Ruckus, Free Bonus Edition: Remembering the Allman Brothers Band
A Blast from the late John Nova's past
A day late, but hopefully not a dollar short: We lost Gregg five years ago yesterday
MAY 28, 2022
∙ PAID
From Five Years Ago Today, with additions and excisions:
Some talking points from a long mournful conversation with Greg Ellis this morning...
Greg says Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac was the closest thing to the Allman Brothers...
And in more recent times he reminded me of their debt to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band:
I threw in early Santana and some of the Stones more sprawling numbers (stuff like "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?") in the running too, and Greg points out that they were all likely influenced by the Allmans.
At any rate, there will never be a band that sounds like them again.
They are creators of both jam band sounds and Southern rock but were better than any band that followed in their wake. They stood alone. They sound like neither Phish nor foul 38 Special. (Not to pick on them, guilty pleasure of mine, but they sounded nothing like the Allmans.)
Greg points out that they were that rare thing: a tight jam band. Yes, they performed 40 minute songs, but they were just that: songs. They were not up there noodling around aimlessly. They were songs, and they had movements and motifs instead of just a succession of mere meandering solos. They had a head or two or three, and they always returned to it.
Gregg didn’t write a lot of words for his songs. Duane didn’t play a lot of notes. It was all about making each word and note count.
God, listen to how those drums sound like a Smoky Mountain creek at full burst rumbling towards the sea! If you’ve never had the chance to listen to the Allmans in the southeastern mountains, I heartily encourage you to do so. Especially when the leaves are starting to turn in the fall and the mist gathers near the mountaintops.
Few bands were able to survive like they did. The deaths of two key members in their mid-20s, one of them them one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. Drug busts and a scandal over Gregg rolling over on the rest of the band. A fallow period with a terrible line-up in the 1980s. The forced departure of Dicky Betts, one that seemed likely to end the band as a creative force in the 2000s.
But they just kept on keeping on. Derek Trucks brought new energy to the band, and they kept it in the family, so to speak.
But it's all over now. We'll never hear their like again, but we were lucky to have them for so long.
Houston-based jazz-blues guitarist Erich Avinger added this comment:
They made their music out of Jazz and Blues and Country. That was an optimistic time for music. All the bands that came later removed the Jazz influence.
This is why American Music is in the current sorry state it finds itself in. A simple beat with some Blues-based noodling over the top, something easily packaged and sold.
I heard that Duane and Greg got the idea for the band after listening to the Miles Davis Group with the two drummers. Plus, they were listening to Coltrane and A Love Supreme.
And the influence of Cream was enormous. They were the first to do the Jazz/Blues /Rock thing, in 1968. And Hendrix was doing the Jazz/Blues thing with Mitch Mitchell before that. Maybe it was that nobody who came after them was smart enough to do that combination. The Allmans, Hendrix and Cream were so smart!
That was music at a very high level. Jazz/Blues/Rock was what it was. Or perhaps American audiences were no longer as sophisticated, intelligent or educated themselves after the early 70s.
Or maybe it was all just the drugs. LSD produced the great bands and audiences from 1968 to 1971, not to mention the social change! After that it was all quaaludes, cocaine, heroin and alcohol. Mostly now, the live music is just alcoholic.
But it was the Summer Of Love in 1967 we have to thank for everything!
I saw the original Allman Brothers Band twice. The spiritual energy of the crowd was magical, unlike anything people have know today. Some day, someone will write the real history of all that, with the gurus in India and everything.
The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore still has the ability to take you to that higher consciousness place that that era and its music was all about. Maybe even without LSD, I don't know. Just put it on your turntable and play it over and over and over. The audiences then demanded music this good, from musicians of rare depth and intelligence. I am still amazed.
(For those of you who don’t know Avinger, and intro below):
And former Houston Chronicle music critic Rick Mitchell had this to sa:
I saw the Allman Brothers at the Santa Monica Civic in, I think, late 1971 or early 1972. Whenever it was, it was a few weeks before Duane died. I was 19. At the time, they were my favorite band.
In hindsight, I have to say the music has held up incredibly well. Though they were and are widely loved and respected, I would go so far as to say the original band was underrated, both as songwriters and musicians. They could play rings around let's just say the Grateful Dead -- Gregg never sang off-key, even if he looked half-asleep -- and their influences ranged from blues and jazz to country and western swing.
The label Southern rock does not do them justice, since they really had more in common with Santana and the Mahavishnu Orchestra than Lynyrd Skynyrd and Marshall Tucker.
I saw them several times over the years, including a great show at the Woodlands with Mark May sitting in, but I feel fortunate to have heard the original band. Gregg's last solo album, Low Country Blues, is also an underrated masterpiece. I am not sad -- he lived longer than anyone might have predicted.
But with or without Gregg, or Dickie, at their best, they were more than the sum of their parts. They seemed to be the soundtrack to the true New South. I hear in their music the same optimism I see in my third grade school picture.
But in the end that was the music of a dream we’ve yet to see.