Richard Betts: American Musician

Out on the lonesome highway,

Suitcase and an old guitar,

Just outside Oklahoma City,

In a place called Johnnie's Roadside Bar,

Havin fun, son of a gun,

Lord I'm fit to be tied,

I'm going back down to Georgia, boy,

Won't you give me a ride... --Richard Betts

I picked up Richard Bett's Highway Call early this fall, and it's been on the record player pretty much ever since, though I've never tried to figure out why until now. I haven't always been so neglectful: a couple of years ago when Merle Haggard and John Prine began to wrest the stereo from Dylan and The Dead, it was clearly something to deal with, a question of sanity. But Betts seems like a more innocent orientation. The lead guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band comes out with a solo album, it starts spinning in my room--so what? The guy never cared much about lyrics--certainly he's not into political exhortation. And he wears buttoned-down shirts; he never hangs himself on stage. But it's gotta be more than just he-plays-good-and-I-like-it.

Richard Betts appears to play escape music, then, which is part of why I haven't confronted it. There's no one to talk to about it. A few years back you could visit a college and hear the same record wafting out of a thousand windows. Whether it was personal and indulgent music like Neil Young and James Taylor, or whether it was wired music like the Stones, with something to say collectively, the open windows were a clue to the pulse of the place. Music meant something, people talked about it; they defined a part of themselves together through what the musicians were communicating. Now people go to their rooms and put on god knows what, and popular music is a detached activity again.

The kids at home can't sit around and listen all day, but they still share their music. Besides drugs, it's all I can talk to them about now--naming names from Rolling Stone magazine and exchanging "did you see's" on the latest concert tours. They love their music, but they love all of it--no discriminating. Every night's a great big high after a day's work, and the music is shared abandon, a substitute for words that doesn't demand intellectualizing. They don't identify with the music, but with the idea that there's something that makes them feel better. An escape.

But escape music is not always a midnight deadening to forget the day, or even a running away. Escaping can reject reality and then go toward something, and tell us something about dreams and forgotten hopes. That's the importance of Betts' music for the rock tradition that disintegrated after the sixties--the Hendrix and the Clapton sound, the high-tension, raging, hostile, exciting music that lashed out at something and died, or went the many strange ways its listeners did. The rock that succeeded it kept up the noise but lost the content. Sometimes it tried to club people into oblivion, deaden their senses (great with quaaludes). Or it tried to take people into an abstract other-world, a zillion steps past mere escape. Or it turned the great strength of the music--its implicit threat to the existing order--into a parody of itself, dressing up in paint and feather boas.

Maybe Richard Betts picked something up out of the aftermath because his immediate situation was a microcosm for what was happening in general. The early Allman Brothers were the last holdouts of the genuine breed of sixties rock, and they were the best in the business-well-balanced, super-competent and, with their steeped-in-Georgia soulfulness, basic. Playing "Whipping Post" under the bright lights, the sound was fierce--Bill Graham introduced them at Watkins Glen as "the band with balls." Well, that was fine, but there was nothing distinctive about them except that they were uncorrupted and the best. Duane Allman might have been the finest white guitarist alive, but he was at heart a sideman, and often his brilliant work would get lost because his brother Gregg was singing. Gregg couldn't sing worth shit, but his voice had a sixties edge to it, a hint of hostility, which made it take over when it rose up.

Meanwhile Betts played in the shadow of Duane. But quietly he was building up a coherent strain of his own in the band's music. It ran through "Revival" and into "Blue Skies" and when Duane was killed broke out into the album Brothers and Sisters with "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica" and "Pony Boy." For his solo album he picked up fiddler Vassar Clements (the best) and an old pedal steel player of Dolly Parton's, and some of the Allmans, to produce Highway Call. All together it's the finest collection of road music--sounds to drive by, preferably for long distances--ever assembled.

For one thing, Gregg's voice was gone, replaced by Betts's plain, unpretentious vocal that weaved in and out of songs so that you hardly noticed the transitions--a bluegrass voice, nondescript. The music itself was still rock--as up-tempo as ever, built around solos; more lyrical and melodic, but essentially structured in the same way. Yet the tone is utterly different--after listening to Betts for a while, even though one's usual appetite for complexity and energy is what's responding, it's impossible to endure the old relentless rock--it sounds fatiguing, heavy.

California counterculture has a word for Betts'tone--mellow, but that's not quite right: a little too mindless and innocent--the Youngbloods, jugs of wine on grassy hillsides, women with long straight hair strumming guitars. Betts's music is mellow in that it's ripe, at peace because it's headed in the right direction:

Sometimes I feel so all alone,

That ain't no place to be,

Wish I had my feet under her table,

Little child on my knee.

Highway call, there's something in your smile,

Highway call, keeps me rolling on.

Words like these are meant to be as unobtrusive as the voice that sings them: a calico background saying nothing on its own. The guitar and the fiddle and the steel and the piano are the real talkers, but they speak the same language. Betts's guitar riffs play on tension-and-release--building a taut peak like any good sixties guitar (only more delicate), then instead of dropping it letting it shower down intact, shaking leaves off a tree. Everything soars and subsides, but in tiny arcing weblets rather than waves. This is the kind of guitar that can have a conversation with another instrument that's not an emotional confrontation between the actors, but more like dolphins nipping and frolicking. It's the kind of guitar that can tell beautiful stories.

But there's an indirect critique of society here as well. For people who feel trapped in places where connections are dishonest and grappling, Betts cuts loose to the rootlessness of the road. Then he heads somewhere, to a place where human contact is open and real, people waiting on the front porch. And yet on the road there's nothing romanticized and self-conscious in the Rambler, not even anything individual--just freedom searching for a community.

(For Betts, the community isn't a tight family. That would be too paranoid and insulated. On the record Brothers and Sisters there is no picture of the band, only of an assembled clan of dozens of men and women, many children. On stage, Betts's tour is called "An American Music Show." And it is: on the left side stands the chorus, mostly a black woman who haunts the singing with an urban, Merry-Clayton-in-Gimme-Shelter howl. In the background bobs an electric-haired bass player. On the right stands Vassar Clements, ramrod straight, hair furled and molded back, holding up the fiddle military-high. And in the center Betts, with his plain calico voice and his wondrous guitar, pulling the American Music Show together.)

If Easy Rider were made again now from the shreds of what remains, maybe Hopper's thug-hostility and the Fonda's empty anti-social posing would be left out. Maybe they wouldn't be cocaine dealers with no idea of what they were looking for. Now maybe going out on the road would be a kind of dream, with friends along the way and a home waiting at the end of the line. Maybe "Born To Be Wild" would be a less defiant but equally idealistic "Blue Skies;" maybe "If Six Were Nine" would be "Ramblin' Man"; and maybe "Long Time Coming," sadly perhaps, would be "Long Time Gone."