One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (17 page)

CHAPTER

8

Live Alive

T
HOUGH THEIR FIRST
two releases had caused barely a ripple in the marketplace, the band was drawing raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with superior musical precision and a deep grounding in the blues. A live album was the obvious solution. To cut the record, the band played New York’s Fillmore East for three nights—March 11, 12, and 13, 1971. They were paid $1,250 per show.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore East debut December 26–28, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat and Tears for three nights. Promoter Bill Graham loved the band and promised them that he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts, and he lived up to this vow.

On January 15–18, 1970, the ABB opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. They were back in New York on February 11 for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing them to a wider, sympathetic audience on both coasts.

TRUCKS:
You can’t put in words what those early Fillmore shows meant to us. The Fillmore West helped us get established in San Fran and it was cool—especially those shows with B.B. and Buddy—but the Fillmore East was it for us; the launching pad for everything that happened.

ALLMAN:
We realized that we got a better sound live and that we were a
live
band. We were not intentionally trying to buck the system, but keeping each song down to 3:14 just didn’t work for us. We were going to do what the hell we were going to do and that was to experiment on
and
offstage. And we realized that the audience was a big part of what we did, which couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A lightbulb finally went off; we needed to make a live album.

BETTS:
There was no question about where to record a concert. New York crowds have always been great, but what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore. It was just special. The bands felt it and the crowd felt it and it lit all of us up. The Fillmore was the high-octane gig to play in New York—or anywhere, really.

ALLMAN:
That was the place to record and we knew it. It was a great-sounding room with a great crowd. Bill Graham called a spade a spade and not necessarily in a loving way. Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the fairest person, too, and after knowing him for a while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.

PERKINS:
The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time. And he would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band—and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered.

Bill Graham introducing the ABB.

DOWD:
I got off a plane from Africa, where I had been working on the
Soul to Soul
movie [
capturing a huge R&B, jazz, and rock concert held in Ghana
], and called Atlantic to let them know I was back and Jerry Wexler said, “Thank God; we’re recording the Allman Brothers live and the truck is already booked,” so I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.

It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business. They were all set to go. When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them in as to what to expect and how to employ the sixteen tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.

Dowd was thrilled with what he was hearing until the band unexpectedly brought out sax player Rudolph “Juicy” Carter and another horn player, as well as Doucette.

DOWD:
We were going along beautifully until the fourth or fifth number when one chap looked up and asked, “What do we do with the horns?” I laughed and said, “Don’t be a smart ass,” thinking he was joking, but three horn players had walked onstage. I was just hoping we could isolate them, so we could wipe them and use the songs, but they started playing and the horns were leaking all over everything, rendering the songs unusable.

ALLMAN:
Juicy was playing baritone and would basically play along with the bass. Dowd was a perfectionist and the best one I ever met, but we didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

We knew we were recording a lot of nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album.

JAIMOE:
Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horns, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.

BETTS:
Dowd was going nuts, but we were just having fun and everyone was enjoying it. We didn’t change our approach because we were recording. We never hired any of those guys. They’d just show up and sit in, and we all dug it.

PERKINS:
The horn players would pop up and just sit in for a few songs. Those guys were friends of Jaimoe’s—we just knew them as Tic and Juicy and everyone liked their playing. Nothing was rehearsed with them. They’d just get up and play. Them showing up at those Fillmore gigs was a surprise to me and I didn’t think it was a good idea.

JAIMOE:
Tic was a tenor player, Juicy played baritone and soprano—sometimes together, at the same time—and there was an alto player we called Fats, who was not at the Fillmore and didn’t come around as much. We had played together in Percy Sledge’s band and I knew them from Charlotte, North Carolina. Good guys and good musicians.

PERKINS:
They often had some heroin with them and were welcomed for that as well.

JAIMOE:
I don’t know about that; if they showed up with a little something, it was probably because Duane or someone asked them to do so.

Gregg Allman, undated letter to Twiggs in jail:
“Juice plays barry and soprano at once, Tick Tock plays the dogshit out of that tenor (and alto and flute) and Fats plays alto.… All we need now is two of the baddest trumpets we could find and commence to kick ass. Duane says if we can cut it payroll-wise, long about summertime we’d like to take them on full time.”

DOUCETTE:
The plan was to bring on the horns full time. Shit, Duane would have liked to have sixteen pieces. Some of the guys thought it was weird for me to be there, but if Duane laid it down, it was down. If he said, “The Ace is playing,” it was done. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.

DOWD:
I ran down at the break and grabbed Duane and said, “The horns have to go!” and he went, “But they’re right on, man.” And I said, “Duane, trust me, this isn’t the time to try this out.” He asked if the harp could stick around and I said, “Sure,” because I knew it could be contained and wiped out if necessary.

PERKINS:
Doucette had played with the band a lot so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing. Duane loved those guys, but he would also listen to reason and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.

DOWD:
Every night after the show we would just grab some beers and sandwiches and head up to the Atlantic studios to go through the show. That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again. They would craft the set list based on what we still needed to capture.

BETTS:
You have to listen to it being played back to get a sense of whether or not it came together, and we loved having that opportunity. We just thought, “Hey this is cool … I didn’t know I did that … That sounds pretty neat.” We were just enjoying ourselves and the opportunity to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of that board tape stuff and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played and if they wanted to record it they could. We were young and headstrong: “We’re gonna play. You do what you want.”

ODOM:
The band was obviously playing great but you also have to give a lot of credit to Tom Dowd. I’ve known two geniuses in my life: Duane Allman and Tom Dowd. Tom in the studio was like Duane on stage: totally charismatic and he knew how to get the best out of you. They both made everyone they worked with better.

ALLMAN:
We sure didn’t set out to be a “jam band” but those long jams just emanated from within the band, because we didn’t want to just play three minutes and be over. And we definitely didn’t want to play anybody else’s songs like we had to do in California, unless it was an old blues song like “Trouble No More” that we would totally refurbish to our tastes. We were going to do our own tunes, which at first meant mine, and because of that there was a lot of instrumentals and long passages between the verses sometimes. Sometimes we had to keep playing to get wound up in search of spontaneity.

BETTS:
We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did. We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on there. All we did was edit some of the harmonica out, where there was a solo that maybe didn’t fit. It wasn’t doctored up, with guitar solos and singing redone in the studio, as on so many live albums. Everything you hear there is how we played it. We weren’t puzzled about what we were playing. We were a rock band that loved jazz and blues. We really loved the Dead, Santana, the Airplane, Mike Finnigan, and all the blues and jazz greats.

ALLMAN:
The Grateful Dead? Well, I never really thought so much of them.

TRUCKS:
Jerry and Duane were friends. They really got along well and respected each other, and we all did. The Dead were definitely an influence on us—not huge but definitely in there.

JAIMOE:
When I first heard the Grateful Dead, I thought, “What do these cats really want to do?” Then we played a gig with them and after we finished I had nowhere to go, so I got the conga drum and sat down on the stage behind the curtains and I just played along with the Dead and someone from their crew saw me and said, “Let him out on stage,” and I went out there and got miked up. The minute I started playing with them it made a lot of sense. I had to be inside that music to understand it.

BETTS:
I’ve actually had to try not to be influenced by Jerry Garcia, ’cause I love his playing so much. I’ve really tried not to let my peers influence me. When I was playing clubs, we played a lot of Cream stuff, and I learned Clapton’s solos note for note. But there’s a thin line between admiring your peers and letting them influence you, which gets real dangerous. That’s when you have to go back and listen to Django and Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson and Leadbelly.

BOB WEIR,
Grateful Dead guitarist:
I understand that. I’ve actually done that myself with some people. Really, once you reach a certain amount of facility with your instrument you’re going to find yourself playing what you just listened to. It comes out before you can think about it.

BETTS:
I also like the Dead’s philosophy, which is very similar to ours. We sound very different, because we’re from different roots. They’re from a folk music, jug band, and country thing. We’re from an urban blues/jazz bag. We don’t wait for it to happen; we make it happen. But we’ve always had a similar fan base and philosophy—keeping music honest and fun and trying to make it a transcendental experience for the audience.

WEIR:
They were definitely more blues-oriented and we were more eclectic, with a jug band background and also some country, and we were also listening to a lot of modern classical music—just grabbing stuff from any and all idioms. But they used the same approach—improvising fairly heavily—and we were both looking to take a scene and run with it.

It was clear to me from the first time we played together that we were kindred spirits. We were both just starting to feel our oats. We felt like we were becoming a hot band and the Allmans definitely were real hot—they were tight, together, and they improvised very well together.

DOWD:
The
Fillmore
album captured the band in all their glory. The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove. Fusion is a term that came later, but if you wanted to look at a fusion album, it would be
Fillmore East.
Here was a rock ’n’ roll band playing blues in the jazz vernacular. And they tore the place up.