The Allman Brothers Band: 30 Years of Ups and Downs

The Allman Brothers don’t talk to each other much these days. It’s not that they’re nursing grudges from decades ago, or that they’re in imminent danger of a fistfight over a backhanded remark. It’s just that after thirty long years together, they’ve learned that the secret of surviving as a band is to keep a safe distance.

They socialize now and then, in select groups: Guitarist Dickey Betts and drummer Butch Trucks sometimes play golf together on the road, and every year or two Betts will have a cookout for the whole band at his house in Florida. But for the most part, they keep to themselves. When they need to make a decision, manager Bert Holman will poll them individually. He even mediates the encores, checking with Betts and organist Gregg Allman after two sets to see who has the energy left to sing a couple of songs.

So when the Allman Brothers Band arrives at the Riverbend Amphitheater in Cincinnati to play another show in the fading light of a long summer evening, seven musicians pull up in three separate buses. Allman’s allows dogs but no smoking, Betts’ allows dogs and smoking, and the third carries the group’s three drummers.

They amble around the stage, displaying no effort to make a dramatic entrance for this crowd of 6,000; about 5,000 of them have been alive for less than the three decades that the Allman Brothers have been a band. Drummer Jaimoe, wearing an ABB T-shirt, sandals and a ludicrous pair of yellow-and-black-striped socks, does a few rolls on his kit. His young daughter scampers around the side of the stage. Allman drinks tea to prepare his throat for singing and cocks an ear disapprovingly to the music coming out of the PA. “What is this bullshit they’re playing?” he grumbles. “Sounds like country. There needs to be six-foot fucking blues, to get the audience in the fucking groove.”

At 8:15 P.M. on the nose, they start playing “Don’t Want You No More,” and it becomes immediately clear that although they may not speak much offstage, their conversation onstage is eloquent and profound.

Allman spends most of the show behind his vintage Hammond organ, singing the blues with the husky abandon of somebody who’s lived them. After he finishes a chorus, he often grabs the microphone with his left hand and pushes it away. This gesture signals that we are about to witness some extended improvisational guitar. Mind-expanding guitar solos are what the crowd has come to hear, and it gets plenty of them as the fifty-six-year-old Betts and the twenty-year-old Derek Trucks (Butch’s nephew) trade licks, tell stories and write epic poems in the key of A, while a hallucinogenic light show flashes behind them. It’s all anchored by the steady, flowing groove of the band’s three percussionists (Butch Trucks, Jaimoe and Marc Quinones) and Allman’s subtle work on the organ.

The encore, like the set list, is ever-changing, but tonight it is simple: The Allman Brothers play their two most famous songs. First Betts sings “Ramblin’ Man,” the country song from 1973 that was the ABB’s biggest chart single. The melody is as joyful as ever, and Betts’ weather-beaten voice underlines the song’s advocacy of the road. Then bassist Oteil Burbridge plays an ominous, thunderous riff that turns back on itself like a staircase to nowhere, and the band throws itself into the concert favorite “Whipping Post.” It is pure no-way-out bluesman doom; Allman moans, “Oh Lord, I feel like I’m dying.”

If you were looking for a band from central casting to embody the story of American rock & roll, you’d want to call the Allman Brothers. They’re from the South, where the music was born, and have always been an interracial band. They combined country and blues — just as the music’s inventors did — and then added some jazz. They embraced the community aesthetic that hippie rock aspired to, and later they also were full-fledged participants in the excesses of cocaine, limousines and, in the body of Cher, showbiz. Naturally, they got screwed financially. But despite losing their resident genius to an early death — another essential component of the rock myth — they persisted and are now celebrating their thirtieth anniversary by making some of the best music of their career. Perhaps that’s the only part of their saga that doesn’t fit the template: Improbably, there’s a happy ending.

Like many American musical stories, the Allman Brothers’ tale begins in Nashville. Willis Allman fought in World War II — storming Normandy — and returned to his young bride, Geraldine, after the war. He got a job as an Army recruiter, and they quickly produced two sons: Duane, born November 20th, 1946, and Gregg, born December 8th, 1947. But in 1949, the day after Christmas, Willis was robbed and killed by another veteran. They had just met that day, over a game of shuffleboard.

Geraldine, now eighty-two years old and known to the band as Mama A, needed to support her family, so she went to school to become a CPA. She remembers that Duane’s drive emerged early: “You might say he was born to lead. Some people are. Gregg is a lover, and laid-back — he’d rather have a leader. One summer, when they were preschoolers, they had a lemonade stand, Duane and Gregg and one little neighborhood boy. So when I got home, they were telling me about it. Gregg says he got to pour the lemonade. And the other little boy says he could hand it to the customer. So I said, ‘Duane, what did you do?’ And he says, ‘Oh, I’m the appetizing manager.'”