Wednesday's Duane Allman Pic

Duane's throwing a little unwanted sugar on his baby brother.
Wail on, Skydog!

Below the jump, Jim Shepley, the fellow who taught Duane his first licks, recounts wild tales of Duane the juvenile delinquent. I bet y'all will like this one better than last week's article:

I met Duane in a pool hall in Daytona Beach when I was about 14. I was shooting pool, and he saw me and came over and started talking. I learned that he had just moved down from Tennessee with his mother and his brother. We lived close to one another - he was in Daytona Beach Shores - and that's how our friendship started. Over the years we rode motorcycles together, we played together, we partied together. We were definitely the best of friends back then. I really liked the guy.

I was about four years older than Duane and had been playing for a while when I met him. Duane was the kind of guy where if he saw something he liked and wanted to do, look out! I always had a lot of respect for him, because he had the energy to do what he wanted. He just said, "I want to play the guitar," bought a cheap Sears Silvertone electric, and started playing. I knew a lot of Jimmy Reed licks, which Duane had never really heard, and he flipped out and immediately wanted me to show him all that stuff. Duane was good from the day he picked up a guitar, and he learned very quickly. We were always jamming. I showed him B.B. King songs. But what he really liked was my fingerpicking blues. Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters - that's what I grew up playing, and he was always in awe of that.

See, Duane's father had been killed in a bizarre accident in Tennessee, so if he looked up to someone a little older than him, he kind of latched onto him. His father had picked up some hitchhiker on Christmas Eve. According to Duane, the guy had escaped from jail or a mental institution. He just jumped into the car, pulled out a gun, and blew his father away. His father was a serviceman who played guitar and sang a little bit. He liked music. Duane would say, "Gee, Jim, I remember my dad picking and singing. That's kind of where I always got my interest in music."

The funny thing is, when Duane first came into town, nobody really liked the guy. He had a cocky attitude and was an aggressive, brazen type. He wasn't your social personality kid that was going to kiss everybody's ass to make you like him, and that's what I liked about him. I appreciated his honesty and raw personality. Duane boiled everything down. He'd say, "Jim, you're too complex. You think too much." To him, it was, "There's good people; there's assholes. I'm gonna be with the good people." He had a hell of a sense of humor and was an astute, articulate, highly intelligent person. And Gregg totally idolized him.

From the first day I showed him Jimmy Reed licks, Duane knew that he only wanted to be one thing: a rock and roll star. Duane was in ninth grade at Sea Breeze High School, but he had found what he wanted, and there was no stopping him. He said, "To hell with it. I'm quitting school and getting a job in music, and that's the end of it." And that's what he did. Duane had a lot of nerve. He was a little guy - 5'8" or 5'9", tops - but he had a lot of charisma. The minute he came into a room, you knew he was there. He had presence, and you knew the guy was gonna be a big star. But he was a punk rocker in the early days, to say the least. He started growing his hair long even before the Beatles did. He was just an outcast type, somebody who was always taking a lot of chances.

You know how they put a Christmas tree at the top of a new building for good luck? One night we went to the top of the Towers Apartments in Daytona Beach, which was about a 30-floor unfinished building at the time, and Duane said, "Hey, man, let's hang off the tree." So he climbed up and started dangling, which pulled the tree over to the edge of the building! That was Duane.

The first time Duane got loaded was unbelievable. We drank beer together, and then we decided to try marijuana. Back in the early '60's, the only place you could buy any marijuana was in the black part of town. So we went down there and met this guy named Available Jones. We bought four joints for four dollars. We went back to the white part of town and each of us smoked two joints. I was high as a kite, everything was funny, and Duane kept saying, "Ah, this sh*it's no good. This stuff doesn't work." At one point, he got heavy into sniffing Testors airplane glue. He abused his body. It was like, let's get high and go play music. And that's what we did.

Duane and I got busted together three times. Once another guy and I were driving around with Duane in the back, and Duane yells, "Turn there!" So I made a left turn and clipped the back of an oncoming car that happened to belong to a black sheriff. Duane said, "Drive away! Let's try to get away from this guy." The sheriff blocked our way, and I got out. Then he opened up the back door, and out falls Duane onto the pavement in a big clattering racket with all these beer and wine bottles. Duane stands up and says, "What the hell you want, you son of a bitch? I'm gonna kick your ass, and I know the mayor of this town!" He was about 16, and we were taken off to jail immediately. We got out on probation.

The most outrageous thing Duane and I ever did was a heist at a little beer joint. The guy had coolers outside of his store, and we went over one night and hacksawed off the locks. We ripped off about 15 cases of beer and put it in the back of the car. Then we buried the beer in some brand-new garbage cans, so we'd always have a place to get beer. The cops found it, but they didn't find us. I went up north, and Duane headed for California for the first time. This was way before he was ever in a band.

Duane and Gregg were definitely influenced by the black musicians in town. There was a black group, the Lindsay Morris Band, that played in the white part of Daytona at a beachside club called the Surf Bar. This began around 1963, and all the musicians in the area came there to sit in. The band was doing soul, Ray Charles. This is where we all got schooled in music. We were underage, but we had no trouble getting in. This is where Gregg heard Charles Atkins and Floyd Miles sing. He idolized them and tried to sing and act like them.

Duane's first band was called the Escorts. This was 1964, I believe. Gregg was originally the guitar player, and then Duane convinced him to get a Vox organ and become a singer. Duane played guitar, and Van Harrison played bass. The drummer was Maynard Portwood, who played in the Allman Joys and worked with Duane for quite some time. They were doing Beatles, some Ray Charles, the Engllish rock thing. They were a high school band and they all wore the same uniforms and were starting to grow their hair long. They were pretty popular; they played dances. I think Duane was playing a Gibson ES-335. He later moved over to a Telecaster and then to a Les Paul.

Back in the early '60's Bob Greenlee was a friend of Duane's who started an integrated band. The black singers were called the Untils, and the House Rockers was the white band that backed them up. I was the original guitarist in the group, and then Duane and Gregg were both in the House Rockers. Duane had a lot of respect for Greenlee, but he and Gregg quit because they wanted to play rock and roll. They didn't want to play R&B and back up singers.

After that, Duane and Gregg started the Allman Joys. This was still in Daytona, but they were getting ready to leave. See, Duane was smart. He realized they were not going to make it out of Daytona, so he immediately put together the club-band kind of image. They went to Birmingham, Montgomery, Pensacola. They started travelling into the Southeast, doing mainly R&B. The band was based around Gregg's singing and Duane's guitar playing. Duane was playing a lot of riffs, and they were doing three-and four-part harmonies.

The band did a stint at Trudy Heller's in Greenwich Village. They had met the Blues Magoos up there, and they were thinking of changing their name to the Black & Blues. They definitely had been influenced by the Blues Magoos. They thought they were a great group: Duane spoke highly of them. They had it rough in New York. They were living in one room, sleeping four in a bed, but that's the way they were. Those guys were so dedicated to their musical desires, they could live anywhere and do anthing. I remember getting them from the airport, and I could see Duane was affected by New York City quite a bit. They were very high about the music. They had been very succesful at Trudy Heller's, and they felt like good things were going to happen. They went to St. Louis after that and then California, where they became the Hour Glass. That's when Duane got into slide playing. He became so much better within the next four years. His music suddenly came to fruition, and his genious just emerged.

But every few weeks the brothers were back in Daytona, because they wanted to see their mother and they just enjoyed coming back home. Every time they'd come back, we'd get together and jam, drink whiskey and do other things. I noticed later on that Duane was smoking quite a bit of weed and taking a lot of speed. That was one of Duane's favorite drugs. I hate to say it, but it didn't surprise me when Duane was killed on a motorcycle. All along, I had a bad feeling about how his life would turn out.

His guitar playing was great, but his slide playing was exceptional. That's what made him what he was. His slide playing was just like his personality. You hear this very heavy, thrusting playing with these outrageous, crazy riffs, and it's just the way Duane was. Nothing personified Duane more than his slide, and he was the happiest man in the world when he was playing the guitar. That's all he cared about, really. Like he said, "Rock on and have a good tiime."