Jessica Dawkins grew up on a rural Indiana farm, raised by a single mother born in East Tennessee and a grandmother whose family had lived on a mountain ridge straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border for two centuries. When Indian Removal came, the men walked West and died on the trail. The women and children hid in caves for four months. What followed for generations was poverty, addiction, silence, and the slow erasure of who they were. Jessica knew by second grade that none of it was her fault. She just had to turn eighteen and get out.

Music was a refuge. She was on the radio at fifteen, backstage at Deer Creek by seventeen, living between a dorm in Bloomington and a boyfriend’s band house in Louisville by eighteen. Motherhood rearranged her life. Education gave her language for what she already understood. She landed in history because a gold-leafed book caught her eye in a dark hallway she wasn’t supposed to walk through, and she opened it, and a map of Louisville in 1852 fell into her hands, and she found her house on it. That was the moment it all clicked for her.

Jessica is a proud member of Generation X, a Southerner raised north of Ohio River, a single mother who broke every cycle she inherited, and a rock & roll bad ass who cofounded a roller derby league because nobody was going to tell her she couldn’t.

We share a frequency—music, history, the South, daughters, and the belief that honesty and integrity is the only leadership strategy worth pursuing.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Our Crossroads

Jessica and I met through our professional careers as historians. We connected in myriad ways. We are both Gen Xers. We each grew up Southerners in places that don’t always register as the South. Jessica grew up on a farm in Indiana, with roots in the mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up in Stuart, a small beach town a hundred miles north of Miami.

We are parents of daughters and conscious every day of breaking the cycles we inherited. We believe local history belongs to the people who live it, institutions exist to serve their communities, and honesty is the only leadership strategy that holds. That is a hill we have each died on.

All podcast episodes

The Conversation

We started with roller derby, that’s where Jessica starts her own rock & roll story—at the roller rink racing with her best friend and eventually co-founding the Derby City Roller Girls in Louisville in 2006. Twenty-five women in matching satin jackets who built a business from the ground up, trained as athletes, and faced judgment from people who couldn’t reconcile hot pants with professional ambition. She puts roller derby on her resume because it was entrepreneurship, team leadership, and community building wrapped in fishnet stockings and set to the Beastie Boys.

From there we went to family—a mountain ridge in East Tennessee, the Cherokee women who hid in caves, the poverty and addiction and silence that followed for generations. Jessica knew by second grade that she had been born into something that was not her fault. She counted the years until she turned eighteen.

We talked about motherhood. Her daughters—twenty-three and fourteen. She drew lines and held them, not out of strictness but out of intention. She raised them the way she wished she had been raised, which is the whole point of breaking cycles.

We talked about education. She failed out of Indiana University because music mattered more than French credits. She went back to community college at twenty-six with a toddler and no money. Financial aid eligible because she had a dependent. A local scholarship because nobody else applied. A national scholarship because the foundation believed in non-traditional students. Every door opened because she knocked on it—or because it was unlocked and she walked through anyway.

We talked about GenX as a leadership superpower. Jessica realized hers when she was the only person her job who could run both the cash register and a point-of-sale system. She speaks in fluent Boomer, Millennial, and Zoomer.

We talked about Louisville—her 250-year-old city with no history museum, where history has been told through the plantation owners who saved their houses. Jessica loves it anyway. She made it her home on purpose thirty years ago and has spent her career trying to make its institutions worthy of the people they serve. She believes a museum is no different than a restaurant—you hope they come in, enjoy themselves for an hour and a half, and walk out wanting to bring friends. She went from saying “welcome” to saying “this place belongs to you.”

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Unique swag from LLtABB

Jimmy Carter. I’ve always loved this Walt McNamee shot of then-candidate Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt. Carter is speaking to reporters July 4 weekend 1976, shortly after the band’s break-up and Gregg’s testimony in a federal drug case. I tagged the barn in the back with Long Live the ABB shroom 2 from Psychodelik Pete.

MERCH

Fillmore East ad. This is an adaptation of an original newspaper advertisement for the original Fillmore East recording sessions. I replaced Johnny Winter’s face with the LLtABB shroom and moved the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, a spot they EARNED after Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them.

GET YER SWAG HERE

I got news of Dickey’s death while I was heading for an anniversary weekend with the Mrs. at the Moon Crush/Pink Moon festival.1

My heart goes out to the entirety of Dickey’s family—blood and musical. I’m glad they get to see these celebrations in his honor. They are well-earned.

I’m taking my time percolating on the news, letting it sink in.

I said a helluva lot about Dickey in Play All Night!2—things I’d been pondering for decades. So the book is your best source for my understanding of Dickey’s IMMENSE importance to the Allman Brothers Band. Here’s an excerpt. 3

Buy PLAY ALL NIGHT

Here was my real-time reaction:

A band to last.

Dickey’s guitar playing, his songwriting, his composing, his very leadership of the Allman Brothers Band has shaped my life every bit as much as Duane Allman did.

And that was by design of course. Duane built a band to last. It outlived him for 43 years, a majority of them with Dickey as the band’s leader.

Duane chose Dickey Betts, THE GUITARIST OF GUITARISTS in Florida at the time, to join his band. Duane, the hotshot lead guitarist of Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude,” Eric Clapton’s favorite solo.

Subscribe now

Very few bands had two lead guitarists.

Even fewer played harmony together. And this was the place where Duane and Dickey excelled: Betts creating melodies in real-time, Allman improvising harmonies along with him.

“Eric Clapton’s got nothing on Dickey Betts,” Duane said, when he returned from playing with Clapton. He turned down Clapton’s offer to join Derek & the Dominos to stay with the Allman Brothers Band.

An outpouring of love

I have been really gratified to see all of the tributes to Dickey, though I do wish he were here to receive them.

I will be doing one as well, but it’s taking me some time to compose. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some things I’d done and/or come across.

Here’s perhaps my favorite Dickey Betts quote of all-time:

Other tributes

• Warren Haynes Y’all have probably seen the Reverend Brother Haynes’s heartfelt tribute to Dickey.

• , the dean of Allman Brothers Band historians hit this one out of the park: “Dickey Betts: Nobody Knows.”

Share Long Live the ABB

• MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger sums up something I’ve seen other artists comment on as well: the MASSIVE VOID he stepped into as the ABB’s leader in 1973. (I agree with him on Highway Call.4)

• Marcus King who paid tribute to Dickey on Friday night at Moon Crush with “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Southbound.”

  

• Paste “The Unparalleled, Two-Year Rock-Stardom of Dickey Betts.”

• shared a great Dickey story: “Dickey Betts (RIP) Talks Singing ‘Ramblin' Man’ with Bob Dylan and Getting Shouted Out in ‘Murder Most Foul’”

If y’all have more particularly poignant remembrances, please send them my way.

A little from me on Dickey

I’ve written a lot about Dickey on Long Live the ABB, this one might be my favorite, a place where my love of southern music, history, and culture combined with time in a museum exhibition.

Stay tuned.

I’m working on something about Dickey’s instrumentals.5

Back Where It All Begins

The subtitle of today’s post is a line from “Back Where It All Begins”—one of Dickey’s finest songs from the 90s. Dickey always (and I mean always) paid homage to the founding era of the Allman Brothers Band and the good feeling he and his bandmates engendered together and with their fans.

He captured that sentiment well in the title track from the band’s final studio album with Dickey.

Here’s the full verse, included here for the final three lines:

Travel out across the burnin' sand.
Across the ocean to some distant land.
When we reach the end
We'll all be singin' and we'll all be friends
Back where it all begins.

Godspeed Dickey. Thank you for sharing your talent with us.

5

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

---

Unique swag from LLtABB

Jimmy Carter. I’ve always loved this Walt McNamee shot of then-candidate Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt. Carter is speaking to reporters July 4 weekend 1976, shortly after the band’s break-up and Gregg’s testimony in a federal drug case. I tagged the barn in the back with Long Live the ABB shroom 2 from Psychodelik Pete.

MERCH

Fillmore East ad. This is an adaptation of an original newspaper advertisement for the original Fillmore East recording sessions. I replaced Johnny Winter’s face with the LLtABB shroom and moved the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, a spot they EARNED after Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them.

GET YER SWAG HERE

---

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

Doug Peaches is an engineer who found the Allman Brothers during COVID, got wrecked by the first minute of “Statesboro Blues,” and spent the next several years chasing every Duane Allman bootleg he could find. He tracked down cassette traders, cleaned up recordings, and put them back into circulation. That work is how I found him.

Since then I’ve watched him move through obsessions—Duane’s slide guitar, guitar in general, and now classical music—with the same intensity each time. He talks about conductors and Beethoven’s sketches the way he talks about the Gatlinburg tapes. He’s person who listens with everything he’s got, definitely my kinda people.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Our Crossroads

Doug and I share the conviction that Duane Allman’s slide sound was meant for us. Not in some abstract way—in the way that makes you stomp your foot and rewind and call somebody and happily scream “Did you hear this?!”

I’ve watched him grow from a bootleg hunter into someone who can sit in a symphony hall and hear the same conducting principles at work that Duane used with the neck of his Les Paul. He credits our concert-going crew for teaching him how to be present at live music. I credit him for reminding me that fresh ears on old recordings can crack open things the rest of us stopped hearing years ago.

The Conversation

We started where Doug started—chess, COVID, and the opening bars of “Statesboro Blues” off the deluxe At Fillmore East. He talked about the moment it clicked, the six months of nothing but Duane playing slide in the car, and the realization that what he loved wasn’t just the guitar. It was Berry Oakley’s thumping bass underneath it. It was the whole.

That led us into the 2014 The Fillmore Concerts box set and a running discussion about how essential Thom “Ace” Doucette’s harp is on “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” Juicy Carter’s out-of-tune squawking (he’s more charitable than I), and the fact that every version of every song across those four shows is different—yet every track they chose for the original record was the right one.

Doug made the case for the 17-minute “Whipping Post” from the Saturday March 13 early show as the best of the lot. He made the case for the Fillmore “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’” as the definitive version. He also held up the Gatlinburg Sessions1—the highest-generation cassette of Duane, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe, and Gregg working out material for Eat a Peach at a ski lodge near Gatlinburg. Duane on acoustic Dobro. Gregg singing Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was.”2 Dickey playing an early “Ramblin’ Man.” Easter eggs everywhere.

From there we moved to the symphonic quality of the Allman Brothers—Butch Trucks and the timpani, the Beethoven-esque endings, the dynamics and decrescendos that separate them from bands that play four on the floor. Doug introduced sonata form—exposition, development, recapitulation—and mapped it onto “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

Two themes, a long improvisational development, Gregg’s organ section, drums, the whole band back to the head.

I talked about hearing Duane conduct the band with his playing, not just his body—pushing Dickey’s rhythm guitar, shaping Berry bass lines—and how Derek Trucks does the same thing with Tedeschi Trucks Band with almost no visible movement at all. Doug called it conducting from the instrument. It’s same thing Mozart did at the piano.

We talked about conductors—what they do, why they matter, and why two performances of Beethoven’s 5th can sound like different pieces. Doug has attended forty-plus classical concerts since landing in Boston. He’s paying attention to which conductors bring personality and history to the score versus the ones just beating time. The best ones, he said, make their musicians feel safe enough to bring themselves.

That’s Duane.

That’s Derek.

That brought us to Leonard Bernstein and the Omnibus lectures—scripted but performed as if improvised, with a live orchestra, in front of an audience. Bernstein on Bach. Bernstein projecting Beethoven’s three rejected endings onto the floor while conducting each one. Doug’s point was sharp: this kind of musical education barely exists today.

We closed on our friends Steeln’ Peaches out of Orlando, Florida, and an upcoming symphonic concert in 2027 with the Ocala Symphony Orchestra. Doug wanted to know who wrote the arrangements, whether there’d be a conductor, and whether the band would let the orchestra vamp during the floating intro passages of “Elizabeth Reed.” I thought about the Big Band of Brothers project and John Harvey, a professor who created these arrangements out of pure love for the music.

Carrying it forward in a new form is the whole point.

Resources

• Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.

• Doug Peaches on social media

  • Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dougpeaches/

  • Tik Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@doug.peaches

  • Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@dougpeaches

• Big Band of Brothers, A Jazz Celebration of the Allman Brothers Band

  https://www.bigbandofbrothers.com.

• Leonard Bernstein, Omnibus television lectures https://www.leonardbernstein.com/about/educator/omnibus

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

2

Wrote about that here

MERCH

Adam Choit runs The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast—hundreds of episodes in, built from a simple compulsion to share a band he couldn’t stop thinking about. That impulse is the throughline of this conversation: what it means to love music so completely that you build something around it, and why that act of building pulls others in.

Adam loved TTB so much he built a podcast around them. Somewhere north of 200 episodes, he has created a genuine community—not a fan club, not a forum, but an ongoing conversation about a great Southern band that has earned its renown the hard way: one town, one gig, one song, one note at a time.

We talk setlists, repertoire, the amazing Learning to Live Together documentary, Leon Russell, and the legacy of Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

But the real subject is community—how it forms, why it sustains, and what music makes possible that nothing else quite does.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Our Crossroads

Adam and I found each other through a shared frequency. Tedeschi Trucks Band got us there, but what kept us talking was something bigger—the recognition that the bands we love become a kind of architecture for the rest of our lives.

Adam put it plainly early in our conversation: the reason we jibe so well isn’t just our love of Tedeschi Trucks Band—it’s that we are unabashed about it. Neither of us traffics in cool detachment.

I came to the Allman Brothers the way he came to TTB: a little late, all-consumed, unable to imagine how I’d missed it but knowing that you get a band when the muses appear. Then you spend the rest of your life making up for lost ground.

We aren’t two fans talking shop—we were two people who had each built a community around a shared love of music and were now asking the same question: what do you do with a community once you have one?

POST: When music worlds collide.

The Conversation

Adam walked through the moment Tedeschi Trucks Band grabbed him and shared his fear someone else would do the podcast first. That fear is a signal worth paying attention to: when you can’t keep the ideas from coming, you stop asking whether and start asking how fast.

From there we got into what makes a TTB show different from a night of good live music. It isn’t just the music—it’s the vibe onstage and in the room working in concert.1 Derek and Susan have always played for the audience, not at it.

POST: Life is short. Buy the tickets.

That’s an Allman Brothers idea, a jazz aesthetic—the audience feeds the performance, and the performance feeds the audience back. Dickey Betts talked about creating a transcendental experience.2 Derek and Susan say the same, as did Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir.

We talked setlists—how Derek Trucks builds a show, and the moves fans learn to read in real time. It’s almost as if Derek composes a live set the way a writer builds an argument: nothing out of place, no jarring transitions, tension and release working in harmony. Adam can feel the moves coming. I can too.

The conversation kept pulling toward Leon Russell—his orbit, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen story, the relationship he built with Susan that lasted until the day he died.

We landed on what I think is a core TTB thesis: Derek and Susan saw Mad Dogs and said, “We want everything about this concept except the dysfunction.”3

They built something to last. And it ABBsolutely has.

Share

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Resources

• Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• Adam Choit, The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast

• Learning to Live Together (Jesse Lauter, 2021)

• Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971)

“Doctor prescribes, great band supplies”

Tedeschi Trucks Band - Future Soul

Since Adam and I spoke, Tedeschi Trucks Band released yet another BANGER.

I knew I was going to love it, that’s how it’s been with every TTB album. But I connected so deeply with I Am the Moon—the album, the entire project, the concept, and the stories I found the songs—I tempered my expectations.

There was no need. It’s another non-skippable album from Derek, Susan, & co.

What can I say? They hit the note for me.4

Lagniappes

Two ABBsolutely terrific interviews with Derek Trucks, who shows, once again, how well artists respond to a thoughtful interviewer. Both of these pieces really draw out some great stuff from Derek.

The Bluegrass Situation “Tedeschi Trucks Band Have Done It Again”
This one was so good, I completely forgot the interview was for a bluegrass publication until Justin Hiltner brought it up midway through.

Premier Guitar “Derek Trucks’ Forward Motion”
By my pal and fellow Allman Brothers historian/obsessive —a cover story, to boot! Alan’s been covering the ABB beat for a long time and has built a level of trust that really shines through in this piece.

4

Pun intended.

MERCH

Past episodes of Conversation from the Crossroads

Podcast episodes

Warren Haynes turns 66 today.

It’s hard for me to even describe how much Warren has influenced me as a fan of the Allman Brothers, as a student of the Allman Brothers, as a scholar of the Allman Brothers.

Haynes has been an ABBsolute constant from the minute I discovered the band in 1993. Back then, everybody talked about the magic that the band had recaptured in the Dreams reunion and subsequent tour.

And sure enough, when I saw the Allman Brothers Band for the first time in November 1993 (with Warren and Allen Woody), I remember thinking, “I cannot believe this band is still this good.”

Warren is probably one of the world’s most generous souls. It flows throughout his music. And it also comes through in the way he talks about the legacy of the Allman Brothers Band as a musical institution.

Warren respects the heritage he is a part of.

It’s one of his most endearing qualities.

“I’ve always maintained that if I was going to join a band I grew up listening to, the Allman Brothers Band would be at the top of that list. It’s a once in a lifetime experience. And it’s also something you can never prepare for. No one is ever prepared for the opportunity to join a band that is an institution like that. I was preparing myself for an entirely different career trajectory and that just came along and disrupted the apple cart in a good way.”

A 5-tool player.

He’s obviously renown for his guitar playing. But Haynes is also a great singer, songwriter, and arranger. He is also a phenomenal onstage musical director. (I can only think about two or three times over 30+ years I’ve seen Warren live where he was not clearly the person directing things onstage.)

Butch Trucks: “Warren is one of the greatest guitar players alive today. He is also a great singer and songwriter. He brings all of these elements to the band and a solid presence that gives us a real focal point when we play.

He does take charge of the music when we play and I doubt if we could play the way we do if he didn’t. He does it in such a way that he pulls everyone together without stepping on anyone’s toes. It is a very tough thing to do and he does it very well.”

Gov't Mule's debut at LLtABB

In 1989, Warren and Allen Woody brought spirit to the Allman Brothers Band—an energy that kicked the band in the ass.

“When the band called me in 89 about the reunion, one of the first things we talked about was that we needed to get back to 69, 70, 71 where the band started because if we could get back there, then the sky’s the limit. But we had to see if the new band and this new chemistry could capture that sound and that feeling.⁠ Dickey told me several times they felt like they just backed out of the music business because the environment that was going on at the time was so different, they felt like they didn’t belong.

But then Robert Cray started having some success. Stevie Ray Vaughan came on the scene and was really knocking people out, and at the same time, the Grateful Dead’s audience was getting bigger and bigger. Dickey said to me, ‘You know, somewhere in between, there is us. So maybe it’s time for us to come back.’ ⁠So the Allman Brothers band came back by being themselves, and I think that’s why it lasted as long as it did. Now, people look at that music as being timeless.”

The group’s Woodstock ‘94 set—the festival’s 25th anniversary—was a highlight.

“I remember it being a pretty inspired performance. I mean, there was 300,000 people there, so just the adrenaline rush alone was making for some great music. But the Allman Brothers Band always walked on stage ready to take no prisoners.

When I joined the band the first rehearsals were inspiring, but not to the extent that the first show was because it’s showtime, it goes up to another level. By the time we got to Woodstock in ’94, the band had been playing together for five years and was really strong.”

Warren and Derek

From 2001-2014, Warren and Derek Trucks anchored the longest-running Allman Brothers Band lineup. Their partnership was truly something special.

“[Derek & I] were together in the Allman Brothers for about 13 years, but we had played hundreds of times on stage together prior to that. A healthy dose of rivalry can be a part of that, it just can’t be trying to outdo each other. We both come from a world in which we listen to a lot of the same music and love the same styles of music and the same approaches to music, so we’re kind of looking for the same result from what we are doing. Once that chemistry is established, being able to build upon it and play together week after week, month after month, year after year, takes it to a completely other level.”

PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN &
THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EAST

Buy Play All Night!

Haynes made the Play All Night Wall of Fame

This is a long distance dedication to Chairman Wonwayout. Much love to you my brother.

Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt

Order here

Sean Gaillard discovered the Beatles in fifth grade when his British teacher demanded he listen to them as penance for foul language. When he first found the Allman Brothers, he saw Jaimoe front and center in the Brothers and Sisters gatefold.

These entry points were invitations, and Sean has spent a lifetime of practice around the idea that the music we love isn’t just soundtrack. It’s also instruction.

Sean is a teacher, school administrator, author, a podcaster, and music lover. He’s one of those people who moves seamlessly from Billy Preston to Butch Trucks to Booker T. and the MGs. He grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the intersection of the Five Royales, R.E.M.’s early recording career, and a record collection his parents built on Motown and Sinatra. He found the Beatles on his own, on a borrowed copy of the Blue album, side one opening with “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Sean’s framework—music as metaphor, music as leadership lesson, music as shared humanity—intersects so closely with my own, we often ride in parallel.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Our Crossroads

Years before we ever met, Sean and I locked in over the final half of “Mountain Jam” from Eat a Peach. We discuss this in minute detail1—the moment Butch comes in late, keeps playing until he finds where they are, and snaps back with intensity. That moment of recovery, of finding the note and holding it, is Sean’s leadership philosophy in miniature. It’s mine too, though I’d never framed it quite that cleanly before he did.

Sean is Black, grew up Catholic in a nearly all-white school in Winston-Salem, and was told more than once that the Beatles weren’t his music. His answer to that was to go find Chuck Berry and Little Richard in the Beatles’ liner notes, follow the chain, and arrive at a fully integrated understanding of American music that nobody could take away from him. It meant something to Sean when he saw Jaimoe on the cover of At Fillmore East. Same when he saw Billy Preston’s name on the back cover of Let It Be.

It meant something.

Sean traces a direct line from those moments to his career, his teaching, and the kind of leader he decided to become.

The story of Wilson Pickett's "Hey Jude"

The Conversation

We open with Tedeschi Trucks Band performing “It Ain’t Fair”—Duane Allman’s track with Aretha Franklin—and that’s the right place to start, because this whole conversation is about what happens when people reach across the lines that are supposed to separate them and make something that belongs to everyone.

Sean’s entry into the Beatles came through a British teacher who assigned them as grammar medicine, a generous neighbor with the Red and Blue albums. A needle drop on “Strawberry Fields Forever” closed the deal. His entry into the Allman Brothers came through “Jessica,” then Brothers and Sisters, then Jaimoe’s presence on the gatefold—a Black man, front and center, not in the background, not credited as a sideman but as a founding member of a band from the Deep South.

Sean connects that directly to the band’s place in a larger story of integration: Duane convincing Wilson Pickett to cover “Hey Jude,” which put that slide guitar solo in front of Eric Clapton, which produced Layla.

The Allman Joys cover the Beatles

The circle remains unbroken.

We talk about Hour Glass recording “Norwegian Wood”—Duane on electric sitar, a little Brubeck, a little Miles, the equation assembling itself before the band that would use it existed.2

We talk Gregg’s solo catalog, his unpolished gems, his amazing version of “Rain,” and Southern Blood. These are the conversations you can only have with someone who has listened as carefully as you have.

A Beatles thread weaves throughout.

Sean’s framework for John Lennon inviting Paul McCartney into the Quarrymen—recognizing a threat, choosing the band over the ego—is a sharp leadership argument. He applies the same lens to Duane assembling the Brothers: Butch’s classical precision, Oakley’s Mingus-inflected bass, Gregg’s voice as an instrument, Dickey’s second lead guitar, Jaimoe’s jazz. The band, not the individual, as the unit of analysis. These are lessons Sean has been teaching for thirty years.

We spend real time on representation—what it meant to Sean as a young Black kid in a mostly white Catholic school to find integration not as policy but as practice inside the music he loved. Billy Preston on the Let It Be sessions. Lamar Williams and Jaimoe on the Brothers and Sisters gatefold. Booker T. and the MGs. Arthur Lee and Love. More than mere symbols, they were evidence that walls are optional.

Of course we talk the South. Sean was born in California, raised in North Carolina, has lived in Boston, and has the particular relationship with the South that belongs to people who chose it—loving its pace and its music and its landscape while holding no illusions about what it has cost and keeps costing. His read on where we are right now is as clear-eyed and unsparing as anything I’ve heard said on this podcast.

We close on “Dreams”3—Dickey’s rhythm part, two chords, holding the groove while the whole thing opens up above it.

Sean plays it that way. That’s my goal as well.

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Resources

• Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.

• Sean Gaillard—seangaillard.com

  • The Pepper Effect: Tap into the Magic of Creativity, Collaboration and Innovation

  • Vinyl Riffs with Sean Gaillard (podcast)

3

MERCH

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

[Bonus preview episode of Conversation from the Crossroads for paid subscribers.]

Lead Bass

Berry laid the foundation with rock-solid bass, something his successors in the band—Lamar Williams, David Goldflies, Allen Woody, Oteil Burbridge—brought to the group in their own way.

All of them following Berry’s formula of lead bass, as I call it in Play All Night.

Berry grounds the band rhythmically, tying the drums, the guitars, and organ all together. But he also propels it forward in a melodic sense.

What Berry’s doing is pretty incredible.

It was one of the first things I noticed once I finally truly heard the Allman Brothers. When they truly clicked.

The bass is a third lead guitar.

And I honestly didn’t know you could do that with a bass until I heard Berry Oakley.

I am on record saying had Berry not died a year after Duane and in the exact same manner, Oakley would be on the Mount Rushmore of rock bassists. One can only imagine the career he’d have had had he gotten to record jazz or funk or even reggae!

Berry’s not a footnote by any means, but like Dickey (who outlived him by 54 years), he is somewhat of a poorly kept secret. And that’s particularly unfair given what a groundbreaking player Berry was.

Anytime I give love to Berry it elicits shouts of acclamation and great conversation about his uniqueness.

Berry’s chief influences were Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane. Their influence on Oakley made the Dead and the Airplane the Allman Brothers’ psychedelic rock exemplars.

All three groups updated the American music canon through their unique musical sensibilities.

All three groups used a lead bass player to anchor their sound.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Berry’s background

Berry started out as a lead guitarist in his hometown of Chicago. He moved South in 1966—“As soon as I had enough sense,” he said. Up to that point, Oakley had been a guitarist. He took a gig as a bass player with Tommy Roe’s backing band, the Roemans and remained primarily a bassist the rest of his life.

Eventually Oakley migrated to southwest Florida where he ran into Dickey Betts. They formed the second pre-Allman Brothers Band partnership: the Second Coming.1 (Duane and Gregg were the first, natch.)

Duane had been recruiting Berry for his band for several months when Oakley showed up to Muscle Shoals to play with him and Jaimoe.

“It was amazing,” Jaimoe said. “It was like, ‘Holy shit! Where did this motherfucker come from?’ It became a whole different ballgame, and at that point my whole perspective changed from what it was when I went [to Muscle Shoals].”

What did it sound like when Duane, Berry, and Jaimoe played together?

“Closest I can relate is the first time I heard Mahavishnu Orchestra.

In the beginning it was even more spiritual. I can remember several times when I was so at peace with what I was playing that my spirit left my body, right on stage.

This is a fact. Since Duane and B.O. have gone on, I have never experienced this while playing.

I have experienced it hearing one other band play and that was Mahavishnu Orchestra.”

Like hearing Mahavishnu Orchestra for the first time.2

The jams were that groundbreaking to his soul he referenced John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, one of the most mind-blowing bands to ever grace the stage.

Back to Oakley

Berry didn’t get many bass solos with the Allman Brothers Band. (ABBassists typically get one spot a night.) But honestly, he’s soloing all night.

All night.

Listening to Berry play amazes me. I hear so much push-and-pull, call-and-response. I love the way Berry drives the band in answering what the soloists are doing.

My favorite is “Mountain Jam,” issued on Eat a Peach, recorded during the At Fillmore East sessions in March 1971.

The 33-minute jam evolves out of a 23-minute “Whipping Post”—two songs stretching nearly an hour that would close the band’s momentous four-night run recording their breakthrough third album.

Butch’s timpani thunders out of “Whipping Post,” setting the pace with Jaimoe’s drums. Berry’s bass weaves in, out, around, under, and through as Duane, Dickey, and Gregg toy with the melody before they announce the theme: Donovan’s “There is a Mountain.”

Some of my ABBsolute favorite playing of Berry’s is in the first half of “Mountain Jam,”3 where Berry and Dickey are parrying and thrusting.

Dickey’s solo starts about 7:27 and the two of them just gallop along along together…

Subscribe now

About 9:02-ish, they begin a new conversation. Dickey will say something, Berry will answer him in a way that prods Dickey a little further along.

They go along like this for a minute and about 10:14, Dickey, Berry, and Duane begin a three-part harmony.

The jam takes a turn at 11:00ish and begins a 2+ minute stretch of some of my favorite Allman Brothers playing of all time.

The band provides everything Dickey and Berry need to just soar. Duane lays down rhythm and short lead riffs over rock solid drums. Gregg slathers B3 gravy all over everything.

Everyone’s hittin’ the note, individually and collectively.

Heavenly music

And that final 1:20 going into the drum jam is not just Dickey’s gorgeous, melodic bit of momentary composition.

Berry Oakley is writing that brilliant piece of music right along with him.

As I wrote in Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East:

“They are so in sync that the result sounds less like six musicians improvising and more like a classical music ensemble. Listening almost feels like eavesdropping on an intense conversation; the music sounds that intimate.”

🍄 Buy Play All Night 🍄

Here’s the full “Mountain Jam” from March 13, 19714

Subscribe now

More on Berry from Long Live the ABB

Here’s two pieces from the archive.

4

Actually the wee hours of the morning March 14, 1971.

🍄 LLtABB SWAG 🍄

Read more

I found this video from 2024 while searching for something else in my archives.

I stop and visit 105 Second Avenue, the site of Fillmore East every time I go to New York.

The East Village was not only ground zero for the Allman Brothers Band’s triumph at Bill Graham’s legendary venue, it was also my own introduction to New York City: December 1992.

New Yorkers have told me I caught the last of the wild and wonderful and untamed New York.1 I certainly agree. The New York I visited in 1992 was a like foreign country to me, particularly the area around Fillmore East.

🍄Fillmore East/Artistic Statement🍄

In 1992, St. Marks Place was teeming with activity, on the stoops, in the shops, in the streets. Music was everywhere. So was weed and incense.

It was a legit 24/7 operation—the city that never sleeps. The things I witnessed in the wee hours of the morning are forever burned into my mind.

I must’ve walked by the Fillmore East building at least 100 times on that trip. It was long abandoned and nothing marked its significance. This was pre-internet, so I couldn’t just look it up.2

It was there all along.

I found this video from 2024 while searching for something else in my archives. It gives a good sense of the corner of Sixth Street and Second Avenue today.

This photo gives a view of the entire building.

Guests entered the auditorium under the marquee on Second Avenue. The black staircase at the top left of the photo is the building’s fire escape (which I talk about in the video).

The theatre had several lives after 1971, most notably as the famous gay nightclub The Saint, called “the Vatican of Disco.” In 1996 it was razed and replaced with apartments, although the original façade and lobby remained intact as a bank. In 2021, a small photo exhibition on the site’s history remained in the lobby.

The building was closed when I last visited in 2025.

Lagniappe

VIDEO ESSAY: You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it! Fillmore East, Bill Graham, and the Allman Brothers Band.

2

And I didn’t even realize the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and the Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend” video were not only shot right around the corner, it’s THE SAME BUILDING.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

It was a real honor when Big Rick—host of Rock Talk Studio podcast—put Play All Night on his annual best-of list. We’ve been fellow travelers in the rock & roll media world ever since. Rick reviews rock and roll books and documentaries every week on Rock Talk Studio, which means he reads about thirty books a year and watches somewhere around fifteen docs. That’s history graduate school by any other name. I figured it was time to return the favor. Rick and I both came to Leon Russell late and hard—and we talk Leon, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and the Mad Dogs and Englishmen films, books, and the albums.

Our Crossroads

Rick and I share a love of rock & roll books and movies and the joy of talking about them with someone who cares as much as you do. Follow the tendrils. Let one record/book/film lead you to the next. Loving music means wanting to understand where it came from. We both believe that if a piece of art doesn’t hit for you, that’s on you. And we both know that the best rock writing does what the best rock music does—it fills in the gaps and shows you something you couldn’t see before.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

The Conversation

We start with the Tedeschi Trucks Band 2015 LOCKN’ set and the re-release of the Mad Dogs universe—how we each came to Leon Russell, why Bill Janovitz’s biography is essential, and the fact that TTB is the last band on earth playing the Mad Dogs’ canon.

Leon Russell stole the entire Delaney and Bonnie band to build Mad Dogs and Englishmen and the tendrils from that moment run everywhere—Derek and the Dominos, Rita Coolidge, even Tom Petty, whose story connects directly to Leon through Shelter Records and Denny Cordell.1

The two films anchor most of what follows: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971) and Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen (2021). Rick breaks down what he loves about Mad Dogs and Englishmen as a piece of filmmaking—the looseness, the sheer number of people on that stage, the Sly Stone-meets-James Brown vibe of it—and I point him toward some details worth watching for on the rewatch, particularly the way the women of that tour are present and visible in a way the era rarely allowed.

Women: The Unsung Heroes of Rock

Learning to Live Together gets its own extended treatment. Jesse Lauter’s decision to let the women carry the story. The room when everyone first walks in after fifty years. Leon doing the “Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen” unrehearsed, sparked from a conversation Derek Trucks had with Chris Robinson just before taking the stage. And what it looks like when a man at the end of his life feels the music move through him one more time. Derek and Susan as protectors of the sound. The fragility and the joy of it all in the same frame.

We talk about the art of rereading and rewatching—why going back through the Janovitz book a second time is what let me catch Leon’s backstage reaction when Rita Coolidge sings “Bird on a Wire,” a detail that tells you everything about a grudge that never fully healed. Rick shares what slows him down: he falls into the music every time, disappears into the catalog of whoever he’s reading about, and has to find his way back. The Rita Coolidge and Jim Gordon story gets its due. What happened on that tour would end things immediately today. They protected Rita after that. Gordon’s trajectory from there is one of rock and roll’s most tragic stories, documented in Joel Selvin’s Drums and Demons.

We closed on what makes a great rock and roll book or documentary: the behind-the-curtain creative moment, the spark you didn’t know existed.

Rick put it simply—rock and roll is a giant puzzle, there are a gazillion pieces, a lot of them have been put together, but there’s still a lot missing.

That’s why he keeps going. It’s why I do too.

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Resources

Bob Beatty

• Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• “When it’s gone, it’s gone”: Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa

• The joy of musical discovery https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/the-joy-of-musical-discovery

Life is short, buy the tickets

• Rock Talk Studio podcast https://rocktalkstudio.buzzsprout.com/

• Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker: A Memoir

• Peter Ames Carlin, Tonight in Jungle Land: Bruce Springsteen’s America and the Making of Born to Run

• Bill Janovitz, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History

• Learning to Live Together (documentary, 2021)

• Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary, 1971)

• Joel Selvin, Drums and Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon

• Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Podcast with Adam Choit—Episode 171 (Jesse Lauter interview)

🍄🍄‍🟫BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT🍄‍🟫🍄

1

See “When it’s gone, it’s gone”: Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history” https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

"When it's gone, it's gone": Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history

I visited The Church Studio in September 2025 on my way to move my older daughter to Phoenix. That’s when I met Teresa Knox, the dogged historic preservationist and music lover who saved the studio Leon Russell founded in a church building in Tulsa…

Listen now

2 months ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · Long Live the ABB

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

Stay tuned, lots more coming.1

And while I have your attention…

I know you wanna know how to best support my efforts.

Upgrade to a monthly or annual membership.

The room where it happened: March 26, 1969

March 26, 1969 is an important day in Allman Brothers Band history. Three days earlier, following a MONSTER jam with five of the original six Allman Brothers, Duane Allman called his younger brother Gregg home from L.A.

Gregg arrived at the Gray House, the communal home of the Second Coming, Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley’s band, directly from the road. The sound was so powerful, it knocked him backwards.

I tell the rest of the story in the above video.2

“You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it!” Fillmore East, Bill Graham, & the Allman Brothers Band

Really proud of this video essay on Fillmore East, which I published March 13, 2026, the 55th anniversary of the Allman Brothers’ recording the bulk of At Fillmore East. www.longlivetheabb.com/p/fillmore-east-video-essay

🍄🍄SUPPORT THE CONVERSATION🍄🍄

Play All Night! goes global

BRASIL: “Duane Allman’s opinion on Eric Clapton”3

UNITED KINGDOM: “The guitarist Duane Allman thinks ‘wrote the book’ on being an icon”

🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT 🍄

Speaking of the U.K.

Guess which album ranked #1 in the BBC Music Magazine’s “21 greatest live albums of all time”?

At Fillmore East ~ An Artistic Statement

Solo projects in Shroom Nation

“Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr. Announce New Album The Offering” I am a big (BIG) fan of Lamar Williams, Jr., who I first heard when he fronted Les Brers, the band Butch founded after the Allman Brothers’ retirement. And Oteil? Oteil’s simply the best.

“Guitar legend Warren Haynes defies Southern rock, jam-band labels: ‘No one likes to be stereotyped’” Matt Wake is just a terrific interviewer. Every time he speaks to a musician from the ABB family tree, it’s clear he knows his ABB history well. Here, he offers to Haynes a genuine opportunity to reflect on his life and career.

“Gabe Dixon presents sonic identity both distinct and intoxicating” Gabe Dixon was new to me when he joined Tedeschi Trucks Band as a sub for Kofi Burbridge (Oteil’s brother) in early 2019. Within a matter of weeks, Kofi died, and Dixon stepped into the chair permanently. He was a revelation onstage as a singer and on the keys. He’s also an amazing songwriter, penning some of my favorite songs on TTB’s epic 2022 release I Am the Moon: the title track, “Gravity,” and the glorious “Soul Sweet Song.”

Derek Trucks plays Jerry Garcia’s guitar at the Beacon

My good friend @farmer_doug1 caught some great video of Derek in action doing what I think is one of his badest-ass moves…changing a string onstage. There’s just something about him sitting there while that music SWIRLS AROUND him…

In this case, it’s on Jerry Garcia’s 13.5 lb. MONSTER of a guitar, Tiger.

“It’s not for the faint of heart. You need to know what you’re doing to play that guitar” Derek Trucks reveals what it’s like to play Jerry Garcia’s record-breaking $11.56mn Tiger guitar

“How Derek Trucks Ended Up Playing Jerry Garcia’s $12 Million ‘Tiger’ Guitar”

Tedeschi Trucks Band just released another ABBsolute BANGER

Future Soul has joined my listening repertoire. My lord is it a great album! More to come. Maybe.4

For now, let this great review from my dude suffice.

Thanks for being here y’all.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

One of my favorite photos ever. Yours truly with my best friends & bandmates Troy & Steve visiting the Gray House in 2021.

2

Excerpted fromPlay All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East.

4

I feel called to write something first on I Am the Moon from 2022, which is my favorite album of the 21st century BY FAR and a truly magnificent artistic achievement IMNSHO.

I'm in. This music, this history, this community. I'm in. UPGRADE NOW

🍄Curated LLtABB Designs🍄

🍄 MERCH 🍄

Ahmad Ward and I have been rolling strong since the early days of the pandemic, when a small cohort of museum leaders got together just trying to make sense of things. He is a historian, a museum leader, a Southerner, a father, and one of the most honest people I know.

Conversation from the Crossroads Podcast

Our Crossroads

Ahmad and I met in the history museum field and stayed close because of what the work demands—honesty, courage, and a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable stuff. We navigate Southern identity differently, and we’ve always been frank with each other about it.

History is our common language. Liberation is the goal.

The Conversation

We started with what it means to be a Southerner—the many Souths, the Lost Cause mythology baked into the culture, and the work of deconstruction that history demands. I was raised with a version of Southern identity modeled on things I’ve spent my adult life unlearning. As a Black man, Ahmad lives that same reckoning from a different position entirely, and hearing him name it plainly has been life-changing for me.

The Civil Rights Movement anchors our discussion. We contend it may be the most significant domestic American political and social movement of the 20th century—because of the stakes, the participants, and what it cost them. Ahmad has spent his career inside the institutions that carry that history forward—from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, where he works today.

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth1 gets his due. Ahmad and I share him as a hero. The bravest man I ever met—and I mean it. When I brought him to the History Center in 2004 for the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, the energy in that room was unlike anything I’ve experienced in a professional setting.

We talked about what it means to do this work in this particular moment (February 2026) and what history offers when the present feels unstable. It doesn’t predict the future. But it does remind you that the struggle is much larger than any one of us, and that people with far less protection than we have put themselves in harm’s way anyway.

We closed on Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in Hilton Head and the philosophy Ahmad lives by these days, “We work in brave spaces, because safe is subjective.” I answered with “Be who the younger you needed.”

Subscribe now

Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

Resources

• Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• Birmingham Civil Rights Institute https://www.bcri.org

• Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

• Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park https://exploremitchelville.org

1

🍄 SWAG 🍄

TY Yoken produced Duane Allman Anthology Volume II. He got the job through sheer effort: an FM DJ and Duane fanatic who fed a steady diet of Duane tracks to the folks at Capricorn Records.

His efforts made the case there was a second record’s worth of Duane Allman anthology material. When Phil Walden eventually called offering the opportunity to write the liner notes, TY said yes. Instead, he ended up producing the entire set.

We’ve been friends since Jeff Kollath1 hosted an event with me and King Curtis biographer to launch Play All Night! at Crosstown Concourse in Memphis.

From there, the conversation moves into freeform FM radio, the bootleg archive that preserved what broadcast stations captured, and what it meant to watch the 5-man band grieve in public.

Our Crossroads

Ty and I both came to this music the same way—obsessively, through record store cutout bins, FM radio, and the conviction that following Duane’s name on the back of an album would always lead somewhere worth going. He did it with a turntable and a 50,000-watt radio station. I did it with a Ph.D. dissertation and a book. The methodology is identical: find the name, pull the thread, don’t stop until you’ve heard everything.

🍄Swag🍄

The Conversation

We started with Duane Allman Anthology Volume II itself—what TY heard when he put it on fresh this morning, what surprised him, what still holds up. “Dimples” comes out of the box hard, mixed from a second or third generation bootleg tape of Ludlow Garage April 1970 he brought to Macon himself. Johnny Sandlin and Ovie Sparks cleaned it up. Nobody knew what they had. That’s the whole story of this record in miniature.

TY built the track list the way he built radio sets—by knowing the canon better than the people who owned it. Capricorn didn’t know where half of them came from. The record opens with “Happily Married Man,” a Muscle Shoals session track TY heard for the first time on full blast in the Capricorn studio—and knew immediately it had to lead. Johnny Sandlin pushed for “Leave My Blues at Home,” recorded on Ovation guitars. Phil Walden and Frank Fenter added Aretha Franklin after they were unable to work a deal with Clive Davis for a Laura Nyro track. What ended up on the record—”It Ain’t Fair,” with King Curtis, Duane, and Aretha—is one of the greatest studio tracks Duane ever cut.

TY’s knowledge of Duane’s catalog brought to mind a puzzle I finally put together in 2025, this piece that ran September 29, 1970 in the Macon Telegraph

Duane did not attend, neither did Clapton. They had planned to, but Clapton was distraught, and Duane stayed behind in Miami. That day they recorded an acoustic version of “Mean Old World” with Luther’s dad Jim Dickinson producing. The funeral trip wasn’t real, but the press release does appear to be.

Freeform FM radio is another topic we cover. TY helped take over WOUR in Utica on June 1, 1973—50,000 watts, blank canvas. They broke Charlie Daniels out of there. They had Meatloaf live. Tom Petty. They played Duane Allman from tapes nobody else had, which was common in the FM freeform era. Listeners recorded those broadcasts and traded them. That’s how we have Syria Mosque 1971, Ludlow Garage 1970, and the like. TY himself seeded the archive with the 4/7/72 Manley Field House show https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/manley-fieldhouse-1972.

A Berry Oakley Thunderfest

We closed on grief, joy, and why this music still matters. TY watched the Allman Brothers play Manley Field House in April 1972—two months after Eat a Peach dropped, five months after Duane died. The 5-man band lived out their grief on stage in real time. Twenty years later, I received a cassette of the show and played it as loud as it would go, feeling every bit of that emotion coming through the speakers.

A gift from my friend TY, 25 years before we ever met.

🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Resources

Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East, Bob Beatty—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• Duane Allman: An Anthology (Capricorn Records, 1972)

• Duane Allman: An Anthology Vol. II (Capricorn Records, 1974)

• Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective (Rounder, 2013)

New Mexico museums/historic sites

• Taylor-Mesilla Historic Site https://nmhistoricsites.org/taylor-mesilla

• Tinkertown Museum, Sandia Park, New Mexico—

  https://tinkertown.com

🍄🍄‍🟫BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT🍄‍🟫🍄

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

1

Here’s Jeff on Conversation from the Crossroads: https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/kollath-1

The bulk of the album derives from the shows recorded today: Statesboro Blues and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed (3/13, early show); You Don’t Love Me (first ~7 minutes: 3/13 early show); Stormy Monday; Hot ‘Lanta; Whipping Post (3/13, late show).

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT (Amazon)

🍄 Original 78-minute, 7-song album released in 1971

1. Statesboro Blues

2. Done Somebody Wrong

3. Stormy Monday

4. You Don’t Love Me

5. Hot ‘Lanta

6. In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

7. Whipping Post

🍄 At Fillmore East, Play All Night! edition

I’m partial to this, which is what I listened to as I wrote Play All Night throughout 2020 and 2021.

It’s the original 7-song album with “Mountain Jam” tacked on to the end of “Whipping Post”1 and “Little Martha.”2

At Fillmore East in context

Play All Night! details why At Fillmore East was so crucial to the Allman Brothers Band. Bottom line, it was the band’s make-or-break 3rd album. They were several hundred thousand dollars in debt to their record label and manager, who couldn’t recoup their losses because their first two albums sold less than 150,000 combined units.

BUY Play All Night

They toured relentlessly, earning a reputation as a must-see band. They knew they played better in front of an audience. Recording live was their only option.

The decision to record live was a huge gamble because of how unusual it was to have a major hit with a live album. No artist from the rock underground had done so.

The Venue

Bill Graham’s Fillmore East was at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue in the heart of New York City’s East Village. A narrow lobby at 105 2nd Avenue opened into a 2,600-seat room built in 1925-6 as a Yiddish theater in the Medieval Revival style. 

Graham opened Fillmore East on March 8, 1968. A little more than three years later, on June 27, 1971, the Allman Brothers played the venue’s final show. The building changed hands several times over the years. From 1980-88 it was the famous gay nightclub The Saint.

The building fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1996. There was an exhibit inside the original lobby, which was a bank the last few years but is now closed. Its historical marker (now missing) made no mention of the ABB’s most important album.3

🎥Bill Graham/Fillmore East/the ABB🎥

The Bill

The Allman Brothers were the scheduled middle act on a bill that included Elvin Bishop opening and Johnny Winter And closing. By the second night, they were the closing act.

There are a lot of serendipitous moments with this album.

For example, Elvin Bishop played on the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s recording of “Spoonful,” which Duane copped for the Allman Joy’s first single (Dial Records, 1966).4

Tom Dowd, their producer, wasn’t supposed to be in town, but a snowstorm in Paris brought him home from Africa early(!). Grateful for that on a number of fronts, his brilliant engineering on the live sessions, but also convincing Duane to abandon the Juicy Carter experiment. 

But it’s the Johnny Winter connection that really stands out to me.

Winter served as Duane’s foil and observers had long compared the two white, southern, slide guitarists. It puzzles me that Liberty Records handled national distribution for Winter’s first album at the same time Duane struggled mightily to get the label to pay attention to his interpretation of the blues. (They also had Canned Heat!)

In January 1969, shortly before he formed the Allman Brothers Band, Duane told fellow Muscle Shoals guitarist Jimmy Johnson (of the Swampers),

“Johnny is really good, but I can cut him. You see that stage down there? Next year by this time, I’m going to be down there.”

Duane made good on his boast the following December.

The Allman Brothers opened for Blood, Sweat, and Tears December 29. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship between the band and Bill Graham5, including playing the venue’s closing sets (listen to Graham speak about that gig).

Winter sat in with the Allman Brothers Band a few times over the years including at the March 1970 Winter’s End Festival in Bithlo, Florida (above). His appearance on “Mountain Jam” at the 2nd Atlanta Pop Festival in July 1970 has been officially released.

Each band was to play 5 shows over three nights:

• Thursday, March 11 (8pm only) and Friday, March 12 and Saturday March 13, 1971 (8pm and 1130pm)

• The Allman Brothers recorded four shows: Friday and Saturday, March 12 & 13.6

Johnny Winter demanded to switch places. 

“The Allman Brothers tore into the early show like it was a Friday night late show,” Alan Arkush recalled. The energy stunned Winter. “He just couldn’t top them.” 

“Johnny is gonna be opening for the Allman Brothers from now on because we can’t have that happen again,” said his manager.

Winter played the middle slot for rest of the run.7

The lineup change gave the ABB the time and liberty to do what it did best, improvise and expand songs as the muse struck.

Graham’s bills afforded only about 60 minutes max. to the middle act, not enough time for a band that topped an hour with four songs on At Fillmore East: “You Don’t Love Me” (19:06), “Whipping Post” (22:40), “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” (12:46), and “Stormy Monday” (8:31).  

The Set

I’ll focus on just the At Fillmore East tracks here and do a deep dive on the full sessions at a later date.8

1. Statesboro Blues (3/13, early show). The song that inspired Duane to learn slide was in the ABB repertoire from the beginning. The ABB play a reworked arrangement of Taj Mahal’s take on Blind Willie McTell’s original, a version they’d been tweaking since their earliest days.

2. Done Somebody Wrong (3/12, late show). Duane introduces this song as “An old, true story.” A quick look shows that these shows are the first time “DSW” appears on tape. Their second take is what made the album.

3. Stormy Monday (3/13, late show). The ABB nailed their only take of this blues standard, one they weren’t playing all that often at this point in their career. 

4. You Don’t Love Me (first ~7 minutes: 3/13 early show; last ~12 mins: 3/12 late show). YDLM joined the repertoire in July 1970 and by this point, the band stretched it out to nearly 20 minutes. (At 16:17-18 is the famous “Play all night!”)

5. Hot ‘Lanta (3/13, late show). An instrumental credited to the entire band, the group debuted it in early 1971.

6. In Memory of Elizabeth Reed (3/13, early show). It goes against my every instinct to call anything perfection, but this is perfection in musical form. One of two previously released songs. 

7. Whipping Post (3/13, late show). The second previously released song, and ditto above. The Allman Brothers Band at their ABBsolute finest. 

Song Statistics:

• The album has three originals, “Hot ‘Lanta” (credited to the whole band), “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” (Dickey Betts), and “Whipping Post” (Gregg Allman).

• All four covers are blues songs. “Statesboro” Blind Willie McTell by way of Taj Mahal; Elmore James’s “DSW;” “Stormy Monday” T-Bone Walker by way of Bobby Bland; and “YDLM” from Junior Wells (with Buddy Guy) Hoodoo Man Blues.

• The oldest in the repertoire is “Statesboro Blues,” which the band had tried to record as recently as a year before on Idlewild South. “Done Somebody Wrong” is the newest. Unless I’m mistaken, it had its debut at Fillmore East.

• Two tracks, “Liz Reed” and “Whipping Post,” had appeared on previous albums. The other five tracks are new.

• Though the band never recorded a studio version, “Hot ‘Lanta” was the only song that made the setlist of the solo efforts of each surviving bandmember. 

General Thoughts

First, I wrote an entire book about this album, so I’ll direct you to Play All Night! for more information.

Buy Play All Night

Here are some thoughts as you listen:

Every single solo is improvised.

Every.single.note. And not one is corrected in post-production. If you want to hear what I mean, check out The 1971 Fillmore East Recordings to see how the tracks evolved over the weekend.

At Fillmore East is not a concert.

Like most live albums it is a carefully curated document pulled from various performances over the weekend.

There is not a single overdub on the record.

There are, however, two edits: Thom Doucette’s harmonica solo was cut from “Stormy Monday” and “You Don’t Love Me” is a splice of two versions. 

The Fade-Outs

At Fillmore East is non-traditional in that it is not mixed as if the record is a concert.

Each track fades out before a new song plays.

The fade-outs have long baffled me because I know of no other live rock album that’s like this. Records released in this time period all sound like a concert. I’ll name some pretty famous live records from the ABB’s contemporaries:

• Grateful Dead - Live/Dead 1969

• Jefferson Airplane - Bless Its Pointed Little Head 1969

• Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys 1970

• The Doors - Absolutely Live 1970

• The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out 1970

• The Who - Live at Leeds 1970

• Joe Cocker - Mad Dogs and Englishmen 1971

Every record above comprises multiple concerts, and every record sounds like a single show. For those of us who couldn’t get to a Rolling Stones show on the 1969 tour, Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out is the next best thing to being there. That’s true about every other album on this list.  

So why the fade-outs?

Best I can come up with9 is that the band wanted the songs treated as individual songs, such as on a studio record, rather than as part of a hypothetical “concert.” 

Everything was riding on the success of At Fillmore East. This was the group’s definitive artistic statement. One they made on their own terms, which is true to form for the Allman Brothers Band. 

It paid off, and the album went gold October 25, 1971. Sadly, four days later, Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. He didn’t live to see the success of his crowning artistic achievement.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Final Thoughts

1. I really dig the between-song banter. Every song but “Hot ‘Lanta” has something either before or after the song. It reflects the band’s good nature. Duane calls out other artists—Elmore James, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and T-Bone Walker—and introduces “Liz Reed” as “Dickey Betts’s song.” Berry exclaims “Brother Gregg Allman sings the blues!” after “Stormy Monday.” As Duane says “Berry starts ‘er off,” listen closely and you’ll hear 5 people yell out “Whipping Post.” 

2. I love Fillmore East stage manager Michael Ahren’s deadpan intro, ”Okay, the Allman Brothers Band” that kicks off the album. The band is about to play its 5th show of the run and they come out FIRING. 

3. My first experience with this album was on a cassette I got far too early in my life—you can read about it here .

4. The Fillmore Concerts, a 1992 release that recreated a full 1971 Allman Brothers show.

   1. It is magnificent for that very reason and also because it put “Whipping Post” and “Mountain Jam” together for the first time in the cd era. 

   2. Despite what The Fillmore Concerts (1992) liner notes say, Tom Dowd DID NOT splice two different versions of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” together. Per Kirk West, the ABB’s long-time archivist/Tour Mystic, also a co-producer on the set, Dowd conflated two separate mixes as two separate tracks.10  

5. The ABB continued to fade tracks in/out on live albums through the 1990s, finally dropping the habit with 2000’s Peakin’ at the Beacon and 2004’s One Way Out. 

A student at New York University asked to interview me about Bill Graham and Fillmore East, (particularly) and West for a documentary project. As I explained to Caroline, I’m not a historian of Bill Graham, but Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East documents well his connection to the Allman Brothers Band story and how important he was in breaking their career and as the premier promoter in rock.

What follows is the conversation that emerged from our discussion.

🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT🍄

Bill Graham

I’m not a Bill Graham scholar, only as much as it attaches to the Allman Brothers Band, but his story fascinates me. Born in Berlin and orphaned in the Holocaust1, Graham grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from City College of New York with a business degree or, as he called it, “efficiency expert.”

Drafted in 1951, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the Korean War. He began his career in the service industry in New York City restaurants. After military service, he worked in the resorts of the Catskills, where he honed skills that later defined him—logistics, people management, and showmanship.

Graham had a genuine love for theatre and trained to be an actor.2 His acting career never took off, but his connections to that world led directly to his groundbreaking career in rock promotion.

Fast-forward to 1965. Graham, now in San Francisco, has just taken over as manager of the political satirists the Mime Troupe, after their leader’s arrest on obscenity charges.

He rents the Fillmore Auditorium for a benefit concert for legal defense. The November 6, 1965 show was transformative for Graham.

He initially approached the event with a practical, almost reluctant mindset. His primary goal was to support the Mime Troupe.

What unfolded fundamentally reshaped his trajectory and that of rock music. The concert featured a diverse mix of local bands, including Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs. Poets and other performers brought more countercultural spirit.

Graham saw the Fillmore Auditorium as a space that could host electrifying, immersive performances. The raw energy, the packed audience, and the seamless interplay of music, performance, and activism left an impression. Graham saw music draw massive, passionate crowds while serving as a platform for a broader cultural movement.

At Fillmore East/An Artistic Statement

The benefit sparked his understanding of the importance of live music, the live music experience, to the youth counterculture. It catalyzed his shift to becoming a central figure in the burgeoning Bay Area music scene, leading to his stewardship of the Fillmore and his role as one of the most iconic concert promoters of the era.

He eventually secured a permanent lease for the Fillmore Auditorium, 1805 Geary Street, San Francisco, which he operated until summer 1968, when he opened Fillmore West at 10 South Van Ness Ave.

Fillmore East, East Village, NYC

He’s so successful in San Francisco that he decides to open a venue in New York City. He buys the somewhat derelict Village Theatre in the heart of the East Village, 105 Second Avenue. He opens it as a rock palace: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.

Graham was a professional who had come up in the Borscht Belt. He understood guest service, and he gave his best to provide excellent value for the entertainment dollar. Built in 1926 as a Yiddish theatre, it was one of those glorious movie/vaudeville palaces built in the years between World Wars I and II.

The building was in pretty poor condition when Graham took over in 1968. The Fillmore East had an odd configuration. Its narrow lobby fronted on Second Avenue. The theatre itself sat back beginning about a half-block east along 6th Street. It sat around 2,700. It had an orchestra section and one long balcony.

GET YERS HERE

The shows themselves were always an event.

Graham said, “I wanted Fillmore East to be the white man’s Apollo Theatre. ‘You got the stuff? You got something you want to say? Walk out on that stage and do it!’ When you walked out on the stage at Fillmore East, you knew. Sound, lights, special effects, light show. ‘You want to show the world your stuff? Do it here.’” “The Fillmore East,” he said, “became what I had hoped it would be.”3

The building shared a block with New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and NYU students were essential to Graham’s operation, adapting and improving upon things he’d learned in San Francisco about lighting, sound, and stage management. Above all, live music was an experience for musicians and audience alike. Graham cared about his audience. He invested in sound, invested in the light show.

Subscribe now

Bill Graham presents

I always think about the The Last Waltz, which he promoted at Winterland in San Francisco. A lavish event he threw on Thanksgiving Day 1976 to say goodbye to the Band, one of the greatest of their era. Graham served a full Thanksgiving dinner. He brought in ballroom dancers to entertain the crowd. The stage was beautifully set, complete with chandeliers from the San Francisco Opera House. The Last Waltz may have been Martin Scorsese’s film, but it’s a film about a Bill Graham production.

Graham made money from rock promotion, but he provided quality—a lot of bang for the entertainment buck. He was foremost a businessman. He recognized artistry had value and he made money presenting it. He went into rock promotion thinking about money differently than the more idealistic young people of the San Francisco counterculture. He saw no problem making a good living providing settings for these important cultural events.

Graham added to the mix unique artist pairings, eclectic bills that educated listeners and exposed his audiences to the highest level of entertainment he could afford. Graham staggered his bills so while the headliner got all the attention, he gave the audience something different at each step.

“Freddie King didn’t mean anything in San Francisco at the time. But Quicksilver alone would sell out the hall. The ice cream was the Grateful Dead or Quicksilver or Jefferson Airplane. But the vegetables you had to go through to get to the ice cream might’ve been Lightnin’ Hopkins or Junior Wells.”

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

At the Allman Brothers Band’s second Fillmore West appearance, January 1971, they were the middle band on a bill with Electric Hot Tuna. The opener was the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band, a 24-member steel drum ensemble from the Caribbean island. Other seemingly disparate pairings over the years include Rahsaan Roland Kirk with Jethro Tull, Woody Herman with the Who, and Miles Davis with Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

Graham was an unlikely tastemaker. When he got started, he was ignorant of contemporary music. He preferred jazz, big band, and mambo. “From the very beginning,” he said, “I accepted the fact that I had no real personal knowledge of the rock scene of that era.”

He didn’t listen to radio. He watched what crowds responded to and served them more of the same.

“I don’t think Bill noticed our music much,” said Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. “He always loves it when the crowd gets off even if he doesn’t personally understand or personally dig the music.”

Graham’s rosters were a genuine blending of cultures that art and music provide

The touring business remained pretty segregated and the musicians exposed him to Black performers like the Staple Singers, Bobby “Blue” Bland, James Brown, Chuck Berry, and “the ultimate” Otis Redding.

A star on the Black rhythm & blues circuit, Redding had yet to break through to the white market. Said Redding’s manager Phil Walden “Otis had worked to white audiences but at white colleges in the South because it was a tradition. Black people always entertained white people down there.”

The shows were a smash. Said Graham, “Otis Redding was by far the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison.”

Graham’s rosters were a genuine blending of cultures, the kind only art, and specifically music, provides.

Nearly every band started out playing blues and they were meeting their heroes.

When B.B. King first played the Fillmore Auditorium, when Otis Redding first played it, they were shocked at how well the white audiences received them. Same was true when Aretha Franklin headlined Fillmore West March 1971.4

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Graham exposed the musicians to different sounds. Introduced them to their heroes. And sometimes he altered their performances.

Here’s one example from his autobiography.

“I liked Ten Years After very much as a band but one aspect of their show personified a lot of my difficulty with rock and roll. The drum solo. The endless, seemingly nonmusical drum solo.

Not that theirs was worse than any other. It was not even really bad drumming. It was just like eating dry Cheerios without milk and fruit.

I wanted to set an example for all the bands as to what real drumming was all about. I was introduced to Buddy Rich. I told him I ran a place called the Fillmore in San Francisco and that on this certain show, I had a headliner from England, a group that was very good but they always did a drum solo I didn’t care for.

I told Buddy I wanted to introduce his music to these kids. But that I also wanted them all to see what a drummer really did. What a real drummer was all about.

The night of the show, we set up for Buddy Rich. Little old-fashioned bandstands to hold up the songbooks. Which the kids had never seen before. We set up this little midget drum kit for Buddy. One bass, one little snare, bang bang, that was it. Buddy sat down at the drums.

As I was making the introduction, people were screaming, “ALVIN! TEN YEARS AFTER! ROCK AND ROLL!” The brass section stood up and played that opening riff from “Norwegian Wood.” Then Buddy took off.

BAM BAM BAM BAM BOOM BOOM BOOM WHANGA WHANGA WHANGA BOOM!

The entire room swerved. All the kids going to get something to eat turned around and looked at the stage. Buddy fucking wailed! The room was mesmerized. They were eating something they had never eaten before and they could not believe how good it was.

They were just glued to the stage. He held that room for an hour. And he was great.

Now I had prepared myself for what came next. I had rehearsed it eight thousand times. We were now in the break, setting up for Ten Years After. I walked into their dressing room.

Ric Lee, their drummer, was at his drum pad warming up. He said, ‘Hey, Bill. How you doin’?’ I said, ‘Ric, how are you? Hey, man. Can’t wait for your solo tonight, baby!’

He didn’t do one. They walked out and played a set of harsh rock and roll and if he took three seconds to go off by himself, that was it. It was great.”

Here’s Bill Graham constructing a lineup using a jazz legend to teach a rock drummer a lesson. And in the meantime, showing his audience the root source of the music they loved so much.

And again, it’s about the music. Bill Graham understood that. He cared about quality for the musicians and the audience. And he delivered that such that bands flocked to Graham’s Fillmores to record live albums. Not just the Allman Brothers Band, but dozens of records, many of them stone-cold classics. Here’s but a sampling of some of the standouts in my listening retinue.

• Aretha Live at Fillmore West

• King Curtis Live at Fillmore West (recorded at the same residency as Aretha)

• Grateful Dead: Live/Dead (Fillmore West)

• Albert King Tuesday Night in San Francisco and Wednesday Night in San Francisco Fillmore Auditorium)

• Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys (Fillmore East)

• Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Fillmore East)

• Jefferson Airplane Bless Its Pointy Little Head (Fillmore East and West)

• Miles Davis At Fillmore

• The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper (Fillmore West)

• Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s 4 Way Street (Fillmore East)

This is not a comprehensive list, just my listening habits. And these are just full albums. It doesn’t count partial albums5 or tracks released on other albums.6

If that list isn’t proof enough, give a good listen to At Fillmore East. The music sounds ABBsolutely ALIVE.

Much of that comes from Graham’s sound system. Producer Tom Dowd captured that sound brilliantly for that record and I’m 100% convinced the stellar sound has a lot to do with the album’s enduring success.

“Fillmore” connotes quality.

It was the gold standard.

The biggest stage in rock.

New York City.

Artists understood that Bill Graham represented quality. Graham demanded artists meet his high standards. He trusted his gut and he had good taste.

The Allman Brothers Band met the mark.

“I played them because I thought they were really good and I thought the public would think so as well. The Allman Brothers made me feel good, in that particularly physical way. You may not move, but it affects your body as well as your emotions. The Allman Brothers have that ability to make me feel really good, to put out the good spirit within you.”

Fillmore East was the pinnacle. It was where Duane and his bandmates recorded their make-or-break third album. And what they recorded of such high quality that even the word “Fillmore” connotes quality live music. The Allman Brothers themselves have a lot to do with that, of course.

At Fillmore East is a record that has just endured. And as a historian of place, I can’t overlook the significance of the name, Fillmore East. It grounds the recording in situ, New York City’s East Village.

The Light Show

Bill Graham understood that the audience—the consumer, to put it in 21st-century terms—was vital to the experience. And the light show added to the magic.

Two different light shows served Fillmore East: Joshua Light Show & Joe’s Lights. Graham hired Joshua White in 1968 to run Fillmore East’s in-house light show. When White and Graham parted ways, Joe Raposo/Joe’s Lights replaced them. Like most places in New York City, space was tight at Fillmore East.

The light show projected from behind the stage. And when you see Amalie Rothschild’s photos you can see the ingenuity at work. For example, Graham’s people invented a lazy Susan-like stage set-up—that would rotate the drums around. That infrastructure also pushed the musicians almost to the edge of the stage.

Joe Cocker during the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour is almost standing in the audience. Now they have 30 people on stage—not a lot of room, but the Fillmore East was a very intimate space, as was true for most of the ballrooms and theatres that nurtured the rock scene of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The light show was a vital part of the performance, and that was especially true for the Allman Brothers Band when they recorded At Fillmore East March 11-13, 1971. They weren’t headliners that weekend. They were an “Extra Added Attraction”—the middle band after the Elvin Bishop Group and before Johnny Winter.7

Alan Arkush:

“I was a member of the light show by then and we weren’t booked to work that weekend because Johnny Winter was the headliner and Johnny Winter didn’t like a light show. We didn’t perform, we just came to see the shows. Duane saw me and he went, ‘Where’s the light show?’ I said, ‘We’re not hired to work this weekend.’ ‘What do you mean? I brought the whole family up here to see the thing.’

They were one of the few bands he would ask that the stage lights to be lowered so people could really see the light show. Duane called Bill in San Francisco and Bill said, “Yeah, hire the light show. Will bring them on for you. If you guys want the light show, will do it. If it will make you feel more comfortable.”8

The light show had the effect Duane wanted. The bulk of At Fillmore East was recorded Saturday, March 13.9

Closing Fillmore East

One reason Fillmore East is remembered as such an epic venue is because it had a really short lifespan.

It opens in spring 1968, and by summer 71, Graham shuts it down due to what he saw as greed on behalf of artists’ managers and agents.

Graham’s goodbye letter, featured in the Village Voice is pretty epic:

“Ever since the creation of the Fillmores, it was my sole intention to do nothing more, or less, than present the finest contemporary artists in this country, on the best stages and in the most pleasant halls. The scene has changed and, in the long run, we are all to one degree or another at fault. All that I know is that what exists now is not what we started with, and what I see around me now does not seem to be a logical, creative extension of that beginning. Therefore, I am taking this opportunity to announce the closing of the Fillmores, and my eventual withdrawal from producing concerts.10

The Fillmore will become a thing of the past. I will remember with deep emotion and fondness the great and joyous moments of that past. I sincerely thank the artists and business associates who contributed to our success. But I warn the public to watch carefully for what the future will bring.

The rock scene in this country was created by a need felt by the people, expressed by the musicians, and, I hope, aided to some degree by the efforts of the Fillmores.

But whatever has become of that scene, wherever it turned into the music industry of festivals, 20,000-seat halls, miserable production quality, and second-rate promoters—however it went wrong—please, each of you, stop and think whether or not you allowed it, whether or not you supported it regardless of how little you received in return.”11

He chose the Allman Brothers Band to close the hall the weekend of June 25-27, 1971. The band themselves calls the late show June 26, the last public show at Fillmore East, as the greatest Allman Brothers Band show of all time. (It wasn’t recorded.) The final night, Allman Brothers Band played the final set at Fillmore East.

Fillmore East was a product of its time

Graham’s was an era of experimentation, but that’s true for most musical eras.12 Graham had his finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist of his moment.

Graham always understood it was about the show, not him. But he definitely impacted the cross-pollination. He used his bully pulpit to book bands he preferred, who he believed deserved to be heard.

And this was important. Artists just need a chance to get in front of audiences. Graham was intentional about that, certainly with the Allman Brothers Band.

The only time the Allman Brothers Band headlined Fillmore East was when they closed the venue. They hadn’t even released At Fillmore East yet (it released the following week).

Yet Bill Graham chose this relative unknown southern band to close the hall. That’s how much they meant to him.

“I wanted to build them into a headliner, and I thought they should have turned the corner sooner.”

He did. And they had just recorded a landmark album at his venue that everybody knew was going to be a hit.

Graham closed the Fillmore East with a big party. Had a bunch of artists play the final weekend—June 25, 26, 27, 1971.

Subscribe now

The Allman Brothers Band closed all three nights.

When the Beach Boys manager demanded to close on the 26th, Butch Trucks remembered, “Bill didn’t even look at him. He just said, ‘Well, you can go ahead and pack up your shit and get out of here. I’ve got my closing act.’”13

The band acknowledged that show as the greatest they ever played. Prior to the 11:30 show, the theatre had been cleared for a bomb threat.

This was a really symbiotic relationship. They closed the venue with an epic 3+ hour show. Here’s how Graham described their set 24-hours later.

“They got out on the stage about 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, and they didn’t get off till about 7:00 in the morning. And it’s not just that they played quantity, and for my amateur ears, in all my life, I’ve never heard the kind of music that this group plays: the finest contemporary music. We’re going to round it off with the best of them all, the Allman Brothers.”

No recordings exist.

The next night, the night of Graham’s introduction, was recorded and simulcast on radio. It was an invite-only music industry affair.

The crowd was tame, to say the least. “Y’all are awful quiet,” Duane said, adding “too high” off mic.

And then the Allman Brothers walked off the stage. That was it. Graham closed the venue for good.

That was June 27, 1971.

The theatre at 105 Second Avenue saw several attempts to recapture its former glory.

The building operated as Villageast in 1972, before being rebranded as the NFE Theatre (New Fillmore East) in 1974. Following Graham’s objections, the use of the Fillmore name, it was christened Village East in 1975.

The building’s most notable post-Graham chapter began in 1980 with its transformation into The Saint, a revolutionary gay nightclub known for a dazzling planetarium dome and cutting-edge lighting, The Saint closed in 1988.

The theater portion met its final curtain in 1995, with complete demolition of the auditorium following in 1997, it is now an apartment complex.

The original facade and lobby at 105 2nd Avenue remain. As late as 2023, it housed a (now-closed) bank branch with a small Fillmore East display in the lobby.

13

Alan Paul, One Way Out.

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

Image and video credits in the order they appear. Anything not listed specifically is from Getty Images. All archival material is included under fair use (17 U.S.C. § 107) for commentary, criticism, scholarship, and historical analysis. Thomas Monaster (Graham underneath Fillmore East marquee); John Olson (Graham Fillmore East stage); Peter Breinig (Graham outside Carousel Ballroom); William Young; John Brenneis; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Stephan H. Lewy and Alex and David Graham); Bill Graham A&E Biography (2002); Bill Bard Associates via the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project; Steingart Associates via the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project; Last Days at the Fillmore (1971); Welcome to Fillmore East (1970); Joe Rosenthal; Fred W. McDarrah (Graham shooting a bird); Pictorial Press/Alamy (Fillmore Auditorium); Fillmore East Reconstructed (Keith Mueller) Facebook page; Amalie R. Rothschild (Fillmore East crowd from across 2nd Avenue, Fillmore East marquee from street level); CinemaTreasures.org (Loew’s Commodore, 1968); NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project (1939 NYC tax roll photo, NYC Municipal Archives); Mad Dogs & Englishmen (1970); Fillmore East Reconstructed (seating chart image and “reconstructed” video); Cecily Hoyt “The Joshua Light Show Liquid Loops” (1969); Allman Brothers Band “Whippin’ Post” 9/23/70 Fillmore East; Elliott Landy (the Band); Gary Fong (the Band at the Last Waltz) Larry Hulst (Last Waltz marquee); John Olson (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane with Graham); Baron Wolman (Graham at desk, Jerry Garcia); Amalie R. Rothschild (Graham at desk); Monterey Pop (1968); Buddy Rich Drummerworld 1970; Thomas Monaster (Graham); Amalie R. Rothschild (Fillmore East marquee closing weekend); Amalie R. Rothschild (Allman Brothers with lightshow backdrop, and backstage at Fillmore East); Richard Edelman (ABB, Fillmore East 3/11/71); Thomas Monaster (Graham outside Fillmore East); Amalie R. Rothschild (Fillmore East light show crew, Grateful Dead with Duane Allman, Allman Brothers onstage, the Who, Fillmore East interior press conference, Joe Cocker/Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Fillmore East audience, Duane Allman with slide, Fillmore East marquee); Carter Tomassi (Gregg Allman); John Brenneis (Bill Graham on phone); Duaneallman.info (Fillmore East closing weekend tickets); Sidney Smith (Butch Trucks); Fred W. McDarrah (Graham’s bird); Jim Marshall (Berry Oakley and Gregg Allman); “Bill Graham Introduction” from the Allman Brothers Band - The 1971 Fillmore East Sessions; Amalie R. Rothschild (Duane and Gregg Fillmore East stage); Ira Zadikow (Duane and Dickey Betts, February 1970); Amalie R. Rothschild (Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East); New York Daily News (Fillmore East marquee); Edmund Vincent Gillon (Village East, 1972); Tim Smith (The Saint, 1988); NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project (The Saint interior).

Jeff Kollath and I go back nearly twenty years—two museum professionals, two Allman Brothers obsessives, two guys who follow liner notes wherever they lead. Jeff reached out wanting to talk. I said let’s record it. Part music history seminar, part genuine friendship, all nerd joy.

Our Crossroads

Jeff and I met in the museum field but bonded over the music. We share the same methodology—find a name in the liner notes, follow it somewhere, let it teach you—and the same instinct that loving something deeply means being honest about its failures. Jeff is the guy you want on your trivia team and his music recommendations are consistently 10/10. We both believe that loving a band honestly—including saying out loud when they blew it—is the truest form of fandom.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

The Conversation

I’d sent Jeff “How Did it Get this Bad? Allman Arista Artistic Apocalypse”—an assignment for Record Time magazine to write about the Arista-era Allman Brothers.1

Jeff came in ready to defend Reach for the Sky and Brothers of the Road. He listened to start to finish, and came to the same conclusion I did: there’s almost nothing to defend. What followed was a reckoning with the Allman Brothers Band’s most troubled era—and the forces that created it.

How it happened: the peak of 1973, the failed American Music Show tour of November-December 1974, the solo tours that favored Gregg over Dickey, Capricorn’s bankruptcy, and a signing to Arista Records that handed Clive Davis final say so. The result was a band stripped of its dynamics, forced to play at a pace and tempo that had nothing to do with how they made music—a band whose power has always lived in intentionality. Dickey yell-singing. Gregg disengaged. Mike Lawler’s keytar!

The ABB's Worst Album

Grateful Dead comparison runs throughout. Both bands exemplars of the counterculture of the 60s & 70s, both on Arista, both navigating the same cultural moment. Why did the Dead survive Clive? It comes down to artistic control, infrastructure, and the difference between a band organically contemporizing its sound and a band being pushed by a label to sound like something it isn’t.

We gave the American Music Show got its due. Dickey’s November-December 1974 tour—Vassar Clements on fiddle; an R&B horn section; an acoustic bluegrass set; and glorious, psychedelic Western Swing takes on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”—remains one of the most ambitious and underappreciated chapters in the whole Allman Brothers story. It face-planted. We talked about why, and why the peak of 1973 made the eventual crash inevitable and devastating.

Who is Elizabeth Reed?

As proof, a recently surfaced complete recording of Dickey’s American Music Show from Santa Monica on December 11, 1974—Dickey’s birthday. It deserved to be heard, so I put it out into the world.

And we close where we started: loving this band means being willing to say when they blew it. The Arista records are the proof. The reclamation—Seven Turns, Shades of Two Worlds, everything that followed—is the payoff.

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Resources

longlivetheabb🍄com

• Vitamin ABB: Artistic Apocalypse https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/vitamin-abballmans-artistic-apocalypse

• I finally did it…I listened to the Allman Brothers’ Arista albums

  https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/arista1

• The ABB’s Worst Album https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/the-abbs-worst-album

• Record Time magazine

• Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band

• One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band

• Bill Janovitz, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History

🍄MERCH🍄

Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt, July 1976 with Long Live the ABB logo on boathouse in the background.

🍄SWAG🍄

1

Record Time is the print-only music rag by , one of my favorite follows in the online world. Issue #4 is in production. I’ll let y’all know when you can order a copy. I will also share a one-time digital edition to paid members of Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads. Stay tuned.

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

Commemoration is an important tool in my historian toolbox, particularly my work with museums and historic sites. We memorialize to remember—whether through archives or museum collections, historic sites, historical markers, books, programs, memorials to Duane (https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/remembering-duane-allman-part-2), you name it.

It helps that we set times on the calendar to remind us, again, to reconsider the past as it relates to the present.

During Black History Month, on International Women’s Day, and events like them,1 we reflect on change over time: where things have been, where they are today, and why.2

Two films about the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour—the eponymous 1971 film and the 2021 Learning to Live Together documentary—offered me the opportunity to consider change over time for women and rock & roll.

This came from an interview for my Conversation from the Crossroads podcast.3

“Conversation” is as intentional a word choice as “Crossroads.”

Great conversation, like jazz, begins at what looks like a single intersection, two fellow travelers talking—a way to explore the world through another’s eyes and experiences. The conversational format works well for me as an opportunity to curate my own thoughts in post-production. Such is the case with the attached video.

Unlike any other rock & roll story of their era, women are represented as vital members of the creative equation from the get-go.

The 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen film and the 2021 Learning to Live Together documentary each show this in on-/offstage moments from the 1970 tour and the 2015 reunion set with Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Claudia Lennear, Pamela Polland, and Rita Coolidge shine as keepers of the story. As does Rita Coolidge’s courage in light of drummer Jim Gordon’s brutal assault on her during the tour.

Women and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen legacy

Rarely are women as well represented in the rock & roll story than in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the Joe Cocker/Leon Russell tour from 1970, the live album, the incredible film that came out of that.

Fast forward to the twenty-teens, Tedeschi Trucks Band seizing the mantle, bringing that band back together and playing a reunion set. That became a documentary, Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen. Phenomenal documentary.

Women are really well-represented across the board, not as objects, but as active participants in the rock & roll story. You can see them working out arrangements, how vital they are to the music, how vital they are to the entire ensemble.

And they’re keepers of the history, as you see Jesse Lauter’s Learning to Live Together.

This is me with Teresa Knox of The Church Studio in Tulsa, Leon Russell’s studio. It’s from a recent episode of Conversation from the Crossroads—Southern music, history and culture, Tulsa-style: longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa.

Women are an important part of the band.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

And it shines through in these films.

Rita Coolidge, in particular, has been a muse and inspiration but was ripped off by the lack of songwriting credits on “Layla” and “Groupie (Superstar).” How many millions of dollars she has lost on just those two records alone?!4

But it’s more than being ripped off musically. During the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, Coolidge endured a heinous attack at the hands of her boyfriend, drummer Jim Gordon, who called her out into the hallway away from others, and knocked her out cold without provocation.

After the incident, everyone on the tour protected her.

In 2025 (probably even 2000), an incident like that would have probably ended the tour. At the very least, Gordon would have been hauled off to jail and kicked off the tour.

Rita’s sequence in the Learning to Live Together documentary shook me.

She clearly knew she dodged a bullet with Gordon, who suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother Osa in a psychotic episode in 1983. (He spent his last 40+ years incarcerated.)

Lagniappe

Tribute: Cocker Power

My video does not acknowledge ’s wonderful photography of the 1970 tour and the 2015 reunion. Her book Tribute: Cocker Power https://cockerpowerbook.com/ is wonderful—a must-have for any fan of rock & roll history, particularly rock & roll photography. Dig also , which has some fantastic Mad Dogs & Englishmen tales.

(Regarding the title of this post, yes, the pun’s intended.)

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Long Live the ABB on Etsy

Original designs in collaboration with artists and graphic designers. https://www.etsy.com/shop/longlivetheABB

🍄 MERCH 🍄

Coda

“The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” Gloria Steinem

Thanks for joining me at the crossroads.

3

Thus far I’ve posted three full episodes and several mini-episodes. Available with a longlivetheabb.com subscription and on all podcast platforms.

SPOTIFY 🍄 APPLE 🍄 YOUTUBE

Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture is an independent project of historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.' No affiliation/endorsement with the Allman Brothers.

Bluesman John Hammond passed away February 28, 2026. The son of famed record producer and talent scout John Henry Hammond, Hammond began his sixty-year recording career in 1963.

Duane and Hammond first crossed paths in November 1969. The latter was recording Southern Fried for Atlantic in Muscle Shoals. Duane appeared on four of the album’s twelve tracks: “Shake for Me” “Cryin’ for My Baby” “I’m Leavin’ You” “You’ll Be Mine.”

Hammond on meeting Duane1

Jerry Wexler sent me down to Muscle Shoals Sound. These guys backed Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and all these guys. I arrived and assumed they would all be Black studio musicians. They were all white guys. They were all a clique and everyone knew each other and their wives and it was a homegrown kind of thing.

I had been there for about three days and we had cut some tunes and I was feeling very frustrated and couldn’t get across the ideas that I had in mind. Then this guy Duane Allman and his friend Berry Oakley showed up. They had driven from Macon in this old milk truck because Duane wanted to meet ‘this John Hammond guy.’

“Hey Duane, how are you doing man!” They admired him so much.

Duane was just something else. He was a really great guy—one of those charismatic guys that makes everybody stand up and pay attention.

And I had never heard of him, so I didn’t know anything. Eddie Hinton said he was the guy that played the slide guitar on “The Weight,” but it was still not clear in my mind.

“Soon as Duane gave me the OK, the session went fantastic.”

He said, “Man I’d love to play on your record.” We did “Shake for Me” and my jaw just slacked.

This guy was just phenomenal.

All of a sudden all of these guys that I could not communicate with before understood exactly what I meant.

And that was the beginning of a short-lived, but intense relationship.

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT!

Duane & Hammond continued crossing paths

Many, many a jam when I toured with them. As soon as the gig was over, we’d be in the hotel room just hanging out playing tunes. He was really eager to learn as much as he could, just to soak it in. He didn’t need much time.

We’d jam country blues, slide tunes, Robert Johnson stuff. That was my inspiration. I had played with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and all these guys he admired so much, and he did ask me about them.

He was way ahead of me. He admired what I did. So I took that on at face value. I mean he respected me and that was great but in terms of his star rising, he was there.

That band hit so hard so fast from the beginning. I think because of Duane and Gregg, they had this great sound together. The whole band was outrageous. I mean between Gregg’s vocals and Duane’s guitar, they were intense.

These guys were totally together at the beginning.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Hammond on Duane’s death

I had spent a lot of the night before he was killed with him. It was at my place in New York.2 I left that morning for Newfoundland where I had a concert and he went back to Macon. That night I got a call. It just blew my mind. I was numb for a week. It was just unreal.

We were going to do a recording together. We had ideas but we hadn’t fully explored them yet. We were talking the night before about the recording and blues songs. He had stories out the wazoo. He was interested in aspects of blues and rock & roll, R&B. He was a sponge. He soaked it all up and he knew what to do with it.

Duane would have been a great producer. He knew how to deal with sidemen, with players and producers, instinctively.

I imagine he would probably be producing albums today if he had lived. He was multifaceted. He was aware of how to make records as well as how to play. He was a trove of information and ideas.

Subscribe now

“Duane was fearless.”

He had this vision of a mixed-race band in the deep South in 1969. He was very adamant about including everyone. He didn’t care what anyone said. He had his own vision of what was the right thing to do and he did it.

He was a live wire! He was so multifaceted that I didn’t see him as a conservative guy in any way.

He was enthusiastic about everything, about life, about music, about traveling, family. I mean, he was just an all-around guy.

He was heavy duty.

He was a good friend to me, and he was a guy who I admired.

Random Notes

Hammond taught Duane Allman open-E tuning. Up to that point (November 1969), Duane had been playing in standard tuning. The only song I know he translated from standard to open-E on slide is “Trouble No More.” See if you can tell the difference:

• “Trouble No More” from The Allman Brothers Band (recorded August 1969)

• “Trouble No More” from Eat a Peach (recorded March 1971)

Long Live the ABB custom swag

Inspiration for a Derek & the Dominos cover? Though Duane didn’t play on it, Hammond recorded Chuck Willis’s “It’s Too Late” for Southern Fried. Less than a year later, Eric Clapton and company rearranged the track for Layla.3 It’s probably just a coincidence, but tracing song lineage is one way to understand music history. It also shows how repertoires develop, which is a key subtext in any great rock & roll story (and fascinating stuff, if you ask me).

Lagniappe

John Hammond Southern Fried YOUTUBE playlist

Keep on truckin’

🍄🍑MERCH🍑🍄

Tulsa, Oklahoma is a genuine crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture—and nowhere is that more evident than at The Church Studio, the century-old sanctuary that Leon Russell transformed into one of the most storied recording spaces in American music.

Teresa Knox—founder, volunteer CEO, and graduate/founder of the School of Hard Knox—saved the building after decades of neglect and turned it into something that defies easy categorization: a working analog recording studio, a living archive, an audio engineering school, a community anchor, and one of the most compelling historic sites in the country.

Our Crossroads

Teresa and I each feels history and place in our bones, whether standing in front of a building, a grave, or a stage. We share a foundational belief that historic sites only matter if they’re relevant, and that relevance has to be earned every single day.

We’re both obsessives about provenance and authenticity—Teresa spent years restoring The Church Studio down to bedrock, following National Park Service standards to the letter, while I spent years researching Duane Allman .

And we both came to our particular obsessions through music that hit us young and never let go—for Teresa, an eight-year-old girl discovering Leon Russell on a Slurpee cup; for me, a Florida kid hearing Southern rock and thinking, “Those are my people.”

(She shared her Allman Brothers Slurpee cup with me.)

The Conversation

Teresa’s story begins with shame and pride in equal measure—growing up poor in Tulsa, learning everything she could about Oklahoma history and famous Oklahomans, and finding in Leon Russell a scraggly-haired kid from her exact hometown who made it onto a convenience store cup. That fierce pride in place became the engine for everything that followed, including buying (sight unseen) The Church, a dilapidated building in the Pearl District of Tulsa and spending six-and-a-half years restoring it.

We dig into the deliberately hybrid business model that keeps the Church Studio alive—recording revenue, memberships, gate admissions, a bar, an audio engineering school, live music three days a week, and a digital content operation generating 1.5 to 2 million YouTube views a month.

Teresa is clear-eyed about what historic sites can and can’t sustain, and her analysis of why the Church had to go back to being a working studio is some of the sharpest institutional thinking I’ve encountered.

The preservation ethics conversation goes deep—the decision to leave the permastone exterior rather than strip it back to brick, the three distinct aesthetic periods layered inside the building, and the painful saga of the historic tax credit that got pulled after Teresa had already spent the money to qualify. I have some thoughts about the Oklahoma Historic Preservation Office. Teresa is more gracious than I am.

The Founder’s Dilemma comes up—Teresa has read the book and recognized herself in it. Her strategic thinking about her own eventual exit, about making the institution bigger than Leon Russell and bigger than Teresa Knox, is the mark of a genuinely mature leader.

We close on Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Learning to Live Together—the women of that tour, Rita Coolidge, Chris O’Dell, Claudia Lennear—and the throughline from Leon Russell to Delaney and Bonnie to the Allman Brothers Band and to the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

She tells a great story of Derek Trucks arriving to the Church drenched in sweat after a six-mile scooter ride in 110-degree Tulsa heat and Susan Tedeschi teary over the Linda Wolf lenticular. That’s what this place does to people.

About Teresa Knox

Teresa Knox is the founder and volunteer CEO of the Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma—Leon Russell’s historic recording studio, now a working analog studio, living archive, audio engineering school, and community music hub. She is the author of a wonderful book, Sanctuary of Sound. Find everything at thechurchstudio.com and schoolofhardknox.com.

Resources

Books

• Teresa Knox, Sanctuary of Sound: The Church Studio Story (2025)

• Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History by Bill Janovitz

Video/Film

• This is Teresa Knox - The Church Studio | Tulsa Oklahoma (podcast interview I reference)

• Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary)

• Learning to Live Together (documentary)

History institutions

• OK Pop, Tulsa—https://okpop.org

• Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa—https://bobdylancenter.com

• Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa—https://woodyguthriecenter.org

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East

🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT🍄

🍄‍🟫🍑🍄MERCH🍄🍑🍄‍🟫

This episode of Conversations from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture features Jason Earle (), host of The Marinade with Jason Earle podcast and emerging singer-songwriter—for a wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation that explores creativity, Southern identity, community, and what it means to finally claim the artist within yourself.

Jason’s podcast was a touchstone for me during the final stretch of writing Play All Night, discovered during a writing retreat in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.1 That serendipitous connection set the stage for a friendship built on shared values, overlapping obsessions, and a mutual commitment to doing the hard work — creatively and personally.

Our Crossroads

Jason and I share more than a love of Southern music. Both of us have spent years reckoning with what it means to grow up Southern—the beauty and the ugliness, the duality that Patterson Hood named and that both of us have lived. Both of us came to our creative lives later than we planned, and both of us are leaning into it harder than ever. Jason’s journey through a decade-long relationship ending, the reclaiming of his Southern identity, and the making of his debut EP at 45 mirrors my own pivot from institutional historian to author, guitarist, and aspiring songwriter. The crossroads here is real.

The Conversation

We covered a lot of ground—geography and how it shapes you, the moment you finally call yourself a songwriter, the Drive-By Truckers as a philosophical framework, community as survival, physical media as resistance, and what it feels like to finally belong on a stage. Jason opened up about emerging from the hardest chapter of his life and finding his most authentic creative self on the other side. I reflected on finishing Play All Night, stepping into my identity as a musician, and what it means to stop being afraid of letting the music come through. Neither of us planned to go this deep. That’s what made it work.

Our conversation included the long, winding road of reclaiming Southern identity—the good, the complicated, and the parts that require ongoing work.

We open up about how geography shaped us: small-town Florida, the Florida Gators, Jacksonville’s fertile creative scene, Nashville, and the music that threads through all of it. The Drive-By Truckers’ “duality of the Southern thing” serves as a touchstone.

Jason shares candidly about emerging from a difficult personal chapter—a decade-long relationship that ended—and how leaning back into his Southern roots and creative life became a form of survival and, ultimately, renewal. His debut EP, recorded at 45, is the product of that reclamation.

I reflect on parallel themes in his own journey: finishing Play All Night, stepping into my identity as a guitarist and aspiring songwriter, and the moment my creative life stopped being something I kept at arm’s length.

Resources & Links

• Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East by Bob Beatty — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

• The Marinade with Jason Earle podcast — marinadepodcast.com

• Jason Earle music on Instagram — instagram.com/jasonearlemusic

• Drive-By Truckers — drivebytruckers.com

• Orange Blossom Revue — orangeblossomrevue.com

• Suwannee Roots Revival — suwanneerootsrevival.com

About Jason Earle

Jason Earle is the host of The Marinade with Jason Earl, a podcast exploring creativity, and a singer-songwriter based in central Florida. His debut EP is expected in spring 2026. Follow his music journey at @JasonEarleMusic on Instagram and find the podcast at marinadepodcast.com and on all major streaming platforms.

Gregg Allman was the last to join the Allman Brothers Band, the band he fronted for 43 years after Duane’s death.

Duane built his band then called Gregg in L.A. to complete the lineup. “I need you to round it all up and send it in some sort of direction.”1

When he arrived in Jacksonville March 26, 1969, everyone knew from the moment he sang “Trouble No More” that the group was complete.

Gregg was one of rock’s great survivors. He faced alcoholism, drug addiction, federal investigation, and tabloid celebrity as he carried on after his brother died. In 2010, he had a liver transplant, and he lived until May 2017, six months shy of his seventieth birthday.

He continued to tour until the end, and released Southern Blood, his final record, posthumously.

“Gregg’s lyrics come from his life of trials, failures, accomplishments—the whole thing.” Dickey Betts

Gregg’s thoughts

“As a kid, I always thought an entertainer or a musician would have no bad days. How could they? They’re entertainers. They have fun for a living. Well, baby, I’m here to tell you they do have bad days. But it ain’t nothing I won’t feel better about when I’m up on stage tonight.”

Subscribe now

“The question is what made the Allman Brothers keep on going. I’ve had guys come up to me and say, ‘Man, it just doesn’t seem like losing those two fine cats affected you people at all.’ ⁠Why? Because I still have my wits about me? Because I can still play? Well that’s the key right there. We’d all have turned into fucking vegetables if you hadn’t been able to get out there and play. That’s when the success was, Jack. Success was being able to keep your brain inside your head.”2

“My grandfather was alive when I got my first bad review. We played the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. The writer put down, ‘Although the singer sounded somewhat like a Black man, he had a four-note range.’⁠ It killed me, man. I went to my grandpa. He says, ‘Man, everybody knew Jesse James. It’s when they stop talking about you, that’s when you worry. As long as they talking about you—good press, bad press? It’s the same thing.’”3

Gregg’s bandmates weigh in

Dickey Betts

“Gregg’s lyrics come from his life of trials, failures, accomplishments—the whole thing. Those words he writes, he ain’t dressing up in front of no mirror. When he writes those words, the dude is opening up his heart, and he’s giving you part of himself.”4

Jaimoe

“So we had everyone there [Jacksonville] but Gregg and some people have said over the years that Duane was trying to do something different, but it’s not true. He told me that Gregg put a spell on women and all this stuff but there was never a doubt that he would be the singer. He was just waiting until he had all the other pieces in place. Gregory was the last member to join the Allman Brothers Band but there never was any question that he would do so. I was the first person Duane Allman signed on and he told me from the very start: ‘There’s only one person who can sing in the band I’m putting together and that’s my baby brother.’”5

Derek Trucks

“When I think about those great Allman Brothers records, what they had over all the bands of that era, at least the bands that were improvising, Gregg could sing his ass off. Not many bands of that era had a guy who could sing like that. Then you had a band that could play anybody under the table. That’s a pretty deadly combination.”6

Oteil Burbridge

“For many, many nights, every time we started ‘Midnight Rider’ there’s this light behind Gregg when he stands out front that hits the back of his hair and makes it light up and it looks like there’s a halo around him. So they would sing that a capella intro and it would just freak me out. I realize I’m up there with major league legends. ⁠That’s a really good feeling. It’s really exhilarating. It’s also beautiful to be there with the Brothers just before the show. It’s like watching the Knights of the Round Table go out to battle.”

Warren Haynes

“Even though we knew each other a bit prior to my joining, I was very intimidated because I’d been a big fan since 1969. Of course, Gregg was immediately disarming. He went out of his way to make me feel comfortable, from the very beginning. ⁠I think that was his nature. He was like that the first time I met him, in 1981. I was 21 years old. He paid me a lot of compliments and was very encouraging. Sometimes when you’re meeting your heroes, it can go either way. But that was a nice introduction to what would eventually be our relationship.”7

Chuck Leavell

“I used to go see the Allman Joys at the Fort Brandon Armory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama when I was a young aspiring musician of 13 and 14 years old. ⁠Gregg mesmerized me with his talent, that incredible voice, his understated yet strong stage presence. ⁠As he developed as an artist and songwriter, I continued to follow his career…and when the Allman Brothers Band was formed, I thought, ‘Now they have figured it out.’ ⁠That first record was groundbreaking and a new style of music, Southern rock, was born. Little did I think at the time that I would be so fortunate to eventually be a part of it. I was just a fan and admirer of what he, Duane and the rest of the band had done.”8

BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT

Lagniappes

“Oncoming Traffic” 3/19/05 Beacon Theatre, NYC and two Gregg cuts from the One More Try anthology set (1997): “One More Try” and “Never Knew How Much”

Merch

As background: these designs are unique-to-me adaptations. I upscaled and edited the classic UPI shot of Jimmy Carter in a Win, Lose, or Draw t-shirt.

The Fillmore East advertisement is from the recording of At Fillmore East. The original ad had Johnny Winter at the top of the bill. I moved him below the ABB, since they switched slots.

The shroom is a commission from , a local artist whose aesthetic just spoke to me.

🍄 MERCH 🍄