Alan Paul's Blog, page 2

Listen Now to Curated Texas Flood Chapter By Chapter Spotify Playlist – SRV, Jimi, Albert and much more!

 

Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan is, of course a book about music and. musicians. Andy Aledort and I carefully constructed these chapter-by-chapter playlists to improve your reading experience. Of course, they are filled with great music and you should listen to them even if you’re not currently reading the book. The music Stevie loved is the music we loved as well and there are hours and hours of incredible listening here, hand-picked by me and Andy, two music-obsessed writers. So tune in.

And, of course, if you don’t have Texas Flood yet, go get it now!

 

Check out new release: John Lee Hooker Live At Montreux 1983 & 1990

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_search_bar_position = "bottom";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "search";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "Shop Related Products";

amzn_assoc_default_search_phrase = "John Lee Hooker";

amzn_assoc_default_category = "All";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "48010f0f11a4d9a67a9b60b982d46324";

Last week, the John Lee Hooker Estate and Eagle Rock Entertainment released John Lee Hooker Live at Montreux 1983 & 1990 as a 2-LP set, digital video & digital audio.

The Hook will forever be hailed as a legend of the blues genre. His storied career continues its impact on modern music even today – with fans spanning generations and transcending borders.  Hooker was responsible for molding the blues into a sound that was entirely his own, dispensing with 12-bar blues in favor of an intensely deep, funky groove.  “John Lee Hooker sent a unique strand of DNA coursing through the gene pool of countless rockers and blues artists … both his guitar playing and, his vocals, in their chanting cadence, could reach the transcendence of devotional singing” – The Guardian.

Located in Switzerland, the Montreux Jazz Festival is one of the world’s biggest and longest-running jazz festivals. Live at Montreux witnesses John Lee Hooker deliver two blistering performances filmed at the festival in 1983 and 1990. He was joined by The Coast to Coast Blues Band, covering an impressive set of hits from across his storied career including “Boom Boom”, “Crawlin’ King Snake” and his very first single “Boogie Chillen” – the latter expanded to an epic 13-person jam on the 1983 set, featuring guitarist Luther Allison, harmonica legend Sugar Blue, and a horn section. For his triumphant return to Montreux in 1990, Hooker added an additional guitar and sax to the line-up, as well as female vocalist Vala Cupp. “The Hook” infuses his set with songs from his 1989 Grammy® winning album, The Healer, including the hypnotic title track.

2 LP Track Listing:

LIVE AT MONTREUX 1983 – LP 1

 

1. It Serves Me Right To Suffer

2. I Didn’t Know

3. Hi-Heel Sneakers

4. If You Take Care Of Me, I’ll Take Care Of You

5. Boom Boom

 

SIDE TWO

1. Worried Life Blues

2. I’m Jealous 

3. Crawlin’ King Snake

4. Boogie Chillen 

 

LIVE AT MONTREUX 1990 – LP 2

SIDE THREE

1. John Lee Hooker Introduction

2. Mabel

3. I’m In The Mood

4. Crawlin’ King Snake

5. Baby Lee

 

SIDE FOUR

1. It Serves Me Right To Suffer

2. Boom Boom

3. The Healer 

4. Boogie Chillen’ 

Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Bob Weir returns to the land of the living

Today is Bob Weir’s 73rd birthday. Happy birthday Bob. Let’s celebrate with this 2000 Guitar World interview.

Bob, with his 335

This interview appears in my Ebook, Reckoning: Conversations With the Grateful Dead, along with similarly extensive interview with Phil, Phil and Trey, Robert Hunter, Bill Kreutzmann, Warren Haynes, Mark Karan and Steve Kimock. It costs less than a latte. Check it out!

A couple of notes: I spent a lot of time with Bobby down in Philly on this afternoon and really enjoyed talking with him. He was gracious, relaxed and easy to be with. We did most of the interview in his hotel room, but also hung out quite a bit at the show.

Just before this – I think two nights before — we also hung out at the Jammies for a good while. They were at Roseland that year, and I actually presented an award. Wish I could remember what it was or to whom. Anyhow, we chilled in his dressing room then. And then I also hung out with him in an NYC hotel room as he did a guitar lesson with Andy Aledort that ran with this piece and it was really fascinating to watch/listen to him demonstrate many of his songs and the proper way to play them.

For as long as the Grateful Dead has existed, people have loved to rag on Bobby for a lot of different reasons – some of which are easy to understand, others of which I think are really unfair. But he is a very interesting and different guitar player; he composed a lot of their most intricate and interesting songs, such as “The Other One,” as well as their catchiest tune – “Sugar Magnolia”; and he is a very good hang. Ultimately, only thing matters: he’s the guitarist Jerry wanted playing by his side all those years.

One other editorial note: when you see Bobby discussing Napster and downloading below, this interview was conducted when that was a very hot issue and Metallica was a taking a lot of fire for battling downloading and file sharing.

Kirk West Foto

Top Dog
Former Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir returns to the land of the living with Ratdog, his ever-evolving “rock and roll Dixieland” band.
by Alan Paul

Outside Philadelphia’s Electric Factory the wind is whipping on a cold winter night. Shivering ticket scalpers circulate through a parking lot slowly filling with musical pilgrims arriving to see Ratdog, the band led by Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.

Inside the nearly empty theater, the mood is sedate as soundcheck gets underway. Lead guitarist Mark Karan is showing off his beautiful assortment of instruments, including a vintage Gretsch and Les Paul and gleaming new PRS and Modulus guitars. Drummer Jay Lane is giving his young daughters lessons, with one girl banging the snare drum while another taps the high hat. Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti is eating a slice of pizza and chatting with the techs.

Without uttering so much as a single word, Weir plugs in his custom Modulus guitar, turns up the volume and starts playing a slinky triad riff. Longtime Weir collaborator Rob Wasserman settles down behind his upright electric bass and joins in. Within moments, the guests peel away, the musicians turn serious and the band falls into place, quickly moving into “Bury Me Standing,” the lead track of the group’s debut album, Evening Moods (Grateful Dead Records). And just like that, they’re off, tearing through a half-hour tune-up for the coming gig. In a few hours, they’ll bring down the house full of aging Deadheads and young jam lovers with their interlocking, ebb and flow improvisations, playing a mix of new material and beloved Grateful Dead standbys.

Those are the moments for which Weir lives, the reason why he’s out here humping it night after night, promoting his new album and whipping his band into shape. He has a beautiful wife and gorgeous two-year-old daughter 3,000 miles away in California and he could be with them, spending his days relaxing in the sun, riding his beloved mountain bike or hiking the wooded trails of Marin County, north of San Francisco. Such are the perks of 30 years spent in the Grateful Dead, a group he helped form when he was just 17 years old.

But Weir is far from ready to give up the ghost. He sees himself as a guitarist. And a guitarist plays guitar, so here he is on a cold East Coast night, pushing ahead with the group that has received most of his passion and effort since the Dead’s 1995 disbanding following Jerry Garcia’s death.

“We are coming into our own,” says Weir. “We’re not there yet, but we are learning how to read each other’s moods and impulses, which is what makes a good band. You need to get to the point where you hear footsteps coming up behind you and know with certainty that someone else is about to pick up the ball and finish your phrase. That’s what the Grateful Dead had and I feel it coming in this group.”

Evening Moods is an important album for Weir, the first of his six efforts outside the Dead that really captures his essence. In doing so, it clearly illustrates what he brought his old band. Weir hardly ever played solos, content to spur on Garcia’s crystalline flights of fancy. But he is an extremely interesting and inventive player, rarely playing the consistent, revolving patterns that are the bedrock of most rock rhythm styles. Instead he relies on counterpoint, riffs and non-circular chord progressions. He was also an important songwriter for the Dead, contributing much of the band’s oddest, most ambitious tunes, like “The Other One,” “Weather Report Suite” and “Estimated Prophet,” as well as “Jack Straw” and “Sugar Magnolia.”

All of these tunes can be heard in different versions on the never-ending stream of Grateful Dead live albums, released on both Grateful Dead Records (mail order only, online at www.dead.net) and Arista. There are also plans to digitize the band’s extensive tape archives to make them available for online downloads, a process said to be causing rifts with bassist Phil Lesh. And, of course, there’s the ongoing story of Ratdog. Certainly, there is much to discuss with Weir and he’s game to talk about it all, reclining comfortably on a hotel suite couch, barefoot and clad in jeans and polo shirt, hours before the Ratdog gig in Philadelphia.

Your guitar style is extremely original. Who were your primary influences?

Initially country and acoustic blues players, but my dirty little secret is that I learned by trying to imitate a piano, specifically the work of McCoy Tyner in the John Coltrane Quartet. That caught my ear and lit my flame when I was 17. I just loved what he did underneath Coltrane, so I sat with it for a long time and really tried to absorb it. Of course, Jerry was very influenced by horn players, including Coltrane, but I never really explicitly thought about that relationship, because I didn’t really ever decide to pattern myself after McCoy Tyner’s piano. It just grabbed me.

I’ve never had much of an idea of what I’m up to and I’m not sure that I do even now, but I have always been there to serve the music and believed that if you sincerely do so then your appropriate role will present itself. Then it’s just a matter of finding the perfect place to play that role and I’m very fortunate that this happened to me at a very young age.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

One of the hallmarks of your style is that unlike conventional rock and roll rhythm playing, you do not play repetitive patterns.

I think that is partly a result of my dedication to rhythm playing and not really trying to be a soloist. Because I’m concentrating on just that figure, I can put a little more energy into it and develop it more brightly. Another big reason for me not being repetitive is the influence of Jerry and, even more so, Phil, who never repeats anything. If no one else is repeating anything, I’ll be damned if I’m going to play the same thing over and over. Besides, it’s not what the music ever wanted. It wants to keep developing and growing and moving, and I really am in service to the music.

Rather than straight chords, you play a lot of figures, riffs and fills that often verge on lead guitar. I’m thinking, for instance, of your work on “China Cat Sunflower.”

Right. I always played a lot of counterpoint in support of Jerry’s guitar or vocal melody. But it’s funny that you mentioned “China Cat Sunflower” because that’s just about the only song where Jerry ever taught me a riff and told me it’s what he wanted to hear. That little arpeggiated lick was his. I do something similar on “Scarlet Begonias,” which I came up with. But the concept of the band was always group improvisation, not merely playing behind Jerry’s solos. The Grateful Dead’s m.o. was to play together in a seamless mesh. We coined the term “rock and roll Dixieland,” a phrase we also often use in Ratdog, and that explains a lot because in Dixieland jazz, every instrument plays a crucial role in support of one another. Jerry was quite a lead guitarist but he also often chugged away in support of what someone else was doing. But people focused so much on his leads they often missed that, and frankly he was so far up in the mix that fans often thought his support lines and rhythm parts were lead lines.

A lot of your songs have featured unusual timing and odd chord changes. Do those things come naturally to you, or did you say, “I want to use unconventional structures?”

It goes back to the late Sixties when the Beatles studied with the Maharishi and suddenly there was an explosion of Northern Indian classical music in American popular culture. To even begin to appreciate people like Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar you have to be able to count in their time signatures, where they will take, say, 13 and put it against 18. They call them the “talls” and it’s nothing I ever expect to master because it is very deep. But even attempting to understand it got me started.

I got this little box called a Trinome, which had three levers, a ding and two clicks. You set a quarter-note pulse, then one through 12 for the ding and within that bar there’s another pulse, so you could get things like three going against four. Working with that, I developed a fascination with seven, because it gave me the best of both three and four. For instance, you can play something in 28 where you play several bars in three then make it up by playing a four here and there. It’s odd at first, but once you learn to breathe in seven, it becomes really interesting because it rocks the rhythm by skewing it one direction then very suddenly skewing it the other. And you can play slightly ahead of the beat and get a whole different feel. It’s a lot of fun to play with.

You can hear a lot of similar ideas in Ratdog’s music. It seems that the reason this band is so successful is you’ve embraced the role you always played in the Dead. Some of your earlier side bands took a left turn, consciously going in a very different direction. Is that because this is now your primary artistic outlet?

There is probably something to that because I’m definitely marshaling my resources for this effort. I’ve taken it slower and easier. In some of my previous groups, I was thinking, I have six months so I have to make something happen, and I often tried to force stuff. With Ratdog I am just letting the band and the music know where to go. And it took a while to find the right lineup. We went through several different incarnations until we settled on the right guys. Another reason the record worked is we started recording it, then went on the road where the songs grew up a bunch. So we ditched what we had and started over, working fast and live. It was mostly cut like a jazz record, so you can hear the conversations going back and forth between all of us. That approach even led us to do songs we hadn’t planned on doing, like “Corrina.”

I had no interest in redoing an old Dead song, but at the end of “Two Djinn” the segue just happened. Everyone just started playing “Corrina,” because the connection was so strong. I actually tried to dig in my heels and stop, but everyone ignored me. The segue you hear on record is what actually happened, minus a few bars snipped out as I changed guitars, putting on my Roland guitar synth.

You were the lone guitarist for Ratdog’s first several years. Did that change your approach at all?

Not radically, but it would sometimes become clear that a certain passage needed a featured guitar part, so I had to step away from putting my shoulder to the wheel and do something. I started poking my head out here and there and, much to my surprise, I found that I rather like leading the charge. I do more of that now, though I doubt that in this middle part of my life I am suddenly going to develop into an extended soloist à la Django Reinhardt or Jerry Garcia. Those guys are good at stating a theme, developing it, taking it for a walk in the woods and coming back home. I generally like to stay home. I am really rediscovering the joy of group improvisation and I want to camp out here for a while.

http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widg...Along those lines, there’s not too much soloing on this record.

No. There is no dominant soloist because the music we’re playing is telling us that we need group improvisation and a weave. One of us will start to play something and someone else will pick it up and finish the idea. It’s the type of thing that only comes from playing together a lot.

T he word on the street is that the entire vault of Grateful Dead music is being digitized to be made available for download. What is the status of this project?

We’re still trying to round up financing for it because it’s going to be an expensive process. There’s no infernal rush. We do have to get to those tapes before they deteriorate but the means of distributing the music over the internet is not yet hi-fi enough to any of our satisfactions. In the meantime, we can and will get started as soon as we get some financing. It will take a while, so we’ll probably do an internet survey of the most popular shows and do those first. The first way we are going to make it available is not going to be via download, but rather made-to-order CDs. You go the web site, click on a show, listen to some of it, and shop until you know what you want and then we’ll burn you a disc. Or if you want every “Dark Star” from ’72-’76 or a disc of all the stuff we did while someone was changing a broken string, we can do that, too.

There are a lot of rumors that this process has caused dissension between Phil Lesh and the rest of you.

No, this is not what has caused the dissension, believe me. My read of the situation, basically, is Phil wants to be the captain of his own ship. If you’re on board with him, that’s great. But don’t argue with him because he won’t have it. That’s all there is to it, really. I guess since having a brush with death [Lesh had a liver transplant in 1998—GW Ed.], he’s come to the realization that he wants to do things his own way with absolutely no compromise and that’s his right.

Over the years most Grateful Dead songs were written as collaborations either between Jerry and Robert Hunter or you and Hunter or John Barlow. A lot of people assumed that you or Jerry wrote the music and the others wrote the lyrics. Now that you clearly co-write all your lyrics, I wonder if that assumption was wrong.

Yes and no. It was exactly that way with Jerry and Hunter and that’s one of the reasons that Hunter didn’t particularly like to work with me. I throw away a lot of stuff and do it myself. On the Barlow songs, I wrote anywhere from a third to a half of the lyrics. There are a few of the songs he wrote entirely himself, most notably “Cassidy,” but most of them were full-fledged lyrical collaborations.

Y ou were always seen as sort of the Dead’s blues guys since you sang most of them. Now you have direct Robert Johnson references on “Bury Me Standing,” the first track on Evening Moods.

Right, Gerrit [Graham, co-writer] and I set out to do that very explicitly. A long time ago I got the notion to bounce flamenco and blues off of each other and see what resulted and I finally did it, with that ham-handed flamenco riff. [laughs] I’m certainly no flamenco guitarist, but I feel that the two idioms are so close they are like brothers, both born and raised in barrooms and whorehouses, driven by six-string guitars largely tuned to “standard” tuning and evocative of evil, smoky imagery.

“Ashes and Glass” seems like a sequel to the great Dead tune “Throwing Stones,” tackling the topic of nuclear apocalypse and lightening it with a child’s rhyme, this time “Mockingbird” instead of “Ring Around the Rosie.”

Yes, I returned to that dire frame of mind. In fact, it was getting more and more dire, so much so that I was about to abandon the song. Then I was bouncing my six-month-old on my knee, singing her “Mockingbird.” She was loving it, so I started making stuff up, just anything that rhymed so as to keep going. And it came to me that was what the song was about, juxtaposing all this dire imagery with the only way you can respond—do what you can and keep going. So you have the pessimism of the verses contrasted with the optimism of the choruses.

You have talked before about the ecstasy of realizing that you are nearing a musical peak. Is that more of a rush than actually hitting the peak?

The exciting part is the anticipation, but the payoff is when you actually become electric in the classical sense. You are no longer flesh and bones. I actually believe that you physically transcend for a while, and if someone fired a bullet at you, it would pass through, because there is nothing there. You are still visible and you are still causing physical things to happen—you’re singing into a microphone, tubes are humming—but you’re not there. You don’t weigh anything. Those are the minutes that I live for. Fortunately, we are hitting those moments more often in Ratdog.

Your mentioning of metaphysical electricity reminds me of a story I’ve heard that you were almost killed at Woodstock by physical, voltage-type electricity.

A very different sort of electricity! [laughs] Yes, that’s true. Our soundman decided that the sound system was woefully inadequate and he was going to set up our P.A. He got the ground plane wrong—real wrong—so anytime Garcia, Phil or I touched our strings, we got 30 or 35 volts, enough to really irritate you. And all hell broke loose if you had the temerity to go anywhere near your microphone while touching your strings. I did so and a blue line about an inch and a half thick flew out, hit me in the mouth, lifted me off my feet and sent me eight or ten feet through the air, crashing into my amplifier. I had a few fuzzy moments and when the birdies went away, I had a fat lip.

If this had been in England, with their higher voltage, I would have been history. As a result of that whole fiasco, the Grateful Dead have been written out of the history of Woodstock. We played so poorly that we wouldn’t allow the footage to be used in the movie or soundtrack album. You try playing with a constant 35-volt shock every time you touch a string.

You took lessons from the great blues fingerpicker Rev. Gary Davis. How did you come to meet him?

Jorma [Kaukonen, Jefferson Airplane guitarist] was a big fan of his and he helped me look him up in Queens. I made my way out there whenever I was in New York. I only got three or four sessions with him before he passed from this mortal coil [in 1972]. He was my main guitar influence, really, and if you listen to his stuff you’ll see that he took it all from piano, too—all of his parts are stride piano playing adapted to guitar. It’s amazing stuff. He had a Bachian sense of music, which transcended any common notion of a bluesman.

You also co-wrote “Eternity” with one of the blues’ greatest writers, Willie Dixon.

That’s right. I went to see him when he played a club near my house and he called me up to jam and, of course I had a great time. Then Rob [Wasserman] suggested we work on a song for his Trios record. We got together in a studio in West Hollywood and kicked some ideas around and agreed to regroup the next day in my hotel room. I had the song’s signature descending riff, which I wrote based on him telling me, “Don’t be going to any of them jazz chords.” He wanted to step slightly out of his bag, which is why he wanted to work with me, but he didn’t want to step too far, so I came up with this Louis Jordan jump-blues style pattern. He slowed it down and we started developing it, and he came up with a chorus and got me singing it with him singing the harmony part. Then we went to separate corners to hammer out our parts and he was jotting down words really fast.

He handed me this piece of paper, filled with simplistic, almost child-like writing and I was really disappointed. He said, “Sing it out loud,” so I started and after two verses and choruses of thinking it rather lame, the eloquent simplicity of the words hit me and my jaw just dropped. I think he read everything I was thinking because he just started laughing and said, “That’s the wisdom of the blues.” That was a big moment for this boy because as far as I’m concerned Willie Dixon was a living fucking saint. I thought that before I met him, and I had every single suspicion confirmed from knowing him for a few years.

Y our best known song, “Sugar Magnolia,” is atypical of most of your work.

That was my take on Southern Rock, and an attempt to do a rock and roll version of a Cajun fiddle tune. We did the Trans Canada Festival Express tour with Delaney and Bonnie and I spent a lot of time hanging out with them and the boys in their band. I loved the way Delaney played rhythm guitar, marked by sliding into A chords. I picked that up and used it in “Sugar Magnolia” as well as in “Monkey See, Monkey Do” and a few other tunes.

At the same time there was an outbreak of Cajun fiddle music, with guys like Doug Kershaw becoming popular. So I tried to throw an overlay of that onto Southern Rock and see what shook out, and the result was “Sugar Magnolia.” The chorus uses a trick straight out of Cajun fiddle tunes, where you go to the four chord, then walk to the four chord of that and back.

And it fit right in with what Garcia and Hunter were writing on American Beauty. Was the outbreak of Americana on that album and Workingman’s Dead a result of the influence of people like Delaney and Bonnie and the Allman Brothers Band?

To a certain extent. We were certainly well aware of those people and we were influenced by anything that came our way. Anything that came within pissing distance of us would be sucked up and incorporated into our music. We sort of forgot our roots during our psychedelic era, but as soon as we stopped taking psychedelics with any absurd regularity and put our feet back on the ground, our love of American music took back over. We osmosed it right up through our systems and it came out our pores and into those songs.

And acoustic roots music was your initial link to Jerry, right?

Absolutely. We formed a jug band [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions] about a week after we met. That happened on New Year’s Eve, 1964. I was walking through an alley behind the [Palo Alto] music store where I gave guitar lessons with two friends and we heard some banjo music and knew damn well it was Jerry. We went in and he was sitting there waiting for his students. I said, “Man, this is New Year’s Eve, I don’t think you’ll be seeing anyone.” He wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost, so he said, “Do you guys play? I have the key to the instrument room.” He got some guitars and we ended up playing well into the evening and had enough fun to think about doing something together. The next week we had a jug band and the next year we had a rock and roll band. The rest is pretty well documented.

 So you knew Jerry before that night?

More like I was aware of him. He was a local hero, playing banjo with the Black Mountain Boys, a really hot bluegrass band. For some reason, our jug band took off and became real successful with much less accomplished musicianship. There was some juice behind it that there’s no explaining. I was 16 and had only been playing guitar for a few years, but I knew I was onto something here. Jug bands were big at the time and one thing that really gave us a leg up was that just after we formed, I was at a friend’s house and discovered his folks’ collection of old Bluebird “race record” 78s and it was a treasure trove of obscure down-home blues. There were no reissues then so no one had heard this stuff and that gave us a lot of material which none of the other guys were doing. Then we also discovered Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller and that gave us the rest of what we needed to be a viable contemporary jug band. Someone came up with a live tape and we just put that out [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, on Grateful Dead Records], but unfortunately it doesn’t contain many of the songs I’m talking about.

Despite your obvious belief in the potential of online music distribution, you have been an outspoken foe of Napster.

Of course. It’s like Marxism except they forget the “from each” part. It’s not a complete system because it consists of people taking and not giving, and it is therefore doomed to failure. It can really bust stuff up. It can really fuck up American popular musical culture. I argue this point with advocates all the time. I say, “How are musicians going to make a living and let their craft be their livelihood?” They always get squinty eyed and go, “But don’t you see, don’t you see?” They have nothing else to say—and I don’t see, though I wish I did. People pick on Metallica by talking about how rich they are, but it’s not about them or me. I’m a guy who can afford to give it away, but I’m talking about the guys in my band, who need to make a living. I’m talking about me when I was 18 years old living on the street. We couldn’t afford to go on the road. The Grateful Dead had to make a record and get an advance in order to get out there and make our way.

On a more personal level, I have to say that we just made a damn good record and Napster is killing us because we’re square in the middle of that demographic. If we can’t at least make back the money we put into that, we’re going to have to think twice about making a record again. And if I’m in that position, believe me, others are, too.

But the entire history of the Dead, as well as bands from Phish to the Allman Brothers who copied your “allow taping” model of business indicates that the more that is available for free, the more people will be into the band and support you. You’ll sell more tickets. More people will buy the actual releases…

But there’s a huge difference between a third- or fourth-generation cassette tape and a digitally reproduced downloadable version of what is essentially the master recording. Then you don’t have to buy the record unless you want the cover and you can probably get that online, too. It can be really injurious to American musical culture. And it’s not like these guys are Robin Hood. Give me a fucking break. They’re making money hand over fist. Napster is worth millions. Of course, I can’t defend the music industry either. You hear stories of mid-level executives having catered lunches or chefs coming in and preparing them gourmet meals, and someone’s paying for this behavior, too. And the whole business of not being able to get something on the radio if it’s not four minutes long is not good. It’s bad. Real bad. And that’s our music industry as it stands. It’s got to come to somewhere in the middle. I think the net is going to have a huge and hopefully positive effect on music, but the absurd left and the absurd right have to disappear for a meeting in the middle if music is going to survive. Maybe it will even open some people’s minds so they throw off the labels the industry has tried to apply to them—“you’re a metalhead, you like jam bands and you only listen to jazz.” The net could take us back to the late Sixties when you could hear the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Igor Stravinsky back to back on the same radio station.In any case, we need the utopian idealists and there always will be people who are only in it for the money. That’s the lexicon of humanity and that’s music. It will sort itself out, but as my friend Bobby Cochran said, “People are going to have to honor what they love.” If you love music enough, support it.

This interview appears in my Ebook, Reckoning: Conversations With the Grateful Dead, along with similarly extensive interview with Phil, Phil and Trey, Robert Hunter, Bill Kreutzmann, Warren Haynes, Mark Karan and Steve Kimock. It costs less than a latte. Check it out!

9/11 Still Hits Hard, 19 Years Later

Reposted today, as I do every year on this date. I don’t think the words will ever be any less true. Three years ago, I took the whole family to visit the Flight 93 crash sight in Shanksville, PA and paid our respects. All the same feelings…

Now we’ve lost almost 200,000 Americans in just six months and I feel like we SHOULD feel raw every day, rawer than we do. We’re getting numb and we need to fight that.

My family strolling through 9/11 Memorial, Liberty State Park on 9/11/11

Eighteen years later, 9-11 is still very, very raw to me.

In 2011, on the tenth anniversary, my whole family visited the Statue of Liberty and we went up in the crown. The security was tight. There were helicopters flying overhead. And when we got back on the ferry to leave, I looked back at the Statue of Liberty and felt as patriotic as I ever have and I thought, “She’s still here and you’re not.”

We took a family picture and we smiled because it felt good to be alive and to be together, and to feel like our way of life had not been destroyed. But we smiled with heavy hearts, because, of course, we thought about everyone who wasn’t there, everyone we all should remember on this day every year.

We came back from the Statue and walked through the very beautiful memorial in Jersey City, in Liberty State Park. I walked through it silently, looking at the names etched on the side: husbands, wives, daughters, sons, lovers, friends who never came home. And I wept to myself.

It’s still so real.

Part of me wants 9-11 to be a National holiday but I can’t bear the thought of it becoming like Memorial or Labor Day; another excuse for sales and a cooler full of beer.

I know this was a national tragedy, but I just don’t think people outside of the NYC area felt it or understood it in quite the same way as those of us who were here in the metro area. We saw the cars sitting unclaimed in the train stations. The missing posters lovingly hand written and pasted all over the city, the candles burning in front of every fire station.

At noon on 9-11, I was at the South Mountain YMCA picking up Jacob, who was 3, and helping the director go through the files looking for kids who had two parents working in Manhattan, flagging two kids whose parents both worked in the Towers. It took hours until everything sorted itself out. One little baby girl lost her mother. A father around the corner never came home.

The next day I went up to the South Mountain Reservation, walked over to the edge of the wall on the bluff overlooking downtown New York and where the towers used to be was a big grey cloud swirling around and filling the air – even here, 25 miles away – with an acrid smell.

I want to make sure my kids understand, really understand, how real this was. How real it still is to me. So I will take them up there in a few minutes to lay some flowers at the memorial. It sprouted immediately, spontaneously, and is now official, honoring our friends and neighbors who got up and went to work and never came home.

“Never forget” means a lot of things to a lot of people. I’m thinking of them.

Listen Now To The First Track From Duane Allman’s Final Show

Next month,on October 16th, the Allman Brothers Band are putting out The Final Note, one hour of Duane Allman’s final show, n Oct. 17, 1971 at the Painters Mill Music Fair in Owings Mills, Md, just 12 days before his tragic horrible, no good motorcylce accident. It’s kind of wild how this came to be, but long story short, someone in the audience recorded an hour on a handheld tape recorder then forget he had it for almost 50 years. The band has put out a track, “done Somebody Wrong” and it sounds great. Enjoy!

You can preorder the CD here. 

A bundle with T shirt, flyer other goodies is here.

If you haven’t yet, you should really check out my books:

One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band 

Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_search_bar_position = "bottom";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "search";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "Shop Related Products";

amzn_assoc_default_search_phrase = "Allman Brothers Band";

amzn_assoc_default_category = "All";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "315aa011eadd0834cb2409860601e09a";

Unreal. Check out Muddy Waters’ Dr. Pepper jingle!

Holy Moly. Muddy Waters recorded a Dr. Pepper jingle written by Randy Newman. Both the interview and the song are just incredible. Enjoy! And thanks to whomever dug this up and posted it on YouTube.

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "My Amazon Picks";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "f11e8b988cc30d98706ebf464ea2e372";

amzn_assoc_asins = "1250622263,1250040507,B00022GJ4M,B07NZ2G3KG";

New Duane Allman Era Video!

This is what I’m talking about! I only know half the story of how this video of the second Atlanta Pop Festival has suddenly emerged. Until I know more, I won’t comment except to say: enjoy this! Any video of Duane is a treasure, and this is great stuff. The groove, the feel, the interaction, the solo, Duane playing slide with a broken wine bottle neck, Thom D. getting down… it’s heaven. Enjoy. 1970.

My 2019 WSJ Profile of David Crosby

Today is David Crosby’s 79th birthday. In honor of that I am reposting my 2019 WSJ profile of him. This was the first of a string of pieces I’m really proud of which have run in the Weekend Confidential column in the Saturday Review section. Since then I have also profiled Chuck Leavell, Jaimoe, Robbie Robertson and Chris Frantz. Enjoy and please continue to support print journalism!

Burdened by an array of health problems, the legendary singer-songwriter says he is ‘trying to get the music out of my head’



David Crosby, photographed at his home in St. Ynez, Calif., June 26.PHOTO: SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By Alan Paul

Aging rock legends don’t generally record a lot of new music. The incentives are low in today’s age of streaming, when money is made on the road as longtime fans come out to hear elderly icons play their hits. So why is David Crosby—77 years old and a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entrant, as a member of both the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash—releasing albums at a feverish clip, dropping four in the past five years?

Mr. Crosby smiles slightly at the question before answering simply, “Because I’m going to die.”

He stirs cream into his coffee and takes a sip before continuing. “I have eight stents in my heart, and I’m going to have a heart attack in the next year or two, and that’ll be it,” he says. “I’m trying to get the music out of my head first.”

Early in the new documentary movie “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” the musician says flatly that he is afraid of dying after battling hepatitis C, receiving a liver transplant and now struggling with diabetes, on top of his cardiac issues. But sitting in an executive dining room at Manhattan’s Sony building, Mr. Crosby discusses his demise with matter-of-fact directness.

“People don’t talk about death, or they adopt some fairy tale like sitting on a cloud playing a little harp. Hogwash. No matter how long you have, the question is the same: What are you going to do with it? I want to make the world better, and the only thing I can contribute is music. I can make good music that will lift you up. That’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Mr. Crosby’s extraordinary 55-year career has seen him rise to the heights of stadium stardom and fall to the lows of being a disgraced, jailed junkie. He still has his beautiful, soaring voice and his knack for jazz-tinged acoustic songs, and he remains a clear-eyed chronicler of history, both personal and cultural.

“I wasn’t prepared that he would go so deeply into the tissue of his soul,” says the filmmaker Cameron Crowe, who produced “Remember My Name,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles theaters on July 19. “Croz is fascinating because he’s been at the forefront of so much American culture for so long.”

Mr. Crosby was at the epicenter of the Age of Aquarius. The son of Floyd Crosby, an Oscar-winning cinematographer known for his work on films such as “High Noon,” the guitarist co-founded the electric folk group the Byrds. When the Beatles held a press conference on their 1966 American tour, Mr. Crosby was sitting right behind them. He played the three most significant festivals of the ’60s: Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont—arguably the beginning, middle and end of the hippie era.

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "My Books";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "099124c004f8ca1dc664400580ee7f3f";

amzn_assoc_asins = "1250040507,1250142830,0061993158,B010EDXYZK";

He later became part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which wrote, recorded and released “Ohio”—one of the all-time great protest songs—within weeks of four students being shot and killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in 1970. The group filled stadiums, but its members were sabotaged by raging egos and infighting.

Mr. Crosby became a junkie, nodding off on stage. He wound up in jail in 1985 on cocaine-possession and weapons charges and credits his eight-month stint behind bars with saving his life by forcing him to get sober. He calls heroin a form of anesthesia, a painkiller he initially took to smother his devastation after his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a 1969 car accident near their home in Marin County, Calif.

Both in the new movie and in person, Ms. Hinton’s sudden, tragic death is the only subject that takes the twinkle out of Mr. Crosby’s eyes and casts his face into melancholy. “I loved her,” he says. “What are you going to do? They don’t give you any equipment for that. That happened to you, you’d be the same.”

Mr. Crosby was a founding member of both the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash.PHOTO: SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

He is frank about his struggles with drugs. “Heroin is a beautiful high the first time. And then it’s just a horror of trying to recapture that beauty, which you can never do. At a certain point, it defeats you completely,” he says. “Your life becomes useless because you’re driving a car where the steering wheel is not attached. You have no control. Me becoming a junkie was the worst thing I did to my partners. That’s how I let them down, where the rift between us started. I so wish I had avoided that, but there’s no point in being dishonest about having made a terrible mistake.”

Crosby, Stills & Nash has broken up and reformed multiple times (both with and without Neil Young), but they seem unlikely to ever play together again. The group’s last performance was a disastrous White House Christmas tree-lighting in 2015.

“After 40 years, it devolves into, ‘Turn on the smoke machine, play your hits,’” Mr. Crosby says. “We hadn’t been friends at all for a long time.”

“Remember My Name” probes Mr. Crosby’s failings as a lover, friend and bandmate almost as much as it does his musical genius. He seems a better romantic partner than he used to be, as evidenced by his 42-year relationship with his wife, Jan. But Mr. Crosby no longer speaks with Graham Nash, Stephen Stills or Neil Young.

Mr. Crosby attributes the film’s pointed honesty to the influence of his longtime friend Mr. Crowe (known for films including “Almost Famous,” “Say Anything” and “Jerry Maguire”), who first made his mark as a teenage music journalist for Rolling Stone, including a 1976 profile of Mr. Crosby and Mr. Nash.

Mr. Crosby understood that his relationship with Mr. Crowe would change once they started working on the movie. “He’s a real artist and journalist, so when he starts making a film about you, you’re not his buddy anymore,” says Mr. Crosby. “He gave me nowhere to hide. Documentaries usually just ask everybody famous you ever met to talk about how cool you are, and the result is a listing of their accomplishments and a polishing of their mistakes. I want to know why a person did things, what’s going on in their head. I knew that would be uncomfortable for me, and Cameron asked me the hardest questions I’ve ever been asked.”

Mr. Crosby didn’t know exactly where the movie was headed or have a say about its final form. By confronting his tumultuous life, the film gets at a painful contradiction: Mr. Crosby’s music has provided so much peace, harmony and joy to so many listeners, even while many of his own relationships have been tempestuous at best.

“I don’t know how to explain that,” Mr. Crosby says. “I celebrate the one, and I suffer the other. I can’t make sense out of that for you, but it’s true.”

Robbie Robertson – My Guitar World interview

Robbie Robertson: “While playing with Bob Dylan I remember thinking, ‘They’re going to wake me up tomorrow because all of this is impossible'”

The guitar legend discusses his time with The Band, Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan – as well as his new album, new documentary and latest Martin Scorsese score, The Irishman.

(Image credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns)

Today (July 5, 2020) is Robbie Robertson’s 77th birthday, which seemed like a good day to share my Guitar World interview from last year.

The Band’s 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink, was such a bolt of originality – creating what came to be known as Americana – that it reverberated throughout the rock world. Eric Clapton said he broke up Cream immediately after hearing it and even trekked to Woodstock, New York, to meet its makers, as did George Harrison.

“I knew the album was good and different, but I was surprised by the impact on people like Clapton and the Beatles,” guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson says, 51 years later. “We were together for six or seven years before we recorded our debut, honing our skills, learning our craft and gathering music – gospel, blues, mountain music, sacred harp singing, Anglican hymns. We were putting everything in our big pot of gumbo, and when we made a record sounding like that, all these guys asked, ‘Where the hell did this come from?’ That’s what happens when you really go out in search of a sound.

“While playing with Bob Dylan I remember thinking, ‘They’re going to wake me up tomorrow because all of this is impossible'”

“We were bringing a musicality that wasn’t already there. So there was a freshness and newness to it. And it opened up some people’s ears. They really thought it was coming from another world – and it was, in a way.”

Robertson is Canadian, as were all of his Band-mates, with the notable exception of the Arkansas native Levon Helm, the drummer/singer who was also a big brother and musical guidepost for the rest of the group. 

The Band first came together backing rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, did an intensive internship as Bob Dylan’s first electric band in 1965-66, then emerged as a singular artistic voice, creating rock laced with country, blues and other folk music. They were built around three remarkable singers – Helm, bassist Rick Danko and pianist Richard Manuel – and a fantastic batch of songs, most of them penned by Robertson, the band’s slashing lead guitarist. He wrote some of rock’s most original, indelible songs, including “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up On Cripple Creek” and “The Weight.”

Robbie and the Hawk. Photo – Ed Perlstein

The songs, which were given more depth by multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, sound utterly original and like folk songs that have been passed down for generations. They are so superb that Robertson’s excellent guitar playing is often overlooked.

Robertson is now 76 and still a vital creative force, with a host of new projects. Sinematic, his first album since 2011, was released in September. A deluxe edition of The Band’s second (eponymous) album celebrated that landmark work’s 50th anniversary. 

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_search_bar_position = "bottom";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "search";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "Shop Related Products";

amzn_assoc_default_search_phrase = "Last Waltz";

amzn_assoc_default_category = "All";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "c5aa99c489847ed7f3547075e36f2bdf";

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, a documentary based on his 2016 memoir Testimony, debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last fall and was picked up for theatrical release in 2020. And Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was the 10th movie by the director which Robertson has scored.

We recently caught up with the busy Robertson to discuss all of the above and a whole lot more.

You became renowned for your songwriting, but you established yourself first as a really hot guitarist. The clips in Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band illustrate how your vibrato is so distinct, even from those early Ronnie Hawkins clips. Who were your biggest influences?

“When I was 16, I went from Toronto to the Mississippi Delta with Ronnie, and we went to this record store in Memphis, the musical center of the universe. It was like walking into a reservoir of sound, and I spent almost my whole paycheck on records. The sound of Hubert Sumlin’s guitar on Howlin Wolf’s I Asked for Water and She Gave Me Gasoline and Evil… man!

“And it was Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, all the acoustic guys. Hearing them and their great vibratos made me determined to figure out how to do that. And one of the things nobody knew about on a large scale yet outside the South was this trick of using a banjo string for the first string, then moving the others all down one. That way the strings were looser, and you could bend them.

A lot of guitar players displayed jealousy and wouldn’t show you things: ‘I had to learn myself – and so do you’

“I learned it from Fred Carter, who was the guitar player I took over from. He was from Louisiana and a lot of guitar players came through the Louisiana Hayride[radio and TV show]: guys like James Burton and Roy Buchanan. I was learning the tricks of the trade and that was my school. Ronnie recognized that there was no stopping me and said, ‘Go get ’em, kid.'”

Roy Buchanan was briefly your bandmate; he seems to have already been an immense and quirky talent.

“He was amazing. A lot of people didn’t understand Roy and thought he was weird, but I really liked him, and he was very generous. A lot of guitar players displayed jealousy and wouldn’t show you things: ‘I had to learn myself – and so do you.’ He wasn’t like that.

“He’d show me something on his guitar, then hand it to me, but I couldn’t play his guitar! The strings were an inch off the fretboard, and I didn’t even know how he played that thing, but it just sang beautifully when he put his fingers on it.”

You were 16 when you hit the road with Ronnie, a child prodigy of sorts.

“It was part of the workshop, paying your dues, learning your craft. I knew I had to do this with everything I’d got because Ronnie had an incredible, tight, driving rockabilly band, who didn’t even have bass! He made me the bass player to help acclimate me to the music and prepare to replace Fred, and I wanted to to be a part of it.

“The bottom line was, there were no Canadians in a Southern rock and roll band.”

“I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, how in the world am I going to impress these guys?’ I’m inexperienced and don’t know how to play well enough, but boy, I wanted it and went on a crash course to learn. The bottom line was, there were no Canadians in a Southern rock and roll band.”

And not just a Canadian – but a 16-year-old Native Canadian/Jewish kid.

“Right! I had the break down all these barriers to win, and it was such a challenge. I had obstacles to overcome that were a mile long.”

If the early road was your school, what was touring with Bob Dylan in 1965 and ’66, with all those incredible shows with people virtually assaulting you as he rewrote musical history?

“It was a deep education on the magic of music and life. You couldn’t have written a more amazing story, and that forged the Band. The shit we went through was incredible. Hooking up with Bob Dylan was like entering The Twilight Zoneof music. You thought, ‘They’re going to wake me up tomorrow because all of this is impossible.'”

There’s an interesting clip in the film where you climb in the back of the limo after one of those shows where you’ve been assaulted with boos, and Bob says, “Well, why did they buy the tickets so fast?” That is such an interesting dynamic where the shows are so in demand yet so attacked.

“Everything was sold out! I don’t believe in history there is an equivalent story that somebody tours all over North America, Australia and Europe, and every night they boo you around the world. They’re booing this guy who revolutionized music, and we’re part of the revolution. I don’t know if this has ever happened to anybody in history. What a strange way to make a buck.”

How did it impact you when you suddenly learned that your father was not your father? You’re living part time on a reservation and find out that you had a whole other family of Jewish mobsters in Toronto.

“I got introduced to music on a real level on the reservation, and it was part of that culture and heritage.”

“And those two worlds never connected. But when my mother told me this, it was so unimaginable that I had to take it in stride because I thought, “I just can’t freak myself out with this information.” It was a lesson about growing up: anything can happen, and you’ve got to stay standing. I just had to accept it because it was the truth.”

Did the native part of your ancestry play a big role in your music?

“I got introduced to music on a real level on the reservation, and it was part of that culture and heritage. Everybody played music and I needed to be in the club, so they said, ‘Well, what instrument? Do you want to play a mandolin or fiddle or drums?’ I said, ‘I like the look of that guitar.’ 

“My mom got me a guitar with a cowboy painted on it. And I thought it was so ironic that I have a guitar with a cowboy on it and Indians are teaching me how to play.”

You really had that thought even at that young age?

“I did, because it was right in front of me. And one of the reasons I’m sure that the guitar appealed to me so much was seeing movies with cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers playing.”

On the song Once Were Brothers on the new album, some of the background vocals and rhythms have a native echo.

“That happens quite often. It’s just there; it lives inside me.”

Am I right in saying that it’s the first time you’ve directly addressed the sadness at the end of the Band in a song?

“It definitely is. As usual, I didn’t know what I was going to write about, and it just started going down that path, and just thinking that I’ve lost Richard and Rick and Levon, and it’s heartbreaking to me. I couldn’t help for it to come out in the music and in the story I was telling.”

The movie addresses Levon’s anger with you and the difficulties in that relationship, which you haven’t discussed too much.Advertisement

Levon and Robbie, woodstock. Photo – Elliot Landy.

“Levon and I were the closest; he was the closest thing to a real brother I ever had.”

“It just came about naturally because we were really leaning on the very real story of the brotherhood. Levon and I were the closest; he was the closest thing to a real brother I ever had.”

Did that make the difficulties that much more painful?

“Yes. It was painful to know what he was going through and that it was eating him up – and it had nothing to do with me. He’s a tremendous guy and a tremendous talent, somebody that I loved so much. 

“When Levon said these things, I thought, “Oh, he’s having a tough time.” And I never engaged in it at all, because I knew there was something else going on, and then I found out he had health and financial problems.

“I still completely loved him. Years later, he suddenly said I was responsible for The Band not coming back together. There was a truth in that, that I completely admit to – but I would have done it if it was doable. I was the only one that showed up.”

What do you mean?

After The Last Waltz, we wanted to talk about what we were going to do when we come back after everybody pursued some other things. We were going to meet at the studio, and I went there and nobody came or answered their phone. 

“I sat there and waited, and it got dark outside and I thought, ‘I’ve got to read the writing on the wall.’ It was just a sign that everybody wanted to go in a different direction, and I was like, ‘Okay, I get it.’ And that was it. I showed up and I guess they would have if they could have.”

The Irishman is your 10th soundtrack working for the same director – what is it about Scorsese that inspires you?

“Is it that many? With Marty, every movie I’ve worked on has been a completely different experience. That’s what’s so exciting about what we do together, and it doesn’t get easier because, just before I start figuring out what I’m going to do on a movie, he says, “As long as it doesn’t sound like movie music.”

Your album is called Sinematic ,  and you attribute your songwriting breakthrough to reading and studying screenplays and scripts. Can you describe how that came about?

“Even at eight years old I remember going to see movies and just living inside them. It just touched a nerve deep inside me.”

“I became a movie bug when I was quite young. And even in the early days of playing with Ronnie, everybody would be laying around in the afternoons. I would go and see a movie and come back from Fellini so inspired and try to describe it, and everyone else’s eyes just glazed over. They thought I probably needed medical help. But I couldn’t help being so drawn to this. 

“Even at eight years old I remember going to see movies and just living inside them. It just touched a nerve deep inside me. And eventually I wondered how they did that and [poet] Gregory Corso, who was living at the Chelsea Hotel the same time I was, told me about a place called Gotham Bookmark where you could buy the scripts of Akira Kurosawa, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Orson Welles. 

“Oh, my God. They revealed something to me that was very valuable and inspired me to write the stories in songs.”

Didn’t playing all those shows with Dylan impact your writing? Did you study his songs in a scientific way?

“No, but they were right in front of me and I had to play them every night. He was a really close buddy of mine doing something nobody had done before. He broke down some of these walls of songs that were all about the same thing. He wrote about different things in a different way – in a different language. 

“Oh, my God. There was a tremendous sense of freedom from what Bob uncovered and revealed to the world. It was like, there are no rules. Even years later when I started making solo records I found I was almost scoring the songs as opposed to strumming along or picking a little riff behind it. It was almost like it was going to be a sonic experience and that’s continued.”

It’s the 30th Anniversary of the Allman Brothers’ return with Seven Turns

ABB 7 Turns Promo photo by Kirk West

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";

amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";

amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "alanpaulinchi-20";

amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual";

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";

amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";

amzn_assoc_region = "US";

amzn_assoc_title = "My Amazon Picks";

amzn_assoc_linkid = "1a6853d6b343513d7831a087bba69d05";

amzn_assoc_asins = "1250040507,1250142830,B000001E0D,B007HOI3WE";

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({

google_ad_client: "ca-pub-1312120505976613",

enable_page_level_ads: true

});

It’s the 30th anniversary of the release of the Allman Brothers Band’s Seven Turns, which came out July 3, 1990. That makes it an excellent day to revisit the most important Story I ever wrote

I didn’t even know I had a digital copy of this story until I stumbled upon it on my hard drive recently. Just looking at it sent me into a wayback machine… to 1989- 90 when I lived in New Port Richey Florida. I went down there because my girlfriend Becky got a job at the Tampa Tribune. It seemed like a cool thing to do. Living was cheap, Becky was making a seemingly killer salary of $22k, I looked at a map and the place seemed to be right on the Gulf. My best other option was a part-time job at a newspaper in Putnam County, New York and I was pretty sure I was madly in love. Might as well find out!

The love thing worked out great, but I found NPR to be a profoundly depressing place, with a weird mix of blue collar retirees and hardcore rednecks. Death metal thrived and there were always weird and disturbing crimes, like 85-year-old ladies being raped and murdered. Black people lived on the other side of tracks – literally. I struggled to find work. There was no beach within 45 minutes –just mangrove swamps and housing developments. When we found the one little county park on the water, we sat on a retaining wall to talk and I put my foot directly into a red anthill. My right foot was covered with the biting bastards and when I ran into the water screaming, they didn’t come off. I had to rub and rub to release their venomous grip and the whole thing felt like a metaphor for my life there. 

On the other hand… we partied hard, we grew really close in ways that formed the foundation for our now-27-year marriage and I spent a lot of time writing and really worked on and improved my craft. Because I had so much free time, when I got an assignment, I sunk my teeth in and became completely engrossed in the subject matter. If I did a record review, I listened to the record 25 times, until it was inside me and I really had an opinion.

I was working for the St. Petersburg Times as a correspondent doing entertainment stuff and also local reporting — covering high school baseball games, writing about an attack dog school or old people’s regular bridge games. Most of it wasn’t too exciting, but the Times was a good paper with good editors and I sharpened my basic reporting skills which has served me well.

I was writing for Pulse (Tower) and Request (Sam Goody) magazines. Record stores were thriving then and the stores had the resources and interest in putting out real mags with real editors and writers. I mostly did smaller things for them and was somewhat ghettoized as the blues/roots rock guy. Every day I would come home from aimless trips to the mall or the grocery store or the laundromat where I went to play Ms. Pac Man and ran for the answering machine, anticipating a call from Rolling Stone that never came.

One day, though, there was a message that was almost as sweet. The editor of Pulse called and they were assigning me a big feature on the then-just-reunited Allman Brothers Band, who were putting out their first comeback album, Seven Turns. It was huge because I had been dying to get a more major story from them. And the ABB loomed large in my consciousness, though I hadn’t listened to them deeply in a long time.

The Allmans had been my favorite band when I was younger (I chose Duane Allman as the subject for my great American essay in sixth grade) but my interest had cooled.  But I was so pumped for this story. I went out and bought, at my own dime, the four-LP box set Dreams that had just come out a few months prior. I spent a few weeks listening to those classic sides over and over, reading the liner note booklet, immersing myself in their music, their myths, their aura and I became totally smitten. Then I got the advance cassette for the new album – via Fed Ex! from New York! – and listened to it constantly… in my Chevy Celebrity, in my big clunky Walkman, in my home stereo.

Then the Seven Turns tour brought the Allmans to Tampa and I went to see them, at the state fairgrounds. The parking lot was filled with Harleys and I was filled with joy. After the shows, I went onto the bus and spoke with Gregg, one of my first backstage experiences. (That was actually after Gregg blew me off for an in=person interview after I waited around all day, but that’s another story. )

This resulting story led me to my job at Guitar World, and it reignited a passion for a band that has basically been my favorite ever since. It was also the first time I interviewed and/or met Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes, Allen Woody and Kirk West, all of whom became key figures in my career and in my life, really.

Most importantly, this story was the first time I felt that I had really tapped into myself and found a way to write journalism that captured my essence without being about me. I have never liked self-centered writing or writing that was cold and clinical. This story was one of the first times I brought the lively voice and passion of my journal to a very solid, well-reported piece of journalism.  I reported zealously, talking to everyone I could — I even tracked down and spoke to Phil Walden and Tom Dowd, two now-deceased music legends.  

I don’t know what I got paid for it – maybe $500. I know that I only made $8,200 that year. This story gave me a surge of confidence and even joy that carried me a long way. Thirty years later and an awful lot of Allman Brothers reporting and writing later only a few segments make me cringe. Most of it holds up well. But even if it didn’t, it still would be the most important story I ever wrote.

Foto by Kirk West. One of my favorites.

 

 

 

An American Legend, Reborn

By Alan Paul

It’s easy to cast a skeptical eye toward ’60’s and ’70’s “super-group” reunions⎯the calculated, corporate-sponsored comebacks by some of our favorite British bands. And the Allman Brothers? To be kind, they’ve regrouped before with less than stellar results. But Seven Turns, the Allmans’ Epic debut, immediately establishes itself as something altogether different⎯it blasts off with the sharp-toned slide guitar hook of “Good Clean Fun” and never looks back.

The band has succeeded in capturing the spark which made it America’s best, most memorable rock band almost two decades ago. The dual, harmonic lead guitars, the twin drums’ relentless propulsion, the country/blues/jazz hybrid rock ’n’ roll⎯all these wonderfully eccentric traits are abundantly present throughout Seven Turns. It’s the group’s best record since 1973’s Brothers and Sisters, and arguably its gutsiest outing since founder/slide guitarist Duane Allman died in 1971. The reasons for the rebound are many, but guitarist Dickey Betts offers a simple one: fellow axe-slinger Warren Haynes.

“We just haven’t had another slide guitarist in the band since Duane,” Betts says with a smoky drawl. “So when I played slide, Dickey Betts’ guitar was absent. This is the first time that my guitar appears with a slide guitar, and I think that’s what’s so reminiscent about the old band.”

The album is also a benchmark in diversity for the Allman Brothers. “Good Clean Fun,” “It Ain’t Over Yet” and “Shine It On” are Southern blues rockers fueled by singer/organist Gregg Allman’s primal growl and the guitar majesty of Betts and Haynes. “Let It Ride” and the title track are melodic, country-tinged tunes⎯antidotes to the heavier blues numbers⎯while the jazzy instrumental “True Gravity” explores the group’s improvisational heart.

The thorough assimilation of Haynes, pianist Johnny Neel and bassist Allen Woody by the original band members (Betts and Allman along with drummers Jaimoe and Butch Trucks) is central to the success of Seven Turns. The newcomers do much more than fill holes⎯Haynes and Neel each wrote several songs, contribute lead and harmony vocals, and have a tangible presence throughout the album.

“They’re not sidemen, that’s for sure,” Allman says. “And we’d never be able to live with them if they were. They are Allman Brothers⎯much more so than some people in earlier incarnations. And that’s a big difference.”

Haynes has a particularly difficult role. It’s impossible to play slide guitar in this band without being compared to Duane.

“He handles that beautifully,” Allman says. “He knows what he’s got and he plays it. He doesn’t feel like he has to recreate Duane Allman every night, and for that I take my hat off to him.”

Haynes, who played in Betts’ band for three years, says that that experience prepared him for the rigors of becoming an Allman Brother. “Had I not worked with Dickey, I would have had more trouble adapting,” he says. “Duane was a great player and he died young, and those two things lead people to immortalize him, so I know some people in the audience would like me to play like Duane Allman. But, for my sake, I just can’t do that⎯and the guys understand that. They’re great about making it a band, and that means everyone plays like a unit and everyone holds up their end.”

Another key to the success of Seven Turns is producer Tom Dowd, who was behind the boards for At Fillmore East and Eat a Peach ⎯records that established the Allmans as rock legends. Over the years, Dowd’s role has grown to be much more than that of mere producer.

“He’s like my father,” Allman says. “Teacher, father, guru⎯you pick your word. He was real supportive of us in this comeback, and he always stood behind me through the drug thing and everything else. Seven Turns would not have been the album it is if it had been done with anyone else. He is the eighth member of the band, for sure⎯and I’m talking charter member.”

Betts agrees that Dowd has become a de facto Allman Brother, and vows that the group will never record without him again.“Recording this thing with Tom was such a pleasant experience,” Betts says. “He carries so much knowledge around with him and just offers very strong guidance for the band. I don’t know how we ever made music without him.”

Dowd⎯who recorded ground-breaking jazz and r&b performances by Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin before becoming involved with rockers like Eric Clapton and the Rascals⎯was drawn to the Allmans’ use of jazz elements, a crucial but often overlooked component of the band’s success.

“The Allmans have this unique facility,” Dowd says. “When they play things that are tangential to the blues, they swing like they’re playing jazz. They have this perpetual swing sensation. Even when they’re playing heavy rock, they’re swinging. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.

“They’re so identified and legendary as a rock ’n’ roll band. But when you take their music apart, you realize how exquisite and deep their playing facility and sensitivity really is.”

So how was a band that could crunch chords like Led Zeppelin, play the blues like Elmore James and coolly swing like miles Davis born?

The Allman Brothers Band formed in 1969 when Duane⎯who, as a studio guitarist in Muscle Shoals, Ala., recorded with Pickett, Franklin, and other r&b greats⎯returned to Jacksonville, Fla. Looking to put together a trio, Duane was already committed to Jaimoe as his drummer, and had his eyes set on bassist Berry Oakley. According to Betts, who played in a band with Oakley, the formation of the unique Allman Brothers Band lineup was largely improvisatory⎯much like the music in which they came to excel.

“As far as puttin’ the two drums and the two guitar players together and all of that,” Betts says, “that was just a jam. Duane and Jaimoe kept coming and sitting in with mine and Berry’s band to get used to playing together, and as we started jamming, something clicked, and eventually Duane asked if I’d go with them. Then when Butch appeared and jammed with us, it was something special so Duane asked him to play drums, and all of a sudden the trio had five pieces.

“So putting the whole band together was more or less of an improv thing⎯it just came about. We all were smart enough to say ‘This guy’s special’ about one another.”

The five went to Macon, Ga., and began rehearsing and cutting demos. It was then that the need for Gregg Allman became clear, according to Phil Walden, at the time Duane’s manager and president of the fledgling Capricorn label. “They had this great instrumental presence but no real vocalist,” Walden says. “Berry was going to do a little singing and so was Dickey and Duane. That was a lot of a little singing and no singer. So Duane called Gregg and asked him to come down.”

Gregg was still in Los Angeles, having remained there after the breakup of Hourglass, his and Duane’s first recorded band. With typically sage wisdom, music-industry types had tried to shoehorn Hourglass into a trendy, psychedelic package, and the experience was painful for both Allmans. In fact, it had sent Duane packing for home but Gregg remained in L.A., where his hard time continued. His disillusionment with the music business and struggle to find his own voice led him to write the songs which became Allman Brothers’ trademarks.

“Aside from a true vocal presence,” Walden says, “Gregg brought these really important foundation songs that the band was really built around.”

The lyrics to “Whipping Post,” “It Ain’t My Cross to Bear” and “Dreams” reveal a world-weariness, inner turmoil, and determination expressed with remarkable depth by the then-21-year-old Gregg.

“Those songs came out of the long struggle of trying so hard and getting fucked by different land sharks in the business,” Allman says. “Just the competition I experienced out in L.A. and being really frustrated but hanging on⎯not saying ‘Fuck it’ and going on to construction work or something like that.”

Foto by Kirk West

The band’s 1969 self-titled debut, featuring five Gregg Allman originals and cover of Muddy Waters and Spencer Davis songs, heralded the arrival of a new voice on the American music scene. But few were listening⎯Walden says that the album initially sold less than 35,000 copies. Still, the band retained its optimism.

“We were just so naïve,” Betts says. “All we knew is that we had the best band that any of us had ever played in and were making the best music that we had ever made. That’s what we went with. Everyone in the industry was saying that we’d never make it, we’d never do anything, that Phil Walden should move us to New York or L.A. and acclimate us to the industry, that we had to get the idea of how a rock ’n’ roll band was supposed to present themselves.

“Of course, none of us would do that, and thankfully, Walden was smart enough to see that that would just ruin what we had.”

But Walden admits now that he thought of cashing his chips and cutting his losses several times. “It seemed like I had just been wrong,” he says, “that they were never going to catch on. People just didn’t grasp what that Allmans were all about⎯musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around and building a base.”

Dowd first heard the Allmans while visiting Walden in Macon, Ga., in 1970. As he passed the Capricorn studio, the sound of the band rehearsing drifted out into the street.

“I got to Phil’s office and asked him who in the hell was rehearsing in the studio,” Dowd recalls. “He said, ‘That’s the Allman Brothers,’ and I said, ‘Get them the hell out of there and give them to me in the studio. They don’t need to rehearse⎯they’re ready to record.’ ”

The result of Dowd’s initial trip to the studio with the Allman Brothers⎯Idlewild South⎯further established the band as an innovative, hard-hitting outfit. During a break in the Idlewild recording sessions, Dowd had another band in his Miami studio⎯Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos, who were recording Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Duane’s presence on the title song, and throughout the album, was masterful, his impact reaching well beyond that of an average studio musician. Duane’s importance to the Dominoes is revealed by The Layla Sessions, a 20th anniversary box set to be released this month on Polydor. Throughout the collection of outtakes and jams, Clapton and Allman trade licks, with Duane’s slide often underpinning Clapton’s leads. One never-released track, simply titled “Jam IV,” features the Allmans band⎯minus Jaimoe⎯playing with Clapton and fellow Domino Bobby Whitlock.

The Dominos’ record hit big, but Idlewild South was only marginally more successful than the Allman’s debut. It wasn’t until the next year, 1971, with the release of At Fillmore East, that the Allman Brothers Band became a verifiable sensation and a huge commercial success.

“Fusion is a term that’s been used in the last 10 years,” Dowd says. “But if you wanted to look at a fusion album, it would be Fillmore East. Here was a rock ’n’ roll band playing blues in the jazz vernacular. And they tore the place up.”

Indeed. With three songs clocking in at over ten minutes, including the 22-minute “Whipping Post,” which ended the album, the recording captured the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. But according to Walden, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form.

“Atlantic/Atco (Capricorn’s then-distributor) rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” he recounts. “(Atlantic executive) Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, not recording. That a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record⎯“People priced” at three dollars below standard list price for a double album⎯became a top seller, and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. “Any comparison to anybody is fatuous,” read Rolling Stone’s review of the album, which went on to call the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band this country has produced in the past five years.”

<A HREF=”http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widg... Widgets</A>

The high times came to a sudden end when Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident while recording Eat a Peach, the band’s Fillmore follow-up. He was 24. But the Allmans didn’t collapse immediately after Duane’s death, returning to the studio to finish the session and cutting several standouts, including Gregg’s “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More.” The song’s sentiments were obviously inspired by Duane’s death.

Betts recalls that the decision to continue as a band was not an easy one. “We thought about breaking up and all forming our own bands,” he says. “But the thought of just ending it and then being alone was just too depressing.”

The following year the group added pianist Chuck Leavell and recorded Brothers and Sisters. But tragedy struck once again when bassist Berry Oakley died in yet another motorcycle accident. The band still didn’t fold, bringing in bassist Lamar Williams and finishing the album. Released in1973, Brothers included “Ramblin’ Man,” which became their biggest hit, as well as “Southbound” and the instrumental “Jessica,” both immediate classics.

Yet it was clear that the group was standing on its last, wobbly legs.

“After Duane died,” Betts says, “it was still very dynamic at first, but it just slowly slipped away and then we lost Berry and it was very hard to continue. I’m not weighing Duane’s loss against Berry’s loss⎯but losing two members was just so tough. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have even lasted as long as it did if it weren’t for Chuck Leavell. He was just such a strong player.”

Betts and Allman both released solo LPs shortly after Brothers and Sisters, and the group’s next outing, Win, Lose or Draw, was shaky at best. The hellhounds that had always nipped at Allman’s heels seem to have caught up with him; his solo remake of “Midnight Rider,” originally cut by the band on Idlewild South, was stripped-down and haunted, ringing with an eerie emptiness. By the time the group’s Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas was released in 1976, the Allmans had already disbanded. Listening to the very flat live recording, it’s clear the breakup was inevitable.

The band reunited in 1979 for Enlightened Rogues, but some indefinable spark was missing. “We tried very hard to reach the classic sound,” says producer Dowd. “We worked our fingers to the bone, but it was laborious.”

The band stayed together for two more albums on Arista Records⎯1980’s Reach for the Sky and 1981’s Brothers of the Road⎯but neither was much of a critical or commercial success, and another, seemingly final split occurred in 1981.

“During the ’80s when we got back together with Arista, they tried to throw us into doing something that we weren’t,” Allman says. “The whole music scene of the ’80s just wasn’t conducive to our music at all. We cut two albums and …God, it was very frustrating.”

Betts, too, says the ’80s weren’t the best of times for the gritty Southern rock band. But he adds that some of the Allmans’ lineup may not have been up to snuff.

“I don’t think some of the band groupings could measure up to the original band,” Betts says. “Even when we had some great players in the band, there was a pull, a tension⎯the unity was lacking. But the thing that made it more obvious was when the music trend started turning away from blues-oriented rock and more towards the synthesizer-based stuff and the more simple arrangements like dance music. That forced the record company to dictate to us what type of record to make or it wouldn’t get played on the radio, and we got caught up in that whole thing. That’s why we broke up in ’81. We decided we better just back out or we were going to ruin what was left of the band’s image.”

While the Allmans split up, with Betts and Allman each leading their own bands, some of their contemporaries managed to hang tough throughout the 80’s. Betts expresses admiration for such performers.

“Eric Clapton has a way of being a chameleon,” he says, “of finding songs that keep him in the forefront and surviving through times when the kind of music he loves to play isn’t exactly popular. The Allman Brothers Band was never able to do that. We either sound like our band or we don’t. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner of the market.”

But that corner began to seem less restrictive as roots rockers and bluesers like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Los Lobos, and Robert Cray found success. FM radio also returned to its roots in a quest for baby boom listeners.

“Classic rock stations really brought the Allman Brothers back,” Betts says, “and Stevie Ray Vaughan opened the whole thing up. He just would not be denied

and kept going in there and making those traditional urban blues records. He just shoved blues down people’s throats and they got to likin’ it. He’s probably the front-runner in letting people see what they are missing. So I take my hat off to Stevie Ray for keeping at it.”

While these changes were taking place, the band was asked to play the Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam, an annual charity event, in the spring of ’89.

“At the time, a lot of bands were getting back together,” Allman says. “The Who were touring, and Little Feat…so CBS came to us with the idea of getting back together. They wanted us to do it because everyone else was, but we said we would just go slow, get back together and see if we really wanted to do it.”

The answers were all yes, but the revamped band insisted that it had to complete a tour together before recording. As an extensive 20th anniversary tour was mounted last summer, Dreams, a four CD retrospective of the band’s career, was released on Polydor. The collection firmly established the Allman Brothers as a great American band, while the tour proved that the band’s fire still burned brightly.

Finally, Betts says, it looked like the band would once again be given free rein. And restricting the Allman Brothers, he adds, is tantamount to sentencing them to mediocrity. “This band doesn’t have anything special when we’re not able to do the instrumental jams and improvisation⎯which were kind of being taken away from us for a while. We were even asked not to mention Southern rock in an interview. It got that bad. ‘Don’t wear any hats on stage,’ they said. It just got so bad.

“I don’t mean to sound negative about the music business,” Betts continues, “because everyone knows that’s the way it is⎯especially the rock ’n’ roll end of it. It’s very, very trendy and you just have to accept that.”

But, in concert, the Allman Brothers seem oblivious to today’s trends toward high-tech gadgetry, elaborate staging and slick choreography. Mostly standing still, tattoos showing, hair flowing un-teased to mid-back length, the band kicks out the jams in three- to four-hour concerts. Here, the Seven Turns material proves itself by standing it ground amid the classic Allmans repertoire.

Whatever comes next for the band⎯Allman suggests a live album⎯for now they are making some serious statements. They’re proving that it’s possible to rebound strongly from adversity and, best of all, they’re proving that even now⎯in our post-Warhol, post-MTV, post-Reagan world⎯sometimes substance can indeed triumph over style.