The operatic story behind the Allman Brothers's 'Brothers and Sisters'
It’s hard to resist a title that implies It All Started Here, that a paradigm-shattering event took place while you were finishing school or planning a cross-country move or simply staring out the window and not really thinking about anything. Rock and pop historians love to home in on particular years. There’s Andrew Grant Jackson’s excellent “1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music,” for example, as well as David Hepworth’s equally fine “Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded.” If you want to go even deeper into the weeds and learn more about a particular album that changed everything, there are books on the making of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beach Boys’s “Pet Sounds,” Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and many more.
“Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s” isn’t one of those books. It’s a riveting piece of reporting, but while it deals definitively with the Allman Brothers’ fifth album, it never quite makes the case that “Brothers and Sisters” impacted the culture at large the way Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or Nirvana’s “Nevermind” did. What does make this book by Alan Paul (author of “One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band,” from 2014) new is his access to hundreds of hours of interviews with the musicians, recorded in the mid-1980s by Kirk West, a longtime Allman Brothers insider, for a book he never got around to writing.
The story begins with the familiar account of young musicians forming and breaking up and reforming bands at breakneck speed until the day Duane Allman called his brother Gregg in California and begged him to move to Jacksonville, Fla., to play in a group of six young men, all between the ages of 20 and 25 yet seasoned musicians with years of touring and performing under their belts.
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The band’s third album, “At Fillmore East” (1971), was heading toward No. 13 on the U.S. sales chart (its first, simply called “The Allman Brothers Band,” had stalled at No. 188). On Oct. 29, 1971, Duane Allman picked up his first significant royalty check and, a few hours later, swerved to avoid a lumber truck and crashed his Harley, dying a few hours later in a hospital in Macon, Ga., the band’s new home. A charismatic leader, Duane was soon replaced by bassist Berry Oakley (“the brains behind the Allman Brothers Band” during that period, according to drummer Jai Johanny Johanson), but then the unthinkable happened: A year and 13 days after Duane’s death, and less than a quarter of a mile from his crash site, Oakley also died in a motorcycle accident, when he sideswiped a city bus.
This is the point at which Paul gets into the heart of a story that reads like a Verdi opera. With the two strongest personalities gone and the others already troubled by alcohol, drug problems and the personal conflicts that would always plague the band, the formerly passive Gregg Allman presided as the band added not another guitarist like Duane but a pianist, Chuck Leavell, who brought in textures and rhythms that would change the band’s sound completely. A new bassist was also found: Lamar Williams, who together with Johanson (who went by the name of Jaimoe) created a rhythm that is the essence of the rock and blues sound.
Other forces had an effect as the nearly dead band rose from the ashes. Phil Walden of Capricorn Records was an aggressive manager who “held the band and company together in part by sheer force of personality,” Paul writes. The support of the Grateful Dead was another boost, the band playing with the Allmans to an estimated audience of 600,000 at the Watkins Glen racetrack in New York on July 28, 1973. August of that year saw the release of “Brothers and Sisters,” which charted at No. 1 and signaled the band’s commercial peak, due in part to the hit single “Ramblin’ Man,” an anomaly with a more country vibe than the Allmans’ jazzier compositions — a vibe that made both some of the band members and some longtime fans cringe.
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The success of “Brothers and Sisters” set off a signing frenzy by record companies looking for similar success, giving a spark to the careers of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, the Marshall Tucker Band and others. The album cemented the Allman Brothers’ reputation as the premier Southern rock band, and moved the group into the forefront of ’70s music more generally; though to say that it defined the era, as Paul’s subtitle does, is going too far.
Rather, this book is primarily a thoughtful tribute to a group that loved playing together so much that they overcame the deaths of two leaders to become one of the great rock bands of all time. The boys from Macon played fast and loose with alcohol and drugs and motorcycles, but they held tight when they had to. Asked how he not only endured but prevailed during his darkest hour, Gregg Allman said simply, “Success was being able to keep your brain inside your head.”
David Kirby’s books include “Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Crossroad: Artist, Audience, and the Making of American Music.”
Brothers and Sisters
The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s
By Alan Paul
St. Martin’s. 338 pp. $32
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