back together. Now, Gregg wasn’t there. I did- n’t ask where he was at, but it was going to be the Duane show. In the past, it had always been the Gregg Show. But here was Duane. We’d just spent two years in the Hourglass and those were the stepping stones, as you might say, and I’d done stepped on that stone and I wasn’t ready to be back in the Hour- glass, you know, I was just trying to move on. You know there comes a time when you just need to quit whippin’ that horse, that dead horse. yBut Phil kept insisting, “No man, you’ve gotta play with Duane.” No, no, no, I don’t have to, no. So anyway, finally he says, “Well,” said he told Sandlin the same thing, he said, “If y’all won’t play in this band with Duane,” he says, “I’m building a studio in Macon and I want to have a house band, a staff band. Would y’all consider being in the house band?” And I said, “Where’s it at?” And he said, “It’s in Macon.” And I remember ask- ing him, “Macon? Where’s that?” I said, “What state is that in?” And he says, “Oh, it’s in Georgia.” Says, “It’s down in the middle of the state, down below Atlanta” and he said, “You know, Little Richard is from there, Otis Redding is from there.” But there was no rea- son we should have ever heard of Macon. Nothing had ever happened here and there had been a music scene here. You had Little Richard and Otis that were from here, but they had to go somewhere else to make it. They didn’t make it in Macon. But anyway, he said, “Yeah, I’m building a studio.” They did- n’t even have a record company, it was just a studio. And he said, “Yeah, it’s just about fin- ished.” And so every week Phil would call and the deal got a little better and a little better. He could talk you into anything. Here it is, I had started having, here was a band I had that stood up, we were playing regularly and I was teaching guitar lessons and eating regu- lar, you know and to have to quit and move again? I don’t know. But it took about two months and finally within two months I found myself in Macon, Georgia and working


down at Capricorn. We were hanging out and by this time, Duane had talked Gregg into moving back from L.A. and they’d gotten the Allman Brothers Band together. He fleshed the group out and he got what he wanted. All of that happened so fast. That happened within two or three months there. It went from them asking me and Sandlin to play to two months later, here he’s got Butch and Jaimoe and all these guys. Jaimoe was here in


Paul with Steve Ivey. (Courtesy Paul Hornsby)


town because he’d played with Otis, played with Percy Sledge, played with all these black acts, you know. Jaimoe fit right in and so did Butch, so the original Allman Brothers Band had formed here in a time period of about two months. So we had our studio guys and we had the Allman Brothers Band and we were all just like one big family, really. And when we weren’t jamming in the studio, we were at each other’s apartments and just hanging out. That’s all there was to do was hang out. No- body had any money. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Sunday afternoons, we usually wound up on a school playground somewhere, play- ing cork ball. And that was a sport I’d never heard of. It was something Duane came up with or something he’d played and you had broomsticks for a bat and you had a cork with a penny taped on the small end to balance it out to where it had some heft to it, and you would hit that cork and depending on how far


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77