When Gregg graduated from Seabreeze High School in 1965, the Allman Joys were freed up to spend their first summer as a traveling band. Jerry watched her boys packing the Chevy station wagon and trailer she had helped them buy to haul their gear. Her sons were grown and would wheel in and out of her life from now on. Duane was loose-limbed and relaxed; he’d rest his big hands on his hips, narrow his eyes in thought. He’d be watchful and a little wary until a smile broke through. She tried to memorize him. Gregg had grown from cute to handsome in a season. His skin browned up like a biscuit and the summer sun made his blue eyes startling. They were a study in contrasts, her young men. She called them in for iced tea before they left, her voice cracking. She walked into her kitchen and poured herself a quick shot, standing at the kitchen sink, looking out into her empty backyard while the whisky warmed her throat and cleared her mind.
The Allman Joys played their first serious out-of-town gig in Mobile, Alabama, at the Stork Club. They played six nights a week, six sets a night, covering songs from as many varied bands and genres as they heard on WLAC. They mastered Top 40 hits, rhythm and blues, and British rock with equal skill. They could play “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” with full harmonies, and “Walk Away Renée” to melt girls’ hearts, then fire off “What’d I Say” and just blow the roof off. They could chase a Beatles tune with a Bobby “Blue” Bland and a James Brown. Working up a set that could last all night took hours of practice. They needed dozens of songs in their pocket to take requests, so they traveled with a portable record player and bought hit singles along the way to update their set.
When they couldn’t afford to crash in even the cheapest hotels, they slept on people’s floors in a heap under thin blankets and coats. They ate pancakes at midnight and again at noon, and fueled up on Coca-Cola and “blackbirds”—amphetamine pills—just to keep up the pace. They smoked cigarettes until they were hoarse and drank whisky to help them fall asleep. For Duane, it was heaven on earth.
The more Duane played, the greater his need to play became. His life had real purpose and it found its expression in performing. Standing onstage and launching into a song tested him every single time. Once he figured out a riff, he started searching for the next piece of the puzzle, and there were always new passages to learn and new licks to try. The weight of his guitar strap over his shoulder, his instrument’s smooth neck gliding under his palm, the thickening of his fingertips and the quickening of his responses, all of it thrilled him. He was doing what he was born to do.
At the outermost limit of their new adventure, they traveled to New York City to play at Trude Heller’s, a small club on West Ninth Street. Greenwich Village was a whole new world, teeming with freaks: college girls in miniskirts and black turtleneck sweaters, gay men in dandy suits, and fully tricked-out drag queens leaning in doorways wearing high-heeled shoes and wigs. Duane thought it looked like a damn anthill. Just watching the street hustle was a groove.
They spent their pay on hip bell-bottoms at bohemian boutiques and took their new Beatle boots to the cobbler to have stacked heels added. They stayed at the Albert Hotel on East Tenth Street, a gloomy, Gothic brick structure built by the same architect who designed the Dakota apartments on Central Park West. The Albert had fallen on hard times and become home to poor traveling bands like the Blues Magoos and the Lovin’ Spoonful.
The Allman Joys fell into a routine of playing long nights at Trude Heller’s, taking home a girl or three, waking up late for a pancake breakfast and an Orange Julius, dropping off their laundry, then heading back to Trude’s to practice before dinner, then doing it all over again. To make extra cash, they even took on the role of backup band for a flamboyant gay cabaret singer named Monti Rock III. Monti wore a full face of makeup and loaded himself down with baubles and bangles and worked the crowd at Trude’s. Bill Connell, the Allman Joys’ drummer, was fresh off the plane from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and couldn’t believe his eyes. Duane, Gregg, and Mike Alexander, their bass player, seemed to take Monti in stride. One look at the expression on Bill’s face and Duane gave him the nickname “the Novice.”
Duane had already mastered this life. He had taken on all of the responsibilities of a bandleader, from talking to booking agents on pay phones and befriending club owners to planning all travel. He had high standards. He demanded shined shoes and pressed pants, polished instruments and punctuality, updated union cards. Daily practice before gigs was crucial to keep up with the growing demand for new songs. Bill felt it was the influence of Duane’s military education showing.
But Duane was also still a kid. The guys made smoke bombs out of toilet paper rolls and firecrackers, using lit cigarettes as fuses. They’d set them in the glass phone booth across the way, then from their hotel room windows watch the smoke pour out, the fire trucks arriving, lights and sirens rolling. They stayed up late after playing, trading stories and worrying about Vietnam and the draft notices that were coming for each of them. Duane sent letters to Jo Jane, full of confidence that they were going to make it; there was no other plan.
Back on the road, they practically wore a groove in the asphalt between New York and Nashville, then St. Louis and Daytona, Mobile and Tuscaloosa, before heading back to New York. All the traveling was wearing Gregg down. He hadn’t entirely let go of the idea of going to college, but Duane asked him to give the band one more year and Gregg couldn’t refuse him.
Many cover songs the Allman Joys were playing had keyboard parts, and although guitar was his first love, Gregg had been drawn to keyboards for a long time. At Julian’s, a restaurant where Jerry now worked as a bookkeeper, a live band played in the bar for the happy-hour crowd. The band’s instruments included a Hammond B-3 organ with a Leslie—the special speaker that revolved around inside to create a vibrating sound that Gregg loved. When he was still in elementary school, Gregg had played around on that B-3, waiting for his mom to finish work. When he first sat down, he thought the thing had entirely too many buttons, but he was intrigued with it. Gregg got a Vox organ to help fill out the Allman Joys’ sound, and he even found a used Leslie that brought it pretty close to the ideal organ sound he could hear in his head.
Duane knew success was within their reach. He encouraged the parents of the Sandpipers—a singing trio of girls they had backed in a Pensacola, Florida, club—to let their daughters join them in New York. A disc jockey liked the girls’ sound and set up an audition for them at Columbia Records with Bob Johnston, a producer who worked with Bob Dylan. The Allman Joys accompanied them, and even if nothing came of it, it was a new connection. John D. Loudermilk, the man who wrote “Tobacco Road” and many other hit songs, saw the Allman Joys play at the Briar Patch in Nashville. He was impressed by the effect they were having on the crowd and saw their potential. He invited them to hang out at his house in the country and gave them tips on the business and songwriting. He financed their first recording studio experience at Bradley’s Barn and introduced them to his influential friends, like Buddy Killen, head of Dial Records, and a fellow songwriter, John Hurley. He even took them out to breakfast with legendary guitarist Chet Atkins, who was so kind and open, the boys were almost able to overcome their nerves enough to talk to him.
With Loudermilk’s support, the Allman Joys recorded their first single, a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”; it was released on Dial Records. Building on the strength of “Spoonful,” which was getting decent regional airplay, they filled the Fort Brandon Armory in Tuscaloosa with their biggest crowd yet and earned enough money for Duane and Gregg to buy Triumph motorcycles. The brothers rode out in front of the band’s station wagon and trailer, leading the way down the road.
Linda, Berry Oakley’s wife, saw the Allman Joys perform when she was seventeen. I had no idea she knew them before Berry became the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band four years later. She told me about the first night she met them, in a club in Jacksonville.
“Me and my girlfriends got to be their squeezes for the weekend. The Allman Joys played at the bottle club, the after-hours club—you bring your own bottle and they sold mixes and sodas, that’s when they really cut loose, and played the old blues. The Beachcomber would close at eleven or midnight, and they’d reopen and a whole new crew of clientele would come in. You could buy your mixers and that’s when they would really get down to it. They were doing great R-and-B stuff and the best harmonies. They did ‘In the Midnight Hour’ and ‘Reach Out.’
“They came over and sat with us and there were all these waitresses with sailor hip-huggers and lace-up shirts and they were all hot for the band. And here, these little high school girls come in there. It was just a change of pace. I remember Gregg coming up to my friend Marilyn and going, ‘Hi, blondie! What’s your name?’ She just turned into a puddle. They invited us to come see them at their little hotel, the 400 Court Motel on Philips Highway. Here we were, these virginal high school girls …
“They took us to Philips Highway Plaza, the mall up there, and they went and bought Geraldine a stereo from Montgomery Ward for Christmas. We went through a package store and they got some Calvert’s Extra and some Cokes and we went back to the motel, and they were fixing us drinks. When Duane started to make a move on me, I told him I was dating David Brown. He said, ‘Let’s reminisce about old Dave.’ Your dad was so much fun. They were headed back to Daytona, and me and my friend said, ‘Oh, our world will never be the same!’ And they said, ‘You’ve gotta come down and see us!’
“They gave us their address in Daytona, and of course we drove down there and it was all these people in and out of the house and their mom was at work, and we sat there and smoked too many cigarettes, and Duane was off with Patti. Nothing could be the same anymore, after you witnessed this. It was something else. There was definitely this magic going on. Things were changing everywhere: Vietnam and the protests and kids getting killed on campus, and peace and love and Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish, and it was so intense man, dig it, and ‘I Am the Walrus’ and Donovan and reefer and laying around on the floor, and let’s solve all the world’s problems! It was wonderful!”
Soon the turbulent times beyond the music scene touched the brothers directly. Duane’s draft notice came. They had to drive home to Daytona to deal with it. They arrived exhausted and loaded down with dirty laundry. They slept all day in their twin beds and happily ate their mama’s cooking. She greeted them like conquering heroes and they brought her all of their motel room keys as souvenirs. Jerry draped each plastic key fob through the spaces in a wooden lattice that screened her kitchen from the living room. Soon the whole grid was covered with different-colored, diamond-shaped key chains embossed with room numbers.
As Gregg drove to Jacksonville to the army induction center, Duane shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the pair of lacy underwear he was wearing digging in under his jeans. It was a cheap trick, but it was worth a try. The brothers sat in their station wagon in silence. Gregg watched Duane hold his head in his hands and was shocked to see a tear drop onto his brother’s shoe. He reached for Duane’s shoulder and said, “It’s going to be all right.”
Duane turned his face away and quickly wiped it with his sleeve. When it came time to take the pledge, standing shoulder to shoulder with a room full of young men with their hands raised, Duane kept his hands in the pockets of his jeans. When he was called out, he simply said, again and again, “I ain’t going. I ain’t going.”
Seated in front of a sergeant who had already dismissed the frilly lingerie with a scoff, Duane gathered his strength and explained that he could not leave his mother and go to war. He knew she would lose her mind if he died in action. She had already lost his father, who had been a dedicated soldier all his life. Duane was allowed to go home that day, but that wasn’t the end of it. Jerry and Duane each had to answer questions in front of a panel of officers, and between them they managed to secure his release from his military obligation. They had somehow made the case that he was needed at home.
Almost as soon as he was home, Duane called Bill Cook, the owner of Daytona’s hot local club, the Martinique. The Q, as they called it, was a big, dark room with high vaulted ceilings crossed by wooden beams. A girl nicknamed Ringo sat in a curtained-off nook by the entrance and took tickets and stamped hands, perched on a high stool. Bill Cook’s office was up a small staircase to a balcony against the club’s back wall, next to the long wooden bar lined with stools. Jo Jane and Patti came down to hear them play. A year on the road had made the band so tight it was unbelievable. They were as good as or better than the bands they were covering. They had swagger and style, total command of the stage.
On the way home, Jo Jane sat quietly in the backseat, listening to Patti tell Duane how well he had played. Patti wore a T-shirt she had made herself that read “Allman’s Joy.” Duane looked at his cousin in the rearview mirror, smirked, and said, “I know your type, Jo Jane. The quiet groupie who stares from the backseat.” She narrowed her blue eyes at him and laughed. “You know I love you best,” he said with a hug when they got home. The band was going to head right back out on the road in the morning. Duane lingered, saying goodbye to Patti.
Gregg rested a palm on top of Jo Jane’s head in the driveway before they left, and said, “As Shakespeare once said: Goodbyes are a bad scene.”
Jo Jane was visiting her aunt Jerry again when the boys came home to face Gregg’s draft notice a year later. Jerry was nearly hysterical with worry, having no protection to offer Gregory, but the boys had a plan of their own. They had a friend who shot himself in the foot and it worked; he was declared unfit to serve.
They started the day drinking and taking pain pills—Gregg for courage and Duane for fun. Then Duane got on the phone and announced that they were throwing a foot-shootin’ party. Vicki came over with a couple other girls, but she left before the deed was done because the thought of Gregg hurting himself made her cry.
Once they were feeling loose, they had to address the fact that they didn’t have a gun. They called a neighbor and asked if they could borrow his hunting rifle. He said, “Are you boys out of your minds? Where is your mother?” Jerry knew about the plan, and agreed to act surprised if the police or the hospital called her after it was done. Until then, she would be in her room with the door closed, staying out of it.
Duane drove them to the other side of town to search for a gun. The way Gregg tells it, they asked the first guy they saw hanging out on the street who looked like he was up to no good. “Hey, man, do you know where we could come by a gun?”
“A gun? I might, for a price.”
“How much?” Duane asked.
“How much you got?” the man asked with half a smile.
“Thirty-two dollars,” Gregg said, pulling the bills from his pocket.
“Well, what do you know? That’s just what this gun costs,” he said, pulling a small pistol out of his waistband.
Armed with the Saturday night special, two bullets rattling in the chamber, they headed home and straight for the liquor cabinet. Duane filled a box with sawdust and carried it out to the garage. Jo Jane got in the driver’s seat of Jerry’s white Oldsmobile 98 and backed up the driveway facing toward the street for a quick exit. She opened the passenger door so Gregg could jump right in, and stayed behind the wheel, watching in the rearview mirror.
Duane was hitting that point of drunkenness where he was getting pushy and mean.
He got down on his knees and started drawing a target on his baby brother’s moccasin with a Flair pen, laughing in a harsh way. He could tell Gregg was scared out of his mind. His knees were quivering.
“Come on, now! We have all these nice people here to see a foot shootin’! If you can’t do it, I will! Now give me that gun and let’s go!”
Gregg stomped out to the garage and pointed that gun at the target and pulled the trigger. He fell back into Duane, who was standing behind him, and who yelled, “Bull’s-eye! Oh fuck! You did it!”
Duane grabbed a few towels and wrapped up his brother’s bleeding foot and half carried him to the car, where Jo Jane was ready to go, then took off with the rest of their friends, fearing the police would come and question them. Jo Jane and Gregg were on their own. Gregg must have been in shock; he didn’t scream or cry.
“I guess I proved I’d do anything for the band,” Gregg murmured. Then, as they waited at a long red light, he said, “Jo Jane, you are driving like a little old lady. Could you step on it, please?”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to be this careful,” Gregg said wryly.
Halifax District Hospital on Sunday night was pretty slow. Jo Jane eased Gregg into a wheelchair and propped up his foot, now bleeding right through the mass of towels.
A doctor motioned them into an exam room.
“What happened here, young man?” the doctor asked.
“I was cleaning my gun, sir.”
Gregg came back with his wound dressed in a clean white bandage around his foot. The bullet had passed through without hitting bone, a minor miracle. Although the doctor called Jerry and she corroborated the gun-cleaning story, he wanted to keep Gregg overnight. Gregg was highly intoxicated and they could not be sure that he had not been involved in a crime. A police detective came by the house and interviewed her with Jo Jane by her side. Duane was holed up at a friend’s crash pad.
In the morning, Jo Jane and Gregg drove to a funky old house down by the river and gathered up Duane for the long drive to the army induction center in Jacksonville. Gregg had driven for him the year before, and it was just as tense now. There was no telling if Gregg’s injury would be enough to get him out of harm’s way, and they didn’t have another plan. Duane and Jo Jane waited in the car while Gregg told the story of his gun-cleaning accident. Somehow it worked and Gregg was classified 4-F.
The army caught up with the Allman Joys once more when they drafted their drummer, the Novice. Bill Connell was back home in Tuscaloosa to play a gig at the armory when his draft notice came. His father, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, took Bill down to the recruitment center and swore him in himself. He also pulled some strings with a neighbor who was the commander of the Naval Reserve Center. He helped Bill transfer from the army to the navy, hoping to keep him out of the ground war in Vietnam.
Bill’s long hair was unceremoniously shaved on the spot. When he got home from his ordeal, he found Duane and Gregg hanging out with a few members of the Minutes, a local band they had crossed paths with many times in the past year. They played the same circuit of clubs and had similar sets. It seemed that in the brief time Bill was gone it had all been decided. Johnny Sandlin, the Minutes’ drummer, would take Bill’s place behind the drum kit.
The Allman Joys had lost three bass players in a year and a half: one to marital discord, one to college, and another to Vietnam. The Minutes’ lineup had been transient, too, and they were down to three players: Johnny, Paul Hornsby, and Mabron McKinney. They needed a singer and a guitar player, and the timing was perfect to join forces with the Allmans. Duane put his arm around Bill’s shoulders and told him it would be all right, but there was nothing anybody could do. He was going to war and the band was moving on without him.
Duane and Gregg spent a couple of weeks crashing at Johnny’s parents’ house in Decatur, Alabama, rehearsing in their garage. The Minutes had a bluesy set and that suited Gregg’s voice. It didn’t take long to find songs they all knew and blending the two bands was smooth sailing from the start.
Johnny had dark hair curling over the tops of his ears and a kind face. He was quick to laugh, easygoing, and quiet; Duane and Gregg both took to him right away. Johnny had seen them play for the first time at a little club in Pensacola called the Spanish Village. The Minutes were playing to the kids on the patio behind the club while the Allman Joys played the bar inside to the older set. Johnny noticed that Duane had rigged up an effects pedal and mounted it right on the front of his guitar with a couple of clamps so he could hit it with his hand; it looked so cool. They tore through a slew of British rock songs that Johnny didn’t usually care for, but the way they played them, he could feel the excitement of those songs like he was hearing them for the first time. Now Johnny had a chance to play with them, and there was no telling how far they could go together.
In the evenings, as a chill blew off the marsh behind Johnny’s house and the pines stood tall and black against the pinkening sky, they rolled up the garage door and played to the empty suburban streets. Soon kids rolled up on their bikes and walked up in pairs, holding hands. Within a few nights, there were a dozen or more people sitting in the paved driveway waiting for them, and Gregg would turn to face them while he sang, smiling.
After practice, Johnny’s mom would call them in to dinner and they would sit at her table and toss out new band names.
“What about Allman-ac? Get it?” Duane suggested.
“Or Allman-Act?” Gregg said.
“Gosh, that’s terrible!” said Johnny.
“Well, what then? Why can’t we keep Allman Joys? We have a following all over,” Duane said.
“So do we! We could keep ‘the Minutes,’ ” said Paul. “It doesn’t seem right to use the name Allman.”
“I never liked the Minutes name anyway. We can change it,” Johnny said.
For a while, they used whichever name they thought would bring in the most people. They were the Minutes in Tuscaloosa and Mobile, and the Allman Joys in Nashville and St. Louis. Duane had booked a month of nights at Pepe’s A Go-Go in Gaslight Square.
A week or two into their stay in St. Louis, Mabron McKinney, their new bass player, went to the airport to pick up his wife. He ran into a pack of musicians, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who were in town to play Kiel Auditorium. Mabron invited them to come down to Pepe’s to see his band, and the Dirt Band’s manager, Bill McEuen, actually showed up.
The Allman Joys put on a rocking show. They got so wild at the end of “Tobacco Road,” their big closer, that Duane tossed his guitar up in the air over his head and stepped forward, letting it fall flat on its back, then stalked offstage.
Bill McEuen offered to manage them right then and there, saying they were going to be the next Rolling Stones. “What are you all doing playing these little joints? Come to L.A.! You’ll be huge there! Go where the people are!”
“The Stones? I don’t know about that. More like the Hillbilly Who,” Johnny joked.
Duane stretched his arm around Bill and walked him to a table to talk.
“Do you have a tape I can take back to L.A.?” Bill asked.
“Give us a week or two and we’ll get you one,” Duane said. They would go back to Alabama, cut a demo, pick up the rest of their gear, and head west.
Duane made Los Angeles sound like the Promised Land. The next Rolling Stones? Was he really falling for that line? Gregg was skeptical and Johnny was nervous to go that far west, but Duane was determined. As long as they had people to play for, everything would be great.
The band recorded a few songs at a local studio in Alabama and sent it with a snapshot of them crowded together, leaning on a car. Bill thought that little picture spoke volumes about these guys, no flashy head shots like they practically papered the walls with in L.A., and he kept it.
The drive to Los Angeles was ridiculously long, made longer by the fact that they were too broke to stop and stay anywhere along the way. Duane and Gregg were in the equipment van, and Paul and Mabron rode with Johnny in his car. They fell into goofy moods and passed the time with bad jokes and nicknames. Johnny was “the Duck,” for reasons he was too embarrassed to explore. They called Paul “Berry” or “Dingleberry,” depending on how mad they wanted to make him. Mabron was “the Wolf,” because his beard and hair completely surrounded his face. Duane was “the Dog,” because of the way his hair drooped down like hound’s ears and for the touch of scoundrel the name implied. Gregg was “the Coyote,” wily brother of the Dog.
When they reached Texas, they were greeted at a gas station by a big guy swinging a baseball bat. Their long hair and tight pants were not taken kindly to in those parts. They couldn’t get out of Texas quick enough. Paul, who looked the least freaky, went in to fetch their takeout food and pump gas and did so the rest of the way.
Finally, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, they stopped at a cheap motel to get cleaned up. Gregg traveled with packets of crème rinse to keep his shoulder-length hair shiny. He mixed the thick goo with water in a glass, and then poured the slick mix over his hair in the shower. He left that little slippery glass on the shower floor and Johnny kicked it over, stepped on the glass, and cut his foot, deep and bloody. After he was stitched up, it hurt too much to press his newly patched-up foot against his bass drum pedal, so the Duck had to play with the wrong foot for their first couple of weeks in town. Welcome to California.