One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band Read Free Page A

I’ll make you a big star.’ As if anyone has the capacity to do that. If you ain’t carrying your own fuel, I don’t care how big of a building they shove you off of, you aren’t going to fly.
    “I would normally be the one to fall for this crap and my brother would be the one to slap me in the head, but I think he wanted to get out there and look at them pretty women in Hollywood and he said, ‘Hey, let’s do this.’ I said, ‘You’re out of your goddamn mind.’ He said, ‘Come on, you know this ain’t doing it.’ And he had a point. So I thought, ‘What the hell. If you do it, I’ll do it.’ It was one of them ‘You jump in the lake first and I’ll go in after you’ deals. So we go.”
    They hoped that being discovered by McEuen was the big break they had been dreaming of, but the group did not find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Renamed the Hour Glass and signed to Liberty Records, they released an unsuccessful album, then found themselves bound by the label’s dictates.
    “All along they wanted to cut Gregg like Gerry and the Pacemakers, with him out front and the band being inconsequential,” Sandlin says. “They hated anything we liked and we hated anything they liked.”
    On stage, the Hour Glass came to life, drawing the attention of the California rock elite, opening for the Doors at the Whisky a Go Go and Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. None of this seemed to have any impact on the people at Liberty Records, who dictated that they not overexpose themselves by playing too often.
    “It was an awful time in my life,” Gregg says. “I mean, they had us wearing these Nehru clown suits. When I look at that today, I have to tell myself, ‘Gregory, it was a long time ago, man. You were real naive and they were taking it from you hook, line, and sinker.’”
    Lacking a strong identity to match their well-developed skills, the restless brothers were struggling to find their own musical voices.
    “They didn’t know their position in the musical world yet—but they knew they were good,” recalls John McEuen. “They would open their sets with an instrumental version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ and close it with a song by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. It was all good, but all over the place. They were seeking their identity, but anyone who heard them understood how good they were. Duane had total command and authority of the guitar and Gregg was just a great singer who could make anything his own.”
    Gregg had written only a handful of songs he considered possible keepers. Duane had not yet begun to play the bottleneck slide guitar with which he would soon be closely associated.
    GREGG ALLMAN: We had chops up the ass, but didn’t have the originality thing down yet. We were stuck out in L.A. and we couldn’t play anywhere because the label wanted to control everything we did. Duane wanted to split and go back south where we belonged and the label said, “You can’t do that. We’ll freeze you from signing anywhere or recording for anyone.” He was in bad sorts over that.
    Around this time, most of the members of the Hour Glass went to see Taj Mahal at the Magic Mushroom, a club near their apartments.
    JOHNNY SANDLIN, longtime Allman friend and colleague; bassist in the Allman Joys and Hour Glass: Taj was great and so was his band, which included Jesse Ed Davis, playing slide guitar. Duane was knocked out by that slide playing and by “Statesboro Blues,” which Taj had just cut on his first album.
    I went by Duane’s apartment a few days later and Duane was playing slide on “Statesboro Blues” and he was very excited about it.
    “Statesboro Blues” was written and originally recorded by Blind Willie McTell in 1928, but it was a retake of Taj’s version that would become intimately linked with the Allman Brothers. From the start, Duane was using an empty bottle of Coricidian cold medicine as a slide. Gregg says the original slide came from a bottle