One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band by Paul Alan Page A

pentatonic, “Ramblin’ Man”/“Blue Sky” side. All those sides of Dickey’s musical personality played a big part in the Allman Brothers’ sound. And most cats that can play blues as convincingly as Dickey cannot stretch out to that psychedelic thing like he can. He’s very unique.
    BETTS: My style is just a little too smooth and round to play the blues stuff straight, because I’m such a melody guy that even when I’m playing the blues, I go for melody first.
    RED DOG: The way Dickey and Duane played, it was like … Fuck it. It was just so human, so emotional, like letting things out of you. It was like making love, caressing each other, but anger coming out at the same time. It was a little raunchy here, a little nasty there, a lot of love here. I thought Butchy and Jaimoe had the same thing going with the drums.
    DOUCETTE: I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that fucking organ and singing and I went, “Whoa. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am.” He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.
    M C EUEN: The magic of Gregg Allman was and is an ability to sing anything like it’s his. He can sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” like it was just written by him. Duane had the magical ability to play anything in a way that made you think, “Well, that can’t be any better.”
    DOUCETTE: One time at the Fillmore East, Albert King came out to jam with us on a slow blues. He’s up there in a lime green suit sucking on his pipe and doing his thing. Then Gregg starts singing and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing and he sees the skinny-ass blond behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.
    Though the debut album heralded the arrival of a new voice on the American music scene, few were listening.
    WALDEN: The first album sold less than 35,000 copies when it was released.
    ALLMAN: My brother and me did not get discouraged when it didn’t go anywhere. Hell, we had already had two Hour Glass records eat dirt.
    JAIMOE: We were just playing music and it was going great. We didn’t think about how great it was going to sound in a month or what we would do next. I guess Duane did, but there were no other thoughts in my head except how great the music we were playing was. The whole world closed out.
    TRUCKS: I did not have any doubts about the band. I don’t think any of us expected to become truly successful. We had all been in bands before where that was all there was. We were trying to be rock stars and all we came out of it with was garbage. Then we started playing this music that was making us feel like this and that became so much more important than fame or fortune. We would just kind of drop a curtain in front of the stage and play for ourselves. We didn’t give a damn if people liked it or not. We were not going to play “Louie Louie” just to get applause. We all had done that enough.
    BETTS: We were just so naive. All we knew is that we had the best band that any of us had ever played in and were making the best music that we had ever made. That’s what we went with. Everyone in the industry was saying that we’d never make it, we’d never do anything, that Phil Walden should move us to New York or L.A. and acclimate us to the industry, that we had to get the idea of how a rock ’n’ roll band was supposed to present themselves.
    TRUCKS: They thought a bunch of Southern guys just standing there playing extended musical jams was absurd. They wanted Gregg out from behind the organ, jumping around with a salami in his pants. They wanted us to act “like a rock band” and we just told them to fuck themselves. We were playing music for ourselves and for each