The Unparalleled, Two-Year Rock-Stardom of Dickey Betts

It was sometime in the mid-2000s and I was gliding across a freeway in my dad’s blue Dodge pickup, listening to 93.3 The Wolf with the windows down. He and I, we were on our way to the Eastwood Mall to grab something for my mom’s birthday—maybe a ring from Kay Jewelers, or a snow globe for her to add to her collection that’s overflowing on our living room shelves. We were a radio family, always having local stations pouring out of any speaker we could get our hands on; The Wolf was my first history lesson into the magic of a rock ‘n’ roll that existed far before my birth. And there is something particularly magical about the way my brain has chosen to retain core memories surrounded by music, like Dad’s thumb and index finger quickly turning up the volume knob as the riff of a Gibson Les Paul Standard in A-flat major came into the truck cab like a gust of wind. It was such a little thing, but I remember him saying “listen to this,” and I remember not being able to muster up even a lick of language afterwards. I was in awe of the sounds fluttering through my ears, as if I’d been let in on some vibrant, elite secret.

When you’re a kid, you rarely know whose fingers are making a guitar sound cherry as wine. It wasn’t my dad’s first instinct to guide young, single-digit me on some technical endeavor of who, when, where and why. No, him turning his truck stereo up a few decibels was a measure of his love—an affection that, so often in our shared life, has existed within the realms of three or four-minute songs. And, like many of us, it is not human nature to be considering every song we adore at all times. So, when “Ramblin’ Man” came on rotation, a gleam of joy hit my father’s face—as if a life he’d lost touch with came back into focus, a life that, just maybe, he ought to share a piece of with his kid. And that he did, and together we soared—maybe even floated—across that highway to the sound of Dickey Betts’ rainbow-hued, Southern-dipped picking.

Last Thursday, April 18th, news broke that Betts had passed away at the age of 80. He had been living with cancer and COPD, and his death leaves only one founding member of the Allman Brothers Band left: drummer Jaimoe Johnson. Betts had started the group with Gregg and Duane Allman and Berry Oakley in Jacksonville, Florida in 1969, and he became one of their two lauded and beloved axemen. After his brother-in-shred Duane was killed in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Georgia in 1971—just a handful of months before the release of the band’s seminal LP, Eat a Peach—Betts became a crucial anchor in the Allman Brothers’ lineage, turning into a de facto frontman in Duane’s absence, putting pen to paper on some of the band’s most-acclaimed tracks—especially “Jessica” and “Blue Sky.”

When I got to college, I met a kid named Tom—a fellow only child whose only compass for culture was rock ‘n’ roll—on the fourth floor of a dorm building across the street from that of my own. You see, I was housed in the basement of an all-guys dorm, a sub-level filled to the brim with athletes (mostly baseball players) and I was certainly not on the same wavelength as them. Granted, I could very easily recite every member of the 500 home runs club or rattle off the leading scorers in NBA history, but I was no longer an athlete myself and long out-of-practice conversing with those who were.

On top of that, my living circumstances were randomized—and I was eventually paired up with an exchange student roommate whose verbal English wasn’t strong, not to mention he was also a few years my senior. It was an isolating life to live, initially, though we would float in and out of school functions together in a combined effort to make some semblance of friends. It didn’t help that he and I were opposites (he was terminally cool, I was far from it). But, after two months of humming around campus and busting my ass in my literary journalism class (which was usually only offered to upperclassmen, but my advisor made an exception because I’d declared my writing major so early), he and I both began to find our people—unwinding our own introversions in the process.

The fourth floor of that neighboring dorm was my own private Idaho, in some ways. It was brimming with geeks, queers and hotties—descriptions I had yearned so desperately to fall into, someday, as well. I’d known some of the students who lived up there from my freshman colloquium class, including the woman I would date for nearly five years. By that point, I’d not yet let my high school habits of smoking bounteous amounts of weed trickle into who I presented myself as in college. Tom seemed like a straight-and-narrow dude, someone who kept to himself and his computer (he and his roommate had a beautiful dual-PC set-up that I knew nothing about but admired the spirit of), and I found out quickly that he was a big Stones guy—and it wouldn’t be long before we’d share a bonding moment over their then-new album, Blue & Lonesome.

But something really clicked when Tom, like my father 10 years earlier, said “listen to this” and played the Allman Brothers Band’s “Blue Sky” on his computer. We—and by we, I mean however many people we could cram into a shoebox dorm room at once—listened to Duane Allman and Dickey Betts trade guitar solos for five minutes, and no one but Tom and I seemed to notice the details that curved and sharpened into a fine blade of country-rock precision, like how, at the 2:29 mark, Betts joins in on the melody of Duane’s solo with such ease that I wouldn’t blame you for believing he was plucking along like that the whole time. But even with all of the uninterested bodies piling on top of each other on two twin-sized beds, I believed (and still do) that Tom was speaking only to me—as if to say “Here, take some of this magic.” And that I did, feeling every bit of Betts singing “Early morning sunshine tell me all I need to know.”

Early in their career, the Allman Brothers Band started to break through with tracks like the 22-minute rendition of “Whipping Post,” “Midnight Rider” and a cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues.” But before Eat a Peach, Betts himself had only written a few songs (“Revival,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”) alone. On At Fillmore East, he co-wrote “Hot ‘Lanta” with the whole band, and “One More Ride” from Idlewild South featured a co-write from Greg. But Eat a Peach is where Betts found his stride and attempted to rival the songwriting chops of Gregg. While the latter penned the slow-burn ballad “Melissa”—which Duane famously considered his favorite of his brother’s songs and said wasn’t “rock and roll that makes me move my ass”—Betts crafted “Les Brers in A Minor” and “Blue Sky” for the record, along with the full-band concerto “Mountain Jam.”

At Fillmore East went Gold and turned the Allman Brothers into rock stars in a flash. Despite that newfound success, the band found itself plagued by drug addiction—and Duane and Oakley, along with roadies Robert Payne and “Red Dog” Campbell, checked themselves into rehab right at the genesis of the recording sessions for Eat a Peach that were taking place at Criteria Studios in Miami, after they’d recorded “Blue Sky.” When they all checked out of rehab soon after entering it, Duane is said to have been, according to Linda Oakley, “the leader, the great soul” who wanted the band to stick together amid all of the noise. “We all had this thing in us and Duane put it there,” Butch Trucks said. “He was the teacher and he gave something to us—his disciples—that we had to play out.” But, as At Fillmore East was about to hit the Top 15 on the Billboard 200, Duane’s fatal motorcycle accident effectively uprooted the Allman Brothers’ momentum.

The band would continue on, eventually wrapping up sessions in December 1971 and tacking on a number of live cuts to pad the project into a hybrid studio/live tracklist that masqueraded as a double-album clocking in at 68 minutes in length. The completion of Eat a Peach—which featured “Melissa,” “Les Brers in A Minor” and “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More”—became a last waltz for Gregg’s leadership, too, as he was suffering mightily in the wake of his older brother’s passing. Enter Betts, the co-lead guitarist who was hardly a second-fiddle in the shadow of Duane’s immortal six-string greatness. The West Palm Beach native had always held his own, and he and Duane’s twin harmony quickly became a talisman for all bands with more than one guitarist in the lineup to behold. The two shredders admonished any idea of lead and rhythm roles, preferring, instead, to churn out parts in equal measure—which is how you get a track as singular as “Blue Sky.” Eat a Peach clocked in as high as #4 on the Billboard 200 and the Allman Brothers would do a 90-show tour throughout 1972 and purchase a 400-acre plot of land in Juliette, Georgia that became their “group hangout” spot—where Oakley was able to live out his, as the band’s biographer Alan Paul called it, “communal dreams.”

But when the Allman Brothers decamped to Capricorn Studios in Macon to record the follow-up to Eat a Peach in 1972, they did so on the verge of unforeseen further tragedy. On November 11th, Oakley (who, in the months leading up to it, was noticeably thinner and drinking and drugging harder than ever before) got into a motorcycle accident of his own—just three blocks from where Duane had crashed a year earlier—and passed away from cerebral swelling due to a fractured skull. It was déjà vu for the band all over again, as they were tasked with asking the same question two years in a row: “Do we carry on?” And, unanimously, they elected to do just that—bringing bassist Lamar Williams and pianist Chuck Leavell into the fold. And from there, due to his increase in songwriting, Betts became the voice of the Allman Brothers Band.