something.’ And he put on his guitar and came up with that five-note pattern that actually announces the song—that signature phrase that just kind of set that song on fire.” Trucks pauses and shakes his head. Perhaps he realizes that he is sharing a remarkable disclosure: The most revelatory riff of Eric Clapton’s career was actually one of Duane Allman’s inspired throwaway lines.

Trucks is surprised to learn that archivist Bill Levenson has recently dug up the Dominos-Allmans session and plans to edit and master it for release in a
Layla
retrospective package. Trucks seems intrigued at the prospects, but he also admits that perhaps some experiences are better left to memory. “I remember one night that was the epitome of this band,” he says. “It was during the closing of Fillmore East, but it wasn’t the closing night, which was the one we recorded for
Eat a Peach.
Instead, it was the night
before.
We went on for the late show, about 1 A.M., and played a normal three-and-a-half-hour set, and when we came back for the encore, the feeling we got from the crowd . . . it was something I’ll never forget. I remember sitting there with tears, just really emotional, and then we started jamming, about four in the morning, and we quit about eight o’clock. It was just one jam that went on and on, one thing leading to another, and it was magic.

“All together, we ended up playing seven or eight hours, and when we finished playing, there was no applause. The place was packed, nobody had left, but not even one person clapped. They didn’t need to. Somebody got up and opened the doors and the sun came in, and this New York crowd, they just got up and quietly walked out while we were all sitting up there onstage. My mouth’s hanging open, and I remember Duane walking in front of me, just dragging his guitar behind him, his head down, shaking it, and he says, ’Goddamn, it’s like leaving church.’ To me, that’s what music is all about. You
try
to reach that level. If you’re lucky, you might get there once or twice. That night—maybe the greatest night of our life
—wasn’t
recorded, and in an odd way, I’m glad.”

Like Betts, Trucks says the loss of Duane Allman was insurmountable. “On just about any level you can think of, it was devastating. What kept us going was the bond that forms when you have to deal with that kind of grief. Also, we did it for his sake as much as ours. We had just gone too far, and hit so many new plateaus in what we were doing, to simply quit.

“The funny thing is, when Duane came back from King Curtis’s funeral [the R & B saxophonist—one of Allman’s favorite musicians—had been stabbed to death in New York in August 1971], he was thinking a lot about death, and he said many times, “If anything ever happens to me, you guys better keep it going. Put me in a pine box, throw me in the river, and jam for two or three days.’ We tried taking six months off after his death, but we were all just getting too crazy from it. There wasn’t any other way to deal with it but to play again. But the hardest thing was just that he wasn’t there, you know? This guy was
always
right there in front of me—all I did was look over and there he was—and he wasn’t there anymore.”

But the band paid hard costs for its determination. Gregg Allman would later say he began his long bouts of drug and alcohol addiction in the months after Duane’s death. In addition, bassist Berry Oakley began having serious difficulties. In some ways, the mantle of leadership passed to Oakley, but according to many observers, he was too grief-stricken over Duane’s death to accommodate the demands. Then, in November 1972, Oakley was riding his motorcycle through Macon when he lost control and slammed into a city bus. The accident occurred just three blocks from where Duane had been fatally injured, a year and two weeks earlier. Like Allman, Oakley was twenty-four. And like Allman, he was buried in Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

“As much as Duane, Berry was responsible for what this band had become,” says Trucks. “But in some ways, you could see Berry’s death coming. With Duane, man, it was just a shot out of the blue. But Berry . . . he just couldn’t cope with Duane being gone, and he got very self-destructive. There were nights when you wouldn’t even know if he would be capable of playing. More than once, he would just fall off the stage. By the time Berry died, it was almost a relief just to see the suffering end. It was devastating, but it was expected. We could see it coming.

“That might sound cold or whatever, but by then another direction was coming.”

In some ways, it was a more fruitful direction. The Allmans had recruited a second keyboardist, Chuck Leavell, and after Oakley’s death, they added a new bassist, Lamar Williams, who had played around Macon with Jaimoe years before. In 1973, the band released its long-anticipated fifth album,
Brothers and Sisters;
within weeks it went to number 1, and spawned the group’s first Top 10 single, Dickey Betts’ countrified “Ramblin’ Man.” At long last, the Allman Brothers Band had become the dominant success that Duane Allman and Phil Walden had dreamed it would become; indeed, as much as any other act, the Allmans defined the American mainstream in the decade’s early years. At the same time, no central guiding vision or consensus had emerged to replace Duane’s sensibility. In time, there were reports that Chuck Leavell wanted to lead the band on a more progressive, fusion-jazz-oriented course, but that Betts felt the group was drifting too far afield from its original blues and rock & roll roots. Also, a somewhat uneasy spirit of competition was developing between Betts and Gregg Allman. Both had released solo LPs and had formed their own bands (Allman’s included Jaimoe, Williams, and Leavell), and gradually, Gregg was becoming the most identifiable celebrity in the group. In part, this was due to his stellar romance with (and turbulent marriage to) superstar Cher, as well as his by-then-widely-rumored drug appetites. But Gregg’s fame was also based on something more morbid: He was a survivor in a band that seemed both brilliant and damned, and many watched him with a certain fatalistic curiosity.

“By this time the initial spark was gone,” says Trucks. Outside, the flash storm is hitting hard. A raging rain slashes against the windows around the room. “We were getting a lot more predictable and were cashing in, and we did more and more of that as the years went on—to the point where it just finally got ridiculous, where even
we
could see it through our drunken stupor.”

Even the band’s biggest moment—when the Allmans appeared at Watkins Glen, New York, with the Grateful Dead and the Band, for an audience of 600,000: the largest crowd ever assembled in America—was a hollow and somewhat bitter experience. “We just gave the people what they expected,” says Betts. “Also, it was not a time for making friends. I remember that Jerry Garcia came out onstage with us and took over. There was no
doubt
he was going to dominate: He’d step right on top of Dickey’s playing. Then he made the mistake of playing ’Johnny B. Goode,’ and Dickey just
fried
his ass, and we left.” Trucks laughs at the memory, then looks saddened. “They never seemed to like us, the Grateful Dead, and they had been gods to us at one time. But everything was so on edge in those days, and like us, they were really in a certain eye of the storm. They were playing for huge audiences and were trying to sell lots of records and they had also lost a couple members of their band, so they were probably feeling a lot of the same doubts.”

Trucks pauses and watches the rain for a moment. “The lifestyle we were going through,” he says with open distaste. “It was just insane, fucking rock-star ridiculousness. Also, we had quit living together, which I think really had a lot to do with our demise. Everybody would get their own limousines and their own suites, and we’d see each other onstage, and that was it. And God, the cocaine was
pouring.
You would go backstage and there would be a line of thirty dealers waiting outside, and the roadies would go check it out. Whoever had the best coke, they could get in, and they would just keep it flowing all night. That right there probably has a lot to do with my negative feelings about the whole time. We were drifting further and further apart, until the last couple of years were just pure bullshit. Actually, to me they were just a blank. I was drunk twenty-four hours a day.”

Then, almost simultaneously, the Allmans achieved their proudest success and their greatest downfall. By 1975, Phil Walden was taking a hand in Georgia politics. He had met and struck up a friendship with Governor Jimmy Carter a couple of years before, and Walden was among the first to know of Carter’s plan to seek the presidency. In the fall of 1975, when Carter’s campaign was almost bankrupt, Walden began organizing benefit concerts, featuring numerous Capricorn acts, including the Allman Brothers—Carter’s favorite American band. In the end, with Walden’s help and federal matching funds, Carter had raised over $800,000; without Walden and the Allmans’ support, it is unlikely that Carter would have survived the expensive primary campaigns long enough to win the Democratic party’s 1976 nomination.

But at the same time, the Allmans’ cavalier attitude toward drug use caught up with the band. In early 1976, a federal narcotics force began investigating drug activities in Macon. In a short time, Gregg Allman found himself threatened with a grand jury indictment unless he testified against his personal road manager, Scooter Herring, who had been charged with dealing drugs. Allman complied, and Herring was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison; plus, there were fears that further indictments might be leveled against other figures in the Capricorn and Allman organizations. The band members were furious. Herring, they insisted, had saved Allman from drug overdoses on more than one occasion, and now Herring had been betrayed. They felt that Gregg had dishonored the group’s sense of fraternity. “There is no way we can work with Gregg again ever,” said Betts at the time—and his sentiment was reportedly shared by every other member of the band. In effect, Gregg Allman had killed off the Allman Brothers Band. The various members went on to other projects. Betts formed Great Southern; Leavell, Williams, and Jaimoe played in Sea Level; and Gregg moved to Los Angeles, where he recorded with Cher, and suffered a difficult marriage in exile.