Night Beat Part 4

But the record's real bounty is its formidable last side, featuring petrifying versions of "Coney Island Baby" and "Street Ha.s.sle"-the definitive accounts of Reed's cla.s.sic pariah angel in search of glut and redemption. "Street Ha.s.sle," in particular, is the apotheosis of Lou's callous brand of rock & roll. The original recording, a three-part vignette laced beguilingly with a cello phrase that turns into a murky requiem on guitar, was Reed's most disturbing song since "Heroin." The new, live version of "Street Ha.s.sle" is an even more credible descent into the dark musings of a malignant psychology, littered with mercenary s.e.x and heroin casualties, and narrated by a jaded junkie who undergoes a catharsis at the end.

Lou Reed doesn't just write about squalid characters, he allows them to leer and breathe in their own voices, and he colors familiar landscapes through their own eyes. In the process, Reed has created a body of music that comes as close to disclosing the parameters of human loss and recovery as we're likely to find. That qualifies him, in my opinion, as one of the few real heroes rock & roll has raised.

That is, if you're willing to allow your heroes a certain lat.i.tude for grimness. Long before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed had begun preparing for a career as a hard-boiled outsider. When he was in high school, his mood swings and headlong dives into depression became so frequent that his parents committed him to electroshock therapy (an experience he later chronicled bitterly in a song called "Kill Your Sons"). Another time, during his student days at New York's Syracuse University, Reed reneged on his ROTC commitment by pointing an unloaded pistol at the head of his commanding officer.

After Syracuse (where, in his more stable moments, Reed studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz, a popular poet of the 1940s), Lou took a job as a songwriter and singer at Pickwick Records on Long Island. While there, he recorded mostly ersatz surf and Motown rock under a mult.i.tude of names, and met John Cale, a cla.s.sically trained musician with avant-garde leanings. In 1965, Reed and Cale formed the Warlocks, with Sterling Morrison, an old Syracuse pal of Lou's, on guitar and Maureen Tucker on drums. The group was renamed the Falling Spikes and then the Velvet Underground, after the t.i.tle of a p.o.r.n paperback about sadomasochism.

In the context of the late-sixties hippie/Samaritan rock scene, the group seemed, to many observers, positively malignant. "I remember," says Reed, "reading descriptions of us as the "fetid underbelly of urban existence.' All I wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. I got off on the Beatles and all that stuff, but why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row? At the worst, we were like antedated realists. At the best, we just hit a little more home than some things."

In the case of the Velvet Underground's first alb.u.m, nominally produced by Andy Warhol, that viewpoint was presented as a remarkably ripened and self-contained group persona. Songs like "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Run, Run, Run," and "Heroin" depict a leering, gritty vision of urban life that, until the Velvets, had rarely been alluded to-much less exalted-in popular music.

The Velvet Underground, of course, would go on to have a profound-probably incalculable-impact on modern popular music. Indeed, next to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, the Velvets were one of the most influential white rock forces of the 1960s. David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Elliott Murphy, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, the s.e.x Pistols, Television, Joy Division, Jim Carroll, R.E.M., and countless others would borrow from and extend the Velvet Underground's sound and vision, though none of them would ever fully match the original group's inventive depths and astonishing courage. The band's first three alb.u.ms, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), White Light/White Heat (1968), and The Velvet Underground (1969) are works that stand strongly alongside Revolver, Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding as some of the most intelligent and illuminating music of the era.

But back in the milieu of the often skin-deep positivism and florid experimentalism of the late 1960s, the Velvet Underground's unswerving hardbitten temper, dissolute romanticism, and abrasive improvisations were, as Reed noted, viewed as "downer" elements, and the group itself was seen as a pack of sick party spoilers. I remember that several of my friends during that period-who shared my love for rock & roll-wouldn't stay in the same room when a Velvet Underground record hit the stereo. (One friend even scratched up the song "Heroin" because of what he termed its "counterrevolutionary nihilism.") All together, the Velvets' catalog would sell something less than 50,000 copies during the time the band was together.

BY THE VELVETS' fourth alb.u.m, 1970's Loaded, financial problems and lack of recognition prompted Reed to quit the band. He embarked on a solo career that became so spotty it seemed irreconcilable with the promise of his earlier work. After finally achieving commercial success in 1972 with "Walk on the Wild Side" (from Transformer, co-produced by David Bowie), Reed immediately began to test his audience's endurance. First he grilled them with the much-maligned Berlin narrative, then later with Metal Machine Music. In between, there were the hits, Rock 'n' Roll Animal and Sally Can't Dance (the latter actually went Top 10), records he now denounces as trivial, commercial contrivances.

Then, in 1976, after a brief, tempestuous marriage (the fodder for Berlin) and increasingly strained relationships with his manager and producer-brothers Dennis and Steve Katz-Reed rebounded. He disengaged himself from Dennis Katz, a.s.sembled a stoical, one-shot band, and recorded Coney Island Baby, his most personal set of songs since his days with the Velvets. Following that, he left RCA Records for Arista and last year delivered Street Ha.s.sle-a jolting statement of self-affirmation-and now is about to release The Bells, which he thinks will surpa.s.s Take No Prisoners and which features a few songs co-written with Nils Lofgren. It would seem that Reed's gifts of vision and expression are fully revivified and newly honed to a lethal edge.

Sitting in the bar, as a last flush of rain washes away the daylight outside, I figure both of us have had enough to drink for me to ask about where those lost years went. As a way of broaching the subject, I quote a pa.s.sage from Rolling Stone's review of Street Ha.s.sle, in which Tom Carson describes Reed's decline as a degeneration into "a crude, death-trip clown." It sobers Reed right up. He smiles grimly and glances around the room. "That's not for me to comment on, is it? Obviously it's someone else's construction."

After a taut moment, he reconsiders. "Let me tell you a little story," he says. "It comes from a collection of personal prose that my friend, the late poet Delmore Schwartz, wrote, called Vaudeville for a Princess. In this one chapter he's talking about driving a car, and how as a youngster he had driven one as contemporary as he was; in other words, the year he was driving it was the year of the car's model. Subsequently, as he got older and fortune, perhaps, didn't smile upon him as he wished it would, the car he would drive was not at all of the same year as he was driving it, but it would be older-five, ten years older. Eventually, we get around to a time fifteen years later and he felt he was making progress because the car he was driving was only two years older than the year in which he was driving it. As a slight tangent, he makes mention not to mock him over this because he, too, has seen visions of glory and ticker-tape parades in New York City. Anyway, he's now at last out driving this car that's almost contemporary with his time, so he's obviously progressing. But he observes that n.o.body is with him to take note of the event, because he didn't have a license and his erratic driving reflected the fact that "life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous.' "

Lou pauses and smiles curtly. "Life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous. I've probably had more of a chance to make an a.s.shole out of myself than most people, and I realize that. But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public."

EARLIER IN OUR conversations, during the tour that sp.a.w.ned Take No Prisoners, Lou and I meet in the same bar. Instead of his usual playfully testy demeanor, he seems sullen, almost solitary. "This is one of those days," he says, taking a seat at a corner table, "where everything's going to go wrong."

At first Reed's mood is hard to place, since his shows of the night before had clearly been fervently fought successes. But then I recall that when he'd come out for his second show, he found his guitar out of tune and threw it angrily to the floor in the middle of the opening number, cracking its body. "I could've cried then," he says, "but I don't really care now. I use my moods. I get into one of these dark, melancholy things and I just milk it for everything I can. I know I'll be out of it soon and I won't be looking at things the same way. For every dark mood, I also have a euphoric opposite. I think they say that manic-depressives go as high as they go down, which isn't to say that I'm really depressive."

Since Lou in his dark moods, though, is probably Lou at his most reflective, I decide to ask him how this affects his songwriting. He's said in the past that he never writes from a personal point of view, that he has "nothing remotely in common with the Lou Reed character." Indeed, much of his work, especially Berlin, seems the product of a detached observer, with no stake in the outcome of his characters' lives and no moral interest in their choices. But Coney Island Baby and Street Ha.s.sle seem as revelatory and personal as anything in seventies music. Isn't the real Lou Reed in there someplace?

Lou sits quietly for several moments, studying a gold-plated lighter cupped in his hands. When he speaks, it's in a soft, murmuring voice. "There are some severe little tangent things in my songs that remove them from me, but, ah, yes, they're very personal. I guess the Lou Reed character is pretty close to the real Lou Reed, to the point, maybe, where there's really no heavy difference between the two, except maybe a piece of vinyl. I keep hedging my bet, instead of saying that's really me, but that is me, as much as you can get on record."

Lou signals the waitress over to order a double Johnnie Walker straight. He seems to be coming alive a bit to the idea of conversation, his eyes studying me as he talks. "I have songs about killing people, but Dostoevski killed people, too. In reality I might not do what a character in my songs would, if only because I'd be jailed. It goes back to when I began to write songs-I didn't see why the form should be looked upon as restrictive, although since then I've seen the resistance it can generate. But that's only if you lose your impetus.

"In my own writing, for instance, I'm very good at the glib remark that may not mean something if you examine it closely, but it still sounds great. It's like a person who can argue either side of a question with equal pa.s.sion, but what do they really think? They might not think anything, so you might not get to know them."

Lou spots a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle on a nearby table and fetches it to show me a review of his concert the night before. He turns momentarily livid. The reviewer, Lou is quick to point out, spent most of his s.p.a.ce denouncing the ticket price ($9.50 at the door) and Reed's take (reportedly $7,500 a night) before commenting on his "unmusical manner," "incoherent lyrics," and his sp.a.w.ning of "sick-rock."

I recall that the Velvet Underground received similar reviews when they played the West Coast. "When we left New York," says Lou, "we were shocked that we were such a big deal. For anyone who goes to movies or reads anything, why should we have been shocking? One reason, I guess, is that singing a rock & roll song is a very real thing; it's accessible on an immediate level, more so than a book or movie. People a.s.sume that what's on a record applies to the person singing it and they find that shocking, although they can pick up the newspaper and read things far more shocking.

"Maybe one of the reasons my stuff doesn't have ma.s.s appeal is that it does approach people on a personal level. It a.s.sumes a certain agreement of mores, or if not an agreement, then at least an awareness on the listener's part. But with somebody like this-"Lou slaps the review with the back of his hand-" it's just deemed incoherent and offensive from the top. Unmusical manner, he spits. "What a great phrase to be used by such a poor writer. It's like saying Philip Marlowe was unsavory.

"Anyway, there wasn't anything like us at the time of the Velvet Underground. There still isn't. "Heroin' is just as right on the nose now as it was ten years ago. Shocking? I suppose, but I always thought it was kind of romantic."

Romantic?

"Yes, because it's not really like that at all," he replies. "There's not that much strain in that world. I've had kids come up to me and say, "You turned me on to junk because of that song.' Well, you can't concern yourself with being a parent for the world. People deserve the right to be what they're going to be, both in the positive and pejorative sense. I just wish they'd see that you can't evolve through someone else."

But one thing that disturbs people about Reed's music, I note, is its lack of what might be called a moral stance. Lou shrugs his nose in disdain. "It's simply professional detachment," he says. "I'm not spinning around in the caldron of it all with no viewpoint. There is a viewpoint, although it's mainly the view that that's the way things are. Take it or leave it. The thing that allows a lot of my characters to leave it is something that ends up negating them.

"Let me propose something to you. Take the guy who's singing in the second part of 'Street Ha.s.sle,' who's saying, 'Hey that's some bad s.h.i.t that you came to our place with/But you ought to be a little more careful around those little girls. . . . ' Now, he may come off as a little cruel, but let's say he's also the guy who's singing the last part about losing love. He's already lost the one for him. He's not unaware of those feelings, he's just handling the situation, that's all. And who would know better than the guy who lost somebody in a natural way? That's what my songs are all about: They're one-to-ones. I just let people eavesdrop on them. Like that line at the end of "Street Ha.s.sle': "Love has gone away/Took the rings right off my fingers/There's nothing left to say/But oh how I miss him, baby.' That person really exists. He did take the rings right off my fingers, and I do miss him."

Lou digs into the pocket of his jacket for his cigarettes. He lights one and gives me a level look. "They're not heteros.e.xual concerns running through that song," he says. "I don't make a deal of it, but when I mention a p.r.o.noun, its gender is all-important. It's just that my gay people don't lisp. They're not any more affected than the straight world. They just are. That's important to me. I'm one of them and I'm right there, just like anybody else. It's not made anything other than what it is. But if you take me, you've got to take the whole thing."

I'm not sure what to say for the moment, so I sit there, returning his stare. I recall something he said the day before about Delmore Schwartz: "It must have been really incredible to have been good-looking, a poet, and be straight."

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Lou is in Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Roxy. On the afternoon of his last show, I visit him at his Beverly Hills hotel and find him lying on the floor before the TV, watching a videotape of the previous night's performance. "Look at that guy," says Lou, pointing at himself on the screen. "He sure is shameless about occupying his own life." Lou Reed on the screen turns and looks over his shoulder and smiles at Lou Reed on the floor. Lou Reed on the floor smiles back.

On the screen a jagged tango pulse announces "Street Ha.s.sle." I've seen Lou do this song eight times, and each time something remarkable happened to his character-and to the audience. Although several of the people at those shows were hearing it for the first time, they nearly always sat in stunned silence. It was as if Lou were guiding them through a private and treacherous world, the world of Lou Reed's ethos. To miss this performance is to miss one of the greatest psychodramas in rock & roll.

Lou on the TV screen slicks his hair back now and begins declaiming to some unseen guest about how that guest has been too reckless with his dope, bringing his girlfriend to Lou's apartment and then fixing her up so carelessly that she overdoses on the spot. "I know this ain't no way to treat a guest," says Lou on the screen, "but why don't you grab your old lady by the feet and lay her out in the darkened street/And by tomorrow morning she's just another hit-and-run/You know, some people got no choice and they can never find a voice to talk with that they can call their own/So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it's called? Bad luck."

"You know," says Lou on the floor, turning to me, "every time I'm doing that song, when it gets to that awful last line I never know just how it's going to come across. 'So the first thing they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it/You know what it's called?' And here comes that line and it should punch like a bullet: Bad luck. The point of view of the guy saying that is so awful. But it's so true. I only realize sometime afterward what Lou Reed's talking about. I just try to stay out of the way."

Lou is up on his feet now and decides he wants to ride into Hollywood to find an obscure patch cord for one of his tape decks. Outside, it's a damp, gray winter day in Los Angeles. "This is the kind of day where, if you were in the Village in New York," says Lou, "you might go down to some gay bar and see if you can make a new friend."

As we swing onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Lou injects the tape resting in my ca.s.sette player. "We're the poison in your human machine," roars Johnny Rotten. "We're the future-You-rrr future." Lou has a queasy look on his face. "Shakespeare had a phrase for that," he says. " 'Sound and fury signifying nothing.' I'm so tired of the theory of the n.o.ble savage. I'd like to hear punks who weren't at the mercy of their own rage and who could put together a coherent sentence. I mean, they can get away with 'Anarchy in the U.K.' and that bulls.h.i.t, but it hasn't an eighth the heart or intelligence of something like Garland Jeffreys' 'Wild in the Streets.' "

We arrive at the stereo store, and Lou spends the next hour meticulously picking through accessory bins until he finds the cord he needs. Back in the car we talk a bit about the early Velvets alb.u.ms. I ask Lou again why it was so hard for him, after he left the group, to maintain his creative momentum. He frames his reply carefully. "It was just an awful period. I had very little control over the records; they were really geared for the money. When I made Coney Island Baby, Ken Glancy, the president of RCA at the time, backed me to the hilt because he knew me. There were rumors that I couldn't stand tours because I was all f.u.c.ked up on dope and my mind was going. I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to stop all of it. No matter what people may think of that record, it wasn't ill-advised at all. It did what it was supposed to do. But it was supposed to do a lot more. I mean, I really believed in it also. That could be ill-advised, I suppose, but I just think it's one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody, anywhere. In time, it will prove itself."

What made Coney Island Baby such a statement of renewal?

"Because it was my record. I didn't have much time and I didn't have much money, but it was mine. There was just me and Rachel [Reed's male companion of the last several years and the raison d'etre of Street Ha.s.sle] living at the f.u.c.king Gramercy Park Hotel on fifteen dollars a day, while the lawyers were trying to figure out what to do with me. Then, I got a call from Clive Davis [president of Arista Records] and he said, "Hey, how ya doing? Haven't seen you for a while.' He knew how I was doing. He said, "Why don't we have lunch?' I felt like saying, "You mean you want to be seen with me in public?' If Clive could be seen with me, I had turned the corner. I grabbed Rachel and said, "Do you know who just called?' I knew then that I'd won.

"It's just that turning that corner was really hard. When Ken Glancy backed me, that was step one; when Clive gave me a call, step two; and Street Ha.s.sle and Take No Prisoners are like step three. And I think they're all home runs. I'm a long-term player. Saying "I'm a Coney Island baby' at the end of that song is like saying I haven't backed off an inch, and don't you forget it."

We arrive back at Lou's hotel and he invites me in to hear the difference the patch cord makes in his tape deck. Inside, two members of his sound crew are already waiting to take him to the afternoon's sound check, but Lou wants to play with his machines first. "It's funny," he says, sitting on the floor with his miniature speakers sprawled around him, "but maybe the most frightening thing that can be said about me is that I'm so d.a.m.n sane. Maybe these aren't my devils at all that people are finding on these records-they're other people's. When I start writing about my own, then it could prove really interesting."

Maybe so, but I can't help recalling his earlier comment about what a master of the glib remark he is. I think Lou's been exposing plenty of his devils all along, and I think he knows it. On an earlier occasion, I'd told him his work sometimes reminded me of that of Diane Arbus, the late photographer known princ.i.p.ally for her studies of desolate and deformed subjects. Lou recoiled instantly at the suggestion. "Her subject matter's grotesque," he said. "I don't consider mine grotesque. To show the inherent deformity in normally formed people is what I'm interested in, not in showing beauty in deformity."

By saying that, Lou seems to be saying he knows exactly what devils he's after, and that he won't pa.s.s them off on anyone as angels.

If Lou Reed has accomplished nothing else, that victory alone would be moral enough.

AFTER THE HARROWING scenarios of his 1978 masterwork, Street Ha.s.sle, Lou Reed began working to counteract his profligate image-or perhaps simply to reveal more of the real sensibility behind his songs. The first glimpses came in his 1979 alb.u.m, The Bells (in some ways, his most resourceful work), during "Families"-a song about a son speaking to his hardened parents across a chasm of mutual heartbreak: "And no no no no no, I still haven't got married," Reed sang in a pain-filled quaver, "And no no no, there's no grandson planned here for you. . . . And I don't think I'll come home much anymore." With The Bells, Lou Reed fulfilled-maybe even laid to rest-a longstanding ethos: one of grim choices and unsparing accountability. A song like "Families" sounded as if it used up the whole of Reed's emotional being. It didn't seem possible that either his art or his life could ever be the same again. In fact, they couldn't.

Reed moved deeper into the theme of familial fatalism-the fear, hate, and defeat that parents too often bequeath upon their children as their most lasting and bitter legacy-on the following year's alb.u.m, Growing Up in Public. But Growing Up in Public was also an alb.u.m about summoning up high-test courage: the courage to love, and along with it, the will to forgive everybody who-and everything that-ever cut short your chances in the first place. On Growing Up, Reed's material bridged the difficult chasm between moral narrative and unadulterated autobiography. In part, the new compositions were about Reed's decision to marry again-a decision that flabbergasted many of the people who'd pegged him as a middle-aged, intractable gay-but they were also seared recollections of the prime forces that almost fated him. In "My Old Man," he railed at the memory of a Karamazov-like father in a burst of near-patricidal rage: "And when he beat my mother/It made me so mad I could choke . . . /And can you believe what he said to me/He said, 'Lou, act like a man.' " And Reed did act like a man. He shattered the alb.u.m's claustrophobic web of hatred and self-defeat-perhaps the most frightening he'd ever constructed, because it was also the most universal-by choosing to run the same risk at which his parents failed: the risk of the heart. "When you ask for somebody's heart," he sang in that alb.u.m's most tender moment, "You must know that you're smart/Smart enough to care for it." It was hardly a detached lyric: On Valentine's Day, 1980, Reed married Sylvia Morales, and for a time, both his life and music seemed deepened by the union.

Indeed, several of the records that Reed made during that marriage-including The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, and New Sensations-were tough-willed statements of personal love as the only remaining act of defiance, and as such, they also worked as a reexamination of his earlier mores. In "Heavenly Arms," he made the act sound like nothing less than an urgent and vital good fight: "Lovers stand warned/Of the world's impending storm." But in such songs as "Legendary Hearts" and "Home of the Brave," Reed fully expressed the difficulty of trying to integrate the frustrations and limitations of his distant past and the reality of his fiery temperament with the knowledge that real love requires constant recommitment-demands, in fact, a daily renewal to a struggle of uphill faith. "The thing about love," he told me back during our 1979 and 1980 conversations, "is that it isn't logical. You don't necessarily love what's logical or good for you. Believe me, I know. At the same time, that's the beauty of love-when you're pa.s.sionately caring for the welfare of somebody beyond yourself." Then he laughed. "Maybe what we're talking about is the touch of an angel's wing. And the possibility of transcendence."

In time, Reed's marriage to Morales ended, and as I write these words in 1997, it is reported that he has recently been quite happy with artist and singer Laurie Anderson (talk about a meeting of the minds). In the 1990s, Reed has continued to make strong, vital, and imaginative records-including New York, Songs for Drella (an elegy to Andy Warhol, co-written with former Velvets partner John Cale), Magic and Loss, and Set the Twilight Reeling. He also briefly re-formed the Velvet Underground in the early 1990s, making-oddly enough-for the only truly unaffecting music that remarkable group ever produced.

After all my years of listening to and loving popular music, I can say that-along with Bob Dylan-Lou Reed remains my favorite rock & roll artist; indeed, along with Dylan, he is probably the only artist who has grown and weathered so well, and whose lapses are even something to pore over, time and again, in wonder. If I had to pick my favorite lines he has ever written, they would be these: "It was good what we did yesterday/And I'd do it once again/The fact that you are married/Only proves you're my best friend/But it's truly, truly a sin" (from 1969's "Pale Blue Eyes"). Also, these: "With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of h.e.l.l/Everybody's going to look for a bell to ring" (from 1979's "All through the Night"). It seems to me that in his best music-even in his darkest, most brokenhearted reveries-Lou Reed has always rung a bell, loud and clear, pealing a clarion call of hope that the glory of love, despite (or because of) our daytimes of sin and nighttimes of h.e.l.l, might see us all through yet.

brothers: the allman brothers band.

Some say there was a ghost. Some unkind spirit, the rumor went, had clambered up out of a dark legacy of death and bad news, and had attached itself to the Allman Brothers Band, like a mean dog trailing its quarry, until it had dragged the band down into the dust of its own dreams.

Maybe the group had attracted the spirit on one of those late nights more than a generation before, when various band members would gather in the Rose Hill Cemetery, not far from where the Allman Brothers lived in Macon, Georgia. The story is, they drank wine and whiskey there, smoked dope, took psychedelics, played and wrote dark, obsessive blues songs, and laid their Southern girlfriends across sleek tombstones on humid, heat-thick Southern nights, and made love to warm, twitching bodies that were laying only a few feet above other bodies, long p.r.o.ne and long cold. Maybe on one of those occasions, in some unG.o.dly moment in which s.e.x and hallucinations and blues all mixed and formed an unwitting invocation, an insatiable specter was raised, and decided to stay close to the troubled and vulnerable souls that had summoned it. Or maybe it was something even older and meaner that trailed the Allmans-something as old as the h.e.l.lions and h.e.l.lhounds that were said to haunt Southern rural crossroads on moonless nights.

Yes, some say there was a ghost. Some even say they witnessed that ghost-or at least, witnessed how palpable it was for those who had to live with the effects of its haunts. There are stories about late night reveries in the early 1970s, when the band's most famous member would sit in darkened hotel rooms, watching early morning TV, brooding. By this time, the Allman Brothers Band was the most successful pop group in America-in fact, the band had played for the largest audience ever a.s.sembled in the nation's history. But perhaps that success was never enough to stave off fears that there was yet more that this band was destined to lose.

In those postmidnight funks, the blond blues singer sat and watched TV, sometimes horror movies with the sound down. An empty chair was sometimes close by. To at least one visitor, the singer insisted that a spirit sat in that chair-and that he knew that spirit well. In fact, he said, he and the ghost were on a first-name basis. He and the ghost even shared the same last name.

WALK INTO A room to meet the surviving members of the original Allman Brothers Band, and you walk into the midst of a complex shared history. It is a spooky, gothic story of family ties-of both blood brotherhood and chosen brotherhood-and it is also a story of amazing prodigies, dogged by amazingly bad fortune. Indeed, the four men seated in this room-keyboardist Gregg Allman, guitarist d.i.c.key Betts, and drummers Jai Jaimoe and Butch Trucks-are people who helped make history: They once personified what rock & roll and blues could achieve in those forms' grandest moments of musical imagination, and they also once played a significant role in the American South's social and political history. But like anybody who has made history that matters, the members of the Allman Brothers were also bruised by that history. They do not seem like men who are unduly arrogant or proud; rather, they seem like men who have learned that proud moments can later form the heart of indelibly painful memories.

It has been several years since these musicians have recorded together, but on this sultry afternoon in mid-spring, as they gather in the lounge at Miami's Criteria Studios, they are beginning the final work on Seven Turns-a record that they boldly claim is their most important and accomplished work since 1973's Brothers and Sisters. In many ways, this is an adventure they never thought they would share. In 1983, after a restive fourteen-year history, the Allman Brothers dissolved into the caprices of pop history. The band had broken up before-in the mid-1970s, on rancorous terms-but this time they quit because the pop world no longer wanted them. "We had been credited as being a flagship band," says d.i.c.key Betts, pulling nervously at his mustache, his eyes taking a darting scan of the other faces in the room. "All of a sudden managers and record company people were telling us that we should no longer use terms like 'Southern Rock,' or that we couldn't wear hats or boots onstage, that it was embarra.s.sing to a modern audience. We finally decided we couldn't meet the current trends-that if we tried, we were going to make fools out of ourselves playing disco music, and ruin any integrity we had left. Looking back, splitting up was the best thing we could have done. We would have ruined whatever pleasant images people had of us by trudging along."

The band members went separate ways. Allman and Betts toured with their own bands off and on, playing mainly clubs and small venues, and even teamed up for a tour or two. Butch Trucks went back to school, opened a recording studio in Tallaha.s.see, raised his family, and involved himself in the difficult fight to stop record labeling in Florida. Jai Jaimoe packed a set of drums in his Toyota and spent years traveling around the South, playing in numerous jazz, R & B, and pop bands. Occasionally, the various ex-Allmans would come together for the odd jam or gig, but n.o.body spoke much about the collective dreams they had once shared. Clearly, the glory days were behind them, and there wasn't much point in talking them to death.

Then, toward the late 1980s, pop music began going through one of its periodic revisionist phases. Neo-blues artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray began attracting a ma.s.s audience; plucky country singers like Lyle Lovett and k. d. lang had started attracting a broad spectrum of alternative and mainstream fans; and the long-suffering, brandy-voiced Bonnie Raitt enjoyed a major comeback with her surprisingly straightforward renditions of blues and R & B music. As a result, d.i.c.key Betts received a call from Epic Records: Was he interested in making a Southern Rock LP? Betts thought Epic was joking, but nope-the label even wanted him to a.s.semble a band with a twin-guitar frontline, and yes, if he really wanted, he could wear his cowboy hat onstage. Betts put together a solo act, and eventually he and Trucks received calls from Epic that led to an invitation to re-form the Allman Brothers. At first, both were wary-Gregg Allman's drug and alcohol problems remained legendary, and they weren't sure about touring or playing with him under those circ.u.mstances. But Betts, who had seen Allman often in recent years, said that Gregg was in good shape and better voice than ever, and that like the rest of them, he had missed the music they had made together. So Betts called Epic back and asked: For a Southern Rock band, how would the label like to have the Southern Rock group, the Allman Brothers Band? Epic was thrilled-until it was learned that the band planned to tour before recording.

"They were afraid we would break up again before we ever finished the tour," says Betts, laughing. Actually, touring was reportedly part of the deal the bandmembers had struck about Gregg Allman: Before entering a studio to work on new material, or before committing themselves to spending a few more years together, they wanted to see how Gregg would handle the road; in fact, they wanted to see how everybody would handle working together again. Mainly, they wanted to see if they could still play like the Allman Brothers, rather than as a once-removed imitation.

"It would have been pitiful to have put this band back together, just to be an embarra.s.sment," says Betts. "I don't think we could have dealt with that. The trouble is, we'd already been compared to ourselves a lot, and not always in a good way."

As it turned out, the timing was good: Numerous other older acts-including the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney were hitting the road in 1989 with largely retrospective tours, and PolyGram was also preparing a multidisc historical overview of the Allmans for imminent release. For the first time in nearly a decade, the Allmans had a context to work in. Betts and Allman recruited some new members-guitarist Warren Haynes, ba.s.sist Allen Woody, and keyboardist Johnny Neel-and the Allman Brothers Band was reborn. More important, they were once again a forceful live band, playing their hard-hitting brand of improvisational blues with the sort of vitality the band had not evinced since the early 1970s. "Once more, we were getting compared to ourselves," says Betts, "but this time in a positive way. The ideal, of course, would be to have all the original members of the band still alive and with us, but that can't be. But I'll say this: This is the first lineup we've had since Duane Allman and Berry Oakley were in the band that has the same spirit that we had in those days."

Butch Trucks-who can be the most paternal and also the saltiest-talking member of the band-puts it differently. "It feels like the Allman Brothers again," he says, "and it hasn't felt that way in a long, long time. I like it. It makes my sticker peck out."

Periodically, as Betts and Trucks talk, Gregg Allman tries to seem interested in the conversation. He will lean forward, clasp his hands together, look like he has something to say . . . but he never voluntarily fields a single question. After a bit, he settles back into the sofa and simply looks as if he's in his own world. He seems to spend a lot of time inside himself, staring into some private, inviolable s.p.a.ce. In the entire conversation, he will say only one complete sentence: "It's hard to live those ten or twenty years, and then try to start all over again with another band."

Abruptly, Gregg is on his feet, excusing himself. He is scheduled to begin final vocals today, and he is restless to get started. When asked if it's okay to watch him record at some point, he visibly freezes. "Um, Gregg won't let anybody in there when he's singing," says Betts, coming to Allman's rescue. "Vocals are real personal, you know. You're just standing there naked."

"Yeah, with your d.i.c.k hanging out," says Trucks. After Gregg leaves, Trucks adds: "I've never seen anybody so nervous about letting others listen."

Recently, there had been some concern about Gregg's vocals. Reportedly, producer Tom Dowd-the owner of Criteria Studios, and the producer of the band's early cla.s.sics, At the Fillmore East and Eat A Peach-was worried that he might not get workable complete performances from Allman, and would have to paste the final vocals together from earlier rough tracks. n.o.body knows at the moment whether Gregg can sing as well as they are hoping he will sing-indeed, any Allmans reunion effort would fall flat without Gregg's trademark growly vocals-and n.o.body's sure how Gregg's current unease bodes for the band's upcoming summer tour.

"It's hard to be sober again after all these years," says Trucks, who went through a drying-out period of his own. "At a time like this, Gregg probably doesn't even know if he can talk to people, much less sing. But the thing is, he did it for too many years not to go for it now."

AROUND MIDNIGHT, a warm spring storm is dropping heavy sheets of rain all over north Miami. Drummer Jai Jaimoe (who was once known as Jai Johanny Johanson, but now prefers to be called simply Jaimoe) stands in the main hallway at Criteria Studios, unpacking a crate of new cymbals, caressing their nickel-plated gleam with obvious affection. He is wearing a pink, blue, and green knitted African cap; bright green baggy pants; and knee-length black T-shirt bearing the statement, "The objects under this shirt are smaller than they appear."

Down the hall, Gregg Allman is taking pa.s.ses at his vocal on "Good Clean Fun," and from what one can hear, he is sounding more confident, more vibrant by the moment. A few feet away, d.i.c.key Betts is strumming an acoustic guitar for some friends, singing "Seven Turns"-a haunting song he has written about the Allman Brothers' hard losses and renewed hopes. In the main lounge, Butch Trucks sits watching a golf tournament, trying to explain the Zen princ.i.p.al of the sport to his wife, who does not seem to be buying the idea. Various Allman wives and girlfriends-including Gregg's new wife, Danielle-sit around talking or reading true-crime books, and d.i.c.key and Gregg's dogs wander in and out of the action, sniffing empty food cartons and looking perplexedly at the downpour outside. Also drifting in and out are producer Tom Dowd-who wears a perpetually rumpled professorial manner-and the legendary Allmans roadie Red Dog, a notorious but charming womanizer, a terrific dirty-joke teller, and plainly the band's most devoted fan. It must seem a bit like old times here, only considerably more easygoing. "I missed playing with these people," Jaimoe will say at one point. "We had something together that I could never find with other bands."

Between storm bouts, Jaimoe suggests taking a walk across the parking lot to a nearby studio, where it will be possible to talk with less distraction. People in and around the Allmans will often joke about Jaimoe-they say that for over a generation, he has been perpetually reclusive, inscrutable, even s.p.a.cey. But they also make awed references to the drummer's near-encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and rhythm & blues artists and styles, and certainly, n.o.body can imagine attempting a reunion at this time without his involvement. In fact, it is often joked that Jaimoe was the original member of the Allman Brothers-or at least that he was the one who had always been waiting for a band like the Allmans to come along. "All my life I had wanted to play in a jazz band," says Jaimoe, settling into a sofa in an empty, dimly lighted studio control booth. "Then I played with Duane Allman."

Like Allman, Jaimoe had harbored a special pa.s.sion for Southern-based musical styles. By the mid-1960s, he had served as a regular session drummer at the Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama-where some of the most renowned Southern soul music of the period was recorded-and he performed with numerous R & B and blues artists, including Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, and Clifton Chenier. "I think I had been preparing to play in this band without really knowing what I was preparing for," says Jaimoe, shifting his weight on the sofa. "I think it was from playing with all those other musicians that I got all that fiery stuff that people hear in my playing."

In the course of his studio work, Jaimoe met the two people who would become among the princ.i.p.al driving forces behind the Allman Brothers Band: Duane Allman and a fledgling entrepreneur named Phil Walden. Walden was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, a middle-sized town that still relied on agriculture for much of its economy, and that still maintained much of its pre-Civil War architecture (General Sherman had considered the town too insignificant to plunder or ravage). In the 1950s, Walden had grown enamored of Memphis-style rock & roll and, in particular, black R & B of singers like Hank Ballard and the Five Royales, and by the mid-1960s he was managing numerous black stars, including Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Al Green, Johnny Taylor, Joe Tex, Arthur Conley, and, most famously, Otis Redding.

Walden's affection for black music was anathema to many of Macon's leading businessmen and church officials. Walden didn't present himself as a civil rights activist, but he did bristle at provincial racism, and he refused to kowtow to local pressures. The South, he often told his critics, would have to change its att.i.tudes, and what's more, the popularity of the new Southern soul was a harbinger of that change. "I think rhythm and blues had a h.e.l.l of a lot to do with turning the region around on race relations," he would later tell an interviewer. "When people get together and listen to the same music, it makes hating kind of harder."

But Walden's involvement in R & B was cut suddenly and brutally short. In December 1967, Otis Redding-a few months after his triumphant appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on the verge of a long-antic.i.p.ated ma.s.s breakthrough-was flying a small twin-engine plane from Cleveland to Madison, Wisconsin, when the plane went down in a Wisconsin lake, killing Redding and four members of his backup band, the Bar-Kays. Walden was known as a proud, ambitious, and clever man-even indomitable-but for him, Redding's death was more than the loss of a prize client, and more than the termination of one of the most brilliantly promising artistic careers of the period. It was also a devastating personal loss, and according to many of the people who knew him, Walden thereafter kept a greater emotional distance from his clients.

Duane Allman had also had his life and sensibility transformed by sudden death. In 1949, when Duane was three and his little brother Gregory was two, the Allman family was living in Nashville, Tennessee. That Christmas, the boys' father, an Army lieutenant, was on holiday leave from the Korean War. The day following Christmas, he picked up a hitchhiker, who robbed and murdered Duane and Gregg's father. The Allmans' mother, Geraldine, eventually enrolled her young children in a military academy in Lebanon, Tennessee, and then, in 1958, relocated the family in Daytona Beach, Florida. As young teens, the Allman brothers rarely talked about their father's death-they were too young to know him well-and in many ways, they were like other boys their age: Duane hated school, and quit in a hot temper several times, then spent his free time attending to his favorite possession, a Harley-Davidson 165. Gregg, meantime, stuck through school and was reportedly a fair student and athlete, though he regarded it as a thankless ordeal.

Early on, both Duane and Gregg found themselves drawn to music of loss and longing-particularly the high-lonesome wail of country music, and the haunted pa.s.sions of urban and country blues. Gregg had been the first to leap in: He had listened to a neighbor playing old-timey country songs on an acoustic guitar, and at thirteen, Gregg worked a paper route and saved money to buy a guitar at the local Sears and Roebuck. While Gregg was slogging his way through school, Duane started playing his brother's guitar-and to his surprise and Gregg's initial annoyance, discovered that he had a gift for the instrument. Soon, Duane and Gregg each owned electric guitars, and Duane would hole up with his instrument for days, learning the music of blues archetype Robert Johnson and jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell. Around that time, Duane and Gregg saw a B. B. King show during a visit to Nashville, and Duane's mind was made up: He and his brother were going to form a blues band of their own; in fact, they were going to make music their life. Duane continued studying numerous guitarists, including King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf's Hubert Sumlin, Elmore James, and French jazz prodigy Django Reinhardt, as well as the emerging British rock guitarists-especially a young firebrand named Eric Clapton-and the guitarists who were playing for soul artists like James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Duane also began paying attention to saxophonists like John Coltrane, to hear how a soloist could build a melodic momentum that worked within a complex harmonic and rhythmic structure. Meantime, Gregg began favoring jazz organists like Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond, and developed a special pa.s.sion for sophisticated blues and R & B vocalists like Bobby "Blue" Bland, Ray Charles, and Roy Milton.

But there was more to the brothers' quest than a mere attraction for music that took painful feelings and turned them into a joyful release. The Allmans-in particular, Duane-seemed intent on forming bands as an extension of family ideals, and they often invested these bands with the same qualities of love and anger, loyalty and rivalry, that they had practiced at home. In a way, this family idealism was simply a trend of the era: The 1960s were a time when rock bands were often viewed as metaphors for a self-willed brand of consonant community. But in the Allmans' case, the sources of this dream may have run especially deep. Their real-life family had been tumultuously shattered, and forming a band was a way of creating a fraternity they had never really known.

But the Allmans were also forming musical bonds in a time when the South was being forced to reexamine some of its cultural and racial traditions, and Duane and Gregg were unusually open to ideals of interaction and equality. To their mother's initial displeasure, the brothers preferred the music being played by local black talents, and in 1963, they helped form one of the area's first integrated bands, the House Rockers. It was a period of fierce feelings, but the Allmans, like Phil Walden, would not back off from a belief that their culture was starting to undergo radical and deeply needed social change.

In any event, Duane and Gregg went through a rapid succession of blues-oriented rock bands, including the Allman Joys, who toured the Southern teen circuit and recorded two alb.u.ms' worth of material (including several Yardbirds and Cream covers). By 1967, the group had been overhauled into the Hour Gla.s.s and had relocated to Los Angeles, where they recorded two LPs for Liberty. Both were better than average cover bands, and they gave Duane a chance to hone his flair for accompaniment and improvisation, and also helped Gregg develop as a sultry organist and an unusually inventive modern blues composer. But none of these groups matched Duane's boundless ambitions, and in 1968, the bossy and restless guitarist quit the Hour Gla.s.s and accepted an invitation from Fame Studios' owner-operator Rick Hall to work as a sideman on an upcoming Wilson Pickett session. Duane left Gregg in L.A. to fulfill the Liberty contract, and in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he played sessions with Pickett, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Arthur Conley, and Ronnie Hawkins; in New York, he played with Aretha Franklin. By 1969, Duane Allman had gained a reputation as one of the most musically eloquent and soul-sensitive session guitarists in contemporary music.

It was in this time that Jai Johanny Johanson met Allman. "I had a friend who was doing session work with Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin," says Jaimoe. "He came home to Macon one day and told me, 'Jai, they got a white boy down in Alabama by the name of Duane "Skydog" Allman. He's a hippie with long, stringy hair,' he said, 'but you've got to hear him play.' I remember listening to the radio late one night in Macon-there wasn't anything else to do there; everything was closed up-and this Aretha Franklin thing, 'The Weight,' came on the radio, with this stand-out guitar solo, and I thought, 'That's got to be "Skydog" Allman, man.' I thought he was a cool guitarist, but he wasn't any Barney Kessel or Tal Farlow, and those were the only Caucasian cats that I heard who could really play the instrument."

A bit later, Jaimoe visited Muscle Shoals during a King Curtis session and sought out Allman. The two musicians became close friends, and between sessions, they would hang out in one of Fame's vacant studios, jamming for hours head-on. Then one day, another skinny, long-haired white boy-a ba.s.sist named Berry Oakley, whom Duane had met in Jacksonville, Florida-started joining on the jams. "Man," says Jaimoe, "when Berry joined us, that was some incredible s.h.i.t. I remember that people like [ba.s.sist] David Hood, [pianist] Barry Beckett, and [drummer] Roger Hawkins [all among Muscle Shoals' most respected session players] would come into the room when we were playing, and we were trying to get them to join in. But none of them would pick up an instrument. We scared the s.h.i.t out of them guys."

Somewhere around this time Allman attracted the attention of Phil Walden, who was in the process of forming his own label, Macon-based Capricorn Records, to be distributed by Atlantic. One day, Rick Hall played for Walden a new alb.u.m he had just recorded with Wilson Pickett, including a cover of the Beatles' "Hey Jude." Walden was transfixed by the work of the guitarist on the session, and after traveling to Muscle Shoals, he eventually made a deal to manage Duane Allman. Walden thought he had found his Elvis Presley: a white musician who could play black, blues-based forms in a way that would connect with an entire new ma.s.s audience.

There had been talk of Allman, Jaimoe, and Oakley forming a trio based on the spa.r.s.e but furious improvisational dynamics of the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream, but Walden encouraged Allman to seek his own mix of style and texture. Allman knew he wanted to work with Jaimoe and Oakley, but he had also been drawn to a few other musicians, including lead guitarist d.i.c.key Betts (who had played with Oakley in a band called the Second Coming, and with whom Allman had played several twin-lead jams), and drummer Butch Trucks (with whom Gregg and Duane had played in Jacksonville). One day, these five musicians gathered at Trucks' home in Jacksonville, and began playing. It turned into a relentless jam that stretched for four hours and left everybody involved feeling electrified, even thunderstruck. When it was over, Duane stepped to the entrance of the room and spanned his arms across the doorway, forming a human blockade. "Anybody who isn't playing in my band is going to have to fight their way out of this room," he said.

Duane told Walden and Atlantic vice president Jerry Wexler-who had advanced Walden $75,000 to form Capricorn-that he wanted to bring his brother Gregg back from L.A. to sing in the newly formed group, but the company heads initially balked. Says Jaimoe: "I remember Duane saying, "Man, Jerry and them, they don't want me to have my brother in the band. They don't want no two brothers in the band. It's always been trouble. I mean, me and my brother, we don't get along that much-I don't like him. You know how it is: Brothers don't like each other.' And then Duane would say, "But Jaimoe, there ain't n.o.body else that can sing like my brother. In fact, I can't think of another motherf.u.c.ker who can sing in this band except my brother. That's who I really want.' "

In the end, Duane Allman got his way-and it proved to be a brilliant choice. Gregg Allman had been lonely in Southern California, had endured a troubled love affair and had even, he would later report, contemplated suicide. When Duane called him to join his new band, Gregg saw the invitation as deliverance from a grim reality. And what he brought with him would amount to one of the band's signature attractions: a powerfully erotic, poignant, and authoritative blues voice. When Gregg Allman sang a song like "Whipping Post," he did so in a voice that made you believe that the song's fear and pain and anger were the personal possessions of the singer-and that he had to reveal those dark emotions in order to get past the bitter truths he was singing about.

Phil Walden moved the band to Macon, and then put it on the road year-round. He and Duane didn't always see eye to eye on matters, weren't always close, but they agreed on one thing: The Allman Brothers Band was going to be both the best and biggest band in the country-or die trying.

ANOTHER DAY into the new sessions, d.i.c.key Betts is seated on a worn sofa in the foyer at Criteria Studios. Down the hall, Gregg Allman is still working on his vocals, and it is apparent from his and Tom Dowd's improved moods that the work is going well.

Betts had stayed up late the night before, listening to a ca.s.sette of an Allman Brothers show from a 1970 venue at Ludlow Garage in Cincinnati. PolyGram's Bill Levenson (who compiled the 1989 Allmans retrospective, Dreams) had recently remastered the session for commercial release, and last night was the first time Betts had heard the performance in twenty years. "I knew if the quality was anywhere above being embarra.s.sing, that it would be good," he says with a fast smile. Betts can seem the edgiest member of the group-he gets up and moves around while he talks, his eyes move constantly, and he is wary about how he phrases things-but behind that manner, he is amiable and honest, and he clearly possesses a remarkable breadth of intelligence. For many years now, he has been regarded as the real heart of the Allman Brothers Band, though he often tends to downplay his leadership role. Right now, he seems to enjoy talking about the revolutionary music the band began making in its early days. "If I recall," he says, "Ludlow was like a dungeon: a cement floor, with a low ceiling, kind of like a warehouse garage. Real funky. As I remember, it was recorded around the time of our first alb.u.m, way before we started getting anywhere. We were still underground at that point. We had a private, almost cultlike following."

The Allman Brothers may have been relatively "underground" in 1970, but they had already developed their mix of bedrock aggression and high-flown invention that would become their hallmark fusion. Like many bands of the time, the group was trying to summarize a wide range of rock, blues, and jazz traditions, and at the same time extend those traditions in new unantic.i.p.ated directions. In contrast, though, to the Grateful Dead or Miles Davis (both of whom often played improvisatory blues in modal formats and freewheeling structure), the Allmans built tremendously sophisticated melodic formations that never lost sight of momentum or palpable eroticism. For one thing, the band was genuinely attuned to the emotional meanings of blues and the stylistic patterns of rock & roll-that is, group members not only found inspiration in the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson, they also understood how that music's spirit had been extended and transmogrified in the later music of Chuck Berry, James Brown, and other rock and soul pioneers. At the same time, the Allmans loved jazz, and had spent many hours marveling at not only the prowess of musicians like Davis, Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, and Roland Kirk, but at how these visionaries had taken the same primitive blues impulses that had thrilled and terrified Robert Johnson and Louis Armstrong and turned them into an elaborate art form, capable of the most intricate, spontaneous inventions. Plus, there was an exceptional confluence that resulted from the Allmans' collective talents. In its straightahead blues mode, the band could barnstorm and burn with a fervor that even such white blues trendsetters as John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, and the Rolling Stones were hard-pressed to match. And when the Allmans stretched their blues into full-scale, labyrinthine improvisations-in the largely instrumental "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Whipping Post," and "Mountain Jam"-the band was simply matchless.

"Duane and Gregg were students of the urban blues," says Betts. "Their thing was like a real honest, truthful, chilling delivery of that music, whereas Oakley and I may have been influenced by the blues and were students of it, but we were more innovative. We would try to take a blues tune and, instead of respecting the sacredness of it, we would go sideways with it. But on our own, Berry and I were always missing something-a certain foundation-while Duane and Gregg didn't quite have the adventurous kind of thing. So when we all came together, we gave each other a new foundation."

It proved to be a unique amalgam, with Allman and Betts' twin-lead guitars often locking into frenzied and intricate melodic flights, and Jaimoe and Butch Trucks' double drumming forming a webwork of rhythm that both floated and pushed the drama of the guitars. The only other band in rock that attempted such an adventurous lineup was the Grateful Dead, though in the Dead's case, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann's rhythms too often pulled apart and lost momentum, and guitarist Bob Weir was never quite inventive enough to engage Jerry Garcia's considerable skill. Likelier prototypes were the double-saxophone and double-drum s.e.xtets and octets led by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman in the mid-1960s, as well as the twin-guitar and guitar-fiddle lineups of numerous western-swing and country-western bands. "I was always real fond of the twin guitars that Roy Clark and Dave Lyle played in Wanda Jackson's band," says Betts. "But it wasn't that we consciously copied any of these sources. It was just that later we realized that people like Clark and Lyle, and Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, had been pursuing the same idea many years before. For a rock & roll band, though, it was a pretty new adventure. I mean, one of the good things about the Allman Brothers, we listened to jazz and were influenced by it without ever pretending we were jazz players.

"But make no mistake: It was a matter of Duane being hip enough to see that potential and responding to it. He was absolutely in charge of that band. Had he missed that possibility or that chemistry, there would have been no Allman Brothers Band."

Betts also cites Berry Oakley as a key shaper of the Allmans' early sound. Certainly, Oakley was a singular ba.s.sist. Like such jazz hero-ba.s.sists as Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton, Ray Brown, or Scott LaFaro, Oakley had a profound melodic sense that combined fluently with a pulsing percussive touch; and like the Dead's Phil Lesh or Jefferson Airplane's Jack Ca.s.sady, he knew how to get under a band's action and lift and push its motions. "There were times," says Betts, "when Berry would be playing a line or phrase, and Duane would catch it, then jump on it and start playing harmony. Then maybe I'd lock into the melodic line that Duane was playing, and we would all three be off. That kind of thing was absolutely unheard of from a rock ba.s.sist. I mean, Berry would take over and give us the melody."

In fact, says Betts, it was Oakley who came up with the arrangement for "Whipping Post," the Allmans' most famous jam vehicle. "Oakley heard something in it that none of the rest of us heard-this frightening kind of thing. He sat up all night messing around and came back in the next day with a new opening in eleven/four time, and after that, ideas started flying from every direction. That sort of thing always happened with him."

By the end of 1970, the Allman Brothers had acquired a formidable reputation. They had recorded two critically praised LPs of blues-rock, interlaced with cla.s.sical- and country-derived elements, and Duane had gained pop renown for his contributions to Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos project, Layla and Other a.s.sorted Love Songs. But it was as a live unit that the band enjoyed its greatest repute, and in the year or so ahead, they would play somewhere around two hundred concerts. In part, to sustain their energy during the incessant and exhausting tours, and in part as a by-product of a time-old blues and jazz tradition (and a by-product of rock culture), the Allmans used an increasingly wide range of drugs-at first, primarily marijuana and occasional psychedelics and, in time, cocaine and heroin. It was a habit that bought the band some short-term potency, maybe even inspiration, but it would also eventually cost them their fraternity. Looking back, Betts has misgivings about the whole experience, and its legacy. "The drugs that were being done back in the sixties and seventies," he says, "were a lot easier to have fun with and be open about, and to find acceptable, because they were drugs to enhance your awareness, instead of an escape into some blackness. I'm not saying those drugs had any redeeming qualities, but at least that was the idea that people had at the time: It was an effort to open the mind up and go even further.

"Today, though, the drugs are so d.a.m.n deadly, so absolutely dangerous. There's nothing about them that's trying to enhance your awareness at all. The whole idea is to kill your awareness, to escape. It's just a perverted thing, and that's why I think that nowadays it's absolutely irresponsible and ignorant to sing in a positive way about doing drugs."

It was in this period that the Allman Brothers singlehandedly pioneered a style and demeanor that would become popularly known as Southern Rock: music that was aggressive yet could swing gracefully, played by musicians who were proud of their region and its musical legacies. Though later bands would reduce Southern Rock to a reactionary posture and a crude parody of machismo, the Allmans began the movement as a blast of musical and cultural innovation. In fact, their outlooks and