One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (30 page)

WEIR:
It was hard to get in and out of that place. It got way, way bigger than we intended for it to get. We thought maybe if we’re lucky we’d get 100,000 people; 60,000 to 70,000 would be nice and handle-able.

LEAVELL:
We were staying in Horsesheads, New York, in a small motel, and I remember being awoken by noise and commotion the day before, when we were supposed to have cars drive us up the road for soundchecking, then seeing this mass of people, like an exodus, out on the little highway. People were abandoning their vehicles in huge traffic jams and there was total confusion and mayhem.

PERKINS:
When we first got there we were able to drive in and out of the site, but then the road became like Armageddon overnight. It was like there had been a nuclear attack and people had just abandoned their cars.

A.J. LYNDON:
We were staying at a Holiday Inn thirteen miles away and cars were abandoned around there, that far away.

WEIR:
As it turns out, the news reported there were 600,000 there and maybe two million people in the area and it was declared a disaster area. As disaster areas go, it was a pretty nice one, but people who were interested in going home, for instance, well, they couldn’t. If they wanted to leave, it just wasn’t possible. People had to be peeled away layer by layer.

PARISH:
All the stuff like transportation just broke down. Amenities were impossible to maintain, fences were broken down. It became a serious security situation for the crowd, but the stage was secure. The Allman Brothers were a little more disorganized than us. We were hard at work building a tremendous PA system. Because of the crowds pouring in, the soundcheck day became a day of free music; it ended up being two days of music instead of one.

TRUCKS:
The afternoon rehearsal ended up being my most powerful memory because in daylight you could see 600,000 people stretched out in front of you and … My God! Everyone should get up in front of 600,000 people some time in their life. It’s sort of intimidating but also very, very inspiring.

LEAVELL:
It became obvious that we weren’t taking cars up there, so helicopters were summoned and as we got close, we asked the pilot to circle around so we could soak it in and it was absolutely stunning, exhilarating, and exciting to see this incredible mass of human beings. It was an ocean of bodies. We were all just really buzzed by the whole scene and situation.

A.J. LYNDON:
We rode a helicopter there and we came over a hill and there was this sea of humanity and we all just went, “Oh, Jesus.” It was like nothing anyone had ever seen or could even imagine, and someone asked the helicopter to circle around so we could take it all in.

ODOM:
There were so damn many people. Cars were backed up forty or fifty miles, and people just got out and walked. There were a lot of problems but we got it done. We had the promoters fly Bill Graham in to be the stage manager, because both bands had total faith in Bill and that paid off.

PERKINS:
We made it up there and found this little idyllic backstage that Bill Graham had set up, with palm trees and everyone having their own RV and everyone had a grand old time hanging out back there.

PARISH:
We shared three days of hang time together. The guys were jamming on music together the whole time, mostly in the trailers set up in the back.

A.J. LYNDON:
I was in one of the trailers and Dickey came into the room and asked others to leave. He sat down, apologized for his actions in New York and asked me to please stay with the crew. I was touched, and I knew it was a sign of how much he respected Twiggs. I never had any other problems with him.

LEAVELL:
I was a fan of the Grateful Dead and was really excited about the opportunity to watch them and meet them.

WEIR:
The music itself … well, typically for us, we didn’t play our best show in front of our largest crowd. We got the short stick on who would open and who would close. As I recall, it was essentially determined by drawing cards out of a hat because it was impossible to rank the bands. It would have been nice to have the lights and we didn’t get them because we played in daylight. I do remember the jam at the end was pretty spectacularly wiggy.

LEAVELL:
It rained like hell and people didn’t seem to mind. There’s always something endearing about everyone getting wet and hanging tough that can bond everyone. I don’t think we had the best show in the world, but it was just so exciting to be there. At the end, we had a long jam, and it was not exactly picture perfect—but there were interactions.

TRUCKS:
One of the reasons that we had such a massive crowd is everyone was coming to hear the three best jam bands in the country jam together. But the jam was just ridiculous, because by the time we all got together everyone was fucked up—and fucked up on different drugs. The Band was all drunk as skunks and sloppy loose, the Dead were full of acid and wired in that far-out way, and we were all full of coke and cranked up. You put it all together and it was just garbage. While we were playing, we thought it was the greatest thing the world had ever heard, but then we listened to the playbacks and it was really horrible.

CHAPTER

18

Shine It On

B
ROTHERS AND
S
ISTERS
was released in August 1973, with artwork that emphasized the band’s family approach just as the title did, with Butch’s young son Vaylor pictured on the front and Oakley’s daughter Brittany on the back. The album opened up to an inside spread of the band and their extended families and friends taken at the Juliette farm.

Brothers and Sisters
became the band’s first number one album and “Ramblin’ Man” rose to second on the singles charts. Almost two years after their guiding light had been killed, the Allman Brothers were the most popular band in the country.

WOOLEY:
Being the only one in daily contact with radio stations, I saw the potential of “Ramblin’ Man” first. Stations were reporting to me that was the track they wanted to play as a single, so Frank, Phil, and I just went with it.

On September 10, 1973, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert show came to Macon to tape the Allman Brothers Band and the Marshall Tucker Band at the Grand Opera House. Billed as “Saturday Night in Macon,” the show was being recorded for national TV just a month after the release of
Brothers and Sisters
and was a major promotional event. Bill Graham was in town serving as the show’s MC.

SANDLIN:
We set up to record, with a very nice truck from Nashville. It was a beautiful setting and seemed like a perfect thing. But Dickey was off from the start—supposedly someone dosed him. Gregg would say, “Now we’re going to play a song off our new album,” introducing “Ramblin’ Man,” and Dickey would kick off “You Don’t Love Me” or something. That happened two or three times. Then in the middle of the show, Dickey put his guitar down and walked off stage.

JAIMOE:
He put his guitar in his case, walked out of the theater, and started walking home—and I think he was living on the farm. He left us there on stage with no lead person. We basically had nothing but a rhythm section—two drums, two keyboards, and bass. That’s fine if you play like that, but someone has to take over for what’s absent.

PERKINS:
Oh boy. That was another Nightmare on Elm Street. His equipment wasn’t going right and Dickey just walked out the door, with Joe Dan running after him. Gregg was far from being on his game that night either.

LEAVELL:
As I recall, Dickey was upset because the whole idea was for the cameras to come down and catch us as we are, the way we lived and played. There had been some direction from the Kirshner people that they wanted certain things certain ways, and Dickey got upset about it, feeling like they were supposed to be staying out of our way and recording it, not interfering with what we were doing. Did recreational items accelerate that? I don’t know, but he flew off the handle and just left. We played a little bit without him, then took a break and waited. It was a very unusual and uncomfortable situation.

SANDLIN:
Phil ran out and got him, stopped him walking down the street and eventually brought him back. It was awful. I was sitting there all ready to capture a great recording and they just didn’t have a great performance in them.

LEAVELL:
We were really upset. I guess Dickey had always been somewhat volatile and moody, but walking off the stage was a first for me. It was like, “Dude, what are you doing? We’re all brothers here. If there’s a problem, let’s talk about it.” At the end of the day, the important thing was to try and salvage the show and make it as good as it can be, but we were all looking at each other like, “What is this all about?” We were happy that he came back, but …

An obviously tense and unpleasant night may have clouded people’s memories of this concert. The performance, while certainly not peak ABB, was stronger than most recall, though it featured only five live Allman Brothers songs, “Southbound” being the only track from
Brothers and Sisters.
The Allmans segment of the TV show ended with the album version of “Ramblin’ Man” playing over footage of an outdoor crowd that never shows the stage.

PERKINS:
I remember after the show Bill Graham and the director sitting on the stage discussing whether or not they had enough usable material for a show. They were not sure, so the decision was made to film Wet Willie down in the park and turn what was supposed to be an Allman Brothers concert into “Saturday Night in Macon.”

SANDLIN:
They were a great band, so even on a bad night they were good, but it was just sad—just like Gregg being whisked from the studio to rehab. There was often a sadness because they were so talented but they were their own worst enemy at times. I’ve thought about it a lot and I have no idea of just what happened or how it could have been different.

RED DOG:
I still don’t understand what happened, starting with Duane’s death. I feel cheated, damn it. Somewhere, somehow … that wasn’t supposed to happen. It was like giving a little kid candy and then taking it away. Somehow we ain’t done something right and we’re paying for it. Someone wasn’t dealing from the top of the deck. We had something so good building and growing and then Duane and Berry were gone and everything got so hard. That’s why a lot of us had to use drugs even more; for me, I always wanted something before I went to sleep so I didn’t dream—because I knew they would be there.

As their tour grosses picked up radically, the Allman Brothers began to play arenas and stadiums almost solely. As travel became easier and the shows bigger, the brotherhood seemed ever more frayed and the drug use escalated.

TRUCKS:
Brothers and Sisters
took off and we became big rock stars and were the number one band in the country but the music became secondary to everything else and it felt hollow. Of course, having all these gorgeous women falling over us and everything else was fun. It was a big party, but the music and everything that had been all-important became secondary.

PERKINS:
With Duane, and then for the first couple of years after he died, the band always seemed to play with one mind. Nobody got left behind. It was never rote and they were never on cruise control. That began to change.

RED DOG:
When Duane was alive, everybody had their job. The band would sit down and discuss things and be on the same page, but Duane just knew what was happening. He knew what he wanted the band to sound like and where he wanted the band to go, and everyone understood their role and how to get there. They all wanted the same thing in the original band; they just sat down and played and what came out was what they wanted. I don’t know who the leader was after that. It should have just been one person: Dickey.

JAIMOE:
After Duane died, a lot changed. Everyone wanted to be Duane, but no one knew how to do shit except play music.

LEAVELL:
There was no leader after Duane. As far as I can tell, Duane made a lot of decisions on behalf of the band. That changed and it became more of equal partners and there might have been some pull between Dickey and Gregg at times, but in terms of musical decisions, everyone seemed comfortable. It was more of a committee; the band as a whole made decisions.

DOUCETTE:
With Duane around, the Dickey/Gregg rivalry was never an issue. Nothing was an issue. People respected Duane so much that there was no room for anything else. Duane laid it down and it was done, but that happened without him ever once saying, “This is my band.” Never ever.

Back in Macon, Payne, now unemployed, began worrying more about receiving regular payments for his contribution to “Midnight Rider.”

PAYNE:
I was aware there were royalty checks coming in and before I got fired Gregg would sometimes just give me some cash for my assistance on “Midnight Rider.” After that, I was a junkie with a five-hundred-dollar-a-week habit running around selling dope and hustling to survive and I wasn’t seeing Gregg every day anymore. I knew that checks were quarterly and I knew when they were due and I’d have to chase Gregg down and twist his arm a little.

I wasn’t signed up with a contract or nothing, and once it was way past time I should have gotten some money and I showed up at Jaimoe’s house, where they were practicing. Gregg was sitting at the organ and when I asked for my money, he said, “I’ll get back to you later.” That was about the third time he blew me off, so I went outside, jumped on his custom chopper and went out and hid it. I told him when he got me straightened out with my money, he’d get his bike back. He went down to Phil’s office, had a contract drawn that gave me five percent of the song, dropped it off to me, and said, “Now this is between you and BMI.” I’ve been getting royalty checks ever since.