Episode Overview
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.
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.
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.
