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until we got kicked out, and drinking cheap wine. Almost every day we were together, Gregg would bitch about his brother. He’d say, “He’s calling me again asking him to join his band, but there ain’t no way because I cannot get along with my brother in a band.” He said that to me countless times.
    LANDAU: When I was in Muscle Shoals I was sitting in the office with Duane, Rick, and Phil, and Duane picked up the phone, dialed a number, and said, “Brother, it’s time for us to play together again.” I was a fly on the wall and could obviously only hear one end of the conversation, but it seemed very positive.
    ALLMAN: My brother only called me one time and I jumped on it.
    JOHN M C EUEN: As I recall, Duane kept calling Gregg, saying, “You got to get down here. The band has never sounded better.” He called enough times and Gregg went. I have to give Duane credit for having the vision to do this thing. I know the L.A. years were not great ones for them, but I think it was something they had to go through to discover their path.
    PAYNE: Gregg kept telling me, “I’m not going down and getting involved with that.” You have to remember he was coming off a very bad band experience; he hated the way the Hour Glass went and how it ended up and he may have connected that with being Duane’s fault. I think he also felt like Duane and the other guys turned on him and blamed him for staying in L.A., when he thought he had to.
    SANDLIN: It kind of bothered me that Gregg stayed out in L.A., but I didn’t know if he wanted to, or was being forced by management.
    PAYNE: At the same time, he was looking at his future—he was driving an old Chevy with a fender held on by antenna wire. Whenever we ran out of money, he’d go down and sell a song. We were living hand to mouth.
    ALLMAN: My brother said he was tired of being a robot on the staff down in Muscle Shoals, even though he had made some progress, and gotten a little known playing with great people like Aretha and Wilson Pickett. He wanted to take off and do his own thing. He said, “I’m ready to get back on the stage, and I got this killer band together. We got two drummers, a great bass player, and a hell of a lead guitar player, too.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he said, “Wait’ll you get here and I’ll show you.”
    I didn’t know that he had learned to play slide so well. I thought he was out of his mind, but I was doing nothing, going nowhere. My brother sent me a ticket, but I knew he didn’t have the money, so I put it in my back pocket, stuck out my thumb on the San Bernardino Freeway, and got a ride all the way to Jacksonville, Florida—and it was a bass player I got a ride from.
    PAYNE: I know that Gregg remembers hitchhiking across the country, but the thing is, I’m the guy who drove him to the airport.
    M C EUEN: My brother bought a Chevy Corvair for Gregg to drive around L.A.—the most unsafe car ever invented. One day Gregg comes by the house, a little duplex in Laurel Canyon, looking for my brother, who wasn’t there. He said, “Hey, John, the man pulled me over. You know how they are. He doesn’t believe this is my car and is going to impound it. I got to take the pink slip to the judge.” So I said, “I know where the pink slip is.” I gave it to him and he took it and sold that car and bought a one-way ticket to Jacksonville. Maybe I’m responsible for the Allman Brothers Band! Gregg came back about six years later when the Brothers were playing the Forum, and gave my brother a check for the car.
    TRUCKS: I don’t know how he got there but a few days after Duane said he was calling Gregg, there was a knock on the door and there he was.
    ALLMAN: I walked into rehearsal on March 26, 1969, and they played me the track they had worked up to Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” and it blew me away. It was so intense.
    BETTS: Gregg was floored when he heard us. We were really blowing; we’d been playing these