Alan Paul's Blog, page 5

Five years ago, Derek Trucks got his mushroom tattoo.

Butch and Gregg watched on and approved.

Five years ago I was honored to sit in for several of the rehearsals for the Allman Brothers band’s final shows. It was incredible then and is more incredible now, on reflection. Wow. Did that happen? Even more remarkable was being in the room when Derek Trucks decided to get the famed mushroom tattoo. I filmed the whole thing and have some really cool video that is still sitting on my laptop. I have not had time to do it justice and yes I know that’s lame. I did share one short clip yesterday on Instagram and Facebook, so check that out to get a taste.

My original post about this was probably my most-viewed up here. Crazy. Reposted here, with no real edits in the text.

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I was at the Allman Brothers’ second Beacon rehearsal Friday and Derek was talking to Jaimoe about getting a mushroom tattoo on his calf. Wanting to make sure that his would match the tat that all the original members received together in San Francisco in January, 1971 from pioneering tattooist Lyle Tuttle, Derek was going around photographing theoriginal member’s artwork. (Details of the Tuttle tattoos are on page 112 of One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band.)

Derek and Warren have been the only members of the band ever to not receive them.

“Why are you doing this now?” I asked Derek.

“Because Jaimoe told me to and I do what Jaimoe says to do,” he replied.

I still wasn’t sure he was serious.

I arrived early on Sunday to find Jaimoe alone in the room behind his kit, with a few hard-working techs getting everything set. Gregg Allman Band keyboardist Pete Levin soon showed up, with two tattoo-artist friends. Derek was close behind. And so it began.

I asked the tattoo artist, Brian, what he thought. “Easy job,” he replied. “Somewhat intimidating setting.”

And that was before Gregg, Butch and everyone else showed up and crowded around.

The stencil

As Jaimoe stood there videoing the action with his phone, I asked him why he pushed Derek to do this now, seemingly six shows from the end of the guitarist’s Allman Brothers career.



“Young Blood told me he wanted this about two years ago and I couldn’t believe it, but no one knew an artist,” he replied.

Derek was reclining on the couch stoically watching the Jacksonville Jaguars game on his Iphone as the artist worked away. The setup had taken so long that the band members arrived one by one and strolled over to have a look. As you can see, uncle Butch and Gregg shared a moment together while this was going on. They were all quite amused and excited.

Derek watching some football as he gets inked.

I shot some classic video, which I still need to edit together and Derek says he still wants!

After Derek, several other people got the same tattoo, including Gregg confidante Chank Middleton and drum tech Stixx Turner, whom Gregg and Butch proclaimed to be the first female to be so adorned.

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RIP Robert Hunter, one of the all-time great songwriters

Eyes of the World: An interview with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter

So very, very sad to hear that Robert Hunter has passed away. To honor the man, I present my 2015 (?) interview. An edited version ran on WSJ.com as part of a preview for Hunter’s City Winery shows.

I met Hunter at the City Winery and gave him a copy of One Way Out. He looked it over, touched the embossed cover and said, “Well, someone likes you!” Sending condolences to his wife Maureen and, of course, to all his many fans.

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men

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Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, 1991. Photo copyright Jay Blakesberg

Robert Hunter was a non-performing member of the Grateful Dead, as important as anyone else to the group’s musical legacy. A master lyricist, Hunter wrote the words to virtually every Jerry Garcia song, including most of the band’s best-loved songs, including “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” ”China Cat Sunflower,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Casey Jones,” “Truckin’,”“Wharf Rat,” and “Dire Wolf.”

Many of Hunter’s finest songs tell novelistic tales in just a few pages worth of verse. His work has always been lyrically ambitious, deeply poetic and simultaneously redolent of both fantasy worlds and toes-in-the-mud Americana. It’s impossible to imagine the Grateful Dead without him.

How did your very unique working relationship with Jerry Garcia begin and when did you realize his words and your music went together so beautifully?

That was when we were 18 and 19 respectively; he was a year younger than I. We started a folk duet called Bob and Jerry. We were doing our folk thing and moved into old-timey music and bluegrass. I kind of dropped out when it moved on to the next phase, jug bands. He handed me a jug and said, “You want to play this?” and I couldn’t get a tone out of it.  I got into writing lyrics just to perform myself. I had written “Alligator,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “St. Stephen,” and I was playing them at parties, so I had something to impress the ladies with.

Then I moved to New Mexico and it occurred to me to send the lyrics to those songs to Jerry because the Dead had formed. And he wrote back and said, “Why don’t you come back to California and be our lyricist?” So I hitchhiked back to San Francisco and met up with them in Rio Nido. They were working on “Dark Star” and I wrote the lyrics to it right then. It just started working immediately. Everyone was glad to have a lyricist at work because they weren’t doing much writing themselves.

Did those original songs you wrote and were performing have any resemblance to the versions we know, or did Jerry write new songs with the same lyrics?

Once Jerry got his hands on something, it morphed , and he’s ever such a better composer than I – and I’m not bad. I’ve put out some records and I’d say some of my songs stand up, but they aren’t at the same level, really, because Jerry is an excellent composer.

Did Jerry ever write lyrics?

No. He wrote a verse for “The Other One” – the “you know he had to die” verse – but that’s about it. I believe Jerry would have been capable of it had he chosen to open his heart and soul to people through words as well as through guitar. Jerry was so brilliant that anything that he tackled, he could have done well.

As the band became what they became and Jerry became an icon, your words became the public’s vision of his vision. When people quoted him, they quoted you, which is pretty unusual. Did you ever talk about that?

No, we didn’t really. The last time I ever spoke to Jerry, he called me about a week or two before he died. We were getting a writing session together. Looking back, the conversation was rather strange on his part. He started complimenting me, which is something he had never done before. He said, “Your words never stuck in my throat.” And I thought, “What? This is coming from Jerry?” Because we took each other 100 percent for granted. It just wasn’t how we spoke to one another and boy…

It’s like he was saying good-bye.

He definitely was, because talking like that was just not Jerry’s nature. Generally, I’d give him a new batch of songs and he’d say, “Oh crap, Hunter!” [laughs] He’d be angry because it meant he had to work. He said in an interview once that he’d rather sit and toss cards into a hat than write a song.

How did the collaboration generally work? Music first? Lyrics first? Sitting together and hashing out a song?

Most of the time, it was lyrics first. I would give certain songs to him. About once a year, I would also put songs into a file called “Can You Dig This?” – the better of the lyrics that I’d come up with. I’d put it in there for any of the guys in the band that wanted to write to pick through. Jerry would take most of those, and Weir would pick a couple out. Once in a while, Jerry would offer a written tune to me.

Can you think of any examples where Jerry wrote the melody first and you added lyrics?

“Foolish Heart” came about like that. And the band pretty much wrote the music for “Uncle John’s Band” together first. I would often work with the band while they were developing something – “Ramble On Rose” was one of those. I’d get a verse for them to add as they were working it out, and then write more. In that context, I would actually work with the band, which happened quite a bit for the first couple of years.

Or I would hear Jerry just jamming on something nice – a lot of that stuff would just evaporate if someone didn’t grab it. Like one time he was sitting at a piano playing a simple four-chord structure that I thought was really a sweet thing. I turned on the tape recorder and captured it. Later I told him that I’d been working on that structure and I had something for it, and he said, “Oh, that’s not complete. That was just an idea.” So I said, “Well, take these lyrics and try it out” – and that was “So Many Roads.” Sometimes you had to sneak up on Jerry to get a tune out of him.

Was the process similar on more complicated instrumental songs like “Terrapin Station,” where fitting lyrics to music just seems more complicated?

Well, there’s a little story behind that. It was a stormy day out at my house at China Camp, which is on the San Pablo Bay [in Marin County]. There was a great storm outside and I was feeling really energized by looking at it outside the windows. I was just sitting at typewriter and I put a piece of paper in and typed “Terrapin Station.”

Then I thought, “Okay, what is this about? Oh, appeal to the muse.” And then: “Let my inspiration flow in token lines suggesting rhythm that will not forsake me until my tale is told and done.” That is an invitation to the muse.

Then I sat back and this stuff just poured out in one sitting and it just so happened that Jerry was driving to San Francisco that day and came up with the appropriate melody for it. He came in to see me at China Camp the next day and I handed him the lyrics, and he said, “Oh, I’ve got the music.” And he did!

That’s one of those fairly mythological things that happen once in a while. [laughs] There it was. Yes, “Terrapin Station” was magic. I didn’t care for our recording of it because the producer took it into the studio in England by himself and threw all kinds of lush strings on it. I’ve never been able to listen to that without gritting my teeth, but I love the song – and the first time they played it, Bill Graham was standing next to me on the side of the stage and he looked at me and asked, “You write that?” I said, “Yeah.” And he nodded and went, “Pretty good.” [laughs] Coming from Bill Graham, that was incredibly high praise.

Why did you stop writing with Bob Weir?

There wasn’t a good close inter-relationship. It’s not Weir’s fault and I don’t think it’s my fault either. It just didn’t quite work. From my perspective, he wasn’t easy to work with. We’d write something and then he would want to rewrite it or add lines, which I didn’t care for. Jerry never did that. He liked what I gave him, and he did it.

Bob and I both tried hard but he didn’t really care so much for hard, elaborate images that I used in songs. He wanted the songs to say something simpler. He voiced that. I said, “That’s what everybody writes. My own style is what I write.”

There are some songs that Weir and I did that worked darn well: “Playing in the Band,” for instance. But we would sometimes work really, really hard only to have what we did disappear, which was frustrating. Like I remember working for days on a song, and then he didn’t like it and called his friend Barlow in. Barlow wrote the words for “Cassidy,” which is a beautiful and classic song, so I had no problem with him at all, but… I think he found it easier to work with Barlow, and with my blessing that’s what he did.

How could Jerry be so unhealthy and yet be such a road warrior, out on the road with multiple bands? Where did he get that energy and drive?

He just loved to play guitar, in the same way I love to write. Jerry would have played guitar regardless. He didn’t have to be the famous Jerry Garcia to do it. He could have continued to be unknown forever and he would have loved playing that guitar. He loved to do that as much as he hated to write a song, so I was a natural collaborator. [laughs]

Did you ever wish to be a performer with the band?

I had my choice. I had my go at that and it didn’t work for me. We were doing Aoxomoxoa, and I was doing background vocals and stuff like that. We were recording “China Cat Sunflower” and they were doing numerous takes, and Phil looked at me and said, “Can you ever sing the same line the same way?”  Which is necessary when you’re recording; there’s an art to doing it. And I said, “You know, I don’t think I can.” [laughs] I just bowed out. What I did instead was sit and listen as the recordings were going down and give my opinion on which takes were good and the sequence of songs and stuff like that. And I named most of the albums.

Did you consider yourself a member of the Grateful Dead?

Yeah. I was a member right up until the time came that I was making enough money in royalties that I was making more than some of the members of the band, so I quit. I went off salary, not realizing I was also going off medical insurance and whatever other benefits there were at the time. I was actually a bit of an idiot to do that. I decided to just live off my royalties rather than drawing a salary from the Dead. That was the equivalent of quitting, really. That wasn’t my intention but I didn’t want to create rancor in the band by making more money than the drummers. Suddenly after all these years the songwriting royalties were becoming very meaningful – and that generally causes an eruption of songwriters in a band. [laughs]

And the song that made that happen, of course, was “Touch Of Grey, “ which you had written years earlier.

I wrote it for a solo album I was working on and had for about six years before the Grateful Dead recorded it. My version, which I had worked out with Jerry and John Khan, was much slower. They were going to help me make an album and “Touch of Grey” was one of the songs, but it didn’t go anywhere. We never even finished the take. Eventually, Jerry said, “You know that song of yours, ‘Touch of Grey’? Would you mind if I reset it for the Dead?” and I said, “No, not at all. Go ahead. I love the lyrics for it.” I did perform my version for a couple of years, but it was a knockout when Jerry was done with it. Before that, I thought it was very appealing, but not a knockout.

And it changed everything.

It renovated the Grateful Dead. We were just about done. The band was just about broke and there wasn’t enough money coming into the enterprise. All of a sudden, here came “Touch of Grey.” I must say that I’m glad it didn’t happen earlier because to my way of thinking, everything went wonky after that. I can’t get very specific other than to say the old days were suddenly gone. There was huge money on the scene and huge money attracts certain types of characters. It simply will; that’s no reflection on anyone. It became a huge problem, and writing songs suddenly became a big money proposition. Even though nothing else ever did what “Touch of Grey” did, that put them back into a pretty superior position. We were the top traveling band in the world for several years… or should I say ‘they?’

I think you can say we.

Ok. Thank you.

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9/11 18 Years Later. Still Raw.

Reposted today, as I do every year on this date. I don’t think the words will ever be any less true. Two 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…

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.

Allman Brothers Band shares Midnight Rider from upcoming Live at Fillmore West release.

The Allman Brothers Band has shared another track to appear on their forthcoming live archival release, Fillmore West ’71. The much anticipated album – any new Duane is good Duane and this is great Duane – will be released Sept. 6.





Photo – Twiggs Lyndon

Rolling Stone excerpt of Texas Flood live now!

Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan is excerpted in Rolling Stone! It’s a chapter on recording, rehearsing, then falling out with David Bowie. Read it here > http://bit.ly/2MEy2tx

Then order the book! > Https://amzn.to/2BhXaAe

Texas Flood AudioBook is something very special!

The Texas Flood Audiobook is off the hook good! Andy Aledort and I read the prose – but much more exciting so did all three members of Double Trouble: Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon and Reese Wynans. You read that right!

They read their own quotes, along with Denny Freeman, Jackie Newhouse and Joe Priesnitz. The audiobook also includes four clips from Andy’s interviews with Stevie and a few songs. Click over to the page below to learn more and hear a sample of Chris and Stevie.

Texas Flood Audiobook

Like the hardcover, it’s out 8/13 and available for preorder now.

An interview with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter

Eyes of the World: An interview with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter

In Celebration of Hunter’s 78th Birthday today. My 2015 (?) interview. An edited version ran on WSJ.com as part of a preview for Hunter’s City Winery shows.

Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, 1991. Photo copyright Jay Blakesberg

Robert Hunter was a non-performing member of the Grateful Dead, as important as anyone else to the group’s musical legacy. A master lyricist, Hunter wrote the words to virtually every Jerry Garcia song, including most of the band’s best-loved songs, including “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” ”China Cat Sunflower,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Casey Jones,” “Truckin’,”“Wharf Rat,” and “Dire Wolf.”

Many of Hunter’s finest songs tell novelistic tales in just a few pages worth of verse. His work has always been lyrically ambitious, deeply poetic and simultaneously redolent of both fantasy worlds and toes-in-the-mud Americana. It’s impossible to imagine the Grateful Dead without him.

How did your very unique working relationship with Jerry Garcia begin and when did you realize his words and your music went together so beautifully?

That was when we were 18 and 19 respectively; he was a year younger than I. We started a folk duet called Bob and Jerry. We were doing our folk thing and moved into old-timey music and bluegrass. I kind of dropped out when it moved on to the next phase, jug bands. He handed me a jug and said, “You want to play this?” and I couldn’t get a tone out of it.  I got into writing lyrics just to perform myself. I had written “Alligator,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “St. Stephen,” and I was playing them at parties, so I had something to impress the ladies with.

Then I moved to New Mexico and it occurred to me to send the lyrics to those songs to Jerry because the Dead had formed. And he wrote back and said, “Why don’t you come back to California and be our lyricist?” So I hitchhiked back to San Francisco and met up with them in Rio Nido. They were working on “Dark Star” and I wrote the lyrics to it right then. It just started working immediately. Everyone was glad to have a lyricist at work because they weren’t doing much writing themselves.

Did those original songs you wrote and were performing have any resemblance to the versions we know, or did Jerry write new songs with the same lyrics?

Once Jerry got his hands on something, it morphed , and he’s ever such a better composer than I – and I’m not bad. I’ve put out some records and I’d say some of my songs stand up, but they aren’t at the same level, really, because Jerry is an excellent composer.

Did Jerry ever write lyrics?

No. He wrote a verse for “The Other One” – the “you know he had to die” verse – but that’s about it. I believe Jerry would have been capable of it had he chosen to open his heart and soul to people through words as well as through guitar. Jerry was so brilliant that anything that he tackled, he could have done well.

As the band became what they became and Jerry became an icon, your words became the public’s vision of his vision. When people quoted him, they quoted you, which is pretty unusual. Did you ever talk about that?

No, we didn’t really. The last time I ever spoke to Jerry, he called me about a week or two before he died. We were getting a writing session together. Looking back, the conversation was rather strange on his part. He started complimenting me, which is something he had never done before. He said, “Your words never stuck in my throat.” And I thought, “What? This is coming from Jerry?” Because we took each other 100 percent for granted. It just wasn’t how we spoke to one another and boy…

It’s like he was saying good-bye.

He definitely was, because talking like that was just not Jerry’s nature. Generally, I’d give him a new batch of songs and he’d say, “Oh crap, Hunter!” [laughs] He’d be angry because it meant he had to work. He said in an interview once that he’d rather sit and toss cards into a hat than write a song.

How did the collaboration generally work? Music first? Lyrics first? Sitting together and hashing out a song?

Most of the time, it was lyrics first. I would give certain songs to him. About once a year, I would also put songs into a file called “Can You Dig This?” – the better of the lyrics that I’d come up with. I’d put it in there for any of the guys in the band that wanted to write to pick through. Jerry would take most of those, and Weir would pick a couple out. Once in a while, Jerry would offer a written tune to me.

Can you think of any examples where Jerry wrote the melody first and you added lyrics?

“Foolish Heart” came about like that. And the band pretty much wrote the music for “Uncle John’s Band” together first. I would often work with the band while they were developing something – “Ramble On Rose” was one of those. I’d get a verse for them to add as they were working it out, and then write more. In that context, I would actually work with the band, which happened quite a bit for the first couple of years.

Or I would hear Jerry just jamming on something nice – a lot of that stuff would just evaporate if someone didn’t grab it. Like one time he was sitting at a piano playing a simple four-chord structure that I thought was really a sweet thing. I turned on the tape recorder and captured it. Later I told him that I’d been working on that structure and I had something for it, and he said, “Oh, that’s not complete. That was just an idea.” So I said, “Well, take these lyrics and try it out” – and that was “So Many Roads.” Sometimes you had to sneak up on Jerry to get a tune out of him.

Was the process similar on more complicated instrumental songs like “Terrapin Station,” where fitting lyrics to music just seems more complicated?

Well, there’s a little story behind that. It was a stormy day out at my house at China Camp, which is on the San Pablo Bay [in Marin County]. There was a great storm outside and I was feeling really energized by looking at it outside the windows. I was just sitting at typewriter and I put a piece of paper in and typed “Terrapin Station.”

Then I thought, “Okay, what is this about? Oh, appeal to the muse.” And then: “Let my inspiration flow in token lines suggesting rhythm that will not forsake me until my tale is told and done.” That is an invitation to the muse.

Then I sat back and this stuff just poured out in one sitting and it just so happened that Jerry was driving to San Francisco that day and came up with the appropriate melody for it. He came in to see me at China Camp the next day and I handed him the lyrics, and he said, “Oh, I’ve got the music.” And he did!

That’s one of those fairly mythological things that happen once in a while. [laughs] There it was. Yes, “Terrapin Station” was magic. I didn’t care for our recording of it because the producer took it into the studio in England by himself and threw all kinds of lush strings on it. I’ve never been able to listen to that without gritting my teeth, but I love the song – and the first time they played it, Bill Graham was standing next to me on the side of the stage and he looked at me and asked, “You write that?” I said, “Yeah.” And he nodded and went, “Pretty good.” [laughs] Coming from Bill Graham, that was incredibly high praise.

Why did you stop writing with Bob Weir?

There wasn’t a good close inter-relationship. It’s not Weir’s fault and I don’t think it’s my fault either. It just didn’t quite work. From my perspective, he wasn’t easy to work with. We’d write something and then he would want to rewrite it or add lines, which I didn’t care for. Jerry never did that. He liked what I gave him, and he did it.

Bob and I both tried hard but he didn’t really care so much for hard, elaborate images that I used in songs. He wanted the songs to say something simpler. He voiced that. I said, “That’s what everybody writes. My own style is what I write.”

There are some songs that Weir and I did that worked darn well: “Playing in the Band,” for instance. But we would sometimes work really, really hard only to have what we did disappear, which was frustrating. Like I remember working for days on a song, and then he didn’t like it and called his friend Barlow in. Barlow wrote the words for “Cassidy,” which is a beautiful and classic song, so I had no problem with him at all, but… I think he found it easier to work with Barlow, and with my blessing that’s what he did.

How could Jerry be so unhealthy and yet be such a road warrior, out on the road with multiple bands? Where did he get that energy and drive?

He just loved to play guitar, in the same way I love to write. Jerry would have played guitar regardless. He didn’t have to be the famous Jerry Garcia to do it. He could have continued to be unknown forever and he would have loved playing that guitar. He loved to do that as much as he hated to write a song, so I was a natural collaborator. [laughs]

Did you ever wish to be a performer with the band?

I had my choice. I had my go at that and it didn’t work for me. We were doing Aoxomoxoa, and I was doing background vocals and stuff like that. We were recording “China Cat Sunflower” and they were doing numerous takes, and Phil looked at me and said, “Can you ever sing the same line the same way?”  Which is necessary when you’re recording; there’s an art to doing it. And I said, “You know, I don’t think I can.” [laughs] I just bowed out. What I did instead was sit and listen as the recordings were going down and give my opinion on which takes were good and the sequence of songs and stuff like that. And I named most of the albums.

Did you consider yourself a member of the Grateful Dead?

Yeah. I was a member right up until the time came that I was making enough money in royalties that I was making more than some of the members of the band, so I quit. I went off salary, not realizing I was also going off medical insurance and whatever other benefits there were at the time. I was actually a bit of an idiot to do that. I decided to just live off my royalties rather than drawing a salary from the Dead. That was the equivalent of quitting, really. That wasn’t my intention but I didn’t want to create rancor in the band by making more money than the drummers. Suddenly after all these years the songwriting royalties were becoming very meaningful – and that generally causes an eruption of songwriters in a band. [laughs]

And the song that made that happen, of course, was “Touch Of Grey, “ which you had written years earlier.

I wrote it for a solo album I was working on and had for about six years before the Grateful Dead recorded it. My version, which I had worked out with Jerry and John Khan, was much slower. They were going to help me make an album and “Touch of Grey” was one of the songs, but it didn’t go anywhere. We never even finished the take. Eventually, Jerry said, “You know that song of yours, ‘Touch of Grey’? Would you mind if I reset it for the Dead?” and I said, “No, not at all. Go ahead. I love the lyrics for it.” I did perform my version for a couple of years, but it was a knockout when Jerry was done with it. Before that, I thought it was very appealing, but not a knockout.

And it changed everything.

It renovated the Grateful Dead. We were just about done. The band was just about broke and there wasn’t enough money coming into the enterprise. All of a sudden, here came “Touch of Grey.” I must say that I’m glad it didn’t happen earlier because to my way of thinking, everything went wonky after that. I can’t get very specific other than to say the old days were suddenly gone. There was huge money on the scene and huge money attracts certain types of characters. It simply will; that’s no reflection on anyone. It became a huge problem, and writing songs suddenly became a big money proposition. Even though nothing else ever did what “Touch of Grey” did, that put them back into a pretty superior position. We were the top traveling band in the world for several years… or should I say ‘they?’

I think you can say we.

Ok. Thank you.

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review: An Interview With David Mansfield

I eagerly watched Martin Scorsese’s new “documentary” Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, as soon as it debuted on Netflix. It’s an incredible movie, featuring footage from the legendary, always intriguing 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. It’s a bit frustrating at times – because the concert footage is so great that it makes you want more. This was on the heels of the release of  Blood on the Tracks, one of my top 10 albums of all time, but we only hear one song from it; a stunning, raw take on “Simple Twist of Fate.” Isn’t there a single version of “Tangled Up In Blue” in the can? And there’s a whole fictional narrative running through the movie that I found first confusing and then silly. But who cares? The backstage footage and concert clips are incredible.

It was also amazing to see my friend and Maplewood neighbor David Mansfield on stage as a teenager. So I started emailing him questions. His answers are below, shared with his permission. David is an amazing multi-instrumentalist. He’s worked with Lucinda Williams, the Wainwrights, Bobby McFerrin, Bruce Hornsby – he plays the mandolin on “Mandolin Wind” – and many others. He’s currently working with T Bone Burnett on a musical (“he’s the composer, I’m the arranger and co-writer on a few tunes”) about Roy Rogers that will open in Atlanta next fall.

This is a good review if you want to know more about the film itself.

How did you and T-Bone Burnett end up in the Rolling Thunder band? Bob had access to anyone, including Mick Ronson, playing lead.

We ended up in the band because of Bobby Neuwirth, who had a gig at The Other End in July of 1975 and flew his friend T-Bone into town to play with him. All kinds of famous musicians (like Ronson) were sitting in. I sat in with the band because my girlfriend had heard they might want a fiddle player. She dragged me down there—that night I joined the “band”, which really was the genesis for the Rolling Thunder Revue.

How old were you? 

18 at that time, 19 by the time the tour started.

That must have been a bit intimidating. How much did you just keep your head down and play music?

Everyone on the tour treated me with affection and respect, no need to keep my head down.

How accessible was Bob to you and everyone? 

I doubt he ever said more than a few words to me during that first tour, but again, I was a 19 year old kid. I think he was fairly accessible to his peers

Rolling Thunder Review. David Mansfield far left

The concert footage is spectacular. I hope they just release a concert film at some point. I want more music! 

So do I!

The movie gives the feeling of the band being thrown together but it sounds terrific. How much rehearsing was there actually?

A good amount. We had rehearsals at SIR and then more rehearsing up in New England before the first show. By the end they were pretty much dress rehearsals, fully staged.

Your comments on Allen Ginsburg are spot on. I interviewed him when I was a cute 19 year old and he invited me to his room afterwards to read poetry and when I politely declined, he just leaned over and kissed me.

Allen was the gentlest and sweetest of souls. He always behaved with nothing but kindness toward me.

You’ve done a lot of work with TBone. Is this where it started?

Yes. We were bandmates in the RTR and continued to be for many years, first with the Alpha Band and later with T-Bone’s solo records.





Did you continue to play with anyone else from Rolling Thunder?

Steven Soles was also in the Alpha Band, which came together after the RTR. Before that,  I was part of a post-tour band with Ronson, McGuinn, Stoner and Wyeth. We rehearsed for a while but it never really jelled, so instead we made a Roger McGuinn record called “Cardiff Rose” together, and then went our separate ways.

Did you ever play with Bob again after this your?

Yes, there was a second RTR tour the next year and also in 1978 (touring behind “Street Legal”, which I played on).

Did you or any other musicians see any of this footage over the years?

Only the footage that was in Renaldo and Clara.

Also, what are your memories of  the performance at Clinton Correctional Facility in front of Hurricane? 

I don’t remember much, though I don’t think the inmates were all that interested in the show, at least not in parts of it.

Happy Birthday Albert King! My interview with the blues giant

Albert King was born on this day in 1923. He’s always been one of my very favorites and writing Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan has only deepened and renewed my appreciation for him. He was Stevie’s number one influence. Let’s take another look at this old story, one of the highlights of my years at Guitar World.

Foto by Kirk West

*

Just days after I became the Guitar World Managing Editor in February, 1991, I sat at my desk listening two of my colleagues (“bosses” would have been the word I used at the time) discussing an interview with Albert King, scheduled for the following week in Clevelan d. They couldn’t think of anyone up to the task of interviewing the great and ornery bluesman. I shifted my weight, cleared my throat and waited for them to ask if I was interested. When the offer didn’t come, I piped up that King was my favorite guitarist and I would be honored to take the assignment. After a bit of back and forth, the job was mine.

As the day grew near, I became increasingly nervous. I desperately wanted to do a great job and he had a reputat ion as a tough, mean old man. I once saw him fire a sax player on the bandstand – surely he’d cancel an interview without a second thought. I called his manager just before I left for the airport to verify our arrangements. “I told Albert about it,” he said. “Hopefully he’ll remember and feel like doing it.”

I spent the day at my cousin Stephen’s house in Cleveland, preparing for the interview and growing increasingly edgy. It started to snow, first lightly, then heavily, and I drove to the theater through a pelting blizzard. Albert was playing with Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King on a spinning theater in the round, and I fidgeted throughout his set. Following his performance, I arrived backstage at my appointed hour, praying that I would be granted an audience with the King.

I was brought to a small dressing room, crowded with band members and their lady friends. King shook my hand and pointed to a seat next to him. As we began to talk, he turned to the others and shouted, “Be quiet! I’m doing an interview.” Silence fell over the room and all eyes and ears turned to me. I have never felt younger, whiter, shorter, or more insignificant. Albert leaned forward and extended his long arm directly over my shoulder to get at some popcorn. Leaning close, he smiled, flashing two gold front teeth, and told me to commence my questioning.

For 45 minutes, Albert answered my questions, though when he considered something foolish or misguided, he shot me a look that could freeze a volcano. He was patient, professional – and every bit as intimidating as I could have imagined, which somehow made me happy. His personality fit his music to a tee; no one has ever played the guitar with more authority or focused intent.

King, who  died of a heart attack at age 69 on December 21, 1992, was a vastly influential guitarist for many reasons: He played with a raw ferocity that appealed equally to fellow bluesman and younger rockers. He was one of the first black electric bluesmen to cross over to white audiences, and one of the first to adapt his playing to Sixties funk and soul backings, on classics like “Born Under a Bad Sign.” But perhaps King’s ultimate legacy is that he embodied two of guitardom’s most sacred tenets: what you don’t play counts as much as what you do, and speed can be learned, but feeling must come from within. The left-handed guitarist played “Lucy,” his upside-down flying V, with absolute conviction and economy. He could slice through a listener’s soul with a single screaming note, and play a gut-wrenching, awe-inspiring 10-minute solo without venturing above the 12th fret.

I last saw King perform about eight months before his death, at Tramp’s, a mid-sized Manhattan club. Arriving after midnight, I imagined his final set would be brief, even perfunctory, and was dismayed when he came onstage and sat down – his towering, 6’-5” hulk was always such a large part of his stage presence. Was he feeling infirm? I was further shaken up when he began noodling leads around the band’s funky vamp in the wrong key. I began to wonder if my hero had lost it, but then he found his footing, caught the groove and began to soar.

King delivered a stirring, two-and-half hour performance, seeming to gain strength as the night wore on, closing the show at 3:00 AM with a coolly passionate version of “The Sky Is Crying” that will remain forever etched in my mind. I left the club with a renewed conviction that music is not about showing off, or impressing fellow musicians, or anything else other than creating sounds that forge a mystical bond with listeners. It’s something that Albert King did with unsurpassed skill.



***

Blues legend has it that Mike Bloomfield, lead guitarist of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and for a time the Sixties guitar hero, once engaged Jimi Hendrix in a cutting contest before thousands of screaming fans. Hendrix drew first and unleashed a soaring, cosmic blues attack. As Bloomfield stood transfixed in awe, struggling to plot a response to Hendrix’s brilliant fury, one thought ran like a mantra through his mindæ“I wish I were Albert King… I wish I were Albert King….”

Two decades have passed, and both Bloomfield and Hendrix are gone. But King and his music remain hale and heartyæeven on a blustery Cleveland night some months ago, when brutal winds and two feet of swirling snow made the city inhospitable to man and blues alike. Inside a suburban club, however, a force of nature even more powerful than a blizzard held sway as Albert Kingæall six-feet-five inches of himæstood puffing a pipe, his upside down Flying V looking like a toy guitar in his massive hands. As clouds of smoke billowed from his snarling mouth, the left-handed King ripped off scorching, jagged blues lines.

On that wintry Ohio night it was easy to understand Bloomfield’s desperate invocation of the massive bluesman in his hour of need. And it was equally clear that King has lost little of the of the devastating blues power that has made his playing the standard of excellence for guitarists from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Moore.

Several nights after the Cleveland show King, resplendent in an open-collared tuxedo, stepped from a limousine in midtown Manhattan. His pipe was still gripped tightly between his teeth, but the on stage snarl was gone. King was all smiles as he headed into a posh nightclub to receive a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.

“I never really considered myself r&b,” King said. “I’m a bluesman. But there’s nothing like being honored by your peers. There’s also nothing like this.” His gold teeth sparkled in a broad smile as he held up a check for $15,000, his bounty for a lifetime of groundbreaking work.

While King is inarguably a bluesman, his earliest recordings for Bobbin Records (recently re-released on CD by Modern Blues as Let’s Have a Natural Ball) featured hard-swinging big band arrangements. Later, he would record his most influential workæincluding “Born Under a Bad Sign” and “Crosscut Saw”æfor Stax, backed by Booker T and the MGs, the r&b label’s famed house band.

But whatever the musical setting, King’s lead playing has always been characterized by stinging, river deep tone and a totally identifiable style, developed as a result of his unorthodox technique. The left-handed King plays with his guitar held upside down, treble strings up, which, among other things, causes him to bend his strings down.

“I learned that style myself,” King said. “And no one can duplicate it, though many have tried.”

AP: You’ve recorded a very wide variety of material, much of which has departed from the standard blues formats. How did you arrive at the appropriate approach for any given song?

KING: I did that in the studio. We would come up with different styles to go behind songsæthen I’d do whatever fit. I might try three or four rhythms behind a song, find the one that feels just right and record it. I can hear real good and I never saw the point of limiting what I listened toælots of times I heard new things that surprised me. The guys at Stax [guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, drummer Al Jackson and organist Booker T. Jones, plus the Memphis Horns] were real good for playing with different grooves and helping me find the right one. I liked playing with them because they were good idea peopleæthey’d twist things around into different grooves. It worked real good.





AP: Your guitar style changed noticeably from your early recordings with the Bobbin label to your work with Stax. You didn’t use a much vibrato originally, for instance.

KING: No, I didn’t. I never made a decision to change my style. Some of it I forgot and some of it just automatically changed. Nothing can stay the same forever. I do all of the vibrato with my hand. I don’t use no gadgets or anything. I used to only use Acoustic amps, but I went to a Roland 120 because it’s easier to handle and it puts out for me.

AP: There has always been so much swing to your music. Have you listened to a lot of jazz?

KING: Yes. I’ve always been a lover of jazz  – especially big band jazz. On the Bobbin stuff, I used a lot of orchestration and big band arrangements to mix the jazz with the blues. I went for the swinging jazz arrangements and the pure blues guitar.

AP: Your lead guitar has always been very lyrical. Do you think of the guitar as a second voice?

KING: Yes, I do. I play the singing guitar, that’s what I’ve always called it. I also sing along with my notesæit’s how I think about where I’m going.

AP: You don’t play a lot of chords.

KING: No, I play single-note. I can play chords but I don’t like ’emæI don’t have time for them. I’m paying enough people around me to play chords. [Laughs.]

AP: You’re also noted for your tendency to bend two strings at one time.

KING: Yeah. Lots of times I don’t intend to do that but I’m reaching for a bend and bring another one along. My fingers get mixed up, because I don’t practice. When I get through with a concert, I don’t even want to see my guitar for a while.

AP: Have you always felt that way?

KING: No, no. Just lately  – in the last four or five years. Since I’ve been really feeling like I want to retire.

AP: You are one the only guitarists I’ve ever heard who will start a song with a bent noteæon “Angel of Mercy,” for instance.

KING: Again, I didn’t plan that out. It’s just what I felt and the way I recorded it. The bent note is my thing, man, and I’ll put one anywhere it feels right. There are no rules.

AP: I’ve heard stories of people who tried to copy your sound but didn’t know that you were playing upside down.

KING: [Laughs] Yeah, I’ve heard that, too. And people who try to restring their guitars to get my sound, and everything else you can imagine. Jimi Hendrix used to take pictures of my fingers to try and see what I was doing. He never quite figured it out, but Jimi was a hell of guitar player, the fastest dude around – at the time. There’s some kids who are coming around now… Whew! Forget about it. They burn up the fretboard.

AP: Obviously, Hendrix was a great guitarist. But what do you think of him as a blues player?

KING: Well, to me, he was overplaying to play the blues. He’d hit two or three good licks here and there and then speed them up and hit them over and over until he’d drown out all the good ones. The kids loved it and I liked his playing, tooæthat was his style. But don’t call him a great bluesman. I think he was going more in that direction, but we’ll never know. He didn’t take care of himself.

AP: Your tone is so tough. How do you make it so heavy?

KING: For one thing, I usually keep my treble all the way up, unless I want to play real soft. Then I zip it down.

AP: You really do utilize dynamics effectively. Do you think that’s something a lot of younger players miss the point of?

KING: Definitely. Because they like to play loud and high all the time. And when you get ready to play chords, you got nothing to go to. I like to mix volumes, treble and bass. There’s a high, there’s a mid-range and there’s a bottom. If you don’t ever mix that stuff up, you’re not a complete player.

AP: What is the single most common mistake young players make with the blues?

KING: Overplaying. They play too loud, scream too high, and run too fast. See, when you overplay, you get too loud and people are gonna mistake what you’re doing for a hole in the air. [Laughs.]

AP: You recently appeared on Gary Moore’s Still Got the Blues album. What did you think of Moore’s guitar work?

KING: Gary’s a good player. To me, Gary and Stevie Ray Vaughan were two of our best young players. I was sure hurt when we lost Stevie. I really wanted to see him and Gary hook up together. I wanted to see that concert. I don’t care where it wasæI would have caught a plane. No doubt about it, both those guys had what it takes to really do it.

AP: Did you give Gary any pointers?

KING: Yeah. I learned a few things from him, he learned a few things from me. I told him to slow it down, double up on his licksæplay every other oneæso that you could feel what he’s doing. If you play too fast or too loud, you cancel yourself out. But Gary plays a whole lot of notes and still sounds good. Every now and then you’re bound to put them in place if you play enough. [Laughs.]

AP: A lot of blues players hit the right note and play the right changes. Yet, something’s missing. What is that something?

KING: I’m going to ask you. You’re the listener. What do you hear or not hear?

AP: It’s hard to describe. It’s more of a feeling.

KING: That’s it. That’s it, man. Stop right there. Don’t overthink this. I just told you: Once you lose the feeling, you ain’t got nothin’ but a show going. It’s not deep.

AP: So can you learn how to play the blues from a book or reading music?

KING: No way, man. First, you got to get in your mind what you want to play. If you hear a good lick – even if you’re just rehearsing to yourself — and you feel it, then hit another one and another one and another one. The next thing you know you got 15 or 20 different licks you can hit and they all feel good. But if you rush right through, hitting them all, you’re not even going to know what you did. You’ve got to take your time and learn your bag one lick at a time. And take your time in your delivery.

AP: Your first appearance at the Fillmore [1968] opened up a whole new audience for you. Were you surprised that those people were waiting to hear your music?

KING: Yes, I was very surprise — and very glad. They made me welcome, treated me nice. Bill Graham opened up a young, white crowd for me by putting me in there.

AP: Robert Cray told me that he had one of the biggest thrills of his life when you recorded his song, “Phone Booth.” [“I’m in a Phone Booth, Baby,” Fantasy, 1984]

KING: Yeah, I did one of his songs because the groove fit and that’s what I look for. Robert is a good player and a very nice person, but I haven’t seen him in a while and I hope that success hasn’t gotten to his head. I’ve seen that happen to many, many people, and it’s one of the saddest things you’ll ever see. It matters who you are and what you’re made of. Anytime you think you’re greater than the people that buy your records, that’s when you lose it.

AP: You have such a commanding stage presence. Is there anyone who would intimidate you if they walked on stage?

KING: No. If it’s my show, it’s my stage, and I won’t let anyone mess with me. Believe me.

AP: When did you start using the Flying V?

KING: Oh, man. Way back around 1958. Just about every one I’ve ever had has been custom-made.

AP: Why did you name your guitar “Lucy?”

KING: Lucille Ball. I loved her.

AP: It didn’t have anything to do with B.B.’s Lucille?

KING: You’d have to ask B.B. — mine was named Lucy first.

AP: Have you and B.B. always gotten along, or has there been any tension between youfor instance over the fact that B.B. is always called “The King of the Blues?”

KING:: Oh God, no. Me and B.B. and Bobby [Bland] always got along great. We go all over the country and sell out every theater we go to. No misunderstandings, no arguments. I’ll open the show for anybody as long as I get paid off. I’ll be asleep in my hotel while B.B.’s still playing and that’s fine with me. B.B.’s a night owl. He closes the show because he stays up most of the night talking, anyhow. [Laughs.]

AP: Has the fact that you once played drums affected your guitar style much?

KING: Not really, except that I can tell immediately if a tempo is off. Being left-handed affected my style more than anything. I started playing drums just because I got a gig with Jimmy Reed and needed the money.

AP: Why haven’t you ever used a pick?

KING: I couldn’t hold one- my fingers were too big. I kept trying and the thing would fly across the house. I just always had a real hard time gripping it, so I learned to play without one.

AP: What type of music did your first band, the In the Groove Boys play?

KING: We only knew three songs and we’d play them fast, medium and slowæthat made nine songs. Somehow that got over all night long.

AP: Did you play strictly by yourself when you started?

KING: I rehearsed to myself for five years before I played with another soul. That may account for some of my style. I knew that playing the blues was a life I chose to lead. And when I started there were three things I decided to doæplay the blues, play ’em right, and make all the gigs. And I have. I’ve never drank liquor in my life or used dope, and I don’t allow it around me. That has a lot to do with why I’m still doing what I’m doing, still feeling good and still in good health. It makes me sick to see the things that people do to themselves when they get all messed up.

AP: Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a blues renaissance, and people say there’s one happening now. Is it real?

KING: The blues “come back” whenever people realize that they can make money booking it. You didn’t hear about young bluesman for a while until Stevie Ray and Robert hit, but they were always around. It’s just a matter of exposure.

This interview originally appeared in Guitar World, July ’91.

The Allman Brothers turn 50! The story of their formation

It’s March 26, 2019. Happy 50th birthday Allman Brothers Band! Let’s celebrate with an excerpt from One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band detailing their formation.

1969, new to Macon. Photo – Twiggs Lyndon

DICKEY BETTS: It says a lot that Duane’s hero was Muhammad Ali. He had Ali’s type of supreme confidence. If you weren’t involved in what he thought was the big picture, he didn’t have time for you. A lot of people really didn’t like him for that. It’s not that he was aggressive; it was more a super-positive, straight-ahead, I’ve-got-work-to-do kind of thing. If you didn’t get it, see you later. He always seemed like he was charging ahead and it took a lot of energy to be with him.

THOM DOUCETTE: I couldn’t get enough of that Duane energy. If Duane put out his hand to you, you had a hand. There was no bullshit about him at all. None.

GREGG ALLMAN: My brother was a real pistol. He was a hell of a person… a firecracker. He knew how to push people’s buttons and bring out the best.

JOHNNY SANDLIN: He was a personality you only see once in a lifetime. He could inspire you and challenge you, with eye contact, smiles… little things. It would just make you better and I think anyone who ever played with him would tell you the same thing. You knew he had your back, and that was the best feeling in the world.

BUTCH TRUCKS: One day we were jamming on a shuffle going nowhere so I started pulling back and Duane whipped around, looked me in the eyes and played this lick way up the neck like a challenge. My first reaction was to back up, but he kept doing it, which had everyone looking at me like the whole flaccid nature of this jam was my fault. The third time I got really angry and started pounding the drums like I was hitting him upside his head and the jam took off and I forgot about being self conscious and started playing music and he smiled at me, as if to say, “Now that’s more like it.”

It was like he reached inside me and flipped a switch and I’ve never been insecure about my drumming again. It was an absolute epiphany; it hit me like a ton of bricks. I swear if that moment had not happened I would probably have spent the past 30 years as a teacher. Duane was capable of reaching inside people and pulling out the best. He made us all realize that music will never be great if everyone doesn’t give it all they have and we all took on that attitude: why bother to play if you’re not going all in?

REESE WYNANS: Dickey was the hottest guitar player in the area, the guy that everyone looked up to and wanted to emulate. Then Duane came and started sitting in with us and he was more mature and more fully formed, with total confidence, an incredible tone and that unearthly slide playing. But he and Dickey complemented each other – they didn’t try to outgun one another – and the chemistry was obvious right away. It was just amazing that the two best lead guitarists around were teaming up. They were both willing to take chances rather than returning to parts they knew they could nail and everything they tried worked.

RICHARD PRICE: Dickey was already considered one of the hottest guitar players in the state of Florida. He was smoking in the Second Coming and always had a great ability to arrange.

WYNANS: I remember one time Duane came up to me with this sense of wonder and said, “Reese, I just learned how to play the highest note in the world. You put the slide on the harmonic and slide it up and all of a sudden it’s birds chirping.” And, of course, that became his famous “bird call.” He was always playing and pushing and sharing his ideas and passions. 

JAIMOE: Duane had talked about a lot of guitar players and when I heard some of them I said, “That dude can’t tote your guitar case” and he was surprised. He loved jamming with everyone.

DOUCETTE:  None of them could hold Duane’s case except Betts.

JAIMOE: Duane loved guitar players. I only knew two people Duane didn’t like: Jimmy Page and Sonny Sharrock. He played on the Herbie Mann Push Push sessions [in 1971] with Sonny and he hated him and the way nothing he played was ever really clear. He also didn’t like Led Zeppelin, though I don’t know why. Anyhow, Duane liked Dickey and the two of them clicked and started working on songs and parts immediately.

WYNANS: Berry was very dedicated to jamming and deeply into the Dead and the Airplane and these psychedelic approaches and always playing that music for us – and it was pretty exotic stuff to our ears, because there were no similar bands in the area. Dickey was a great blues player with a rock edge; he could play all these great Lonnie Mack licks, for instance. And then Duane arrived, and was just on another planet. And the power of all of it combined was immediately obvious.

Photo – Twiggs Lyndon

BETTS: All of us were playing in good little bands, but Duane was the guy who had Phil Walden — Otis Redding’s manager! — on his tail, anxious to get his career moving. And Duane was hip enough to say, “Hey, Phil, instead of a three-piece, I have a six-piece and we need $100,000 for equipment.” And Phil was hip enough to have faith in this guy. If there was no Phil Walden and no Duane Allman there would have been no Allman Brothers Band.

The unnamed group began regularly playing free shows in Jacksonville’s Willow Branch Park, joined by a large, rotating crop of musicians. They went on to play in several local parks.

PRICE: It was Berry’s idea to play for free in the parks for the hippies.

TRUCKS: The six of us had this incredible jam and he went to the door and said, “If anyone wants to leave this room they’re going to have to fight their way out.” We were playing all the time and doing these free concerts in the park and we all knew we had something great going, but the keyboard player was Reese Wynans not Gregg and we didn’t really have a singer. Duane said, “I need to call my baby brother.” I said, “Are you sure?” Because he was upset that Gregg had stayed out in L.A. to do his solo thing and I was upset that he had left when I thought we had something going with the 31st of February project the year before. He said, “I’m pissed at him, too but he’s the only one strong enough to sing with this band.” And, of course, he was right. Whatever his issues, Gregg had the voice and he had the songs that we needed.

PHIL WALDEN, original ABB manager; founder/president of Capricorn Records: They had this great instrumental presence but no real vocalist. Berry, Dickey and Duane were all doing a little singing. That was a lot of a little singing and no singer. So Duane called Gregg and asked him to come down.

JAIMOE: Duane was talking about Gregory being the singer in the band from the beginning. Very early on, Duane told me, “There’s only one guy who can sing in this band and that’s my baby brother.” He told me that he was a womanizer. He said Gregg broke girls hard and all the rest of it, but that he’s a hell of a singer and songwriter – which obviously was accurate and is to this day.

LINDA OAKLEY: We were all sitting in our kitchen late one night after one of these jams. They were all so psyched about what they were building and Duane said, “We’ve got to get my brother here, out of that bad situation. He’s a great singer and songwriter and he’s the guy who can finish this thing.”

WYNANS: For quite a while, we were all just jamming and guys from other bands would often be there singing, or Berry would sing, Duane would sing a little, “Rhino” Reinhardt would sing. [Guitarist Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt, who was in Second Coming and went on to play with Iron Butterfly.] Then all of a sudden there was talk of this becoming a real band, and Duane was talking about getting his brother here to sing. Everyone was excited about it, but I knew Gregg played keyboards and figured that might be the end of it for me. It was personally disappointing, because the band was really going somewhere and obviously had a chance to do something great. It was kind of a drag but this was Duane’s brother, so what can you say? You wish them good luck and move on to the next thing.  It was a thrill to be a part of.

BETTS: We had all been bandleaders and we knew what we now had.

Gregg was still in Los Angeles, having stayed there after the breakup of Hour Glass. Liberty Records had recorded and released a second album with Gregg backed by session musicians after Duane, Sandlin and the rest of the band left California.

ALLMAN: I didn’t have a band, but I was under contract to a label that had me cut two terrible records, including one with these studio cats in L.A. They had me do a blues version of Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which can’t be done. It was really horrible. I hope you never hear it. They told us what to wear, what to play, everything. They dictated everything, including putting us in those clown suits. I hated it, but what are you gonna do when they’re taking care of all your expenses? You end up feeling like some kind of kept man and it was fuckin’ awful. I was excited when my brother called and said he was putting a new band together and wanted me to join. I just wrote a note that said, “I’m gone. If you want to sue my ass, come on after me.”





BETTS: We were all telling Duane to call Gregg. We knew we needed him. They were fighting or something, which they did all the time – just normal brotherly stuff.

JAIMOE: Duane finally called Gregg when he got everyone that he thought would work, because he needed to give him as much time as possible to resolve the contract issues with Liberty. Once everyone else was in place, Duane called him and said, “You’ve got to hear this band that I’m putting together. You need to be the singer.”

KIM PAYNE, one of the ABB’s original roadies: I met Gregory in LA when I was working for another band that played with him and we became good friends, running around, staying with chicks until we got kicked out and drinking cheap wine. Almost every day we were together, Gregg would bitch about his brother. He’d say, “He’s calling me again asking him to join his band, but there ain’t no way because I can not get along with my brother in a band.” He said that to me countless times. 

JON LANDAU: When I was in Muscle Shoals I was sitting in the office with Duane, Rick and Phil and Duane picked up the phone, dialed a number and said, “Brother, it’s time for us to play together again.” I was a fly on the wall and could obviously only hear one end of the conversation, but it seemed very positive.

ALLMAN: My brother only called me one time and I jumped on it.

JOHN McEUEN:  As I recall, Duane kept calling Gregg saying,  “You got to get down here. The band has never sounded better.” He called enough times and Gregg went. I have to give Duane credit for having the vision to do this thing. I know the L.A. years were not great ones for them, but I think it was something they had to go through to discover their path. 

PAYNE: Gregg kept telling me, “I’m not going down and getting involved with that.” You have to remember he was coming off a very bad band experience; he hated the way the Hour Glass went and how it ended up and he may have connected that with being Duane’s fault. I think he also felt like Duane and the other guys turned on him and blamed him for staying in LA, when he thought he had to.

SANDLIN: It kind of bothered me that Gregg stayed out in LA, but I didn’t know if he wanted to, or was being forced by management.

PAYNE: At the same time, he was looking at his future – he was driving an old Chevy with a fender held on with antenna wire. Whenever we ran out of money, he’d go down and sell a song. We were living hand to mouth.

ALLMAN: My brother said he was tired of being a robot on the staff down in Muscle Shoals, even though he had made some progress, and gotten a little known playing with great people like Aretha and Wilson Pickett. He wanted to take off and do his own thing. He said, “I’m ready to get back on the stage, and I got this killer band together. We got two drummers, a great bass player and a hell of a lead guitar player, too.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he said, “Wait’ll you get here and I’ll show you.”

I didn’t know that he had learned to play slide so well. I thought he was out of his mind, but I was doing nothing, going nowhere. My brother sent me a ticket, but I knew he didn’t have the money, so I put it in my back pocket, stuck out my thumb on the San Bernardino Freeway and got a ride all the way to Jacksonville, Florida – and it was a bass player I got a ride from.

PAYNE: I know that Gregg remembers hitchhiking across the country, but the thing is, I’m the guy who drove him to the airport.

McEUEN: My brother bought a Chevy Corvair for Gregg to drive around LA – the most unsafe car ever invented. One day Gregg comes by the house, a little duplex in Laurel Canyon, looking for my brother, who wasn’t there. He said, “Hey, John, the man pulled me over. You know how they are. He doesn’t believe this is my car and is going to impound it. I got to take the pink slip to the judge.” So I said, “I know where the pink slip is.” I gave it to him and he took it and sold that car and bought a one-way ticket to Jacksonville. Maybe I’m responsible for the Allman Brothers Band! Gregg came back about six years later when the Brothers were playing the Forum, and gave my brother a check for the car.

TRUCKS: I don’t know how he got there but a few days after Duane said he was calling Gregg, there was a knock on the door and there he was.

ALLMAN: I walked into rehearsal on March 26, 1969, and they played me the track they had worked up to Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More” and it blew me away. It was so intense.

BETTS: Gregg was floored when he heard us. We were really blowing; we’d been playing these free shows for a few weeks by that point.

ALLMAN: I got my brother aside and said, “I don’t know if I can cut this. I don’t know if I’m good enough.” And he starts in on me: “You little punk, I told these people all about you and you don’t come in here and let me down.” Then I snatched the words out of his hand and said, “Count it off, let’s do it.” And with that, I did my damnedest. I’d never heard or sung this song before, but by God I did it. I shut my eyes and sang, and at the end of that there was just a long silence. At that moment we knew what we had. Duane kinda pissed me off and embarrassed me into singing my guts out. He knew which buttons to push.

The group played their first gig on March 30, 1969 at the Jacksonville Armory. Gregg had been in town for four days.

Excerpt adapted from One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band.  Copyright 2014 Alan Paul. All rights reserved.