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

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    BETTS: Of course, none of us would do that, and thankfully, Walden was smart enough to see that would just ruin what we had. We just stayed in Macon and stayed on the road, playing gigs and getting tighter and better.
    SCOTT BOYER, guitarist in the band Cowboy : Macon became known as a place to go if you were a musician in the South looking to get something going. It started because the Allmans were there and Capricorn was headquartered and it built on itself.
    ALLMAN: Over the years, players from the South would find their way to New York or Los Angeles and break out of there. We elected to stay down South and do it from there rather than going where all the damn competition was. Everyone told us we’d fall by the wayside down there.
    HAYNES: I grew up in North Carolina and it was a big deal for Southern musicians to feel like they could stay in the region and succeed, that they didn’t have to move to the East or West Coast, which had been presumed. We all identified with and felt a connection to the music because it was made by people who looked like us, acted like us, and lived like we did. It was the first time the South was taken seriously as a place for great rock music to come from. It let us know that we could make it without changing, that it was cool to make rock music that sounded like it was from the South.
    HAMPTON: The Allman Brothers transformed Macon from this sleepy little town into a very hip, wild, and crazy place filled with bikers and rockers. Every time you went down there, it was like mental illness in the streets: fights, bikes …
    MAMA LOUISE: I started seeing them boys around town on their motorcycles, and Red Dog and Kim would pick me up and give me rides home after work. I always felt safe with them, especially Red Dog. He was a sweet man.

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    DOUBLE TROUBLE

    Inside the revolutionary dual-lead-guitar approach of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

    The Allman Brothers Band’s first real musical breakthrough was the extensive use of guitar harmonies. This new concept in rock music was a natural outgrowth of having two lead guitarists, rather than one who primarily stuck to rhythm playing. Duane Allman’s dynamic slide playing is revered, but he was a fully formed, well-rounded guitarist. Betts was also already a wide-ranging, distinct stylist by the time he and Allman joined forces, and he was almost certainly the driving force behind the duo’s landmark harmony playing.
    Though closely associated with guitar harmonies, the pair also had a wide range of complementary techniques, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with each other and with the bassist, Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised melodies. The precision with which the musicians landed together back on their riffs also elevated them above their peers.
    WARREN HAYNES: Their guitar tandem came about naturally because Dickey was such a strong melodic player and Duane’s ear was so good and he could play complementary harmony or counterpoint on the fly. Most of the dual-guitar stuff that they did was Dickey playing melody and Duane playing harmony.
    DICKEY BETTS: From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that. We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from both jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele, and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.
    HAYNES: Dickey had a deep western swing influence. He learned a lot of guitar from Dave Lyle, who had played with Roy Clark in Brenda Lee’s band and the two of them had played a lot of harmony lines. That’s where Dickey got the concept from and I don’t think Duane had ever done anything like