Inside the Mind of a Legend: Butch Trucks’ Personal Foreword to One Way Out

Honoring Butch's legacy with my thoughts and his own words.

Butch Trucks passed away nine years ago, on January 24, 2017. Usually on that day, I re-post the remembrance I wrote the next day, and you can read it here, but this yeat I wanted to give you some insight into Butch another way. By sharing the Foreword he wrote for One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. I think reading it offers a lot of insight into his intelligence, wit and passion.

And also into how supportive he was of me and my efforts to tell the full story of the Allman Brothers Band. Butch had read my first book Big in China, really liked it and felt sure I was the guy who could get the ABB story right. His belief in me was huge and opened a lot of doors. He and Jaimoe were always available for a phone call or text. It turns out people rarely ask the drummers their opinions and they have plenty to say. I wish I could call Butch right now and thank him again.

In 2015, he came to my house in Maplewood, NJ for an unforgettable breakfast with my family and then a book talk at Words, Maplewood’s Bookstore. The store’s owner Jonah Zimiles was wowed by Butch, calling him the most interesting guest the store had ever hosted - and they’ve hosted hundreds of authors of all stripes.

When I asked Butch if he would write a Foreword, he immediately said yes and scoffed at my offer to help him. “If I am going to write the thing, I am damn sure going to write the thing myself,” he said. Two days later it was in my inbox, and I barely edited it. I’d love for you to read it now.

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  Butch and Gregg, ABB final rehearsals, 2014. PHOTO BY DEREK TRUCKS

FOREWORD BY BUTCH TRUCKS

In the early days of 1969, I was living on the St. John’s River with my first wife and on the verge of quitting what was, at the time, a very unprofitable and unsatisfying career in music. My not too well thought out plan was to return to college and get my degree in math, since that was what I was best at doing. My first attempt at “higher education” ended in 1966 when Florida State University asked me not to return for the fall trimester. It seems that non-attendance that led to a great deal of F’s was unacceptable even at the great party school of FSU. I joined up with two of my buddies from high school who just happened to land in the same dorm as me and we decided to start a band and play this new stuff by the Byrds and the newly electric Bob Dylan among others such as The Lovin’ Spoonful. We called ourselves The Bitter Ind. and somehow going to class just didn’t seem as important as rehearsing and playing for every frat at FSU.

In the summer of 1966 we packed up our gear in the back of our guitar player and singer, Scott Boyer’s, car and headed to Daytona Beach to make it big. Well, that bombed big time. We auditioned at all of the clubs there and they all thought we were the best band they had ever heard, but the universal rejections came because “you can’t dance to it.” We were doing our last audition at a place called The Martinique when in walked The Beatles. Of course, it wasn’t actually John, Paul, George and Ringo, but the way people acted it may as well have been. It was a band called The Allman Joys and walking in the lead as he always did was this dude with long blond hair followed closely by another dude with even longer and blonder hair. This was of course, Duane and Gregg Allman.

You can buy a signed copy from me here.

We played our set and got the usual “you guys are great but they can’t dance to it” from the club owner, but waiting for us backstage were those two blond guys and they were blown away with what we had just played. We explained our predicament and got an invite to come hang out at 100 Van Avenue where they lived with their mother, Momma A.

After a few days we packed it up, stuck our tails between our legs and headed back to Jacksonville, where a few weeks later I got a call from Duane asking me to come to a club in downtown Jacksonville, because their drummer had just quit. I, of course, said “I’m on my way.” I played with them for a night or two and Duane, knowing that this club’s owner was a huge Dylan fan, got our band an audition and we took over the Allman Joy’s gig. That lasted for around eight months. Then we hit the southern club circuit where we would run into Duane and Gregg from time to time.

Sometime in, I believe 1967, we were in Daytona and stopped by 100 Van Ave. and there were Duane and Gregg fresh from a run at the big time in L.A. as a band called The Hour Glass. We decided to join forces and played for the next few months as The Bitter Ind., The Hour Glass or The 31^st of February (we had signed a record contract with Vanguard Records and The Bitter End club in New York would not let us use that name). Don’t ask me where the 31^st of February came from. It is still a mystery.

Tickets at Friends Of The Brothers Band.com

We took this version to Miami to record our second record for Vanguard. You can hear two of those recordings on Duane’s retrospective, Skydog. One of them was the very first recording of “Melissa.” When we finished there, Gregg flew back to L.A. and found out that The Hour Glass’s record company, Liberty, would release the rest of that band from their contracts if he would stay and record solo. I was with Duane in Daytona when he got the call from Gregg. I believe if Duane could have gotten through the phone he would have strangled Gregg on the spot. Well, Duane had been offered a gig as a studio player in Muscle Shoals and without Gregg he just didn’t feel like our band was going to go anywhere so he packed it up and headed to Alabama.

Back to my opening sentence: Luckily for me, before I enrolled in college again, there came a knock on my door and there was Duane with an incredible-looking black man. Duane, in his usual way, introduced us to each other as Jaimoe, his new drummer, and Butch, his old drummer. He hung around for a while and then took off to meet up with Berry Oakley at the house on Riverside Drive where Berry’s then-band, Second Coming, was living. Of course he left Jaimoe at my house and, for the first time in my middle-class white life I had to get to know and deal with a black man. It changed me profoundly. Over 44 years later, Jaimoe and I are still best of friends and I am very proud to call him my brother.

Pidemont Park, 1969. Photo- Twiggs Lyndon

I could go on with this story for several hundred pages but that is what Alan Paul has written and that is what I am writing a foreword for. I will let Alan tell the story of the Allman Brothers Band as he has been able to uncover it from many long interviews with me and everyone else that he could get to who was there during many of the band’s incarnations.

There have been several attempts to write THE epic rock and roll story but so far, I haven’t read anything that really “gets it.” They tend to be written by newspaper writers and the books wind up being very long newspaper articles that deal with who did what where and when. None have delved into the HOW and WHY.

I’ve read Alan Paul’s articles about us going back many years. I’ve read his book, Big in China, and the one thing that jumps from those pages is How and Why. In Big in China Alan finds himself in as alien an environment as possible and still finds a way to assemble an extremely good band that he educates in American Blues/Jazz rock as exemplified by The Allman Brothers Band. These are excellent players that never imagined that rock music could be played with this level of sophistication. Alan does an incredible job of telling his story from the very uneasy and very difficult beginnings when even communicating was difficult, other than through the music, up through the day that his band was selected as the top band in Beijing.

Alan has a way with narrative that just draws you in without using the single level storyline used by the other writers who have attempted telling the Allman Brothers Band’s story. He gets right to the How’s and Why’s and give his narrative real substance.

I know from everything that Alan Paul has written in the past that this book will tell our story and it will do so on many levels. He has never settled for less in anything he has written in the past and I can’t fathom that he would do so with this epic.

I’ll shut up now and let you proceed with Alan Paul’s version of our story. I myself can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Enjoy and become enlightened.

Butch Trucks

West Palm Beach, Florida – 5/10/2013

Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third straight book 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 was 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. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.