One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (45 page)

“There was so much tension within the Allman Brothers and Warren and Woody had the balls to walk away and say, ‘Let’s put our energy into Gov’t Mule and be happy,’” says Abts. “It was so much fun—and we were so happy. For a couple of years, we were having the times of our lives, a band of brothers making music that we loved.”

Adds Haynes, “We were best friends getting ever closer and tighter. It was a really magical period for the band and the music. We were playing together almost every night, we were getting to know each other personally and professionally quite well, and it was just a lot of fun.”

That camaraderie began to crack in 2000. There were growing tensions throughout the summer tour in support of their third studio album,
Life Before Insanity.

“Allen was having a real hard time,” Abts says. “His life was spinning out of control. We basically had an intervention and said, ‘You have to straighten up or we can’t play with you.’ We were going to take a break, which no one wanted to do, because things were tight, but it just had to be. Allen was going into rehab in September and of course he never made it there.”

Woody died in his sleep in a New York hotel room on August 26, 2000, and Abts and Haynes had no real idea what they would do next.

“It was not clear if we could or should continue the band,” says Haynes.

Says Abts, “We spoke with people from a lot of bands which had lost members—Metallica, the Dead, and, of course, Gregg and the other Allman Brothers. We were soaking up advice, and everyone said, ‘Keep the band together. You have to continue. You never forget, but life doesn’t end.’”

Haynes and Abts launched an acoustic Smile at Half Mast tour that included nine shows opening for Ben Harper, with Woody’s rig set up onstage as a haunting reminder. “It was comforting to do that,” says Abts. “It was an important part of the grieving process.”

Haynes and Abts next began recording
The Deep End
, which became two separate CD releases, featuring guest bassists, ranging from the Who’s John Entwistle to Phish’s Mike Gordon.

“It started because we were joking that to replace Woody we’d need Chris Squire on one song and Flea on another, and then we decided to try and record a song with each of them,” says Haynes. “Almost everyone we called said yes.”

After touring with a rotating cast of bassists and keyboardists anchored by Oteil Burbridge, Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools, and Chuck Leavell, the group added bassist Andy Hess and keyboardist Danny Louis as permanent members. “We knew we could never be a trio again,” says Abts. “We had to move on without trying to re-create what we had with Woody.”

In 2008, Jorgen Carlsson replaced Hess and the band has kept on keeping on. In 2014, the band, which formed to record “one experimental album” celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

DEREK TRUCKS:
No one’s ever taken slide guitar all the way, which is why I was drawn to it. Duane was heading there, but he never had a chance to fulfill his destiny; he only played slide for about three years! He had everything that the earlier guys, the blues masters, had, and then he took it somewhere else. I want to see where slide guitar can go, and it’s a great vehicle for expression, because of the way it can mimic the human voice, wavering on one note and playing melodies on one string. My voice really doesn’t work, so I use my guitar instead.

WEST:
Derek was special to both Dickey and Gregg from the start. He wasn’t just another guitarist; they saw Duane in him.

ALLMAN:
Where does Derek come from? I don’t know, man, but if you believe in reincarnation … I mean, sometimes I look over there [at Derek] and see my brother and … well, I can’t explain it, but I enjoy it.

JOHN HAMMOND JR.:
People sometimes talk about Duane being reincarnated in Derek and there’s something to that. Derek is phenomenal and he has that same sort of easygoing yet very intense style.

CHAPTER

25

Lay Your Burden Down

O
N
J
ANUARY
8,
2000, Joe Dan Petty, an Allman Brothers road crew member since 1970 and one of Dickey Betts’s oldest and dearest friends, died in a private plane crash. Petty was remembered with a memorial service at Macon’s Grand Opera House, featuring a stirring performance by the Allman Brothers Band, joined by Haynes for the first time in three years and Leavell, who had not played with the group in over a decade.

HAYNES:
Woody and I both loved Joe Dan, who was a wonderful, sweet guy. It took someone like that to bring together some people who had not even spoken in many years. It was an emotional and special day.

WEST:
After the memorial concert, everyone came back to the Big House, which was my home then, and it was very meaningful to everyone to all be together there. I remember looking out and seeing Dickey, Butch, Chuck, Bonnie Bramlett, and Leroy Parnell sitting together on the sunporch, gathered around a table and talking for hours. Everyone was so sad about Joe Dan but so happy to be together, especially in the Big House.

A few days later, while he was still in Macon comforting Petty’s widow, Judi, Betts learned that his spiritual mentor, the Navajo medicine man Stewart Etsitty, had also passed away. Betts was still heavily grieving both losses when the band arrived at the Beacon for thirteen March shows.

WEST:
Joe Dan and Dickey were close friends since they were kids and the comfort zone that Joe Dan created for him onstage was gigantic. He also had his way of making a point with Dickey that other people who just tuned and handed him a guitar did not have and could not have. Losing Joe Dan hit him hard and losing Stewart so soon after knocked him off balance.

The Beacon performances were shaky, as can be heard on the CD
Peakin’ at the Beacon,
a curious release that captured what was probably the band’s worst run ever at the theater. Things degenerated considerably in a month, however, and an eight-show spring tour of the Southeast that started on April 28 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was erratic and tension-filled.

WEST:
The spring tour was a fiasco from the first night and it just got ridiculous and it was consistently bad. It was a horrible situation. Red Dog was getting ready to quit. He was going around telling everybody good-bye in Nashville. We went from there to Memphis to Atlanta. Those shows were embarrassing to the legacy of the Allman Brothers. There was so much anger coming from everybody.

BURBRIDGE:
I had never worked in a situation where it was impossible to even get through a whole song without it going completely off the tracks. The crowds still cheered. I was bewildered. Rock and roll, celebrity, all that was new to me. It seemed like a surreal movie.

WEST:
The last show of the run was at a festival in Atlanta, so it was a big, cheering crowd; “Yay, the Allman Brothers!” But I thought, “This band’s breaking up right here.” I felt like I was standing on the side of the stage of the last show of the Allman Brothers Band.

BURBRIDGE:
It had probably been that bad in the past, maybe worse at times, but when it’s the umpteenth time and you can see it coming a mile away because you’ve lived through the cycle so many times before, then it’s harder to swallow.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
It wasn’t that the gigs were that bad. It’s that he was starting to go down that slope again and I wasn’t going with him this time.

WEST:
It was still light when we finished and I watched Butch and Dickey walk off the stage ten feet apart and the anger and hostility between them was so strong that you could feel it. I was certain it was the end of this thing, and it was all within spitting distance of Piedmont Park, where they had really begun.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
When I walked off that stage, I looked at my wife and said, “That’s the last time I’m gonna play with that motherfucker,” and I meant exactly what I said. I figured that’s the end of the Allman Brothers Band.

DEREK TRUCKS:
The year I was in the band with Dickey there was obviously a lot of other stuff going on, a lot of internal tensions that had nothing to do with my arrival and that I tried to steer clear of. There was never weirdness in my own relationship with Dickey. He was always very good to me, dating back to when I was ten years old and sitting in with the band.

When they all returned home, Allman, Trucks, and Jaimoe sent a letter to Betts, the fourth partner in the Allman Brothers Band, informing him that they were going to tour without him that summer.

ALLMAN:
I just knew that either I was leaving or he was leaving. Honestly, my first thought was I was leaving. I was getting ready to walk because I could not stand the situation anymore. I even wrote a letter of resignation.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
I came close to quitting several times. The bottom line is, as bad as Dickey was fucking up and as difficult as some of the situations were, we were still making a lot of money. Had that been the case in 1982 we probably would have kept going then, too. We all needed the income, sad to say. We try to be as aesthetic as we can be and as true to our roots as we can be, but we’ve got to feed our families. Now it just reached a point where something had to give. And I was ready to quit before I spoke with Gregg.

ALLMAN:
I spoke with Butchie and he was thinking the same thing, and we just realized that was crazy. He asked me, “Are you through? Have you done all you can with the Brothers? Have you had enough?”

I said, “To tell you the truth, no. I feel like he has spoiled something really good that belongs to all of us. He’s destroying it.” Butch said, “He doesn’t have to destroy it. Why should we leave if he’s in the wrong? Hell, let’s get rid of him.” And I said, “Let me sleep on that.” The next morning, I said, “Please, just let me write the letter,” and he wisely said, “Let’s get together and do it.” I was just really fed up. I had written this real stinger of a letter and I’m glad I didn’t send it.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Both Gregg and I were ready to say, “That’s it. Let’s walk away.” But Jaimoe said, “I’m not going to do that. I’ll agree that he has to get help. I’ll say we will tour without him this summer but the only way to leave the Allman Brothers Band is to die or quit; you can’t get fired.” We wrote Dickey a letter and said we would not tour with him that summer, but dates were already booked and we were going to honor them with someone else and we hoped he would get some help.

JAIMOE:
I said you can’t get fired and I meant it. I thought Dickey would take some time to clean up or whatever and come back to the band after we played some shows without him. He’d done that before and come back basically fine until the cycle started up again.

ALLMAN:
We did not fire Dickey. We laid him off for the summer tour. We made this decision for a simple reason: the music was suffering. It had ceased to be a band—everything had to be based around what Dickey was playing.

BUTCH TRUCKS:
Dickey’s volume was so high that no one on stage could hear anything else. There was nothing to do but react to Dickey’s playing, or have a train wreck.

HOLMAN:
Everyone was out of sorts at the end of that tour, and the stage volume and how that impacted everything was a major sore spot. The other guys felt that Dickey was so loud that [they] had to follow what he did. I spoke to Dickey and said, “There are real issues with the volume on stage. They want you to use fifty-watt Marshalls.” And he said, “I’ll talk to Gregg. Don’t worry about it.”

BETTS:
I called Gregg and he said, “I don’t owe you an explanation. Listen to the fucking tapes [of the spring tour],” and hung up. A lot of things have been said about our relationship over the years, but we were actually the closest guys in the band.

TRUCKS:
He responded by hiring a lawyer and suing us and then we sat there in arbitration for weeks and after all the stuff that was said, there’s no way we can work together again. Once he filed against us, I spoke to Jaimoe, who said, “Well, I guess he quit.”

JAIMOE:
In reality, Dickey quit the band.

ALLMAN:
I don’t see playing with Dickey again unless something really major happened … No, I just don’t. No.

HOLMAN:
Dickey had the potential to come back. If he had come to a self-realization and stopped drinking, I really think that Gregg and Jaimoe would have done it. Instead, he filed arbitration. We had a meeting with a facilitator, which had the potential to be the start of reconciliation, but Dickey made a statement and then walked out. The band wanted it to be the five of us having a meeting, but he came with two lawyers so the band had to bring lawyers to protect themselves.

When that didn’t turn out to be constructive, we were on a different path. It’s like going to couples therapy. You either put your marriage back together or it enables you to get divorced, which is what happened. The other three guys said, “You know what, this is not going in a positive direction.” Then the band entered into a very, very lengthy arbitration.

ALLMAN:
After so many years of drinking and abusing drugs, I finally cleaned up and I didn’t want to waste one minute of time for the rest of my life. God, I had wasted enough time! I was finally sober. That monkey was off my back. I even quit cigarettes and I quit it all at once. I realized I was on death’s doorstep and I was thankful to God that I had woken up before all the innings of the game were over. And I wasn’t gonna put up with nothing—not another minute of bullying or negativity mixed with music. I’d quit music first and I don’t think I’m ever gonna quit music.

BETTS:
I knew that there was tension that had to snap but I had no idea that it was all on me. I thought I was doing pretty good. I thought something would snap that I would have to take care of, like I had so many times before. I had no idea that I would be snapped out of the picture. I thought it was cruel and impersonal.