“I don’t get an explanation,” Dickey Betts told Rolling Stone in 2000. “I get a damn fax.” Betts, one of the six founders of the Allman Brothers Band and the writer of “Jessica” and “Ramblin’ Man,” was talking about a page that arrived in mid-May of that year and took him off the band’s summer tour. As Ultimate Guitar’s recent look back shows, the people on either side of that page never agreed on what it meant.
What Betts said the fax said
The firing, if that is what it was, came privately by fax. The argument about it happened in public, on the band’s own website. On 20 May 2000, Betts posted a statement there and quoted the fax: “You have not been performing well and our shows have been repeatedly disappointing to both us and our fans as a result.” He read that as a hint of a health or drug problem, and answered in capital letters: “THIS IS TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY, UNFOUNDED!” (Rolling Stone, 2000).
He said he phoned Gregg Allman for an explanation. Allman’s reply, as Betts told it: “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you – listen to the [expletive] tapes.” So Betts listened to the recordings from the Beacon Theatre and the last tour, and said he was “impressed with the quality of the music.”
Drummer Butch Trucks posted on the same site the same day, in a very different key. “Ain’t no way we can fire Dickey,” he wrote. “We will be doing the summer tour without him.” Then he asked the fans: “Do any of you remember a summer a few years ago when we had to tour without him?” The band’s announcement said it hoped its “good friend and brother” would be back on the road that fall (Pollstar, 2000).
The band’s side
In 2017, Rolling Stone reported that Allman, Trucks and Jaimoe had written Betts a letter after a run of rocky shows, saying he was out until he sobered up. “This time he didn’t do it,” Jaimoe said. “He didn’t get fired. He quit” (Rolling Stone, 2017). Betts blamed something else: he said it began when he asked manager Bert Holman for an audit of the band’s finances. Holman said he had no memory of that request.
Holman gave his fullest account to Pollstar in 2024, days after Betts died. The three other equity partners, he said, asked Betts to take the summer off and pull himself together. “Fired by fax,” in his view, was not what happened.
He named Betts’s “personal habits,” and then something less expected. “The bigger problem was Dickey was losing his hearing,” Holman said. “He was playing unbelievably loud, because he couldn’t hear, and it got to the point where he was drowning everybody else on stage.” He added: “Dickey managed to do something that I’ve never seen anybody else do, which is get Gregg, Jaimoe and Butch to agree on something.”
The same page, read two ways
Side by side, the accounts overlap more than they clash. By Betts’s own description, the fax said he would not be performing this summer. The band talked about the summer too. Nobody on the record says there was no page. The fight is over what it was: a time-out among partners, or a door closing.
A fax carries exact words and a dated record, the kind of paper trail that can carry legal weight. It carries nothing else. There is no tone of voice, and no chance to ask “what do you mean?” while the other person is still there. That has not changed: a page sent today as a fax from a computer arrives just as bare. Betts heard a firing. His bandmates, by their later accounts, meant an ultimatum.
How it ended
The dispute went to arbitration, and Betts received what Rolling Stone called “an undisclosed financial settlement and his walking papers.” Holman says he was paid as one of the band’s four main shareholders. The Allman Brothers Band played another 14 years without him. A three-song invitation to the 40th-anniversary shows in 2009 struck Betts as halfhearted, and he did not take it.
Betts died on 18 April 2024, at 80. He never played with the band again, though he and Gregg Allman did speak in the weeks before Allman’s death in 2017. That same year, Betts looked back without much bitterness. “There are lawsuits I probably could have dealt with better,” he said. “But so what? You do the best with your amount of time.”
Part of: The strangest fax stories ever told