By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
He was charismatic and a lightning rod for trouble. He was a roadie for the Allman Brothers Band. What little I know of his life tells me one thing: his is a movie in the waiting. Twiggs Lyndon. Too bad he’s dead.
In 1974 the Allman Brothers Band had a gig in Hartford, Connecticut. Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts — no-shows for an hour — had riled the audience up. In a scene evoking the Blues Brothers playing to a country audience of good ol’ boys, folks began hurling objects (beer bottles I’d dare say) onto the stage.
John “Gyro” Gilley, a stage technician, pleaded with the band to do something. “Listen, man, is there anything you guys can do? They’re starting to throw stuff on stage—it’s getting real bad.”
Three members of the Allman Brothers Band had been playing together, not moonlighting, but experimenting with jazz. Calling themselves “We Three,” they never played publicly. Chuck Leavell, Lamar Williams, and Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson, introduced as “a little band within the band,” went to work.
“The crowd loved it,” said Chuck. “That night in Hartford — two years before the actual split of the Allman Brothers Band was basically the birth of Sea Level.”
The name, “Sea Level”, spun out of a pun on C. Levell. The wordplay stuck. Twiggs Miller Lyndon, the ABB’s road manager, stenciled “Sea Level Safe Co.” on one of Chuck’s road cases as big as a, well, a safe.
Twiggs had a knack for spotting future stars. A Macon native, he started his road management career fresh out of the Navy working for another Macon native, Little Richard. Twiggs helped Maurice James get an audition to play guitar in Little Richard’s band, The Upsetters. That was in 1965. Maurice was none other than Jimi Hendrix. Little Richard’s brother, Robert Penniman, fired Hendrix for upstaging Little Richard. Purple haze stardom waited somewhere along the watchtower.
Impresario Phil Walden sent Twiggs to fetch Duane Allman from Muscle Shoals. The first road manager of the Allman Brothers Band? Twiggs Lyndon.
Chuck Leavell remembers him well.
“They assigned Twiggs to me and I found him to be absolutely fascinating. He was full of energy and he was a problem solver with a super-logical, common sense approach.”
Chuck told me his road case was, indeed, “pretty big.” Well, it should have been. Twiggs built a case to cushion Chuck’s Steinway grand piano on the road using four VW shock absorbers.
Alan Paul, author of The Allman Brothers Band, wrote about Twiggs in Organization Man — Twiggs Lyndon’s Wild Life and Eerie Death: “Lyndon’s perfectionism sometimes led to conflict. ‘Things could get testy,’ said Willie Perkins, longtime friend. “When something was one minute late, or the ice in the cooler wasn’t to his liking, Twiggs would go through the roof and create some very tense situations.” Jaimoe said Twiggs was a “thin-line-between-insanity-and-genius kind of guy.”
Twiggs stabbed a club owner to death in a dispute over $500 owed the band. A plea of temporary insanity saved him. His lawyer claimed that life on the road with the Allman Brothers had driven him crazy.
Duane Allman’s death profoundly affected Twiggs. In Duanesburg, New York, of all places, coincidence? Twiggs went skydiving. His chute failed, leading some to speculate he had committed the suicide he often talked about. A witness believes it was an accident. Greg Allman had a different view.
“A few months later, I got a manila envelope in the mail. In it was a picture of Twiggs walking into the woods with his head down. He’s wearing his jumpsuit, with ‘Allman Brothers’ and ‘Dixie Dregs’ running down either side and ‘Harley-Davidson’ across his back. It freaked me out, man, because it was obviously premeditated. He had somebody mail it for him, because it was postdated after his death. Like I said, the world was just not perfect enough for Twiggs Lyndon.”