Far Cry

The Zoo Crew has got "Far Cry" rolling out of the stack from The Dickey Betts Band, off the 1988 album Pattern Disruptive, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO for any length of time, you already know this one sits in a strange pocket of Southern rock history. It is not the song everybody quotes when they talk about Dickey Betts. It is the one the band kept in the set when they were trying to prove the guitar still had a place after a long quiet stretch, and it still sounds like a band that had something to settle.

Far Cry clocks in just under four minutes, and the lead vocal belongs to Johnny Neel, not Dickey. The writing credit runs to Neel, Kim Morrison, and Warren Haynes, which tells you right away this record was a workshop, not a one-man show. Pete Feenstra, writing years later for Get Ready to Rock, called Far Cry one of the slow burners on the album, sitting next to Dickey's own Heartbreak Line. That is a fair read. The track does not come at you like Rock Bottom, the opener that still gets named first whenever old fans dig the record out. Far Cry hangs back, lets the guitars talk, and then opens up in the chorus. A listener who caught a later live cut from the Lone Star Roadhouse in New York left a note that the chorus lands and the guitars at the end get melodic in a way that sticks. Johnny Neel, they said, was blowing it out. That is the feel.

Pattern Disruptive landed on Epic on October 18, 1988, Dickey's fourth album away from the Allman Brothers and the first in close to a decade. Atlanta's Burning Down had come out in 1978. After that, the contract dried up and the tape sat still. William Ruhlmann at AllMusic later described the comeback as a blistering guitar-rock record cut in a style strongly reminiscent of the Allman Brothers Band. Feenstra put it plainer: it is hard to picture the man who wrote Ramblin' Man sitting without a deal for the better part of seven years, then coming back with a blast that brought the twin-guitar sound around again, this time with a young Warren Haynes standing on the other side of the amp. The same review notes that Betts had been leaning toward a country record and set that idea aside, calling Haynes in so the album would sit in a landscape crowded with big-hair rock bands. Far Cry is part of that adjustment. It is Southern, but it is not a front-porch ballad.

The band on the sleeve is worth lingering on, because this lineup did not stay in 1988. Dickey handled lead and rhythm guitar and most of the lead vocals. Warren Haynes played lead, rhythm, and slide, sang backup, and took the lead vocal on Time to Roll. Johnny Neel covered keyboards, harmonica, and Hammond organ, sang backup, and stepped up front on Far Cry. Marty Privette played bass. Matt Abts played drums and added backup vocals on a couple of tracks. Butch Trucks, still the Allmans' drummer in every fan's memory, came in as a guest on percussion. The record was cut and mixed at Pegasus Studio in Tallahassee, produced by Jon Mathias and the band, with Michael Caplan as executive producer, and mastered by George Marino at Sterling Sound. Jessica Betts, Dickey's daughter and the namesake of the instrumental everybody knows, handled the letter design on the package. That little credit is easy to miss and hard to forget once you see it.

Haynes and Neel did not stay sidemen. When the Allman Brothers Band regrouped for Seven Turns, both of them walked into the lineup. Abts later formed Gov't Mule with Haynes. Fans who pull Pattern Disruptive off the shelf now often say the same thing: if Gregg Allman had been in the room, parts of this record could pass for an early edition of the reunion band. One AllMusic listener called it a favorite Dickey album for exactly that reason, less country than the earlier solo work and closer to the rock side of the house. Another noted that the production holds up better than a lot of late-eighties guitar records, and that the real story is what walked out of this band afterward. Far Cry is one of the tracks that carries that future in it. Neel is out front, Haynes is in the writing and the guitar bed, and Dickey is still the center of gravity.

On the road that fall the song earned a place beside the old book. A set from the Lone Star Cafe in New York on November 1, 1988, put Far Cry in the show with Jessica and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. Years later a live album drawn from the Lone Star Roadhouse stand in New York that same year kept Far Cry on the track list, issued under Dickey's name. The studio cut is the one on Pattern Disruptive. The live cut is the proof they trusted it in a room full of people who had come to hear the Allmans songs. Official pages still list the album cleanly. The Dickey Betts site carries a discography entry for Pattern Disruptive, dated October 18, 1988, on Epic, under The Dickey Betts Band, and it reprints the AllMusic note about the layoff and the band that would feed the next Allmans lineup.

To get why a song like Far Cry could even exist in that band, you have to go back to West Palm Beach and a house full of fiddles. Forrest Richard Betts was born December 12, 1943, and raised in Bradenton, Florida. His dad played fiddle. His uncles played fiddles and guitars. The family held jam sessions at the house, and his mother kept the radio on the country stations. Saturday nights they gathered for the Grand Ole Opry. He started on ukulele at five, and as his hands grew he moved to mandolin, banjo, and guitar. In a 2019 conversation with Guitar Player he said he got serious on the guitar later than a lot of players, around sixteen, studying Chuck Berry, B.B. King, and Albert King, and hanging around a western-swing guitarist who was, in his words, so, so good. That player, he said, was the one who really taught him. He also talked about loving the twin guitars in Bob Wills' band, which is where he first heard harmony guitar parts he would spend the rest of his life building. He did not read music. He listened and took what he needed.

By sixteen he wanted something a little faster than the front-porch repertoire, so he worked the Florida circuit and up the East Coast in a run of rock bands. Rick Derringer later said the group called the Jokers in Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo was one of those early Betts outfits. In 1967 he formed Second Coming with Berry Oakley. Two years later Duane Allman, fresh off session work and a deal with Phil Walden, started assembling a band that grew into the six-piece Allman Brothers Band, with Gregg, Dickey, and Oakley in the circle. Dickey told Guitar Player he had played a little slide before Duane, and not very well, and that after Duane was killed he had to take those parts over because songs like Statesboro Blues would have sounded silly without them. He also said he wrote more uplifting songs on purpose, to balance Gregg's melancholy, a habit that came from a house where the fiddle was the family instrument. Far Cry is a long way from that Bradenton living room, but the twin-guitar habit and the refusal to let a song sit in one mood are still in the track.

Dickey Betts died on April 18, 2024, at home in Florida, at eighty. The pages that still carry his name are kept up by the family and the old camp. You can follow the official word on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Listeners who want the wider circle, the Peach Corps talk and the old set lists, gather in the Allman Brothers Band Fans group, which has been running for years and still trades stories on the records that fed the reunion, Pattern Disruptive included. Put Far Cry on again and listen for Neel's vocal against those two guitars. That is the Dickey Betts Band in 1988, between the quiet years and the road back, and it still earns the needle.