The two were out on the road with their dads — the late, great Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts — after the Allman Brothers Band had regrouped for a twentieth-anniversary run. A teenager at the time, the younger Allman didn’t know what to make of the junior Betts, but the two bonded over an unlikely common ground: thrash metal.
“I remember the first day of the tour. My dad said, ‘Hey, go throw your stuff on the bus, Dickey’s kid’s on there.’ I walk on the bus, and I’m like seventeen and he’s twelve. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you've got to be Dickey Betts’s kid. You look just like him,’” Allman, now 52, shares. “He was listening to some heavy metal on a Walkman. I was like, ‘Oh, I like this kid. He’s listening to some tough stuff,’ and I was huge into thrash when I was seventeen.
“There was a kinship there, but we were quite a bit different in age," he continues. "I was chasing flight attendants and he was being told to do his homework, but we connected over thrash, which was crazy.”
Little did they know back then that, like their fathers, they would eventually become bandmates and stewards of the familial alliance and music responsible for their meeting on that tour bus. But before all that would come to be, Allman started his own bands, including the Dark Horses and Honeytribe, while wunderkind guitarist Betts joined the Allman Brothers on stage at sixteen. In fact, his earliest appearance with the seminal Southern-rock group — his dad was a founding member of the band, which formed in 1969 — happened to be at Vail’s Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater during the summer of 1994, less than two months before he jammed with the Allman Brothers again at Woodstock ’94. Talk about learning the family business.
Devon Allman, left, plays his dad's Hammond B-3 organ during a recent Allman Betts Revival show.
Courtesy Vetrell Yates
“Through the years, my solo band would get paired up with his dad’s band, so the Devon Allman Band would open for Dickey Betts, and Dickey would have me come out and jam, and Duane was in his band,” Allman says.
“Or I’d be backstage in England, and there’s Duane," he continues. "I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ He’s like, ‘I’m playing this other festival tomorrow.’ We would just run into each other at various points around the world, and we would always jam. We would be on the same cruise, like a rock legends cruise, or be on the same festival. So we always kept up with each other and would sit in and jam with each other.”
It wasn’t until 2017, when Gregg Allman passed away at 69 and a subsequent seventieth-birthday-party-turned-celebration-of-life at the Fillmore in San Francisco was planned, that the two decided to start the Allman Betts Band, which also includes Berry Duane Oakley, son of late Allman Brothers bassist and founding member Berry Oakley. The group focuses on original material but will throw in an Allman Brothers cover from time to time. But before officially teaming up for the event, which was called the Allman Family Revival and inspired by the Band’s The Last Waltz, neither Allman nor Betts had thought about properly resurrecting the Allman Brothers' music with a full-blown act.
“After taking some personal time off, I decided, ‘Man, we need to throw him a birthday bash,’" Allman says of his late father. "It needed a name, and I always loved the Allman Brothers song ‘Revival,’ so the Allman Family Revival just sounded perfect. The criteria was people who were influenced by him or have been in his band or an opening-act situation with him. It was just a party. It was just a one-and-done party. Never meant for it to go any further than that.”
It went over so well, the Fillmore offered to host a two-night Revival party the next year. Then it turned into a mini-tour and just kept growing. Now the Allman Betts Family Revival, as it’s currently called, is letting its soul shine as an ode to the Allman Brothers and a family legacy, complete with a rotating cast of pickers and players.
The group is heading to Denver on Wednesday, December 18, for a show at the Paramount Theatre. Allman and Betts will be joined that evening by Jake Shimabukuro; Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars; Jimmy Hall; Larry McCray; Lindsay Lou; Jackie Greene of the Black Crowes; Lamar Williams Jr. (the son of former Allman Brothers bassist Lamar Williams); Alex Orbison (Roy Orbison’s son); Robert Randolph and Sierra Green.
Allman also recently pulled out his dad’s Hammond B3 organ for the song “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” to kick off the current tour.
“Ultimately, we’re really celebrating the songbook of the Allman Brothers, which was mostly penned by my dad and Duane Betts’s dad,” he explains. “We’re custodians of this songbook. We feel honored to be custodians of this songbook, and we feel really grateful that all these incredible artists make themselves available at the end of the year to celebrate this songbook with us.”
The enduring music created by the Allman Brothers patriarchs is in their blood. Betts, now 46, was named in homage to Duane Allman, Gregg’s older brother and Devon’s uncle, who tragically passed away in a motorcycle accident on October 27, 1971, at the age of 24. Earlier this year, on April 18, Dickey Betts joined his Allman Brothers brethren on the other side at eighty years old. Eat a peach, fellas.
“It’s extremely meaningful for us," Allman says. "Duane Betts and I met on an Allman Brothers tour when we were just kids. So to fast-forward thirty years or so and now we’re playing the songs, it’s very surreal. It’s very humbling. It’s really strange.
“Half of me thinks that would never happen in a million years, and half of me thinks of course it happened. It’s our duty. But ultimately the great thing about a tour like this is that the songbook is the boss. It’s really only about the songs. It’s even more about the songs than any person, including our fathers, who are no longer with us,” he continues. “The songs are immortal, the things that are living forever, and we just feel so honored to have the chance to bring them to life and transport people back. To see a guy in his mid-’60s and he feels like he’s 21 again, that is mission accomplished.”
While Allman grew up with his mother across Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, once he reconnected with his father, they naturally gravitated toward music in making up for lost time. “Music was always the cornerstone of our relationship,” he says. “I’d be backstage, or I’d come out when he lived in San Francisco for Christmas, and we’d end up going down and jamming in the rehearsal room until the wee hours.”
Allman joined his dad on tour more often, but instead of being a teenager hanging out on the tour bus, he warmed up the stage as an opener and sat in as a guitarist during his dad’s sets.
“It was really meaningful to me, because I had fallen in love with music and the fantasy of becoming a musician before I ever met him. So it was really kind of wild, because as a kid, I thought those guys were rock gods and that I’d never do that,” Allman admits. “I think meeting my dad and being around it, I was like, ‘Well, these are talented people who work really hard, and if I can work really hard and develop my craft, I can do this as well.’ It was meaningful to me to have that connection with Dad because it gave me confidence in myself. Him and Dickey really gave me confidence and said that I was good and that I should follow my dreams.”
Even if he and Betts didn’t see it coming as youthful metalheads who were happy tagging along to work with their dads, the Allman Betts Family Revival now feels like an inevitability, or their destiny, if you will.
“I think it’s always going to be natural just because of how much we were around it,” Allman concludes. “There’s a lot to be said for osmosis, and when you’re backstage and you hear ‘One Way Out’ 200 times, it’s part of you. Not to mention it’s just part of our DNA. Did it come natural? Very much so. Those are sacred songs.”
Allman Betts Family Revival, 8 p.m. Wednesday, December 18, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place. Tickets are $62-$112.
