Alan Paul's Blog
October 19, 2023
May 24, 2023
Stevie Ray Vaughan with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, Toy Caldwell… “Breeze”
Well, this was kind of a wild thing to stumble upon. So much interesting music and cool collaborations came out of the Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jams. Here’s Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Call Me The Breeze” with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie and Toy Caldwell.
May 5, 2023
Author tour events announced.Many more to come, but to st...
Author tour events announced.
Many more to come, but to start…
Brothers and Sisters is out 7/25 and I’ll be at:
-7/27- My hometown of Pittsburgh, Cinderlands Warehouse, with a special Brothers and Sisters beer. In conversation with WDVE’s Randy Baumann.
Tickets coming soon. Almost free, but limited space.
-7/28 – Atlanta’s City Winery with the great ABB tribute band End of the Line and special guests. Starting the night with a conversation about the Allman Brothers Band and Jimmy Carter.
TICKETS: https://bit.ly/3Li6jvy
7/29 – Canandaigua, NY – Summer Jam ’23: Celebrating 50 Years since Watkins Glen ft. Tributes to Allman Brothers Band, The Band, Grateful Dead
Friends of the Brothers headlining. Will include a book signing.
Tickets: https://bit.ly/3l30GZ2
7/30 City Winery New York – A gala celebration of the book and the Allman Brothers Band, featuring a talk and Q and A followed by a fulle set of music with Friends of the Brothers anbd very special guests including Duane Betts, Lamar Williams Jr., Vaylor Trucks and Johnny Stachela. More to come!
Tickets: https://bit.ly/3AzJqP3
9/9 – The Soiled Dove, Denver with My Blue Sky. Singing, Q and A and a performance of Brothers and Sisters in full.
Tickets: https://bit.ly/3HwCqqk
January 7, 2023
I am so excited about my fourth book, Brothers and Sister...
I am so excited about my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Album That Defined the 70s , which will be released on July 25 by St. Martin’s press. Relix did a really nice write up about it here. -> https://bit.ly/3CDfYZq
Introducing my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters.
February 27, 2022
Friends of the Brothers Spring Tour!
“Though they honor the music, Friends of the Brothers never feel like a ‘tribute band.’ They play the songs as if they’d written them. “
– David Browne, Rolling Stone
After taking a few months off to let things settle down, Friends Of The Brothers are coming back with a vengeance this spring.
We are now working with the Mint Talent Group, one of the premier booking agencies in the country and will be spreading our wings.
To start, we have shows just announced all around the greater New York area, from northern Connecticut to Western NJ. All dates and ticket links are below. Hope to see you at one of these shows!
March 5, Broad Brook Opera House, Broad Brook, CT
Tickets >> https://bit.ly/3H2vH46
May 14, The Stanhope House, Stanhope NJ
Tickets >> https://bit.ly/3gNImxp
May 20 The Loft at City Winery NYC
Tickets>> https://bit.ly/3H23ivh
This is a small room which we have sold out twice, so…
May 28 Daryl’s House Club, Pawling, NY
Tickets >> https://tinyurl.com/mrx66ujr
July 2 The Peach Music Festival
WE ARE VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS ONE!
MANY MORE TO COME!
“Friends of the Brothers isn’t a tribute band. They’re a continuation of the Brotherhood.”
-Kirk West, Allman Brothers “Tour Mystic” and historian
The Friends of the Brothers is a celebration of the music of the Allman Brothers Band, with members closely associated with the original band and continuing the brotherhood with passion, committed to the ideals of every night being special and unique. Guitarist/singer Junior Mack has fronted Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band for 12 years. Guitarist Andy Aledort played with Dickey Betts for 12 years. Singer/guitarist Alan Paul is the author of One Way Out, the definitive, best-selling Allman Brothers band biography based on 25 years of reporting on and interviewing the band.
They are often joined by singer Lamar Williams Jr., who is the son of the late Allman Brothers bassist and was featured in Les Brers, featuring ABB members Butch Trucks, Jaimoe, Oteil Burbridge and Jack Pearson. Founding keyboardist Peter Levin toured the world with Gregg Allman for 3 years and appears on his final album, Southern Blood. Mack, Aledort, Levin and Williams all performed with the Allman Brothers Band.
“This band is based around our shared love of the Allman Brothers Band and our friendships with one another,” says Paul. “It’s not just a gig. The music is holy to us, but it’s also alive. We honor our friends and mentors’ legacies by investing this great music with life, heart and passion. It’s not about copying solos, which would be completely against the spirit the Allman Brothers had from the day Duane Allman started forming the band in 1968.”
The group members’ first-hand experience with the Allman Brothers Band and their deep knowledge of the repertoire and the music’s roots and heritage allows them to play with an unrivaled depth. They perform songs from every stage of the Allman Brothers Band’s career, backed by a band of inspirational, veteran players, drummers Dave Diamond (Zen Tricksters, Bob Weir, Robert Randolph) and Lee Finkelstein (Tower of Power, Blues Brothers) and bassist Craig Privett (Half Step). With Levin touring with Amanda Shires, the Blind Boys of Alabama and number-one country stars The Highwomen, Eric Finland (Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band, Eric Krasno) ably steps in on keys for most gigs.
Other Friends have included keyboardists Jason Crosby (Phil Lesh, Susan Tedeschi) and Ike Stubblefield (Col, Bruce Hampton, George Benson, B.B. King), drummers Jeff Sipe (Col. Bruce Hampton, Susan Tedeschi, Warren Haynes), Eric Kalb (Eric Krasno, John Scofield, Scott Sharrard) and Van Romaine (Steve Morse, the Dixie Dregs), saxophonist Ron Holloway (Gov’t Mule, Allman Brothers), bassists Brett Bass (Gregg Allman) and Berry Duane Oakley (Allman Betts Band), and guitarists Tash Neal (London Souls, Amy Helm) and Brandon “Taz” Niederauer.
July 20, 2021
Dion Still Sings of America
This story originally ran in the Wall Street Journal on June 12 2020.
It takes a rare artist to help define the early days of rock ’n’ roll and to still have the creative vitality to release a star-studded new album in 2020, but Dion DiMucci has done just that. He burst onto radio in the late 1950s and early 60s with hits like “A Teenager in Love” and “Runaround Sue” and has now just put out “Blues With Friends,” 14 tracks on which he’s accompanied by musical compadres including Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Beck, Van Morrison, Paul Simon and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. Bob Dylan wrote the liner notes.
Now 80 and living in Florida with Susan, his wife of 57 years, Dion (who has always used just his first name professionally) acknowledges his continued productivity with a grateful shrug. “I feel like I stand under the wellspring of creativity, the spout where the glory comes out,” he says. “I’ve always been a weird guy, man: I was an Italian kid in [the] 1950s Bronx reading St. Thomas Aquinas, then Thomas Merton, and fascinated by Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed when everyone else was listening to Jerry Vale. ”
‘I feel like I stand under the wellspring of creativity, the spout where the glory comes out.’
Dion’s complicated life is explored in “The Wanderer,” a jukebox musical that had been scheduled to debut last month at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., but has been rescheduled for next April because of the pandemic. There was plenty of drama to work with. In 1959, Dion was the fourth headliner on tour with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (the “Big Bopper”); Dion opted out of the plane ride that crashed and killed the other three because he couldn’t justify the ticket’s cost of $36, the very amount that his parents paid in rent on their Bronx apartment.
He was 18 when he returned home after “the day the music died.” Nobody much wanted to talk about it. “There were no grief counselors in the Bronx in 1959,” says Dion. “I lived by instinct, though a priest did comfort me by saying that relationships don’t end, that my friends were closer to the beatific vision and I should ask them to say a prayer for me. But the first way I dealt with that pain is I became a heroin addict.”
Dion had huge hits with “Runaround Sue,” “The Wanderer,” “Dream Lover” and “Ruby Baby.” But by 1965 his career had been derailed—both by his worsening drug habit and by tension with Columbia Records, which wanted him to focus on crooning even as he obsessed over bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
In 1968, shaken by the death by overdose of his fellow teen sensation Frankie Lymon, Dion completely reimagined his life. “I got on my knees and said a prayer, and I haven’t had a drug or a drink since—52 years,” he says. “Unbelievable. I just changed, and the Thomas Aquinas and Merton pieces fit together. It went from my head to my heart. I had a conversion experience, and I saw myself as a child of God instead of a rock star.”
In a phone interview last week, another soulfully inclined musician, Bruce Springsteen, called Dion pivotal to his own development as a singer and songwriter. Songs like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” inspired him to add a saxophone to his own band, he added. “I’ve loved Dion since I heard ‘Teenager in Love’ on my mom’s radio as a small boy,” Mr. Springsteen said. “His artistic curiosity has never left him, which is very unusual. Dion has remained musically curious throughout his entire life, and made all kinds of different kinds of records and continued using one of the great white pop voices of all times in creative ways. That’s very inspiring.”
‘His artistic curiosity has never left him, which is very unusual.’— Bruce Springsteen
Amid the tumult of the late 1960s, Dion recast himself as a gentle, incisive folkie, including a 1968 hit with “Abraham, Martin and John,” a mournful song about the assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, looking backward to the killings of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Dion went through more musical phases, including releasing a string of gospel albums during an extended evangelical period. (He returned to the Catholicism of his childhood more than 20 years ago.) On “Blues With Friends,” the song “Hymn to Him” (which features Mr. Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa ) harks back to Dion’s gospel days with a gorgeous, haunting tune. “It’s an incredible song, and it’s very difficult to write well about that subject and not sound preachy,” says Mr. Springsteen. “Dion just wrote a beautiful hymn.”
Still, the new album’s emotional core is “Song for Sam Cooke (Here in America),” sung as a duet with Paul Simon. Dion wrote the song for his late friend Cooke, the iconic soul singer and author of the civil-rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come,” who was murdered in 1964. Dion says that he wrote the song years ago and was thrilled to finally record it, only to find it strikingly relevant with the streets once again filled with marchers demanding racial justice.
“My song is about racism, but it’s also about brotherhood, understanding, friendship. It’s about beauty and truth, which is what Sam led with,” Dion says. “He taught me that racism was a peculiar way to become a man. I was horrified by the racist BS I saw him grapple with on the road, but he didn’t get ruffled because he was always the smartest guy in the room. He was living in a higher reality and helped me raise my game.”
Dion adds that Cooke was just one of many friends who have shaped his life. The music and guests on “Blues With Friends,” he says, only scratch the surface of his debts to a lifetime of compatriots. “I’ve always had a gift for latching onto quality, no-BS people who take me to higher ground,” he says. “I think that’s why I’m here at 80 to talk to you.”
January 6, 2021
An Interview with John Mayall
I interviewed John Mayall for the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog in 2015 around his Find a Way to Car album. That blog seems to have disappeared so I’ll be sharing some of the many pieces I did for them here.
**
John Mayall was a blues pioneer, one of the first British musicians to fully embrace and perform the American music. Throughout the 60s, his band the Bluesbreakers granted PHDs in blues to a steady stream of musicians who became rock royalty, including guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, who moved on to join or form Cream, Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones, respectively. Other graduates included Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Cream’s Jack Bruce and Free’s Andy Fraser.
Now 81, Mayall remains vibrant and active. After going five years without a new studio album, he has released two in two years, including the new Find a Way to Car, featuring his steady quartet.
We spoke to him on the phone from his Los Angeles home just before he set off for a 53-date, two-month tour of Europe.
You’ve had a very busy run here, with two albums in two years.
We’ve been touring consistently all these years; we do at least 100 shows a year, but our record company was just holding us back. I finally asked them to put something out or release us, which they did. I signed with 40 Below Records and we’re back in business, which is great because I really feel like this is the best band I’ve ever had.
Your Bluesbreakers were like the University of British Blues, with Eric Clapton being replaced by Peer Green being replaced by Mick Taylor, for instance. It enhanced your reputation but was it frustrating to constantly have to make a new band? Were you a difficult boss?
No. That was all entirely due to the musicians that I chose to be in my bands. They were free to develop their own styles and in very short time they were ready to put their own bands together. It was always that way.
I was such a good bandleader that I allowed a band to develop in its own way. If someone was ready to move on, they were replaced with someone else who was ready to step up. They were all very young and they were just finding their own direction. The thing was to encourage them to go on and develop their styles and personalities – and everyone was pleased with that.
Clapton-Green-Taylor was a rather incredible run of guitarists.
You don’t think about those aspects of it while they’re happening. They’re all so different from one another but with such strong playing personalities. Eric was the right player for me to work with at the time. He was in the band for almost a year, during which he set off on a hair-brained trip to Greece. He was just very restless and he moved on and formed Cream. He was a great talent, obviously, and Peter Green, the greatest pure blues guitarist of his time, replaced him. Mick Taylor was very young and was in the band for longer than the other two.
But this all happened in a short time and it’s a very short time of my career. They became big names and I understand why people want to know more about them, but there have been so many great musicians in the band, including Sugarcane Harris on violin; Larry Taylor on bass guitar; Walter Trout, Coco Montoya and Buddy Whittington on guitars and the list goes on…
Right, but those three went on to such landmark careers, and Clapton’s playing with you completely altered people’s perspective of what a guitar can sound like. His Bluesbreakers tone changed everything,
The amazing thing is it’s just the sound of him playing. He was just using a guitar plugged into a Marshall cabinet with a couple of 12-inch speakers. It’s really got nothing to do with the instrument or the amplification. He just astounded people with what he played because he was so good!
How has your conception of the role of a bandleader changed over the course of your career?
I don’t think it’s changed at all. You know what you want to play and if you get the right guys it all comes together and clicks. We have a great time and it’s exciting and we communicate that to an audience. If we’re not excited and having fun, then they won’t be.
You’re 81. As a blues musician, what has gotten better and worse as you age?
There’s a maturity that takes place where you just understand what you want, but really it all has to do with who you’re working with. With this band, we’re so very creative and it’s different every night. We don’t play the songs and we don’t play things the same way and that’s what keeps it fresh and exciting. It’s an endless cycle and I think the new album is a testament to that.
Alan Paul is the author of Reckoning: Conversations With the Grateful Dead and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band.
December 24, 2020
Check out my forgotten interview with Rush’s Geddy Lee
In 2000, I interviewed Rush’s Geddy Lee about his solo debut My Favorite Headache and in the subsequent 20 years completely forgot it had happened, until I found the interview in my Dropbox folder. Hey, I did a lot of interviews over the years, especially in those contract writer days when I was Johnny on call, and I had two little kids! Enjoy.
The basic scenario is quite familiar: keystone member of legendary band releases the first solo album of his storied career. But the particulars of Geddy Lee’s My Favorite Headache (Atlantic) are anything but standard. You expect someone in his situation to explain that a crushing desire to express his real self led him to go solo after 32 years and 22 albums with Rush. Instead, he says, “It’s something that I never wanted to do.”
That’s not exactly a ringing marketing slogan, but then Lee has never been about such things. The bass icon has managed to maintain a remarkably low profile for the frontman of progressive rock’s longest running, most successful bands.
“I really have had no desire to draw more attention to myself,” Lee explains. “On top of that, I had no frustrations in Rush as a writer or a player. This happened as a result to having a really long layoff and feeling the need to flex my creative muscles.”
Rush has been on a three-year hiatus, due to drummer Neil Peart’s lack of musical desire following a pair of devastating personal tragedies; he lost his daughter in a 1997 car accident and his wife to cancer the following year. Consequently, Rush has not recorded since 1996’s Tears For Echo.
Several years ago, Lee began collaborating with old friend Ben Mink, a stalwart of the Canadian music scene best known as a producer of KD Lang and Barenaked Ladies. The results are the 11 co-written songs that became My Favorite Headache.
“Ben and I were friends for years but never jammed together until we casually got together in his Vancouver studio when Rush was passing through in ’97,” Lee recalls. “I picked up a bass, he picked up a guitar and we were shocked at the similarity of our feels. We decided to try writing a song and were surprised by how much we liked working together. So we sort of sheepishly backed into doing an album together.”
Mink played most of the guitar on the album, with Lee adding acoustic parts as well as “the obnoxious leads” on the title track. Pearl Jam’s Matt Cameron handled the drums. The tunes will be immediately familiar to Rush fans, thanks to Lee’s unmistakable singing voice and aggressive bass work, but many songs also display a gentler and at times musically simpler side of Lee.
“Two or three of these songs would certainly worked for Rush,” lee says. “Though they may be a bit less histrionic. They have a rock and roll approach that is not too divorced from Rush. But other tunes are earthier and more groove oriented than what we would do. Somewhat to my surprise, I really enjoyed the process and found it nice to do things a little bit differently.”
GW: As you noted, some of the songs on your album sound quite different-from Rush. Was the writing process also different?
LEE: Not tremendously, but there are subtle but important differences. Ben and I have a more similar view of where a song should go than Alex and I do. Alex and I usually come at things from very different points of view, which we work on marrying.
His approach is more riff-oriented, more complex and wilder. Usually that’s a great thing for Rush but working on my own it was fun to be able to pick a groove and serve it, rather than feeling the need to keep shifting as we do in Rush. Neil hates repeating in his drum licks and is always pushing the rhythm.
GW: Was it fun to play with different people after so many years with the same guys?
LEE: It was way fun. I was happy just to be writing again. I can’t go too long without writing some music. It’s a part of me that really has to come out. The things that have come in the way of me working on my own never involved the music. It was always the peripherals, like having to promote myself in conversations like this. I never wanted my life to be “Spotlight on Geddy Lee.”
But things change once the songs are written, because you develop allegiance to them, and you suddenly have something to promote other than yourself. First you want to make the songs as good as you can and then you don’t want just leave them in your closet where no one can appreciate them.
GW: As successful as Rush has been, you have been able to maintain a pretty low profile.
LEE: We’re just not particularly driven by those things. In my own way, I have as much attention as I can handle. I have a good life and other things I like to do, so I’m not 100 percent involved in myself. There are lots of things to do out there in the big, wide world. I’ve been really fortunate to have success with music, which is one thing I do, but I’ve never had any burning desire to dominate the music industry.
GW: Do you, Alex and Neil have any plans to get together?
LEE: Yes, probably early in the new year. We’ll take it one step at a time and see what happens. Alex and I see each other often and talk all the time. Neil has moved to California, so we don’t see him as much, but we correspond via letter or email at least once a month. He is starting to put his life back together and move on and now feels ready to tackle some work. He has not been playing much if any music. At one point, he got on his drums just to see if he still had a feeling for playing. Once he determined that he did, he stepped away again, but I think that right now, he is very interested in getting his chops back in shape.
You have to realize what a spiritually deflating thing a loss of that magnitude is. You have a hard enough time figuring why you want to get out of bed in the morning, much less why you should want to get on your drum kit and make music that is essentially celebratory and rebellious. Rock music is not blues. You need a particular spirit of life to do it well and you just can’t do that if you are not in a frame of mind capable of producing that optimism.
GW: It must have been frustrating to not be able to reach out to him through music.
LEE: Not at all. The whole thing was terribly tragic to me, and it was heartbreaking to have to watch him suffer to that degree. I just wanted to be there as his friend. The last thing I was worried about was whether he should be playing or not. You have to walk before you can run, so you break things down to the basics and try to be a supportive friend and hope that all things conspire to make him a person capable of rebuilding his life and moving forward.
GW: Your bass style is very influential, but its roots are not readily apparent.
LEE: I guess that’s because while a lot of people formed what I do, I thankfully don’t sound like any one of them. Early on, I was influenced by people like Jack Bruce, Paul McCartney, who is a great melodic player, Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane, John Entwhistle, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Yes’ Chris Squire and [fusion player] Jeff Berlin. I gleaned things from all of them.
GW: Was there a moment when you realized that you were impacting people in a way similar to what those guys did for you?
LEE: A few years ago it became apparent to me that a lot of young bands cited us as a primary influence and I got some nice correspondence. It’s incredibly gratifying to hear that you’ve impacted someone’s musical life in that way. It may be the greatest reward a musician can receive.
GW: What gear did you use on the album?
LEE: My main bass is my early 70’s Fender Jazz bass and I also use two other Custom Shop basses, all strung with Roto Sound round wound strings. They go through three or four different, direct-style devices: a Demeter DI box and/or an Avalon U5; a Palmer speaker simulator; and two different Sansamp units which I switch back and forth between for different top-end distortions. One is a standard guitar unit and the other is a bass line line driver, which is simpler and less over the top.
On stage, I just run that into my Trace Elliot cabinets to create some live bottom end, but on record I never use any speakers. I go straight into the console and keep them on different tracks so I can mix and match the tones. Add a little compression and that’s how I get my sound.
