Review, Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (Little, Brown and Co., 1995)

Columbia Missourian, 1995, May 21, 1995

The Allman Brothers Band symbolized one of the great triumphs of the civil rights movement. An interracial group of Southerners, the band emerged in the late 1960s as one of the best blues bands in America. Fueled by two brilliant guitarists, Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, the smoky vocals and organ playing of Gregg Allman, and the outstanding rhythm section of bassist Berry Oakley and drummers Jaimoe Johanson and Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers reached a pinnacle with the 1971 two-record set, Live From the Fillmore East, perhaps the greatest live album in rock ‘n’ roll history.

But just as the group established itself as one of the most popular bands in America, it fell victim to a series of misfortunes. First, band leader Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. A year later, Oakley also died in an eerily similar motorcycle accident. Gamely, the band continued but found itself constantly beset by financial, personnel and drug problems. With Gregg Allman’s move to Los Angeles and highly publicized marriage to Cher, the group fell apart amidst bitter recriminations. Scott Freeman, a former reporter for the Macon, Georgia, Telegraph and News, relates the whole story in often painful detail.

The sensationalism of the Allman Brothers’ later years often tends to overshadow the brilliance of their early work. The band’s genius derived from its fusion of a variety of musical sources, primarily blues, jazz and country. Its mixture of racial and cultural styles stands as an exemplar of what jazz critic Albert Murray has described as the “incontestably mulatto nature of American culture.”

As teenagers growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the early 1960s, Duane and Gregg rebelled against the current vogue of surf music. Instead, they developed a fascination with the rhythm and blues of Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles and Bobby “Blue” Bland and formed friendships with black youths, something virtually unthinkable in the pre-civil rights South. Soon the brothers were playing in local bands, with Duane on lead guitar and Gregg on rhythm guitar. As a vocalist, however, Gregg still had room for development; as he later would comment, he sounded “like a cross between Hank Williams with the croup and James Brown with no lips.”

After a couple of failed attempts at forming a band together, first as the Allman Joys and later as Hour Glass, Duane went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he established himself as the top session guitarist at Atlantic Records Studio. There he recorded with soul stars such as Wilson Pickett, King Curtis and Aretha Franklin, as well as on the debut album of Boz Skaggs. Eventually, Duane would play on albums as diverse as jazz flutist Herbie Mann’s Push Push and a classic pairing with Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominoes’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. During this period, Duane honed his skills on the slide, or bottleneck, guitar, in which the guitarist uses the neck of a broken bottle or, in Duane’s case, a medicine bottle on the left ring finger and slides it along the guitar neck, creating a vibrato sound. As Freeman comments, “Duane took the bottleneck guitar to places it had never been before.”

But Duane was not satisfied with his success as a session musician, wanting to lead his own band. In early 1969, after jamming with Trucks, Johanson, Oakley and Betts, Duane barred the door, announcing, “Anybody in this room who’s not going to play in my band, you’ve got to fight your way out.” Before the other band members even had heard Gregg, Duane insisted that his brother be lead singer, telling the others: “My brother is the blues-singingest white boy in the world. If there’s another, I ain’t heard him.”

The band soared to popularity on the basis of its superb blues playing and extended instrumental jams on such songs as “Whipping Post” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” whose complex harmonic and rhythmic structures reflected the influence of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

After Duane’s and Oakley’s deaths, the band maintained its popularity for a few years with Betts’ country-influenced guitar playing and songwriting assuming a more dominant role in songs such as “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica.” But the group became a victim of its own success as the members consumed a mind-staggering amount of drugs and increasingly fought over artistic and financial matters, leading to its breakup in the mid-1970s.

Like the band’s music, Freeman’s book is most interesting in its discussion of the period before Duane’s death. After that, the book grows increasingly depressing, a tragic story of talent wasted. Although the band’s recent reunion produced some fine music, it mainly serves as a reminder that it its prime, the Allman Brothers Band was a model of the potential greatness of America’s multicultural society.