Jaimoe doesn’t have to look too far for a reminder of the past and the friends and bandmates he’s lost. On any given day, all he has to do is glance down at his right calf.
On this particular day, Jaimoe is chilling in a recording studio near his home in Bloomfield, Connecticut, where he’s lived for more than 35 years. Although he’s stout and his scalp is dotted with white hair, he still exudes the formidable intensity of his early days as the co-drummer and percussionist with the Allman Brothers Band. Gripping a pair of drumsticks, dressed casually in a T-shirt and leisure slacks, he’s recalling the bond he had with Duane Allman, the band’s walrus–’stached guitarist and guiding light. Like the times they’d visit pawn shops together and unearth guitars and old drum kits. Then Jaimoe pauses, flashes a quick, playful grin, and rolls his right pant leg up to his knee.
And there is it: the last of the original Allmans band tattoos.
The story — which was documented in a 1971 Rolling Stone cover story — goes like this. The Allmans were in San Francisco, having just played a typically ferocious set at Winterland, when they decided to formalize their bond with the help of Lyle Tuttle, a famed local tattoo artist. In honor of the psychedelic shrooms they’d consume together, they chose a mushroom and had one of each tattooed on their lower right legs. On Jaimoe’s calf, it’s a small, somewhat smudged mushroom that’s darkened in, unlike the more colorful ones the other band members received. “This is the only one like that,” he says. “The ones that were colored, they don’t look anything like this.”
