Hitting the Note with the Allman Brothers Band
By Grover Lewis

November 25th, 1971

Shortly before Duane Allman's fatal motorcycle accident on October 29th, Associate Editor Grover Lewis spent a week on the road with the Allman Brothers to do an article for this issue. He turned it in a week before Duane's death. His candid account of the band's life on the road, and Duane Allman's final days, follows. --- Editor

There are 16 seats in the first-class compartment of the Continental 747 flight from L.A. to El Paso, and the tushy blonde stewardess greeting the boarding passengers beams the usual corporate smile until she does a fast snap and realizes that a full baker's dozen of the places are being claimed by this scruffily-dressed, long-haired horde of ... Dixie greasers. Her smile congeals, then goes off like a burnt-out light bulb when one of the freaks asks her matter-of-factly for a seat-belt extension and starts packing guitar cases - seven of them - upright into Seat 1-D.

"Well, now, wait, I don't know" she stammers, fidgeting from foot to foot. "Who are you, anway?"

"We're the Allman Brothers Band from Macon, Gawgia," Willie Perkins, the band's road manager, announces in a buttery drawl. He searches patiently through his briefcase and produces a round-trip ticket for the seat in question. "It's OK," he assures her, "we paid cash money for it. It's the only safe way to transport our git-tars. We do this sometimes six days a week. Now would you please get the extension, please, ma'am?"

Reluctantly, the stewardess fetches the cord and Willie finishes lashing the vintage Gibsons into position. Then, just before take-off, he does a quick head count of the entourage to be certain that no one's been left behind. The members of the band - Duane Allman, Greg Allman, Dicky Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks, Jai Johanny Johnson - are all present and accounted for. The three roadies - Joe Dan, Kim, and Red Dog - and the sound technician, Michael Callahan - all aboard. The proud bird with the golden tail lifts skyward to Texas.

By the time the No Smoking sign flashes off, both of the Allmans are fast asleep, their mouths characteristically ajar. Duane, whose nickname is "Skydog" but who resembles a skinny orange walrus instead, looks bowlegged even when he's sitting down.

Dicky Betts, alternate lead guitar to Duane, whiles away the flight swapping comic books with the bassist, Berry Oakley. Butch Trucks, the group's white drummer, pores over a collection of sci-fi stories by Philip Jose Farmer. Jai Johanny Johnson, the black drummer who's also known as "Frown," stares somberly out the window the entire trip.

Willie Perkins, wearing a faded Allman T-shirt, offers a fellow traveler a filter-top and concedes that yes, there's quite a few hassles involved with being on the road almost constantly. "Coordination is the key to the whole thang," he says as if it's just occurred to him. "Gettin' all the people and the equipment to the right places at the right time. Then, too, I've got to mess with gettin' us paid, all that shit. These days the band averages about $7500 a gig, and we don't ordinarily have no trouble gettin' our money. When the band was younger, though, playin' smaller clubs, sometimes I had to ... well, lean on some of the shadier promoters.

"Sure, there's a bunch of headaches. Me, myself, I wouldn't do my part of it if it was just a pure-dee ol' gig. I wouldn't do it at all unless I really dug the band. Business-wise and musically, see, the boys are all equals. Unofficially, Duane is the leader - everybody looks to him for makin' the major decisions. Family is an over-used word, I reckon, but here it fits just fine."

While a second, less nervous stewardess serves lunch, Willie points out the three married members of the group - Greg Allman, Berry Oakley, and Butch Trucks - "Greg just got married two weeks ago, was you aware of that? Yea, sweet little ol' girl, too. But the wives don't travel with the band 'cept on special occasions. Everybody has purty well adjusted to the situation, you might say." Willie signals to the stewardess that he needs some help with his tray. "Would you fix this doohickey for me, ma'am?" he asks pleasantly.

"You bet," she says, bending to the job. "Did you fellows play someplace last night? Everybody looks pretty sleepy."

Willie grins. "Naw, we was up all night, but we wasn't workin'. Truth is, we up all night purty near every night."

From the seat behind, Red Dog reaches forward to tap Willie on the shoulder, jostling Greg awake in the process. "Hey, brother," Red Dog asks Willie excitedly, "is that snow down there on them hills?" Greg squirms angrily in his seat. "Kiss my dyin' ass, brother" he mumbles. Willie peers out the window for a second and shakes his head at Red Dog: "Naw, brother, that's the desert. That's a right smart of dust down there."

As the plane makes the descent to El Paso, Berry Oakley squints down at the brown, hilly town. "Hey, my man, this is where the Kid got it, you know that?" Butch dog-ears a page in his book and yawns: "Billy the Kid?" "Naw, brother, that cat in the Marty Robbins song. Marty Robbins is my hee-ro, man."

Inside the terminal, after Willie and the roadies have rounded up the group's 30-odd pieces of luggage, Joe Dan rubs his palms together in a parody of lustful anticipation. "Man," he crows to Michael Callahan, "I can't wait to put skates on the ass of some of these nice Texas ladies." Callahan tells him that the night's gig is in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and that they won't be in Texas more than a few minutes in transit. "Well," Joe Dan says philosophically, "they got nice ladies in New Mexico, too, I reckon. We'll put skates on their asses."

Under a lowering sky, the entourage crowds into two Hertz station wagons for the 60-mile drive to Las Cruces. During the ride, Jai Johanny plays lacy Afro jazz on a cassette machine, frowning, saying nothing. At the wheel, Willie reminisces to the fellow traveler about the band's gig on the last paid-admission night at the Fillmore East: "Oh, my God, the boys was hittin' the note for sure, brother. They smoked up the place till seven in the mornin'. That was a great place to play. The World Series of rock and roll."

In the back seat, Duane leafs boredly through a copy of Cycle magazine and grumbles about the group's travel arrangements. "It's a drag not to have your own plane, man. That way you could go where you wanna go when you wanna go. Jesus, I'm wasted." He falls asleep almost instantly, as does Berry Oakley. The wasteland miles roll past, and the first quarter-sized spatters of what will turn into a furious rainstorm blur the windshield.

Las Cruces is the kind of vanishing Western town where you can leave your motel room safely unlocked, except almost no one ever does because most of the people in the motels are from places where you can't leave anything unlocked. At the Ramada Inn, where the Allman menage disgorges for a rainy afternoon of sleep, TV viewing, card playing, comic-book reading, coke snorting, and pure listless boredom before the evening's concert, there is a stenciled sign on the door to the hotel's cocktail lounge. It reads:

N. Mex. Law:
All Customers Must Wear
Shoes & Shirt

Wearing neither, Dicky Betts sits in his room just before the show, strumming his guitar and softly running through the lyrics of "Blue Sky," a muted country-style air he's just written in honor of his Canadian Indian lady friend, Sandy Blue Sky. Joe Dan, one of the roadies, sits hunkered on the carpet across the room, sipping a can of beer, and when Dicky has finished signing, Joe Dan nods and murmurs respectfully "That's hittin' the note, brother." Betts acknowledges the tribute with a sober bob of his head; he has just cut his hair short, and he has the kind of bony, back-country face that calls to mind the character Robert E. Lee Prewitt in James Jones' From Here to Eternity.

"Hittin' the note," Betts muses, cradling his guitar snug against his bony chest. "It's kinda hard to explain to anybody outside the band. It's like gettin' down past all the bullshit, all the put-on, all the actin' that goes along with just bein' human. Getting' right down to the roots, the source, the truth of the music. Lettin' it happen, lettin' that feelin' come out ...

"See, we gota lotta blues roots, the old-timey blues players - Robert Johnson, Willie McTell. Myself, I do a lot of the old white country players like Jimmie Rodgers, some of those fellows ... Hell, I'm a big fan of Merle Haggard. The truth be known, I bet ol' Hag sat down with his manager and schemed out 'Okie From Muskogee' ...

"Ten year from now? Well, I'll still be playin' music. That's just in me to do. Where I'll be at or what kinda music I'll be playin' ... shit, I don't know. Naw, this band won't be together by then. I don't see what point there'd be in tryin' to keep it together that long. Everything's got to change. The times'll be completely different. But I'll still be playin' somewheres or other."

There's a knock at the door. It's Willie Perkins, rounding up the boys for the gig. It's time to go hit the note.

But it doesn't happen this night. At the Pan American Center of New Mexico State University, a cavernous, sweltering-hot gym where the concert is scheduled to begin at 9:45, there's a 45-minuted delay while Greg Allman's rented organ is located and installed on stage. During the wait, Greg and Duane Allman and Dicky Betts sprinkle out little piles of coke on a table in the backstage locker room where the band is sequestered and sniff it through rolled-up $100 bills. Duane calls it "Vitamin C," and after his second snort, he buttonholes the fellow traveler in expansive praise of Betts' guitar-playing: "Brother Dicky's as good as there is in the world, my man. And he's gonna be smokin' tonight. Listen to him on 'In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.' Fuck, he wrote that fuckin' song after he fucked this chick on a fuckin' tombstone in a fuckin' cemetary in Macon. On a fuckin' tombstone, my man!" The other members of the band sprawl listlessly about the room on wooden benches, drinking Red Ripple and reading comic books in a tableau that will be ritually repeated every evening for the next six days.

When the band finally files on stage and Duane kicks off "Statesboro Blues" to a scattering of cheers and applause, the principal revelation of the occasion is that Greg Allman is not, after all, a stone catatonic, as he appears to be everywhere except in front of a microphone. His voice rises and swoops, circles and jerks the old blues staple to a frenzied, hair-raising climax that's explicitly sexual enough to be rated "X." The usual contingent of snowbirds and total-loss farmers, massed ten-deep in front of the towering amps, howl their pleasure - "Boogie my mind, motherfuckers!" a pudgy cockatoo in head-shop plumage screeches as the band runs through its more or less standard repertoire: "Elizabeth Reed", "Please Call Home", "You Don't Love Me", "Stormy Monday", "It's Not My Cross to Bear", "Dreams", and "Hot 'Lanta."

But the crowd in the farther reaches of the hall seems considerably less enchanted. For one thing, the sound is soggy at the rear, and a long-haired kid who says he's majoring in Police Science (yes) estimates the crowd as "25 percent freaks, 25 percent cowboys, and 50 percent who don't give a fuck." The band manages one encore, "Whipping Post," but halfway through the number the audience is busily streaming toward the exits.

Afterwards, back in the locker room, Greg Allman morosely doles himself out another dollop of coke. "I couldn't hear shit," he snorts, and snorts. "Sounded like we'us playin' acoustic," Dicky Betts chimes in disgustedly. "Coulda been a dynamite gig, too, man," Berry Oakley laments. "'Coulda been, but it wadn't," Duane snaps. He sinks down on one of the benches, frowning. "I thank mebbe it was the audience," he sighs, "but then again ... it coulda just been too much fuckin' coke. You know what I mean?" He snuffles and reaches for the coke vial.

Off to one side, Red Dog is whispering in the ear of the lone groupie who's shown up, a big-nosed redhead with deep acne scars. The girl listens expressionlessly, then finally nods yes to whatever, sucking on a joint as if it were the last sad drooping cock in the world.

Under Willie Perkins' persistent proddings, the Allman retinue is out of the Ramada Inn and settled on a flight back to L.A. by noon the of the next day. Again, most of the boys spend the travel time dozing or poring over comic books. Before zonking out on the plane, Duane shows Berry Oakley a crumpled letter he's just received. "Know who this is from, brother?" he crows. "Ol' Mary. You 'member Mary? Man, I hitchhiked 2500 miles to see that chick one time, and then her daddy caught me fuckin' her in the garage and throwed me out. Sheeit, I'm still in love with that chick, man ... I ... thank." Within five seconds, Duane is snoring, and when a saucy-hipped stewardess stoops to pick up his letter from the aisle, Red Dog leans over and says to her conversationally, "Honey pie, you got the sweetest lookin' ass I've looked at all year. Lawd, I wish you could sang. We'd take your sweet-lookin' little ass right along with us." "Oh, I can't even carry a note in church," the stewardess sings out, flustered and flattered.

Red Dog is the undisputed king of the Allman roadies. He's been with the Allman Brothers Band since its earliest permutations - first, with the Allman Joys in 1965; then with the short-lived Hourglass, a West Coast-based studio group in '67; still later, when the present band was formed, principally from the personnel of the earlier groups, from '69 on. Red Dog was there toting instrument cases when the Allmans cut their three LPs to date - The Allman Brothers Band, Idlewild South, and The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East - and he'll likely be around as long as there are any Allman instrument cases to tote.

Right now, he winks slyly, orders three cocktail-sized bottles of Jack Daniels Black Label from the sweet-assed little stewardess, serves himself one and pockets the other two. "Gawddamn," he cackles to the fellow traveler, "I gotta whole suitcase full of these leetle fuckers. Why not? They free when you fly first-class."

Rubbing his back, he complains that he feels achey all over: "See, I tuck and fell of the fuckin' stage. And I got a pimple on my ass, too, man. Hurts like hell. This just ain't my trip, brother."

Teasing his scruffy red beard with a swizzle stick, Red Dog remarks that the band's success has brought some changes: "Aw, it's still fun awright, but not anywhere the way it used to be. Time was, we'd blow our last five bucks on a case of beer in Flagstaff or someplace. Now it's big bid-ness." He makes a face, then laughs aloud: "I still get off behind the chicks, though. Man, we get chicks ever'where we go. What really knocks me clean smooth out is to get head. Did I tell you? This weird chick was eatin' me on stage at the last Fillmore East blast. Naw, the audience couldn't see it, but all the boys could.

"Another time, in Rochester, I was standin' against the stage wall while the band was hittin' their note and some chick come up and unzipped me and started gobblin' me alive, man. The cat in the booth saw what was happenin' and he flashed a spotlight on us. Shit, man, I didn't know what to do. Three thousand people out there, see, but goddamn, it felt so good. I thought well, fuck it, and I grabbed her ears and said, 'Let it eat!' "

A black-suited, middle-aged limo chauffeur named Atrie, self-styled "driver for the stars," meets the band at L.A. International Airport, helps Willie round up the mountain of luggage, and drives the boys to the Continental Hyatt House high atop Sunset Boulevard. During the ride, he prattles on cheerily about what groups are playing in Vegas and Tahoe, and he looks away discreetly as Duane snorts coke through a short-stemmed surgical straw.

At the hotel, Bunky Odum greets the group with bear hugs for all. A bluff, hairy grinner with a build like a crocodile wrestler, Odum books the band in the East and South and serves as second-in-command to Phil Walden, the Allmans' sharp young manager. In a poshy suite on the fifth floor, he seizes the fellow traveler's hand and pumps it like a hydraulic jack. "Gawddam, boy," he booms, "you gonna have to come down to Macon and get laid back with us when this bid-ness is over. We'll take you ridin' on our motors and get you laid and feed you some down-home collard greens."

In another suite on the same floor, Berry Oakley orders a meal from room service, then kicks off his boots and plops heavily ln the bed. "Tourin'," he grimaces, "I'm gettin' just a little tired of it, but that's what I been doin' ever since I could do anything on my own. Started playin' gigs eight, nine years ago when I was about 15, and I been more or less livin' on the road ever since ...

"I can't say what's gonna happen with the band. It could be somethin' great, and then again it might just go away like all the rest of 'em. We could do ten times more than we do, actually. There's so much that's in us that we haven't played. We're gonna have to start rationin' ourselves out, like goin' on the road then goin' home and workin'. Lately it's been just goin' on the road.

"All of us like to play to an audience and get response back. That's what we call hittin' the note. How should I say it ... Hittin' the note is hittin' your peak, let's say. Hittin' the place where we all like to be at, you know? When you're really feelin' at your best, that's what you describe as your note. When you're really able to put all of you into it and get that much out of it. We just found it out along as we did it. We learned some from the audience, and they learned some from us, and things came together that way. It happens, I'd say, 75 percent of the time. There's some special places we play where we've done it before, and every time we go back, the vibes are there and it ends up happenin' again. We'll end up playin' three or four hours, and when we finish, I'll be so high I can't hardly talk. When you start hittin' like that, the communication between the members of the band gest wide open. Stuff just starts comin' out everywhere."

Stuff starts coming out everywhere that evening at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, beginning with the little white piles of coke backstage. This time around, though, the acoustics of the hall are crisper, the audience is more responsive, and the band's music flows more smoothly, although there's little if any variation from the previous evening's program. The crowd bawls its approval, but begins to disperse after one encore.

Afterwards, there's a party like an open running sore in Phil Waldens's tenth floor suite at the hotel. The booze flows, the smoke blows, and coke goes up, up and away. Around midnight, a trio of female freaks, including a Grand Guignol-painted dwarf, crashes the festivities, chanting gibberish, doing stylized little dance numbers, groping cocks. Somebody says they're part of Zappa's grass menagerie. When the hotel manager finally flushes them out of the room, Dicky Betts nudges the fellow traveler and guffaws: "Haw! You better get out yo' pen and pencil and write down their names, my man!"

The next morning, while Artie and Willie Perkins are loading the black limo with luggage and instruments, Greg Allman sidles up to the fellow traveler in front of the hotel and palms off a plastic vial containing a quarter ounce of white powder. "Hey, brother," Greg mutters, "hold these goods for me till we get to Frisco, will you do that? I'm scared of them fuckers at the airport, man. They got them gun detectors and all, and they down on people that look like hippies."

On the way to the airport, more comic books and boredom. As the car passes the Super All Drugs, Butch Trucks cranes around to stare at a flamboyant leather dyke, "Well, theh's ya big city," he philosophizes. Willie is fascinated by the dizzying onrush of traffic. "These California people all got to be good drivers," he drawls, "or they'd all be dead by now."

At the airport, Duane draws Dicky Betts off to one side. "Did you hear them tapes of last night, brother?" he asks, shuffling excitedly from foot to foot. "Man, I was inspahred. Listen, we got to get at least six more killer tunes right away. My composin' chops are gettin' rusty. What say when this tour is over we woodshed and write for a coupla weeks?" "I dunno," Dicky says, looking dubious. "I was thankin' about goin' to Canada to see Sandy." "Aw, come on, man," Duane groans.

An hour and a half later, in a rented station wagon headed for what turns out to be a fleabag tourist warren near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, Dicky is reading aloud the marquee billings along Broadway in North Beach: "Cal Tjader, hmm ... the Modern Jazz Quartet ... hey, Mongo Santamaria. Shit, I thank I'll bop in there and ast ol' Mongo when he's gonna record 'Elizabeth Reed.'" He double-takes at the sign above a topless joint that reads NAKED SEDUCTION. "Crap on that stuff," he wheezes. "I druther do it than look at it."

Pausing at the hotel only long enough to drop their gear, Duane and Greg and Berry Oakley race back to North Beach on a shopping binge. In a super-expensive leather shop, Duane freaks over a handtooled shirt with a colored panel on the front that resembles a drive-in theater facade in, say Ponca City, Oklahoma; he eagerly pays $200 for it. Within minutes, he and Greg have dropped over $500 for a few shirts and trousers, and then Butch Trucks, accompanied by his slender, shy wife, Linda, briefly joins the group and buys a cowboy-style coat. Then Dicky shows up, looking for a maxi-length white leather dress for his Indian lady friend. After Butch and his wife have paid for the coat and drifted on to rubberneck the bizarre upper Grant Street mise en scene, Greg curls his lip derisively: "Shit, you see that ratty-lookin' coat ol' Butch bought? Fucker didn't even fit him." Duane shrugs contemptuously: "His ol' lady probably put him up to it. She don't know shit. She made him buy that Dee-troit car, man, he coulda bought a fuckin' Porsche for the same bread. Shit, man." "Yea, shit, man," Greg agrees.

The band plays for a near-capacity audience at Winterland that evening. Before the music starts, while Bill Graham's rent-a-goons are nastily hassling reporters on what seems to be sheer lunatic principle, Greg draws on a joint backstage and mumble-explains his concept of hitting the note: "Uh, achievin' ... the right ... frame of mind, man. You smoke enough grass, you'll get there. Uh ... three joints, maybe."

Ten minutes later, Greg is squalling out the opening lines of "Statesboro Blues," and a joy-transfixed chickie in the balcony shoots to her feet in a writhing dance. "Oh, baby," she screams, "joy up and jump on me! "

Early the next afternoon, enter the photographer, looking cheery. An easygoing zoftig lady, she's been promised a 2 o'clock shooting session with the band, but whatever else they're doing, the boys are not hitting the note today. Half of them, in fact, are still asleep at the appointed time, and to a man they resist being roused. "Aw, Duane and Greg'll do that, you know," Willie Perkins explains sheepishly. "They'll stay up for three, four days, and then crash like they'us dead."

Bunky Odum promises solemnly that he'll deliver the Allmans to the photographer's studio before the evening's concert at Winterland. "Gawddamn, honey," Odum booms, "you gonna have to come down to Macon and git laid back with us when this bid-ness is over. We'll take you ridin' on our motors and ... uh ... feed you some down-home collard greens."

But Odum fails to deliver on his promise that evening when both Allman brothers balk at the notion of being photographed apart from the rest of the group. They seem, in fact, outraged by the notion. "Fuck, man, we ain't on no fuckin' star trip," Duane snarls. "Naw, man, we ain't on no fuckin' star trip," Greg echoes. Trying to smooth things over, Odum arranges for the photographer to join the group's swing back to Southern California the next day.

 Exit the photographer, looking addled.

Exit the fellow traveler, looking for a movie far from the madding goons at Winterland.

Sleepy and hanging over, the group assembles in the hotel parking lot the next morning for the drive to the airport and an early flight to Santa Barbara. Only Dicky Betts seems in high spirits; after last night's gig, he'd gotten a new tattoo at Lyle Tuttle's south-of-Market studio - a dove entwining the name "Sandy" on his right bicep. "Ever'body in the band got one a these, too," Dicky says proudly, pulling up his pant leg to show a tattoo of a mushroom on his calf. Willie Perkins nods shortly: "It's the band's emblem. We all got one, and we use the same design on all our litachoor, too."

Dicky catches sight of Duane and guffaws: "Hey, brother, you got coke all over in your muss-tache." Peeved, Duane rakes the white grains out of the hair his lip and glares steadily at the photographer, who's snapping individual candids of the band members. When she moves in toward him, he turns his back with a growl.

On the drive to the airport, Berry Oakley is literally holding his head with both hands. "I run into this ol' girl last night who had a whole purseful of tequila," he groans. "Then when that run out, we got into some Red Ripple. Jesus."

On the flight south, Butch Trucks reads the opening chapter of D.T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism. "You read this un?" he asks Dicky Betts. Betts' eyes flick over the title. "Yeah, good, ain't it," he grunts. An hour later, one of the stewardesses remonstrates repeatedly with Duane to return his seat to the upright position for landing. Irritably, he complies, but when the stewardess moves on, he reclines the chair again, muttering balefully under his breathe. "The boys are getting' pretty tahrd," Willie Perkins sighs.

The band puts up for the night at the Santa Barbara Inn, a plush beach resort for the middle-aged rich, where, once again, Duane refuses to show up for a picture session with the photographer. Looking positively shell-shocked by now, she pleads her case to Bunky Odum. "Goddamn, honey," he booms, "you gonna have to come down to Macon and git laid back with us when this bid-ness is over. We'll take you ridin' on our motors and feed you some down-home collard greens."

That night's concert is held in Robertson's Gym at the University of Santa Barbara. The band plays a tight, subdued set that sets a gaggle of bra-less nymphets near the stage to jiggling like fertilized eggs frying in the ninth circle of hell, but the general ambience in the hall - high humidity, surly security guards, a surfeit of bum acid - gives the evening a jagged, unpleasant edge, and streams of people begin leaving before the set is done.

Duane and Dicky lope backstage afterwards to "do some sniff," as Dicky terms it. Duane grabs a towel and mops his streaming face while Dicky spoons out the coke. "Goddamn, I'm sopped, brother," Duane complains. Dicky snorts the powder and bobs his head in pleasure. "Sheeit, my man, I druther sniff this ol' stuff than a girl's bicycle seat." Jo Baker, a black singer with the Elvin Bishop Group, hovers nearby, eyeing the coke. Duane fixes her with a cold stare. "Look-a-here, sister," he says loudly, "I'm sorry, but I got just a little bit of this shit left, so I can't give you none." "Oh, that's all right," Jo says, looking embarrassed. "Sure, as a musician, I understand."

Early the next morning, "Frown" - Jai Johanny Johnson - is living up to his nickname in the hotel restaurant. Slurping a triple Gold Cadiallc, which is a positively depraved concoction of liquor and liqueurs, he growls, "Bullshit, my man. I'm into playin' music, not this sittin'-around bullshit. Seems like when we was unknown, all we did was play. Now all we do is get publicity ... Ten years from now, if I be livin' I expect to be playin' music ... Naw, not with this same band ... I got my nickname, the full thing of which is 'Jaymo King Norton Frown,' from drinkin' Robitussin H-C, that cough syrup. It makes you nod and frown. All the cats in the band used to drink that shit, so they finally got me to drink it, too ... Shit, I don't know what my attitude is towards dope. I don't guess they ever gonna stop it comin' in the country and all that shit. Sure has caused a lot of hang-ups, if you can what I mean ... Hittin' the note is - well, that don't be nothin' but a phrase. What the cats in the band mean by it is ... gettin' out of it whatever you're lookin' for ..."

Bunky Odum has again promised the photographer that he'll line up the boys for some shots when the group checks out of the hotel, so she stations herself near the parking garage and nervously waits for them to show up. Soon, Butch Trucks and wife join her, and Butch apologizes to her for the runaround she's been getting. "Aw, ol' Greg and Duane don't mean no harm, I reckon, but they still ortn't to act that-a way," he mutters, looking pained. "We been on the road too long, I guess. It's been five weeks now, and you get awful tahrd and wore out bein' out that long, playin' the same tunes every night and all. It gets to where sometimes it ain't any fun. And this definitely ain't the kind of business to be in if you ain't havin' no fun."

One by one, the boys straggle out to the cars, again looking sleepy and hungover. When they've assembled in a loose semi-circle, the photographer explains that she'd like to get a group shot showing the tattooed mushrooms on the calves of their legs. There's some grumbling, but the begin to fall in line and raise their pant legs. Then Duane shakes his head angrily and stomps out of camera range. "This is jive bullshit, man," he rasps, "it's silly." "Yeah, silly," Greg echoes, and follows suit. "Jive bullshit," Dicky Betts agrees, stuffing his pant leg back into his boot. At the fellow traveler's teasing suggestion that it's no sillier to shoot a picture of everyone's tattoos than it is to have them put on in the first place, Duane coldly offers to punch him on the spot. Well, what the fuck, Hare Krishna; Duane is, after all, the walrus.

The entourage crowds into two rented cars for a tensely silent ride down the coastal highway to L.A. Along the way, Duane gruffly agrees to stop for a last try at the photos on a beach road. When the photographer tries to position the group around the cars so all their faces will be visible, Duane goes out to lunch entirely. "Fuck it," he bellows at her, "either take the fuckin' picture now or don't take the fuckin' picture. I'm not gonna do any of that phony posin' shit for you or nobody else."

He's still grumbling and snuffling when the cars swing back onto the highway. "I don't like any of that contrived shit, man. We're just plain ol' fuckin' Southern cats, man. Not ashamed of it or proud of it, neither one. Ain't no superstars here, man." When he finally shuts up and falls asleep, his fellow traveler gladly crouches down toward the floorboard so the photographer can shoot both the Allmans with their mouths agape in the rear seat. It's uncomfortable for a few miles, but it beats the hell out of getting punched.

Quartered once again at the Continental Hyatt House on the Karmic Strip in L.A., the Allman group whiles away the afternoon snorting coke, reading comics, mounting a seek-out-and-buy raid on Tower Records, and watching The Thief of Baghdad on color TV. When it's time for the evening's gig, Willie Perkins rounds them up and herds them toward Artie's black Cadillac limo for the half-mile ride down Sunset Boulevard to the Whisky-a-Go-Go. "C'mon, brothers," Michael Callahan, the sound man, calls out as the band mills about the driveway, "they gonna eat you alive at the Whus-key-a-Dildo."

In the upstairs dressing room at the Whisky, amid the usual groupie babble and turmoil, the photographer determinedly tries to shoot some final pictures. Politely, she asks a busboy to replace some burnt-out light bulbs in the ceiling. When the busboy fetches a ladder and the bulbs, Greg Allman saunters up and mumbles, "Don't screw that bulb in, my man. I like it in here the way it is." "Please screw the bulb in," the photographer entreats. "Don't screw the bulb in, man," Greg says to the busboy stonily. This happens a few times. "Oh, screw it," the photographer says finally in exasperation, and leaves.

When the band's set gets underway downstairs, the usually-comatose Strip crowd yells its lusty approval from the first chorus of "Statesboro Blues." By the time Dicky Betts thunderballs into his solo jam on "Elizabeth Reed," people are standing on their chairs yodeling cheers. As the band jam-drives to a sexy and demonic close, sounding not unlike tight early Coltrane, a flaxen-haired waitress is passing out draughts of beer to the screaming patrons in the second-story gallery. The beer is streaming amber and glistening down her bare arms, and the Allman Brothers Band from Macon, Gawgia, is - what else - Hitting the Note.

--- End