When it’s time for leaving, I hope you’ll understand

Throughout the 1960s, most rock bands had two guitarists — a rhythm guitarist who played chords and established the song’s basic structure, and a lead guitarist who provided the multi-note solos that soared above it all and often stole the spotlight.

Then in 1969 came The Allman Brothers Band, which featured two supremely talented lead guitarists in Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. One would play lead while the other supported on rhythm, then they’d switch roles. Most impressive, though, was when they played lead guitars simultaneously. In the studio, these passages were precise and rehearsed, but on stage (and captured on live albums), Allman and Betts were master improvisationalists. Hearing the way these guitarists played off one another, giving each other room while adding a harmony solo to the melody solo, was truly special, and it was a primary reason the Allman Brothers were regarded, for a while, as the best band in the country.

Dickey Betts in the 1990s

Duane Allman died shockingly young, at 24, in a motorcycle accident just as the band was becoming successful. And now Dickey Betts has died as well, succumbing to cancer and pulmonary disease at age 80 last week.

As Betts put it in “One Way Out,” the 2014 biography of the band, “Because of the name of the band, a lot of people assumed Duane was the lead player and I was the rhythm guy. He was so charismatic and I was more laid back then. But he went out of his way to make sure people understood we were a twin-guitar band. ‘That was Betts who played that solo, not me,’ he would say. ‘We have two lead guitarists in this damn band!’

“Duane and I talked about how scared we got whenever the other played a really great solo. But then he’d chuckle and say, ‘This isn’t a contest. We can make each other better and do something deep.””

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Betts was drawn to music at a young age, learning ukulele at age five, then mandolin, banjo and guitar as his hands got bigger. His musical family listened to a lot of country music, Western swing and bluegrass, and as a teen, Betts became fascinated with rock ‘n’ roll and the blues. He played many dozens of gigs with different rock bands all over Florida and up the East Coast. In 1967, he met bassist Berry Oakley and formed Second Coming.

Betts in 1968

“In our band, Berry and I would take a standard blues and rearrange it,” Betts said. “We were really trying to push the envelope. We wanted to play the blues in a rock style like what Cream and Hendrix were doing. We liked taking some of that experimental stuff and putting a harder melodic edge to it. One of our favorite things to do was to jam in minor keys, experimenting freely with the sounds of different minor modes. We allowed our ears to guide us, and this type of jamming eventually served to inspire the writing of songs like ‘In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.’

“But we weren’t some garage band. We were a nightclub band. We had brought ourselves up in the professional world actually playing in bars, and that gives you a lot more depth. Duane and his brother were doing the same thing, so we all had a lot of miles under our belt when we met, despite our ages.”

When The Allman Brothers Band came together in 1968, they featured two drummers (Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johnson), bassist Oakley, Gregg Allman on vocals and organ, and the Betts-Allman guitar attack. They focused on blues with a rock edge, and while their self-titled debut album in 1969 performed poorly on the charts, it established them as a force to be reckoned with.

Betts’ first attempts at songwriting, which came on their next LP, “Idlewild South,” were impressive indeed. “Revival” opened the album with a burst of uptempo optimism — “People can you feel it, love is everywhere” — while the instrumental track “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” built on an infectious riff and showcased both Betts’ and Allman’s complementary styles.

The Allman Brothers front line (from left): Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley in 1970

But the band knew that something was missing from those first albums. They didn’t capture the excitement and ferocious output you’d hear when they played in concert, and they knew they needed their next release to be a double live album, where they had the chance to stretch out and show their phenomenal skills as an improvisational jam band.

“At Fillmore East” was that album, produced by the great Tom Dowd from performances at the famed New York City venue in March 1971, featuring seven extended songs over four sides. In particular, “Whipping Post” and “Liz Reed” were a revelation, showing how the guitarists had been inspired by freeform jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the album ended up peaking at #13.

Said Betts: “It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. It’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. Duane would almost always wait for me to come up with a melody and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony. A lot of his notes are not the notes you would choose if you sat down to write it out, but they always worked. Our band came along at a wonderful time for improv, and we felt free to just play and work things out on the fly. Doing that gave it all a certain spark.”

They toured relentlessly and also continued writing and recording new material for their next album. Betts wrote the sunny, joyous “Blue Sky,” a love song to his then-wife, a Native American named Sandy Blue Sky, “but I decided to drop the pronouns and make it like I was thinking of the spirit, like I was giving thanks for a beautiful day. It made it broader and more relatable. It was a bad marriage, but it led to a great song.”

Betts said he and Allman often played acoustic guitars together backstage and in hotel rooms and buses, working out things they would later play electrically. “Little Martha,” a brief instrumental duet on Dobro guitars, came out of that.

Betts and Allman working out arrangements on acoustic guitars, 1971

Then, as the album was nearing completion, disaster struck. In a flash, Duane Allman, the band’s spark plug and spiritual leader, was gone. “We thought about breaking up and all forming our own bands,” said Betts, “but the thought of just ending it and being alone was too damn depressing.”

Thom Doucette, harmonica player and Duane’s confidant, noted, “It was kind of a leaderless operation there for a while. It very easily could’ve ended right there, but Betts pulled it out of the fire. Dickey’s personality and ego were pretty big, so he sort of took over. Someone had to, and Gregg hated responsibility and confrontation, and didn’t want to do it.”

The album, “Eat a Peach,” reached #4 and included both live and studio tracks, both with and without Duane’s contributions. On the road, the group proceeded as a five-piece, though Betts found it frustrating. “I had to learn to play Duane’s slide guitar parts, and we no longer had that dual guitar thing going. But we got through it by just playing, all the time. It’s all we knew how to do, and it’s what Duane would’ve wanted.”

Betts leading the band in 1972-73, with Gregg Allman (left) and Jaimoe (right)

The entire band tended to be excessive in their use of drugs and alcohol, but Oakley took Duane’s death particularly hard, diving deeper into the escape they provided. When he was killed in October 1972 under eerily similar circumstances, again the remaining members were faced with how to proceed. As Betts put it, “We found another bass player in Lamar Williams, but replacing Duane with another guitarist was simply out of the question.”

The answer, they found, lay in using a different instrument as the second lead: the virtuoso keyboard work of Chuck Leavell, who’d been playing with Dr. John. “When we added Chuck, it gave us a new wrinkle that energized us,” said Betts. “I’m not sure the band would’ve lasted as long as it did if it weren’t for Chuck. He was such a strong player.”

Betts, meanwhile, hit his stride as a songwriter, composing four of the seven tracks that comprised their 1973 album “Brothers and Sisters,” which reigned as #1 in the US for two weeks that autumn. The galloping “Southbound,” the front-porch country blues track “Pony Boy” and the exhilarating instrumental “Jessica” (with Leavell featured prominently) showed the diversity of Betts’ musical influences. His leanings toward country music manifested themselves most famously on “Ramblin’ Man,” which peaked at #2 as their highest charting single ever.

The song initially met some resistance from within. Drummer Butch Trucks recalled, “We knew ‘Ramblin’ Man’ was a good song, but it didn’t sound like us. It was too country to even record. But we made a demo to send to Merle Haggard or someone, and ended up getting into that long guitar jam (with guest guitarist Les Dudek adding the dual lead), which kind of fit us. So we put it on the album after all, and it ended up being our biggest hit.”

The fame that came with that album and single proved to be a double-edged sword. It made them a bigger concert draw than ever, packing arenas, stadia and festivals, but it also ramped up the partying and internal tension. For his part, Betts dipped his toe in solo waters with the country-heavy “Highway Call” LP in 1974, while Gregg Allman became more withdrawn and distracted by his own solo album (“Laid Back”) and tour, and a whirlwind relationship with pop star Cher. When he was threatened with prison on drug charges, he chose immunity by testifying against his roadie/drug dealer, which left such a bad taste that the band broke up in 1976.

Betts in 1976

A self-described workaholic during that period, Betts soldiered on with a new band and album, “Dickey Betts & Great Southern,” which saw Betts teaming up with guitarist Dan Toler on seven songs all written by Betts, notably the seven-minute piece “Bougainvillea.” A second Great Southern LP, “Atlanta’s Burning Down,” followed.

When Allman and Betts mended fences to reunite The Allman Brothers Band in 1979, it would be with Toler and bassist David Goldflies in the lineup in place of Leavell and Williams, who chose not to participate. The group came storming back with the strong “Enlightened Rogues” album, which made the US Top Ten, but again, there were storm clouds on the horizon, this time because of new record label demands and changing tastes in the music industry.

Betts (right) with Toler at a 1979 concert in Cleveland (photo by Bruce Hackett)

“When the music trend started turning away from blues-oriented rock towards more simple, synthesizer-based dance music arrangements,” Betts said, “the suits at Arista Records started pushing us hard in that direction, but we were never able to do that convincingly, mostly because we didn’t want to. Sure, we wanted a hit, but not if we had to make concessions. We broke up in ’82 because we decided we just better back out, or we would ruin what was left of the band’s image.”

Betts and Allman each kept their tools sharp through the Eighties by playing clubs with their own bands, and when the 4-LP box set “Dreams” was released in 1989 to commemorate the Allman Brothers’ 20th anniversary, the time seemed right to try again.

The arrival of the classic rock radio format created a favorable climate, as did the emergence of blues guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan. “He opened the whole thing up,” said Betts. “He just would not be denied, and kept making those traditional urban blues records, and people got to appreciating the blues again. We didn’t want to record without touring first, but it was hard to tour without a record to support and generate interest. The box set took care of that.”

With both Trucks and Jaimoe back on drums, and Betts’ colleagues Warren Haynes and Allen Woody on slide guitar and bass, the band was reborn a third time, churning out three new studio albums in four years (“Seven Turns,” “Shades of Two Worlds” and “Where It All Begins”), liberally sprinkled with great Betts songs. The group performed nearly 100 dates annually, and not only were original fans thrilled to have the group back in the picture, but a new generation of listeners embraced their music as well.

Betts (right) with Warren Haynes, 1993

Still, as always with this star-crossed band, problems surfaced. First Allman and then Betts fell victim to their own addictions and excesses, sometimes missing shows because of an inability to perform (Allman) or a mercurial temper and difficult ego (Betts).

“Dickey was capable of being really great, knowledgeable about all sorts of things, musical genres, art, news of the world, all of that,” said Danny Goldberg, the band’s manager for a spell. “But he was also capable of being really mean and physical, mostly when he was drinking. People were scared of him.”

In 2000, Betts lost two close friends within a few days of each other, which threw him for a loop and exacerbated his demons. Betts became so difficult to work with that the rest of the band felt they had no choice but to move on without him. Sadly, he never performed nor recorded with his old bandmates again after that.

In the years since, Betts stayed as active as his deteriorating health would allow, playing clubs and releasing a handful of live albums on smaller labels. When Allman was near death in 2017, working on one last album, he contacted Betts and asked him to join the sessions, but time ran out before that could happen.

Betts mellowed quite a bit in his final years, refusing to badmouth Allman or other members in the press. He was more than willing to concede his own part in the estrangement that plagued his relationships. “Substance abuse is an occupational hazard of being a musician,” he reflected. “It’s like working in an industrial waste factory. That shit is around, and so easy to get. And you can go for three hours and feel like a king, but it doesn’t work in the long run. Man, I’ve been there.”

Betts in 2018

In the wake of Betts’ death last week, Haynes spoke highly of his compadre’s musical talent. “Dickey played awesome straight traditional blues, but he also had this Django Reinhardt-on-acid side of him that was very unique. Most cats that can play blues as convincingly as Dickey cannot stretch out to that psychedelic thing like he could.”

Duane Allman’s daughter, 55-year-old Galadrielle Allman, spoke glowingly about how Betts and her father created magic together. “It’s so hard to respond to losses like this, to try to comprehend that we all just keep losing the originals, the creators, the artists who wrote the book,” she said. “My father could not have reached the heights he reached without Dickey beside him. They raised one another up and created a sound together that changed music. We are so lucky that, although everything else eventually goes, the music stays.”

R.I.P., Dickey. I’m cranking up your music a lot these days…

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The playlist below collects Allman Brothers Band songs written (and usually sung) by Betts, as well as songs he wrote for his solo LPs. Perhaps my favorite, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” appears twice — in the incendiary electric version from 1971, and again in a live acoustic performance from 1995.

Makin’ love was just for fun, those days are gone

In the summer of 1972, a song started getting airplay that grabbed my attention. It had strong power chords like The Who, a vocal chorus like The Beach Boys, and lyrics that boldly talked about “going all the way.” As a teenager growing up in Cleveland, I was jazzed to discover the tune was by a local group called The Raspberries, who had been playing gigs at area high schools and teen clubs since 1970.

“Go All the Way” reached #5 on the national pop chart in October, followed by a second big hit, “I Wanna Be With You,” within a month or two. Despite these Top Ten successes, some critics and hipster album buyers turned their noses up at the group, calling them “wimpy Beatles imitators,” which hurt their momentum and reputation at a time when more complex music by progressive rock bands was in vogue.

Too bad. The band cranked out four LPs and managed one more Top 20 hit before frustration and internal dissension caused them to throw in the towel. Today, The Raspberries are praised as one of the pioneers of the “power pop” sub-genre that inspired many dozens of groups in the years since, from The Cars and Squeeze to The Bangles and The Posies.

The group’s lead singer and chief songwriter, who embarked on a solo career in 1975 and enjoyed worldwide fame for a half-dozen popular singles over the next 15 years, was Eric Carmen, who passed away this past week at age 74.

Although he is more broadly known as a balladeer for his solo work — particularly the 1975 power ballad “All By Myself” and his #3 hit from the 1987 “Dirty Dancing” film soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes” — I want to focus first on what Carmen was trying to do with The Raspberries.

Artists like Badfinger (“No Matter What,” “Baby Blue”) and Todd Rundgren (“We Gotta Get You a Woman,” “Couldn’t I Just Tell You”) and even early songs by The Who (“Substitute,” “I Can’t Explain”) exemplified the power pop sound, but many industry insiders have cited The Raspberries as the quintessential power pop band. “They are THE great underrated power pop masters,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in 2007. “Their best records sound as fun and as fresh today as when they were released. Soaring choruses, Beach Boys harmonies over crunchy Who guitars, lyrics simultaneously innocent and lascivious — that’s an unbeatable combination.”

The Raspberries in 1972: Jim Bonfanti, Wally Bryson, Eric Carmen; Dave Smalley in front

Referring to “Go All the Way,” Carmen once said, “I wanted to write an explicitly sexual lyric that the kids would instantly get but the powers that be couldn’t pin me down for. So I turned it around so that the girl is encouraging the guy to go all the way, rather than the stereotypical thing of the guy trying to make the girl have sex with him. I figured that made us seem a little more innocent. We decided, ‘Let’s start it out like The Who, but when we get to the questionable part, we’ll do it like choir boys and maybe they’ll let it slide.”

Carmen had shown musical talent early, taking violin lessons from an aunt who played in The Cleveland Orchestra, and also learned piano and dreamed of writing songs. In high school, he was the lead singer in a series of bands, playing piano and guitar. While attending nearby John Carroll University, he cut one record (“Get the Message”) with a group called Cyrus Erie, which included guitarist Wally Bryson, who joined him in forming The Raspberries. Capitol Records signed them to a four-album deal.

“We got noticed by going completely against the grain in 1972,” Carmen said years later. “Prog rock and glam rock were ‘in,’ and FM radio embraced it, but I hated it. I loved the Beatles, The Who, the Byrds, the Stones, the Beach Boys and the Small Faces. Most of their songs were instantly appealing.”

The 1972 debut LP with scratch-and-sniff cover; the second LP, “Fresh Raspberries”

I can’t fail to mention the gimmick employed upon release of their “Raspberries” debut album: The shrink wrap was adorned with a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smelled strongly of raspberries. The sticker must’ve been drenched in some potent concoction, because my copy of the album STILL has a faint raspberry aroma more than 50 years later!

The Raspberries’ catalog had great hook-filled power pop tunes like “Let’s Pretend” and “Tonight,” but sprinkled in there were mellower ballads like “Don’t Want to Say Goodbye” and “I Saw the Light,” dominated more by piano and string arrangements that recalled Paul McCartney’s oeuvre. That, apparently, was part of the problem, Carmen said.

“There were a lot of people in 1972 who were not ready for any band that even remotely resembled the Beatles,” he noted. “Critics liked us, girls liked us, but I guess their 18-year-old, album-buying brothers said ‘no.’ We got pretty frustrated, and things got a little intense.”

Two members of The Raspberries, drummer Jim Bonfanti and bassist Dave Smalley, left the group in 1974 and were replaced by Michael McBride and Scott McCarl, respectively, for their fourth and (as it turned out) final LP, “Starting Over.” Ironically, due to its harder rocking leanings (check out the Who-like “I Don’t Know What I Want”), Rolling Stone picked it as the best rock album of the year, but it flopped on the charts despite its superb single, the hopeful “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record).” Bryson’s tune, “Party’s Over,” chronicled his disillusionment with the music business: “When we started, it was a lot of fun, and the times we had I’ll never forget, /But now I’m older and wiser and a bit of a miser, and it’s crazy, but I don’t want to quit, /Ain’t it a shame, the party’s over…”

It’s telling that the song “Starting Over,” a piano-driven ballad, gave strong hints about the direction Carmen’s solo career would take when he released his “Eric Carmen” debut LP on Arista Records in late 1975. While there were several irresistible pop tracks that would have fit comfortably on any Raspberries album, the massively successful “All By Myself” (which I liked but grew sick of through overexposure) was often described as maudlin and overly sentimental. The fact that it was derived from a piano concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff, covered by Frank Sinatra and later became a hit for Celine Dion indicates the kind of non-rock audiences that enthusiastically welcomed it.

The rest of the debut LP, though, is consistently strong and gorgeously produced by Jimmy Ienner, who had manned the boards for all four Raspberries albums as well. Great stuff here: the effervescent opener “Sunrise,” the Top 20 hit “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” the Brian Wilson-ish “My Girl” (no relation to the Temptations hit) and the dynamic cover of the ’60s chestnut “On Broadway.” Teen idol Shaun Cassidy had a big hit covering the album track “That’s Rock and Roll” two years later, and the hard-rocking “No Hard Feelings” did a nice job of summarizing the end of The Raspberries: “Four years on, and things were really gettin’ too intense, /Critics raving ’bout our album, but we’re makin’ fifty cents, /We gave it everything we had to give, but it was gettin’ so tough, /Too much frustration makes it hard to live, I think enough is enough, /I hope there’s no hard feelings ’cause there isn’t anyone to blame…”

Carmen decided to up his game in 1977 with the more artful album “Boats Against the Current,” which didn’t do as well commercially but sported more sophisticated songwriting on tracks like “Nowhere to Hide” (featuring The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings sharing vocals), “Marathon Man” and the title song.

His career arc took a dip when his three subsequent LPs in 1978 (“Change of Heart”), 1980 (“Tonight You’re Mine”) and 1984 (another LP entitled “Eric Carmen”) flopped on the album charts, although he managed two Top 40 chart appearances for the somewhat slight “Change of Heart” and “I Wanna Hear It From Your Lips,” which sounded suspiciously close to Springsteen’s lost classic “Fire.”

Interestingly, his next move was to collaborate with lyricist Dean Pitchford to write “Almost Paradise,” which became a #7 hit from the 1984 “Footloose” film soundtrack as sung in a duet by Loverboy’s Mike Reno and Heart’s Ann Wilson. That project led rather seamlessly to two more major successes for Carmen as a recording artist: The 1987 hit “Hungry Eyes” from the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack, which peaked at #4, followed by another co-write in 1988 with Pitchford, the #3 smash “Make Me Lose Control.”

Those hits proved lucrative enough for him to back away from the business in 1990, abandoning the Los Angeles scene to return to his roots in Cleveland, where he spent most of the past 30 years laying low with his family in his high-end digs in Gates Mills.

Although his American audience proved rather fickle, running hot and cold in turn, Carmen was as surprised as anyone when he developed a rabid following in Japan, where crowds greeted him in Beatlemania-type frenzy. In 1982, I interviewed Carmen as he played host to a half-dozen Tokyo-based contest winners, who visited him in his Cleveland home, checked out some childhood landmarks and sat in on a mixing session in a local recording studio.

He was only sporadically active during recent decades. Carmen released one last LP in 1998, “Winter Dreams,” only in Japan, which included his own version of “Almost Paradise,” more co-writes with Pitchford, and cover versions of ’60s classics “Caroline, No” and “Walk Away Renee.” (The album was eventually released in the US as “I Was Born to Love You,” but it’s no longer available.)

In 2000, Carmen signed on for a stint in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, performing 40 concerts with the likes of Dave Edmunds, Jack Bruce, Simon Kirke and, of course, Starr. Carmen was featured on “Hungry Eyes,” “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” “Go All the Way” and “All By Myself.” In 2014, as part of the release of “The Essential Eric Carmen” 2-CD compilation, he recorded and released his last new song, “Brand New Year.”

The Raspberries’ Smalley, Bonfanti and Carmen in concert, 2004 (Bryson out of frame)

As for The Raspberries, any ill will between the members was eventually forgiven long enough for the group to reunite in 2004 for a well-received special show in Cleveland to commemorate the opening of the House of Blues location there, which precipitated another half-dozen shows at other House of Blues venues in 2005. The band’s legacy got another boost in 2014 when “Go All the Way” was used prominently on the “Guardians of the Galaxy” film soundtrack, exposing them to a whole new generation of fans.

Carmen and his third wife, Amy Murphy, 2018

Out of the small handful of rock musicians who have Cleveland connections, Carmen is a native who arguably achieved greater fame than anyone else on the list. (Joe Walsh lived in five other cities while growing up before attending nearby Kent State University and becoming a star in The James Gang; Chrissie Hynde is from Akron, not Cleveland; same goes for The Black Keys; Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails began his music career in Cleveland but grew up elsewhere; Benjamin Orr of The Cars and Neil Geraldo of Pat Benatar’s band grew up as proud Clevelanders and sold tons of records, but their names aren’t well-known outside rock music circles; artists like Tracy Chapman and Marc Cohn grew up in Cleveland but left early and haven’t had much nice to say about the city since leaving; and Michael Stanley, a Clevelander who was wildly popular there, isn’t all that well known elsewhere.)

In my view, The Raspberries (and probably Carmen as a solo artist) are every bit as deserving of induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as many bands that are already in there, but they’ve never even been nominated. It would be nice if Cleveland’s biggest rock star had his name on the wall.

Rest In Peace, Eric.

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