End of the Line

The Zoo Crew has got "End of the Line" spinning right now, and if you are a Zoo Freak who only knows the Traveling Wilburys tune with the same name, pull the bike over. This one belongs to the Allman Brothers Band, and it opens their 1991 album Shades of Two Worlds like a man who has already looked over the edge and decided he is not done riding. Gregg Allman sings it the way he lived it. The gravity of trouble was more than he could bear. At times his luck was so bad he had to fold his hands. Life ain't what it seems on the boulevard of broken dreams. He opened his eyes in the nick of time, because it sure felt like the end of the line. That is not a metaphor you dress up for the radio. By the time those words hit tape, Gregg had buried his brother, watched the band come apart more than once, and climbed back out of a hole that had nearly swallowed him.

The record came out on July 2, 1991, on Epic, cut at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Tom Dowd back in the producer's chair. Dowd had been the man behind the glass for the band's early Capricorn years, so the room already knew the language. The writers on the opener were Gregg Allman, Warren Haynes, Allen Woody, and John Jaworowicz. A radio edit went out as the lead single and climbed to number two on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, which told the rest of the country that the Brothers were not a nostalgia act cashing old Fillmore tickets. This was the first album with percussionist Marc Quiñones in the family, and the lineup around him was a serious machine: Gregg on organ and vocal, Dickey Betts and Warren Haynes trading the guitars, Allen Woody on bass, and the twin drum line of Butch Trucks and Jaimoe. You can hear the guitarmony between Betts and Haynes right out of the gate. It is faster and meaner than a lot of the seventies records, a blues-rock stomp about getting off the line before the train takes you with it.

Butch Trucks later put the feeling of those sessions in plain English. For the first time since Duane Allman and Berry Oakley died, he said, there was a group of guys all going in the same direction, all feeling the same type of music and energy. On the previous album, Seven Turns, they just were not familiar enough with each other yet to take the chances they took here. They had another year to get to know each other. Warren and Woody knew exactly whose chairs they were sitting in. Woody told the Chicago Tribune in 1991 that it was a hot damn seat. Warren had come into Duane's slot and Woody was walking in behind Berry Oakley and Lamar Williams. They knew they were going to be compared to their predecessors, but they could not be daunted by that. The song was the public confession that opened the door. Gregg had spent a lifetime downtown, sleeping behind the wheel, king of the hill until it all came down to kill or be killed. The devil still got in the way. The chorus is the shiver you get when the old days show up uninvited.

They were already playing it on the road before the album hit the racks. The first documented show was June 19, 1991, at a club date in Boston, and by September 6 they were tearing it up outdoors at Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts, on a night filmed for Japanese television and later issued as Live at Great Woods. That outdoor set is the same seven-piece band, touring behind a record that was barely two months old, and "End of the Line" gets a spirited welcome between "Statesboro Blues" and "Blue Sky." Warren Haynes and Gov't Mule kept the tune alive long after the Brothers played their last Beacon stand in 2014. Haynes has said the door on that brotherhood stayed open in his head, and the song still shows up in his sets because it was never about quitting. It was about the terror of nearly losing the whole thing and the adrenaline of the escape.

None of that comeback makes sense unless you go back to two kids in Daytona Beach who got hit by the blues and never recovered. Duane and Gregg Allman were born in Nashville and raised on the Florida coast. The story the brothers told for the rest of their lives starts at a rhythm-and-blues concert where they saw B.B. King. Duane turned to Gregg and said they had to get into this. Gregg picked up a guitar first. Duane passed him in a hurry, left school, and practiced until the instrument was just another limb. They played the Escorts, then the Allman Joys around 1965, opening for bigger acts and grinding the club circuit. By 1967 a Los Angeles outfit renamed them the Hour Glass and cut two albums that did not catch. The California years were a dead end with a nice view. Duane came home, landed session work at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and started sounding like the guitarist other guitarists copied.

The band that would carry his name came together in Jacksonville in March 1969, slow and then all at once. Duane had been jamming with Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley. Jaimoe came with him out of Muscle Shoals. Butch Trucks was already in town. What they needed was a singer who could hang with that rhythm section, and Duane knew who he wanted. He called Gregg out in California and told him they had it shaking and all they needed was him. Gregg walked into a rehearsal around March 26, a date the band later treated as a best guess, and the first song they threw at him was a new arrangement of Muddy Waters' "Trouble No More," a tune he did not know. He was intimidated. Duane told him to sing his guts out. He did. A few days later they debuted at the Jacksonville Armory, still barely named, playing for whoever would stand still. Phil Walden, who had managed Otis Redding, moved them to Macon to be the flagship of his new Capricorn label. By early 1970 they were living in a rented place on Vineville Avenue that everybody still calls the Big House, roadies and families and guitars stacked in the corners, the whole southern rock idea cooking in one kitchen.

Duane was gone by October 29, 1971, killed on a motorcycle in Macon just as the band was becoming the best live outfit in the country. Berry Oakley died the same way on November 11, 1972, not far from the same stretch of road. The Brothers kept going, broke up, came back, broke up again. When they rebuilt around Haynes and Woody at the end of the eighties, "End of the Line" was the sound of that rebuild telling the truth. You can read the album notes and the track list, with this song sitting at number one, on the band's own discography page.

If you want the long view, the official home of the Allman Brothers Band is the Allman Brothers Band site, where the Peach Corps still gathers and the Shades of Two Worlds page still lists "End of the Line" right up top. Ride with them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The album page that names the song is here on the Shades of Two Worlds discography. Fans keep the porch light on at the Big House Museum in Macon, the same Vineville Avenue house where the early band lived, and a busy crowd of listeners trades stories in the Allman Brothers Band Fans group. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning the deep cuts for the Freaks over at THE ZOO. When this one ends, do not change the station. The boulevard is still out there, and the band already told you how they got off it.