While touring Scandinavia, this adage/wisdom from my cousin Brad came to mind.

Here’s the full conversation:

Thanks for reading, y’all.

An annotated read of Tom Nolan’s 1976 book, Allman Brothers Band: A Biography in Words and Pictures. This is Part 13: At Fillmore East.

Here are Parts 1-12.

Previously on Long Live the ABB…

Allman’s work on Layla so revitalized the Dominos that they asked him to join them as a permanent member; when he demurred, saying “He had his own biscuit to fry” with the ABB. Someone suggested putting both groups together. “Wouldn’t that have been a band!” exclaims Bobby Whitlock.

Although Duane did appear onstage with the Dominos for at least two concerts, he never seriously considered these offers.

He was too committed to the group he had put so much effort into—a group which was, after three years of relative obscurity, about to turn the corner into the bigtime.

Duane definitely gave the offer serious consideration. I mean, who in their right mind would turn down Eric Clapton?!

“I really don’t know what to do,” he wrote his wife Donna. “It would mean about $5,000 a week to us, as well as a home in England and a lot of things we’d like to have. . . . I’m really up in the air right now.”

Jaimoe knew “Duane had more going playing with us than with Eric.”1

Duane agreed. The following spring, March 12-13, 1971, he and his band recorded their landmark album: At Fillmore East.

The beginning of the great popular acceptance which would be enjoyed by the Allman Brothers Band came with the release of their two-record live album: At Fillmore East.

Phil Walden recalls there was opposition from key Atlantic Records personnel to putting that album out in its final form.

“The tunes are too long,” they said. “These jams aren’t that important.”

Pricing it at $6.98 was thought to be too expensive.

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“You can’t have a double album with a band that hasn’t broken big yet. To have a live album before you’ve had a really successful studio album doesn’t make sense.”

Everything, according to certain people, was all wrong; but it turned out to be all right.

The band had not really found themselves in the studio at that time; but they had, in front of live audiences. They had more freedom there; they opened up. They weren’t a three-minute-cut band.

The live album gave them an opportunity to play on record as they played in person; and people reacted to that. That was really the turning point.

Here’s Phil Walden telling this same story from a CMT documentary released in the 00s. The whole thing is fantastic, but this snippet is gold.2

I’ve got it queued up to the point Walden recounts his conversation with Wexler, his Capricorn Records partner and Atlantic Records’ executive.

Remember, too, that Capricorn was also an Atlantic subsidiary, giving Wexler twice the right to tell Walden a double album sold for a single album price was not gonna fly economically.

These are obvious conflicts of interest, particularly as the band grew more successful. Wexler was an Atlantic executive and co-owner of Capricorn. Walden was the ABB’s manager, co-owned its record label, and controlled its publishing. Wexler might make decisions that were best for Atlantic but not for Capricorn; Walden could choose something that was best for Capricorn but not the ABB.3

Ultimately, the caliber of the March 1971 Fillmore East performances and recordings made the decision an easy one. A single album would have made sense, but Walden argued that the band’s performances warranted more, and he fought to release a double album.

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

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Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.

🍄MUSHROOM🍄MAGICIANS🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

🍑PEACH🍑PARTY🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

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SWAG: Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt.

🍄‍🟫MERCH🍄‍🟫

Conversation from the Crossroads podcast

“I told Wexler that our Fillmore East live album would have to be two LPs and contain at least one sixteen-minute song,” Walden said.

“Not every note is vital to our heritage,” Wexler replied.

“The boys are pure artists and that’s what it’s got to be,” Walden argued, adding, “Jerry agreed, he understood.”

What Wexler understood was, “I had never heard a guitarist I found as satisfying as Duane.”

Walden presented Wexler with an additional demand: “Our image is that this is the People’s Band. Music is for the people and therefore we want to make this specially priced”—a double album for the cost of a single.

Wexler relented only after Walden agreed to cut a deal on song publishing for the three original Allman Brothers Band songs on the record—“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” “Hot ‘Lanta” and “Whipping Post”—a decision that probably cost the band millions in royalties.

On this album, recorded March 12 and 13, 1971 at Bill Graham’s New York venue, we hear at last a great band in full possession of its considerable intelligence and stamina: in sound mind and body, as it were.

Whether because of the rapport generated by a live setting, or simply because some necessary time had elapsed, the Allman Brothers at last achieved their appropriate mixture of taste and power.

With grace they move repeatedly from subdued, engrossing, intricate levels, to brilliant and fiery cascades of notes, and back again to quieter yet equally exciting areas.

Guitar solos of the perfect logic blend seamlessly into arranged sections; the music rushes forward, pauses, maneuvers around a bend and continues onward with the force of a natural stream—liquid, pure, flowing, offering constant diversion to the attentive senses.

First, pause a moment to revel in Nolan’s prose. This is some of the best writing on the Allman Brothers Band I’ve ever encountered.

The album was as near a representation of the band’s live performances as possible.

At Fillmore East gave the ABB the opportunity to stretch out. “No record [is] as good as hearing the band live,” Tony Glover wrote, but “[At Fillmore East] comes close”

Said Walden, “We didn’t go back and re-record one guitar solo; we didn’t add anything to it. The live album gave them an opportunity to play on record as they played in person. That was really the turning point.”

“Elizabeth Reed” has expanded from the interesting album track of Idlewild South4 to the 12-minute-plus concert piece its dramatic conception warrants.

It is a highlight of the record and among the best pieces of music the Allman Brothers ever recorded.

Just think, had Tom Dowd not convinced Duane to excise Juicy Carter’s out-of-place/-tune sax from the At Fillmore East sessions the world would be minus a truly great work of art: the note-perfect, horn-free, first take “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” from the 3/13 early show.

Likewise, “Whipping Post” has become a twenty-three-minute tour de force, and “You Don’t Love Me” takes up another side. The length of these songs is an essential factor in the overwhelming mood the band creates.

It’s as difficult to single out notable passages as it is to separate elements of a striking landscape, but it is impossible not to notice certain moments, including those extraordinary ones which crown “You Don’t Love Me,” during which Duane’s unaccompanied blues lines build into a keening chorus which pulls the rest of the musicians along like postilions pacing to an exultant funeral dirge; coming as it does at the conclusion of an exhausting number, it takes one forcefully by surprise and affords an especially stirring release.

The success of the album and the fact that it endures all these years later as part of the canon5 validates Duane, the band’s, and Walden’s instincts to issue a double album featuring the band in their most natural element: playing live.

Where the songs on the first two albums seemed clearly compartmentalized into blues, ambitious rock, and ballad, here the music is an eclectic whole, an entity.

Blues and ambitious rock are here, but At Fillmore East is definitely missing the ballad side of the Allman Brothers Band.

No complaints from me at least not since my late friend/editor Bill Proudfoot, the Champ, helped me get over “Dreams” not being on the album. “Ol’ Duane just wanted to work on some other things on this one Bobby.”

Everything else is here. It really is the perfect representation of the Allman Brothers Band at that time in their career.

It is a machine cranked by hand, fueled by steam and wind, octane and electricity, discharging memory and surprise.

Truth.

55 years later, we are still reaping the dividends of this magnificent album. And after 30+ years of my own listening to it, I’m still finding new things to hear. That is the mark of a great album.

The group had headlined in certain Southern cities, but as the Fillmore set swiftly climbed the record charts their national status as a top-of-the-bill act was securely established. Now began, as well, the widespread critical acceptance which verified the band’s position among the hierarchy of rock.

Here’s Duane in July 1971: “You'll have to pardon me if I appear a bit swell-headed about this band, but I'm really proud of it, and it shames a lot of other bands I've ever heard. We're a lot more serious about it than a lot of people are, and we work a lot harder at it than a lot of people do. It is very greatly evidenced every time we play with a band that is supposed to be some kind of hot shit. We've been putting them in the back seat every place we play and we're going to keep on doing it because we like what we're doing. We do it damn good and we've been at it a long time.”6

After 2+ LONG years as road dogs, the group was poised to seize the mantle as the country’s #1 band.

With At Fillmore East, they achieved the success that had theretofore eluded them.

Looking back, Jon Landau7 summarizes the strengths and appeal of this group.

“The Allman Brothers were one of the few legitimate improvisatory American bands, one of the few rock bands that made a basically soloing style work. Every guy in that band could really play. And they could play together. That band could swing.

Their Fillmore album, from the first note to the last—you can’t even subdivide it into songs…it’s all there”

They were a band. Duane did not so dominate that group that they ceased to be a band, or became a vehicle for Duane Allman. It was one of the things he had most in mind when he conceived of the group; he wanted a band that he could play with, not over or against, or through. He wanted a group of partners, and that’s exactly what he got.

This last paragraph was an important part of my thesis in Play All Night.

Duane Allman’s artistic vision was a band of equals playing music like you hear on At Fillmore East.

He damn sure fulfilled that vision.

Thanks for your membership.

I am truly grateful.

Bonus post for paid members of Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

You may recognize the title and cover page above. It’s an adaptation of Cameron Crowe’s 1973 Rolling Stone cover story1 by ’s editor . (Years later, Crowe turned the experience into Almost Famous.)

Crowe caught the band at their zenith. My essay covers the nadir, the two worst records in the catalog: Reach for the Sky (1980) and Brothers of the Road (1981). This is the first article I’ve ever written for a music publication, and I’m proud of how it turned out. And I’m super pleased that we were able to use some snaps from my pal (and paid member) Art Dobie in the piece.

And for historical purposes, here’s my real-time reaction after listening to the records for this assignment.

Record Time

is a print magazine that focuses on forgotten, neglected, obscure, and unusual records, and the stories behind the music and the people who made it.

Scott and I bandied about several topics before we landed on the Arista era/error. He’s pretty strict on the print-only part of the RT equation, but we agreed I could send it out to y’all knowing some of you might want to add Record Time to your reading stash.

An Allman Brothers Story: In which a rock & roll band with a legendary run of albums signs with soft rock giant Arista and makes 2 crummy records while watching their band die a slow death

An Allman Artistic Apocalypse

Backstory

Founded in Jacksonville in March 1969, the Allman Brothers Band emerged from Macon, Georgia, as the South’s counterculture standard bearers. The group was the brainchild of hotshot Muscle Shoals session guitarist Duane Allman and bass player Berry Oakley, who conceived of a psychedelic rock band with a distinctly Southern flavor. From community jams in Jacksonville, they recruited a murderer’s row of pickers playing improvised live rock music at high decibels and even higher caliber: drummer Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson (formerly with Otis Redding, among others), guitarist Dickey Betts (Oakley’s bandmate), and drummer Butch Trucks (longtime pals of Duane and Gregg). Duane’s brother Gregg was the last to join the band.

After two relentless years touring and two relatively unsuccessful studio albums, a self-titled debut (1969) and Idlewild South (1970), the band released At Fillmore East (1971). It captured the group in its element: Onstage in front of a rapt New York City audience who adored them. Playing hard-driving blues rock with a jazz aesthetic, At Fillmore East is brilliant record and a breakthrough smash. Three months after release and several days after learning the record hit gold, Duane Allman, the band’s founder, leader, and spiritual force, died in a motorcycle crash. He was just twenty-four.

In tribute, his band played through their grief. They finished Eat a Peach (which hit #4) and embarked on a ninety-show tour as a quintet, a legendary one-year lineup called the Five-man band. In yet another entry in the Southern Gothic tale that is the Allman Brothers’, bassist Berry Oakley died in a motorcycle accident in November 1972. It was a little more than a year after, and within blocks of, Duane’s accident.

The band regrouped, adding Chuck Leavell on keyboards and Jaimoe’s lifelong friend Lamar Williams on bass. This lineup saw the band’s greatest commercial success. Their fifth album, Brothers and Sisters (1973), hit #1. Its follow-up, the desultory Win, Lose, or Draw (1975), began a slide into irrelevance that led to a break-up in 1976, a three-albums-of-declining-quality reunion beginning in 1979, and a second break-up in 1982.

The group’s artistic nadir encompasses two albums for Arista Records: Reach for the Sky (1980) and Brothers of the Road (1981). In an attempt to update their sound for modern audiences, the records feature synthesizers, keytars, background vocalists, and slick 1980s production. Both albums are pretty awful, but Brothers of the Road has the additional sin of missing Jaimoe, the first member of the Allman Brothers Band, who was fired in late 1980.

Even though I never listened to either Reach for the Sky or Brothers of the Road in their entirety, I know they suck. In fact, until this assignment for Record Time, I only owned Reach for the Sky on 8-track2 and didn’t even own any copy of Brothers of the Road, and I love the band.

I’m gonna take my first deep dive into these records after thirty-plus years of fandom, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to for the same reason nobody wanted to see Willie Mays falling down in the outfield with the Mets.

How did it get this bad?

That’s what I’m gonna try and sort out.

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

Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.

🍄MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty.

🍑PEACH🍑 PARTY🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

Read more

The first time I encountered Kenneth Burke’s concept of the Unending Conversation was in 1997. It was my first semester of graduate school in a class called, Modern Rhetorical Theory.1

I’ve carried the ideal that life is an unending conversation ever since. It’s a central precept of my teaching, my writing, my way of seeing the world. The good thing is, I’m surrounded by people who do likewise.

Earth School

This video is from an upcoming episode of Conversation from the Crossroads with , my pal and fellow maker of good trouble. He hipped me to his term, Earth School—the idea that a life well-lived means continuing to learn, to grow.

People get it instantly when I use the term Earth School. It’s not something I have to explain. I offer it to you as a way to think about the kind of ancestor you want to be.

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Music is the ultimate unending conversation

This is very much true for the Allman Brothers and extended family of bands/musicians. The core of this publication is in my subhead: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. Long Live the ABB is the lens I use to explore those ideas.

Here’s one example of that in action, my comments on a Karl Paulnack’s truly magical “2003 Address to the Parents of the Freshman Class”—Why Music Matters: The Unending Conversation.

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

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This episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.

🍄 MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS 🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

🍑 PEACH🍑 PALS🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

Thanks for joining me on the journey.

Until next time…

Bonus post for paid members of Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

I scored the six 8x10 images below on eBay. The seller included them with a Win, Lose, or Draw tour program.

An ad toward the back of that program details the source of the photos: the Official Allman Brothers Band Fan Club.

ABB merch

I included the facing page so you can browse the wares of the Allman Brothers’ official merchandising arm: Phil Walden’s Great Southern Company.1

The Allman Brothers were among the first bands that hipped to the value of merch. Road manager and ABB chronicler Willie Perkins says “the first authorized and commercially available t-shirt was a combination Allman Brothers Band and Grateful Dead design” for the bands’ co-headlining appearance at RFK Stadium, July 9-10, 1973.

The band, Perkins remembers, “began to realize the commercial value of using their image on t-shirts and other merchandise”—primarily for sales at concerts.

The initial plan was to “administer sales in-house with assistance from band members’ spouses. This proved unwieldy.”

The solution was the Great Southern Company, which, Perkins continues, “manufactured and licensed, with Allman Brothers Band approval, the distribution and sale of t-shirts, jerseys, hats, belt buckles, ladies’ tops, mirrors, pendants, and posters.” Great Southern paid the Allman Brothers “cash advances against a royalty percentage on gross merchandise sales.”2

Back to the fan club photos

I’ve never seen any of these images, and thought y’all might enjoy seeing them.

Here’s Gregg:

Here’s shots of Dickey, Butch, Jaimoe, Chuck, & Lamar:

Bonus images

Two more photos I purchased recently, photographer unknown. These are scans of actual, very faint prints. I’ve used my modest editing skills to improve them a bit to share with y’all

By the looks of things, I’m guessing these are from 1973.

Lagniappe

Just came across this gem:

Gregg Allman, Taj Mahal, and Chris Stapleton “Statesboro Blues” (2015)3

Thanks for being here and supporting my writing. I’m truly grateful.

FULL EPISODE

This video is an excerpt from a recent Conversation from the Crossroads: “I wanted to get in the game” History, storytelling, and making sense of the South

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Lagniappe

Sending this one out again. Very proud of this collaboration with my daughter Ryan.

VIDEO ESSAY: “Walk out on that stage and do it.” Bill Graham, Fillmore East, and the mighty Allman Brothers Band

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

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MERCH

Fillmore East ad.

MERCH

Jimmy Carter in an ABB t-shirt.

Put simply, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That ethos was a founding principle of the band, and it inspired both of our professional lives as teachers and historians.

When our conversation turned to the uniqueness of the Allman Brothers’ approach, John nailed a key difference between the Allmans and the Grateful Dead: the Allmans always found that crossroads home.

And don’t miss the shout-out to the original Gov’t Mule—some of the most intense rock and roll either of us has ever experienced.

FULL EPISODE1

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Lagniappe

In the full episode, we discussed our amazement at seeing the Warren Haynes/Allen Woody version of the Allman Brothers Band. Here’s an example from the last year they were in the band: “Dreams” 5/1/96.

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

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MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

1

Here’s part 2:

SWAG

Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt.

MERCH

Fillmore East ad for the original Fillmore East recording sessions.

GET YER SWAG HERE

I’ve studied Miles’s influence on Duane and the Allman Brothers Band pretty extensively, from my Ph.D. dissertation, to my book Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East, to Long Live the ABB Kind of Blue is more than the Best-Selling Album in Jazz History: It was a major influence on the Allman Brothers Band 🍄1

Everyone acknowledges Jaimoe as the one who brought jazz to the band, but as he told , “I’m absolutely certain that Duane had listened to Miles and Coltrane before he met me, but we did spin those a lot. His two favorite songs were Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’ and Miles’s ‘All Blues.’ Those two songs were the source of a lot of our modal jamming, without a lot of chord changes.”2

I’ll begin with one of my favorite quotes in the entire Allman Brothers Band universe, the group’s resident jazzman.

I felt the exact same way when I got into guitar and the blues (more than 40(!) years ago). I was already a history geek of epic proportions. Finding MUSIC in stories made the music even more meaningful. Since middle school, I have been devouring music—playing, listening to, thinking/writing/reading about.

God sent Jaimoe Downbeat magazine.

God sent me the Allman Brothers Band.

Music is divine.

Jazz and the Allman Brothers

Duane Allman~Crawdaddy 1970

We listen to Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Roland Kirk, and you know soloists and the cats that really get some shit together. B.B. King, Junior Wells.

All reach. Energy. And all reach. Woo! Kirk, shooo! He kills me. He can sure play those F sharps.4 Like bands, like young bands, British bands, that ain’t like it is with them old cats, they can really get their shit together.

Fine, fine artists. Ray Charles is another one. Tony Williams.

When we were first putting a group together, down south. Well, we were listening to Jefferson Airplane and the Dead’s records, we are all kicking around down south, buying records out of the Kmart and taking them home and digging them. And Frown [Jaimoe] comes along and says, “Well that’s cool—good, but take what I got over here, this collection.” They just turned us all around. We heard with them cats were doing. Knocked us out.

“Dreams” is the effect that good jazz has had on us. Those cats catch the flow, so it’s on a level man that—like if you can ever achieve, you’ll never be satisfied with nothing else. If you can get the music flowing out there, where you don’t have to listen to it, it just takes you away. That’s the way we try to do it. It’s what we want to get out of it.5

Duane Allman~WPLO-FM 1970

Complexity is the only difference between blues and jazz. It’s all the portrayal of the feelings and the soul in a medium other than words. You can either complain and say “Oh man, I really feel bad,” or you can put your sadness into a musical context and make it desirable. Nobody warts to hear anybody bellyache, but everybody wants to hear him play the blues. You can say the same things, but make it to where it’s a little less offensive to your fellow man by playing it with music Develop your talent, and leave the world with something.6

Jaimoe~Max Weinberg/Scott K. Fish 19827

Learning drums was different than playing music, Jaimoe discovered when he first saw Charles “Honeyboy” Otis in 1960. It changed his life.

I just got my set of drums. It was February 1960. February 28th. I was playing the drums and I thought I was pretty good. For what I was doing, I was pretty good. I wasn’t a damn professional or anything like that. I had good rudimental hands and I was interested in learning.

This friend of mine, Benny Lockhart, him and Lem Barney8, he told me, he said, “Hey man. You got to go on by The Throne and hear this band. They got a bad drummer over there from New Orleans.”

Well, that bad drummer turned out to be Charles Otis. Honeyboy. And man! You talking about walking around in a daze!? Jesus Christ! I mean, you only heard playing like that on records. And this was happening in Mississippi, man, in 1960.

Hearing it live? Phew! Man!

They played everything. Charles Fairley is from Pascagoula, Mississippi. Charles Otis is from New Orleans. Otis Dubonnet was the bass player and he was from New Orleans. And Duke Verrell was the piano player.

Now, everybody in that band sang. Otis, the bass player, he’d sing stuff like those Billy Eckstine kind of tunes. He didn’t even use a microphone. That’s the kind of lungs he had.

And as bad as Honeyboy was, Honeyboy sang 90 percent of the songs. And he sung everything: Ray Charles, Fats Domino. You name it, he sung it. But, he admitted, he said, “Man, Otis [Dubonnet] can sing.” He said, “‘Cause I don’t have them kind of lungs. If I don’t use that microphone,” he said, “I won’t be able to talk to you by the time I leave here.”

Those cats, man, they were playing. This is when I got hip to Coltrane too. They were playing “Giant Steps” and all that stuff, man. Horace Silver tunes. They’d do that for about an hour-and-a-half. Then Honeyboy would start singing. And he’d sing stuff like, “In the morning when the sun comes up / She brings me coffee in my favorite cup [Hallelujah, I Love Her So].” He sang it all, man.

And Charles Fairley used to sing this thing: “You always hurt the one you love / The one you shouldn’t hurt at all [“You Always Hurt The One You Love”].” He did little tunes like that.

The records that I had been listening to were Stan Kenton records, Ahmad Jamal, Miles, Coltrane, Stan Kenton, Gerald Wilson. All this stuff I’d been listening to—and hearing these cats play like that? There was four guys sitting there playing like that. And, I mean, it wasn’t on no record!

Man, it just blew me away.

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Jaimoe~Rolling Stone 1999

One of my favorite Jaimoe stories.

When Otis Redding wanted to write or rehearse some stuff, he would go out to his farm. The band would come out, and he’d have a big barbecue. We were out there, and I had all my jazz records with me. I found the stereo, and Coltrane was blasting all over the yard. I guess Otis took about as much of it as he could. He told me, “Jai Johanny, all you’re doing is playing that jazz. If you can’t play none of my goddamn records, I’m not going to let you play my record player anymore!”

Butch Trucks~1996

Butch on how well jazz fit the Allman Brothers mélange.

As the band fell together, Jaimoe turned us on to people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I’d kind of grown up with a classical background and Duane and Gregg with the blues. Plus, my background was gospel. But then with Dickey with the blues and the country background, it all kind of melded.

That first year or two, all we listened to was Miles and ‘Trane and people like that in the jazz idiom. We started trying to bring that element into what we were doing, putting more of the jazz spontaneity in structure, or lack of structure into what we were doing. I think that’s the unique element we added, that, with that passion we had for playing.

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Dickey Betts~Guitar Player 1972

Here’s Betts on the influence jazz had on his own playing.

It’s like the blues background was right in there and then like Roland Kirk, Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane kind of gave my music that far-out effect, and then adding that blues thing makes it a little more soulful than your jazz music.

The way it’s always worked out for us is that the music usually speaks for itself. When the right thing happens, then all of us can hear that that is the way it should be. When it’s right, we can hear it. Everybody’s got enough ear that we can tell the way it should follow.

Anytime I write something I try to keep that in mind—to have at least some time when we can get loose and go out and then bring it back to the basics. Gregg writes that way too, so that we don’t get tied down to a set little tune as much as the other groups do

That’s where our strength lies, in our improvising and free playing. If we just had to play straight tunes, we’d be no different from any other group.

Dickey Betts~Rolling Stone 1990

Dickey on the Allman Brothers Band’s jazz impulse.

It wasn’t that we consciously copied that music. It was just that later we realized that people like Coltrane and Adderley, or Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, had been pursuing the same idea many years before. For a rock & roll band, though, it was a pretty new adventure. I mean, one of the good things about the Allman Brothers was, we listened to jazz and were influenced by it without ever pretending we were jazz players. But make no mistake: It was a matter of Duane being hip enough to see that potential and responding to it.9

Tom Dowd~Swampland.com 2002

Producer Tom Dowd was with the band from the very beginning—a seventh member of the original band who helped shape their songs and arrangements into finely tuned takes on Idlewild South, At Fillmore East, and Eat a Peach. He offers a different take on jazz and the Allman Brothers Band sound, how Dowd used his jazz background to nurture the best from Dickey Betts.

Dickey was extremely sensitive to Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. He was sensitive to Grappelli particularly, if you listen on Idlewild South some of his solos start like the Grappelli violin solos and they start on low strings and go up, now all of a sudden he is a blues, jazz, rock guitar player. He never just jumped on it like that. He set a foundation and then slid into it.

I recognized that right away from my jazz sensitivity days and I could not say that to him for fear that I would upset him, so I choose to leave him alone, because what he is doing is beautiful. I would admire him and tell him that the way he started that solo is magnificent, and that what you are doing is great don’t change it, try and start everyone like that.

I would tell him to try and do every lick with that touch you have right now, because I never wanted to criticize him because I would send him off on a tangent that would take him a week to recover, but on the other hand, if you just stroked him, oh, he would come up with some exquisite playing.10

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

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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.

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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.

As a historian of the 20th century American South, Dylan’s is an era I’ve spent a lot of time studying over the years. My familiarity extends to the folk movement and the stories of John Hammond, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Joan Baez, events like the Newport Folk Festival, and the Greenwich Village folk scene that birthed the rock scene the Allman Brothers Band were such a key part of.1

Dylan’s electric set at Newport in 1965 was a groundbreaking rock & roll event, a disruption that reverberates today. From the beginning, Dylan pushed back against categorization and genre. It’s a theme throughout his life and career, as it has been for the Allman Brothers Band.2

On Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday (May 24, 2026), here are some thoughts on Dylan & the ABB.3 I put the musical connections into a playlist. Tidal’s options are more limited than Youtube, particularly when it comes to Allman Brothers’ covers of Dylan songs.

PLAYLISTS

🍑 YOUTUBE PLAYLIST (24 songs)

🍑 TIDAL PLAYLIST (15 songs)

“Trouble No More” / “Someday Baby”

I believe this is the only track Dylan and the Allman Brothers Band each released.

Dylan called it “Someday Baby” on his 2006 Modern Times album.

The Allman Brothers recorded it as “Trouble No More” on their debut album in 1969 and again on 1972’s Eat a Peach. Their version comes from Muddy Waters.

Both songs are based on Sleepy John Estes’s “Someday Baby.”

Duane’s connections to Dylan are obscure.

The Sandpipers

In 1965, the Allman Joys joined forces with the Sandpipers, a girl group from Pensacola. Duane finagled an audition in New York City with Dylan’s producer Bob Johnston, then working on Blonde on Blonde. Remembered Sandpiper Charlyne Kilpatrick, “Johnston wasn't interested in the Allman Joys, which wasn't very smart. He was very interested in us, but he was extremely busy in the studio. He was so exhausted. He asked my parents to bring us back in two weeks.” The two bands went their separate ways shortly thereafter.4

Johnny Jenkins “Down Along the Cove”

This is a cut from Duane’s solo project at FAME, the one he abandoned to form the Allman Brothers Band. Jenkins overdubbed vocals on this Bob Dylan original from John Wesley Harding. Players include Duane and Berry Oakley, and Duane’s Hour Glass bandmates Paul Hornsby, Johnny Sandlin, and Pete Carr.

Otis Rush "Reap What You Sow”

The link isn’t the song, it’s not Dylan’s, but producer Mike Bloomfield, who was Dylan’s guitarist on both Highway 61 Revisited and at Newport. From Rush’s Mourning in the Morning, recorded at FAME in February 1969, shortly before Duane and Jaimoe left for Jacksonville.

Ronnie Hawkins “One More Night”

From Nashville Skyline. Hawkins had Dylan connections through the Band, who were the Hawks, his backing group before they went off on their own. Recorded in September 1969 at Muscle Shoals Sound.

ABB/DYLAN Playlist (Youtube)

John Hammond, Jr. “Shake for Me”

Duane’s second brush with a Bob Dylan producer, Hammond was the son of the Columbia Records producer of the same name.5 He had a couple of memorable exchanges with Duane, the first in Muscle Shoals in November 1969.6

“When I arrived, they thought I was going to be Black and I thought they were going to be Black! They got pretty cold to me, and I didn’t know what to make of this. It was Roger Hawkins, Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, Eddie Hinton—and for three days I tried to get them into what I was playing, and they just seemed to play a little bit awkwardly.

Then on the scene arrives this guy with long red hair down his back, eyebrows that crossed, and a mustache that went all the way into his sideburns, wearing a T-shirt that said City Slickers on it. He pulled up in this milk truck, and everybody said, ‘Hey, Duane, how you doin’ man?’ Everybody just fell all over themselves for Duane, you know. He was their idol.

He said, ‘Where’s this John Hammond guy? I want to meet this guy—I really dig him.’ They said, ‘You do?’ And they all looked at me with new respect.

I was introduced to Duane, and he said, ‘I sure dig your stuff, boy, and I sure would love to play on your record, if it’s okay.’ I said, ‘Sure, I guess so.’ I had never heard him play before, but these guys worshipped him. As soon as Duane gave me the okay, the session went fantastic.”

The first track they cut was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Shake for Me.”7 The song kicks off Hammond’s Southern Fried.

“We decided to do ‘Shake for Me’ and my jaw just slacked. This guy was just phenomenal. So, 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. Duane was just phenomenal and a really cool guy; and everything just came together and we made the whole record in one week.

I was floored. He played on and on and on! He was just incredible.”

Open E tuning

During this same session, Hammond showed Duane how to play slide in open E tuning. He continued to play in standard tuning on “Dreams” and “Mountain Jam,” but between the first album and the March 1971 Fillmore East sessions, Duane adapted “Trouble No More” to open E and from that moment forward, played slide pretty much exclusively in that tuning.8

I’ve put both ABB versions of “TNM” on the playlist along with “Someday Baby” by Dylan and Estes and Muddy Waters on “Trouble No More.”

The Allman Brothers Band covers Dylan

As far as I can tell, the ABB never covered Dylan between 1969 and the early 2000s. This changed when Warren Haynes rejoined the band and the setlists opened up considerably. Here’s what I could track down of the Allman Brothers covering Dylan—all but a couple are on the Youtube playlist.

1. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” most often (exclusively?) played when Susan Tedeschi sat in. First showed up in setlists in 2003, played 28 times.

2. “Blind Willie McTell” joined the repertoire in 2010 and appeared 27 times.9

3. “Highway 61 Revisited” 2006 (15)

4. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” 2008 (15)

5. “All Along the Watchtower” 2007 (11)

6. “I Shall Be Released” 2007 (4)

7. “Down Along the Cove” 2011 (3)

8. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” 2011 (2, both with Steve Earle)

Woody Guthrie “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”

I don’t know if Dylan ever covered this Woody Guthrie tune, but it was a centerpiece of the Allman Brothers Band’s acoustic sets in the 1990s, including the first time I saw the band.

Guthrie was an important part of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which is why I included this here. Plus, it’s always such a pleasure to see Dickey enjoying himself playing acoustic onstage.

Dickey and Dylan

Dickey and Dylan had not only a mutual admiration society, but also a personal relationship. Each name-dropped the other in song: Dickey in “Tombstone Eyes” and Dylan in “Murder Most Foul.”10

“Tombstone Eyes”

It’s clear this song meant a lot to Dickey. He worked hard on it for five solid years. Debuted at the Beacon Theatre in 1996, it underwent several iterations and name changes before Dickey settled on “Tombstone Eyes” for his 2001 album Let’s Get Together.11

The first two verses conjure visits to Elizabeth Reed’s gravesite in Rose Hill Cemetery for hush-hush trysts with Carmella (Storniola) Scaggs in the band’s early days in Macon.12

“Not so long ago, just a few years back.
We used to hang out down by the railroad tracks.
The guitars playing and the singers made rhyme.
It was a good time for being free.

Bouquet of flowers on her kitchen windowsill.
We listened to Bob Dylan’s stuff he’d just done in Nashville.
Lay down on the hillside and look up at the sky
We had it all you and I.”

The Dylan reference is Nashville Skyline, released April 9, 1969, around the time Dickey and the band relocated to Macon.

“Tangled Up in Blue”

Dickey covered this Blood on the Tracks tune on his mostly acoustic 2002 album Collectors #1.13 It is my favorite track on an album that I dearly love. Betts is playing on an Alvarez gut string here, which is why you don’t hear him bending a lot of notes. This is a deep cut and a way cool arrangement. Don’t skip this. (You’re welcome.)

“Ramblin’ Man”

Then there’s this gem, Dickey and Dylan dueting on “Ramblin’ Man” in 1995. The sound isn’t great, but it’s worth a listen.

The backstory is even better, I’ll quote a bit from Flagging Down the Double E's/Ray Padgett:

Bob wanted to do “Ramblin’ Man.” I said, “You don’t know the words to that, do you?” He said, “I know all the words to ‘Ramblin’ Man.’ I shoulda wrote that song myself.”

I said, “Okay, let’s check. If you don’t know, just make shit up, and you’ll do well.”

So we sang “Ramblin’ Man.” He sang every word exactly the way I wrote it.14

Gregg and Dylan

First, a note from Jaimoe.

“Gregory’s music and singing were based on rhythm and blues and blues but his songwriting was so influenced by people like Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne and other people who wrote poem songs. What made him so unique is the way he combined those things.”

“Just Like a Woman”

Gregg sat in on this Blonde on Blonde track with Gov’t Mule a few times over the years. It saw official release in 2015’s Dub Side of the Mule.

“Going Going Gone”

This one, from Gregg’s Southern Blood, hits HARD. It’s also the only Dylan song Gregg ever recorded,15 which is a surprise to me. Gregg was one of his generation’s greatest interpreters, and Dylan’s vast catalog seems a bit of a missed opportunity for him.

Or perhaps it’s like Jaimoe said, Gregg captured the Dylan spirit with his own writing.

Butch and Dylan

Butch Trucks and the Freight Train Band “Highway 61 Revisited”

Butch’s only vocal was his turn on a cut made most famous by Johnny Winter, I suppose. This is a raucous version with one of two(!) bands Butch toured with after the Allman Brothers Band closed up shop in October 2014.

Frogwings “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”

Apparently the Allman Brothers Band considered cutting a version of this Blonde on Blonde track for 1994’s Where It All Begins but shelved the idea for “No One to Run With.”

In 1997, Butch revived it for his band Frogwings. Here’s the final performance of the Edwin McCain-fronted Frogwings (which I much prefer) 5/3/98 Sunfest West Palm Beach.16

Thanks for being here y’all.

Until next time…

I obsessed over “Dreams.” The song’s ethos of carrying on in the face of insurmountable mountains, has been a guiding force in my life. (See: https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/dreams-part1.) It was my first “favorite” Allman Brothers Band song. Remains, with “Mountain Jam,” my favorite to this day.

The music consumed me, and I became enamored with the Allman Brothers Band’s story. There was a Southern Gothic quality to it that the Dreams box set captured brilliantly—Duane’s death just as they’re about to take off, Berry’s death a year later, and the band continuing on in each case.

The Allman Brothers reunited after touring on Dreams. They were active as a recording band, and, as always, made their name on stage. Music and guitar magazines said they’d found a new magic—something based on the foundation Duane Allman had long-before established for the band. One such publication was Guitar World. I can’t recall the issue, it was one of several Allman Brothers’ features they ran over the years, but this was on ABB history—two guys who years later have become friends: , the dean of ABB historians, and Kirk West, ABB Tour Mystic. Kirk commented “Mountain Jam” going on for 30+ minutes on a lark.

“Any band that can hold my attention for 30 minutes, deserves it,” I thought out loud.

That night, on break from my shift at Wunderbar at the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando, I walked to the music store and bought Eat a Peach on CD.

It started a lifelong love affair, one that’s shown zero signs of cooling. It is simply the most magical musical moment I have ever encountered. “Mountain Jam” speaks to my soul in ways I can never give words.

Shit, 90% of writing Play All Night was an attempt to explain “Mountain Jam” for myself. There are some moments in music that defy description. If you play with other people, you’ve surely felt it. The part when there is no separation from you and your instrument, you are communicating in a language your bandmates also understand, and they are also so keenly in tune with you, and you with them, that you seem to move as if one.

That’s what I hear when I listen to “Mountain Jam.”

“Mountain Jam” is my favorite 33-minutes of music of all-time. I have told my children I want the back half of “Mountain Jam” played at my funeral—from Duane’s count-off to the end. Because it’s what Heaven sounds like to me. (Which fits, because what I imagine Heaven to look like is the image in the Eat a Peach gatefold.)

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19 days ago · 1 like · MJ Polk

And stay tuned for a guest post this Sunday on —a music storytelling series that dives into connections to the songs that shape our lives. “Mountain Jam” is the topic there too.

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

“Berry Oakley, Dickey Betts, Butch Trucks, Jai Johanny Johanson, Gregg Allman, I’m Duane Allman!”

Duane’s emotional introduction of his band concluded nearly an hour of nonstop music playing just two songs, “Whipping Post,” a ferocious psychedelic blues and “Mountain Jam,” a tour-de-force instrumental based on Donovan’s “There Is a Mountain.”

“Mountain Jam” closed a five-show run at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. Four of the March 1971 shows served as sessions for the band’s third album, At Fillmore East, whose success validated Duane’s pursuit of musical excellence on his own terms in a music business that prioritized conformity and record sales over individuality and live performance.

At Fillmore East appeared just two years after Duane turned his back on a successful career as a studio guitarist to develop a band focused on musical virtuosity and improvisation, qualities best presented live. Duane forged an uncompromising musical path as the ABB’s front man despite neither singing nor writing. And Duane, a white man, made this journey in an integrated band from the South, a group of fellow southerners whose sound melded strains of southern music in ways that reflected a collective vision of music and its possibilities.

Improvisation, virtuosity, and live, organic, communal, experience are what Duane Allman valued most in music. It took him time to sift out these values, put them into action with the Allman Brothers Band, and capture the dynamic on record.

These qualities are all in abundance on “Mountain Jam.”

The song is one of the earliest in the repertoire. But to call “Mountain Jam” a song is a misnomer. It’s a jam in the truest sense of the word. It begins with the group toying with Donovan’s melody in “There is a Mountain” before they lock into a groove that is entirely their own.

“It was literally a jam that turned into a song,” Betts recalled. Gregg said, “We just started playing it one day, a happy little melody and it makes for a really nice jam.”1

“Mountain Jam” is twelve-minutes at Macon’s Central City Park on May 4, 1969.2 In less than a year, the band stretched out the song beyond thirty minutes, including multiple movements and solos from all six members.

Donovan’s simple pop song provided a platform for the band’s explorations and influences. “Mountain Jam” is a conversation. Duane would quote “Shortnin’ Bread,” a nineteenth-century folk song, which, Jaimoe remembered, prompted “Dickey’s melody that answered and made statements in response to Duane’s melody.”

Said Butch, “Duane would start playing, and as soon as Dickey would hear something, that would trigger something in him, Dickey would jump right in and start playing along. Neither one of them were playing guitar solos. Duane would start the conversation, and Dickey would join in the conversation. We all would. And then we’d see where it would go. And every night it would go to a different place.”3

On many nights, including the version from Eat a Peach, Duane’s outro solo featured the Carter Family standard “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as the song wound down.

It’s in this moment listeners can hear the closeness of the musicians in their musical conversations, each improvising his part, whether soloing, comping, or both simultaneously. “What made that weekend special is that we had been out on the road, we’d been playing these songs, and you know how sometimes, everything comes together at the right time? When you have the right people in the right place doing the right thing?” Butch Trucks reflected. “We were really comfortable with these songs that we were playing. On ‘Whipping Post’ and ‘Mountain Jam,’ we had really learned to talk to each other. By the time that weekend came along, we were really communicating.”

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“Mountain Jam” closed out the ABB’s three-night run at Fillmore East in March 1971. You can hear its opening notes as the band chugs the band forward out of “Whipping Post.” The track fades out, closing At Fillmore East. “Mountain Jam” would appear the next year on Eat a Peach, covering sides 2 and 4 of the LP.

Berry Oakley

Berry Oakley didn’t get many bass solos with the Allman Brothers Band. (ABBassists typically get one spot a night.) But he’s really soloing all night. And nowhere is this more evident than on “Mountain Jam.”

Berry amazes me. I hear so much push-and-pull, call-and-response. I love the way he drives the band in answering what the soloists are doing. The ABB catalog is packed with Berry Oakley greatness; “Mountain Jam” is among my favorites.

The 33-minute jam evolves out of “Whipping Post”—Butch thundering on tympani 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 gallop along along together…

• About 9:02-ish, they begin a new conversation. Dickey will say something, Berry answers in a way that prods Betts 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 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.

• 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.

“Mountain Jam” is a masterwork of momentary composition.

The six musicians created an entirely new piece of music from Donovan’s simple song, a fully improvised jam with multiple movements and solos from each band member, including a drum duet between Trucks and Jaimoe. Berry Oakley transitions the drum/bass jam to a thundering cadence of notes, Duane, Dickey, and Gregg join back in, the next five minutes are some of the finest musical communication the Allman Brothers Band ever recorded. They are so in sync, the result sounds less like improvisation and more like a classical music ensemble. Listening almost feels like eavesdropping on an intense conversation; the music sounds that intimate.

Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.

MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin, Buddy Lewis, Kevin Harper, Charlie2541

1

Here’s a recording from May 4, 1969 in Macon:

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

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3

Jon Dale, “Butch Trucks on the Allman’s Wild Times at the Fillmore East,” Uncut 9/14/14.

SWAG

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.

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Everyone has that person in their life—someone slightly older than you who introduced you to great music. For me, that was Brad Beatty, my first cousin and the person who has known me longest in this life. Brad and I loved the Beatles, Tom Petty, and Steve Miller Band. Sometime in the 80s, he hipped me to punk rock/alternative music.

Brad is a man of deep faith. He founded Heart for Winter Haven to address poverty, homelessness, and broken community in his hometown. He served in the Navy during the first Gulf War, came home, and built something grounded in the belief that generosity—of service, of words, of money—returns more than it costs. He is a counselor by training and was dispensing wisdom at age ten (I say that without exaggeration).

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Our Crossroads

Our dads were brothers who grew up in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s on a chicken farm. The farm was off Beatty Road in Babson Park, Florida, our name on a road sign is all that remains. We share the South—the pride, the inheritance, and the reckoning with a Lost Cause catechism we had to deconstruct on our own terms. Music has remained important to both of us, since discovering the Beatles in my mom’s record collection. As young teens in the early 80s, we listened to (pre-classic rock) radio, excited for the new “Rock Block” weekend format—three Tom Petty, Steve Miller, and Skynyrd songs in a row.1

We share faith, though carry it differently. We are husbands and fathers and Southerners, two dudes unpacking those labels and their meaning in our lives.

In addition to our family connection, our conversation sits at the crossroads of so many topics I regularly discuss: music and art as healing, the South as inheritance, history as liberation, and the enduring question of legacy and meaning.

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The Conversation

Music. We started with music. Brad is the reason my musical tastes expanded in middle school in the 80s. He brought me to the Smiths, New Order, Black Flag, and Minor Threat—an entire musical universe that shaped both of us. These thoughts rolled through my mind at the Orange Blossom Revue in Lake Wales,2 as we stood together and watched the Drive-By Truckers, a band that means as much to me as any Southern band since the Allman Brothers.3

Abide. Brad used the phrase to describe the Allman Brothers. Not “abide” in The Big Lebowski sense. Abide as in being present. He observed you can feel how present the Allman Brothers are with each. That presence pulls you in. He connected it to the way music calls us out of the anxieties of the future and the regrets of the past and into the moment. It’s a brilliant construct.

Family. We talked about family inheritance, specifically the legacy of the Lost Cause. Though we are six generations removed from our Southern family’s Civil War experience, the mythology of the Lost Cause reached us intact. Brad saw through the inherent racism watching his father interacting with his Black citrus industry workers and teaching him to respect them. My journey was more academic. It began in undergrad and moved into full focus during a New South class my first semester in history in graduate school, when the lengths white Southerners went to keep Black people subjugated hit me as indefensible.

History is liberation. There is greater power in saying “our ancestors made a mess” than the weak sauce of defending what they built. Brad notes that the residual pain belongs to the persecuted and the inheritors. He concludes that we should look to the margins and be more thoughtful about how we build the future. He said it with humility and without qualification.

Place. The farm off Beatty Road in Babson Park—a family poultry farm started by an Irish goods trader and the only daughter of a physician who left New York City because they were tired of it. When my dad died in 2014, Brad and I went to the farm together to get a scoop of dirt to place in the ground with my father’s urn because that place was his, and ours.

Theology. Brad had a spiritual reawakening at twenty-one and went back to the ancient texts with the same seriousness he brought to punk rock—looking for the real thing underneath the packaging. He found the ministry of reconciliation and built a career around it.

Music and Art. My evangelical upbringing taught me any non-spiritual music was of the Devil. And I carried guilt for years about my love of music. Brad cut through that cleanly: art is God-breathed whether the artist intends it or not, because creativity creates something different in every person who encounters it. Art is a lens and a mirror—you look through someone else’s eyes and catch a reflection of yourself. He said if you saw the whole reflection at once, you would fall apart.

Heart for Winter Haven. Brad founded H4WH after returning to his hometown with a love for his city and a conviction that the love he had received from God was not his to keep. The organization addresses poverty and homelessness through the lens of broken relationships—with family, with work, with money, with self, and with God. Brad noted homelessness is a man-made problem: finite & solvable if the will exists. Their goal is to end child homelessness in Winter Haven by the end of 2030—a tall order given 50%+ families in Polk County are one missed paycheck, one broken transmission, one uninsured broken arm from the margin.

Community. Hope gets passed around in community. Hope gives people courage. Brad believes God created us for community and that your community works better when you honor each other.

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

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Resources

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

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John Lynskey taught history at Miami’s Columbus High School for thirty years, coached for twenty, and served as assistant principal for seven. Upon retirement, he moved to Macon to work hands-on with the Big House Museum, where he had served on the board since day one. He has produced more than two dozen archival releases for the Allman Brothers Band, co-wrote Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg with drummer Bill Connell, and spent two decades as a driving force behind Hittin’ the Note magazine.

But I knew John well before I knew of his connection to the Allman Brothers Band. In the early 1990s at UCF, some of my good buddies were Columbus guys, John’s guys. Lynskey was their history teacher and coach, full stop. Decades later, Mario sent a photo at John’s retirement. Talk about mushroom magic. Mario’s text arrived within minutes of it dawning on me that their beloved history teacher was John Lynskey, my fellow Allman Brothers historian and whose work I’ve been mining for decades.

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Our Crossroads

John and I share multiple intersections. We are historians who found the Allman Brothers Band through the music and grew fascinated with the entirety of their story. We both understand what it means to sit in an archive and chase a review that might not surface for five months after an album dropped. We believe music is a primary source, a band is a team, and community is what happens when like-minded people stop pretending they don’t need each other.

When I launched Play All Night in Miami in October 2022, John flew down to host an event. Like the teacher and coach he is, Lynskey teed me up to tell Duane’s remarkable story in a bookstore packed with his students. That night I met Abel Sanchez of MiamiStadium on Instagram, a sports, history, and culture site that became a model for my work at Long Live the ABB.

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The Conversation

(Picking up where we left off in part 1)

During the 1989 Dreams reunion, John saw two shows he never thought would happen at Sunrise Musical Theatre in Fort Lauderdale. He knew who Warren Haynes was. Allen Woody was a revelation. He blew the room away.

Dickey was still in his ABBsolute prime. Haynes pushed him into a different role—the push-pull that had been missing since Duane. We agreed Dan Toler and Dickey played too similarly for that tension to exist.1

We talked about my first show—November 13, 1993. I went expecting a nostalgia act. I got on the bus that night. I was unaware that Dickey had just returned from a rough patch and the Florida dates were a test run. The band broke out “Mountain Jam” for the first time in years. It was a concession from Dickey upon returning to the band.

I asked John for archival favorites by year. 5/2/70 Swarthmore; 3/13/70 Warehouse, NOLA; 2/28/71 Brewer Fieldhouse with John’s favorite “Dreams;” 4/8/72 Manley Fieldhouse; 9/26/73 Nassau Coliseum.

We talked about the dearth of Duane era bootlegs. Mike Callahan, the band’s soundman, apparently had a footlocker full of tapes. The footlocker disappeared when he got sideways with disreputable people. It’s probably sitting at the bottom of Tampa Bay.

Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg is one of my favorite books in the Allman Brothers canon. The book fills gaps. Duane’s first marriage. The Anchor Motel brawl with Shriners in Nashville. The Boutwell Studios session in Birmingham where the tapes vanished. Duane and Gregg running into Yardbirds Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in New York—young musicians chatting, none of them knowing what they would become.

I asked John for his favorite projects. Hittin’ the Note ran twenty years. The Trouble No More box set gave John an unlimited word count and earned Grammy consideration. The Laid Back deluxe reissue gathered everything Gregg recorded in that era. A Gregg Allman documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, is coming to seventy-five theaters this summer.

Like-minded people have a way of finding each other. John has watched it happen through Columbus High School and through the music of the Allman Brothers Band.

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

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Resources

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

• Bill Connell with John Lynskey, Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg (2023).

• Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (1995).

• Abel Sanchez, Miami Stadium on Instagram—www.instagram.com/@miamistadium

  ---

MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

1

Toler’s greatest flaw is probably that he’s the least regarded guitarist in the greatest guitar band in history. Not a knock on Toler really, as Duane, Dickey, Warren, & Derek routinely rank high on any “Top ### Guitarist List” and Jack Pearson is the one they all cite as the GOAT in ABB circles. Here’s some proof:

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Fillmore East ad adapted to move the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, the weekend they recorded At Fillmore East. Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them.

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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.

Out of print since its first print run in 1975, the book is packed with ABBsolute gems. Nolan’s interviews with the band and crew right before the first break-up are insightful. So too is his commentary on the band’s ascent.

The Allman Brothers Band: A Biography in Words and Pictures has long been an essential source for me.

Here’s part 1 of my marginalia series.

I did my best to organize this visually for you.

The original text looks like this.

My comments look like this.

I’ll start from the beginning…

Acknowledgments

I love to read a book’s front matter.

Always.

I learn a lot about writers and their respective journeys, and appreciate and learn from the ways folks pay honor to others. Nolan’s Acknowledgments are simple: three paragraphs, each increasingly shorter.

Virtually all the material in this book is the result of a series of interviews conducted in Macon, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in June and July of 1975.

Grateful acknowledgment is extended to Capricorn Records, without whose generous cooperation this project would not have been realized. Mark Pucci, Mike Hyland, and Diana Kaylan of Capricorn were especially helpful. Absolutely indispensable was the coordinating effort of Twiggs Lyndon, "the rock-on-tour raconteur.”

The timing here is interesting, particularly given what a fraught time it was for the band. It was a fractured group that recorded Win, Lose, or Draw in 1975. Gregg had relocated to L.A. with Cher and was mostly absent from the sessions. Within a year, the group would break up. You wouldn’t know anything wrong by reading this book.

Capricorn’s promotions folks had a big hand in the book and I have a feeling that’s why it’s as thorough as it is.

And gotta love the mention of Twiggs, the band’s original road manager and one of Duane’s earliest disciples. This book is LOADED with great Twiggs stories.

Macon residents who made the author’s stay in that city pleasant and memorable include Darlene Moore, Robert D. Lewis, Rodney Groth and Gyro of the ABB road crew, and the entire Morrison family.

The author thanks all those interviewed for their time and candor.

The band was remarkably candid and cooperative as was everyone involved in the book. It really is an incredible document of the time.

Dedication

This work is respectfully dedicated to the eight members, past and present, of the Allman Brothers Band.2

This is a really nice touch, acknowledging Duane and Berry—as well as Chuck and Lamar—along with Butch, Dickey, Jaimoe, and Gregg.

The text is very respectful to the Allman Brothers Band as a band—Duane’s founding ideal that outlived him despite the odds.

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Baby pictures. Snapshots of a shorthaired high school band called the Escorts.

Creased photographs of the same fresh faces, a few years later, with the written legend: the Allman Joys. The pseudo-psychedelic cover of an album on Liberty Records by The Hourglass. Then, blurry black-and-white enlargements showing the very first gigs played by the Allman Brothers Band. Amidst scrapbooks and memorabilia forming an informal archive, Mrs. Geraldine Allman speaks of her sons.

“I remember when we got the first guitar. It was a $19.95 Sears acoustical. He had earned the money on a paper route. He was a little kid at that time, just a brat. Not a brat, but, you know - 11, 12. You know what kind of a sound comes out of a dumb $20 Sears guitar! But he was so happy.” They were in Castle Heights, which is about 30 miles outside of Nashville.

First, the band’s name was Hour Glass, not the Hourglass. It’s a minor detail I know, but something the Champ3 pointed out and I keep up in his memory.

Second, Duane and Gregg weren’t at Castle Heights when Gregg got his first guitar. They were visiting their grandmother in Nashville when a neighbor showed him his guitar. Gregg saved up money to buy one when he returned to Daytona Beach.

The Castle Heights Military Academy building is now the Lebanon (TN) City Hall. Also in Lebanon, Bradley’s Barn studio, where Duane and Gregg first recorded as the Allman Joys.

“Duane had one year of piano lessons; Gregg had a half a year, then his teacher got ill.”

Duane was scared of his teacher, telling her when he quit “The reason I don't wanna do this is because I'm never gonna need it for the rest of my life. I'll never need this damn music!' She died before I could get back and apologize to her. I always regretted that.”4

His teacher also told him he had beautiful hands. I can see why. His hands look made to play guitar.

Then they joined the marching band, and played trumpets, before we moved to Florida. Their father died then, and they thought we were going to fall off the earth; they felt insecure. So I said, look, I’d rather you stayed here in school, but if you want, when vacation comes, you can come home with me; we’ll pack up and move to Florida. That’s what we did. But then they weren’t happy there, and they went back to military school in Castle Heights.” She shows a picture of Gregg in school uniform, but has none of Duane - he tore his up.

Duane and Gregg had two separate stints at Castle Heights and hated both of them. The comments about their father, Willis Allman, are interesting to me. Never noticed that “felt insecure” line before, but it makes sense. Duane was three and Gregg two when Willis was murdered.

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That’s when they started guitar again. They would play at parties, little sororities, things in school. It just grew out of that.

Duane - and I don’t say this just as a mother - Duane was a brilliant person. We sat on the couch one day. and by this time we had traded guitars so many times: he had his guitar, and he said to me, ‘Mother, I would go hungry to play this guitar.’ Well, then, I knew he was dedicated. I knew that he had picked his way.”

This is a powerful quote, but also one that’s easy to dismiss. Many mothers talk about their sons in these glowing terms. Add to it that Duane died young, before he was truly famous. His efforts were forever cast in bronze by 1971.

But here’s the thing: this quote is typical when folks talk about Duane. His was “a love affair with the guitar,” as his daughter Galadrielle called it.5

The Garbage Circuit

He wanted to snatch Gregg out of school. I said, no, you didn’t want to graduate, but Gregg wants his diploma. Duane didn’t need a diploma; later he regretted it, but he didn’t need it, he had everything born in him that he needed. But I said, Gregg’s gonna get his. So Duane waited around for Gregg to get out of school.

Then I said to them, if you’re going to be in this business, you gotta get into it. You go right down here to Local 601 and join up. Duane says, ‘Momma, how come we gotta spend all that money?’ I said, “Look, man, they ain’t but one way in this business. If you gonna go, you have to join the union, and you pay your dues. I said, These are the first dues. You got a lot more to pay in life.”

When they were ready, I sent them to Atlanta, to a friend of an acquaintance of mine, and they auditioned. And as Duane said, they worked the garbage circuit of the South. But they learned a lot of things.

Don’t miss that Geraldine insisted Gregg finish high school and that her sons join the musician’s union.

When the Allman Joys hit the road in 1965, that Atlanta booking agency was Allied Artist Agency.6

I love Geraldine cited Duane’s “garbage circuit of the South” reference. It’s from an interview with Ed Shane of WPLO out of Atlanta. (I’ve queued it up for you.)

Know what Duane Allman said? He said, ‘Mother, I never want a hit record. I do not want that wherever I go, I have to play the same song.7 I want to do whatever I want to do; I want to be free: ‘He says, ‘I don’t want fame and fortune. just want enough money to eat regular, and to pay my bills, that’s all I want out of life; and to play my guitar.” He did not want the fame and fortune. He never looked for it, and that’s why he attained it. When you don’t look for it, it comes to you.

When you try so damn hard, you never get it. This is the truth. Duane didn’t ever want nothing but to play his guitar, and make enough money to keep himself clean and fed, to pay his bills and his rent, and to buy himself one more guitar, if he wanted one more guitar. He didn’t ask too much out of life. And neither does Gregg.

The fame and the fortune has happened to Gregg, and it’s different, much different. We’ve been through so many changes, Gregg and Duane together, both of them. But they just played their music, and did what they wanted to do; and that’s where it’s at.

It’s 1975. Mama A. has seen her son Gregg and the Allman Brothers Band reach the ABBsolute peak of fame.

And Duane missed out on every bit of it.

Johnny Sandlin, now a resident producer at the Capricorn Records Studios in Macon, Georgia, met Duane and Gregg Allman in Pensacola, Florida, in 1964.

The date was actually 1966.

Sandlin called the Allman Joys “amazing, the best band I had ever heard. They were playing very different music from what we were: English stuff, Yardbirds, and Beatles’ music. They were just incredible.”

Here’s a recording of the performance he’s talking about:

Duane was 17, Gregg was 16, and they had a band. “They were the first band I’d seen with long hair, and I mean long hair.” Sandlin says. “Hanging way down past their shoulders.

They were in danger; their lives were in danger, in the South.

“People just didn’t cater to that in a Navy town.”

The Allman brothers were the first long-haired musicians Sandlin ever encountered. “It was almost a cardinal sin to go around with long hair at that time, and I couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten killed.”

This continued to be an issue for the band into the early 1970s. It is also a major subtheme of Play All Night.8

Sandlin was the drummer in Five Minutes, a band playing on the same bill as the Allmans. When both bands broke up simultaneously, the remnants reformed into a single group.

We called it the Allman Joys, the Allman Act - anything we could use to get gigs at the time. We played a lot of rather questionable clubs, around St. Louis and all, until we met our manager, Bill McEuen, who was also the manager of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

The Five Minutes also played as the 5-Men-Its. The group included the incredible Eddie Hinton, who quit the road to play sessions in Muscle Shoals.

“Then we set out to California to be rock ‘n’ roll stars.”

In Los Angeles, in 1967, the Allman Joys were rechristened the Hourglass, under which name they made two albums and several singles for Liberty Records.

The band’s style was Contemporary Adaptable; like the Fogerty brothers’ pre-Creedence group, the Golliwogs, Hourglass shifted musical stance from track to track. One moment they were a go-go band, the next a funkier Young Rascals, with a strain of r&b evident throughout.

While Hour Glass has its defenders9, no one in the band was pleased with the the music they recorded for Liberty.

As keyboardist Paul Hornsby remembered. “They didn’t know what a southern rock band was supposed to sound like. It was Black, blues-based rock ’n’ roll. [Producer Dallas Smith] kept referring to us as a Motown band. We do Black-oriented music, but it’s southern blues, southern black blues. It’s not Motown.”

Standout cuts from this band include “The Power of Love,” a likable tune sung with throbbing ‘60s emotion by Gregg Allman; and “Bell-Bottom Britches,” an obscure artifact of a period, worthy of inclusion in a time capsule (and bearing no resemblance to a similarly-titled song later recorded by Derek and the Dominos featuring Duane Allman).

“The Power of Love” was title track to the band’s second album. Liberty released the song as a single in 1968; it failed to chart.

“We got hooked up with a label that was not to our best advantage,” Sandlin continues, “and a producer who was not in tune with what we should have been doing. We never understood what they were trying to do with us, except make us another Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.

“We sat and rotted for a year and a half. Trying to keep up some kind of image. We couldn’t play in just any joints out there, just to keep our chops up; we had to play only the fashionable places. We played the Whisky a Go Go lots.”

No members of Hour Glass spoke fondly of the experience with Liberty Records. Their contract terms left them stymied creatively, forced to record songs and wear clothes selected by Liberty and producer Dallas Smith.

The music and image-making neither reflected nor appealed to the band. They simply wanted to play.

“The Fillmore. The Avalon. The Cheetah - the beautiful Cheetah, with the strobe lights; man, I couldn’t even see what I was doing when they turned those things on! We’d play once every week or two, and have nothing to do the rest of the time. A lot of what we played was copy stuff. Yardbirds material. Lotta rhythm and blues - Gregg has a great r&b voice.

By all accounts Hour Glass was a great live band. But Smith limited Hour Glass’s live engagements, leaving Duane and his mates in dire financial straits. The band found a measure of salvation when they finally reached the stage. Rather than songs from their album, they played the music they knew best, southern blues and R&B.

I collected some examples here: Playlist: Hour Glass repertoire.10

“I didn’t know what to think. I was scared to death. I didn’t like what I saw.

“This was ‘67, ‘68. Most of the groups happening then - the San Francisco Sound? - were basically inept musicians, copying old songs, playing rather meaningless fifteen-minute solos; but everybody said this was what’s happening. California seemed to drive the whole band crazy. Being from here, and going out there was just strange strange strange.”

The “here” Sandlin is talking about is the South. Los Angeles was disorienting. It left the southerners feeling “awfully alienated.”

Southern music offered comfort. Hour Glass bass player Pete Carr recalled playing the “The Long Black Veil.” “I remember us harmonizing on it, and it really was a moment separated from everything else we were doing. It was like a close family thing.”

Final note: I’m going to leave “inept musicians, copying old songs, playing rather meaningless fifteen-minute solos” unanswered for now. Remember that he’s talking in 1975, at a time when the jamming excesses of the late 60s were out of vogue.

One thing Duane found to occupy his time was learning slide guitar.

Sandlin was not one of his biggest encouragers. “I asked him what the hell he was doing with that bottle. ‘Man, that sounds terrible!’ He had some records he was learning licks from. I’d say, ‘Man, as good as you play, why do you do that damn thing on your hand?’ It didn’t sound good at all; it was just horrible. And we would do it onstage. And sometimes it’d work and sometimes it wouldn’t. But then all of a sudden, you look around and he’s doing things that nobody else ever done on it. I’m glad it wasn’t up to me.”

Anyone who’s ever struggled to play slide can relate to Sandlin. I always find it funny to think of Duane Allman struggling to play anything on guitar.

But to think he struggled to learn slide really blows my mind.11

Meanwhile, Hourglass morale deteriorated. “One day, the band would have broken up. The next day, we were back together. We wanted to play, but we weren’t sure exactly what; we had no real strong direction. Then somebody said, we gotta get home, and we left there and didn’t look back.”

In the famous FAME Studios of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Hourglass recorded some songs that were closer to the music they thought they should be playing; their record company thought otherwise.

This session, in April 1968, resulted in a four-song demo tape that Liberty Records rejected with prejudice. The session was Duane’s first interaction with FAME Studios. By the end of 1968, he was a FAME regular.

“We tried to go back to playing clubs in the South. We had made good money before - two, three, four hundred a week - before we even went to California; but you can’t go back. Finally Duane and Gregg went to Daytona. I [Johnny] went home to Miami; I played sessions and went hunting for a year.”

This was September 1968, a momentous three-week stretch in Duane’s life that began with him in L.A. and ended in Muscle Shoals.

Sandlin’s home was Alabama, not Miami, so I’m not sure where that came from. He eventually ended up in Macon working as a house producer for Capricorn Records.

He produced Brothers and Sisters and Win, Lose, or Draw for the Allman Brothers Band; Laid Back and The Gregg Allman Tour for Gregg; and Highway Call for Dickey Betts.

Thanks to each of you for being a paid subscriber to Long Live the ABB. This post was just for you. I hope you found the context interesting.

Let me know your thoughts. And please tell others.

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11

And gives me some hope as well. I first tried slide in the 80s after watching the Ralph Macchio movie Crossroads. Took me nearly 30 years to feel any measure of comfort playing it.

---

Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.

MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty

PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin

LLtABB SWAG

Jimmy Carter. Walt McNamee shot of Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt 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.

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Fillmore East ad. Adaptation of original ad for the 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.

John Lynskey taught history at Miami’s Columbus High School for thirty years, coached for twenty, and served as assistant principal for seven. Upon retirement, he moved to Macon to work hands-on with the Big House Museum, where he had served on the board since day one. He has produced more than two dozen archival releases for the Allman Brothers Band, co-wrote Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg with drummer Bill Connell, and spent two decades as a driving force behind Hittin’ the Note magazine.

But I knew John well before I knew of his connection to the Allman Brothers Band. In the early 1990s at UCF, some of my good buddies were Columbus guys, John’s guys. Lynskey was their history teacher and coach, full stop. Decades later, Mario sent a photo at John’s retirement. Talk about mushroom magic. Mario’s text arrived within minutes of it dawning on me that their beloved history teacher was John Lynskey, my fellow Allman Brothers historian and whose work I’ve been mining for decades.

Share Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads

Our Crossroads

John and I share multiple intersections. We are historians who found the Allman Brothers Band through the music and grew fascinated with the entirety of their story. We both understand what it means to sit in an archive and chase a review that might not surface for five months after an album dropped. We believe music is a primary source, a band is a team, and community is what happens when like-minded people stop pretending they don’t need each other.

When I launched Play All Night in Miami in October 2022, John flew down to host an event. Like the teacher and coach he is, Lynskey teed me up to tell Duane’s remarkable story in a bookstore packed with his students. That night I met Abel Sanchez of MiamiStadium on Instagram, a sports, history, and culture site that became a model for my work at Long Live the ABB.

All podcast episodes

The Conversation

John talked about his journey from the classroom in Miami to the Big House in Macon. It’s the unbroken circle—from Columbus High School, a huddle on the football field, and the Allman Brothers Band dominating on stage. Brothers is a term that continually emerges in his life.

As South Florida natives, Miami was a foundation of our conversation. I grew up 100 miles up the road in Stuart, and my grandmother spent the 1920s in the area. Some of my formative memories of the “big” city were from visits to Miami.

John’s grandparents arrived in the early 1920s, one side from Savannah, the other from Huntsville, Alabama. He grew up in the mid-1970s version of the city—when Criteria Studios was cutting some of the greatest rock & roll ever recorded and the Dolphins were winning back-to-back Super Bowls at the Orange Bowl. He attended Super Bowls II and III. He played and coached in the Orange Bowl. He called it decrepit, uncomfortable, and a shrine all in one breath. I had the same impression as a youngster who first visited in the early 80s.1

The Miami Dolphins were important to both of us. John’s parents bought season tickets in year one. They dumped him and his siblings in the Huddle Club in the west end zone while they sat on the 50 yard line. He has memories similar to my own: the sound tumbling down from the closed end of the stadium, shaking the structure. Joe Robbie Stadium, where the Dolphins moved when they vacated the Orange Bowl, is beyond sterile in comparison.

John’s Allman Brothers origin story includes older kids in his neighborhood who dropped the needle and said, “Listen.” He landed on the Allman Brothers because of the intensity. Nobody played harder, with more passion, more purpose. Six guys playing as one. As a coach, he saw them as a team: everybody knew their role, everybody contributed, everybody supported. That framework held from 1969 to 2014.

We ranked the catalog the way nerds do. Enlightened Rogues—a Miami record, maybe the most underappreciated Allman Brothers album. Brothers of the Road—last, always, because it doesn’t have Jaimoe. Reach for the Sky only ahead of BotR because it does. Win, Lose or Draw saved from the bottom by “High Falls,” one of the most complex songs in the catalog and the seed of Sea Level.

John’s first Allman Brothers show was the Hollywood Sportatorium January 22, 1972.2 He was twelve and it was freezing. That is about all he remembers from what was surely a mind-blowing experience.

The show that hooked him for good was August 17, 1974 was at where else but the Orange Bowl? He was fourteen and his life has never been the same since.

THIS ENDS PART 1 OF THE INTERVIEW. STAY TUNED FOR PART 2.

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A native of Miami, Sebastian Garcia’s parents emigrated from Colombia with a clear theory of his success in America: a career in medicine, law, or engineering. He entered the University of Central Florida as a biomedical sciences major and lasted two semesters before adding a second major in history.

His work spans a narrative series about the First Seminole War and his master’s thesis about a 1920s Irish Catholic governor undone by a Protestant radio station that formed specifically to destroy him.

Sebastian and I met when I came back to UCF in 2022 on the Play All Night book launch tour. He ran the department podcast. He was sharp, curious, and engaged. It remains one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.1

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Our Crossroads

Sebastian and I each hold undergraduate and graduate history degrees from the University of Central Florida. Same department decades apart.

In October 2022, the department hosted me for a homecoming in the truest sense of the word. Sebastian interviewed me about Play All Night for Knights HistoryCast.2

He came prepared. And the book hit the right notes for him. It was a joy to sit with a young historian at my alma mater who understood exactly what I was trying to do and why.

We share a conviction that history belongs outside the walls of the academy, in history as storytelling in audio, video, prose, in whatever medium puts the story in front of people who need it.

Sebastian was already living that when we met four years ago. Following his work and career continues to be a joy.

The Conversation

Sebastian called it liberation: the moment history stopped being an academic subject and became a way of seeing the world. It happened in a history class, tracking how the present shaped the people doing the writing. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

A first-generation Colombian American, Sebastian grew up in a Spanish-speaking Miami neighborhood. English came from school and television. UCF, four hours north, was a genuine culture shock—the first time he was consistently around people who didn’t look or sound like him. He’s still working out what “southerner” means. Orlando taught him the question exists in the first place.

We spent considerable time on public memory. Monuments and memorials are historical arguments set in stone and what doesn’t earn mention means as much as what does, even more.

That conversation led to his latest endeavor, The Memory of Negro Fort, a podcast series about a British fortification in the Florida panhandle that became the largest autonomous community of freedom seekers in American history. Andrew Jackson destroyed it in 1816, illegally, sparking the first of three American wars against Florida’s Seminoles.3

Sebastian wrote his master’s thesis on Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. An Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, Smith’s radio presence was powerful enough that opponents founded a radio station, WHAP (We Hold America Protestant) in response. Sebastian argues that public optimism that radio could rectify social rot, didn’t collapse in the 1930s with Father Coughlin and Benito Mussolini. The trust in the new technology cratered in the 1920s. Smith is an example of his thesis.

We closed on community—family, his fiancée, the professors worth keeping close, the difference between being in an institution and having a home in one.

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Resources

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

• Bob Beatty and Sebastian Garcia, Knights HistoryCast, October 2022. https://knightshistorycast.podbean.com/e/episode-24-dr-bob-beatty-and-play-all-night-duane-allman-and-the-journey-to-fillmore-east/.

• Matthew J. Clavin, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

• Sebastian Garcia

  • The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast

  • Instagram

• David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (New York: Random House, 1999).

• Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

• David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

• Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986).

• Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).

3

A British fort on Spanish land.

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.

MERCH

This is a story of my thesis for Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East, that At Fillmore East is the definitive artistic statement of the Allman Brothers Band.

The book started as a Ph.D. dissertation on Duane Allman and the Allman Brothers Band. That was basically a long document that just proved I could complete this long Ph.D. process.

My goal was always to turn it into a book. I asked a friend to read the dissertation. He called me and said, “You just wrote a book on At Fillmore East.”

That blew my mind.

At that point, I was stuck.

I’d written a 500+ page dissertation weaving in every quote, every story I possibly could stating that Duane Allman had changed American music. What I hadn’t done to that point was explain how we know that to be true.

My dissertation said At Fillmore East was the definitive artistic statement of Duane and the Allman Brothers Band. It didn’t answer why that was. Nor, how we know that.

Though it became my thesis in Play All Night, I spent months grappling with what seemed an impossible task.

How could I distill a sound that I find the BIGGEST in the universe, into one album, one place, one moment in time?

Doing so, I had to completely rethink albums altogether. I’m not being nostalgic when I say that album releases since the streaming era are just not what they were in the LP/CD eras. Albums were somewhat rare, precious gifts from artists. We didn’t have video and audio of nearly every concert or television appearance.

In Duane’s era, there were generally two ways to make a living playing music: playing live and AM radio hits, where the Allman Brothers found no room. Where they succeeded was on freeform FM radio, which was album-oriented.

To that point, albums had been a collection of singles. The Beatles helped make them artistic statements. It became de rigueur to think of records holistically, as a statement.

At Fillmore East was their third album. They’d released their self-titled debut—sporting a BANGER of a Southern gothic image1—in 1969 and Idlewild South a year later. The debut flopped. Idlewild hit #38 but wasn’t a breakthrough hit.

Reviews were positive about both albums. But by the time you get to the Idlewild reviews, many writers have seen the Allman Brothers live. “Yeah, this is good and everything, but if you’ve seen them live, this doesn’t even touch it. They’re so much better.”

And from 1969-1971 the Allman Brothers Band are ABBsolute road dogs. Touring 300 days a year, playing an estimated 250 shows a year.

And these were not just paying gigs, they’d often play anywhere they could find an outlet. Sometimes they’d show up at a park on an afternoon and jam. They were building their chops and an audience.

The band found it difficult to capture that live sound in a studio because they thrived on the energy of playing in front of an audience. That synergy with the audience pushed the band. They loved the dynamic.

So there was a lot at stake when they decided to record their third album live on the most important stage in rock: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.2

It was a bold decision.

Why? This is something I explore in Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East extensively.

At Fillmore East answers the questions:

What was Duane/the ABB trying to do with music?

How do we know that? And how do we know if they were successful?

We know what they were trying to do because they said it. And it’s not just Duane—he sets the vision, but they all share a vision: improvisational music at the highest level performed in front of live audiences.

At Fillmore East is how we know if they succeeded. Number one, it is the album they recorded when it was all on the line. “This is how we want to be remembered.”

Because after two years of relentless touring, the Allman Brothers and their manager Phil Walden were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. There was talk of breaking up the band. And we’d remember them differently had the band broken up in 1971. They would be much more of an underground band, a secret maybe, instead of a the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band they became.

The second way we know it was successful is because it sold well. It was a massive hit that saved the band, Walden, and Capricorn Records.

This is a band that literally had all forms of American music in their fingers. They had blues. They had jazz. They had folk. They had country. They had string music, bluegrass-y stuff. They loved the power and dynamics of classical music.

They looked to what San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were doing with their music. Expanding the American musical canon with psychedelic musical explorations.

Like the Airplane and the Dead, the Allman Brothers Band created their own particular musical stew, a dish uniquely theirs. In my dissertation I called it “American music,” but that has always seemed inadequate.

And At Fillmore East isn’t really Southern rock. It’s much bigger than that and has a sound completely its own. Released in 1971, Fillmore predates the 1973 explosion of Southern rock with Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band joining the Allman Brothers Band on the charts.

The Allman Brothers in Duane’s era is altogether different. Reviewers lauded At Fillmore East in language that reflected the band’s own vision as they struggled to categorize the sound. This is true in countless reviews, from students in college newspapers to the great Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone.

“I just don’t know how to tell you what I’m hearing, but it’s really awesome.”

Their sound and attitude was southern and uniquely theirs. The Allman Brothers Band were doing something completely new. And new takes a little while sometimes to catch up.

Phil Walden, manager/record company owner/booking agent (no conflicts of interest there), remembered frustration. “We were just afraid maybe this group was too musical. Like, they were just too good for the audience.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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• 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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