Dickie

Let's get this out of the way... I liked the Allmans for both personal and musical reasons. Personal: they were the soundtrack for discursive late afternoons in Mississippi alongside rivers or at country houses involving grilled meats, beer, and laughing. Musical: they were the only band that did anything interesting with the form, even during the last 10 minutes of the live version of Mountain Jam, which is longer than five of Beethoven's nine symphonies.

So RIP, Dickie Betts.

You know where this is going. Pam and I were scouting places to live in the southeast and towards that end we gave Auburn, Alabama a spin. Walked into a pizza place. Jam-assed music, loud as fuck. And not the funky, slap-bass stuff that's the mean. Whoever was playing was trying to do Ornette Coleman. It was unpleasant - I wasn't sure if the musicians were using the same key - but I decided to stay to see what we could endure.

The guys behind the counter were stoned almost to the point of paralysis; big, young, shaggy dudes who everyone thinks are fucking idiots but happen to be pretty damn smart. (I know tons of them.) Ordering was like launching the Titanic. It took a while for the boilers to fire, but we were promised a cheese pizza with mushrooms and we settled in with our Cokes.

You could argue what came was in the phylum known as pizza. You could see dough. There's some cheese. Red sauce. No skimping on the mushrooms. But the ingredients seemed to rotate around each other rather than assemble into their traditional configuration. Think a pizza bowl served on a paper plate.

We ate it. We were hungry! Could've been worse.

I went to pay and asked who's playing. You know the answer and it wasn't the Allmans.

(Beat) (Beat) (Beat) "Dickie."

Dickie Betts at the Pistoria Blues Festival, 2008