Farewell, Dickey. I’ll never forget all the joyful noise you brought into my life with your band.
Dickey Betts, founding member and co-lead guitarist for improvisational blues-rock legends the Allman Brothers Band, passed away today at the age of 80. And if you knew anything about what a hard-livin’ man Dickey Betts was, then frankly, you’re mildly impressed he made it this long — a man tips his cap. With his death, only one of the original Allmans (drummer and percussionist Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson) remains, and Betts was truly one of its core members.
I just wanted take a moment to bid a fond farewell to the man as he sits down in the back seat of his final Greyhound bus and appreciate his place within the Allman Brothers as well as within rock history — as a writer, guitarist, and bandleader — during their glory days.
Betts (who was called “Dickey” after his middle name Richard; his actual first name Forrest wasn’t ideal for rock) fell in with the brothers Duane and Gregg Allman indirectly, by way of bassist Berry Oakley, who was playing with them and once shared a band with Betts. Dickey could sing, but since allowing Gregg to handle lead vocal duties was part of the deal to get him to join, he contented himself with playing co-lead guitar and singing backing vocals at first. And what a job he learned to do of it, almost instantly.
The chemistry Betts had with Duane Allman on guitar is the stuff of musical legend. All serious fans of guitar-based rock acknowledge this, for the proof is right there on magnetic tape. It was always easy to tell the difference between the two in their various interweaving guitar parts, live or in the studio, and the reason wasn’t merely because Duane’s guitar style was so wonderfully expressive, though it was; it was because Betts was there playing next to him as a true equal, with a stingingly distinctive guitar tone all his own and an equally interesting exploratory style to match. And when Betts began to write himself (he favored instrumentals, particularly those with a certain spring-coiled, relentlessly unfolding melodic logic to them), he came up with wonders such as “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a wordless, haunted journey through contrasting moods whose smokey tones and beguiling dual guitar harmonies dance up and down the fretboard in a melody that evokes a mysterious, alluring girl known only by a name.
Most Allman Brothers fans would agree that “Elizabeth Reed” is best heard — whether you’re new to them or a fanatic — on the classic double album At Fillmore East. (Ideally, get a version that includes the entire concert.) For it is on this live gig from 1971 that you not only hear the sweaty, delirious muscularity they brought to their take on blues-in-rock (nobody sounded this tough and authentic, ever), you also hear the band at its free-flying improvisational best. What jumps out the most on songs like “Whipping Post” is how tight yet unharnessed the interplay between Duane and Betts is on the extended instrumental passages — at one moment dovetailing together in tight thirds, then flying gracefully apart into entirely separate independent melodic strands. Listening to Duane and Dickey wail in such instinctive and natural harmony long after midnight in New York City is a privilege no person should ever deny himself.
And then Duane Allman died in a pointless (and likely reckless) motorcycle accident, cut down instantly in his youth. One minute, the undisputed leader of the most fascinating southern band in America. The next, dead of massive skull trauma. The devastation of losing a talent as immense as Duane’s — right at the absolute peak of both his and the band’s powers both live and in the studio — would have destroyed most groups. And indeed, the Brothers’ next album (the delightfully named Eat a Peach, which contrary to urban legend is not a reference to Duane’s cycle accident) plays like a wake for him: an entire disc’s worth of live material with Duane left over from the Fllmore East shows, plus Duane’s last studio sessions, including Dickey’s “Blue Sky.” Their soaring twin guitar leads are a final farewell to the sound of an Allman Brothers that we would never hear again. But what would come next?
Another death, and another triumph. Bassist Berry Oakley, losing his own battle to drugs and recklessness, suffered an eerily similar fatal motorcycle crash the very next year, in nearly the same place as Allman’s. Yet it was Dickey Betts who rallied, added Chuck Leavell as a pianist to thicken their sound alongside a replacement bass player, and put out their only No. 1 album: Brothers and Sisters. Gregg Allman contributed a fine song in “Wasted Words,” but the record’s twin commercial and artistic centerpieces were its two most famous songs, and both were by Betts. “Ramblin’ Man” is of course a song you’ve heard countless times on the radio, and probably tried at karaoke night as well. For all that, it hasn’t really aged; sung with that tart, vinegar-and-honey-toned wistfulness that only Betts’s deeply country-fried singing voice can convey, it earns its ubiquity.
But Betts is also responsible for what I still think is the band’s finest instrumental moment. While it may lack the elegant complexity of Betts’s own earlier “Elizabeth Reed,” he tops himself here with “Jessica,” a piano-driven instrumental that sings a wordless melody of transporting joy. (And aptly so: Betts named the song for his infant daughter, who would bop and giggle along happily to the rhythm of the melody when he played it for her. How serendipitously perfect, that the melody should convey the beautiful purity of that spirit so well.) It’s a tune you almost certainly know even if you don’t think you do by name, and if for some reason you don’t, then I envy you the discovery.
In later years the Allmans fell on hard times. I won’t get into it all; I’m not one to name names or lay blame at the feet of any one particular member of the band who might have been primarily responsible for their decline, but c’mon now . . . we all know it was Gregg Allman’s fault. Some people say that Allman “went Hollywood” when he married and quickly divorced pop star Cher, but not before putting out a pop-flavored duo album. (This is not a joke. Their supergroup was named, yes it’s true, “Allman and Woman,” and no man or woman was ever meant to see this cursed image.) But of course, he really only did that because his name was mud in the rock industry (and even with his own band) for turning snitch on the group’s security guard and sending him to jail behind five counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine on the back of his own testimony. (That’s the sort of thing that will make a man hard enemies.) So while Duane could probably have had a better late Seventies just by living through it, by a certain point somewhere around 1977 or so, it became debatable whether Gregg was doing perceptibly worse than him.
Meanwhile Dickey was just chugging along, keeping the band together and on the road as often as he could. The albums were coming slowly when they were coming at all, and were no longer worth the time. (Enlightened Rogues, anyone? Brothers of the Road? Didn’t think so.) They broke up for seven years, and when they reunited it was the live work that sustained the band: That was where Betts could always be relied upon to bring a solid show, now working with a truly gifted fellow guitarist in Warren Haynes.
Members would cycle in and out, and the band petered out until coming to a definitive end in 2017, when drummer Butch Trucks sadly commited suicide and Gregg Allman died of liver cancer only four months later. Not all bands get a dignified end; sometimes they just pile on the miles and then the wheels fall off. But nothing detracts from the dignity of the Allmans’ music at their best and Betts’s central role in every part of that. He mastered the art of working alongside one of the greatest guitarists of all time — a very specific art, indeed — and then was forced through tragedy to become the central focus of the group. And he did it successfully.
So farewell, Dickey. I’ll never forget all the joyful noise you brought into my life with your band. Tonight I’ll eat a peach for peace and throw on Idlewild South. “People, can you feel it? Love is everywhere.”