The Brothers were at the peak of their power now, as pure and searing as fire onstage. They only had one rule—play hard, bringing all of your strength, intuition, and knowledge to every performance. You can hear the quantum leap they took musically by listening to a song like “Dreams,” first from 1969 on their studio album, and then a later live version, like their show at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on September 19, 1971. The song, which was ambitious and haunting in the studio, has a new expansiveness two years later. It is the difference between a photograph and an action movie.
Jaimoe says their story was in the songs’ development over time. “What Ornette Coleman was doing in 1959 with Ed Blackwell was basically what we were doing and still do to this day,” he said. “A good example is, Twiggs came up with this thing, a Donovan song, ‘There Is a Mountain.’ Twiggs and Duane played it, then Dickey and Duane played it. He took the melody to ‘Mama’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread,’ and Dickey’s melody answered and made statements to Duane’s melody. It’s very, very simple. It’s like Ping-Pong. Which way is the ball going? That ball is going to go a lot of different places until you learn how to control it. Every which direction the ball is going is where you go; the ball controls the game. You have to learn how to control it. You have to learn how to know where you’re going. When you learn how to do it, that’s when things get really interesting. Well, you think you know how to do it, and you have a pretty good idea but it becomes more and more interesting the more you know.” We were sitting in his hotel room after a show at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2013, talking and listening to jazz. I watched him arrange a pile of magazines on the coffee table in front of him, piling two and then three on top of one another, then placing a single one off to the side. He began playing a complex little riff with his drumsticks, hitting the different magazines and the edge of the table, and each surface made a slightly different tone. He said, “I’ve been working on this pattern for forty years.”
Playing live for two solid years was one source of their power, and the other was listening. The band listened to music all day every day, and drew from the most challenging and innovative players across the board. Listening to masterful musicians fed their imaginations and recharged their spirits when the road wore them down.
In August, word came that one of the great players who had inspired Duane and became his true friend had been killed. Curtis Ousley, the legendary saxophone player known as King Curtis, was stabbed to death in New York City when he tried to run off a couple of drug dealers on his stoop. Duane attended his funeral. Aretha Franklin sang and Stevie Wonder played. Jesse Jackson performed the service at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan.
A week or so after the funeral, Duane stepped up to the microphone, “About King Curtis, that was one of the finest cats there ever was. He was just right on top of getting next to the young people, you know. It’s a shame. If y’all get a chance to listen to that album he made out at Fillmore West, boy, it was incredible. It’s unbelievable, the power of that and the emotional stature that man had. He was an incredible human being. I hope that whoever it was that did it knows what they did, it’s a terrible thing.”
They played “You Don’t Love Me,” and during the solo Duane played unaccompanied, slowly building a lovely, subtle bridge into “Soul Serenade.” The band joined him in a tribute to King Curtis while the audience cheered, clapping along. They lingered inside the song Duane had recorded with his friend, the optimistic, sunny melody flowing out of him, then Dickey turned a phrase around and pulled them smoothly back into “You Don’t Love Me.” They created a heartbreaking, spontaneous tribute for a man they all admired in a way he would have loved.
The band had strong songs for the new album, but they felt a new kind of pressure, now that their live album was such a success. With Tom Dowd’s help, they wanted to record a studio album that could stand toe-to-toe with At Fillmore East, and they felt they were on the right track.
Dickey wanted Gregg to sing “Blue Sky,” the love song Dickey had written for his new wife, Sandy Wabegijig. Duane wouldn’t hear it. He told Dickey his voice would suit the song perfectly, and the beauty of the sentiment was all his to share. It was the first recording the Brothers released with Dickey singing lead, a taste of things to come.
“Stand Back” was a real barnburner with funky swagger to spare, and Duane loved it. It felt like something of a new direction for the Brothers, a tight groove they could easily imagine on the radio. As soon as he got back to Macon, Duane took it to the studio to play it for Johnny Sandlin. He stood by Johnny’s chair with his head bent and listened in the control room. They sat there, tapping their feet and listening with their eyes closed, so proud. This new album was going to be huge. They could feel it.
Albhy Galuten, who once again worked as an engineer on the album, regretted that they hadn’t kept the outtakes of these Eat a Peach sessions. “In those days they didn’t keep outtakes because tape was expensive, and so they would roll back over previous takes. I remember on ‘Blue Sky,’ there were three takes, and the reason we chose the take we did was because it had Dickey’s best solo and it was Dickey’s song. That was not official, it’s not like we said that, it was just an unspoken thing between me and Tommy: Hey wow, Dickey is really beginning to come into his own, because everybody was in Duane’s shadow. Clearly Duane was so much the leader of the band. ‘Stand Back’ was originally called ‘Calico’ before the words were written, and we did three takes on that, and every one of Duane’s solos were entirely different. Not like most musicians, who would improvise a little for a couple bars. Of course the Allman Brothers did that for all their orchestrated parts. Duane and Dickey would do harmonies, but Duane would just play stuff that was totally different every time.”
In late August, Duane returned to Muscle Shoals to record with Cowboy, a band that Scott Boyer, a member of the 31st of February, had formed with Tommy Talton, and which Duane had brought to Phil Walden’s attention.
“He played great on ‘Please Be with Me,’ ” Scott Boyer said. “There were jaws dropping all over the studio on Jackson Highway. Session players had to build a track and it would take hours and Duane didn’t have the patience to sit through all that. He wanted to come in and lay something on top of it. He was like, ‘Play the track and I’ll put something on it and then I’m out, I’ve got places to go.’ ” He wanted to play on something brand-new.
Duane told Scott, “I don’t want to add to a track you already have worked out, because you already have three guitars, and I’ll never find a place to play, so let’s start with a brand-new song.”
They tossed out four or five tunes before Scott said, “Well, I’ve got this one I wrote last night.”
Scott had stayed behind at the motel while the band went out to dinner the night before. He picked up his notebook.
“I wrote stream of thought. In about fifteen minutes I had eleven stanzas that didn’t rhyme and didn’t make sense, and it was like a puzzle. I threw the pad on the floor and went to bed.” Scott played Duane what he had worked out, and Duane thought it was a beautiful song.
“I thought it was stupid, the line ‘I sit here lying in my bed’? How can you sit and lie in bed at the same time?” Scott said.
Johnny Sandlin, who produced the session, said, “I thought it meant I’m sitting in my bed, lying to myself about the way things are.”
“Wow! That’s deep! That’s good! I like that!” Scott said.
“Duane and I sat side by side and played together, both facing Johnny. George [Clark] played upright bass, which he never did before, and he did it pretty well. We recorded that night, the night that Duane came into town. They overdubbed my vocal, along with Tommy and George Clark singing harmonies, and it was done.”
Duane’s Dobro was buzzing; the bridge was out of alignment or something and Johnny had someone come in and fix it. They recorded another take in the morning with it fixed. Scott didn’t think the new take was as good and he told Johnny he wanted to use the take from the night before.
“It’s buzzin’,” Johnny said.
“I don’t care. The buzzing doesn’t bother me. He played great on it,” Scott said, so they used the first version. (Years later, Johnny asked Scott if he could use the second take of “Please Be with Me” on the first Duane Allman anthology. “Fine. I’m over it,” Scott said.)
“I tried to get him to play on ‘All My Friends,’ ” Scott recalled. “The way I did it on the Cowboy album, there were seven-beat measures in the verse, and there were seven-beat measures in the solo, and Duane did that solo until he got so mad, he took his guitar off and threw it down on the floor and he stormed out of the studio. Then Eddie Hinton couldn’t do it and Tommy couldn’t either, so I finally put a violin part on it, and it wasn’t very good, but I had to put something there. They couldn’t get that extra beat to recycle in their heads. They kept losing the time. Duane was playing great stuff, but he couldn’t get from point A to point B. Somewhere along the way he’d mentally trip and it was hard to watch it.
“You never saw Duane unable to play. It was the only time I ever saw it.
“He was an emotional guy. He wore his feelings on his sleeve. He’d get excited about stuff, but not mad. Oh my God, I wished to God I never wrote that song, I felt so bad.”
The pace of the Allman Brothers’ touring didn’t let up for anything, not even the completion of their album. They were traveling to Miami whenever they had a few free days in a row. Duane, Dickey, and Berry recorded a little instrumental tune at Criteria. The melody had been growing inside Duane since they had first started playing together, little traces recognizable from a hundred nights spent with their acoustic guitars, Dickey with his Martin, Berry with his Hummingbird, and Duane with his Dobro. They had perched together on the edge of narrow hotel room beds, sat at the edge of the water at Idlewild, and rested on their amps in the music room at the Big House. Many of their songs had been born that way, letting a simple tune lead wherever it wanted to go. At first they cut a version with Berry playing bass, but they agreed that the little tune didn’t need the weight. “Little Martha” had a peaceful, rambling quality that only wanted the two guitars lightly rolling through.
It was the first song Duane had ever written for the Allman Brothers and it was the last song he ever recorded in a studio.
Twiggs had been in jail in Buffalo for a few months when John Condon decided to bring in Andrew Watson, a Michigan law professor, medical doctor, and psychiatrist. He felt they needed Watson to be there for the trial, but it would be a year before he had time in his calendar. They agreed to delay the trial for a year. The jail was rougher than prison. It operated on a shoestring and had no real facilities. Twiggs told his family the New York state prison at Attica would be better when he got there. All in all, Twiggs spent almost eighteen months in jail awaiting trial. The Brothers stayed in contact with his legal team and with Twiggs through letters. Twiggs’s brother Skoots brought him a copy of At Fillmore East. On the back cover, above the heads of the roadies who posed all together on the road cases was a picture of Twiggs. There was no way they would leave him out of their family portrait.
When Watson was free, he and Condon got to work putting a defense together. They wanted to trace Twiggs’s behavior and personality from birth until the night at Aliotta’s Lounge. They had Twiggs write a personal chronology, and interviewed his family, the band, and many of his friends. In the end, they felt confident that they could show he had no option but to commit the crime.
When Condon came to Macon to visit the Lyndon family home, he began by stating that his hourly rate began from the moment he left his office until he returned there, travel time included. As far as the Lyndons understood, Phil Walden was paying Twiggs’s legal fees, but most likely he was billing the band.
The trial was slated to begin in September 1971. Condon said it would likely take two weeks, because he had waived a jury trial. Watson suggested that the two state psychiatrists jointly interview Twiggs. They agreed that he had had a psychotic episode brought on by the stress of life on the road with the band. Berry Oakley was assigned the task of testifying personally to the effects of life on the road.
As soon as Berry and Kim landed in Buffalo, they asked a friend there to help them find drugs. He took them to a local pharmacy. They were dope sick because they knew better than to risk flying while holding. After a ridiculous negotiation, with the pharmacist telling them he could only give them drugs if they said it was for pain, Berry said, “Fuck Payne, the dope is for me!” Kim says they were only given enough to feed their enormous tolerance and the week they spent there was fraught with sickness.
On the stand, Berry paused for long moments to process his thoughts before answering. The state’s attorney was getting frustrated. He asked Berry how many times he had taken LSD: more than twenty-five, fifty, one hundred times? Finally Berry said, “Lots more than a hundred times.”
While he talked and spaced out, Berry kept pulling out a roll of tablets and popping them in his mouth. Finally, the prosecutor demanded to know what drug he was taking, in plain view of the court.
Berry smiled and said, “Tums, for my tummy.”
Twiggs was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sentenced to six additional months in a state mental hospital.
The Brothers played two nights at Winterland in San Francisco on October 8 and 9, and after the second night’s encore, Duane snatched his strap off and turned his back on the crowd, quickly walking into the wings, wound up and ready for running. It was hard to find a place to put the immense energy that surged through him when the band built to such intensity and then stopped. It could feel like a free fall, and the only stable place was inside another song. It hadn’t felt right all night. It didn’t get off the ground. He felt alone, out on a limb, and no one followed where he was pointing. Butch brushed by him as he left the stage and Duane grabbed his arm and said, “I need to talk to you!”
“Okay, man, let’s go back to the hotel and we’ll talk,” Butch said.
An hour later, Duane was pounding on his door. “When Dickey gets up to play, y’all are pounding away, backing him up, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all!” Duane shouted as he shouldered his way into Butch’s room.
Butch met Duane’s angry eyes and raised his voice, something he had never done before. “Duane, you’re so fucked up you’re not giving us anything.”
Duane looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He knew Butch was telling him the truth. They sat together in silence for a minute or two.
“This shit has got to stop,” Duane said quietly, and put a hand on Butch’s back as he walked out the door. “Thanks, brother.”
Heroin had gained the upper hand, in ways I’m not sure Duane believed it could. He had fallen prey to the idea that snorting it was safe and his abhorrence for needles would protect him from serious addiction, but the lie of that was starting to show.
Jerry Wexler and his partner Ahmet Ertegun took Duane and Gregg into a back room at a party in New York and told them they needed to talk. They didn’t waste a moment with polite chat. They told the brothers they had seen this bullshit all before and they were not going to sit by and watch two young, talented men kill themselves. They were squandering their talent and their opportunities. They had watched helplessly while Ray Charles struggled with heroin. It had killed Charlie Parker. They would be no different. The shit had to stop. Wexler and Ertegun were self-made millionaires who had launched the careers of an astounding number of artists. To be scolded like a couple of kids deeply embarrassed the brothers. Gregg felt sure all they really cared about was Duane, because of the way they spoke directly to him. He felt invisible next to his big brother, and guilty that he had been the first one to bring dope around.
Duane was resolved. The next time he spoke to either of these men, he would be clear-eyed and sober. And he would make sure everyone in his band was clean, too.
He was the bridge between the band and the businessmen. He was the one who started the train rolling and he was responsible for all of them.
It bothered him that he hadn’t seen clearly the moment when heroin started working against him, beaching him on the other side of the warm wave where there was only cold grit and need. Around this time, he told Jonny Podell, “I’m not doing heroin anymore, heroin is doing me.” He had called Podell to ask him to sort out rehab beds for everyone. He arranged for Duane, Berry, Gregg, Kim, and Red Dog to enter Linwood-Bryant Hospital, in Buffalo, to undergo medically supervised detox. The bill is marked October 20, 1971. Dickey agreed to clean up and would take care of it himself. I believe Jaimoe and Butch did the same.
Gregg told me very simply that drugs would have come between him and his brother eventually. Drugs were the thing that would have driven them apart, he said. It made me consider how different their personalities were. Gregg was the dreamer, private, shy, and comfort-seeking, while Duane turned toward the world; he wanted to engage with it and sought a sense of purpose. Gregg could retreat into himself and his high, with a woman and a bottle, and become completely unreachable. As heavily as Duane was into drugs, he wasn’t an escapist, and when it began to interfere with his music, he knew enough to put an end to it.
Gregg didn’t show up to fly to Buffalo, and Duane called him from the airport, furious. Bunky Odom, who was traveling with them, overheard Duane say, “You are not fit to fry fish for my band.”
Red Dog went to visit Twiggs in the mental hospital while they were all in Buffalo for rehab. He and Twiggs were left alone and they had a nice visit. Twiggs told him an incredible story about a man who hadn’t said a word inside for more than twenty years, until Twiggs convinced him it would be a gas to surprise everyone by simply saying hello the next day, and the man agreed.
Duane didn’t go to see Twiggs. He couldn’t handle it.
When Duane got out of rehab, he went to Manhattan and called Ace and told him he wanted to take him fishing when he got back to Macon to tell him about it. He said he had learned a lot and wanted to share it. Ace was into meditation and yoga, and he could go deep in conversation. Duane was looking forward to a good long talk. They had plans to make.
He also called John Hammond and invited him to come hang out at his friend’s place on Fifth Avenue, where he was staying for a couple of days.
“It wasn’t often that I got to hang out with him,” John recalled, “but when I did it was just terrific because we talked music and blues and he knew the guys that I knew and I hipped him to some guys, he hipped me to some guys.… It was just terrific. I was about to go to play these shows in Canada,” John said. He had a loft downtown on Broadway and they headed over to jam together and keep talking.
Duane was in a good space. During his week in Buffalo, he had let the last year sink in. He had never felt stronger or sharper. With Layla, At Fillmore East, and the new songs, he was doing the best work of his life and he didn’t want to waste any more time chasing a high.
Having friends like John, musicians he admired, there was really no limit to the projects he could envision for the coming year. Money was starting to come in, and that would help buy a little downtime.
“He was talking about producing a record for me, and I was so excited,” John said. “What a fantastic deal that was. He was beginning to talk percentages and stuff, which I didn’t know anything about, but it all sounded really real and exciting. I had to leave early the next morning for Newfoundland and he was on his way home to Macon.”
Still, they couldn’t resist the chance to play together, and Duane had carried the Dobro over. They sat knee to knee and started rolling through tunes they both loved. The city was quiet in the time between night and earliest dawn, the sky still dark, but shifting every moment toward pale blue morning, only the momentary hiss of a passing taxi now and then, and soon enough the sound of the first steel gate being raised on a distant market. Duane loved the way John played. He had been living and breathing the blues, watching and learning from the best, a direct line from Charley Patton to Howlin’ Wolf to John. He was holding down stages alone with his guitar the way the original masters did it. His deep, gravelly voice, the sound of his boot heel on the floor, and the wide resonance of his National. He loved it, the interplay between them.
“We jammed, and had ideas for songs … country blues, slide, Robert Johnson stuff: That was my inspiration. I had played with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and all these guys he admired so much, and he’d ask me about them. Duane would have been a great producer. He knew how to deal with sidemen, with players and producers, instinctively, I guess. He headed back to Macon, and that’s the last time I saw him. He was a great person and I often think about him and wonder, what if? I feel richer for having known him. He was a cut above everybody else. He had such a vision of what he wanted to do, how to make songs work. He could really play anything. He had the facility to play and I admired him so much.”
The next day was Linda Oakley’s birthday, October 29, 1971, and Duane wanted to be home for her party.
Can you feel it?
The road is waiting and his wheels have started to roll. I can’t stop them.
I stopped working. For months, I refused to write it, but it stayed there, just waiting for me. The road was laid under the first sentence I wrote about him years before. I idly picked up a good bottle of whisky at the grocery store and was walking out into the parking lot with the small brown paper bag before I realized what I’d done. I stood like my grandmother by my kitchen sink and swallowed a hot shot of the amber liquid like medicine for pain, and then another. If I couldn’t slow down the story, I could slow my mind and numb my heart. I think of the recording of Duane’s drunken voice, talking to a DJ, saying his grandfather soaked his feet in Jack Daniel’s. I drink and then I sleep. When I wake up, the white page is still on the screen, the cursor blinking like a traffic light. The road is waiting and my father is moving now, picking up speed. I am reckless with rage. There is nowhere to turn.
You learn how to stay suspended in a moment when someone you love is taken from you. You imagine the moment just before the thing happens, and part of you lives there.
You camp out, pinning down the moment in time when everything was still okay, and hold it still with the weight of your body and the force of your will.
Part of me lives on Broadway, staring up at John Paul Hammond’s lit window from the street. In the stillness when the wind shifts, I can hear the sound of them playing—two moans, one low and one high, threading through each other like smoke.
Anything is possible from where I stand. Duane will walk out the door soon.
He could turn right instead of left. He could miss his plane. Or decide to fly to Canada with John. Some small choice could change now, and everything would be different. Everything.