How the Allman Brothers Survived the Unsurvivable At Watkins Glen

In July 1973, the Allman Brothers Band had two dead founders and a lineup that hadn’t existed eighteen months earlier. Duane Allman was gone. Berry Oakley was gone. They were buried side by side at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia — two motorcycle crashes in the same neighborhood, thirteen months apart.

The band that walked onto the stage at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen on July 28, 1973 had Dickey Betts playing lead in the spot where Duane used to play slide. Chuck Leavell, a twenty-year-old piano player, was filling a hole no one had ever filled before. Lamar Williams was on bass, having played his first Allman Brothers show less than a month after Berry Oakley’s funeral.

Six hundred thousand people showed up — the largest crowd in the history of American rock. The Allman Brothers went on at ten at night after two hours of rain delays and played for four hours. Rolling Stone’s Joel Siegel wrote that they “chewed ’em up and spit ’em out whole.” Within weeks, Brothers and Sisters hit number one on the Billboard chart.

And there is a piece of that day nobody talks about: Bill Kreutzmann was backstage between sets, sitting with Jaimoe, the Allman Brothers’ drummer, just banging out rhythms together. That’s the Watkins Glen story underneath the story.