The Allman Brothers Band: 30 Years of Ups and Downs
Jaimoe, Born July 8th, 1944, is the Allman Brothers Band’s most eccentric figure and its greatest philosopher. “He’s like Yoda,” says Burbridge. “The Force is strong in him.” When I meet the Jedi drummer in his Cincinnati hotel room, he is wearing only a pair of green athletic shorts. His large potbelly protrudes over the waistband. “We’ve got three drummers up there,” he says. “That’s so much power, it can be overbearing.” Jaimoe says that sometimes he won’t play his bass drum for an entire show, just to change the band’s chemistry. Or he’ll step away from the drums for a song and go listen in the audience. He takes the same nonlinear approach to conversation — a story about his childhood might be prefaced with a ten-minute discourse on water aerobics — but it’s well worth the effort to hear what he has to say.
Originally known as Jai Johanny Johanson, he grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, where he spent his adolescence trying to decide between his dreams of being a pro athlete and being a jazz drummer. He saw Louis Armstrong play in New Orleans, and that settled it: He hit the road in 1965 with R&B singer Ted Taylor. A year later, he remembers, he was playing in Otis Redding’s road band:
I couldn’t play in that Otis band — it was way too loud. And I couldn’t play rock & roll like I can now. But Otis was a great cat. He was funny, he was serious. If you see Muhammad Ali, you see Otis — he was a riot, man.
I remember when Otis wanted to write or rehearse some stuff, he would go out to his farm. The band would come out, and he’d have a big barbecue. We were out there, and I had all my jazz records with me. I found the stereo, and Coltrane was blasting all over the yard. I guess Otis took about as much of it as he could. He told me, “Jai Johanny, all you’re doing is playing that jazz. If you can’t play none of my goddamn records, I’m not going to let you play my record player anymore.”
I played with Otis from December of ’66 to April of ’67. When that tour was over, I was getting ready to go to Europe with him. But I didn’t have any identification, because I had lost my wallet. So I didn’t go to Europe. When Otis died [five months later, in a plane crash], so many people called me, because they thought I was on that plane.
Jaimoe played with Percy Sledge for a while, and then Joe Tex. He had decided to move to New York and really pursue jazz. And then a friend called to tell him about Skyman: “He’s a skinny white boy with red hair. And, Jai, I ain’t never heard nobody play the guitar like that.” Late one night soon after that, Jaimoe got out of bed to go to the bathroom; as he was falling back to sleep, he heard Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude” on the radio and knew it had to be Skyman.
When Jaimoe heard that Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records was a supporter of Duane’s, “the dollar signs went off in my head, and I got on the bus.” One very long Trailways ride later, he was in Alabama, shaking hands with Skyman.
Jaimoe moved into Duane’s place by the river, where they would hang out and listen to records. Jaimoe turned Duane on to John Coltrane; Duane exposed him to Buffalo Springfield and Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. After Jaimoe had been in Alabama for six weeks, Duane decided that his sideman days were over. Jaimoe relates, “Duane said, ‘Man, I’m tired of doing this shit. Pack up your drums. We’re leaving.'” They went down to Jacksonville, Florida, to steal away a bassist Duane knew, Berry Oakley, who’d been touring with bubblegum singer Tommy Roe but had been born in Chicago and was steeped in the blues. While in Jacksonville, they stayed with old Allman friend Butch Trucks. There were rock jams in the local park every Sunday afternoon, so Duane and Jaimoe joined in.
On Sunday, March 23rd, 1969, they stayed home to jam instead of going into the sunshine, and a group was born. Duane and Jaimoe were there, and Trucks, and Oakley and guitarist Dickey Betts from Oakley’s band, the Second Coming. They played for three hours straight, seamlessly flowing from slow blues to up-tempo shuffles, reading each other’s cues perfectly. When it ended, everyone in the room had chills; Duane stood in front of the door and told the others, “Anybody in this room who’s not going to play in my band, you’ve got to fight your way out.”
Betts’ father played fiddle, guitar and mandolin on weekends; during the week, he was a carpenter. Dad taught his son Forrest Richard Betts (born December 12th, 1943, in West Palm Beach, Florida) to play mandolin but wouldn’t show him his woodworking secrets. “You got too much talent,” he said. “If you don’t want to play music, I want you to be a doctor or an attorney.” Dickey Betts graduated from weekend country-music jams with his family to the electric guitar, striving to copy Chuck Berry licks. At seventeen, he got his first professional gig: touring with the Swinging Saints, who played on the midway of a circus, twelve times a day. Betts learned carny talk and then came home and falsified his birth certificate so he could play in nightclubs — which he did for the next eight years.
