One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (39 page)

Chuck Leavell and Johnny Neel are probably the best blues pianists around, but the band with them was never true to the original members’ vision, which we had before we even started the band. I think this band sounds like what we would’ve sounded like if we had the original players together—if we’d stayed together, which I think we would’ve. Sure, we’d have broken up from time to time. You have to, for God’s sake. Even the Dead break up. They just have enough sense not to talk about it. But this was the first time I felt that way—that we sounded like we would have—since Duane died.

NEEL:
I was disappointed that they did not want me to continue when my contract ran out, but I wasn’t quite playing like they wanted me to play. I think I was experimenting a little bit too much. I was hardheaded and wanted to make my mark, do my own thing. I thought I was bringing something to the table that they didn’t have, but they didn’t want that. I think I made some mistakes.

BETTS:
It was kind of frightening for Gregg to see Johnny go because he hadn’t been stuck out there having to shoulder everything for a long time. But he plays great blues piano. It’s not complex, but it’s exciting. He’s not expected to be a virtuoso; he’s the singer and the piano is mostly coloring—and it fits in great with the guitars.

NEEL:
I know that Gregg was the one who really wanted me in the band in the first place.

BETTS:
Warren was also really coming into his own.

HAYNES:
I had been trying my whole life to establish my own voice as a guitar player. I never wanted it to be obvious to a listener exactly where I was coming from; you want to spread your influences out enough so that you can hear a little bit of this and a little bit of that but it still sounds like you. Then suddenly I was in the Allman Brothers and had to struggle with hitting those notes. It was a challenge to do that and retain and develop my own personality, but being in the Allman Brothers taught me a lot. Being on stage with people who have had their own voice for a long time kind of puts it front and center what that means—in search of the elusive original tone.

I played with Dickey Betts for eleven years, so of course my playing leaned more towards that school. If I had spent those years playing with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, I’d probably play more like Hendrix—but I still wanted my own personality in there at all times. I would try to forget how I listened to a song originally and the way they first played it and take it to another place, while still making it sound natural and not forced, which is hard to do. I do feel like I got much better at it after a few years; it helped to write more original music together.

BETTS:
It takes a lot of time to get up to the level where you can really improvise together. Warren co-wrote these last two instrumentals “True Gravity” [from
Seven Turns
] and “Kind of Bird” [from
Shades
] with me. That’s something I’d never done before; I could collaborate on [songs with] lyrics, but I wrote instrumentals strictly on my own because I never wanted to give anyone a chance to mess with my babies. But I really enjoyed writing these two with Warren.

HAYNES:
“Kind of Bird” is such a complicated song, and writing it with Dickey was such a fun challenge. We would work during the day composing and that night we would rehearse whatever we had written, then write another section the next day. That went on throughout two weeks.

BETTS:
Duane and I used to play “Come On in My Kitchen” all the time and we made up that arrangement. Robert Johnson’s original version doesn’t move off the one chord much, so we put the chords for “Key to the Highway” to it and I made up a vocal melody. Duane recorded a similar version with Delaney and Bonnie [
on 1971’s
Motel Shot].

Going from Robert Johnson–style acoustic, dirt-road blues on “Come On in My Kitchen” right through the urban blues things into an abstract, lyrical thing like “Nobody Knows” and a Charlie Parker tribute, “Kind of Bird”—that covers a hell of a lot of ground, a giant spectrum. It is shades of two worlds: from real life to the imaginary world. I think that is also implied by the cover, with the real down-to-earth picture on the front and the very mystical thing on the back.

During the recording sessions, Dowd suggested that while the group had a strong set of songs, they lacked a single track that would become the album’s centerpiece. “Write something like ‘Whipping Post,’” he suggested.

Betts returned with the mystical “Nobody Knows,” written for Gregg to sing. The song became a point of contention, ratcheting up tensions between Betts and Allman. Gregg objected to the song’s similarity to “Whipping Post,” the relatively wordy lyrics, and Betts’s insistence on telling him how to sing it. When Dowd finally told the song’s composer, after repeated interruptions, to quit telling the singer how to phrase the lyrics, Betts stormed out of the studio. Despite these creative differences, the final version of the song became a centerpiece of the album and subsequent shows.

Shades of Two Worlds
sessions, Ardent Studios, Memphis. Tom Dowd is on the right.

The band toured hard behind
Shades
and released the live
An Evening With the Allman Brothers Band, First Set
in 1992. Once again, things were less calm than they may have appeared to fans seeing consistently strong performances by a band with a fairly ambitious touring schedule. The Allman Brothers Band played sixty-eight shows in 1990, eighty-seven in ’91, and seventy-seven in ’92, but there was growing tension during the ’93 summer tour and on July 31
Betts was arrested at a Saratoga Springs, New York, hotel the morning after a show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center when he shoved two police officers responding to a call from his wife saying he was drunk and abusive.

The Saratoga show had been part of the HORDE Festival, also featuring Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and the same bill would be repeating the next night in Stowe, Vermont. The Allman Brothers did not know whether or not Betts would be joining them there.

HOLMAN:
Jonny Podell happened to be there and I immediately pulled together some cash and gave it to him along with a tour bus and told him to go bail Dickey out while the rest of us went on to the gig in Stowe. He paid the bail, but Dickey insisted on being driven to the airport, where he got on a plane to Sarasota. This was before cell phones and Jonny could not get ahold of us. We arrived at four or five and were going on at nine and we did not know whether or not Dickey was going to make it until Jonny pulled up in an empty bus at about seven. We were talking about the alternatives and possibilities and Warren was going around seeing who was there and could help us out.

HAYNES:
My solo band was on the bill and playing at about noon. We drove overnight to Stowe and were staying in a bed-and-breakfast. We got there and crashed at about seven a.m., and an hour later there was banging on my door and someone saying I had an emergency phone call from Bert Holman. There was no phone in our little bungalow and I had to walk all the way up this hill to the main house to talk to Bert, who said Dickey was in jail and probably wouldn’t be there. I had to start thinking about what to do—and my solo band was due on stage in just hours.

KIRK WEST,
ABB “Tour Magician” and logistical coordinator, 1989–2009:
I had traveled with Warren and we were there trying to figure out who could help out, but Warren was going on before most of the bands had arrived, so there was no one to talk to yet. There was a lot of scrambling going on, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what we were going to do about it.

Amid the scramble, Haynes managed to not only perform his own set, but to sit in with Widespread Panic for two songs. That night, Aquarium Rescue Unit guitarist Jimmy Herring subbed for Betts and the band was also joined by Blues Traveler harmonica player John Popper for seven songs and Warren Haynes Band keyboardist Danny Louis for two. While these guest musicians helped to plug a gaping musical hole, they were all going their separate ways with the HORDE tour, and the Allman Brothers had a gig the next night at Boston’s Great Woods Amphitheater. They started looking for a replacement, for what was originally presumed to be a single gig. Herring was continuing his tour with the ARU and was not available.

HAYNES:
I said that we should bring in Chuck Leavell. I said that the fans love Chuck, he’s a big part of the history, he sounds great, he’s contributed so much to the band’s music through the years, and he knows all the material. Bert and Jonny [Podell] were concerned that there needed to be two guitar players on stage, which I disagreed with.

They were saying, “This is a guitar band. People want to hear the two guitars.” I was assuming we were talking about one night and I thought, “No, the best way to get through this show is gonna be with Chuck Leavell. We’ll have a blast. People will love it.” There was concern about people demanding refunds, but I figured that while people would surely be disappointed that Dickey wasn’t there, in that situation you stay to see what happens, because what happens is probably going to be really cool. Worst-case scenario is it’s going to be one to remember. When it became obvious they wanted another guitarist, I said, “Well, let’s get Jack Pearson.”

Pearson, a Nashville-based friend of Haynes, had a run of festival dates booked and did not want to break his commitments, particularly with no guarantee that the Allmans gig would go on for more than one or two shows. The search for a sub continued.

DAVID GRISSOM,
Austin, Texas, guitarist:
I was out playing gigs with John Mellencamp and was on my way home. I called my wife from O’Hare and she said, “Someone from the Allman Brothers called and they want to know if you can come out and play some gigs.” Um, yeah! This was all pre-cell-phone-in-every-pocket, so I called and left a message for Bert, then got on a plane, and by the time I got back home they had already gotten someone else.

HAYNES:
I called Jack, but he couldn’t make it, then I called David and couldn’t reach him, and the decision was made—not by me—to bring Zakk Wylde in.

HOLMAN:
By the time Grissom called back, we had gotten ahold of Zakk and I think he was literally on the red-eye to Boston to join us. We told David, “We’ve got this covered, but we’re going to put you on deck.”

Zakk Wylde had been playing with Ozzy Osbourne since 1987 and was known to be a fan of Southern rock, performing Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers with a band dubbed Lynyrd Skynhead. He also had some connections to the Allman Brothers: Jonny Podell booked him, and Michael Caplan worked with Ozzy at Epic.

ZAKK WYLDE,
Ozzy Osbourne guitarist, 1987–95:
I was in the studio recording with Ozzy when I got a call from the Allmans’ manager, who knew that I was a big fan. He called at six and said that Dickey couldn’t make the next night’s show, and that they’d like me to sit in but I’d have to fly out that night—at eleven on the red-eye. I grabbed my guitar and headed for the airport. I was pumped.

WEST:
It was clear this was a bad idea before he ever walked on stage—from the moment he got there. He had a rebel flag Les Paul with Budweiser bottle caps nailed into it, and the target Les Paul and he looked wrong and acted wrong for the Allman Brothers.

WYLDE:
I got there at seven in the morning, listened to the tape they had for me, and jammed a couple tunes. Warren and I went through some stuff before the show, but no one told me much about what we would do. We just had a soundcheck/rehearsal, which was hilarious. Butch Trucks asked if I knew how to play “Dreams” and I said, “What, that Molly Hatchet song?” And they all cracked up. Gregg said, “Brother Zakk, keep talking like that and we’re gonna have to send you home.”

HAYNES:
We had a long soundcheck to rehearse. He had been given a list of songs to learn, and part of their selling point convincing us to bring Zakk in was that he played in an Allman Brothers cover band in his spare time and knew all the material. For me, who the other guitarist on stage is going to be is a sensitive topic, especially in the Allman Brothers. Zakk is great at what he does, but I don’t think until he got there he understood what makes that music click—and maybe he still doesn’t.

HOLMAN:
Zakk loved the music, but the problem is, he had never really seen the band play. He thought they were Lynyrd Skynyrd. He’s a nice-enough guy and he plays well, but he was not really attuned to what we do and wasn’t ready to listen to what anybody else was playing. His idea was “Everybody vamp and I’ll solo.”

WEST:
He was out there with his Ronnie Van Zant hat on running all over stage, fanning Warren with a towel and trying to put his hat on Warren’s head. He was very excited and had no clue how the Allman Brothers Band behaved onstage.