Play All Night Playlist Project #7: Hour Glass studio
“We had chops out the ass but didn’t have the originality thing down yet.” Gregg Allman
Welcome back to another edition of Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern Music, History, and Culture. This is the 7th installment in the Play All Night Playlist Project.1
Thanks for all of the good feedback about things I’m sharing. I have much more cooked up, including the launch of Long Live the ABB in Conversation with ABB historian Alan Paul on Sunday, July 23 8p Eastern/5p Pacific.2
Thanks especially to my paid subscribers, who help sustain the work. This one’s especially for y’all.3
This is the second of three playlists to accompany Chapter 4 of Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East
Frustration in California is the chapter’s subtitle.
It documents Duane’s time in Los Angeles with Hour Glass where the heavy hand of producer Dallas Smith stifled him. In late summer 1968, Duane left California and returned to the South for good.
The playlist features the two Hour Glass studio albums in their entirety.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking about originality in music. I’ve written about it quite a few times here.4 And Play All Night is basically Duane’s quest for originality as an artist.
He struggled mightily with originality with Hour Glass.
Worse, his guitar is buried in the mix.
This is my take on the two records that Gregg said “form what is known as a shit sandwich.”5
“We had chops out the ass but didn’t have the originality thing down yet.”
This quote, from Gregg, really sums up Duane’s frustration as a musician in this era. He knew he was a great guitar player and his band was white-hot on stage.
But with somewhat untested arranging skills and only Gregg as a songwriter, Duane had few options in countering the ideas Dallas Smith and Liberty Records had to present Hour Glass as pop psychedelia.
He was the undisputed leader of the band, but his creative input remained limited to guitar and arrangements. It is in this era he matured as an arranger, which helped him further develop his artistic voice.
Hour Glass released October 1967
Hour Glass contained only one original, Gregg’s “Got to Get Away,” which the Allman Joys had recorded the previous summer in Nashville. It also had a pretty bizarre album cover.6
The record fell flat despite contributions from a wide array of top-notch songwriters: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Curtis Mayfield, Del Shannon, and future superstar Jackson Browne.7 Although a covers-heavy album was not out of the ordinary and Hour Glass was primarily a cover band, the material was an ill fit for their southern mix of rock and rhythm and blues.
"Out of the Night" (Alex Moore, Bob Welch)
"Nothing But Tears" (Jimmy Radcliffe, B. J. Scott)8
"Love Makes the World Go 'Round" (Deon Jackson)
"Cast off All My Fears" (Jackson Browne)
"I've Been Trying" (Curtis Mayfield)
"No Easy Way Down" (Gerry Goffin, Carole King)
"Heartbeat" (Ed Cobb)
"So Much Love" (Gerry Goffin, Carole King)
"Got to Get Away" (Gregg Allman)
"Silently" (Dan Bourgoise, Del Shannon)
"Bells" (Edgar Allan Poe, arr. Peter Alin)
Smith’s heavy-handed style—“An absolute dictatorship,” said Hornsby—grated on the band, particularly Duane. Smith’s production amplified Gregg’s vocals and buried the band deep in the mix under a sheen of sounds designed to reach the pop market.
Duane’s guitar was nearly inaudible as it competed for attention with robust horn and background vocal arrangements.
“The music had no life,” Gregg said.
Power of Love released March 1968
The experience recording Hour Glass’s second album, Power of Love was a rehash of the first.
Dallas Smith again dictated the material and approach. Once again, he spurned Duane, whose inability to write or sing left him a sideman to his younger brother. Duane actually quit mid-session and made haste for Daytona Beach before returning and completing the recording.
Liberty released Power of Love in March 1968. Like its predecessor, it failed to chart.
Power of Love demonstrated growth, most notably in Gregg’s songwriting; he penned seven of the album’s twelve tracks: “Changing of the Guard” “To Things Before” “I’m Not Afraid” “I Can Stand Alone” “I Still Want Your Love” “Going Nowhere” “Now Is the Time.” None were particularly memorable and none reached the repertoires of his future bands, but Gregg’s improvement was notable.
Before the end of the year, Gregg wrote two stalwarts for the Allman Brothers Band repertoire: “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” (here’s the demo he recorded for Liberty) and “Dreams.”9
Of the remaining five songs, fellow southerners wrote three10: one by Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn (“The Power of Love”) and two more by Marlon Greene and Sandlin and Hornsby’s former bandmate Eddie Hinton—“Down in Texas” and “Home for the Summer.” Oldham, Penn, Greene, and Hinton all began their careers at a place that would loom large in Duane Allman’s career: Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals.
Here are the links again.
Final thoughts
Hour Glass is an interesting time in Duane’s development as an artist. It’s hard to tell how much he grew on guitar, but he certainly grew to understand the music industry a bit better than he had before he moved to L.A. And it dictated his creative terms from that point forward.
Gregg made the most strides, both as an artist and a songwriter. More than half of Power of Love are his originals.
By August/September 1968 Duane left L.A. for good and returned to the South. Gregg soon followed, but quickly returned to California. Duane was furious when Gregg called with the news that Liberty would release Hour Glass and therefore Duane from its contract if Gregg recorded as a solo act, breaking up the 31st of February, Butch’s band that they’d just recorded with.
Hornsby always believed Gregg returned willingly.
“I doubt they had to twist his arm very much. I think he really liked it. He liked the personal attention they were giving him. Can’t blame him for that.”
Gregg surely felt pressure to fulfill Hour Glass’s contract, but he also found California more enticing than Florida. Duane stayed in the South, still under contract to Liberty
Duane and Gregg both distanced themselves from these records, as did bandmates Paul Hornsby and Johnny Sandlin.11
Hornsby and Sandlin would soon reunite with Duane and Gregg in Macon, serving as Capricorn in-house producers. Carr was a longtime session guitarist at Muscle Shoals Sound.12
I’m not a huge fan of the Hour Glass period. To me, very little of the music hints at what’s to come.
The band had players but they clearly weren’t ready. The Los Angeles–based music business was an ill fit. Duane had yet to find the right mix of musicians, and Gregg’s songwriting was still emerging.
Context
My idea is to provide some musical context to the story I tell in Play All Night.
This comes from my own needs when I read music books. It can be overwhelming to have so much *new* music at my fingertips as I read and/or want to further explore an artist’s work.
I thought I’d close that gap for y’all by posting playlists to familiarize yourself with the music in the book.
Please let me know your thoughts on how I’m succeeding (or not) with that.
LAST CHANCE
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Originally posted behind the paywall. Updated 1/8/25.
Here’s the archived conversation on Youtube.
*Was*—now it’s fully liberated.
I did a search and it seems I talk about this a lot, which must mean I think it’s important 🍄. (I do.) If the topic interests you, here are some other times I’ve specifically referenced originality on Long Live the ABB:
This quote is from Cameron Crowe’s 1973 Rolling Stone cover story, which was also part of the inspiration for Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000).
Look at it again. It’s an out-of-focus, upside down, quadruple-exposure image of the band dressed in costume. Truly a weird marketing strategy, particularly because Liberty was promoting Gregg as frontman.
Also roommates with Gregg Allman for a brief time. This is where Gregg learned “These Days,” which he recorded on Laid Back before Browne released his own version.
Liberty released “Nothing But Tears” as a single in 1967. It failed to chart.
Something surely clicked with Gregg. He wrote “Whipping Post,” “Black Hearted Woman,” and “Every Hungry Woman” within days of arrival to Jacksonville in March 1969.
The other two tracks were an instrumental version of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and “I'm Hanging Up My Heart for You” by John Berry and Don Covay, made famous by Solomon Burke.
Not really sure about Pete Carr’s thoughts on this. I have to keep an eye out for that!
He’s the guitarist in blue behind Paul Simon here Concert from Central Park "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."