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

play.” When I did, I flipped out. Duane was just a phenomenal guitar player and a really nice guy. I asked him to play on some of the songs and it brought a whole new life to the sessions. It was just incredible.
    Berry came with him to at least one of our sessions. Over that week’s time Duane and I became friendly and he told me about his new band, with Berry, Dickey, Butch, Jaimoe, and Gregg. He had a lot of energy and excitement about this.
    The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut was released in November 1969, featuring five Gregg Allman originals, as well as Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and Spencer Davis’s “Don’t Want You No More.” The latter was transformed from a light pop song into a hard-driving, organ-fueled instrumental, which opened the album and led directly into the pained majesty of Gregg’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear.” That song, which had heralded the singer’s emergence as an original songwriter, now signaled his band’s emergence as a powerfully original entity. The band had thrown down a gauntlet of musical precision and deep blues feeling, even if the production somehow tamped down the fire.
    Though the group had been together less than six months and the members ranged in age from twenty-one (Oakley and Gregg Allman) to twenty-five (Betts), The Allman Brothers Band sounds like the product of a veteran unit with a fully formed vision. They were perhaps the only group to pull off what every hippie with a guitar and a Muddy Waters album talked about in 1969: reinventing the blues in a manner both visionary and true to the original material. The entity’s ability to keep their feet firmly planted on terra firma while blasting into outer space was unparalleled.
    All of this instrumental virtuosity was tied to a terrific batch of Gregg Allman compositions that captured the weary existentialism of the finest blues, expressing a fatalism profound enough to border on Southern Gothic. They were remarkably mature lyrical conceptions for such a young man, expertly executed in a minimalist, almost haiku style.
    ALLMAN: Those songs on the first album came out of the long struggle of trying so hard and getting fucked by different land sharks in the business. Just the competition I experienced out in L.A. and being really frustrated but hanging on and not saying, “Fuck it,” and going on to construction work or something.
    JAIMOE: From the minute Gregory arrived in Jacksonville, we started working on these early songs, and he kept writing them, and we played them damn near every day. We very seldom “rehearsed”; rehearsal for us was just playing: “The song goes like this. Let’s go.” And we played it. No other shit, no talking, no messing around. We played the songs into shape. Those blues tunes that we copied, starting with “Trouble No More,” they were just songs that were so good they couldn’t be left off the album.
    BETTS: Berry played a huge role in the band’s arrangements. “Whipping Post” was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us; it was a real melancholy, slow minor blues, along the lines of “Dreams.” Oakley came up with the heavy bass line that starts off the track, along with the 6/8-to-5/8 shifting time signature.
    JAIMOE: “Whipping Post” sounded just like “Stormy Monday Blues.” It would go into the 6/8 feel on the “sometimes I feel” section. Berry came up with that bassline that made you pay attention.
    BETTS: Oakley called a halt to the rehearsal and said, “Let me work on this song tonight and let’s get back to it tomorrow.” By the next day, he had that intro worked out. When he played that riff for us, everyone went, “Yeah! That’s it!” Oakley morphed a lot of those songs into something different.
    DOUCETTE: Berry played a huge role in the songwriting. A lot of those feels that are at the core of the Allman Brothers’ sound are Berry. He was huge within the band, and he was such a hip guy.
    BETTS: A lot of the