The article that inspired Almost Famous. All six of their albums have now made over a million dollars; most have sold over a million units. Isn’t that shitty?”. “There were posters all over,” Gregg says. And success, like tragedy, dogged the band. Both buried at Rose Hill Cemetery. The question is what made the Allman Brothers keep on going. He was a young kid, y’know, trying to make a big break for himself. “I played for peace of mind.”, The boys’ mother, Geraldine “Mama” Allman, went to school and became a CPA. It was at Fame that Duane met Jai Johanny Johanson, a knock-around drummer who had worked behind the late Otis Redding, Percy Sledge and Joe Tex, among others. The only way we made it was with a great big old bag of Mexican reds and two gallons of Robitussin HC. I wouldn’t eat or sleep or drink or anything. Which is where Duane and I got the idea for doing that kind of thing, only we did it much better, later.”. Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. “I haven’t been on the road in a while because of my health but I like the crowds mainly, and what the music did for them,” he says. “Well, a lot of my songs I wrote I had the crowd in mind. The cat had left a note and downed 95 Seconals. ... Crowe toured with the Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And it was really nice to see that. "Oh, yeah, that scene reminded me of myself but I played slide before we put the Allman Brothers Band together; but with Duane, I wasn’t as good at it,” Betts says. The accident occurred only three blocks from the site of Duane Allman’s fatal crash, a year and two weeks later. The local R&B station was always on and he had some old Kenny Burrell, Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry albums that he’d listen to over and over again to get the structure down. Courtesy of Rolling Stone #149 – Cameron Crowe – December 6, 1973, How They Grew We were a good team. But, it’s not until 20 minutes later that Betts really takes notice: When onto the big screen walks Billy Crudup as Russell Hammond, the lead guitarist of the band Stillwater and the rock star who becomes closest with Patrick Fugit’s character William Miller, the rock writer based on a teenage Crowe. It all fell together and we started cooking.” The new band played Nashville as the Five Minutes, then rambled back up Highway 41 to St. Louis and used the name Allman Joys. I talked to him right after that movie came out. The film is director Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical account of life as a young Rolling Stone reporter. “Sent his ass home.”. When it did, he quit school. Gregg was great but you don’t want to hear a whole album of melancholy, at least that was the way I felt about it. The Allman Joys crumbled in St. Louis in early 1967. Stricken and grieving, the band returned to Macon from various vacation sites. Five reds and slug of HC and you can sleep through anything.”, The first two or three tours bombed but, says, Trucks, “Phil Walden had complete faith in us, and I’ll respect him forever for that. He specialized in interviewing the celebrities of Rock N Roll music. Duane and Gregory Allman were born in 1946 and 1947 in Nashville, Tennessee, just as the city was experiencing its first studio-building boom. Good Lord, to get that much money from my bank up there they wanted 20 percent. Cameron Crowe wrote this story in 1996 for a short-lived magazine named Live! Because I can still play? Eleven of us, with nine sleeping in the back on two mattresses. I got up the first morning we lived there, thinking I’d go swimming. It was a moderate critical success, but didn’t do much for the band’s financial status. “That summer we went on the road as the Allman Joys. “It was so hard to get into anything after that second loss,” Gregg says. Shortly after leaving the house about 5:45 p.m. he swerved to avoid a truck, which was moving in the same direction, but which he had apparently not seen in time after it turned onto the street. “A lot of the stuff that was happening in the Allman Brothers Band, I could really see it, it was a pretty accurate movie,” Betts says. They were drummerless, and the new bass, Billy Canell, enlisted in the Navy to beat the draft. It took four or five Sundays to hit the right note: the day of the Legendary Jacksonville Jam, as Trucks calls it, “We set up at Oakley’s house. That was funny.”, Not everything about “Almost Famous” rings true for Betts, though. “Together those two records form what is commonly known as a shit sandwich.” Neither record sold, and the band was in debt. “See, Rick Hall wanted him to do a Hendrix power-trio thing. Their manager, Bill McKuen, was impressed. I came back the next day, got it, and proceeded to wear that son of a bitch out. Crowestarted experimenting with his talent at a tender age. The Allman Brothers Band moved to Macon, where manager-label president Phil Walden was setting up Capricorn Studios. The only track Duane ever liked was “Going Down Slow,” a haunting blues tune on which he makes a rare vocal appearance. Bassist Berry Oakley, too, would die, ominously almost a year to the day after Duane. I got mine a little earlier than my birthday, actually. Dicky would sometimes go down there at night with his acoustic guitar and write songs. Crudup’s resemblance to Betts in the film is unmistakable. I’ve had guys come up to me and say, ‘Man, it just doesn’t seem like losing those two fine cats affected you people at all.’, “Why? And Cameron came to me and was saying, ‘Gregg got all my tapes from my interviews.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll get ’em for you.’ And I went down and talked Gregg out of them and got his tapes back for him. Matter of fact, I put hands on my first guitar November 10th, 1960 at three o’clock that Saturday afternoon. The group signed with Liberty Records under the name of Hour Glass. He became a student journalist for his school journal at the University Of San Diego High School. ", When Crowe’s character William attempts to interview Russell at the various hotels he keeps getting met by “Do Not Disturb” signs on the door, including a modified “Do Not Disturb” sign duct-taped to the doors. Campbell was one of the original Allman Brothers Band roadies (he embraced that term and preferred it to “crew member”). We never experienced anything like that but that was true to life as far as the relationships went. “We had some bad experiences with Rolling Stone,” the 76-year-old Betts says. In the movie, Rolling Stone’s editors are thrilled with William’s profile of Stillwater but when the magazine’s fact checker calls the band, Russell tells her 90% of it has been fabricated and the magazine refuses to run the piece. Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. Our first gig was in Mobile, at a place called the Stork Club. “He had lost all interest. It was to be marked by a fanatic familial closeness, by talent and determination, and tragedy. “The real question,” he says, “is not why we’re so popular. Gregg is a bit more blunt. He just wrote a real bad article on us. Gregg got a call from Liberty “telling me to get my ass back to California or they’d sue us for $48,000 that Hour Glass still owed them.” For the first and only time in their musical careers, Duane and Gregg split. I was vouching for him and finally talked the guys into letting him come out with us. “I helped Cameron pick his spots to get his interview, and he threw me a bone 30 years later,” Campbell told me during an interview at his Tampa home for my college paper, the USF Oracle, in 2001. Still, it was a difficult thing to get in the studio and brush up Brothers And Sisters. The bass, Bob Keller, was in and out of the band, trying to strengthen up troubles with his wife. Rumors that either of them will soon embark on a solo career “are horseshit,” Gregg says. It was getting toward the end of summer, the mornings were getting colder and I was in Sears and Roebuck to get some gloves with the money when I strolled by the guitar department and fell in love with those beauties. It was the first dead person I’d ever seen.”, The dead man in that sleazy room weighed on the brothers’ minds. Betts remembers that the Second Coming did “double lead guitar, the same sort of thing that Duane and I did later. When they hired drummer, Portwood, went out on the road a few months ago, he billed himself “the original drummer of the Allman Brothers Band,” a cheap but embarrassing gimmick that raised the hackles on Gregg’s neck. But Duane was too warm and personal for that. Some of these tracks, including the “B.B. “That was one thing, that might have been somebody else, one of the other bands, the Eagles or Led Zeppelin,” Betts says. “I never did anything like that. We played three or four hours without stopping and when we finished, Duane looked around and said, ‘Man, this is it.’ He got on the phone and called Gregg in California.”, That was March 23rd, 1969. The pickup bass was caught trying to make off with the brothers’ equipment. In 1977 rolling stone Magazine relo… “We were misled,” Duane once said of the Liberty period. “They did all the arrangements and all the songs. “Shit, I was with the band when it wasn’t no band.”, Also at Fame, Duane cut a solo album with Berry Oakley and Sandlin and Hornsby from Hour Glass. We had to turn my mother on to the blacks. “Going to play with them niggers again? That band was really tight, playing R&B and Yardbirds tunes by the hundreds. The next day, October 29th, 1971, Duane visited the Oakley house to wish Berry’s wife, Linda, a happy birthday. “You’ve got to consider why anybody wants to become a musician anyway,” Gregg says. The movie is semi-autobiographical, since Crowe was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone … “I don’t think I’ve changed the band as much as broadened them,” Leavell says. “The band lived there a while and when we began to get $100-a-night gigs, Duane moved a block and a half away and Dicky moved down the street. “I had been building up nerve to put a pistol to my head,” he said. 1 and produced the chart-topping single “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Betts, as well as the hit instrumental “Jessica,” also composed by Betts. Loosely based on Crowe’s teenage years as a music journalist covering the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin, “Almost Famous” is the story of … They’d dress us up in these funny duds and we just felt silly.”. It was really close.”. Even though Duane appeared once or twice with Derek and the Dominoes, roadie Red Dogs says, “He never forgot about the Allman Brothers Band. But I’d always be there for the bus the next morning or the next day. We had our own sound system, amps and fucking station wagon. '”, By the time Idlewild South, the second Allman Brothers album, was released, the band had picked up a growing and dedicated audience. I was bad about going home with people, though. Paraphrasing (inappropriately) what we said. Then when he got killed I had to refresh myself on it. He loved and idolized Duane. I told them to stick it. Of course, Allman Brothers fans have all the albums — starting with the essential “At Fillmore East,” “Eat a Peach” and “Brothers and Sisters” — to return to whenever we need some Southern comfort, but it’s also nice to know the band’s spirit lives on in Crowe’s smart, heartwarming film “Almost Famous,” which celebrates its 20th anniversary Sept. 8. The cycle skidded and flipped over, dragging Allman nearly 50 feet. Not long after the band cut the best-selling “Ramblin’ Man,” Berry Oakley’s motorcycle slammed into a Macon city bus. SAY ANYTHING… (1989) Written and directed by Cameron Crowe. But during that first three years, Phil never once tried to change us.”, The Allman Brothers Band was released in 1970. I happened to look in and there’s this cat lying on the floor, covered up with a blanket. Fuck playing this goddamn ‘In a Gadda-Vida’ shit. There’s a poster of Stillwater on William’s wall clearly based on the “At Fillmore East” album cover and then a minute later we hear the Allman Brothers’ explosive live version of “One Way Out” on the soundtrack followed by a bus scene with Russell playing slide guitar, something Betts recalls doing on the ’73 tour after taking over sole lead and slide guitar duties following the death of Duane Allman. “He wasn’t really hot on doing the solo album,” Dicky Betts says. “It was entertaining, too. The new album, Brothers And Sisters, was begun last spring, and keyboard artist Chuck Leavell joined the band early in the sessions. “We sent an attorney out there to talk that over with him,” he says without particular emphasis, as if this is the way civilized folks deal with the irritating problems. “They were a strong outfit,” Gregg says, “and they were stuck without a singer or a guitarist. “But if the band hadn’t made it, it would have fractured the structure of their identities. He was pretty arrogant sometimes, and I think one critic said he had ‘an ego that could fill the Grand Canyon,’ but he had a talent to match. “I hear you’re doing a musical version of ‘Almost Famous,’” John said. 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