You think we got a band now, wait ‘til my little brother gets here

Gregg arrives in Jacksonville

Welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.

My last post was part 2 of my deep dive into Dickey Betts as a composer of instrumentals. Dig it here if you missed it:

Dickey’s Instrumentals (part 2): Jessica, Hand Picked, High Falls

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This is Part 6 of my annotated read of the Allman Brothers Band: A Biography.

Here’s Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

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This is the page I’m commenting on today¹

It’s only seven paragraphs beginning midway through the first column and continuing midway down the second one.

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Dr. B’s Marginalia

The original text looks like this.

My comments look like this.

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Previously on Long Live the ABB…

“I don’t want no trio, I want six guys”

Duane has made the decision that his band would be him, Jaimoe, Berry, Dickey, Butch, and Gregg (still in California).

And he said, “I don’t want no trio; I want you, and I want Butch, and I want six guys!”

So we got six guys, because when we played, we made white people do things they hadn’t done in thousands of years. Stomp their bare feet on the ground, and dance. And they dug it.”

I ABBsolutely LOVE Dickey’s tongue-in-cheek description about the undeniable GROOVE of the Allman Brothers Band.

The remaining member of the Allman Brothers Band was still lingering in Los Angeles, writing songs as therapy for an unhappy love affair and feeling very lonely.

It’s a quirk of history that the last person to officially join the Allman Brothers Band in March 1969 was Gregg. The brothers had been estranged since the previous September, when Gregg fled Florida for California to fulfill Hour Glass’s contract.

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Here’s where the book picks back up.

Duane broke the ice.

Gregg Allman: “Just as I was about to put the gun to my head, the phone rang. It was a Sunday morning, the first Sunday before March twenty-third, 1969, which was the date I got to Jacksonville.

Let’s stop and pause at how casually Gregg talks about depression here. This was the one time in Gregg’s life he and Duane were estranged and he was suicidal.² Want proof? He had just penned two songs dripping with existential crisis: “Dreams” and “It’s Not My Cross to Bear.” (More on this later.)

And some nerdy stuff only I think about. Here’s one place where the earliest story conflicts with what became official. Gregg claims Duane called Sunday March 16, meaning it took him a week to get to Jacksonville. All his other accounts said he arrived in a matter of days. That’s why we celebrate March 23 as Jacksonville Jam Day (no Gregg) and 3/26/69 as the ABB’s anniversary (the day Gregg arrived).³

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It was my brother. He said he had felt like a robot doing session work in Muscle Shoals, and that he’d decided to get a band together, to do some more traveling and playing around.

This is one of my favorite parts of Duane’s story. In Muscle Shoals, he finally broke through and got someone to recognize his talent. He signed a contract for a solo project and ditched it posthaste.

He missed gigging.

📷Paley

The months Duane spent in the Shoals were the only time in his adult life he didn’t spend regularly performing. “I wanted to get to playing in joints again, which is what I did before I did anything else. Play for people,” he said.

As I say here, it took some convincing for Duane to make the call.⁴

Marginalia reserved for paid subscribers of Long Live ABB