The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes.

Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time.

Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the Allmans were all about musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around, and building a base.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened.

It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained.

“This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach.

They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment — offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made — not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy — the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmore East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

“New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade — and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights — March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 — as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs.

“I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go.

“When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine.

“Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.”

Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out.

“I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could.

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth.

Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers.

Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette remembers another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately.

“We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio.

“We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it.

“This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[Atlantic executive] Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, and that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record — “people priced” at three dollars below standard list for a double album — slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album.

“All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches — from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.”

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends.

“He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that.

“I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte.

“He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him.

Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old.

“And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

The Allman Brothers Band created some of the most iconic twin-guitar harmonies in rock history. But according to Warren Haynes, their magic came from something unexpected: imperfection.

Some of their most beloved harmony lines weren’t carefully composed or rehearsed. They happened spontaneously onstage, as Duane Allman and Dickey Betts reacted to each other in real time — and occasionally hit notes that weren’t technically “correct.”

““A lot of the twin lines that people recognize as parts of Allman Brothers songs actually came about during improv moments where Dickey Betts would start playing a melody and Duane Allman would start playing harmony with him,” Haynes says on the No Guitar Is Safe podcast. “If you go back and check out the live stuff — like At Fillmore East — and some of the stuff on Eat a Peach, the harmonies are not always perfectly parallel.”

That wasn’t a flaw. It was the point.

“They didn’t know exactly what they were doing,” Haynes says. “Duane just had a good enough ear that he would hear Dickey play a melody and then play a harmony to it. And one of them might change a note, and things might get a little squirrelly for a minute — but that’s okay. It wasn’t meant to be perfect.”

That philosophy would hit home for Haynes in a life-changing way when he recorded his first Allman Brothers album, Seven Turns. Haynes and Betts had written the instrumental “True Gravity” and worked out one harmony section meticulously.

They got it exactly right. But when Betts recorded his final take, he played a few notes differently. Haynes assumed they’d fix it.

“So I went to our producer, Tom Dowd, and said, ‘I think we should fix those two or three notes,’” he recalls.

Dowd had other ideas.

“He said, ‘Before we do, I want you to close your eyes and listen to the track as if you had never heard it before.’”

Haynes did.

“And it sounded beautiful,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t change a thing.’ There are three notes that make the harmony weird — but if you don’t know that, it sounds great.”

The moment changed how he thought about music forever.

“What I learned — especially when I joined the Allman Brothers — is that perfection and beauty in music have nothing in common,” he says.

In fact, many legendary recordings contain mistakes their creators considered fixing.

“I talked to Booker T. Jones about recording with Otis Redding, and he said whichever version was Otis’s best take, that was the take,” Haynes says. “If it wasn’t your best take, too bad — because it was all about the vocal performance.”

Listeners, he realized, don’t hear music the way musicians do.

“They don’t know what we intended,” he says. “They only know what it sounds like hearing it for the first time.”

Haynes learned that lesson years earlier while listening to Johnny Winter’s album Second Winter. As a young guitarist, he heard one electric guitar passage that blew his mind.

“What the hell is that?” he remembers thinking.

Decades later, he revisited it — and discovered Winter had briefly played in the wrong key.

“But to a beginning guitar player, it sounded like psychedelic jazz,” Haynes says. “I’m sure he thought, ‘Oh, I should fix that,’ and somebody said, ‘It’s fine.’”

That, Haynes believes, is where the real magic lives.

Not in perfection — but in the human moments listeners feel, even if they don’t realize why.

To hear the full conversation, including Haynes demonstrating Allman Brothers–style harmonies and discussing his current tour, listen to the latest episode of No Guitar Is Safe wherever you get your podcasts.

Warren Haynes never imagined he would fill the shoes of his childhood hero Duane Allman by playing opposite Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers band.

Even after he was hired by Betts to play opposite him in his Dickey Betts Band, Haynes had no assumptions about making the sizable leap to the ABB.

“Well, it was intimidating because the Allman Brothers Band was always one of my favorite bands, and I had no expectations of that happening,” the guitarist tells Music Radar in a new interview.

But when it finally happened, he couldn’t have been better prepared.

“I had been playing with Dickey and his band for two or three years, and that really helped condition me for being in the Allman Brothers,” Haynes says. “By the time I joined the Allman Brothers, Dickey and I had been playing for three years, and writing songs together for three years, so we had that initiation period, so to speak, which made it a little easier.”

Haynes was about 27 when Betts called him to help perform backup vocals on his first solo project following the initial breakup of the Allman Brothers Band in 1987. That led to Haynes being hired as Betts’ guitarist for more session work that resulted in the band’s 1988 debut album, Pattern Disruptive. Haynes’ next project was co-writng the title track for Gregg Allman’s solo album Just Before the Bullets Fly.

So when the Allmans decided to regroup in 1989, Haynes had a leg up on the competition. Besides, he already knew how to play opposite Betts, with a fire equal to the older man’s, but in a style that was complementary to it.

“I had three years of standing next to Dickey Betts, in smaller venues,” he says.

What he didn’t expect was that he would be given the room to bring that style to the Allman Brothers Band. Far from wanting a Duane Allman clone to help them relive their glory days or copy the classic Allman–Betts guitar duels, the ABB needed a guitarist who would take them to the next stage in their development.

“They were great about allowing and encouraging everyone to bring their own personality to the music,” Haynes says. “From the very beginning, they never asked me to play more like Duane Allman, or less like Duane Allman. It was always, ‘Be yourself. Play like you.

“Play it however you want to do it,’ knowing that I had this reverence for Duane’s playing, and for the music in general, and that I wasn’t going to go too far away from the feeling and the spirit of the music. But I wanted to make it my own as well.”

Even on the old tunes, Haynes was given room to work his reinvention. Consider “Blue Sky,” the Dickey Betts cut from 1972’s Eat a Peach, one of the last cuts to feature Duane Allman. Unlike Allman, he approached his solo on the song with a slide and a Strat —— as in the performance shown below from the band's 1991 tour — something he says “was strange, because Duane," a devoted Les Paul player, "never played slide on it.

“But that was something that Dickey probably asked me to do for his band — or maybe it was my idea, I don’t know.”

Betts departed the ABB in 2000 as tensions rose to the breaking point, opening the door for Derek Trucks to take on his position after having filled in for Betts in 1999. The Allman Brothers Band hung it up for good in 2014 when Haynes and Trucks announced they were leaving to focus on their own projects.

Today, the Allman Brothers Band is never too far from Haynes heart. His new album, The Whisper Sessions — a stripped-back version of his 2024 studio album, A Million Voices Whisper — finds him paired up again with Trucks for a cover of the ABB hit “Melissa.” The duo also present a reworked version of “Real Real Love,” the unfinished Gregg Allman tune that Haynes brought to its completion for A Million Voices Whisper.

Trucks also appeared on that previous recording of “Real Real Love,” marking the first time the two guitarists made a studio album since the 2003 Allman Brothers Band album, Hittin’ the Note. Haynes told Guitar Player that upon finishing the song, he knew immediately he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense.”

The Whisper Sessions comes out September 12 on Fantasy and can be saved to your preferred streaming service ahead of time.

In related news, Haynes will front his group Gov’t Mule on their 30th anniversary co-headlining tour with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Visit Warren Haynes for dates and tickets.

“I'm the best unknown guitar player you've ever heard!" Les Dudek exclaims. While he may not be a household name, Dudek's blues-infused guitar playing is certainly familiar to many. Over a five-decade career, he's contributed guitar to recordings by artists like Steve Miller Band, Cher, Stevie Nicks, Boz Scaggs and the group that firmly established his six-string reputation, the Allman Brothers.

Dudek’s playing on the Allman Brothers staples “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” tends to overshadow anything else the now 72-year-old guitarist has done, including his own solo outings. His contribution to those two time-honored Dickey Betts cuts — both of which were highlights of the group's 1973 album, Brothers and Sisters — cannot be understated, since neither might have transpired if it hadn't been for Dudek.

“I had been invited down to Capricorn Sound one night when the Allman Brothers were cutting 'Ramblin’ Man,' ” Dudek tells Guitar Player, referring to the studio in Macon, Georgia where Brothers and Sisters was recorded. “I was in the control room when they were working it out. Periodically, Dickey would come up to me and ask what I thought about where this or that part of the song was going, so I gave him my suggestions.

"This kind of volleyed back and forth a few times before Dickey finally said, ‘Why don't you just come out here and play it with me?’ So I went out there and helped put on the wall of electric guitars. We put two low and two high guitar parts on it so that it had some padding for the main guitar vamp.”

With the backing track completed, Dudek and Betts began working on the lead guitar parts. At Dudek’s suggestion, a guitar harmony was added. “The song starts off with that cascading phrase, and then I come in with a harmony part,” he explains. “We did that a few times in the song and at start of the solo.

"Then I made the suggestion of putting on another layer above that and have the drums kind of kick us into it. Later it branched out into a two-part harmony: a lower and a higher octave. It's the same harmonies, but played in a different octave. Once that was done, Dickey put the slide part on for the final touch.”

Sometime later, Dudek received a call from Betts inviting him over to his house for dinner and instructing him to bring along his acoustic guitar. “While dinner was being cooked, Dickey showed me this rhythm part he had, what I would call the verse section of 'Jessica,' ” Dudek remembers. “And that's all he had. He had writer's block and didn't know where to go with it. He didn't have enough of it together that would allow us to go in and start developing it in the studio.

“So he got a little frustrated, but I stuck with it, and I came up with the bridge section that goes to the G chord. I said to Dickey, ‘Try this’ and showed him this little melody I had. As he was playing it, I said, ‘Take the melody all the way to the top.'

"So he went all the way to the top and said, ‘Now what?’ I said, ‘Stop.’ And he says, ‘Okay, now what?’

“I said, 'Now start over.’ ”

"And that's how it came out of the bridge section and back into the verse.

"Dickey lit up like a Christmas tree! We played it a few times, and he was like, 'Yes!' We finally got another part to add to it. So we took it into the studio and started working on it.”

While the recording session for “Ramblin’ Man” ran trouble free, the sessions for “Jessica” were problematic. “It took us about a week to cut that song,” Dudek says. “We just kept doing it every day until we finally got the one. In the middle of the week, Dickey and Gregg Allman also got into a verbal fight, which caused them to storm out of the studio, leaving us all sitting there going, ‘Now what?’

“At the start of the sessions, Dickey came up to me and said, ‘Look, you just played on 'Ramblin’ Man' and I really don't want the critics to think you're going to be in the band, so would you mind playing the acoustic guitar on this?’ I said, ‘No problem at all,' because I figured I helped co-write it and I'm going to get a credit.”

Nevertheless, Dudek’s songwriting contributions were never acknowledged when the song was released or at anytime after.

“Once we got 'Jessica' recorded, Dickey took me into the office of Phil Walden, the manager of the Allman Brothers and the president of Capricorn Records,” Dudek explains. “Dickey told him he didn’t know what the split should be or anything, but that I was to get some writer's royalties and writer's credit for helping him come up with the bridge section to the song. But it never happened.”

Dudek doesn’t recall many details about the guitars used on “Jessica,” only that he played “an acoustic guitar that was lying around at the studio.” He has a better memory of the gear used on “Ramblin’ Man.”

“It was my ’68 goldtop Les Paul, the one that was on my first album cover, with the black pickups,” he says. “It was a guitar that my mom and dad had got me when I was 15. Amp-wise, I used a 100-watt Marshall half stack. Dickey had a couple of half stacks in the studio, so I used one, and we each had a cabinet. And Dickey used his sunburst Gibson Les Paul, too.”

Dudek confirms that in the aftermath of Duane Allman’s tragic death on October 29, 1971, there was a lot of pressure placed on Betts, who became the group’s default leader. “It was a major blow and just took the wind out of the band,” Dudek recalls. “Dickey didn't know if the band was going to stay together or not. It was a really strange time because Duane had been gone only for a few months when I first came up there.

"Duane died at the end of October ‘71, and I was up there, around January, February of ’72. Dickey was already starting to look for players. He was going to put together his own band and continue on.

“Dickey basically wanted me to play in his band, and we were going to call it Great Southern. He already had that idea in his mind. But when Dickey finally started making moves to put it together, I think Gregg got a little bit annoyed by that."

As a result, Dudek says, Great Southern was put on hold, at least for the time being.

"The Allman Brothers had band meetings and finally decided to try to make another record, which turned out to be the Brothers and Sisters album. And so Dickey's band got put on the back burner. He did finally do it later, in 1974, but not with me. I had already moved to California by then.”

When Dickey Betts died on April 18, 2024, he left behind a long career that touched the lives of countless musicians. As his friends prepare to honor him with a memorial concert on February 28 in Macon, Georgia, one of those players has spoken about Betts’ influence on him: Warren Haynes.

Although he was introduced to the music world largely through his work as Betts’ Allman Brothers Band playing partner, Haynes was hired first to perform in the Dickey Betts Band, around 1987.

"Dickey gave me the biggest opportunity of my career,” Haynes tells the UCR Podcast. "He hired me in his band and I had no idea at that time that would lead to me joining the Allman Brothers. But it did, and in 1989, they asked me to join them when they reformed. That opened every door imaginable for me.”

Moreover, it allowed Haynes to make his mark as both an electric guitar player and a songwriter. His song “Soulshine,” from 1994’s Where It All Begins, is among the tunes he wrote or contributed to, and it remains one of the best-loved tracks from the group’s later catalog.

As Haynes has revealed, he was a longtime Allman Brothers Band fan when Betts enlisted him in the group. "When I first started — chronologically speaking — Hendrix and Clapton and Johnny Winter were the first three people I got turned on to,” he told Gibson.com's Backstage Pass in 2006. “That was the Cream era of Clapton. Then eventually, I heard the Allman Brothers and everybody else from that era that I stole something from,” he added with a laugh.

Betts was among those whose musical influence rubbed off on Haynes. The guitarist was particularly inspired by Betts’ vocal-like approach to lead playing, a quality that was especially apparent on instrumental works like "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Jessica" and the Betts Band cut "Duane's Tune," from 1988's Pattern Disruptive.

"He had that flowing melody thing, one note after another that all feels like you're singing along with the music," Haynes tells UCR. "His solos have that singing quality and that melodic ease that pulled the listener along.

“In turn, it turned into something that people looked at it as being part of the song. You know, the parts he played were so singable and hummable that even people who didn't play an instrument were singing along with his guitar solos."

Haynes would certainly appreciate that quality. As he told Rick Beato in December 2024, he views singing as a vital skill for guitarists. “I started singing first. And so all the guitar players that I became enamored with were either singers, or players like Santana that sounded like they were singing through their instrument.

“I loved B.B. King's voice before I cared about guitar. Freddie King I always say would be one of my favorite singers even if he didn't play guitar.”

Haynes’ fans were reminded of his deep connection to Betts and the Allman Brothers Band when he asked fellow ABB alumnus Derek Trucks to help him finish and record “Real Real Love,” a previously unreleased song by Gregg Allman, for his latest album, Million Voices Whisper. Released this past November, the album is dedicated to Betts, whose playing style informed Haynes’ own on the album,

"A lot of the reason that I dedicated this album to him, aside from the obvious, is that I felt like this music needed for me to play with a little more of his influence than I normally would," Haynes said. "So there are several songs where I'm definitely channeling Dickey intentionally."

Haynes will lead the pack of artists honoring the guitarist for the In Memory of Dickey Betts concert on February 28. The show will feature performances by Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Oteil Burbridge Jaimoe, Chuck Leavell, Devon Allman, Duane Betts, Charlie Starr, Jimmy Hall & Lamar Williams Jr. and many others.

Dickey Betts grew up listening to country, bluegrass and fiddle tunes, so most of his songs were born from acoustic seeds that sprouted into epic electric arrangements with the Allman Brothers Band. With that said, you can still rock classics like "Blue Sky" and "Ramblin’ Man" — as well as most Betts material — with nothing more than an acoustic guitar.

Betts, who died this past April 18, incorporated more fingerpicking in his acoustic work than in his electric, but — onstage, at least — he approached a dreadnought much like he did a Les Paul, attacking leads in a similar way and muscling the strings to achieve bends and vibrato. In the studio, however, Betts and his fellow Brothers used acoustic elements creatively. Here’s a closer look at a few choice cuts.

"Little Martha"

This acoustic instrumental in open E tuning (low to high, E B E G# B E) first appeared as a guitar duo on 1972’s Eat a Peach. Duane Allman wrote it and laid down the main part on a resonator shortly before his passing in late 1971. Betts overdubbed the harmony line on a flattop. Their synchronicity makes it sound like a single player at times. Leo Kottke described "Little Martha" as “possibly the most perfect guitar song ever written,” and his arrangement is perfect for a solo player. It’s even more fun to play it with a buddy, Dickey-and-Duane style.

"Midnight Rider"

Gregg Allman wrote "Midnight Rider," and Duane played acoustic on the studio version, while Betts played the lyrical electric lead. For a cool bluesy take that works well on a big box, check out Gregg’s solo version played in double Drop D (low to high, D A D G B D).

"Jessica" / "Revival"

Both are in the key of A and have acoustic intros. Betts played the primary electric part on his instrumental masterpiece, "Jessica," while Les Dudek, who also plays the second electric part, played the acoustic. It takes at least two players to do justice to "Jessica." Betts penned the hippie anthem "Revival" with its singalong chorus of “People can you feel it? Love is everywhere.” Duane played acoustic on the studio version. Acoustic guitar provides framework for the lovely leads that define "Jessica" as well as the extensive introduction on "Revival." That tune works well campfire-style if you simply jump in after the prelude. The “second intro” riff is sort of an elder sister to Jessica.

"Pony Boy"

Betts penned this acoustic closer from 1973’s Brothers & Sisters, and it’s a fine example of how he mixed things up in the studio to provide a different tonality. Summoning some Allman signatures after the tragic loss of Duane, he plucks a Dobro in open E tuning and incorporates some fine slide. "Pony Boy" also featured Tommy Talton sitting in on acoustic guitar.

"Seven Turns"

This Betts gem is the title track from the ABB’s 1990 comeback, which was the first to feature Warren Haynes on second guitar. It’s a major cowboy-style picker and strummer that rolls along simply, until the bridge solo takes a few minor twists and turns in Betts’ recognizable harmonic style. If you’re looking to sit down to strum and sing a Betts-based Allman Brothers tune with your friends, this is a great choice.

At age 25, Quinn Sullivan is already a music veteran. That’s what happens when you begin your career before you’re out of first grade. The singer/songwriter and guitarist has cemented his transition from child prodigy to mature adult performer with his new, fifth album, Salvation (Provogue/Mascot Label Group). The wide-ranging set touches a lot of musical bases, with riff-driven hard rockers reminiscent of classic radio rock, like Dark Love, rubbing shoulders with R&B falsetto groovers, like Once Upon a Lie.

“Musically, Salvation is truly where I’m at in my life, and it touches on topics of loss, trauma and love,” Sullivan says. “It’s a very personal album.”

Sullivan became nationally known when he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show at age six. Two years later, he met Buddy Guy backstage at a concert near his New Bedford, Massachusetts, home, and the blues legend invited him out to play the night’s last few songs.

“That night truly changed my life, both professionally and personally,” Sullivan says. His mentorship with Guy lasted a decade, as he often appeared with him and even recorded a solo on Guy’s 2008 album, Skin Deep.

“I’m forever grateful for Buddy’s support for my music,” Sullivan says. “His mentorship lasted about 10 years, but we have a friendship that is eternal.”

You started playing at age three and were on The Ellen DeGeneres Show when you were six. How the heck did that happen?

“My parents knew that I had a natural ear for music, which I was always around because of them. When I was three, I saw Dickey Betts at a blues festival in my hometown and was mesmerized. I had a First Act acoustic guitar that I brought everywhere, and a photographer snapped me strumming along. It ended up on the front of our local newspaper.

“My father, Terry, had been almost jokingly emailing TV show producers with some videos of me playing around town. The Ellen show producers got back to him almost immediately, and a month later my dad and I were flying to Los Angeles. I had never been on a plane before!

“Ellen was super-kind and gave me a Gibson ES-335, which was double my size. I still have it today and got it signed by B.B. King and Buddy Guy. It’s my own personal national treasure. The show aired about a week later and propelled me onto the scene nationally. People still come up to me and say they saw me on Ellen.”

Tell me about how you met Buddy at a concert in New Bedford.

“Some people we knew at the theater were aware that I wanted to meet Buddy, and they very graciously got us backstage for a meet and greet. Buddy was so kind and soft spoken. He had an American flag rugby shirt on, with a brown fedora, a gold Rolex with gold rings... He was the coolest person I had ever seen! He signed my Squier Stratocaster and asked me to play a few notes for him, then said, 'Be ready when I call you.'”

Can you point to a few things you learned from him?

“I learned so much musically from Buddy. The main thing was his showmanship – his way of commanding a crowd like no other. He can have the audience in the palm of his hand in less than a second, then go into a blistering solo that just knocks everyone out. I try to bring that fire into my live shows.

“Another valuable lesson I’ve learned from Buddy is to put 100 percent of your heart and soul into every performance, whether you’re playing in front of 10 people or 10,000, because you never know who’s watching. I sometimes have to remind myself of that when I’m gearing up to play for a room of 50 to 60 people. His voice echoes in my brain and helps immensely in those situations.”

Was there a specific point where music transitioned from something that a parent pushed you toward to being your own thing?

“I was lucky in that I was never pushed into anything by my parents, although they certainly lifted me up and allowed me to follow my dreams. I think exposing children to music at a young age has nothing but positive outcomes, but parents come up to me and ask for advice on how to get their child into playing an instrument and I always say never force him or her to do anything. It’ll never be natural if they don’t seek it out themselves.

“I think it started becoming my own thing at around 11 or 12. I put out my first album at that age and was touring heavily, mostly in the summer and on school vacations. I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but I have had that feeling for as long as I can remember. Being an artist is something that I feel is a need for me as a human being. It’s the best way I know how to express myself.

The new album covers a lot of ground, including R&B and rock. You do a great cover of the Beatles’ Dear Prudence. I love the arrangement, which adds a guitar coda that makes it very much yours.

“Thank you! I wouldn’t be a musician if it wasn’t for the Beatles. They have by far had the biggest impact on me musically. I just love how they never let anyone define them. They changed with the times and pushed the boundaries in the studio and did things that hadn’t been done before. I still find new things about songs I’ve listened to since I was three. Every time I’m in the studio, I think about how they would approach things.”

Who are some of your other primary guitar and musical influences?

”There are so many guitar influences, but if I had to narrow it down to a few, I’d say Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, Carlos Santana and David Gilmour. They shaped guitar playing for me, and they all have one thing in common: They play from their heart to make every note count. I am a fan of guitarists who tell a story with their playing that can move you emotionally.

”All of them do that for me, and I listen to them every day. I’ve been lucky enough to meet, hang and play with all of them, except Gilmour, who’s still on my bucket list. I’m also influenced by modern music, like Tame Impala and Post Malone, and even Harry Styles. I’m a big fan of their albums and am influenced by their songwriting.

“Recently, I’ve been getting into Middle Eastern, African and Indian music, via Derek Trucks. I’ve heard him talk about how much those styles have influenced his approach to playing the guitar, so I’ve been digging into some of the people he’s mentioned, like Ali Akbar Khan, D’Gary and Bismillah Khan. It’s such beautiful music.

“I’m also a fan of soul singers like Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, Sly Stone and, of course, Susan Tedeschi, who is the best singer I’ve ever witnessed live. My influences keep evolving and changing. I’m always keeping my ear open for new music and discovering new artists every day that I add to my arsenal of inspiration.”

Salvation feels like a very emotional album. Tell me about the recording process.

“Thanks. This was a very therapeutic album to make. It touches on loss, trauma and love. I lost my mother unexpectedly a year and a half ago, so this album was made while grieving this unimaginable loss. I felt her strength pushing me through. I probably wouldn’t have been able to make an album at that time if it wasn’t for the strength of my mother carrying me through the entire process.

“I called the album Salvation because that word echoes what I’m going through right now: being saved by the love and the people around you, through the pain of loss and the trauma that comes along with that. That feeling speaks in all of the songs, touching on several topics.

“I recorded it in Minneapolis with producer/mixer John Fields and wrote the album with John and songwriter Kevin Bowe. My live band is on two tracks, but we used session musicians for most of the album. I’m the only guitar player and played bass on some of the tracks too, which is a first for me.”

What gear did you use?

“The electrics were Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters, Gibson Les Pauls and SGs, and a PRS Silver Sky. My acoustic was a Martin Eric Clapton signature 00-28. For amps, I used a Fender Deluxe Reverb and a Vibrolux Reverb. The pedals were a Vemuram Jan Ray [boost overdrive] and Myriad Fuzz, an Ibanez Tube Screamer, a Fulltone Octafuzz, and Strymon Lex and Flint pedals.”

Tell me about a few of the songs on the album, starting with Don’t Wanna Die Today, which has a great guitar tone, and two others that are special to you.

“I was inspired by the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, and the groove to Don’t Wanna Die Today began with that album in mind. I was also going for that Wheels of Fire Cream sound with my guitar. I played a Gibson SG ’61 reissue. I wanted it to sound like the ’60s, and I have to give credit to John for capturing that sound.

“Once Upon a Lie is one of my personal favorites. The inspiration came from the school of soul music. I had the initial riff for years but never really touched it until I was in the studio and found the old voice memo on my phone. I’ve always loved singing in falsetto, and this song just felt like the right song to do it. Lyrically, it’s about the feeling of being lied to by someone you love, which is about the worst feeling. It’s about being tired of being lied to and moving on with your life.

“The third song I’ll mention is Salvation. I wanted a song that paid homage to Jimi Hendrix, with some of that fire, but without copying Hendrix, because let’s face it, nobody can do what Jimi did. Michael Bland plays on it, and he’s one of the greatest drummers alive. He played with Prince for a long time, so he put his vibe on the track, which I think really lifts it. I’m excited for people to hear Salvation and take on their own meanings to the songs.”

Is it fair to say that you started as a blues guy and keep expanding while staying rooted there?

“You know, I haven’t ever felt like a blues guy, despite being rooted in it and having a mentor who is the genre’s biggest star. I have a major love for blues, which I think is the purest music ever, but it’s not necessarily the genre I gravitate toward when working on my own music. I’m influenced by everything: soul, rock, Latin, Indian, hip-hop rhythms and some pop.

“I’m a singer/songwriter and guitar player who draws inspiration from a lot of styles and mixes them all into my music, which leans toward rock and soul. I never want to be defined by one genre because I never want to have a lid on my creativity.

“A lot of people have looked at me as some sort of ’savior of the blues’. That’s certainly not a one-person job, and we have to look more at how we can keep that music alive in a way that speaks to young people. We have to push it forward but not be stuck in the past.

“There’s a lot of people who expect players like me to stay rooted in one area, because of their own nostalgia. But I have to be my own artist, and that’s the place I’m moving toward now in my career.”

With the passing of Allman Brothers Band great Dickey Betts in April, at the age of 80, the rock world lost one of its greatest, and most idiosyncratic, guitar heroes.

It was Betts who took the helm of the group following the tragic death of electric guitar dynamo Duane Allman in 1971, serving for years afterward as the band's sole guitarist.

Though he did so with incredible creative and commercial success, leading the Allman Brothers in the wake of Duane Allman's passing took a heavy toll on Betts, emotionally and musically.

Examining the tumultuous period for the band in his book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s – an excerpt of which features in the new issue of Guitar Player – Allman Brothers Band biographer Alan Paul recounts how Betts wrestled with his newfound musical responsibilities.

“It was difficult to suddenly have to play slide,” Betts said. “I’ve always enjoyed playing acoustic slide, but I never cared much for playing electric slide and I hated having to play Duane’s parts. It was uncomfortable, but if we were going to play those songs, then I had to play them.”

Faithfulness to the band's more slide-heavy side – perhaps best encapsulated in Statesboro Blues, the opening track on the band's live classic, At Fillmore East – aside, Betts nonetheless also led the group into country territory at times following Duane's death, penning some of their most beloved tunes, among them the instrumental Jessica and the immortal Ramblin' Man, in that vein.

As Paul recounts in Brothers and Sisters, Betts was unsure of taking the band in that more country-flavored direction – with Ramblin' Man in particular – but the band's co-leader, the late Gregg Allman, was enthusiastic about the tune.

“Hell,” Allman said, “that song cooked.”

To read the full Guitar Player salute to Betts, pick up a copy of the new issue of the mag at Magazines Direct. Alan Paul's Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s can also be purchased now.

In honor of Dickey Betts, who died at the age of 80 on April 18 2024, we have been leafing through the Guitar Player archives to unearth some of his best interviews. The following is an interview that took place in 2019.

“I’ve definitely lived a dangerous life,” admits guitar legend Dickey Betts, “but not really that much different than a lot of other rock and rollers.”

Case in point: Of the six original members of the legendary Allman Brothers Band, only Betts and former drummer Jaimoe Johanson are still around to tell the tale. Guitarist Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971, at just 24 years of age. Bass player Berry Oakley suffered the same fate a year later, close to the same location. Drummer Butch Trucks shot himself in 2017 and Gregg Allman, the band’s charismatic singer and keyboardist, succumbed to liver cancer after decades of hard living, just four months after Trucks’ passing.

Last year, Betts suffered a stroke, only to find himself hospitalized again a month later following a serious home accident. Just prior to those two incidents, on July 21, 2018, he’d recorded a live show at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York City. 

The concert featured Betts backed by bandmates bass player Pedro Arevalo, keyboardist Mike Kach and, in a nod to the Allman Brothers, two drummers – Steve Camilleri and Frankie Lombardi – plus slide guitarist Damon Fowler and Betts’ son, Duane. 

Even Gregg Allman’s son Devon made an emotional guest appearance, performing one of his father’s signature compositions, “Midnight Rider”. One year later, the performance is now available on DVD as Ramblin’ Man: Live at the St. George Theatre (BMG), with abbreviated audio versions available on CD and vinyl.

Betts, who is still recovering, took some time to speak about the new release and his past with the Allman Brothers Band.

How are you feeling?

“Well, I’m still a little shook up from the accident. I was trying give my dog, who’s a big Lab, a bath, when she suddenly charged me. While I was holding on to her, she rammed me right into these brick steps, which cracked the vertebrae in my neck and cracked my head open. 

“I had to have brain surgery to stop the bleeding, and it was quite an ordeal. I was in a coma for about six days. I’m fully recovered now, but I’ve gained a lot of weight from just laying around, and my chops, of course, are real awkward. Hopefully, I’ll be doing some dates next summer.”

For years, you’ve been known for your iconic ’57 Les Paul Goldtop. The new live album shows you using an unusual SG-style Gibson model that you’ve been spotted with before, with a pickup selector on the upper bout and an asymmetric shape.

“The guitar is one that I personally designed for Gibson. It’s a cross between an SG and a Les Paul, and the controls are more user friendly than on an SG. It’s also got a shorter neck, more like a Les Paul. At first glance it looks like an SG, but when you really look, it’s totally different. That night I was also using Marshall amps with Electro-Voice speakers.”

Your son, Duane, has been playing with you for a long time, going back to your days with your band Great Southern. When you’re both playing Allman Brothers’ songs, is the dynamic similar to when you played with Duane Allman?

“Nobody plays like Duane Allman. He was a real individualist and had a very unique style. As far as slide playing goes, I’d say Derek Trucks plays slide like Duane Allman more than anybody.”

Your playing is a mix of country, blues, rock and even jazz. What were your primary guitar influences?

“Well, my dad played fiddle and my uncles played both fiddles and guitars, and we would have jam sessions at the house. That influenced my playing quite a bit. Plus, my mom always had the radio tuned to the country music stations, so that influenced me.”

Could you pick up WSM and The Grand Ole Opry?

“Yeah, we would all gather around the radio every Saturday night. Later on, there was this Texas station we could get, and they had Wolfman Jack, who played James Brown and all those rhythm-and-blues kinds of things.”

At what age did you start playing the guitar seriously?

“Probably what would be considered late by most musicians - around 16. I studied Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Albert King. I also hung around this western-swing guitar player that was so, so good. He’s the one who influenced me, and that’s how I really learned to play.”

Would you also count Bob Wills as an influence?

“I didn’t listen to Bob Wills that much, but I loved his band and their twin guitars. That’s how I was first exposed to twin-guitar harmony. I don’t read music, so I just listen to people and learn things from them.”

There’s a brand-new four-CD box set of the Allman Brothers Band from the 1971 Fillmore West shows [Fillmore West 1971]. Did you see any difference between that audience and the one at the East Coast Fillmore dates?

“There was definitely a noticeable difference between those two cities, San Francisco and New York. The West Coast audiences were looser, more like a having fun kind of audience. Maybe it was the LSD that was going around. In New York, they were pretty rowdy. Not in a mean way, just a “raise hell” kind of rowdy.”

It’s said that, unlike some live albums, where parts were recut in the studio, At Fillmore East is presented intact.

“That’s exactly right. The vocals, the guitar solos...everything. It is truly a live album. We did some editing, and [producer] Tom Dowd took out the horns. [At Dowd’s request, saxophonist Rudolph “Juicy” Carter and another unknown horn player were cut from the lineup during the first show because their horns were leaking into the other instruments’ mics]. 

“My new live album is kind of reminiscent of the Fillmore album – not comparing it to the sound, of course, but the cover has that same dark look.”

A photo inside At the Fillmore shows you playing a Les Paul. Did you use any other guitars at those dates?

“I think a [Gibson ES-] 335 and SGs, on and off. I can’t remember exactly. And I might have used a wah pedal on some songs.”

After Duane died, you had the added responsibility of not only playing your guitar parts but also having to replicate his slide playing.

“You know, to this day, I’m not crazy about playing electric slide because of that. I did play some slide before Duane and I started working together but didn’t play very well. But after he got killed, I had to take over. Songs like “Statesboro Blues” and some of the others would have sounded silly without it.”

Did his death put pressure on you to assume a leadership role in the band?

“I actually never wanted to be the leader, and neither did Duane. We were a pretty loose outfit, and didn’t have a real regimented hierarchy kind of thing. If one guy had a grudge or a problem with the rest of the guys, we’d get together and talk about it. That’s how we kept things together.”

Your influences range from country and rock to jazz. When I hear the melody to “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” it strikes me as having a strong jazz influence. Was it inspired at all by Miles Davis?

“I’d say part of it could have come from listening to Miles Davis. We used to listen to guys like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Pharoah Sanders and Charlie Parker. So yeah, I see the Miles Davis connection.”

When you were planning on recording your first vocal for “Blue Sky,” did you feel confident about yourself as a singer, or were you considering letting Gregg do it?

“I never liked to sing that much. I mean, I do nowadays, but back then I always thought the main reason I was doing some singing onstage was to give Gregg a rest. So I didn’t start singing because of “Blue Sky.” It was just the first song that people noticed because it was the first time I did it on a record.”

What’s the story behind “Ramblin’ Man”?

“Actually, it was the Hank Williams song with the same title that I had in mind. Of course, his was a real mournful song, done in a minor key. I had a friend who was an old cowboy, and when he’d see me, he’d say, “Whatcha been doing? Playing your music and doing the best you can?” 

“It just struck me as funny, so I just put those two lines together and started writing the song. Sometimes things like that just come together, like on a whim or like a piece of magic, and it all falls into place. I wrote that song on paper in just five minutes, like I was writing a letter to my girlfriend.”

After your association with the Allman Brothers ended in 2000, was there ever any thought of a reconciliation?

“I said, 'Let’s get back together and do a farewell tour,' but Butch didn’t want to do it. I’m still really sorry they ended things the way they did. I’m very proud though that the Allman Brothers music still stands on its own, and there’s a new generation with my son, Duane, Gregg’s son Devon and Berry Oaklely’s son keeping it alive. I’m just going to try to stay out of harm’s way and hope to be around for at least a few more years.”

When Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971, it seemed as if the Allman Brothers Band were history. In fact, their greatest days still lay ahead of them.

Duane’s co-guitarist, Dickey Betts, stepped into the breach and took control. First he rallied the group to tour in support of 1972’s Eat a Peach, the follow-up to At Fillmore East, the 1971 double live album that brought the Allman Brothers the commercial and critical acclaim they so deserved. He then led them to create what would become their commercial breakthrough: the 1973 studio album Brothers and Sisters.

Supported by such stellar Betts compositions as “Jessica” and the chart-topping hit “Ramblin’ Man,” Brothers and Sisters went on to sell seven million copies and established the Allmans as one of the decade’s biggest groups.

But the album’s wildly successful infusion of Betts’ country-rock also helped to pave the way for the success of other southern rock bands, like Lynyrd Skynyrd, who made their record debut that same year.

Without a doubt, the Allman Brothers dominated this era of American culture, from their massive shows with the Grateful Dead (their Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in July ’73 was attended by some 600,000 fans) to their support for Jimmy Carter that helped elect him to the presidency in 1976. Betts and keyboardist/guitarist Gregg Allman also enjoyed solo success when their respective 1974 albums – Highway Call and The Gregg Allman Tour – landed in the Top 20.

But the good times were marred by tragedy, from the death of bassist Berry Oakley shortly after the band began recording Brothers and Sisters, to the drug-fueled lifestyle that followed. The Allman Brothers Band dissolved in 1976, ending the first chapter in their long run.

This era in the Allman Brothers Band’s history comes to vivid life in Alan Paul’s new book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s. Out this July 25 from St. Martin’s Press, the book is the much-anticipated follow-up to Alan’s New York Times bestseller, One Way Out: The Inside Story of the Allman Brothers Band, the definitive biography of the celebrated group.

In this exclusive excerpt from Brothers and Sisters, we present an inside look at the group’s recording session for “Ramblin’ Man.” The action picks up shortly after the group hires keyboardist Chuck Leavell, fresh from his sessions for Gregg’s solo debut, Laid Back, and brings in guitarist Les Dudek to assist Betts.

The recording of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man”

Chuck Leavell’s musical imprint is unmistakable on the first two tracks the band recorded, Gregg’s “Wasted Words” and Betts’ “Ramblin’ Man.” He added a bounce that elevated “Wasted Words,” undergirding Betts’ slide guitar, which was less fluid and expansive than Duane’s and more attuned to playing a defined melodic part.

Gregg had recorded a demo of “Wasted Words” in Los Angeles on August 9, with Johnny Winter on guitar and Buddy Miles on drums. Betts’ slide line sounds like it was inspired by what Winter had played on the demo.

The lyrics of the song are a brutal kiss-off to Gregg’s first wife, Shelly Winters (not the actress), including his own admission of failure:

Well, I ain’t no saint and you sure as hell ain’t no savior…. Don’t ask me to be mister clean, baby, I don’t know how.

This was followed by a brutal line:

Your wasted words, so absurd / Are you really Satan, yes or no?

The song kicked off the sessions with swagger, which continued in a totally different vein with “Ramblin’ Man.” The two songs, one an Allman rock blues, the other a Betts country rocker, are entirely different but sonically linked by Leavell’s honky-tonk bravado.

His sound is singular, even as you hear elements of the musicians the pianist cites as his prime inspirations: Ray Charles, Nicky Hopkins, Dr. John, Leon Russell and Elton John. He wasn’t particularly influenced by country music, but his instincts naturally took him to some traditional playing on “Ramblin’ Man,” bringing to the song a genuine country swing.

“I just followed my ear and played what seemed appropriate,” Leavell said.

“Ramblin’ Man” was different from anything the band had ever recorded before. The only thing close was “Blue Sky,” another major-key song with a country bounce. But “Blue Sky” wasn’t all that country, as Betts would note. “It was more of that country/rock thing that was popular at that time. It could have been done by Poco or the Dead.”

“Ramblin’ Man” was much closer to being an actual country tune. Betts said the Hank Williams song of the same name inspired his initial idea, with Dickey’s lyrics adapting Williams’ “when the Lord made me, He made a ramblin’ man.”

Betts originally thought he’d offer it to a country artist but was surprised to learn that he was the only guy in the band who thought it was too country for the Allman Brothers Band to record. “I was going to show it to Hank Williams Jr. and ask if he wanted to cut it,” he said.

Gregg had no issues adding the song and broadening the band’s range. “Hell, that song cooked,” he said. He was glad the band recorded it and that Dickey didn’t save it for a solo album, as he had suggested he might do.

Decades later, after years of conflict with Betts, Trucks would scoff at the song, alluding to Dickey’s initial inclination to give it to a country artist, by saying the band thought they were “recording it as a demo for Merle Haggard or someone.” But all indications are that the song was always intended to be an Allman Brothers release and that the group almost immediately knew that they had hit on something beautifully different.

“I can’t remember any discussion whatsoever about ‘Ramblin’ Man’ being too country to include,” said Leavell. “I certainly didn’t feel that way. I thought it was a marker of how great of a band it was that you could do a song like ‘Melissa’ followed by ‘Liz Reed’ followed by ‘One Way Out’ – and now Dickey was pushing that out to country rock.”

As much of a departure as it was, “Ramblin’ Man” was not a new song. Betts had been working on it for a few years and had played an embryonic version for Duane. He can be heard working through the song on The Gatlinburg Tapes, a bootleg of the band jamming in April 1971 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, during Eat a Peach songwriting sessions.

At that stage, the lyrics refer to a “ramblin’ country man,” but the chords, structure and concept are all in place. He finished writing the song about a year later in the kitchen of the Big House, the Allman Brothers’ communal home at 2321 Vineville Avenue (which now houses the Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House). He had written “Blue Sky” in the living room.

Betts said that he carried the germ of the idea around in his head for several years. Before the Allman Brothers Band’s formation, whenever he didn’t have a place to sleep, he’d crash at the Sarasota apartment of his friend Kenny Hartwick, whom he described as “a friendly, hayseed cowboy kind of guy who built fences and liked to answer his own questions before you had a chance.”

“One day,” Betts told writer Marc Myers, “he asked me how I was doing with my music and said, ‘I bet you’re just tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best you can.’ I liked how that sounded and carried the line around in my head for about three years. Except for Kenny’s line, the rest of the lyrics were autobiographical.

“When I was a kid, my dad was in construction and used to move the family back and forth between central Florida’s east and west coasts. I’d go to one school for a year and another the next. I had two sets of friends and spent a lot of time in the back of a Greyhound bus. Ramblin’ was in my blood.”

On the final version, Les Dudek, who had been jamming with the group and thought he might be hired as Duane’s replacement, plays sterling guitar harmonies with Betts, making a huge contribution to the song’s success.

The two men had worked out all the parts together, but then Betts decided to play them all himself, cutting multiple tracks. Dudek was in the control room watching as Betts repeatedly came in and asked his opinion about various takes, before finally just saying, “Why don’t you just come out and play?” Dudek said they played their harmonies live, with Oakley “staring a hole” through him. The sight of another guitarist playing with Betts seemed to hit Oakley hard. “That was very intense and heavy,” Dudek said.

Brothers and Sisters producer Johnny Sandlin agreed that the entire band knew they had something special the moment Dudek and Betts finished their guitar parts. “We all knew it was really good,” he said. “The guitar playing is just amazing.”

As Trucks said, “Les added a lot to ‘Ramblin’ Man.’ He was a good, slick player and he and Dickey worked well together.”

In addition to its obvious country influences, “Ramblin’ Man” also shows Betts’ love of jazz big bands. For the coda, he wanted an orchestral approach with a huge sound. The song’s instrumental section had four guitars playing two different harmonies an octave apart and Betts’s final overdub, which was a slide guitar line.

“I added that long instrumental ending in the studio to try and make it sound more like an Allman Brothers song,” said Betts.

Knowing that the song needed a strong intro to “grab the listener,” Betts turned toward the string band music he played with his family as a boy in Florida. He wrote a fiddle-style major pentatonic guitar line, which he then worked out as a call and response with Leavell.

The pianist’s “Ramblin’ Man” contributions and his bouncy, swinging work that elevated the blues structure of “Wasted Words” illustrate the brilliant decision to add Leavell instead of replacing Duane with another guitarist. His role at the heart of the music would only grow over the rest of the album sessions.

“It was just a happy accident – certainly nothing that was by design,” said Leavell. “Nobody said, ‘Let’s get a piano guy!’ It happened by osmosis, more or less out of the blue from an unexpected direction, which is maybe why it wound up working as it did.”

Even as the recording sessions were going well, the band remained concerned about Oakley and his drinking. Sandlin said that many of the initial sessions had to wrap up early because Berry became too inebriated to continue. The producer said that he played bass as the band learned “Ramblin’ Man” because Oakley hadn’t shown up and that the band even questioned whether Oakley “would be able to be on the album at all.”

They were all aware without openly discussing it that the first anniversary of Duane’s death was approaching. Heaviness hung in the air, particularly around Oakley. Still, his playing on “Wasted Words” and “Ramblin’ Man” was excellent, and there was hope that he was coming out of the year-long depression. Oakley was particularly buoyed by Leavell’s arrival. “He started playing his ass off again after Chuck joined,” said Jaimoe. “It was like he saw the light and the old Berry was back.”

An enthused Oakley went out of his way to make the new member feel at home. “Berry and Jaimoe were the first ones to really welcome me into the band,” said Leavell. “Berry would put his arm around me, check on me, make sure I felt comfortable. He was very keyed into the dynamics of being the new guy and smoothing over that transition. He was also just the coolest guy.”

Harmonica player and frequent ABB musician Thom Doucette was at the first rehearsal the band had after Duane’s death. There to support his friends and maybe to be a part of the new band, he sensed heavy tension between Gregg and Dickey over who was in charge the moment he walked into the room. It was a feeling that Oakley shared, Doucette said.

“Berry and I looked at each other and understood what the other was thinking,” said Doucette. “What was is now over. It’s gone. It was just too weird. With Duane around, the Dickey/Gregg rivalry was never an issue, but without him, it was inevitable.”

With two songs in the can, the group played live for the first time after a nearly two-month hiatus on November 2, flying to New York for a short set at Hofstra University, as part of Don Kirshner’s In Concert TV show, which also featured Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chuck Berry and Poco.

They debuted not only “Ramblin’ Man” but also their new lineup, back to six pieces and featuring Leavell. The pianist was thrilled to finally be onstage as a member of the Allman Brothers Band and was particularly keyed into Oakley’s distinctive playing.

“Berry was the most unique bass player I had ever played with,” said Leavell. “Rather than holding down the bottom end, he was very adventurous, constantly listening to the other instruments and popping out with great melodies. He was there to support anyone’s improvisation. I could feel Berry following me when I started a melody and it was just fantastic. He also had the most powerful rig and the coolest bass sound; you could feel it inside.”

While the characteristics of Oakley’s playing were apparent in the studio, Leavell said that they were especially evident onstage, where he drove the band. Leavell would only perform in concert with Oakley that one time.

Just nine days later, on November 11, 1972 – one year and 13 days after Duane’s crash – Oakley, too, was killed in a motorcycle accident when he sideswiped a city bus, less than a quarter mile away from Duane’s crash site. Like Duane, Oakley was just 24 years old when he died.

Despite everyone’s acute knowledge of and concerns over Berry’s struggles, his death jolted the band. As they pondered their next moves, they immediately canceled two shows with the Grateful Dead, which would have represented their first official billing together since February 1970.

“We had finally gotten some good positive energy going again,” said Trucks. “The dynamic had turned with Chuck. Dickey was writing and singing his ass off. Everything felt like it was moving in the right direction for the first time since Duane’s death and then, bam, we were right back in it again.”

The band once again stood at a seemingly unthinkable crossroads. Not only had they lost two of the original six band members in one year, but they were essentially missing their corporate board. Duane and Berry were the group’s undisputed leaders, a general and his colonel, the two everyone else looked to for direction. “Duane had the vision and Berry got it done,” said Doucette. “They were so close.”

“Duane was very outspoken and Berry was a lot easier to deal with,” Jaimoe said. “You couldn’t talk Duane out of anything once he made his mind up. He was just so intense. Berry was more the voice of reason, a bit more diplomatic. In fact, Berry Oakley was the brains behind the Allman Brothers Band. He knew enough about how to do business, and he knew how to deal with people. Duane didn’t have Berry’s patience.”

Oakley’s loss left everyone in and around the band reeling. Gregg was in New York, on his way to Jamaica with his new girlfriend, Janice Blair, when he got word of Oakley’s death from Carolyn Brown, Walden’s secretary.

“She called me and said, ‘Honey, if I was you, I’d go right on to Jamaica. You don’t need this, not again,’” Gregg recalled. He did not attend Oakley’s funeral, held at Macon’s St. Joseph Catholic Church on November 15. The remaining band played a desultory set of music, with Joe Dan Petty on bass.

“Berry’s death fucked me up the way Duane’s death did to him,” said Jaimoe. “Berry was my man. I got high on smack just to go to his funeral. Later that night, I nodded out in my car.”

Sleeping at a red light in downtown Macon, Jaimoe was rescued by a friend who happened to see him, ran to the car, and drove Jaimoe home to the Big House. It was a reflection of how deeply impacted the entire group was by this second tragic death.

“It was just like when Duane died,” said Sandlin. “Suddenly you’re just going through the motions of daily life. I really didn’t know how much more any of us could deal with. At that time, at our age, we didn’t know how to grieve properly. Most of us had not lost many people yet.”

“It was so hard to get into anything after that second loss,” Gregg said. “I even caught myself thinking that it’s narrowing down, that maybe I’m next.”

From Brothers and Sisters by Alan Paul. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

• Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s is available now from Amazon.

The 1970s constitute classic rock’s grittiest and perhaps most prized decade. With the dawn of 2020, it also became a decade full of half-century milestones, with 1973 the current epoch du jour. In addition to herculean releases like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and the Who’s Quadrophenia, the Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters album ascended the charts, despite the band’s considerable personnel challenges.

With the group still reeling from the tragic loss of bassist Berry Oakley during the recording process – his demise was eerily reminiscent of guitarist Duane Allman’s monumental passing only one year earlier – guitarist Dickey Betts took the reins and led the band into what would be its most commercially successful era.

The band recorded the album’s tracks between October and December 1972, with the help of Chuck Leavell on piano and Oakley’s replacement, LaMar Williams, on bass, as well as session guitarists Les Dudek and Tommy Talton.

Released in August 1973 on Capricorn Records, Brothers and Sisters went on to sell more than seven million copies, making it the ABB’s all-time best-selling album. At this juncture, Betts assumed an unofficial leadership role and wrote more than half the songs on Brothers and Sisters. In doing so, the guitarist-vocalist augmented the band’s groundbreaking amalgamation of rock, blues and jazz with country music elements, most notably on songs like the Dobro-driven “Pony Boy” and the autobiographical “Ramblin’ Man.” The latter validated the shift as “Ramblin’ Man” would go on to reach number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and become a beloved southern rock anthem.

Alongside the success of “Ramblin’ Man,” which would be the last song Berry Oakley would record with the band, Brothers and Sisters included two more future staples composed by Betts. Contrary to the emerging country influence was a more Brothers-like blues-rock vibe in “Southbound” and the commemorative instrumental “Jessica.” The latter was an homage to Django Reinhardt – one of Dickey’s idols – as much as it was a loving tribute to his daughter, for whom the song is named.

Despite losing two founding members, the Allman Brothers Band prevailed with Brothers and Sisters, while Betts furthered his own legend. In this lesson, we’ll investigate some of Dickey’s signature playing approaches on the album – including some that may fall under the radar – starting with a look at “Ramblin’ Man.”

Take note: “Ramblin’ Man” was recorded in standard pitch and played as if it were in the key of G, but a tape machine function called varispeed was deliberately used in the mastering process to speed up the song a little, causing it to be heard a half step higher, in the concert key of A flat.

Sometimes all it takes is a modest call-and-response hook to sear a song’s identity into the hearts of millions, and “Ramblin’ Man” does just that. Ex. 1 is a two-bar lick inspired by Dickey’s eloquence in the track’s opening moments.

The gold here is his use of the six-note G major hexatonic scale (G, A, B, C, D, E). The major hexatonic excludes the 7th degree (F#) of the conventional seven-note (heptatonic) G major scale (G, A, B, C, D, E, F#), and it fuels much of what Dickey plays throughout his melodic and soloistic performance on this song as well as many others.

Before we inspect any more lead-playing action, it’s important to acknowledge the rock-solid rhythm playing of Dudek. On “Ramblin’ Man,” the guest sideman lays down, on a clean electric guitar, a bed of crisply articulated chords for Betts and the band to play along with throughout the arrangement, much as he does with acoustic guitar on “Jessica.”

Stationed mostly on the D-G-B string group, Dudek plays close-voiced triads with an emphasis on beats 2 and 4 – what are known as the backbeats – and peppers them with a staccato attack on the following upbeat.

Ex. 2 similarly presents a condensed version of the chords played throughout the song’s verse and chorus sections. With the exception of the root-position Em shape played on the top three strings, these voice-led triads are evenly split between pairs of 1st- and 2nd-inversion voicings: G/B and F/A, and C/G and D/A, respectively.

Betts’ soloing style is characterized not only by his copious use of the major hexatonic scale but also by his tastefully poised melodic phrasing.

Looking at Ex. 3, a reworking of what the guitarist plays at the beginning of his “Ramblin’ Man” solo, you can see two key elements on display.

First is the use of space in the form of staccato quarter notes, which serve to punctuate the eighth-note rhythms nicely.

Second is the use of legato articulations, such as string bends, hammer-ons and pull-offs, which function like “vowels” that break up and smooth out the picking while still clearly conveying the eighth-note rhythms.

Bars 3 and 4 demonstrate another signature Betts move, with the use of descending and ascending whole-step finger slides on the G string that playfully ricochet while also ping-ponging with picked notes on the B and high E strings, all while targeting the tones of the underlying G chord – G, B and D.

Dickey employs these and other techniques in endlessly fresh ways with a characteristically lyrical approach to arpeggio-based soloing that never sounds contrived.

Another hallmark of Betts’ phrasing style is his penchant for dramatic rhythmic shifting and parallel modulation.

Ex. 4 is modeled after a moment in “Jessica” where the band completes the song’s third cycle through the head melody. Here, the guitarist throttles back the vibrant momentum of the A major hexatonic (A, B, C# , D, E, F# ) two-part harmony licks that are played with a straight-eighths feel by “downshifting” to quarter-note triplets.

Following Leavell’s brilliantly melodic piano solo over Dudek’s locomotive acoustic rhythm in “Jessica,” Betts once again transforms the streaming-eighth-notes rhythmic feel, this time while also transmuting the tonality, with a climatic, syncopated ensemble riff that’s an ascending line based on the parallel A Dorian mode (A, B, C, D, E, F# , G), which informs Ex. 5.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dickey’s soloing style and sound, and you are starting to develop an overall assessment of his playing and tonal choices based on what’s been laid out so far, hold the phone. The guitarist’s improvising prowess does not solely make use of subdued overdrive tones as he expertly wields major-based melodic devices.

Consider “Southbound,” a funky uptempo Memphis soul-flavored jam song based on a I - IV - V 12-bar blues progression in the key of C, made up of all dominant 7th chords (I: C7, IV: F7, V: G7). Betts reels you in from the track’s opening lick, which is based on the C minor pentatonic scale (C, Eb, F, G, Bb), by sporting a comparatively pronounced increase in gain, with an upward tick in the mids to spice up his infamous middle-pickup setting on a humbucker-equipped Les Paul plugged into a 100-watt Marshall stack.

Ex. 6 does something similar, offering a taste of the tension created by playing the minor 3rd, Eb, over the major 3rd, E, that lives in the underlying C7 chord (C, E, G, Bb), which, in “Southbound,” the band chromatically ascends to from Bb7 (Bb7 - B7 - C7).

Dickey’s two solos in “Southbound” also highlight a few more of the guitarist’s celebrated moves, such as his use of call-and-response phrasing, with which he crafts catchy, unforgettable hooks.

Ex. 7 is inspired by a salvo in his first solo, where he digs in with a short motif over C7, again using notes from C minor pentatonic.

Based on the same scale, Ex. 8 is modeled after a dense 16th-note phrase Dickey plays over two bars of C7 a little later.

Notice the way the six-note pattern repeats, producing a rhythmically dramatic hemiola as the motif shifts forward by half a beat with each repetition.

Ex. 9 presents a reworking of what Betts plays in his second solo, where he offers some southern musical hospitality in the form of poised call-and-response coupled with repetition over F7 and C7 chords.

Finally, Ex. 10 is in the spirit of what Dickey lays down over the I chord to open his final pass through the changes.

Super-catchy licks like this not only take the audience to the peak of a musical rollercoaster ride but also cue the band to close out the song.

While Dickey Betts’ creative contributions on Brothers and Sisters are undeniable, that’s not to say the remaining blood brother was absent from the process, nor did his legendary gruff go unheard. In fact, most of the original album’s side one features Gregg Allman singing his own tunes, including the opening track “Wasted Words,” “Come and Go Blues” and the Billy Eckstine standard “Jelly Jelly.”

As for side two, it’s the Dickey Betts show. And while Gregg’s vocal growl is crucial to the soulful impact of “Southbound,” it’s Dickey’s guitar lines that steal the show as they weave in and out of Allman’s vocal performances with his unmistakable and tasteful style.

Order Brothers and Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band here.

Allman Brothers Band fans of a certain age may remember Duane Betts as a teenager taking the stage to sit in with his father, Dickey, and the ABB in the mid ’90s. But 30 years later, the younger Betts has been around the block a few times, touring with his father for more than a decade, playing with California folk-rockers Dawes for a stretch, and forming the Allman Betts Band with Devon Allman. Together, they recorded two albums and toured extensively.

But while Betts’ 2018 EP, Sketches of American Music, laid down a marker for him as a solo artist, the just-released Wild & Precious Life (Royal Potato Family) is his proper solo debut.

Recorded to two-inch analog tape at Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks’ Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville, Florida, the album features Betts’ “dream team” – guitarist Johnny Stachela, bassist Berry Duane Oakley, keyboardist John Ginty and Tedeschi Trucks Band drummer Tyler Greenwell.

Stachela and Betts continue to expand the impressive guitar team harmony they established in the Allman Betts Band, and are accompanied by guests that include Trucks and Marcus King.

“We tracked everything live and kept whichever takes had the magic,” says Betts, who co-produced the album with Stachela and Ginty. Infused with Americana swagger, the album is a major step forward for Betts in establishing himself as a solo artist infused with, but not frozen by, his family legacy. “You write and record music and just hope it lights a fire in people’s hearts,” he says.

The first thing we hear on the album is the harmonized guitars on “Evergreen.” Was that an intentional statement?

Sort of. I just liked the song. I wrote it with a more standard opening, but my writing partner, Stoll Vaughan, was adamant about putting the harmonies on the front of the song because it was a little more unique, and once we tried it, it felt great.

The song is underpinned by a strong acoustic guitar part. Did you play that?

Yes. I played all the acoustic on a post-World War II Martin D-28, which belonged to my dad and he used a lot for writing. I know he wrote “Seven Turns” on it. I would see him playing that a lot in the early ’90s. It’s just a great-sounding guitar that is very fun to play. Some of the most fun I had was playing acoustic rhythm on “Waiting on a Song” and “Evergreen.”

What were your electrics and amps? And did you use any effects? It sounds pretty clean.

My main guitar was what I play the most onstage, the number-one prototype of my dad’s Gibson goldtop, which they made in 2001. I also played my 1961 Gibson 335 and a 1930s Gibson L-00. I used my mid-’60s Fender Deluxe Reverb and late-’50s Fender Tweed Deluxe. The only effect is a Dandrive Secret Engine fuzz pedal that J.D. Simo gifted me.

Johnny played his 2000 Gibson ’62 LP/SG Custom Shop, which he calls Stormy, my 335 and a 1960s Guild S-50 Jet Star from Derek’s collection, running through a 1960s Silvertone 1448, which is also Derek’s and a mid-’60s Fender Vibrolux Reverb.

Some of the songs recall Highway Call, your dad’s 1974 solo album, particularly the first single, “Waiting on a Song.” Was that a conscious point of reference?

I was passionately interested in having pedal steel on a few songs to capture some authentic old country-rock sounds. That music has a lot of character, with good honest, meaningful songs.

“Waiting on a Song” originally had a dreamier, big rock flow, but I gave it different treatments to see what works, and it became clear it should be an up-tempo, gliding, uplifting song. Once it took that shape, we were absolutely influenced by Highway Call and not afraid of going for that authentic gangster country vibe, which is the best. Of course, it’s not just Highway Call but Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver…

There’s a lot of great stuff in that vein right now. Do you relate to contemporary country?

For sure, the Americana side of things. I love guys like Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers and Charley Crockett, and I would love to play with them and be more in that scene, which is really hip.

How did the Allman Betts albums and touring set you up to do this?

I had a lot of fun doing these records and playing all those shows. It just felt like it was time to take this next step. My time with Allman Betts gave me space to get better overall, and more comfortable as a singer onstage – which is a lot different than sitting on your bed singing to your dog with an acoustic guitar!

What’s the status of Allman Betts?

We’re on hiatus, doing other things and occasional shows, at least two this summer.

How did you end up recording at Derek and Susan’s studio?

We were hanging out at a friend’s wedding, where I was a guest and they were performing. I said I was going to make a solo album, and Susan said I should do my record at their place, so I took her up on it. It was just such a comfortable environment. They are such gracious hosts, and the property is really inspiring – on a river, with a lot of beautiful nature. And Bobby Tis, who engineered, is so gifted at what he does.

Derek and Marcus King both play great on “Stare at the Sun” and “Cold Dark World” respectively. How did that happen?

Marcus is a really talented friend, and I knew he would play amazingly on “Cold Dark World.” With Derek, it was established that he would play from the first conversation we had about me recording at their studio. That song title actually came from something he said to me: “Your dad’s a player who’s not afraid to stare directly into the sun.” It only made sense to have him on that one.

“Under the Bali Moon” is a beautiful instrumental. What’s the significance of the title, and can you describe the writing process?

Bali is a beautiful, sacred place, where my wife and I spend time whenever money and our schedules allow. I had an instrumental idea with a lot of parts, and when we got into the studio I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out or if it was right yet. Tyler thought that the coolest part of the song came and went too fast, so he added the beat and made that part more of an emphasis. Then we incorporated all the parts that we had already written and it just came together as you hear it. It’s much more focused and has a fresher sound. He could hear the good parts and grasp what was missing.

“Colors Fade” has a very Dead feel, although the harmony playing echoes western swing and the Allman Brothers. Was that an intentional homage?

It wasn’t conscious, but as we worked up the song, it was apparent that it had a Dead vibe, and we embraced it.

You just played some shows with Phil Lesh. How was that experience?

Phil Lesh is a legend, and it’s an honor to play that music with him and the astounding cast of characters he puts together. It’s a comfortable, friendly vibe, which is good, because it’s also nerve racking – you don’t get the setlist until about 24 hours before the show, and it’s a lot to process. I would be all in to learn the stuff inside out, but there’s a lot of it and it’s not simplistic music.

Duane Betts is currently on tour. Click here for info and tickets.

Duane Betts – the son of Allman Brothers Band legend Dickey Betts, and a talented electric guitar player in his own right – is set to release his first solo album, Wild & Precious Life, this summer.

Now, the guitarist has released its second single, an ode to his father – and his guitar playing – titled “Stare At The Sun.” 

For the tune, Betts – who, among a number of other groups, has played in his father's backing band and with Gregg Allman's son Devon in the Allman Betts Band – enlisted the help of someone else who knows a thing or two about Dickey Betts and the Allman Brothers Band, Derek Trucks.

You can hear the guitarists' collaboration below.

“I was inspired by a conversation I’d had with Derek,” Betts said of the song's origins. “He was talking about my father’s guitar playing and he told me, ‘Your dad is one of those players who’s not afraid to stare directly into the sun,’ and I loved that line. I was already working on a new song, and Derek’s sentiment gave the song a center.”

Though vital and modern, “Stare At The Sun” will have a warm familiarity to any Allman Brothers fan – the sweetly melodic twin guitar leads, Trucks' lyrical slides, and even the track's soulful organ work recall the Southern rock pioneers at their best, but never to the point of outright copying the band. 

Wild & Precious Life, incidentally, was also recorded at Swamp Raga studio, which is owned by Trucks and his wife and Tedeschi Trucks Band partner-in-crime, Susan Tedeschi. The album also features Marcus King, and is set for a July 14 release via The Royal Potato Family.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

I find it hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago.

This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock genres.

Also on the rise was a reverence for the album format. Thanks to my older brother Louis and his well-fortified stereo system, our Jersey Shore home was consistently shaking at the rafters with all the rock 1972 had to offer. I soaked it all in from my very beginnings.

All things considered, it’s safe to say I was born into this collection of essential guitar moments from 1972.

Let There Be Rock

By the second year of the tumultuous 1970s, the world of rock had expanded into subsets that celebrated everything from platform shoes and glitter to fake blood and guillotines, and even included electrified southern-fried country and blues.

This trifecta of disparate approaches garnered a worthy collection of guitar moments, starting with David Bowie’s fab The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. 

Bowie’s brilliance is matched by the prodigious playing of guitarist Mick Ronson.

Ex. 1 shows something similar to Ronson’s opening salvo in “Ziggy Stardust,” where open chords and arpeggiation patterns combine to make the prototypical glam-rock arena riff.

Shifting to the dark side, Ex. 2 takes its cue from the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, highlighting the vibe of the incendiary E Dorian riff played by shock-rock stalwarts Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce.

Completing the trio is an iteration of the Am riff of “One Way Out” (Ex. 3), from the Allman Brothers Band’s quintessential southern rock album Eat a Peach, courtesy of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

All three original tunes are as celebrated today as they were in 1972, from arenas to local watering holes.

Opening Lines

The ’70s was the decade of Detroit Iron, when nearly everyone drove a hot rod. If they weren’t cranking an eight-track, they were listening to an FM rock station, which was in the beginning stages of a transformation to the album-oriented rock (AOR) format.

Nothing had you leaning over to pump up the volume faster than a great guitar intro. Elliott Randall’s opening A major pentatonic licks in the Steely Dan FM staple “Reelin’ In the Years,” from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was a top contender.

Ex. 4 is inspired by and loosely based on this classic intro solo.

Ex. 5 brings to mind the dreamy relative major and minor arpeggios and modulating bends immortalized in that track.

Another classic is the unforgettable opening of the Bowie-penned glam-rock anthem “All the Young Dudes,” recorded by Mott the Hoople.

These are just two of the many songs that reeled you in from the first notes and entertained every type of rock apostle, both young and old, as they cruised America’s highways.

Hammer of the Gods

Two of the three bands considered the creators of heavy metal released records in 1972. With Led Zeppelin between Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy, the void was filled by Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

Ex. 6 closely illustrates what Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi laid down on Vol.4’s “Snowblind,” with his signature power chording and speaker-melting gain in check.

As for Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he was in his creative prime at the time that the group dropped its magnum opus, Machine Head. Much like Zep’s fourth outing, Machine Head featured timeless tunes that have proven their longevity to this day, including the venerable “Smoke on the Water.”

While the opening riff has ascended into a ubiquitity for rock guitarists the world over, Ritchie’s fiery solo over a power chord backdrop in the key of G minor showcases such signature Blackmore-isms as pre- (or “ghost”) bends, adjacent-string rolls and 16th-note linear flurries.

This is all on display in Ex. 7, which presents a reworking of some key licks from this solo.

Though in its infancy at the time, metal began with these pioneering bands and with albums and moments like these.

Everyone is Experienced

But 1972 wasn’t all about high-gain licks and riffs. The influence of Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, was felt across the guitar pantheon. Indicative of the time were a pair of low-gain opening riffs from two different worlds but in no less capable hands.

Ex. 8 is patterned after a moment from one of prog rock’s most endearing releases, Close to the Edge, where perpetual ambassador Steve Howe threw down biting Hendrix-like chordal comping ideas in the key of E minor at the top of “Siberian Khatru.”

Ex. 9 offers a taste of the kind of dynamic-duo guitar work of the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons on the endearing hit “Listen To the Music,” a moment that still motivates muscle-car drivers of yore to turn up the volume at the first hammer-on into that E/G# triad.

Groove Collective

But cleaner tones and booty-shaking grooves were also heard in 1972, thanks to the impact of a Jamaican film called The Harder They Come, which starred musician Jimmy Cliff. While the movie was released to much fanfare (on the very same day I started my journey to 50), it was the film’s soundtrack that made history, as it’s widely regarded as the world’s introduction to reggae.

Ex. 10 is inspired by the infectious opening groove heard in the Cliff classic “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which features hallmark reggae rhythm guitar approaches with its tightly voiced top-string triads, anchored to the upbeat and treated with some staccato phrasing.

Back on the mainland, James Brown and Al Green were creating some of their most significant works. The Godfather of Soul put Hearlon “Cheese” Martin’s lock-tight precision into the limelight with “Get On the Good Foot” from the album of the same name.

An homage to Martin’s hypnotic single-note staccato phrasing is paid in Ex. 11.

Adding to the title tracks explored, the beloved gem from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together features the sultry guitar of work of Mabon “Teenie” Hodges perfectly nested between Green’s enthralling vocal performance.

Looking at Ex. 12 reveals a remodeling of four bars from this treasured work.

Unplugged

Although the era of the chimerical Les Paul/Marshall monster had fully arrived by 1972, it didn’t quell the acoustic guitar’s substantial presence, which had solidified in the 1960s.

In fact, acoustic guitars were behind some of the most successful single releases of the year, including Paul Simon’s controversial “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” America’s mesmerizing “Ventura Highway” and soft-rock troubadours Seals and Crofts’ irresistible “Summer Breeze.”

The main themes of all three songs have been reinterpreted in Examples 13–15.

Aside from Simon’s syncopated voice-led triads, the other two riffs make ample use of the acoustic guitar’s penchant for open strings.

Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Canadian-born Neil Young released the best-selling record of the year with Harvest, which boasted the number one hit “Heart of Gold.”

A rendition of the perfectly sparse presentation of Em and D chords is found in Ex. 16.

Outro

With countless guitar moments still to gush over, it’s important to note that 1972 was also brimming with superbly constructed albums that had massive impact and further bolstered the emerging AOR radio format.

The year delivered classics that featured now-mythic guitarist pairings, including the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (Keith Richards and Mick Taylor), Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (Martin Barre and Ian Anderson), Genesis’s Foxtrot (Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford), and the Eagles’ self-titled debut (Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey), which helped bring country rock to prominence.

Before the year was out, Deep Purple went on to release the Made in Japan live album, and Stevie Wonder released his own pair with Music of My Mind and the seminal Talking Book.

The latter gave the world the funk-rock classic “Superstition,” which features a punchy Hohner Clavinet keyboard riff that has been appropriated by guitarists in countless cover bands.

If all these moments and genre births are any indication of the benefits to an augmented leap year, I say bring on the next one UTC.

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul is a deep dive into the time before and after 1973’s Brothers and Sisters.

It was not only the band’s best-selling album, at over seven million copies sold, but it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Brothers and Sisters the book delves into the making of the album, while also presenting a broader cultural history of the era, based on first-person interviews, historical documents and deep research and a trove of never-before-heard interviews conducted by the band’s “Tour Mystic,” Kirk West.

The five-year period between Duane Allman’s 1971 death and the Allman Brothers Band’s 1976 breakup was a remarkable run for the group that helped define the era, rock history and American culture and politics.

They played a major role in electing President Jimmy Carter; were intimately linked with the Grateful Dead; and inspired the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the entire Southern Rock genre.

Gregg Allman’s marriage to the iconic star Cher also put the couple at the vanguard of a newly emerging celebrity media culture.

A wide range of fascinating, crucial characters pass through the pages of Brothers and Sisters. Not only Jimmy Carter and Cher, but Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, actress Susan Sarandon and Native American activists.

The book includes several extensive chapters on the Jam at Watkins Glen, the concert featuring the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band that drew over 600,000 people to a small town in upstate New York and will celebrate its 50th anniversary the week of the book’s July 2023 release.

Brothers and Sisters includes the deepest reporting and writing yet about the bond between the Allmans and the Dead and just what drove them apart.

There are also chapters about the making of Gregg Allman’s Laid Back and Dickey Betts’ Highway Call, solo debuts that have been largely overlooked.

The book also contains the complete inside story behind Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which was largely based on his experiences touring with the Allman Brothers Band for a 1973 Rolling Stone cover story.

Brothers and Sisters is enlivened by content from Kirk West’s never-heard interviews.

“Kirk was researching a book while the band was broken up in 1986 and 1987 and he interviewed all the surviving members extensively: Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, as well as many other friends and associates,” says Paul.

“The subjects were talking to someone they deeply trusted, the band was twice broken up with no plans to reunite and everyone was bracingly honest and deeply reflective and insightful.

“The interviews were an absolute gold mine, most of which not even Kirk had ever listened to. I am thrilled to get them out to fans of the band. I can’t wait to share this book and start talking about it!”

Pre-order Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul (St. Martin’s Press; July 25, 2023) here.

The Weight Band may have been born in a barn, but it wasn’t just any old barn; we’re talking about Levon Helm's barn in Woodstock, New York. And with their eclectic blend of blues, soul and roots-rock (aka “the Woodstock sound”) guitarist Jim Weider and Co are back with a barnstorming new album.

Following up 2018’s World Gone Mad, Shines Like Gold is the Weight Band’s sophomore studio effort and is set for release on April 1, 2022.

Staying true to the group’s knockout live sound led by Weider’s punchy electric guitar licks, Shines Like Gold was tracked with long-time collaborator, producer Colin Linden, in just four days.

"He had a big hand and footprint on this record," commented Weider. "We go back, so there is a comfortableness working with him."

Alongside world-renowned Telecaster Master Jim Weider (The Band, Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble Band, Jim Weider Band), the Weight Band’s all-star line-up also features keyboardist Brian Mitchell (Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble Band, Bob Dylan), bassist Albert Rogers (Jim Weider Band, Jimmy Vivino), drummer Michael Bram (Willie Nelson, Jason Mraz) and keyboardist Matt Zeiner (Dickey Betts, Jaimoe.)

With a mutual appreciation and deep-rooted love for the “Woodstock mountain sound,” the Weight Band serves as a torchbearer for this unique brand of Americana. 

On Shines Like Gold, the veteran quintet conveys a sense of hope for the future in a musically dynamic work that swings from swamp pop to roadhouse rock, with hefty doses of blues, soul and country thrown in for good measure.

The Weight Band recently dropped the lead single and title track from Shines Like Gold along with an accompanying video. Take a listen here and check out Weider’s masterful guitar technique…

Pre-order Shines Like Gold by the Weight Band here.

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd. “The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes. Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time. Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the Allmans were all about musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around, and building a base.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened. It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained. This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach. They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment – offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made – not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy – the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmores East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

 “New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade – and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights – March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 – as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs. “I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go. When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine. “Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.” Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out. I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could. 

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth. Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers. Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette recalls another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately. “We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio. “We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it. This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[Atlantic executive] Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, and that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record – “people priced” at three dollars below standard list for a double album – slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album. “All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches – from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’ 

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.” 

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends. “He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that. I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte. “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him. Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old. And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

Released in 1971 on Capricorn Records, At Fillmore East captures the Allman Brothers – guitarists Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, keyboardist/singer Gregg Allman, bassist Berry Oakley, and drummers Jaimoe and Butch Trucks – in the zone and at the peak of their powers.

All one can hope for when buying a live record is to hear the self-conscious studio restraints vanish and the intangible elements of spirit and heart make their way to tape for the ages. At Fillmore East delivers in spades.

“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” exemplifies the Allman Brothers’ magic. This Dickey Betts-penned composition ebbs, flows, peaks and simmers, while the entire group melds into a musical army.

This track is a mystical journey that never leaves the high altitude of stellar. It starts seductively with the iconic Am9 - Am, Am9 - D changes, and with volume swells and cinematic unison harmonies that preface a boulder rolling down a hill. Dickey and Duane play great solos, and the band churns in support.

Other tracks, like “Statesboro Blues,” still hold up 50 years after the fact as quintessential blues-rock tracks. Duane’s Les Paul through a Marshall sounds like a flamethrower, while he exhibits a slide technique so exceptional, it’s still the high bar for guitarists to aspire to.

Absolutely no one before Duane sounded like him, and his contributions to the Allman Brothers and Derek & the Dominos’ Layla sessions – not to mention his contributions to Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann and Wilson Pickett – are part of the significant legacy this young man left us before his untimely death at 24.

While the group is informed by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Blind Willie Johnson and the like, they take the next step of redefining the blues guitar as they hear and feel it. The listener gets to hear them innovate the genre.

“Done Somebody Wrong” features a great Gregg Allman vocal, to which Duane answers by making the guitar seem like another human voice, while Dickey digs in, never to be upstaged or diminished.

Speaking of which, Mr. Betts has a style we could all learn from. He plants himself with a pentatonic idea so thoroughly, he torturously depletes its every possibility before ascending to the next chapter.

His solos are like a slow walk up a dark stairway in a movie thriller.

Dickey’s artistry blossomed on the post-Duane LP Brothers and Sisters, and his original gem “Jessica” shows him at the top of his game. Together, Duane and Dickey are the quintessential guitar duo, and they pioneered and defined the timeless marriage of harmony guitars.

It’s safe to say At Fillmore East influenced and opened the door for Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvin Bishop, Dixie Dregs and other influential southern rock groups that followed. 

The Allman Brothers’ influence was so distilled and true, most of those groups couldn’t help but retain the language and spirit of the southern rock genre the Allmans helped create.

Pick up a copy of At Fillmore East here.

Anyone can get a good sound with a Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amps, but not many players can drop jaws with that rig like Dickey Betts and the late, great Duane Allman. 

Their full, thick tones are right in your face on this classic live cut from At Fillmore East, with Betts fretting his riffs and Allman playing his 60s Gibson SG with a glass slide made from a Coricidin cold medicine bottle. 

Betts’ tone is slightly cleaner than Allman’s – due, in part, to his choice of 100-watt Marshalls (Allman used a 50-watter) – and he wrenches snarling rock tones from his Les Paul that bark with dynamics and tension. 

Allman’s tone is smooth, luscious and almost impossibly sweet.

The roots of Duane's use of the Coricidin bottle were explained by Gregg Allman in the Muscle Shoals documentary (see clip below, from 1:07). The way Gregg tells it, he convinced Duane to go on a horseback ride. Duane fell from the horse, damaging his left elbow. He couldn't play and blamed his brother and wouldn't speak to him. One day, Gregg went round to visit with the first Taj Mahal album and a bottle of Coricidin, a cough medicine, leaving them on his doorstep.

A couple of hours later, Gregg gets a call asking him to come over: Duane had been listening to Jesse Ed Davis on the Taj Mahal album and learned to copy him, using the Coricidin bottle as a slide. 

Gregg still has the bottle.

Buy The Allman Brothers At Fillmore East