And So It Began. Happy Birthday To The Allman Brothers Band's Debut Album.

The Allman Brothers Band self-titled debut was released 55 Years ago today. This is the story of its recording. A One Way Out excerpt.

1969 photo by Twiggs Lyndon

The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut was released on November 4, 1969, 55 years ago today. The following, about the album’s recording, is an excerpt from One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band, copyright 2014 Alan Paul.

If you enjoy, please subscribe and share!

In August, 1969, five months after forming, the Allman Brothers Band went to New York City to record their self-titled debut. Their trip North was not without drama, as Oakley detailed in a letter to his wife Linda, who was still living in Jacksonville. The bassist wrote her regularly, generally starting out by saying how much he missed her and “Bee Bop,” their infant daughter Brittany, before filling her in on the band’s latest news.

OAKLEY LETTER TO LINDA, POSTMARKED 8-5-69, AND SENT FROM NEW YORK CITY:  “The damn truck started heating up again about midnight. We got as far as Greenville, SC and could go no further… We spent the night in a motel and now it’s afternoon and Twiggs is out renting a van to get us the rest of the way there.”

Berry and Linda Oakley. Photo by Jim Marshall

In New York, the band was to work with Cream producer Tom Dowd, but he was unavailable and Atlantic house engineer Adrian Barber was assigned to record the new band. Barber was an experienced engineer, having worked on sessions with Cream and a range of jazz greats, as well as with the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany in 1963. This was his first producer’s credit. A year later he would engineer and play most of the drums on Velvet Underground’s Loaded.

The entire seven-song Allman Brothers Band album was cut and mixed in two weeks and virtually no outtakes exist from the sessions. During this time. the Brothers also played three nights at Ungano’s, a Manhattan club; these were their first shows in the city that was to become their second home.

JAIMOE: The best way to prepare to go into the studio is play the songs you’re going to record on gigs and then you should know if they’re ready or not and judge from the crowd reaction what’s clicking and what needs more work. We played them songs hard from May to August and walked into the studio having them down cold. We were not intimidated, even though me, Dickey and Berry were not that experienced in studio work.  Butch had more experience and Gregg and Duane had cut a few albums, in addition to all of Duane’s session work.

BUTCH TRUCKS: The whole experience of making the first album was absolutely wonderful. I felt comfortable in the studio, having recorded a bunch before, as did we all, and the music was great.  We had played these songs so much and we were all just busting to get them down on record.

BERRY OAKLEY LETTER TO LINDA, POSTMARKED 8-14-69: “We set up and ran down some tunes for a few hours Sat. eve but didn’t record till Sun. We did ‘Trouble No More,’ ‘Cross To Bear,’ [and] ‘Dreams’ and they came out really well. The producer is a good cat to work with. He’s English and everything is working out pretty well. Today we were working on ‘Black Hearted Woman’ all day but didn’t finish cause we changed it around so it is more together and we were just doing a part at a time. It’s going to come out good.

“What a funky place New York really is.”

JAIMOE: They booked two weeks for us in Atlantic Studios– and that was just supposed to be playing down basic tracks, with overdubs coming later. We went in on Sunday night to get sounds, went back Monday night to start cutting and came out Thursday with the whole thing done, overdubs and all. We went in there played our asses off and that was it; we were done in four days and they spent the rest of the time mixing.

TRUCKS: It all happened so fast. We did that whole record in two weeks beginning to end, from the time we set up to the time we mastered, and the only thing we got stuck on wound up being the high point of that whole record: Duane’s solo on “Dreams.” We tried playing it several times and couldn’t get it to where it felt right to him. Finally, he said, “Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s record the song and leave a good long opening for me to solo.” We were just jamming to give him some movement to play along with, and he was playing rhythm, leading us where he wanted to go, setting the tracks just how he wanted it.

And at the end of every day’s sessions, he would go and give “Dreams” a shot, but never felt like it was happening. One night, we had finished what we were doing and he said, “Turn off all the lights” and he went way to the back corner, where his amp and baffle were, and sat down – on the floor, I think — and they rolled the track and he started playing that solo that’s on the record. All of a sudden he was playing slide, which he had never done on the song before. He said that he just saw the slide sitting there, stuck it on and played a lot of the same licks he had played, redone with the slide. Then he got to the end and started that rolling lick and built to an incredible climax. By the time he finished everybody in there was in tears. It was unbelievable. I still have a hard time listening to that solo without getting emotional. It was just magic. It’s always been that the greatest music we  played was from out of nowhere, that wasn’t practiced, planned or discussed.

BERRY OAKLEY LETTER TO LINDA, POSTMARKED 8-11-69 NYC

“Sun.”

“Went to the park and saw Jefferson Airplane play. The park is neat. There’s all kind of freaks up here so I don’t mind walking around ‘cause nobody minds me walking around.

“We got another tune done tonight… all we do is one more and then finish putting them together and we’re done. Phil Walden and the vice president of Atlantic are coming here tomorrow and maybe then we’ll find out when it’s going to come out.”

Two more shows to go: www.friendsofthebrothersband.com

The paperback edition of my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, was released last week by St. Martin’s Press. It was the third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.