Wednesday's Duane Allman Pic

Annie Leibovitz gets a good photo of a bunch of irritated musicians.
Wail on, Skydog!

Just the other day, Butch Trucks (foreground) wrote an illuminating letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review regarding the photo session that this pic came from and the infamous Grover Lewis Rolling Stone article in which it appeared:

Paper: New York Times Book Review, The (NY) Title: 'Whipping Post'! Date: May 8, 2005 Section: Book Review Desk Page: 6

To the Editor:

I am a founding member and am still the drummer for the Allman
Brothers Band. In 35 years of playing music for the public, and especially
because of the nature of the music we played and the time and origin of
our group (late 60's, the Deep South), we have had more than our share of
controversy and criticism. I realize that this comes with the territory
and accept it for what it is. In these 35 years of criticism I have
read reviews and articles that run the gamut, but there has always been
one article that stands above all the rest as being the single most
meanspirited piece of fiction ever written about us. It is to journalism
what an ant is to an aardvark. That is the Rolling Stone article about the
Allman Brothers Band written by Grover Lewis, which is referred to in
Roy Blount Jr.'s review of "Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover
Lewis Reader" (April 3).

First, let me state unequivocally that Duane Allman was one of the
most powerful, charismatic and trustworthy men I have ever known. I would
use the word "messianic" to describe the impact he had on the people
around him, and his influence on music today runs much deeper than all
but a very few even begin to know. He was a man of the highest character
and principles, and for Blount to refer to him as "one of these churls"
is inexcusable. Blount also quotes Lewis's article about us: "At my
teasing suggestion . . . Duane coldly offers to punch me out on the spot."
To put things in their proper perspective, I will tell you exactly how
Lewis, our "fellow traveler," came to be threatened.

Lewis joined our tour in 1971 at the insistence of our management. We
were a very close-knit group of musicians and had little use for all
the interviews, photo shoots and other such nonsense that went with the
image building that made for big-time rock 'n' roll success. I am sure
that our fellow traveler was used to bands falling all over themselves
at having one of the great writers from Rolling Stone magazine around.
He was somewhat taken aback by our lack of interest in his presence.
What he wound up writing under the guise of journalism could have been
humorous satire, at best, if it weren't for one very tragic fact: it was
published within weeks of Duane Allman's death, and the people at
Rolling Stone had time to pull the article but did nothing.

Lewis writes at one point about a conversation between me and Dickey
Betts about a book on Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki. I asked Dickey if he
had read it. He said that he had and that it was too academic an
approach to a subject that had to be felt and experienced. Dickey and I went
on to discuss the book and the topic for some time. Lewis's version was
that I asked Dickey if he had read the book and Dickey's response was,
"Yeah, good, ain't it." There actually was a conversation that went
somewhat like this later in Lewis's stay with us. I had just bought a copy
of Saul Bellow's "Herzog." I asked our fellow traveler if he had read
the book. His answer? "It's a good book."

In Lewis's article, all the dialogue among members of our group seemed
to be taken directly from Faulkner. We are from the South. We did and
still do have Southern accents. We are not stupid. The people in the
article were creations of Grover Lewis. They did not exist in reality.

Finally, Rolling Stone had sent Annie Leibovitz to photograph us. As I
said earlier, we were busy playing music, and photo sessions just got
in our way. We all had tattoos of a mushroom on our right calves. The
reasons for getting these tattoos were personal and had deep meaning for
us. Somehow Leibovitz had heard of them and asked if we would all pull
up our pant legs and line up so that she could shoot a photo of the
tattoos. We looked at one another and started to comply when Dickey Betts
pushed his pant leg down and said, "No, this is silly." Our fellow
traveler's "teasing suggestion" was, "It's no sillier than getting a tattoo
in the first place." This was the final straw for Duane. That was when
he looked Grover Lewis in the eye and said, "One more crack like that
out of you and I'm gonna knock your block off."

Butch Trucks

Palm Beach, Fla.

I typed out the RS article a couple of years back for another board. I'll post it if someone would like to read it.