This came off the Boyden Amplifiers site and was posted by their webmaster Gary Lockwood
Duane Allman- guitar
Bob Keller - bass
Gregg Allman - keyboards
Bill Connell - drums
Here's a promotional picture taken from the Sahara Club in Pensacola Florida from the early 1960's. My sister (Linda Tietjen) was a waitress there and would sometimes get pictures of the bands she liked. She became friends with the Brothers and would often hang out with them.
The Brothers were surely in their teens here and it appears that Greg had not yet switched to his signature Hammond organ.
Hope you enjoy it.
Gary Lockwood
Web Master
Boyden Amplifiershttp://www.boydenamp.com
Subject: Bob Keller of The Allman Joys
Hey If you are still around I am friends with Bob Keller who might be able to clear up some history. Do you have anymore photos of old Allman Joys or better yet .. know where some of the rest of them are....Bill Connell, Maynard Portwood? ..John West
JW:
Pretty sure Bill Connell still lives here. I don't have Bill's current email address but I'm gonna forward this to some of his friends plus others who might be interested in the gory details concerning the recording of YOU'LL LEARN SOMEDAY or YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER.
best,
rr
Hey Bobby Keller is here in Knoxville. Alive , well, and healthy.. Still plays music all the time.. Mainly his own stuff.. I just traded him My fender Jazz Bass. and Telecaster.. . Youll LEARN SOMEDAY and YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER-what do you mean gory details? John West
JW:
Just joking about the gory details. Any reminiscences about recording & performing with the Allman Joys will be appreciated.
Interview with Pete Carr courtesy of http://swampland.dreamhosters.com/articles/view/Gritz/33:
So when did you see The Allman Joys for the first time?
I was about 15, and I went to see the Allman Joys play at the Club Martinique in Daytona Beach. I had my guitar case with me, and introduced myself when the band took a break and asked Gregg Allman to show me some guitar lines. Gregg replied, "That's my brother, Duane's, department." At that point I introduced myself to Duane Allman. That meeting began a friendship, which lasted until Duane's death in a motorcycle crash on October 29,1971.
Tell us about The Five Men-its.
Duane and Gregg told me about a band in Alabama that they knew who needed a guitar player. So I moved to Decatur Alabama in 1966 to play guitar for a band called The Five Minutes. Their guitar player, Eddie Hinton, was leaving the band to pursue studio work, and I was called in to be his replacement. Irony and fate have shown their faces to me many times in my life. I would later become the replacement for Eddie Hinton again when he left the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section in a twist of fate. Johnny Sandlin, Mabron McKinney and Paul Hornsby were the other members of the band. I remember Sandlin playing me songs such as "It's All Over Now" by Bobby Womack and the Valentinoes. I already knew the Rolling Stones version of that song, which I loved, but I also liked Womack's version. Sandlin had heard Womack's version first and did not like the Stones version. They were both great recordings in different ways. Sandlin also got me to sit down with the classic B.B. King album "Live at the Regal." I credit Johnny Sandlin and Paul Hornsby as both being big-brother influences and teachers that helped me in my music career.
I first met John Wyker. A long time friend of mine, who is from Decatur, at Johnny Sandlin's house. John was in a band called the Rubber Band and had a hit single out. John Wyker recalls, "I remember the first time I ever saw Pete when Duane Allman brought him to Decatur in about 1965 when Pete was about somethingteen, (1?) 13 or 15 or 16, but not much older than that and he was so thin that you could barely see anything except long wild hair and big Beatle boots with stacked Cuban heels and he talked like the great baseball player Pete Rose, attitude and lightning fast and he was playing guitar like a cocky little mad genius and he was smokin' Duane Allman and Gregg loved his playing. I mean Pete was a kid, but even back then you just knew that Pete's brain was wired to be lightning fast. Computers were invented years later and Pete was one of the first ones to learn to play hot licks on them too! A few years later, as I watched in the recording studio, Pete and whoever would go back to the studio and take their places. Pete would pick up his guitar and instantly start playing EXACTLY what the song needed, intro, feel, EVERYTHANG and that's the way it went session after session, over and over and time and again."
How did the Hour Glass come to be?
The Five Men-its band couldn't find a lead singer and we were about to disband. At the same time Duane and Gregg Allman needed new band members and called upon Sandlin, Hornsby and McKinney to join their band. I was just a kid and they really had no need for three guitar players in the band so I left and traveled around Alabama meeting some great musicians. I would also go back to Daytona Beach and play at the Pier over the ocean. This new Allman Joys band would later be seen in St. Louis by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Bands' manager who persuaded them to move to California and changed their name to Hour Glass. I lived just across the river from Gregg and Duane, about a ten minute drive, and they had just flown back home from California with a recording of the first Hour Glass Album.
They seemed very excited with the new album and it sounded good to me. Gregg was really singing! Gregg was also home for a draft notification which would have ruined everything for the whole band if he, the lead singer, left for the army. I mean a lot of peoples' careers were on the line. He had to do something, so he drank a few belts of whiskey, went into the front yard, and shot himself in the foot. The next day he got on the bus for Jacksonville. The army people turned him down and the band was saved. Gregg and Duane asked if I would like to fly back to California with them and I accepted the offer. In a twist of fate I again joined forces with the Allmans, Sandlin and Hornsby when Bob Keller, who was playing bass for them at the time, just got up and left one day before a show at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go on Sunset Blvd. They asked if I would play bass for them and I accepted. I figured if Paul McCartney played guitar first and picked up the bass out of necessity I would give it a try also. It all worked out fine at the show that night and I became a permanent part of the band.
Duane and I shared an apartment and we would play guitars together a lot. I remember Gregg, Duane and I playing and singing 'Long Black Veil' a few times, which is a country standard. It started "Ten years ago, on a cold dark night, there was someone killed, in the town that night".
I remember us harmonizing on it and it really was a moment separated from everything else we were doing. It was like a close family thing. I remember my mother talking about that song and how my Aunt Gertie would play and sing songs like that. She also sang a lot of country blues because my mother said she used to use a kitchen butter knife to play slide guitar. I wish I could have played music with her but she died before I was old enough to really remember her. She had epilepsy and I think I recall Mom saying that had something to do with her death. I don't really know. It seems like a dream since I don't remember her except vaguely. I seem to remember her falling from the doorway into the yard one time and people gathering around. Maybe she was having an epileptic seizure. It is like a dream to me now, very vague and shadowy images. I was probably two or three years old.
In 1967 Gregg, Duane, Paul Hornsby, Johnny Sandlin and I, as Hour Glass, played together on the "The Power Of Love" album. The Hour Glass had recorded songs in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at Rick Hall's Fame Studios, which was known for innovative productions and great sound.One song recorded at Fame, "Sweet Little Angel", was later released in a —Duane Allman Anthology‚ set. This recording is now considered a classic piece of raw electric southern rock blues. When we got back to California we played the tape we made in Muscle Shoals for our producer and he didn't like it. He was looking for a hit single and the Muscle Shoals cuts had no radio top ten type of hit singles. We went ahead and finished the "Power of Love" album and it turned out fairly well for the time but we never got that radio hit record. We finally disbanded and everybody went their separate ways.
Meeting Gegg and Duane Allman from the Allman Joys when I was about 15 or 16 was exciting to me also but in a much different way. They were not yet famous like Paul Simon but they were Daytona's only real band that had traveled and played in other cities like Nashville, New York's Greenwich Village, etc. I had heard so much about them and how great they were. They were older than me but still just kids, also. I think they played the usual stuff that was popular at that time. Songs playing on the radio, etc. The first time I actually met them (I had seen them play a couple of years earlier as the House Rockers) was when they returned from playing at Trudy Heller's in New York's Greenwich Village. They were really hyped up about a band called The Blues MaGoos. Duane had a Vox distortion box clamped to his cream colored Telecaster which I believe he got from them or got the idea from them. Anyway, I had been playing at a club in Daytona called the Martinique. They were now called the Allman Joys and I really anticipated seeing them play since I had heard how great they were. The first time I heard them was when they came into the club and sat in on a few songs. They had had a few too many beers or whatever and I was not very impressed. Of course it wasn't like they had their own band and doing a real gig. It was just a spur of the moment, get up on stage and play something type of situation. There were other people up on stage singing along. Not a showcase episode for talent. They were probably talked into it by someone and they weren't prepared or in any state of mind to do a very good job. Anyway, I told my friends who had been building them up so much that I was not that impressed. Later Duane told me he heard I was disappointed in seeing them play that night and I could tell he planned on being more impressive the next time I heard them play. And I was very impressed later. They had a very good band called the Allman Joys, which seemed to be changing members very frequently. You know it is a hard thing to keep a band together. It always has been which is one reason I preferred recording studio work. Anyway the next time they played for real, I was very impressed with Duane's playing but I was more impressed with Gregg Allman’s singing. He was the best I had ever heard at that time to be a kid. I mean he could sing anything from a pretty R&B /Pop song to a gutsy Ray Charles style, and he was a teenager! He was and still is one of my favorite singers. He was just fantastic. Everyone I knew wished that they could sing like Gregg. Duane was great too, and I loved his playing but I could play a lot of what he was playing at the time also. He did have some cool gadgets like that Vox distortion box and that was impressive at the time. I was impressed enough that I got one and clamped it on my guitar also. Don't get me wrong though, I thought Duane was great and he was. This was teenage years for all of us! Duane and I played together many times over the years and I learned a lot from him. We were best of friends.
A Great Day In Tuscaloosa courtesy of http://www.dsmithgalleries.com/g/agreatdayintuscaloosa
