"I saw him do things with a guitar that I’d never seen done before, or since."

An annotated read of the first Allman Brothers Band book

Welcome back to Long Live the ABB! Really happy to have you here.

Before I get to part two of my annotated read of Tom Nolan’s The Allman Brothers Band: A Biography in Words and Pictures (1976), here are two things y’all might find interesting.

1. “A Badass With a Gentle Side: The Complex Life of Dickey Betts,” David Browne’s excellent eulogy in Rolling Stone.

2. “High Falls,” 7/2/98 featuring Jack Pearson and Dickey Betts.

Now, on to the festivities…

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Here are the pages I’m commenting on

I’ve posted full text of the book here¹

ABB Biography in Words & Pictures

Today’s post is basically the first three pages of text.

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Previously on Long Live the ABB

Meanwhile, Hourglass morale deteriorated.

[JOHNNY SANDLIN:] “One day, the band would have broken up. The next day, we were back together. We wanted to play, but we weren’t sure exactly what; we had no real strong direction. Then somebody said, we gotta get home, and we left there and didn’t look back.”

In the famous FAME Studios of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Hourglass recorded some songs that were closer to the music they thought they should be playing; their record company thought otherwise.

“We tried to go back to playing clubs in the South. We had made good money before - two, three, four hundred a week - before we even went to California; but you can’t go back. Finally Duane and Gregg went to Daytona.”

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Dr. B’s Marginalia

Click image to access PDF.

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I did my best to organize this visually for you.

The original text looks like this.

My comments look like this.

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Our story picks up in September 1968 in Daytona Beach, Florida

Duane has just left LA for good. The rest of Hour Glass followed him back South.

In Daytona, the Allmans ran into some musicians they had known a few years earlier as folk rock trio: the Bitter End. David Brown and Scott Boyer, later of Cowboy and drummer Butch Trucks joined Gregg and Duane to become the 31st of February…

I’ll interject mid-sentence to clarify one major point.

Yes, Duane and Gregg aligned briefly with Butch Trucks and the 31st of February. But they didn’t become the 31st of February, the band had existed under that name and had already released their self-titled debut album on Vanguard Records, the premier folk label of the time.²

The Greenwich Village folk club forced the group to change their name from the Bitter Ind (for individual).³

…a band which had difficulty securing gainful employment in local clubs operating under a Top-40 policy. Scott Boyer recalls, with some incredulity,

“At a club date in St. Pete, we were playing Wilson Pickett’s ‘Mustang Sally’ and the owner still wasn’t satisfied. ‘You guys do too many originals!’ It was a three-day gig; we got fired the first night. Yeah, times were hard.”

I used the “too many originals” story in Play All Night. Duane and Gregg never really had that problem. By all accounts, they were incredible artists, but much of Duane’s struggle in this era was to find *his* voice.

The 31st of February was loaded with talent. Butch founded the ABB. Boyer founded Cowboy with Tommy Talton, who anchored Gregg’s Laid Back sessions and tour. Brown played bass for Boz Scaggs for many years.

Marginalia reserved for paid subscribers of Long Live the ABB