Why Music Matters
Another entry into the unending conversation
Welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music history, and culture.
I’m writing on September 19, the anniversary of a pretty epic Allman Brothers Band show, 9/19/71 SUNY Stonybrook.1 The band released the set few years back. It’s well-regarded, and for good reason. Not only does it carry a rare version of “Blue Sky” with Duane, it’s also got a smoking “You Don’t Love Me” and one of my favorite versions of “Elizabeth Reed” this side of At Fillmore East.
But for me, the gem of this set is the “Dreams to End All Dreams”
I make no secret that “Dreams” is my favorite song in the ABB canon. As I wrote in Play All Night!2
The band loosely based its arrangement of “Dreams” on Miles Davis’s “All Blues.” Like “All Blues,” from which Jaimoe derived his drum part, “Dreams” carries a gentle 6/8 waltz-time rhythm. Duane’s mid-song solo is his best on the album, among the finest of his entire studio career.
Duane’s solo answers the desperation of the first verse Gregg sings: “The whole world was falling, right down in front of me. / Lord, help me babe, this will surely be the end of me.”
The band settles into a tranquil groove as Duane begins to play. Halfway through, he moves to slide and plays a solo that simultaneously feels urgent and restrained, building the energy back to the second verse, when Gregg’s lyrics seem to find some redemption: “Pull myself together, put on a new face. Climb down off the hilltop, get back in the race.”
For critic Lester Bangs, the lyrics tell “a familiar story, but the way it’s written and delivered by the Allmans makes it poignantly realistic and universal.”
The song had been in the ABB’s repertoire since March 1969. It was a regular on the set throughout 1970 but had fallen out of the setlist in 1971 as the band rehearsed for the At Fillmore East recordings.3
The band played a legendary (untaped) version of “Dreams” on 6/26/71, the final public show at Fillmore East.4
Here’s Rowland Archer in an old Hittin’ the Note magazine:
“At some point the band cruised into a long and flowing version of ‘Dreams.’ I’ll never forget that otherworldly, 12-note descending sequence repeated over and over again: ‘Dah-uh, dum, dum; dah-uh, dum, dum; dah-uh, dum, dum; dum, dum dum…’ It seemed to go on for hours. I’ll never forget the image of Duane bent over his guitar playing those magical scales and transporting me wherever concert goers go when they’ve heard the best there is to hear.”5
By late September of 1971, they were blazing new paths altogether.
There’s nothing about this version I don’t love, from the pre-song chatter—Duane’s “Who’s doing that man?” to Gregg’s “We’d like to do an old song if we can get a little mic!”—to the ABBsolutely transcendent version of one of the first of Gregg’s songs the band worked up when he arrived in Jacksonville.6
“Dreams” from 9/19/71 is a wonderful example of the ABB’s ensemble playing. Gregg, Jaimoe, and Butch holding it all together while Berry, Dickey, and Duane engage in an incredible conversation that they, too, are a part of.
Of particular note is the middle section, as Duane switches to slide—Dickey isn’t playing straight rhythm, he’s playing similar to how he plays in the back half of “Mountain Jam”7—it’s a conversation, and it’s really beautiful to me.8
Why Music Matters: The Unending Conversation
I thought about the ABB’s musical conversation as I read a piece a reader9 sent my way: Karl Paulnack’s10 “2003 Address to the Parent’s of the Freshman Class.” It was his speech to parents of new freshmen at the Boston Conservatory on August 28, 2003.11
I learned of the unending conversation my first semester of graduate school. It was a way to conceive of life in the humanities: we are part of a conversation that began well before we got here and will continue well after we’re gone.
This piece moved me, and I suspect it’ll move you as well.
It’s a fantastic essay and were it not for the newspaper and 9/11 references, it could’ve been written yesterday.
I offer it in its entirety, with my thoughts interspersed within to give you a sense of my thoughts as I read the piece. This is the unending conversation in action, as are your own thoughts as you read this.
(Go here to read it without my commentary.)
PAULNACK: One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
I think this rings as true in 2023 as it did in 2003, maybe even more so. We’ve had decades of educational policy that steered children to STEM education, in some cases removing music, arts, and the humanities out of the curriculum altogether.
As a historian and observer of American history and culture, I believe this has been a net-negative for us all. I see Long Live the ABB as a way to reverse this trend with thoughtful commentary on life and culture from the lens of a historian, musician and lifelong lover of music.
I’m not talking about serious careers in music. I am thinking about music in a way that fits my own interests, skills, and passions. For Long Live the ABB, that’s to use music to learn more about ourselves and others.
PAULNACK: One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.
I added the bold, because that point really hits home in myriad ways. It reminds me of an exchange I had with a student in my history of rock & roll class at Valencia Community College way back in the ‘00s.
I was playing B.B. King’s “How Blue Can You Get?” from Live at Cook County Jail. As King wailed during the song’s introduction, a young student asked “When’s he going to start singing?”
And it’s true. B.B. “sang” the blues through his guitar. And listeners feel every moment of his pain and frustration before he even sings the first verse, nearly 3-minutes into the song.
I am alive, and my life has meaning
PAULNACK: Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why?
Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning." [all bold emphasis mine]
One of the things we learn from studying history is resiliency. I think it’s good to understand that no matter how bad things are, there are folks who have and have had it worse. The Holocaust is certainly one such example of the human spirit triumphing despite all attempts to squelch it.
Closer to home, slavery, segregation, and white supremacy pervaded the lives of Black Americans, particularly in the South, which I study.
The blues—what Robert Palmer calls “a continuation of deep and tenacious African traditions and a creative response to a brutal, desperate situation”—was a response to those conditions.12
Through songwriting, records, and live performance, bluesmen and -women boldly declared Paulnack’s charge—“I am alive, and my life has meaning.”
People sang
PAULNACK: In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
I remember the day vividly in my mind. I was in a staff meeting at the Orange County Regional History Center when we got the news on 9/11. My wife was pregnant with our first kid and I remember thinking, “What am I doing bringing a child into this world?”
Then, as now, I sought solace in music. “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” is my go-to when I need a dose of resilience—as I wrote here:
“Dreams” is likewise comfort for my weary soul, Duane’s gorgeous guitar answering the despair of the first verse, “The whole world was falling, right down in front of me.”
Music is a basic need
PAULNACK: From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a past-time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
This is one reason I’m drawn to the longer instrumental pieces and passages of the Allman Brothers Band, jazz, and bands that jam. I value folks who can express such deep emotions through their instruments alone. I try to do likewise when I play, never quite reaching those heights, but always striving.
“Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives” could also be a founding principle of Long Live the ABB.
PAULNACK: Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
“Adagio for Strings” in Platoon is one of the most effective uses of music in any film, period. It gets me every.damn.time.
PAULNACK: Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks.
Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects. [Emphasis is my own.]
Ever get so excited about music you’re unable to speak, or is it just me? I’m guessing more than a few of you feel what Paulnack means when he writes: “Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it.”
This is EXACTLY what happened to me when I *discovered* the Allman Brothers Band. It was like Duane and the band flipped a light switch in my soul. I’ve never been the same since then.
I want you to SAVOR this last part
Paulnack really brings his whole piece home marvelously.
PAULNACK: I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this:
"During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.13
I doubt Copland imagined this exact response when he wrote his piece, but if artists/writers could choose how folks might receive their work—I imagine most would choose to have this kind of impact on audiences.14
And think of the sheer miracle of this connection between Paulnack’s playing this piece, the audience member who was so moved, and Copland’s original inspiration for his piece? In a nursing home in the Midwest?
As Donny Hathaway sang, “I Believe in Music.”
A future of peace
PAULNACK: What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
Paulnack addressed music majors entering college in 2003. They are about to enter their 40s. America has been at war either in Afghanistan or Iraq their entire adult lives. They’ve endured the Great Recession and the tumultuous summer of 2020.15 And they, among thousands of others, including you and me, have endured.
A few paragraphs above, Paulnack wrote of music: “This is my work. This is why music matters.”
It’s my work too.
I believe music matters as a reflection of the best of humanity.
It’s good to have you here to discuss this together.
Quite a few shows from Stonybrook circulate: 4/28/70, 7/9/70, 7/10/70 (often mislabeled as 7/26/70). Stonybrook a very ambitious student activities board, they and students with the A/V know-how and wherewithal to record shows.
Surely you already have your copy, but buy a gift copy on Amazon and send me an address and I’ll mail out some Play All Night swag to your friend.
See here for more of my thoughts on that:
The show that circulates was an invite only event on the following night 6/27/71. It’s good, but nowhere near the energy of the night before, which Duane acknowledges early in the set.
Rowland Archer, “The Night They Closed the Fillmore Down.
“The only song I had with me when I showed up to join the band,” Gregg quipped on the intro to “Dreams” on First Set.
I’ve asked my family to play the last half of “Mountain Jam” from Eat a Peach at my funeral. It sounds like what I imagine Heaven sounds like.
Another song where Duane played slide in standard tuning, come to think of it.
The Chairman, Gary Wonwayout.
I love this from his bio: “Karl is a nationally recognized speaker, writer, workshop facilitator, and thought leader on the Power of Music” The Power of Music, capitalized.
Here’s the speech in its entirety. It’s a masterwork.
This is what they call a mic drop.
In case you missed the link above, here’s Copland’s Sonata by violinist Tai Murray and pianist Shani Diluka.
I’m sure a few are no longer pursuing music professionally, whether they stopped in college or along the way. I hope each of them has continued to play, to create music for themselves or others.
Stunning piece - bravo!