Allman Brothers Band: A Great Southern Revival
Countless circuses have spent their winters in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and plenty of tourists, too. Tourist season is just about over by the end of March; the highways are clogged with mobile homes and campers. But out on the edge of town, in an industrial park that, from the road, looks as if it’s shut down for the night, rehearsals are just beginning for the spring and summer tour by the newly reconstituted Allman Brothers Band.
“This is the real Florida,” says Steve Massarsky, the band’s new, New York-based manager, as we pull into the industrial park at nightfall. “It’s as Southern as Georgia or Alabama. Dickey Betts comes from here, you know. He was already living in Sarasota, and so were Danny and Rook [guitarist Dan Toler and bassist David Goldflies, who were picked out of Betts’ band, Great Southern, to join the new Allman Brothers lineup]. We decided it would be easier to bring the three other musicians here than to take the whole band someplace else.”
The clump of warehouses is almost surrounded by an orange grove, and as we get out of the car, the smell — close to honeysuckle but with a tinge of tartness — is overpowering. “Pretty soon they’ll be able to walk out here when they’re taking a break and pick ’em off the trees,” says Massarsky, a young lawyer who took over Betts’ management in 1976, a year after he passed his bar exam and around the time the Allman Brothers Band officially broke up in a welter of recriminations and bad blood. The sound of a relaxed blues jam drifts out of one of the warehouses, contributing to the easy feeling that seems to hang over the whole enterprise.
A year ago, putting the band back together didn’t look easy, or even possible. “There is no way we can work with Gregg Allman again, ever,” Dickey Betts had said in 1976 after Gregg testified against his former personal road manager, Scooter Herring, in his widely publicized drug trial. That sounded pretty final. But a reunion was effected, and an album called Enlightened Rogues was recorded. Since the release of that LP in early March, it looks like reclaiming their position in the upper echelons of American rock is going to be as easy for the Allman Brothers Band as picking oranges off those trees. In just two weeks the album has gone platinum, jumping into the Top 15 on the trade magazine charts and still bulleting rapidly upward. And in New York, two concerts were announced on one radio station, WNEW-FM, just once, on a Saturday morning, and they sold out within an hour and a half.
Inside one of the warehouses, a road crew that includes Twiggs Lyndon and the Red Dog, two original crew members who were pictured on the back of the band’s seminal At Fillmore East album, is busy setting up microphones, testing channels on an impressive, state-of-the-art mixing console that will travel with the group, and discussing details with the musicians, who have let their blues jam wind down. Dickey Betts, whose band, Great Southern, fared better commercially than any other post-Allmans project but never really broke out of the club and small-theater circuit, is in a corner running over an intricate climb-up pattern with fellow guitarist Dan Toler. Those climb-ups, voiced in bright, ringing harmony, were the trademark of the original Allman Brothers Band. When founder Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident in October 1971, the two-guitar lineup was abandoned, and a keyboard soloist, Chuck Leavell, was brought in to replace him. Now, after two years of intensive work in Great Southern, Betts and Toler have the two-guitar sound down cold.
David Goldflies, known as Rook because at 22 he is the rookie of the bunch, is pumping at his bass, trying to fit into the syncopated patterns being played by Jaimoe on one of the two drum sets. Jaimoe’s backgound is in soul music — he was road drummer for Otis Redding, Joe Tex and Percy Sledge before joining the original Allman Brothers Band — and jazz, and he learned a great deal from the rhythmically sophisticated R&B musicians of New Orleans, men like drummer Charles “Honeyboy” Otis and pianist Professor Longhair. The band’s other drummer, Butch Trucks, is busy adjusting his timpani. He was attracted to a musical career by Leonard Bernstein’s Young Peoples Concerts on television and has played in the Jacksonville Symphony. The Allman Brothers’ two-guitar sound has received more publicity than the two-drummers setup, but the interaction between Trucks and Jaimoe is equally distinctive. After a while Butch stops tinkering with his timpani and gets back behind his traps, and it becomes evident that the magic is still there. The two drummers set up a busy, bristling whirlpool of accents and cross-rhythms, and not once do they get in each other’s way.
The only musician missing is Gregg Allman. “Didn’t you hear about his accident?” asks a roadie. Accident? After his widely publicized cure for heroin addiction, a drinking-related disorderly conduct arrest as recently as last October and a round with Alcoholics Anonymous, Gregg is the one member of the reconstituted band whom the skeptics are going to be watching closely. He is the group’s powerful, growling vocalist, his keyboard sound contributes to the music’s unique character, and after all, he is the only member named Allman. Without him, one might argue, the new Allman Brothers Band is really Great Southern with different drummers.
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