Dickey Betts - Official Live Bootleg Vol. 1 - Extended Liner Notes by Wade Tatangelo
Dickey Betts: Official Bootleg Volume 1
After 50-plus years in the spotlight, experiencing amazing highs and some terrible lows, he's the last man left standing from the formidable front line of the Allman Brothers Band. Guitar hero. Songwriting genius. Reluctant singer blessed with a voice as sweet and pure as a country stream. Dickey Betts, now 77 and retired on the west coast of Florida, has indeed lived the kind of life most men only dream of.
Betts cofounded the Allman Brothers Band alongside siblings Duane (guitar) and Gregg Allman (vocals, keys) with his previous band mate Berry Oakley on bass and Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson and Butch Trucks on drums. They were a bunch of long-haired hippies and a Black man trying to make a living deep down in the South in 1969, dealing with racist rednecks while on the road and even back home in Jacksonville.
They relocated to Macon, Georgia, and built a fan base without a radio hit by touring in a rundown Winnebago to the tune of 300 shows a year. They lost Duane and Berry in eerily similar motorcycle crashes in Macon a year apart and then became the most popular band in America when Betts’ song "Ramblin' Man" became a pop smash and propelled their “Brothers and Sisters” album to the top of the charts.
Things change, though, and the same Allman Brothers musicians who pioneered stadium touring and mile-high debauchery in the ‘70s found themselves playing dingy clubs with their solo bands in the ‘80s. The Brothers were far from done, however, and rose again thanks in large part to the leadership and contributions of Dickey Betts. By the ‘90s, they were issuing hit new albums, doing huge summer tours and enjoying their rightful place as one of the most respected bands in the country.
In 2000, Betts and the three other surviving Allman Brothers Band members had a very public breakup that would never be amended although Betts and his longtime partner in crime Allman rekindled their friendship before the latter’s passing in 2017. “I was trying to make him feel good and tell him how much he was loved and respected,” Betts told me for a story on the band’s 50th anniversary. “I would just call and try to make his day a little better.”
I first met Betts about 20 years ago and was pretty sure he was about to deck a drunk fan.
The incident took place following a Dickey Betts & Great Southern show at an outdoor venue now called Jannus Live in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. Not long removed from headlining shows at 20,000-capacity amphitheaters with the Allman Brothers Band, Betts stepped on the stage to see an audience of no more than 2,000. Yeah, many rock stars would have been bitter.
After the show, Betts stood in front of his tour bus drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboros. He greeted fan after fan, signed albums and T-shirts, and then a guy who had clearly been overserved stumbled right into him. A deadly flash appeared in Betts’ eyes as he stopped the guy from knocking him back. Then a security guard the size of an NFL lineman jumped in the middle. The drunken fan begged for forgiveness and Betts flashed that grin of his, “Oh, it’s alright,” Betts said. “Man, we’ve all been there.”
Dickey Betts made a fan for life that day. And not just because of the way he handled himself like a Southern gentleman when accosted by an inebriated enthusiast. Betts had been in good spirits throughout the evening, entertaining a crowd that included people like my dad who had been a fan since the early ‘70s and college students such as myself just beginning to truly appreciate the music. Betts played for a couple hours, offering impassioned versions of some of the most acclaimed rock songs from the ‘70s along with ones I fondly recalled from modern rock radio play and MTV videos in the ‘90s. By the time he closed with the propulsive “No One to Run With,” I was hooked.
Yeah, I became a fan just as my journalism career began and have been fortunate enough to interview Betts numerous times over the years, mostly for his hometown newspaper the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Truth be told, I write about Betts whenever I can, always seizing the opportunity to remind readers of his place in the pantheon of the most important musicians of the classic rock era. Remind readers of his status as a key architect of the Southern rock and jam band movements, one who initiated the dual lead guitar approach with Duane Allman and then single-handedly composed several of rock’s most enduring instrumentals – while also writing and singing expertly crafted country and blues based hits.
You know, it’s an impressive range. Going from, say, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” which has been covered by numerous jazz and jam band acts, to “Ramblin’ Man,” which has been covered by country stars past and present as well as none other than Bob Dylan, who insisted on doing it as a duet with Betts at a Tampa concert in ‘95.
Like other seminal music figures from his generation that grew up in the South, Betts’ influences can be traced back to the country music of Jimmie Rodgers (hear the version of “Waiting for a Train” Betts did for the Dylan-produced “The Songs Of Jimmie Rodgers - A Tribute” album) and the blues music of Robert Johnson (just listen to the version of “Steady Rolling Man” contained here). But unlike the vast majority of his musical peers, Betts had ears for more than just country, blues and rock ’n’ roll. Betts could swing!
“We had these other influences,” Betts tells me while being interviewed at his home on Little Sarasota Bay in 2014. “Horn players, Gerry Mulligan, all these great jazz players, Louis Armstrong, how they would roll their stuff together, Benny Goodman, the great trumpet player Harry James, he would blow his trumpet and the band would be building a pyramid and he would be coming up the middle of it. We had those models in our mind. We knew how to roll and play.”
Yes, all those influences, from blues and jazz to country and rock, can be heard on “Official Bootleg Volume 1,” which hopefully will be the first in a series of albums spotlighting Betts’ brilliant but often overshadowed solo career. It features more than a dozen choice live recordings made with his Great Southern group in the 2000s that would feature various lineups including Betts’ guitar playing son Duane Betts (now co-leader of the Allman Betts Band), former Allman Brothers co-lead guitarist “Dangerous” Dan Toler, and a host of additional gifted players such as Mike Kach (keyboard, vocals), Andy Aledort (guitar), Pedro Arevalo (bass), Twinkle (vocals), Frankie Lombardi (drums) and James Varnado (drums).
All songs are Betts originals except for the new arrangement of Robert Johnson’s “Steady Rolling Man” and “It Happens Sometimes,” Kach’s touching ballad that Betts would include on subsequent releases titled as “Get Away” and finally “My Getaway.” The tracks represent a best-of approach to the professional recordings in the Betts vaults with, for instance, four cuts included from the out-of-print “Instant Live” album he made in Cleveland in 2004 with the lineup featuring Toler. The songs on “Official Bootleg Volume 1” are sequenced to resemble any number of outstanding Betts concerts from the past 20 years.
Disc one opens with the dreamy instrumental “High Falls,” which originally appeared as the centerpiece of the Allman Brothers’ 1975 album “Win, Lose or Draw,'' followed by the rocking “Good Time Feeling” from Betts’ ‘77 solo album “Atlanta’s Burning Down.” Grateful Dead enthusiasts will notice that “Blue Sky,” originally from the 1972 “Eat a Peach” album,” now opens with a rhythm recalling “Franklin’s Tower.”
“I guess from listening to The Dead every now and then I remembered the riff and it was a good way to set the tone for that song,” Betts tells me during a 2020 interview. “The band, the drummers especially, tended to get too fast and kind of play too much like ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or something. And I was trying to get that real, like loping, feeling to it, so I started doing ‘Franklin’s Tower’ in front of it to kind of set the tone for it.”
Disc one continues with the powerhouse “Nobody Knows” originally from the Allman Brothers’ 1991 album “Shades of Two Worlds.” Featuring Betts’ most evocative lyric, the philosophical lines are given a smart and sensitive rendering by Kach, who sings again on the blues chestnut “Steady Rollin’ Man” that Betts first recorded for his “Collectors # 1” solo album issued in 2002. Betts returns to lead vocals on a hard-charing rendition of his quintessential road song “Southbound,” from the Allman Brothers’ 1973 bestseller “Brothers and Sisters,” with spirited backing by singer Twinkle.
The upbeat new original “Having a Good Time,” featuring a nice shout out to Betts’ old pal Jerry Garcia, sets the stage for “Seven Turns.” The hit single and title track from the Allman Brothers’ 1990 comeback album, it's one of Betts’ most striking and lovely songs, one that sounds downright poignant on the recording contained here as Betts carefully delivers each line. “‘Seven Turns’ refers to an old Navajo legend about how there’s seven times in in your life when you have to make a great decision, and if you make the wrong turn you end up at a dead end,” Betts explains in Scott Freeman’s book “Midnight Riders.” “And you either have to stay there, or back your way up and find where you went wrong.”
The second disc of “Official Bootleg Volume 1” opens with a mesmerizing “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” that clocks in at over 30 minutes. It’s one of Betts’ favorite songs to perform and, for my money, the supreme instrumental in the rock canon. “What I love about that song is if you have a bunch of top-shelf players they can express themselves beautifully in that song, once they learn it,” Betts tells me with a grin during an interview session sweetened with some hippie wine he’s provided. “It’s not an easy song to play. It’s kind of a minor and a major scale, half minor and half major … But once you get the niche of it you can express yourself beautifully if you’re a top-shelf player.”
Kach’s ballad “It Happens Sometimes” comes next followed by a gorgeous rendition of Betts’ sublime song of exploration “Back Where It All Begins,” which first appeared as the cornerstone of the Allman Brothers’ 1994 album “Where it All Begins.” The version included here is a smile-inducing delight, as Betts sings earnestly about when he was younger and “hard to hold” and how “now that travelin' feelin’” calls him again “back where it all begins.”
Next, we have a warm and rollicking “Ramblin Man” followed by an absolutely blissful “Jessica.” Both songs first appeared on “Brothers and Sisters” with “Ramblin’ Man” reaching No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 1 on the Cashbox Top 100 and remaining the lone Allman Brothers single to crack the Top 10 on either pop chart. “Jessica” is the rare instrumental to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (at No. 65) with a rendition similar to the one heard here winning a Grammy in 1996 for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
“Official Bootleg Volume 1” closes just like Betts would often conclude his shows, with a fiery rendition of the Bo Diddley-style rocker “No One to Run With” featuring Kach delivering the emotive lyrics Betts co-wrote with John Prestia for Gregg Allman to sing on the Allman Brothers’ “Where it All Begins” album. “No One to Run With” would reach No. 7 on the Billboard rock chart not long before Betts and the rest of the Allman Brothers Band members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
“We had some real tragedies losing Duane and losing Berry Oakley and we had to keep the band together, had to keep it effective, and viable through all that period,” Betts tells me in 2019. “We took off the (1980s) and Gregg and I put our little bands together and played clubs. After we got back together a lot of writers from Rolling Stone and stuff were calling us dinosaurs and making fun of bands like us and wondering if we could still play and we were determined. It gave us more drive and we showed we weren’t done yet. We made some of our best records and I think that helped put us in the Hall of Fame.”
Wade Tatangelo is the entertainment editor for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, part of the USA Today Network.