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First There Is a Mountain First there is a mountain Then there is no mountain Then there is. Lines from Donovan's "There Is a Mountain" by John Odgen | |
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Sunday, May 11, 1969. Around noon. A group of us, just on the heavy side of 20 years, is walking south along the "Strip," the loosely demarcated Midtown section of Peachtree Street that lies somewhere between 14th and 5th Streets in Atlanta. We pass the day-glo colored Catacombs nightclub at 14th - past the Peachtree Art Theatre and the Ol' King Cole Bakery - heading, by a circuitous route, for Piedmont Park and some live music at the weekly "be-in." Bell-bottomed jeans, zippered boots, tie-dyed shirts. Dressed in the times. The conversation floats and convects like smoke in the air. Vietnam, local rock and roll bands, police harassment of hippies, Nixon. Teddy Kennedy is in town for the weekend, looking like a solid bet for a presidential bid in the coming decade. But the topic seems to flow consistently back to music, the "poetry of this generation." Radar, the Hampton Grease Band, Jeff Espina, Eric Quincy Tate, Chakra, the Sweet Younguns. These are the solid local acts that we catch at such venues as the Bowery, the Bottom of the Barrel, the Golden Horn, Twelfth Gate, the Bistro, the Catacombs and, best of all, for free at Piedmont Park. Near the A&P at 12th, a street merchant hassles us for speed and downers. One of us has just seen Hendrix last Friday over in Birmingham - and, hey, it would be nice, we all agree, to have us a true southern guitar hero, somebody from Georgia. Somebody with an authentic interpretation of the great black blues players like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, or B.B. King! A quick bite at the Roxy Delicatessen and we ramble out the back door to take a short cut down 11th Street, dropping 100 feet off the Peachtree Street ridge into the Park. The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta's underground newspaper, has negotiated with the City to allow rock bands to play the Park on the weekends. Last Saturday there had been six decent bands here at the Atlantis Rising Festival. The Park evolved from the famous Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. Prior to this, the exclusive Piedmont Driving Club raced horses on a meadow below Cheatham's strategic Confederate entrenchments. Now, 100 years later, the hip community, the flower children of Atlanta, have adopted it as a meeting place to congregate and listen to their music. Local spokesman Barry Weinstock characterized it as "the piedmont green of a city park, [where] there exists the embryo of a community of like-minded folk… They believe that war must be abolished and that, ultimately, all peoples of the world must live as brothers together in peace and they are attempting to establish a community to include the children of black people, working-class people, poor people, rich people, all people. Theirs will be a community of the new age of Aquarius, the age of brotherhood, the age of peace." Prepared to boogie, we enter the Park by the VFW Club - stride up a small hill and across the ball fields. There's a strong fragrance from the flowering linden trees that ring the fields. Here once stretched the 1895 Grand Plaza with its landscaped radial walkways where Booker T. Washington was allowed to stroll and John Philip Sousa marched his band. The stone steps at the eastern end of the ball fields come into view. Called the Parapet when built for the Exposition, they are one of its few vestigial components - composed of massive granite and concrete terraces, huge goblet-like planters and flared pillars where towering Greek statuary once was bolted. Rock bands have been setting up here since the previous spring. In inclement weather, they play under the adjacent, 1920's era pavilion. As we approach the steps we see a group of about 50 colorfully dressed people milling around. It's a sparkling afternoon - cool, breezy with the sun bright and streaming through the elm trees that overhang the steps. The light reflects a bluish cast off the granite blocks. Long-haired roadies are arranging equipment for a band. Speakers and Marshall amplifiers line the back wall of the terrace and wrap around it facing out towards the lake. A crowd is forming slowly. Bird staffers are standing out from of the steps watching, discussing that the band drove up from Macon this morning on the spur of the moment - no one has heard of them. A black family is cooking on the nearby granite grill. A Frisbee zips close overhead - dogs and children cavort about - a tambourine jangles. The smells of patchouli, cigarettes, marijuana, and barbecue diffuse through the cool air. A tall, lean young man with long reddish blond hair, sideburns grown shaggy into his mustache, emerges from the crowd. He is an unusual looking dude, even among this crowd. A vintage Gibson Les Paul electric guitar slung over his shoulder, he walks to one of the Marshall amps and plugs in. Another man, remarkably similar in physical appearance, sits down at the organ. The two drummers, one black, the other white, take their positions. They are followed by a messianic looking bass guitarist and another guitar player. Discordant tune-up notes pierce the air. There are now over a hundred people gathered around, standing, some perched on the granite walls and planters, others sprawled on the ground, two or three have climbed into the trees. The band members turn to the blond guitarist. Shoulders rolled forward like a boxer, he smiles confidently, reaches into his pocket and extracts what looks to be a long Coricidin pill bottle. He places it on the ring finger of his left hand, knocks the pick-up switch of his guitar into the forward position, nods to the band and snaps his fingers - "All right, gentlemen - 1..2..3..4." And Duane Allman, his long hair flying in the wind, pulls his slide down the fretboard into Muddy Waters' classic tune, "Trouble No More." Butch Trucks and Jaimo are laying down their syncopating rhythms in metered rolls, playing off each other, punctuating and driving the blues song. Berry Oakley's Gibson bass is humming deeply - Dickey Betts' liquid guitar switches easily from lead to rhythm to harmonic counterpoint around Duane's slide work. Gregg Allman's keyboard weaves into the melody - his raspy lyrics cutting into the music with righteous intonations: "Don't care how long you're gone, Don't care how long you stay, Good kind treatment, Bring you home someday." And the masterful slide guitar of Duane Allman responds, ringing out in clear tones and full vibrato with a deep melodic range and clarity. His music sweeps and glides through the crowd - the sound reflecting off of the granite bathhouse, rushing back over the ball fields and diffracting into the marble halls of the Piedmont Driving Club. The melody drives onward and upward, lifting like some great firebird - soaring over the Park, resonating and reverberating with an emotional intensity perhaps not heard here since John Philip Sousa led his band down the Grand Plaza with "Stars And Stripes Forever." "Some day baby, you ain't gonna trouble, poor me, anymore." Duane's final licks glide the song back to earth, his last note sustaining through several bars as Dickey's vigorous cascade puts the coda on the song. The Allman Brothers Band have begun their Atlanta debut. They are playing the first in a long line of free concerts at Piedmont Park. This spring afternoon they blow up a storm, playing traditional blues numbers and original songs written by Gregg Allman in collaboration with the other band members. Newly formed, they have been rehearsing all together only two months, but there is a cohesive vibrancy to their playing that is hard to describe. The following week's issue of The Great Speckled Bird features Bill Fibben's full-page photograph of Duane Allman on its cover, and peppered within are found descriptions and interpretations of the day. "For the rest of us there is, was and shall remain Music... Sunday it was the ALLMAN BROTHERS, an aggregation soon to be too important to play Piedmont Park . . . their music is compulsion and became at our reception propulsion . . . it overwhelms verbal communication... The general opinion going through the crowd was that these guys could stand up against the best - Hendrix, Cream, etc. I am not alone in the opinion that they may be one of the great pop music discoveries of 1969." Miller Francis, nationally known music critic for the Bird, would write his first of many reviews of the group: "You don't, can't ‘listen' to the Allman Brothers; you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it." But what appeared to be an almost overnight success, was actually a strenuous ascent. The Allman Brothers Band had coalesced from the permutations of many musical collaborations. By early 1969, Duane Allman had established a reputation as a solid session guitarist at Rick Hall's Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. About that time Atlantic Records Vice President Jerry Wexler bought Allman's contract from Fame and resold it to Capricorn President Phil Walden, a subsidiary label Wexler co-founded with him (they both shared the astrological namesake). Many say Jerry Wexler became like a second father to Duane, who had lost his dad when he was three. Wexler described their relationship: "We were good friends. I appreciated his versatility, he was a great arranger and improviser... He was a complete guitar player, he could give you whatever you needed, he could do everything... and on the slide he got the touch." Capricorn at first wanted to structure a Claptonesque group around Allman, featuring him as the star. Duane eschewed the spotlight however, opting to hold together his newly formed band. Walden laid out the hard cash for their equipment and moved them up to Macon that March. Berry's widow, Linda Oakley Miller, recollects that, "At first we all lived in Macon in an old Victorian House on College Street that Phil rented for us. Our daughter, Brittany was born that April. There was little money, everyone slept on mattresses on the floor, but the positive energy from Duane and the growing quality of the music sustained us." The Spartan communal life was subsidized in part by the small salary of road manager Twiggs Lyndon and the generosity of Mrs. Louise Hudson (Mama Louise), proprietor of the H&H Restaurant across from the Capricorn Studios at Cotton and Forsythe Streets. Mama Louise dished up some of the finest "vittles" in town (Duane's favorite was collards) along with an encouraging word when "her boys" needed it. The Band practiced and rehearsed tirelessly during the days, often playing for free in Macon's Central City Park. At night, a short stroll down to the bottom of College Street took them into Rose Hill, a picturesque ante-bellum cemetery carved into the bluffs along the Ocmulgee River. Here was a sanctuary for the musicians to stretch out and experiment, playing acoustically amidst the Italianate brick terraces, marble angels and lush vegetation planted by Simri Rose 150 years ago. Sometimes at Rose Hill the musicians would wander among the headstones of the "humble and exalted," gathering inspiration from their inscriptions. They may have chanced upon the monument of the famous relocated Macon citizen, W.L. "Young" Stribling, the "King of the Canebrakes." In the '20s and '30s, he was a world heavyweight boxing contender, a protégé of Jack Dempsey, and the fighter Gene Tunney "wouldn't fight." Stribling was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident at the height of his career a few miles from the cemetery. During this period, Phil Walden concentrated the Band's live concerts in smaller club and college venues in the Southeast, bringing them along slowly, like a good boxing manager would handle his prizefighter. Duane, the unofficial band leader, quickly set the tone for the direction of their music. "A cat comes to my band to pick, not to show off his fancy clothes," he said. "We want to share our music with the audience; but there ain't no stage show. This ain't no ballet. We want people to listen with their eyes closed, to just let the music come inside them and forget their worldly cares." They shuttled often that summer between Macon and Atlanta to play free concerts in Piedmont Park, trying out new songs, arrangements, and jams. The mere presence of Duane began to enkindle rapport with the growing crowds. His improvisational long jumps on the slide or straight lead guitar carried us with him on his melodic explorations - in and out of different keys and back again - the playing improving at each hearing. His talent seemed to gather inspiration from the burgeoning vegetation of the Park as it suspended us in time - temporarily transposing us out of the all too real social turmoil and daily hassles. Joe Roman, Atlanta music promoter, remembers Duane dropping by the Twelfth Gate coffee house after one of the Piedmont concerts that summer to offer a donation and talk with the other musicians and clientele. "Duane was down to earth; he didn't have a rock star complex." Others recall that Duane was always approachable and genuinely interested in people in general and musicians in particular. Visitors to Piedmont Park were likely to see him mingling with the crowd to watch other acts on any given weekend when he happened to be in town. He passed through not only with his band but by himself en route to doing Atlantic session work in New York City or at Muscle Shoals. He would often stay at a particular apartment overlooking the Park. There was a grassy promontory nearby where he liked to take his acoustic guitar late at night and serenade friends. In the evenings you might catch him jamming at the Bowery or Twelfth Gate with such groups as the fledgling Lynyrd Skynyrd band. Duane would often offer encouragement to the journeyman musician. "You gotta sort yourself out and sort the music you hear out," he'd say. "Then find something to hang your notes on. You hang your notes on your attitude and on yourself." The summer of '69 was a watershed period for musical promotion in Atlanta. Organizations like the Bird, Nexus House, Atlantis Rising, the Universal Life Church, and the Twelfth Gate had nurtured the free music in Piedmont Park, serving as inspiration for the emergence of hip entrepreneurs. Musician Alex Janoulis and his wife had started up the Dynamic Talent Agency. Steve Cole had formed his Discovery, Incorporated. Both companies began as booking agencies and expanded into promotional companies, teaming up with organizations like Frank Hughes' Electric Collage Light Show to promote some memorable pay and free concerts within the next several years. Local television station WPBA was shooting the Sounds of Summer Music Festival in the Park that June. Promoter Alex Cooley and his partners were putting together the first Atlanta Pops Festival, bringing in such headliners as the Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and the Chicago Transit Authority. It was held at the Atlanta International Raceway on July 4th . The Pops Festival might have served as a national launching pad for the Allman Brothers Band as it did for Johnny Winter and Grand Funk Railroad. According to Joseph Campbell, better known as "Red Dog," the famed Allman Brothers Band roadie, the Brothers were scheduled to audition for a spot on the bill, but "Duane overslept that morning and we missed our appointment." Red Dog considers it a blessing in disguise, however, because it "gave the band more time to tighten up the music for the success we were all sure was coming." Working along with Cooley, was Ed Shane, operations manager for Atlanta's WPLO-FM radio and popular emcee for local concerts. Shane had, by the Summer of '69, captured the ears of Atlanta's younger listeners with his formula of playing favorite cuts off long-playing albums and keeping a music/commercials ratio of 8:1 rather than the monotonous 2:1 prevalent today. Shane's self-trained ear and low-key delivery served him well, as he helped build WPLO-FM from a pilot project at Georgia State University in 1968 to an institution of regional esteem at its location at Peachtree and 5th Streets. In August, Duane's daughter, Galadriel, was born prematurely in Macon. He named her for the beautiful Elven queen of Lorien out of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, a favorite book of his. The following month, the Band flew to New York City to record their album at Atlantic Studios, and then swung back through Piedmont Park on September 21st for the Atlanta "Mini Pops Festival," promoted as a rally for the recently fire-bombed Atlantis Rising. This concert took place on a portable stage at the north end of the ball fields, adjacent to where the old Sergeant Pepper-style bandstand stood for the Cotton States Exhibition. The weather held and the Allman Brothers Band, along with the Hampton Grease Band, Brick Wall, the Sweet Younguns, and the Booger Band filled the freshly-cut fields with appreciative people. That day, the twin guitar leads of Allman and Betts, counterpoised at opposite ends of the stage, were creating something new out of their soulful rhapsodies. Miller Francis' critique in the following issue of the Bird explains: " . . . the Allman Brothers were there to prove that they are in better shape than ever. Their rhythm section swings harder than ever, their organist is still in top form, and the two lead guitarists - especially Duane Allman on slide guitar - solo as brilliantly as the last time we heard them. The sounds they make together are among the finest musical creations of any group in rock music. When they closed the show with their bluesy arrangement of Donovan's ‘First There Is a Mountain,' the spirit of the people in attendance approached that of the Grateful Dead concert." In October Donovan was in town for a show and an enlightening interview with the Bird. On the 17th the Allmans were back at the Park headlining the three day "Piedmont Music Festival." Co-producers the Universal Life Church and Atlantis Rising also brought in some national names like Mother Earth, Billy Joe Royal, Joe South and a young Boz Scaggs. Duane had just contributed some smoking session guitar for Scaggs' first album. These, along with local and regional talent, offered a good musical program, and - at a $1.00/day optional donation - it was a real deal. The temperature dropped into the 40s that first evening and the eclectic audience of hippies and straights huddled close, as the music and the glow from the Electric Collage Light Show provided an illusion of warmth. Berry Oakley's and Dickey Betts' old band, the Second Coming, played that night, followed by Joe South and Mother Earth with Tracy Nelson energetically belting out her boozy lyrics through a feeble sound system. Saturday was better, but it all peaked Sunday. The smell and feel of Autumn was in the air and the crowds had grown from the hundreds into the thousands as the word had spread. With the audio problems finally resolved, local band Radar started things off. Berry and Butch joined in with Larry Rhinehardt of the Second Coming for a musical reunion. The day seemed to last forever as the music progressed. That evening the sunset painted an indigo-hued horizon over Peachtree Street, silhouetting the newly emergent white spires of Colony Square. The Brothers, playing for the third day in a row, closed the program with a transcendental version of "Mountain Jam." Duane's polychromatic melody, running like a thoroughbred through the fields, synchronized with Bett's and Oakley's phrasings to hold the spectators completely spellbound. The Piedmont Park music Festival ended with two couples being married on stage by the minister of the Universal Life Church. The festival was declared a success and profits were channeled back into the community. The music scene seemed to be developing in Atlanta, gaining momentum. Hopeful eyes looked ahead to more music in the Park the following Spring. In the period of six months, the Allman Brothers Band had ridden steadily upward in popularity, boldly engraving their style on the musical fabric of the South as surely as the Chattahoochee River incised into the Georgia granite during its antediluvian run to the sea. Their playing would soon reset musical banchmarks.  |