I’ve told y’all I’ve been dabbling in video creation lately. Here’s my latest, a discussion about one of the core arguments in Play All Night.1
I intended it as a thirty second intro to this video, which contains a clever (for me) edit of the famous “Play all night!” call from “You Don’t Love Me” on At Fillmore East.
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I started riffing and just kept going.
A note on process.
Creating video content is something people have been encouraging me to do for awhile. I was long reluctant, and it’s taken some getting used to. I don’t necessarily dig being a solo artist.
Writing is a solitary enough endeavor as it is. And conversation is jazz to me. I love the give-and-take of good people talking about something they are passionate about.
I s’pose video is just like this blog2—where I’m writing for myself and sharing it with you.
This past January I hired Jake
as a coach. Jake had me get started on Tiktok, a pretty low-stakes way for me to get used to the format.3 Then about midway through our work together, he had me start posting these videos across my other networks: Facebook / Instagram / Threads / Youtube.I’ve also mined my archives on Youtube4 and created a bunch of “shorts” using AI. (That’s the source of the video above.)
I have learned some basic5 editing skills, and created three videos using audio of three different interviews, all saved at youtube.com/@LongLiveTheABB6
Gregg Allman: Southern Blood
I have a weird relationship with Gregory’s solo stuff.
I love it, but it’s so different from the ABB (which scratches my musical itch perfectly) that it sometimes takes a while for me to absorb it.
This was true of his older albums now considered classics—Laid Back, the Gregg Allman Tour—and the solo efforts that came out after I became a fan: Searchin’ for Simplicity (1997), Low Country Blues (2013), and Southern Blood (2017).
It took me awhile—all of ‘em did—but Laid Back is now one of my ABBsolute go-to’s. One I like to put on while falling asleep. It’s a gorgeous album, a more “modern” version of another itinerant Southern bluesman, the great Robert Johnson.
There’s a haunting quality to Laid Back that is always there with the Allman Brothers Band, just not as nakedly so.
As is customary, Southern Blood took a few listens to sink in. But at some point it just GRABBED ME and, aside from “Blind Bats & Swamp Rats”7—it’s a nearly flawless record.
Southern Blood is quite the career bookend.
An elegy, if you will.
Every Gregg Allman solo album gets compared to Laid Back. And for good reason: It’s his single greatest artistic statement as a solo artist.
It presaged what might’ve been had Liberty Records figured out what to do with him and/or had Gregg not gone back to Jacksonville in March 1969 to join up with Duane and crew.
Laid Back is part of the canon, not just of the ABB, but of a bevy of music from folk-inspired male singer/songwriters cranking out shit like this in the late 60s/early 70s: Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, etc.
What Gregory had that those dudes didn’t was an amazing band to return to.8 One where he was part of a much greater whole. And he never devoted enough time to his solo muse to get close to Laid Back again.
Until Southern Blood.
No, Southern Blood isn’t Laid Back part II. It’s more complex than that.
Laid Back was the work of an artist who had just reached the highest highs after his brother Duane (his role model) and his bandmate Berry Oakley died . Had Gregg, et al. quit after Eat a Peach or Gregg quit making music with Laid Back, that’d have been enough to put them in the all-time pantheon.
But it didn’t end there.
Gregg made solo records sporadically—8 records in a 44 year span. Some were very good, some way overproduced, some bordered on cliché9, but all showed this side of Gregg that he couldn’t show with the ABB. A quiet, contemplative side.
Gregg’s swan song
Recorded in March 2016 in Muscle Shoals, Southern Blood was released September 2017, four months after Gregg’s death.
And at the tail end of his life, as he knew he was dying, Gregg Allman produced a gem of a goodbye, at FAME Studios, where it all began for him and for Duane. FAME was where:
Hour Glass made their killer demos in April 1968 that told Duane that LA/Liberty wasn’t gonna work.
Duane first made his mark as a studio guitarist.
Duane, Jaimoe, and Berry first jammed on his aborted solo project.
Southern Blood is an amazing bookend to Gregg’s career. It is the work of a mature, confident artist staring into the unknown.
His road band was the perfect foil for him. The band’s execution ensured Gregg went out on a high note, as he deserved.
Southern Blood is a perfect goodbye.
Liner Notes
Some thoughts on the tracks that comprise Southern Blood.
Liner notes are reserved for paid subscribers.
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