Maybe the only thing that saved us was everybody was scared of us
The Allman Brothers Band relocates to Macon
Welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. Glad to have you here.
Today’s post focuses on the first 5 (or so) months of the Allman Brothers Band, from their founding in Jacksonville, moving to Macon and meeting Mama Louise, through the recording of their debut album in August 3-12 at Atlantic studios, NYC.
What I’m Reading/Watching
Sticking just to to music-related books (for now).
Daniel De Visé The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic (2024). I’m a big fan of the movie from way back—and this was a fun read for sure.
More importantly, it led me to…
Daniel De Visé King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King (2021). The book is a terrific, thorough biography of the King of the Blues, and a key influence in not only Duane and Dickey, but also Warren, Jack, and Derek.
Warren Zanes Petty: The Biography (2015). I skimmed this when it first came out, paying attention to Allman Brothers references mostly. My second read proved more fulfilling. I’ve always felt a connection to Tom Petty because of our shared Florida roots.
Which led me to…
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream (2007), a 4+ hour documentary. Well worth the watch. If only for Tom singing “Southern Accents” in his hometown of Gainesville.
Part 7 of my annotated read of the Allman Brothers Band: A Biography.
Here’s parts 1-6:
Part 1 - Annotations aka “Marginalia”
Part 2 - I saw him do things with a guitar I’d never seen done before, or since
Part 3 - He did not look like your ordinary Muscle Shoals regular
Part 4 - The spirits met and that was it
Part 6 - You think we got a band now, wait ‘til my little brother gets here
This is the page I’m commenting on today1
I’ve posted the full book here
Today I’m highlighting Just four paragraphs.
Marginalia
The original text looks like this.
The marginalia looks like this.
Previously on Long Live the ABB…
“Jesus Christ! What a band!” Gregg Allman
Gregg:
“It was such a pleasure playing and singing with them. They had never heard any vocal over their music, in the three months they’d been together.
Duane had planned it that way; he was getting the whole band so it would be already a little rehearsed by the time he called me.
I felt so good about everything, in the next week or so I wrote ‘Whipping Post,’ ‘Blackhearted Woman,’ and ‘Every Hungry Woman” and I wrote on the average a couple songs a week, from then on.”
It wasn’t three months, probably wasn’t even 3 weeks total. But yeah, they’d never heard vocals like Gregg’s before. He was just what the band needed.
Don’t miss Gregg’s observation that that’s exactly how Duane planned it. He pulled the band together, worked it out a bit, and called Gregg to “round it up and send it somewhere.” The band lived on for 45 years.
Here’s where the book picks back up.
Macon
The band practiced in Butch Trucks’ house, as well as at a Jacksonville club called the Beachcomber, until frequent trips to Macon for replenishment of funds—Phil Walden was their sole source of income—made moving to Georgia a logical step.
Nolan places both the jam that founded the Allman Brothers Band 3/23/69 and subsequent rehearsals at Butch’s house. As far as I know, those jams all happened at the Gray House at 2844 Riverside Avenue in Jacksonville.2
As the Allman Joys, Duane and Gregg had played the Beachcomber Lounge with Butch Trucks sitting in on drums. Duane scored Butch’s band, the Bitter Ind,3 an audition, which they parlayed into a months-long stint in the club.
The Beachcomber is where Berry’s future wife Linda first met Duane and Gregg. A year or so later, she is who introduced Berry and Duane.
Walden funded their early days, but the reason they left Jacksonville for Macon was legal trouble, specifically a gun charge for Dickey.4
Twiggs ensconced them in his old apartment at 309 College Street, in two rooms covered with wall-to-wall mattresses. There was also a Coke machine filled with Budweiser.
That apartment, at 309 College Avenue in Macon, was the infamous Hippie Crash Pad. It was only in the last decade I realized it was right next door to the site of the first album cover photo shoot.5
Butch Trucks says, “We used to come in after practicing all night, take some psilocybin, and start playing corkball6 in the apartment. Four, five in the morning—screaming, hollering, sliding into the Coke machine (that was third base).
Instead of calling the cops or anything, everybody in the apartment building just moved out. When we finally got evicted from that place, we were the last ones left.
And I mean, we were a perfect bust.7
In Macon, at that time, nobody had even seen any long hair. Maybe the only thing that saved us was, everybody was scared of us.
They didn’t know what we’d do! I’m really surprised we got away with all that. Macon’s been good to us in ways like that.”
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