By Scott McLennan

Alan Paul’s meticulous, in-depth research lays out many of the pieces needed to help the reader think more deeply about this era.

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers and the Inside Story of the Album that Defined the ‘70s by Alan Paul. St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages, $32.

The title of longtime Allman Brothers Band chronicler Alan Paul’s new book asserts that the band’s Brothers and Sisters is the “album that defined the ’70s.” I can just see what fans of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours would have to say to that; or admirers of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or The Eagles’ Hotel California… well, you get the picture.

Hype is routinely used to sell books, but in this case the hyperbole is indicative of a problem that runs through Paul’s second volume about the Allmans. By centering on just one of the era’s groups in this narrative, Paul misses out on a bigger, broader, and arguably much better story about how the ’60s turned into the ’70s, the cultural shifts that made Brothers and Sisters into a best-selling album by a then-badly-damaged Allman Brothers Band. Lurking in the background — and screaming for attention — are social forces only touched on in the story Paul tells here that lifted a little-known governor from Georgia to the presidency and propelled a young rock and roll obsessive into becoming a music journalist-turned-filmmaker.

Paul’s meticulous, in-depth research lays out many of the pieces needed to help the reader think more deeply about this era. The writer had access to interviews that band members and associates did in the ’80s with fan-turned-confidant Kirk West. West planned to write a book and shelved the idea, eventually handing the tapes over to Paul. These exchanges don’t bring new issues to light, but do point to the healing that eventually pulled the band together after the tumultuous period examined in Brothers and Sisters.

The book is structured chronologically, focusing on the period between the 1971 death of guitarist Duane Allman and the band’s meltdown in 1976. The end result retells a familiar tale, which Paul himself already told in his excellent Allman Brothers oral history One Way Out. The problem this time around is that the writer doesn’t supply any convincing reasons to present the yarn again.

Still, for aficionados, the book serves up highly detailed portrayals of notable figures in the band’s history, such as Jimmy Carter, Cher, and Cameron Crowe, and probes pivotal events, such as the famous Watkins Glen concert featuring the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, and The Band. In the latter coverage, for example, Paul weaves in stories not just from band and crew members, but from attendees and organizers as well. He captures all the weird and wondrous energy of a musical gathering that drew 600,000 people to upstate New York in the summer of 1973. This historic concert occurred before the release of Brothers and Sisters. As Paul notes, not even “Ramblin’ Man,” the big hit off that record, had been released yet. Put in contemporary terms, imagine Taylor Swift selling out multiple nights of Gillette Stadium before any of her biggest hits had registered.

Indeed, the Allmans of 1973 were quite different from the Allmans of October 28, 1971, the day before band founder and visionary Duane Allman succumbed to injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash. Up to that point, the young band out of Georgia had been scrambling to garner attention for its reappropriation of American blues from British rock stars, alchemizing that process further by bringing in jazz and psychedelia. These artistic aspirations finally won commercial success with the release of Live at Fillmore East in July of 1971. Following Duane’s death just a few months after that, the remainder of the band completed work on the studio album in progress, augmenting that material with live recordings from concerts to yield Fillmore East.

The lineup that recorded Brothers and Sisters: Jaimoe (aka Jai Johanny Johanson), Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks, Chuck Leavell, Lamar Williams, and Dickey Betts. Photo: The Big House Museum Archives

Original bassist Berry Oakley died little more than a year after Duane Allman. The remainder of 1972 and much of 1973 were spent rebuilding the band around the single guitar of Dickey Betts and the addition of Chuck Leavell on keyboard, which allowed Gregg Allman to move over and play more organ. Bass player Lamar Williams was brought in to join the double-drumming section of Butch Trucks and Jaimoe.

On the one hand, the Allman Brothers camp was in turmoil, recounted through Paul’s descriptions of drug abuse and emotional despondence. Yet the Allmans were on the brink of becoming even more commercially successful, and music was being made during this volatile period. Paul leaves it up to the reader to untangle the paradox. One key to understanding what happened is provided by the author’s rich portrait of Phil Walden, head of Capricorn Records, who was making money off just about every aspect of the Allman Brothers’s work. Walden was also a power broker in Georgia and was one of Jimmy Carter’s key allies. Post-Watergate, America — and the American South — was changing. Paul pulled this gem from an interview Betts gave Rolling Stone magazine about Carter’s governorship: “It was like the sun came out in Georgia. It was the Peach State instead of the ‘afraid to drive through it to get to Florida’ state.”

Paul establishes the Allmans and Walden as essential players in a movement that was about powering up the South’s cultural and political cachet. And the nation had an appetite for this aesthetic and sensibility as well.

Moving back to the making of the album Brothers and Sisters, Paul notes how both Gregg Allman and Betts were plotting solo albums around the time the album was being made, with Allman ready to spring one first. Allman was leaning more into singer-songwriter and R&B motifs with his solo material, while Betts was digging into his country music roots and picking up ideas from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. The Dead and the Allmans had shared the stage for several epic concerts between 1970 and 1973.

It’s Betts who brings that country influence back into the Allmans via “Ramblin’ Man.” Listening to the otherwise blues-infused Brothers and Sisters, the irony is inescapable: the biggest commercial hit from the record is its outlier.

Author Alan Paul. Photo: George Lange

A burgeoning audience for “Southern rock” embraced “Ramblin’ Man,” but the genre was not central to the Allmans. Paul notes that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut disc was released the same day as Brothers and Sisters. Al Kooper produced Skynyrd’s debut, and Paul includes Kooper’s critique of the Allmans’ improv-heavy sound. That argument makes it tough to claim that the Allmans inspired this rock and roll subgenre. The apologetic tone of Paul’s insistence that they did undermines the book’s thesis.

Also, Paul’s defense of the band is unshakable, even when it comes to rehashing the Allman Brothers’s greatest controversy: Gregg Allman’s decision to testify against a crew member in a federal drug case. Paul lets Allman off with a “what was he supposed to do?” defense, even as he notes that Allman’s own bandmates and other musicians turned against him. It’s amusing to read, at one point in the book, that nobody could explain why the Dead and Allmans never shared the stage again after a 1973 New Year’s Eve concert. Yet Paul supplies the reason later on when he quotes Garcia saying he wouldn’t play with a “rat” as the “real reason” the bond broke.

That said, Paul looks at how the political establishment at the time was trying to stop Carter’s run for the White House. Was Allman just a pawn in a larger game to embarrass Carter and cut off the presidential campaign cash that was coming from Walden and benefit shows performed by the Allman Brothers Band? Paul does not go far enough in that direction: he tiptoes around these issues, mainly because he is bent on keeping the spotlight on the Allmans.

To its credit, Brothers and Sisters makes it clear that the national spotlight moved away from the Allmans not long after the album came out, which raises some serious questions about Paul’s claim. Was Brothers and Sisters really all that influential? Or is there a case to be made that the lingering influence of the Duane-era band was enough to keep the group moving forward for a while? That, without him, the band broke apart.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to the Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.