The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes.

Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time.

Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the 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.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened.

It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained.

“This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach.

They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment — offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made — not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy — the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmore East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

“New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade — and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights — March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 — as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs.

“I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go.

“When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine.

“Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.”

Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out.

“I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could.

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth.

Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers.

Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette remembers another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately.

“We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio.

“We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it.

“This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[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, and 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 for a double album — slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album.

“All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches — from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.”

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends.

“He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that.

“I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte.

“He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him.

Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old.

“And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

From the Van Halens to the Gallaghers, rock history is full of famous musical siblings. But few brotherly relationships were as formative — or as complicated — as the one between Gregg and Duane Allman.

Although Gregg helped found the Allman Brothers Band and wrote some of its most enduring songs, he spent much of his life measuring himself against his older brother. As he admits in a new documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, that admiration never really faded.

The film, which opens in theaters today, explores Gregg Allman’s life and career. In doing so, it also shines a light on Duane Allman’s brief but hugely influential life through the eyes of those who knew him best. Among them is Gregg, who recalls how a childhood rivalry over an electric guitar eventually forged one of rock’s most celebrated musical partnerships.

“My brother was walking through the house one day,” Gregg remembers, “and that’s when he looked at it, like, ‘What have you got there that’s making that sound? How are you doing that?’”

Gregg was the first of the brothers to pick up the instrument, much to Duane’s annoyance.

“You’re not supposed to be doing cool stuff,” Gregg recalls his older brother thinking. “Big brothers will do it first.”

The pair battled over the family’s lone guitar until their mother stepped in.

“She had to buy another one to keep peace in the family,” Gregg says with a bittersweet smile. “And when she did, she bought two electrics. I got a Fender, and he got a Gibson, and we just started playing.”

What began as a source of friction soon became the foundation of an unusually close bond.

“We became closer and closer,” Gregg says. “It was wonderful to watch it happen, because I admired him so much. Then we started becoming equal. That was such a good feeling.”

By the time the Allman Brothers Band broke through with songs such as “Midnight Rider” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” Duane had emerged as one of the most respected guitarists of his generation. His reputation grew even further when Eric Clapton recruited him for Derek and the Dominos, creating one of rock’s most celebrated guitar pairings.

But Duane’s rise was cut tragically short. Just months after the release of At Fillmore East, he died in a motorcycle accident in Macon, Georgia, at the age of 24.

More than five decades later, Gregg still struggled to talk about his brother without emotion.

“I spent my life trying to impress him,” he says after a long pause. “Well, the first 20 years of it, anyway.”

More than 50 years after Duane’s death, Gregg’s admission offers a revealing glimpse into the bond that powered one of rock’s greatest bands.

When Duane Allman died following a motorcycle crash in October 1971, it nearly became an even greater tragedy for the Allman family.

According to the new documentary Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, Gregg Allman nearly died from a heroin overdose on the same night his brother was killed.

At the time, the Allman Brothers Band was on the verge of a breakthrough. Their landmark live album, At Fillmore East, had established the group as one of America’s premier rock acts, while Duane had further raised his profile through his celebrated electric guitar work with Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Then, on October 29, everything changed.

Riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster in Macon, Georgia, Duane swerved to avoid a flatbed truck that turned in front of him and lost control of his motorcycle. Though he survived the initial crash, the severity of his internal injuries wasn’t immediately apparent. He died later that evening at the age of 24.

As Gregg’s friend Chank Middleton recalls in the documentary, he and Gregg had been waiting at the hospital when a doctor assured them Duane would survive. Believing the worst was over, they left.

Hours later, Allman Brothers Band roadie Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell arrived at Gregg’s home with devastating news.

“When I opened the door, I could look at Red Dog’s face and tell that Duane had died,” Middleton says in the film. “And I just told Red Dog, ‘Man, don’t tell him now.’ When I said that, I could hear Gregg’s voice coming out the bedroom from behind me. I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t tell me what?’”

What happened next nearly turned one loss into two.

According to Devon Allman, Gregg and Middleton had bought heroin after leaving the hospital.

“They copped some heroin. They got high. And my dad OD’d,” Devon says. “And Chank was like… He literally thought for a second, he thought he lost them both. And they revived my dad, but there for a minute he thought, ‘They just both died tonight.’”

Gregg, who died on May 27, 2017, also reflects on Duane’s death in the documentary and how his perspective on the loss changed over time.

“For a long time, I’d get drunk and rave and rant about, ‘He was short-changed,’” Gregg says. “Then I grew up. He didn’t get short-changed, he had a blast. He had a good ol’ time.”

Directed by James Keach, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces the singer’s life from birth to death through his music, friendships and seven marriages, including his highly publicized marriage to Cher.

The film also chronicles his decades-long battle with addiction. Over the years, Gregg entered rehab 14 times before ultimately overcoming dependencies on cocaine, heroin, alcohol and cigarettes. He remained sober until his death from liver cancer in 2017.

Among the top rock groups of the 1960s, few could match the live firepower of Cream. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were among the era’s most formidable players, and their extended jazz-rock excursions onstage set a standard few bands could match.

Remarkably, Clapton himself didn’t see the trio as a particularly strong live act.

“We were really limited onstage. We could go into the studio and make great records by overdubbing,” he said, as quoted by Bob Beatty in the 2022 book Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East. “I would play a rhythm part, and then play a lead part with a harmony to it, so you’re really talking about three guitar parts.”

Bruce had already confirmed Clapton’s viewpoint years earlier.

“Basically, Cream was two bands: a recording band and a live band,” the bass guitarist told Guitar Player in the July 1985 issue. “There was a certain amount of dissension in the band, though. I don't think Eric ever had much faith in Cream as a live band in the beginning. I remember him saying, ‘This is a good recording band, but it will never be a good live band.’

“My feeling was that we could succeed on both levels if we didn't try to approach them both from the same point of view. So the band had a split personality. It was definitely more of a jazz band onstage.”

So which group did Clapton consider the best live band of the classic-rock era? His answer was the Allman Brothers Band, who emerged just as Cream were nearing the end of their run.

“The Allman Brothers’ music was unbelievable, because they were doing all that harmony playing,” Clapton said. “Even if they played solos, they were all in harmony. It was fantastically worked out.

“The impression that I got was how much hard work they’d put into their presentation, and the fact that it wasn’t really blasted all over the airwaves. They had just quietly gone about doing a fantastic job of making really, really good music that was really well thought out. It influenced my music at the time.

“They made it okay for a band to be live all the time. Their thing was really more about live than [studio].”

Clapton’s admiration began when he first heard Duane Allman on Wilson Pickett’s late-1968 cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Driving in his car, Clapton was so struck by the guitar playing that he pulled over to listen more closely.

“I remember hearing ‘Hey Jude’ by Wilson Pickett and calling either Ahmet Ertegun or Tom Dowd and saying, ‘Who’s that guitar player?’” Clapton later told Guitar Player. “To this day, I’ve never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record.”

About a year and a half later, Clapton and Allman would finally meet — thanks to Dowd — and go on to record together in Derek and the Dominos.

“When Eric’s manager called me at Criteria Studios to produce the Derek and the Dominos album, I was working on Idlewild South by the Allman Brothers,” Dowd recalled to Guitar Player. “The Allman Brothers had to take a break from recording to go on the road.

“When I got off the phone, I mentioned to Duane, ‘Boy, a guitar player you’re going to love is coming here in about 10 days: Eric Clapton.’ He said, ‘Oh, man, I’d love to meet that guy’ — and he started playing me Eric’s licks.”

Dowd said something similar happened when he mentioned Allman to Clapton.

“When Eric started recording a couple of weeks later, Duane called and said they were going to be doing a concert in Miami and asked if he could drop by the studio. I turned to Eric and said, ‘There’s a chap I’ve been working with named Duane Allman.’ He said, ‘The guy that plays all those bottleneck licks?’ and he started emulating Duane on the guitar. He said, ‘I’m dying to see him play.’

“I told him they were giving a concert Saturday night, and Eric announced, ‘There will be no session Saturday night. We are going to a concert.’ After the show, I introduced them, and they came back to the studio and started trading instruments and licks.”

Clapton would ultimately credit Allman with inspiring his transition from acoustic slide to exploring the technique on electric guitar. Before Allman’s emergence, Clapton noted, most electric slide players were essentially repeating the standard vocabulary established by Elmore James. Allman, however, pushed the style into new territory.

“No one was opening it up until Duane showed up and played it a completely different way,” Clapton said. “That sort of made me think about taking it up.”

Even so, Clapton said his own slide style ultimately developed along different lines.

“No, not a great amount, because I approach it more like George Harrison. Duane would play strictly blues lines; they were always innovative, but they were always in the blues vein. I’m somewhere in between him and George, who invents melodic lines often on the scales.”

The Allman Brothers Band created some of the most iconic twin-guitar harmonies in rock history. But according to Warren Haynes, their magic came from something unexpected: imperfection.

Some of their most beloved harmony lines weren’t carefully composed or rehearsed. They happened spontaneously onstage, as Duane Allman and Dickey Betts reacted to each other in real time — and occasionally hit notes that weren’t technically “correct.”

““A lot of the twin lines that people recognize as parts of Allman Brothers songs actually came about during improv moments where Dickey Betts would start playing a melody and Duane Allman would start playing harmony with him,” Haynes says on the No Guitar Is Safe podcast. “If you go back and check out the live stuff — like At Fillmore East — and some of the stuff on Eat a Peach, the harmonies are not always perfectly parallel.”

That wasn’t a flaw. It was the point.

“They didn’t know exactly what they were doing,” Haynes says. “Duane just had a good enough ear that he would hear Dickey play a melody and then play a harmony to it. And one of them might change a note, and things might get a little squirrelly for a minute — but that’s okay. It wasn’t meant to be perfect.”

That philosophy would hit home for Haynes in a life-changing way when he recorded his first Allman Brothers album, Seven Turns. Haynes and Betts had written the instrumental “True Gravity” and worked out one harmony section meticulously.

They got it exactly right. But when Betts recorded his final take, he played a few notes differently. Haynes assumed they’d fix it.

“So I went to our producer, Tom Dowd, and said, ‘I think we should fix those two or three notes,’” he recalls.

Dowd had other ideas.

“He said, ‘Before we do, I want you to close your eyes and listen to the track as if you had never heard it before.’”

Haynes did.

“And it sounded beautiful,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t change a thing.’ There are three notes that make the harmony weird — but if you don’t know that, it sounds great.”

The moment changed how he thought about music forever.

“What I learned — especially when I joined the Allman Brothers — is that perfection and beauty in music have nothing in common,” he says.

In fact, many legendary recordings contain mistakes their creators considered fixing.

“I talked to Booker T. Jones about recording with Otis Redding, and he said whichever version was Otis’s best take, that was the take,” Haynes says. “If it wasn’t your best take, too bad — because it was all about the vocal performance.”

Listeners, he realized, don’t hear music the way musicians do.

“They don’t know what we intended,” he says. “They only know what it sounds like hearing it for the first time.”

Haynes learned that lesson years earlier while listening to Johnny Winter’s album Second Winter. As a young guitarist, he heard one electric guitar passage that blew his mind.

“What the hell is that?” he remembers thinking.

Decades later, he revisited it — and discovered Winter had briefly played in the wrong key.

“But to a beginning guitar player, it sounded like psychedelic jazz,” Haynes says. “I’m sure he thought, ‘Oh, I should fix that,’ and somebody said, ‘It’s fine.’”

That, Haynes believes, is where the real magic lives.

Not in perfection — but in the human moments listeners feel, even if they don’t realize why.

To hear the full conversation, including Haynes demonstrating Allman Brothers–style harmonies and discussing his current tour, listen to the latest episode of No Guitar Is Safe wherever you get your podcasts.

Friday, October 29, 1971 is a date that will long be remembered by music fans all over the world. It was on that night in Macon, Georgia that Duane Allman, lead guitarist and co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band died as a result of injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. He was twenty-four.

Duane was born in Nashville, Tennessee and lived there until he was 12. At that time his widowed mother, Mrs. Geraldine Allman, decided to seek better means of employment and moved both Duane and his brother, Gregg, to Daytona Beach, Florida. The yearning for the Nashville sound stayed with the youngsters and fortunately for them the late-night rhythm-and-blues radio shows of WLAC Nashville could be heard in Daytona Beach. Muddy Waters, Bobby Bland, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson were listened to incessantly.

As in the case of so many youngsters, Duane’s road to music was started with a Christmas gift — to brother Gregg. Duane was given a motorcycle while Gregg received a guitar. The bike was soon wrecked and Duane traded the parts for another guitar. Gregg, then taught Duane everything that he had already learned and Duane stayed with the guitar, even though his brother went on to expand his own versatility with keyboard instruments.

In an interview with Ellen Mandel on Queens College radio station WQMC in New York City, Duane was asked how he learned to play guitar. In his own inimitable style he replied, “The cat that taught me how to play guitar lives in New Haven. Jim Sheppley, Ol’ Lightnin’ Fingers. The first number one, taking-care-of-business man in Daytona Beach, Florida; the cat that had it all together.

“If you wanted to learn anything, if you wanted to play something right, you’d go to him and learn it. The baddest cat. A very influential cat in my life, also. He’s dynamite. The smokin’-est cat. I can’t even talk about him, he’s so hip. He glows in the dark. He hung the moon and tells the sun when to come up. Shepp is smokin’.”

The Allmans made their first public appearance at a youth-center teen dance. They would play anything anywhere just to get the chance to play. At 16 they were making $41 a week in a group called the House Rockers. In 1965 they formed a four-piece group called the Allman Joys, which was mainly a regional band and lasted for only two years. It was with the Allman Joys that Duane and Gregg recorded their first commercial release for Buddy Killen (Joe Tex’s manager) on the Dial label. The song was their own rendition of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” and was not a national success, although it sold well locally.

In 1966, while on a national tour with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band [which he managed at the time of this article’s publication in 1973], Bill McEuen spotted the Allman Joys playing in the St. Louis Gaslight District. The area could best be described as being the underworld side of the South — really a funky cafe community. “It was like being drawn into a new musical form,” said Bill in a telephone interview.

Duane’s music then was mostly top-40 stuff, including “Walk Away Renee,” and some Curtis Mayfield material. Gregg at that time was singing set-ups for Duane’s guitar breaks. In those days Duane was playing through a very early model blonde Fender Telecaster with Fender’s 150 rock and roll strings. He used Vox Super Beatle amps, a very popular model at the time, with six 10-inch speakers and two horns. He had a distortion device somewhat like a Fuzz Tone that he actually attached on a little bracket connected to the volume and treble knobs.

Duane frowned upon any “phony” electric guitar sound, and used this device to play at a little lower level and get more sustain. He also had an Echoplex tape-delay unit. Sometimes they would have it connected to the P.A. and other times put it in the guitar breaks.

McEuen felt that because he had connections in the recording end of the business he could help the Allmans get a contract. More than anything else he wanted to get their music across to the people.

“When Duane played guitar he was part of the song, he was part of the lick, he was visually interpreting his music like when you watch John Lee Hooker or you got a chance to watch Hendrix. He was obviously totally glued and tuned in to those licks, and he knew that he wasn’t just playing notes, that they were things that should communicate and when they did it was very exciting.”

McEuen brought the band to the West Coast and put them up in a big house in Hollywood with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. At this point the band consisted of Duane and Gregg, with Paul Hornsby on piano and Johnny Sandlin on drums (in the early stages Maybrun McKinley on bass). They were still calling themselves the Allman Joys and making it big playing the Whiskey a Go Go and then the Fillmore with the Buffalo Springfield, where Steve Stills and Neil Young flipped over them.

From the beginning McEuen and Duane developed a strong relationship and respect which transcended ordinary manager-client relationships.

“Duane and I would sit for hours in my front room playing guitar and we’d discuss the possibilities of getting that guitar up front. But we didn’t know what kind of music to do it with because there weren’t many guitar instrumentals that were making it, and Duane didn’t sing very much.

“When he came to California he started getting interested in fingerpicking and acoustic music [for acoustic sound he played a Gibson Heritage] . He loved arpeggio picking and had a great ear. He could hear something, and in a half-hour have it down. He would listen to Hendrix’ first album and say, ’Shit, man, that’s good, but I can do that.’” He got the idea for “Statesboro Blues” after listening to the Folkways album Country Blues.

The Allman Joys broke up in 1967 and formed a group known as Hourglass. They released two albums on the Liberty label which were, according to the Allmans, not up to their own standards. They had the same opinion of the Liberty management. Liberty Records at that time didn’t let musicians go into the studio and prepare and record their own albums; they tried to direct them, and the band felt that the direction for this type of a group was totally inadequate.

The first album was cut with his Fender Telecaster played through Vox amplifiers while the second was through the Fender Twin Reverb. But Hourglass never made it and the group soon collapsed.

Soon Duane picked up slide playing using a ’57 goldtop Gibson Les Paul, explaining why on WQMC.

“I heard Ry Cooder playing some time ago and I said, man that’s for me. And I got me a bottle and went in the house for about three weeks, and I said ’Hey man, we’ve got to learn the songs — the blues to play on the stage. I love this. This is a gas.’”

He admitted that it took him a while to get the hang of it.

“So we started doing it. and for a while it was everybody looking at me and thinking, ’Oh no! He’s getting ready to do it again!’ Everybody just lowered their heads — start it off fast and get it over with. But then, I got a little better at it, and improved it, but now everybody’s blowing it all out of proportion. It’s just fine for me as a relief from the other kind of playing.” He’d tune to a chord and play what he felt.

One of Duane’s closest friends was Jerry Wexler, head of Atlantic Records and one of the most perceptive men in the recording industry. I asked him how he first heard of Duane.

“My first knowledge of Duane came when Rick Hall played for me on the telephone from Muscle Shoals a playback of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Hey Jude,’ which Rick had just finished producing. I was knocked out by the lead guitar I heard all through the record, and because I was familiar with the several session guitarists in Muscle Shoals I realized I was hearing a new player. It was Duane, of course, and I asked Rick to put him on the phone. That was the beginning of a close relationship, business and personal.

“Rick Hall had Duane under contract and I purchased it from Rick for Atlantic Records for $15,000. At this time it was a steep expenditure, because Duane didn’t sing, write, nor did he have a band. I was encouraged to buy Duane’s contract by Phil Walden, who became his manager and who built the Allman Brothers Band. Phil set up Capricorn Records, backed by Atlantic, which became the distributor for Capricorn, and the Allmans were Capricorn’s first, and ultimately most successful, project.”

(At that time Duane was playing a Gibson Les Paul goldtop and a Gibson SG through two 50-watt Marshall amps driving two Marshall cabinets containing eight J.B.L. D-120F speakers. Sometimes on gigs he would play through a Vega P.A. system. In studio work he also used a Fender Stratocaster with the Fender Twin Reverb amp. He never modified his equipment in any way throughout his career.

Wexler continues, “While the band was being formed, we used Duane as a session guitarist with Aretha Franklin, Delaney and Bonnie, King Curtis, Boz Scaggs, Ronnie Hawkins and Eric Clapton. These sessions were cut mostly in Criteria, Miami; Atlantic, New York; and Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

“Duane loved to play and he loved to hang out with musicians and music people. He came to visit with me often, at my houses in Florida and Long Island.”

There would usually be other musicians around such as Delaney Bramlett, Curtis, Doctor John and Eddie Hinton. Duane taught Eddie how to play bottle slide; he used a little glass pill bottle, Coricidin type, and once wrote to the manufacturer telling them what he used them for and they in turn sent a whole case to him. He used to give these out to his admirers.

Wexler goes on, “His playing was incredible. He played great, authentic blues, and he phrased like the great black guitar players, playing beautiful melodic segments. He was a masterly player, way beyond the chops problem —and being born and raised in the South, the blues came naturally to him. He didn’t have to learn them off phonograph records.

“He was a great acoustic guitar and Dobro player. [He used a Gibson Heritage and a National Steel] . He even produced a slide effect manually when he wanted to. He played excellent bossa nova and jazz when needed, and when he jammed, he showed a good grounding in bop, and played a terrific country guitar, à la Hank Garland or Chet Atkins, as the spirit moved him.

“He loved B. B. King, Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Slim Harpo and Eric Clapton. We discussed Eric often, and Duane felt that Eric was the one foreign-born player who had it all the way. No, there was one other: Robbie Robertson. Duane put Robbie in the top category. Also he loved Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson; and shared a passion for these two artists with Delaney Bramlett, and it was something incredible to hear when they got together and played the songs of these two great Delta artists on acoustic guitars.

“I remember them playing outdoors on the deck of my house on Gardiner’s Bay on a still summer night. They did songs like ’Shackles and Chains’ as a slow, soulful ballad, ’Sweet Dreams” and many Jimmy Rogers songs. Duane even sang a little bit.”

Duane Allman’s personal philosophy of life was very simple and basic. He once said, “Everything’s the same everywhere. There are nice folks and assholes, and you have to learn to distinguish between the two in order to get by. And someone who’s an asshole to somebody may be a nice folk to somebody else, so you’ve got to learn to be nice to everybody, and show everybody respect, that’s the only way people respect you. You’ve got to have mutual respect and a little bit of love, if you can round it up.

“And don’t be afraid to share what’s inside of you with other people. That’s the only way you’re ever going to get free or have any fun at all, either. So just rock on, and have you a good time. If I have a choice between having a good time and a shitty time, I’m going to have me a good time. I’ve had enough shitty times.”

Probably the greatest session work that Duane ever did was on the Layla album with Derek and the Dominoes, featuring Eric Clapton. Tom Dowd, producer with Atlantic, invited Duane to come to the session and one of the finest rock and roll albums ever produced evolved from this. Eric had asked Duane to sit in when he heard he was in the studio and the rest is history. His entire career can be followed in the album Duane Allman: Anthology on the Capricorn label.

* * *

It was quiet in Macon’s Memorial chapel the day of Duane’s funeral, but not for long. Hundreds of people — relatives and friends — gathered, talking, crying about something they still could not believe had happened. The band performed that day at the service like they had never done before; blues, with more meaning now than ever. They played “Stormy Monday,” “Elizabeth Reed” and “Keys to the Highway.” The harmonies and counterpoint of Duane and Dicky Betts weren’t there, however. Delaney was, though, and so was Dr. John. Jerry Wexler delivered the eulogy. As he later described it, “There was a short sermon, and my few stumbling words — and a lot of Allman-style soulful southern rock and roll. Not rock. Rock and roll.”

Washington Irving once said, “There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. These we would not exchange for the song of pleasure or the bursts or revelry.” Wail on, Skydog.

The logistics of busy careers are about the only thing that keep Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks apart — and, even then, never for long.

The two have been friends since even before they became the Allman Brothers Band’s final electric guitar tandem circa 2001. North Carolina native Haynes had already served one tenure with the Allmans and was focused on Gov’t Mule, which he founded in 1994 with his late ABB bandmate Allen Woody. Florida-born Trucks, nephew of ABB co-founder Butch Trucks, was working at the same time with his own band.

Together they were credited with bringing back the vintage six-string fire fans associated with Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, and the two saw the band to its conclusion in 2014, with a famous final series of shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

Neither has taken his foot off the pedal since. Haynes — who recently issued his signature Gibson Les Paul Standard — has kept busy with Gov’t Mule and solo albums, among other projects. Meanwhile Trucks — who swears by Gibson SGs — and his wife Susan Tedeschi have led their large-scale Tedeschi Trucks Band for the past 15 years.

The two guitarists’ parallel lines have been intersecting more recently of late, however.

Trucks, for instance, co-wrote and played on three tracks for Haynes’ 2024 album, Million Voices Whisper, which included “Real Real Love,” a song Gregg Allman had written but remained incomplete until Haynes put his hand to it. The duo also reunited for a pair of Allman Brothers tribute shows, where they were billed as the Brothers, this past April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Haynes, meanwhile, is featured on “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” from Tedeschi Trucks’ upcoming Tedeschi Trucks Band and Leon Russell Present: Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revisited (Live at Lockn’). Recorded 10 years ago, the project was also the subject of the 2021 documentary Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

Both it and Haynes’ The Whisper Sessions, which features stripped-down arrangements of Million Voices Whisper songs, come out September 12. As a result, Tedeschi Trucks and Gov’t Mule — which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its self-titled debut album — will be on the road together for a half-dozen shows that will surely find them playing next to each other each night.

With all that going on, it seemed like an appropriate time to put Haynes and Trucks together via Zoom — Haynes at home in New York preparing for the Mule run, Trucks on tour in Berkeley, California, but both anticipating their upcoming co-bills.

What should we expect for these six dates in September?

HAYNES We don’t have anything planned. I think there’s gonna be a lot of just hanging and stage sharing and figuring it out night by night and trying to make every night different and memorable. Sky’s the limit as far as what we can do to bring everybody into the fold and what songs we can pull out that we haven’t done.

TRUCKS It’s gonna be a fun run, a great way to kind of dive back in. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on the road and together this way.

HAYNES It’ll kind of force us to think about some stuff that we’ve probably never done, which is what I’m excited about.

There’s a lot of history here, of course. What is the commonality or kindred spirit that you find between yourselves after all this time?

TRUCKS We’ve known each other since I was 10 years old, 11 years old. We have similar backgrounds, similar love of the same music, similar heroes — and ended up in a band together for 15 years, which in 1990 neither one of us thought was likely or even possible. And even when that happened we had already been on tour together with my solo band and Gov’t Mule, playing clubs all over the country for months and months at a time. We just kinda grew up doing this together in a lot of ways.

HAYNES By the time we wound up in the Allman Brothers together, we had already played dozens if not over one hundred times together.

TRUCKS Yeah, and on each other’s records and circling and colliding and circling, and then we ended up in the Allman Brothers together.

When that happened, how did you forge and then evolve that playing relationship?

HAYNES It was a really natural thing at that point. The biggest topic of discussion was who was gonna play which part, because I spent 12 years playing with Dickey and Derek had just spent the last few years playing with Dickey, so we were both kinda taking the same role. And now that Dickey was not in the band we had to figure out how to divvy up the parts in a way that made sense on a song-by-song basis.

TRUCKS I think in a lot of ways that’s when that version of the Allman Brothers Band really came into its own, because we had to reimagine it. It wasn’t one of us in the Duane role and one of us as Dickey; we had to throw all that stuff away, in a way. There are certain tunes where the personality of what Duane played originally was so strong that you want to carry that through, but there were other tunes you could just reimagine entirely. That was kind of fun. I think that’s when we developed our own language as two guitar players.

How has it further evolved outside of the Allman Brothers? What do you do now, playing together, that defines the relationship?

HAYNES A lot of what we do is just unspoken, unrehearsed, looking at each other and kind of knowing what the other one is thinking.

TRUCKS Especially in this last go-round with the Brothers, those last two shows and even working on Warren’s record — I think after all that time away from it, it was even more second nature than it was originally. It was stronger, I think.

HAYNES I think so, too. And it was relaxed. Some of the Allman Brothers music is based around tension, and that’s a good thing. But there’s also this relaxed approach that we took to it that freed it up.

TRUCKS There was so much history between Butch and Dickey and Gregg. There was often an underlying tension that you didn’t even know where it came from. A lot of it started before me and Warren were born.

So how do you get the ferocity without the tension?

TRUCKS There’s other energy you can draw from. You’re thinking about the drum chair that your uncle used to sit in, like, “Motherfucker, you should be back here and fuckin’ banging on these drums, dude!” and turn up a little bit. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened and there’s a lot of pain in the story of the band. That stuff’s not lost on us. We were there for some of it; Warren was there for a lot of it. There’s a lot to tap into.

HAYNES Miles Davis said in his book that that band with Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter, that quintet — which is my fuckin’ favorite band of all-time — he said they would play better when they were pissed off. So he would always piss ’em off to make them play better.

But then you wonder, A) what did it sound like when they weren’t pissed off, and B) once that music has been created and you have that music to tap into and to learn from it exists. So once something has been established and it’s a reference point, do you still need the tension?

Both of you have some notable anniversaries this year. It’s 15 years since Tedeschi Trucks became a formal band. And, of course, it’s 30 years for Gov’t Mule this year.

HAYNES And Allen Woody’s been gone 25 years. I still remember when Derek was on tour with us early on and we were playing the House of Blues in New Orleans and Allen Woody walked over to that little record store across the alley and bought the Aubrey Ghent record Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus, and bought three copies — one for himself, one for me and one for you.

It was like, wow! It was like a light bulb coming across our heads. Woody just saw it in there and thought it looked interesting, because Woody liked to play lap steel.

TRUCKS That record changed my life. It changed the way I approach playing the instrument I play. “Amazing Grace” was the one that did it. Then Aubrey Ghent ended up officiating at my wedding.

HAYNES The way he played this riff on the lap steel that sounds just so human, like a woman’s voice. It just gives me some chills thinking about it.

TRUCKS That was a game changer, ’cause at that point I was starting to go down the Ali Akbar Khan path, a lot of Indian classical vocalists, and hearing Aubrey Ghent I was like, “Oh, wait, there’s the same thing! You can take that approach with this music we’re playing.” It was a major light bulb for sure.

HAYNES Me, Derek, Woody, Jaimoe — there’s a circle of 10 or 12 people that were trying to turn each other onto something; “If you’ve never heard this before, you need to check it out.” So there was a lot of cross-pollination going on in that way. It was a way of keeping the ball rolling, keeping the inspiration flowing out there on the road.

Warren Haynes never imagined he would fill the shoes of his childhood hero Duane Allman by playing opposite Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers band.

Even after he was hired by Betts to play opposite him in his Dickey Betts Band, Haynes had no assumptions about making the sizable leap to the ABB.

“Well, it was intimidating because the Allman Brothers Band was always one of my favorite bands, and I had no expectations of that happening,” the guitarist tells Music Radar in a new interview.

But when it finally happened, he couldn’t have been better prepared.

“I had been playing with Dickey and his band for two or three years, and that really helped condition me for being in the Allman Brothers,” Haynes says. “By the time I joined the Allman Brothers, Dickey and I had been playing for three years, and writing songs together for three years, so we had that initiation period, so to speak, which made it a little easier.”

Haynes was about 27 when Betts called him to help perform backup vocals on his first solo project following the initial breakup of the Allman Brothers Band in 1987. That led to Haynes being hired as Betts’ guitarist for more session work that resulted in the band’s 1988 debut album, Pattern Disruptive. Haynes’ next project was co-writng the title track for Gregg Allman’s solo album Just Before the Bullets Fly.

So when the Allmans decided to regroup in 1989, Haynes had a leg up on the competition. Besides, he already knew how to play opposite Betts, with a fire equal to the older man’s, but in a style that was complementary to it.

“I had three years of standing next to Dickey Betts, in smaller venues,” he says.

What he didn’t expect was that he would be given the room to bring that style to the Allman Brothers Band. Far from wanting a Duane Allman clone to help them relive their glory days or copy the classic Allman–Betts guitar duels, the ABB needed a guitarist who would take them to the next stage in their development.

“They were great about allowing and encouraging everyone to bring their own personality to the music,” Haynes says. “From the very beginning, they never asked me to play more like Duane Allman, or less like Duane Allman. It was always, ‘Be yourself. Play like you.

“Play it however you want to do it,’ knowing that I had this reverence for Duane’s playing, and for the music in general, and that I wasn’t going to go too far away from the feeling and the spirit of the music. But I wanted to make it my own as well.”

Even on the old tunes, Haynes was given room to work his reinvention. Consider “Blue Sky,” the Dickey Betts cut from 1972’s Eat a Peach, one of the last cuts to feature Duane Allman. Unlike Allman, he approached his solo on the song with a slide and a Strat —— as in the performance shown below from the band's 1991 tour — something he says “was strange, because Duane," a devoted Les Paul player, "never played slide on it.

“But that was something that Dickey probably asked me to do for his band — or maybe it was my idea, I don’t know.”

Betts departed the ABB in 2000 as tensions rose to the breaking point, opening the door for Derek Trucks to take on his position after having filled in for Betts in 1999. The Allman Brothers Band hung it up for good in 2014 when Haynes and Trucks announced they were leaving to focus on their own projects.

Today, the Allman Brothers Band is never too far from Haynes heart. His new album, The Whisper Sessions — a stripped-back version of his 2024 studio album, A Million Voices Whisper — finds him paired up again with Trucks for a cover of the ABB hit “Melissa.” The duo also present a reworked version of “Real Real Love,” the unfinished Gregg Allman tune that Haynes brought to its completion for A Million Voices Whisper.

Trucks also appeared on that previous recording of “Real Real Love,” marking the first time the two guitarists made a studio album since the 2003 Allman Brothers Band album, Hittin’ the Note. Haynes told Guitar Player that upon finishing the song, he knew immediately he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense.”

The Whisper Sessions comes out September 12 on Fantasy and can be saved to your preferred streaming service ahead of time.

In related news, Haynes will front his group Gov’t Mule on their 30th anniversary co-headlining tour with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Visit Warren Haynes for dates and tickets.

“I'm the best unknown guitar player you've ever heard!" Les Dudek exclaims. While he may not be a household name, Dudek's blues-infused guitar playing is certainly familiar to many. Over a five-decade career, he's contributed guitar to recordings by artists like Steve Miller Band, Cher, Stevie Nicks, Boz Scaggs and the group that firmly established his six-string reputation, the Allman Brothers.

Dudek’s playing on the Allman Brothers staples “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” tends to overshadow anything else the now 72-year-old guitarist has done, including his own solo outings. His contribution to those two time-honored Dickey Betts cuts — both of which were highlights of the group's 1973 album, Brothers and Sisters — cannot be understated, since neither might have transpired if it hadn't been for Dudek.

“I had been invited down to Capricorn Sound one night when the Allman Brothers were cutting 'Ramblin’ Man,' ” Dudek tells Guitar Player, referring to the studio in Macon, Georgia where Brothers and Sisters was recorded. “I was in the control room when they were working it out. Periodically, Dickey would come up to me and ask what I thought about where this or that part of the song was going, so I gave him my suggestions.

"This kind of volleyed back and forth a few times before Dickey finally said, ‘Why don't you just come out here and play it with me?’ So I went out there and helped put on the wall of electric guitars. We put two low and two high guitar parts on it so that it had some padding for the main guitar vamp.”

With the backing track completed, Dudek and Betts began working on the lead guitar parts. At Dudek’s suggestion, a guitar harmony was added. “The song starts off with that cascading phrase, and then I come in with a harmony part,” he explains. “We did that a few times in the song and at start of the solo.

"Then I made the suggestion of putting on another layer above that and have the drums kind of kick us into it. Later it branched out into a two-part harmony: a lower and a higher octave. It's the same harmonies, but played in a different octave. Once that was done, Dickey put the slide part on for the final touch.”

Sometime later, Dudek received a call from Betts inviting him over to his house for dinner and instructing him to bring along his acoustic guitar. “While dinner was being cooked, Dickey showed me this rhythm part he had, what I would call the verse section of 'Jessica,' ” Dudek remembers. “And that's all he had. He had writer's block and didn't know where to go with it. He didn't have enough of it together that would allow us to go in and start developing it in the studio.

“So he got a little frustrated, but I stuck with it, and I came up with the bridge section that goes to the G chord. I said to Dickey, ‘Try this’ and showed him this little melody I had. As he was playing it, I said, ‘Take the melody all the way to the top.'

"So he went all the way to the top and said, ‘Now what?’ I said, ‘Stop.’ And he says, ‘Okay, now what?’

“I said, 'Now start over.’ ”

"And that's how it came out of the bridge section and back into the verse.

"Dickey lit up like a Christmas tree! We played it a few times, and he was like, 'Yes!' We finally got another part to add to it. So we took it into the studio and started working on it.”

While the recording session for “Ramblin’ Man” ran trouble free, the sessions for “Jessica” were problematic. “It took us about a week to cut that song,” Dudek says. “We just kept doing it every day until we finally got the one. In the middle of the week, Dickey and Gregg Allman also got into a verbal fight, which caused them to storm out of the studio, leaving us all sitting there going, ‘Now what?’

“At the start of the sessions, Dickey came up to me and said, ‘Look, you just played on 'Ramblin’ Man' and I really don't want the critics to think you're going to be in the band, so would you mind playing the acoustic guitar on this?’ I said, ‘No problem at all,' because I figured I helped co-write it and I'm going to get a credit.”

Nevertheless, Dudek’s songwriting contributions were never acknowledged when the song was released or at anytime after.

“Once we got 'Jessica' recorded, Dickey took me into the office of Phil Walden, the manager of the Allman Brothers and the president of Capricorn Records,” Dudek explains. “Dickey told him he didn’t know what the split should be or anything, but that I was to get some writer's royalties and writer's credit for helping him come up with the bridge section to the song. But it never happened.”

Dudek doesn’t recall many details about the guitars used on “Jessica,” only that he played “an acoustic guitar that was lying around at the studio.” He has a better memory of the gear used on “Ramblin’ Man.”

“It was my ’68 goldtop Les Paul, the one that was on my first album cover, with the black pickups,” he says. “It was a guitar that my mom and dad had got me when I was 15. Amp-wise, I used a 100-watt Marshall half stack. Dickey had a couple of half stacks in the studio, so I used one, and we each had a cabinet. And Dickey used his sunburst Gibson Les Paul, too.”

Dudek confirms that in the aftermath of Duane Allman’s tragic death on October 29, 1971, there was a lot of pressure placed on Betts, who became the group’s default leader. “It was a major blow and just took the wind out of the band,” Dudek recalls. “Dickey didn't know if the band was going to stay together or not. It was a really strange time because Duane had been gone only for a few months when I first came up there.

"Duane died at the end of October ‘71, and I was up there, around January, February of ’72. Dickey was already starting to look for players. He was going to put together his own band and continue on.

“Dickey basically wanted me to play in his band, and we were going to call it Great Southern. He already had that idea in his mind. But when Dickey finally started making moves to put it together, I think Gregg got a little bit annoyed by that."

As a result, Dudek says, Great Southern was put on hold, at least for the time being.

"The Allman Brothers had band meetings and finally decided to try to make another record, which turned out to be the Brothers and Sisters album. And so Dickey's band got put on the back burner. He did finally do it later, in 1974, but not with me. I had already moved to California by then.”

When Dickey Betts died on April 18, 2024, he left behind a long career that touched the lives of countless musicians. As his friends prepare to honor him with a memorial concert on February 28 in Macon, Georgia, one of those players has spoken about Betts’ influence on him: Warren Haynes.

Although he was introduced to the music world largely through his work as Betts’ Allman Brothers Band playing partner, Haynes was hired first to perform in the Dickey Betts Band, around 1987.

"Dickey gave me the biggest opportunity of my career,” Haynes tells the UCR Podcast. "He hired me in his band and I had no idea at that time that would lead to me joining the Allman Brothers. But it did, and in 1989, they asked me to join them when they reformed. That opened every door imaginable for me.”

Moreover, it allowed Haynes to make his mark as both an electric guitar player and a songwriter. His song “Soulshine,” from 1994’s Where It All Begins, is among the tunes he wrote or contributed to, and it remains one of the best-loved tracks from the group’s later catalog.

As Haynes has revealed, he was a longtime Allman Brothers Band fan when Betts enlisted him in the group. "When I first started — chronologically speaking — Hendrix and Clapton and Johnny Winter were the first three people I got turned on to,” he told Gibson.com's Backstage Pass in 2006. “That was the Cream era of Clapton. Then eventually, I heard the Allman Brothers and everybody else from that era that I stole something from,” he added with a laugh.

Betts was among those whose musical influence rubbed off on Haynes. The guitarist was particularly inspired by Betts’ vocal-like approach to lead playing, a quality that was especially apparent on instrumental works like "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Jessica" and the Betts Band cut "Duane's Tune," from 1988's Pattern Disruptive.

"He had that flowing melody thing, one note after another that all feels like you're singing along with the music," Haynes tells UCR. "His solos have that singing quality and that melodic ease that pulled the listener along.

“In turn, it turned into something that people looked at it as being part of the song. You know, the parts he played were so singable and hummable that even people who didn't play an instrument were singing along with his guitar solos."

Haynes would certainly appreciate that quality. As he told Rick Beato in December 2024, he views singing as a vital skill for guitarists. “I started singing first. And so all the guitar players that I became enamored with were either singers, or players like Santana that sounded like they were singing through their instrument.

“I loved B.B. King's voice before I cared about guitar. Freddie King I always say would be one of my favorite singers even if he didn't play guitar.”

Haynes’ fans were reminded of his deep connection to Betts and the Allman Brothers Band when he asked fellow ABB alumnus Derek Trucks to help him finish and record “Real Real Love,” a previously unreleased song by Gregg Allman, for his latest album, Million Voices Whisper. Released this past November, the album is dedicated to Betts, whose playing style informed Haynes’ own on the album,

"A lot of the reason that I dedicated this album to him, aside from the obvious, is that I felt like this music needed for me to play with a little more of his influence than I normally would," Haynes said. "So there are several songs where I'm definitely channeling Dickey intentionally."

Haynes will lead the pack of artists honoring the guitarist for the In Memory of Dickey Betts concert on February 28. The show will feature performances by Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Oteil Burbridge Jaimoe, Chuck Leavell, Devon Allman, Duane Betts, Charlie Starr, Jimmy Hall & Lamar Williams Jr. and many others.

With the passing of Allman Brothers Band great Dickey Betts in April, at the age of 80, the rock world lost one of its greatest, and most idiosyncratic, guitar heroes.

It was Betts who took the helm of the group following the tragic death of electric guitar dynamo Duane Allman in 1971, serving for years afterward as the band's sole guitarist.

Though he did so with incredible creative and commercial success, leading the Allman Brothers in the wake of Duane Allman's passing took a heavy toll on Betts, emotionally and musically.

Examining the tumultuous period for the band in his book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s – an excerpt of which features in the new issue of Guitar Player – Allman Brothers Band biographer Alan Paul recounts how Betts wrestled with his newfound musical responsibilities.

“It was difficult to suddenly have to play slide,” Betts said. “I’ve always enjoyed playing acoustic slide, but I never cared much for playing electric slide and I hated having to play Duane’s parts. It was uncomfortable, but if we were going to play those songs, then I had to play them.”

Faithfulness to the band's more slide-heavy side – perhaps best encapsulated in Statesboro Blues, the opening track on the band's live classic, At Fillmore East – aside, Betts nonetheless also led the group into country territory at times following Duane's death, penning some of their most beloved tunes, among them the instrumental Jessica and the immortal Ramblin' Man, in that vein.

As Paul recounts in Brothers and Sisters, Betts was unsure of taking the band in that more country-flavored direction – with Ramblin' Man in particular – but the band's co-leader, the late Gregg Allman, was enthusiastic about the tune.

“Hell,” Allman said, “that song cooked.”

To read the full Guitar Player salute to Betts, pick up a copy of the new issue of the mag at Magazines Direct. Alan Paul's Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s can also be purchased now.

When Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971, it seemed as if the Allman Brothers Band were history. In fact, their greatest days still lay ahead of them.

Duane’s co-guitarist, Dickey Betts, stepped into the breach and took control. First he rallied the group to tour in support of 1972’s Eat a Peach, the follow-up to At Fillmore East, the 1971 double live album that brought the Allman Brothers the commercial and critical acclaim they so deserved. He then led them to create what would become their commercial breakthrough: the 1973 studio album Brothers and Sisters.

Supported by such stellar Betts compositions as “Jessica” and the chart-topping hit “Ramblin’ Man,” Brothers and Sisters went on to sell seven million copies and established the Allmans as one of the decade’s biggest groups.

But the album’s wildly successful infusion of Betts’ country-rock also helped to pave the way for the success of other southern rock bands, like Lynyrd Skynyrd, who made their record debut that same year.

Without a doubt, the Allman Brothers dominated this era of American culture, from their massive shows with the Grateful Dead (their Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in July ’73 was attended by some 600,000 fans) to their support for Jimmy Carter that helped elect him to the presidency in 1976. Betts and keyboardist/guitarist Gregg Allman also enjoyed solo success when their respective 1974 albums – Highway Call and The Gregg Allman Tour – landed in the Top 20.

But the good times were marred by tragedy, from the death of bassist Berry Oakley shortly after the band began recording Brothers and Sisters, to the drug-fueled lifestyle that followed. The Allman Brothers Band dissolved in 1976, ending the first chapter in their long run.

This era in the Allman Brothers Band’s history comes to vivid life in Alan Paul’s new book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s. Out this July 25 from St. Martin’s Press, the book is the much-anticipated follow-up to Alan’s New York Times bestseller, One Way Out: The Inside Story of the Allman Brothers Band, the definitive biography of the celebrated group.

In this exclusive excerpt from Brothers and Sisters, we present an inside look at the group’s recording session for “Ramblin’ Man.” The action picks up shortly after the group hires keyboardist Chuck Leavell, fresh from his sessions for Gregg’s solo debut, Laid Back, and brings in guitarist Les Dudek to assist Betts.

The recording of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man”

Chuck Leavell’s musical imprint is unmistakable on the first two tracks the band recorded, Gregg’s “Wasted Words” and Betts’ “Ramblin’ Man.” He added a bounce that elevated “Wasted Words,” undergirding Betts’ slide guitar, which was less fluid and expansive than Duane’s and more attuned to playing a defined melodic part.

Gregg had recorded a demo of “Wasted Words” in Los Angeles on August 9, with Johnny Winter on guitar and Buddy Miles on drums. Betts’ slide line sounds like it was inspired by what Winter had played on the demo.

The lyrics of the song are a brutal kiss-off to Gregg’s first wife, Shelly Winters (not the actress), including his own admission of failure:

Well, I ain’t no saint and you sure as hell ain’t no savior…. Don’t ask me to be mister clean, baby, I don’t know how.

This was followed by a brutal line:

Your wasted words, so absurd / Are you really Satan, yes or no?

The song kicked off the sessions with swagger, which continued in a totally different vein with “Ramblin’ Man.” The two songs, one an Allman rock blues, the other a Betts country rocker, are entirely different but sonically linked by Leavell’s honky-tonk bravado.

His sound is singular, even as you hear elements of the musicians the pianist cites as his prime inspirations: Ray Charles, Nicky Hopkins, Dr. John, Leon Russell and Elton John. He wasn’t particularly influenced by country music, but his instincts naturally took him to some traditional playing on “Ramblin’ Man,” bringing to the song a genuine country swing.

“I just followed my ear and played what seemed appropriate,” Leavell said.

“Ramblin’ Man” was different from anything the band had ever recorded before. The only thing close was “Blue Sky,” another major-key song with a country bounce. But “Blue Sky” wasn’t all that country, as Betts would note. “It was more of that country/rock thing that was popular at that time. It could have been done by Poco or the Dead.”

“Ramblin’ Man” was much closer to being an actual country tune. Betts said the Hank Williams song of the same name inspired his initial idea, with Dickey’s lyrics adapting Williams’ “when the Lord made me, He made a ramblin’ man.”

Betts originally thought he’d offer it to a country artist but was surprised to learn that he was the only guy in the band who thought it was too country for the Allman Brothers Band to record. “I was going to show it to Hank Williams Jr. and ask if he wanted to cut it,” he said.

Gregg had no issues adding the song and broadening the band’s range. “Hell, that song cooked,” he said. He was glad the band recorded it and that Dickey didn’t save it for a solo album, as he had suggested he might do.

Decades later, after years of conflict with Betts, Trucks would scoff at the song, alluding to Dickey’s initial inclination to give it to a country artist, by saying the band thought they were “recording it as a demo for Merle Haggard or someone.” But all indications are that the song was always intended to be an Allman Brothers release and that the group almost immediately knew that they had hit on something beautifully different.

“I can’t remember any discussion whatsoever about ‘Ramblin’ Man’ being too country to include,” said Leavell. “I certainly didn’t feel that way. I thought it was a marker of how great of a band it was that you could do a song like ‘Melissa’ followed by ‘Liz Reed’ followed by ‘One Way Out’ – and now Dickey was pushing that out to country rock.”

As much of a departure as it was, “Ramblin’ Man” was not a new song. Betts had been working on it for a few years and had played an embryonic version for Duane. He can be heard working through the song on The Gatlinburg Tapes, a bootleg of the band jamming in April 1971 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, during Eat a Peach songwriting sessions.

At that stage, the lyrics refer to a “ramblin’ country man,” but the chords, structure and concept are all in place. He finished writing the song about a year later in the kitchen of the Big House, the Allman Brothers’ communal home at 2321 Vineville Avenue (which now houses the Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House). He had written “Blue Sky” in the living room.

Betts said that he carried the germ of the idea around in his head for several years. Before the Allman Brothers Band’s formation, whenever he didn’t have a place to sleep, he’d crash at the Sarasota apartment of his friend Kenny Hartwick, whom he described as “a friendly, hayseed cowboy kind of guy who built fences and liked to answer his own questions before you had a chance.”

“One day,” Betts told writer Marc Myers, “he asked me how I was doing with my music and said, ‘I bet you’re just tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best you can.’ I liked how that sounded and carried the line around in my head for about three years. Except for Kenny’s line, the rest of the lyrics were autobiographical.

“When I was a kid, my dad was in construction and used to move the family back and forth between central Florida’s east and west coasts. I’d go to one school for a year and another the next. I had two sets of friends and spent a lot of time in the back of a Greyhound bus. Ramblin’ was in my blood.”

On the final version, Les Dudek, who had been jamming with the group and thought he might be hired as Duane’s replacement, plays sterling guitar harmonies with Betts, making a huge contribution to the song’s success.

The two men had worked out all the parts together, but then Betts decided to play them all himself, cutting multiple tracks. Dudek was in the control room watching as Betts repeatedly came in and asked his opinion about various takes, before finally just saying, “Why don’t you just come out and play?” Dudek said they played their harmonies live, with Oakley “staring a hole” through him. The sight of another guitarist playing with Betts seemed to hit Oakley hard. “That was very intense and heavy,” Dudek said.

Brothers and Sisters producer Johnny Sandlin agreed that the entire band knew they had something special the moment Dudek and Betts finished their guitar parts. “We all knew it was really good,” he said. “The guitar playing is just amazing.”

As Trucks said, “Les added a lot to ‘Ramblin’ Man.’ He was a good, slick player and he and Dickey worked well together.”

In addition to its obvious country influences, “Ramblin’ Man” also shows Betts’ love of jazz big bands. For the coda, he wanted an orchestral approach with a huge sound. The song’s instrumental section had four guitars playing two different harmonies an octave apart and Betts’s final overdub, which was a slide guitar line.

“I added that long instrumental ending in the studio to try and make it sound more like an Allman Brothers song,” said Betts.

Knowing that the song needed a strong intro to “grab the listener,” Betts turned toward the string band music he played with his family as a boy in Florida. He wrote a fiddle-style major pentatonic guitar line, which he then worked out as a call and response with Leavell.

The pianist’s “Ramblin’ Man” contributions and his bouncy, swinging work that elevated the blues structure of “Wasted Words” illustrate the brilliant decision to add Leavell instead of replacing Duane with another guitarist. His role at the heart of the music would only grow over the rest of the album sessions.

“It was just a happy accident – certainly nothing that was by design,” said Leavell. “Nobody said, ‘Let’s get a piano guy!’ It happened by osmosis, more or less out of the blue from an unexpected direction, which is maybe why it wound up working as it did.”

Even as the recording sessions were going well, the band remained concerned about Oakley and his drinking. Sandlin said that many of the initial sessions had to wrap up early because Berry became too inebriated to continue. The producer said that he played bass as the band learned “Ramblin’ Man” because Oakley hadn’t shown up and that the band even questioned whether Oakley “would be able to be on the album at all.”

They were all aware without openly discussing it that the first anniversary of Duane’s death was approaching. Heaviness hung in the air, particularly around Oakley. Still, his playing on “Wasted Words” and “Ramblin’ Man” was excellent, and there was hope that he was coming out of the year-long depression. Oakley was particularly buoyed by Leavell’s arrival. “He started playing his ass off again after Chuck joined,” said Jaimoe. “It was like he saw the light and the old Berry was back.”

An enthused Oakley went out of his way to make the new member feel at home. “Berry and Jaimoe were the first ones to really welcome me into the band,” said Leavell. “Berry would put his arm around me, check on me, make sure I felt comfortable. He was very keyed into the dynamics of being the new guy and smoothing over that transition. He was also just the coolest guy.”

Harmonica player and frequent ABB musician Thom Doucette was at the first rehearsal the band had after Duane’s death. There to support his friends and maybe to be a part of the new band, he sensed heavy tension between Gregg and Dickey over who was in charge the moment he walked into the room. It was a feeling that Oakley shared, Doucette said.

“Berry and I looked at each other and understood what the other was thinking,” said Doucette. “What was is now over. It’s gone. It was just too weird. With Duane around, the Dickey/Gregg rivalry was never an issue, but without him, it was inevitable.”

With two songs in the can, the group played live for the first time after a nearly two-month hiatus on November 2, flying to New York for a short set at Hofstra University, as part of Don Kirshner’s In Concert TV show, which also featured Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chuck Berry and Poco.

They debuted not only “Ramblin’ Man” but also their new lineup, back to six pieces and featuring Leavell. The pianist was thrilled to finally be onstage as a member of the Allman Brothers Band and was particularly keyed into Oakley’s distinctive playing.

“Berry was the most unique bass player I had ever played with,” said Leavell. “Rather than holding down the bottom end, he was very adventurous, constantly listening to the other instruments and popping out with great melodies. He was there to support anyone’s improvisation. I could feel Berry following me when I started a melody and it was just fantastic. He also had the most powerful rig and the coolest bass sound; you could feel it inside.”

While the characteristics of Oakley’s playing were apparent in the studio, Leavell said that they were especially evident onstage, where he drove the band. Leavell would only perform in concert with Oakley that one time.

Just nine days later, on November 11, 1972 – one year and 13 days after Duane’s crash – Oakley, too, was killed in a motorcycle accident when he sideswiped a city bus, less than a quarter mile away from Duane’s crash site. Like Duane, Oakley was just 24 years old when he died.

Despite everyone’s acute knowledge of and concerns over Berry’s struggles, his death jolted the band. As they pondered their next moves, they immediately canceled two shows with the Grateful Dead, which would have represented their first official billing together since February 1970.

“We had finally gotten some good positive energy going again,” said Trucks. “The dynamic had turned with Chuck. Dickey was writing and singing his ass off. Everything felt like it was moving in the right direction for the first time since Duane’s death and then, bam, we were right back in it again.”

The band once again stood at a seemingly unthinkable crossroads. Not only had they lost two of the original six band members in one year, but they were essentially missing their corporate board. Duane and Berry were the group’s undisputed leaders, a general and his colonel, the two everyone else looked to for direction. “Duane had the vision and Berry got it done,” said Doucette. “They were so close.”

“Duane was very outspoken and Berry was a lot easier to deal with,” Jaimoe said. “You couldn’t talk Duane out of anything once he made his mind up. He was just so intense. Berry was more the voice of reason, a bit more diplomatic. In fact, Berry Oakley was the brains behind the Allman Brothers Band. He knew enough about how to do business, and he knew how to deal with people. Duane didn’t have Berry’s patience.”

Oakley’s loss left everyone in and around the band reeling. Gregg was in New York, on his way to Jamaica with his new girlfriend, Janice Blair, when he got word of Oakley’s death from Carolyn Brown, Walden’s secretary.

“She called me and said, ‘Honey, if I was you, I’d go right on to Jamaica. You don’t need this, not again,’” Gregg recalled. He did not attend Oakley’s funeral, held at Macon’s St. Joseph Catholic Church on November 15. The remaining band played a desultory set of music, with Joe Dan Petty on bass.

“Berry’s death fucked me up the way Duane’s death did to him,” said Jaimoe. “Berry was my man. I got high on smack just to go to his funeral. Later that night, I nodded out in my car.”

Sleeping at a red light in downtown Macon, Jaimoe was rescued by a friend who happened to see him, ran to the car, and drove Jaimoe home to the Big House. It was a reflection of how deeply impacted the entire group was by this second tragic death.

“It was just like when Duane died,” said Sandlin. “Suddenly you’re just going through the motions of daily life. I really didn’t know how much more any of us could deal with. At that time, at our age, we didn’t know how to grieve properly. Most of us had not lost many people yet.”

“It was so hard to get into anything after that second loss,” Gregg said. “I even caught myself thinking that it’s narrowing down, that maybe I’m next.”

From Brothers and Sisters by Alan Paul. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

• Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s is available now from Amazon.

Deep in the midst of the pandemic, with touring halted and no clear indication of when the road may open up again, Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes paced his New York state home like a caged tiger. He had to make some music.

Haynes was tempted when his wife and manager, Stefani Scamardo, suggested it may be a good time to record that blues album he had been kicking around for years. But he had also written stacks of new songs he was anxious to record after channeling all his restless musical energy into songwriting during the pandemic.

“I loved the idea of doing a blues album, but I was dying to record all these new Mule songs,” Haynes says. “So I proposed doing two records at the same time, and everybody was into the idea. Which meant finding a place where we could set up in two different rooms with two completely different sets of equipment and make two records that sounded completely different from each other.

“Under normal circumstances, that would be a lot to take on,” he continues. “But during lockdown, it was the perfect solution. We needed to be creative, play music and get in the studio, because we couldn’t tour. It was a great way of expending our energy and being creative. And it was a way of not going crazy.”

Working on both albums with co-producer John Paterno (Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos), the Mule set up in two adjoining rooms at the Power Station New England, with no shared gear or instruments, keeping the two concurrent projects with their own unique identity and character.

Heavy Load Blues was released in November 2021 and nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues album. Less than two years later, this past June, the Mule released its companion album, Peace…Like a River. Haynes says he considers this, the band’s 12th studio album, to be the true follow-up to 2017’s Revolution Come… Revolution Go.

It’s an ambitious album that hearkens back to Dose, Gov’t Mule’s 1998 second release, in its wide range and musical risk taking. Haynes, bassist Allen Woody and drummer Matt Abts formed the Mule in 1994, when Haynes and Woody were playing together in the Allman Brothers Band and longing for an outlet to stretch the boundaries of music and indulge in the power-trio music they loved from bands like Cream, Mountain and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

After Woody’s 2000 death, the band expanded to a quartet with the addition of keyboardist/second guitarist Danny Louis. Jorgen Carlsson has been the band’s bassist since 2008. 

On Peace…Like a River, the band is augmented by guests Billy F. Gibbons, Billy Bob Thornton, Celisse, Ruthie Foster and Ivan Neville. With its release, the ambitious, simultaneously recorded two-album song cycle is complete, and Haynes is excited to be back on the road and playing it all. Later in the summer, the group will appear with Willie Nelson on some of the Americana legend’s Outlaw Music Festival dates, and tour with Dark Side of the Mule, an expansive exploration of the music of Pink Floyd.

Describe the process of recording two very different albums at the same time.

We set up in two adjacent rooms with completely different gear. In the small room, we set up all these little vintage amps: a Supro Tweed Champ, a Gibson Vanguard, a Gibson Skylark, an Ampeg B-15 for Jorgen, a piano and organ, and Matt had this tiny little vintage Ludwig kit.

It was a small room with low ceilings, and we set up really close to each other. I sang through a monitor; we used no headphones. Basically, every instrument was bleeding into every microphone, which forced us to keep everything we played: no punching in to fix things. We were stuck with the live performances, which is exactly what you want for a blues record.

Meanwhile, we set up all our normal Gov’t Mule gear in an adjacent big room with a high ceiling. There was virtually no gear overlap between the two, except my ’59 Les Paul, which I used on a few songs of each. Otherwise, the guitars, amps, keyboards and drums were all completely different.

We would go in around noon and work on Peace... Like a River songs till about 9 p.m., take a break, have a bite to eat and go next door to the little blues room and play blues for the rest of the night. That was every day for a few weeks.

Did playing blues all night impact you when you went back in the morning, or were you bifurcating your brain – get one thing out of the way and then go focus on something totally different?

It was a way of shutting off our brains after a long day of working on these songs with more complex arrangements and a lot of moving parts, where we’re constantly rethinking about changing this or that section. At the end of the day, we’d just play blues and stop thinking, and it was the perfect remedy. I’m not sure I would recommend it under normal circumstances, but under these circumstances, it was perfect.

So you played the Les Paul some on both albums. What else did you use on Peace…Like a River?

I played my signature model Les Paul the most, as well as my blond Custom Shop 335, and played a bunch of non-reverse Firebirds, some with three P-90s and some with two Burstbuckers. 

The ’59 Les Paul is on three songs, I think, and I played the Grace Potter Flying V on “Blue Blue Wind.” I played a Tele on one song and an Epiphone 12-string on a couple of songs. I also played a D’Angelico Excel on “The River Only Flows One Way,” on the jazzy stuff.

Most of the acoustic stuff was on Danny’s 1970 Gibson Hummingbird, and I used a J-200 on one song. I also borrowed Allen Woody’s ’70s Gibson 12-string. That sounded beautiful! I used a lot of different amps – some old Marshalls and my Homestead [HS100] and Diaz [CD100], always mixed in with my little Alessandro amp that I use in recording. I always like to blend the big amps and the small amp together.

It’s great that you got a Woody instrument on there!

His daughter, Savannah, has his collection. On “Snatch It Back and Hold It,” from Heavy Load Blues, I played his three-pickup SG that’s exactly like the one I had when I was a teenager. And Jorgen borrowed an EBO and a purple Alembic, which is what he’s playing for that Chris Squire-style bass stuff on “Same As It Ever Was.” I think we borrowed three basses and three guitars and wound up using all of them. The 12-string acoustic is on “Your Only Friend” a little bit and maybe on “Under the Tent.”

Peace…Like a River opens with “Same As It Ever Was,” which is a really cool, complex composition, starting with gentle fingerpicked acoustic and then opening up into a prog feel. It feels like a statement about the album. Is that why you decided to open with it?

Sort of. I think a lot more about sequencing than most people probably do these days. I was brought up on the concept of an album having an overall personality and people listening to it in sequence. A lot of the world doesn’t listen that way anymore, but I do, and I think that a lot of Mule fans do as well. This is our 12th studio record, so obviously, there are going to be a lot of things about it that are different from previous records.

It was Jorgen’s idea to open with “Same As It Ever Was,” and I thought that was really cool. As you said, it starts really mellow and acoustic, and as soon as the bass comes in, with this Chris Squire-style thing, it takes your head off and you go, “Oh, I get it!” It’s very different from most of the stuff we’ve done in the past and I like that. There’s some Yes influence, some Zeppelin, and one reviewer mentioned Procol Harum, which I had never thought of. But I really like them!

The other song that has a similar approach is “Made My Peace,” though that’s more of a Beatles-like feel. Do you see a connection between those two songs?

Yeah, especially in the way that they’re very different from what we’ve done in the past. “Made My Peace” has the most Beatles and John Lennon influence that we’ve ever committed to in the studio. But it also has all these different moving parts and an ambitious arrangement that goes all over the place. There are several songs that have seven or eight different sections, which is kind of not the norm in most of today’s music and is something that I fell in love with years ago.

That’s why the album reminds me of Dose. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah, it does. It’s kind of an odd choice, but the first four songs on Peace...Like a River have that ambitious arrangement concept where there’s all these moving parts and a bunch of different sections. And rather than separate the ones that had the most of that, we put them all back to back to give you a sense of the personality of the record.

I’m curious about the composition of the ambitious songs. For instance, “Your Only Friend” has this great guitar riff that would often be the heart of the song, but it’s just one component. Did you write that as a more standard song and then add everything else? Or did you go into it thinking, for instance, a string section would be perfect?

“Made My Peace” and “Your Only Friend” have strings, which we’ve never used before, and in both cases I had not thought of it until we were listening back. It just made sense. But the compositions themselves were largely written as cohesive songs.

In Mule’s early days, you were dedicated to doing everything live in the studio. Do you still?

It’s still predominantly live. I think I overdubbed three solos here and there – all short. All the jamming and long solos are what I played live on the track, and the only overdubs that we do are in addition. We don’t go back and replace this or replace that. If we feel like we could add to it, we do. Even the effects are usually me stepping on a pedal, like I do onstage. It’s all just kind of in the moment.

Let’s talk about the guests on the album. Did you write the songs with these people in mind? Some of them fit it so well.

It was usually after the fact. Like, we would start working them up at rehearsal, and it would occur to me, “Oh, this would be cool with so and so.” “Shake Our Way Out” obviously has some ZZ Top influence, so getting Billy [Gibbons] to sing on it was obvious.

With “Dreaming Out Loud,” I wanted the verses to be like Sly and the Family Stone, with different people singing different lines, and then singing together in the choruses. And I thought about Ivan and Ruthie [Foster], ’cause they both sang on my solo record Man in Motion, and I love the way our voices work together.

With “The River Only Flows One Way,” I had that kind of spoken-word, beat poetry idea for the verses, and I didn’t think it should be my voice. Billy Bob [Thornton] just has one of those voices – that spooky, demented narration that draws you in – that I thought was perfect for it.

Celisse, the other guest, I’ve only discovered in the last couple of years. I watched some videos of her and was really knocked out. She only sang on “Just Across the River” – I thought it would be cool to have a female voice counter my voice to give it a gospel back-and-forth thing. I’d love to do some stuff with her playing, because she plays her ass off.

After a spring Mule tour, you’re hitting the road this summer with Dark Side of the Mule, playing Pink Floyd. What spurred that?

I love doing it, but we all felt like it had run its course and we didn’t think we would do any more of it. Then we were reminded that this is the 50th anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon. If you were ever going to do it again, now would be the time.

Dark Side of the Mule is not just us playing that album; it’s really us playing whatever Pink Floyd songs we want to do, with this crazy production and laser show and an enhanced band that includes Ron Holloway on saxophone, T Bone Anderson on guitar, keys and vocals, and Machan Taylor, Mini Carlsson and Sophia Ramos singing background.

It’s just this cool interpretation of the music. We’re not trying to do exactly what Pink Floyd did, but we also don’t want it to be too far from what people expect when they think of those iconic songs. It’s fun trying to summon up the spirit of it while being yourself.

That’s a line you’re used to navigating after all your years in the Allman Brothers Band.

Yes, there are things that you have to play precisely or a song sounds wrong, but then you do your own thing. And I’m playing a Strat, which I hardly ever do. It’s fun, and it’s the only way to honor the spirit of David Gilmour.

It’s great to see Mule with a full touring schedule after you had to cancel shows. [The band postponed its spring 2022 tour after Haynes fractured his shoulder blade, and canceled its New Year’s Eve concerts due to a medical emergency.] How are you feeling?

I’m feeling very good, thanks – and very ready to get back on the road. I’ve never had to cancel shows until recently and it was really, really frustrating. Between being sick and breaking my shoulder blade, and the whole COVID lockdown – that was a lot of not touring. I’m psyched to get back.

Gov’t Mule are on tour now. Click here for info and tickets.

The 1970s constitute classic rock’s grittiest and perhaps most prized decade. With the dawn of 2020, it also became a decade full of half-century milestones, with 1973 the current epoch du jour. In addition to herculean releases like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and the Who’s Quadrophenia, the Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters album ascended the charts, despite the band’s considerable personnel challenges.

With the group still reeling from the tragic loss of bassist Berry Oakley during the recording process – his demise was eerily reminiscent of guitarist Duane Allman’s monumental passing only one year earlier – guitarist Dickey Betts took the reins and led the band into what would be its most commercially successful era.

The band recorded the album’s tracks between October and December 1972, with the help of Chuck Leavell on piano and Oakley’s replacement, LaMar Williams, on bass, as well as session guitarists Les Dudek and Tommy Talton.

Released in August 1973 on Capricorn Records, Brothers and Sisters went on to sell more than seven million copies, making it the ABB’s all-time best-selling album. At this juncture, Betts assumed an unofficial leadership role and wrote more than half the songs on Brothers and Sisters. In doing so, the guitarist-vocalist augmented the band’s groundbreaking amalgamation of rock, blues and jazz with country music elements, most notably on songs like the Dobro-driven “Pony Boy” and the autobiographical “Ramblin’ Man.” The latter validated the shift as “Ramblin’ Man” would go on to reach number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and become a beloved southern rock anthem.

Alongside the success of “Ramblin’ Man,” which would be the last song Berry Oakley would record with the band, Brothers and Sisters included two more future staples composed by Betts. Contrary to the emerging country influence was a more Brothers-like blues-rock vibe in “Southbound” and the commemorative instrumental “Jessica.” The latter was an homage to Django Reinhardt – one of Dickey’s idols – as much as it was a loving tribute to his daughter, for whom the song is named.

Despite losing two founding members, the Allman Brothers Band prevailed with Brothers and Sisters, while Betts furthered his own legend. In this lesson, we’ll investigate some of Dickey’s signature playing approaches on the album – including some that may fall under the radar – starting with a look at “Ramblin’ Man.”

Take note: “Ramblin’ Man” was recorded in standard pitch and played as if it were in the key of G, but a tape machine function called varispeed was deliberately used in the mastering process to speed up the song a little, causing it to be heard a half step higher, in the concert key of A flat.

Sometimes all it takes is a modest call-and-response hook to sear a song’s identity into the hearts of millions, and “Ramblin’ Man” does just that. Ex. 1 is a two-bar lick inspired by Dickey’s eloquence in the track’s opening moments.

The gold here is his use of the six-note G major hexatonic scale (G, A, B, C, D, E). The major hexatonic excludes the 7th degree (F#) of the conventional seven-note (heptatonic) G major scale (G, A, B, C, D, E, F#), and it fuels much of what Dickey plays throughout his melodic and soloistic performance on this song as well as many others.

Before we inspect any more lead-playing action, it’s important to acknowledge the rock-solid rhythm playing of Dudek. On “Ramblin’ Man,” the guest sideman lays down, on a clean electric guitar, a bed of crisply articulated chords for Betts and the band to play along with throughout the arrangement, much as he does with acoustic guitar on “Jessica.”

Stationed mostly on the D-G-B string group, Dudek plays close-voiced triads with an emphasis on beats 2 and 4 – what are known as the backbeats – and peppers them with a staccato attack on the following upbeat.

Ex. 2 similarly presents a condensed version of the chords played throughout the song’s verse and chorus sections. With the exception of the root-position Em shape played on the top three strings, these voice-led triads are evenly split between pairs of 1st- and 2nd-inversion voicings: G/B and F/A, and C/G and D/A, respectively.

Betts’ soloing style is characterized not only by his copious use of the major hexatonic scale but also by his tastefully poised melodic phrasing.

Looking at Ex. 3, a reworking of what the guitarist plays at the beginning of his “Ramblin’ Man” solo, you can see two key elements on display.

First is the use of space in the form of staccato quarter notes, which serve to punctuate the eighth-note rhythms nicely.

Second is the use of legato articulations, such as string bends, hammer-ons and pull-offs, which function like “vowels” that break up and smooth out the picking while still clearly conveying the eighth-note rhythms.

Bars 3 and 4 demonstrate another signature Betts move, with the use of descending and ascending whole-step finger slides on the G string that playfully ricochet while also ping-ponging with picked notes on the B and high E strings, all while targeting the tones of the underlying G chord – G, B and D.

Dickey employs these and other techniques in endlessly fresh ways with a characteristically lyrical approach to arpeggio-based soloing that never sounds contrived.

Another hallmark of Betts’ phrasing style is his penchant for dramatic rhythmic shifting and parallel modulation.

Ex. 4 is modeled after a moment in “Jessica” where the band completes the song’s third cycle through the head melody. Here, the guitarist throttles back the vibrant momentum of the A major hexatonic (A, B, C# , D, E, F# ) two-part harmony licks that are played with a straight-eighths feel by “downshifting” to quarter-note triplets.

Following Leavell’s brilliantly melodic piano solo over Dudek’s locomotive acoustic rhythm in “Jessica,” Betts once again transforms the streaming-eighth-notes rhythmic feel, this time while also transmuting the tonality, with a climatic, syncopated ensemble riff that’s an ascending line based on the parallel A Dorian mode (A, B, C, D, E, F# , G), which informs Ex. 5.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dickey’s soloing style and sound, and you are starting to develop an overall assessment of his playing and tonal choices based on what’s been laid out so far, hold the phone. The guitarist’s improvising prowess does not solely make use of subdued overdrive tones as he expertly wields major-based melodic devices.

Consider “Southbound,” a funky uptempo Memphis soul-flavored jam song based on a I - IV - V 12-bar blues progression in the key of C, made up of all dominant 7th chords (I: C7, IV: F7, V: G7). Betts reels you in from the track’s opening lick, which is based on the C minor pentatonic scale (C, Eb, F, G, Bb), by sporting a comparatively pronounced increase in gain, with an upward tick in the mids to spice up his infamous middle-pickup setting on a humbucker-equipped Les Paul plugged into a 100-watt Marshall stack.

Ex. 6 does something similar, offering a taste of the tension created by playing the minor 3rd, Eb, over the major 3rd, E, that lives in the underlying C7 chord (C, E, G, Bb), which, in “Southbound,” the band chromatically ascends to from Bb7 (Bb7 - B7 - C7).

Dickey’s two solos in “Southbound” also highlight a few more of the guitarist’s celebrated moves, such as his use of call-and-response phrasing, with which he crafts catchy, unforgettable hooks.

Ex. 7 is inspired by a salvo in his first solo, where he digs in with a short motif over C7, again using notes from C minor pentatonic.

Based on the same scale, Ex. 8 is modeled after a dense 16th-note phrase Dickey plays over two bars of C7 a little later.

Notice the way the six-note pattern repeats, producing a rhythmically dramatic hemiola as the motif shifts forward by half a beat with each repetition.

Ex. 9 presents a reworking of what Betts plays in his second solo, where he offers some southern musical hospitality in the form of poised call-and-response coupled with repetition over F7 and C7 chords.

Finally, Ex. 10 is in the spirit of what Dickey lays down over the I chord to open his final pass through the changes.

Super-catchy licks like this not only take the audience to the peak of a musical rollercoaster ride but also cue the band to close out the song.

While Dickey Betts’ creative contributions on Brothers and Sisters are undeniable, that’s not to say the remaining blood brother was absent from the process, nor did his legendary gruff go unheard. In fact, most of the original album’s side one features Gregg Allman singing his own tunes, including the opening track “Wasted Words,” “Come and Go Blues” and the Billy Eckstine standard “Jelly Jelly.”

As for side two, it’s the Dickey Betts show. And while Gregg’s vocal growl is crucial to the soulful impact of “Southbound,” it’s Dickey’s guitar lines that steal the show as they weave in and out of Allman’s vocal performances with his unmistakable and tasteful style.

Order Brothers and Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band here.

Allman Brothers Band fans of a certain age may remember Duane Betts as a teenager taking the stage to sit in with his father, Dickey, and the ABB in the mid ’90s. But 30 years later, the younger Betts has been around the block a few times, touring with his father for more than a decade, playing with California folk-rockers Dawes for a stretch, and forming the Allman Betts Band with Devon Allman. Together, they recorded two albums and toured extensively.

But while Betts’ 2018 EP, Sketches of American Music, laid down a marker for him as a solo artist, the just-released Wild & Precious Life (Royal Potato Family) is his proper solo debut.

Recorded to two-inch analog tape at Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks’ Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville, Florida, the album features Betts’ “dream team” – guitarist Johnny Stachela, bassist Berry Duane Oakley, keyboardist John Ginty and Tedeschi Trucks Band drummer Tyler Greenwell.

Stachela and Betts continue to expand the impressive guitar team harmony they established in the Allman Betts Band, and are accompanied by guests that include Trucks and Marcus King.

“We tracked everything live and kept whichever takes had the magic,” says Betts, who co-produced the album with Stachela and Ginty. Infused with Americana swagger, the album is a major step forward for Betts in establishing himself as a solo artist infused with, but not frozen by, his family legacy. “You write and record music and just hope it lights a fire in people’s hearts,” he says.

The first thing we hear on the album is the harmonized guitars on “Evergreen.” Was that an intentional statement?

Sort of. I just liked the song. I wrote it with a more standard opening, but my writing partner, Stoll Vaughan, was adamant about putting the harmonies on the front of the song because it was a little more unique, and once we tried it, it felt great.

The song is underpinned by a strong acoustic guitar part. Did you play that?

Yes. I played all the acoustic on a post-World War II Martin D-28, which belonged to my dad and he used a lot for writing. I know he wrote “Seven Turns” on it. I would see him playing that a lot in the early ’90s. It’s just a great-sounding guitar that is very fun to play. Some of the most fun I had was playing acoustic rhythm on “Waiting on a Song” and “Evergreen.”

What were your electrics and amps? And did you use any effects? It sounds pretty clean.

My main guitar was what I play the most onstage, the number-one prototype of my dad’s Gibson goldtop, which they made in 2001. I also played my 1961 Gibson 335 and a 1930s Gibson L-00. I used my mid-’60s Fender Deluxe Reverb and late-’50s Fender Tweed Deluxe. The only effect is a Dandrive Secret Engine fuzz pedal that J.D. Simo gifted me.

Johnny played his 2000 Gibson ’62 LP/SG Custom Shop, which he calls Stormy, my 335 and a 1960s Guild S-50 Jet Star from Derek’s collection, running through a 1960s Silvertone 1448, which is also Derek’s and a mid-’60s Fender Vibrolux Reverb.

Some of the songs recall Highway Call, your dad’s 1974 solo album, particularly the first single, “Waiting on a Song.” Was that a conscious point of reference?

I was passionately interested in having pedal steel on a few songs to capture some authentic old country-rock sounds. That music has a lot of character, with good honest, meaningful songs.

“Waiting on a Song” originally had a dreamier, big rock flow, but I gave it different treatments to see what works, and it became clear it should be an up-tempo, gliding, uplifting song. Once it took that shape, we were absolutely influenced by Highway Call and not afraid of going for that authentic gangster country vibe, which is the best. Of course, it’s not just Highway Call but Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver…

There’s a lot of great stuff in that vein right now. Do you relate to contemporary country?

For sure, the Americana side of things. I love guys like Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers and Charley Crockett, and I would love to play with them and be more in that scene, which is really hip.

How did the Allman Betts albums and touring set you up to do this?

I had a lot of fun doing these records and playing all those shows. It just felt like it was time to take this next step. My time with Allman Betts gave me space to get better overall, and more comfortable as a singer onstage – which is a lot different than sitting on your bed singing to your dog with an acoustic guitar!

What’s the status of Allman Betts?

We’re on hiatus, doing other things and occasional shows, at least two this summer.

How did you end up recording at Derek and Susan’s studio?

We were hanging out at a friend’s wedding, where I was a guest and they were performing. I said I was going to make a solo album, and Susan said I should do my record at their place, so I took her up on it. It was just such a comfortable environment. They are such gracious hosts, and the property is really inspiring – on a river, with a lot of beautiful nature. And Bobby Tis, who engineered, is so gifted at what he does.

Derek and Marcus King both play great on “Stare at the Sun” and “Cold Dark World” respectively. How did that happen?

Marcus is a really talented friend, and I knew he would play amazingly on “Cold Dark World.” With Derek, it was established that he would play from the first conversation we had about me recording at their studio. That song title actually came from something he said to me: “Your dad’s a player who’s not afraid to stare directly into the sun.” It only made sense to have him on that one.

“Under the Bali Moon” is a beautiful instrumental. What’s the significance of the title, and can you describe the writing process?

Bali is a beautiful, sacred place, where my wife and I spend time whenever money and our schedules allow. I had an instrumental idea with a lot of parts, and when we got into the studio I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out or if it was right yet. Tyler thought that the coolest part of the song came and went too fast, so he added the beat and made that part more of an emphasis. Then we incorporated all the parts that we had already written and it just came together as you hear it. It’s much more focused and has a fresher sound. He could hear the good parts and grasp what was missing.

“Colors Fade” has a very Dead feel, although the harmony playing echoes western swing and the Allman Brothers. Was that an intentional homage?

It wasn’t conscious, but as we worked up the song, it was apparent that it had a Dead vibe, and we embraced it.

You just played some shows with Phil Lesh. How was that experience?

Phil Lesh is a legend, and it’s an honor to play that music with him and the astounding cast of characters he puts together. It’s a comfortable, friendly vibe, which is good, because it’s also nerve racking – you don’t get the setlist until about 24 hours before the show, and it’s a lot to process. I would be all in to learn the stuff inside out, but there’s a lot of it and it’s not simplistic music.

Duane Betts is currently on tour. Click here for info and tickets.

When the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it inspired a generation of Boomers to pick up the guitar. But it was a much earlier TV broadcast that helped turn Bill Frisell on to the instrument, when he was a boy growing up in Denver.

Credit Jimmie Dodd, host of The Mickey Mouse Club, with planting the six-string seed in Frisell’s young brain. Dodd was Head Mousketeer during the televised show’s initial 1955 to 1959 run, when it was shown five days a week on ABC stations across the country. He wasn’t just an actor; Dodd also wrote the program’s theme song and premiered his Mousegetar on the November 11, 1955 show, which aired just a few months before Frisell’s fifth birthday.

Dodds’ adeptness on the instrument was immediately evident in the crisp, Django-esque filigrees he played between strummed chords on the tune “I’m a Guitar.”

It may have been that very song that first captured the imagination of young Billy Frisell. “Right there is what got me wanting to play the guitar,” Frisell tells Guitar Player. “I think I was about four. Wow!” 

Frisell’s guitar journey followed a path that began in earnest at age 13, when he took lessons with Bob Marcus at the Denver Folklore Center. In high school, he got hooked on Wes Montgomery and as a senior began studying guitar with Dale Bruning, who recorded a series of jazz standards with Frisell decades later on their 2000 duo album, Reunion.

At Colorado State, now the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, Frisell studied for one semester with jazz guitar great Johnny Smith, whose clean articulation and impeccable picking technique on 1956’s Moonlight in Vermont, with sax great Stan Getz, had also influenced young Pat Martino.

Smith’s 1962 solo guitar album, The Man with the Blue Guitar, recorded at his Johnny Smith Guitar Center in Colorado Springs, may have served as a template for Frisell’s own 2018 solo guitar debut, Music IS.

To date, Frisell has made more than 40 albums as a leader, starting with 1982’s In Line for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. Prior to that, he had served as a kind of house guitarist for the imprint, appearing on albums by German bassist Eberhard Weber (1979’s Fluid Rustle), American drummer Paul Motian (1981’s Psalm), Norwegian bassist Arild Anderson (1982’s A Molde Concert) and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek (1982’s Paths, Prints).

He has since racked up appearances as a sideman on more than 300 recordings that cover a remarkable range of artists and styles. He’s cut pop and rock sessions for the likes of Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Marianne Faithfull, Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Jackson, Loudon Wainwright III, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

He’s accompanied jazz legends like pianists McCoy Tyner and Paul Bley; bass players Ron Carter and Gary Peacock; trumpeter Chet Baker; drummers Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Andrew Cyrille; and saxophonists Charles Lloyd and Lee Konitz.

Some of Frisell’s most potent and revered recordings came as a member of the bass-less trio featuring saxophonist Joe Lovano and led by the late jazz drummer-composer Paul Motian, with whom he made 20 albums during their more than 30 years performing together.

Frisell was also a pioneer of the current craze for looping. He pioneered looping-delay-backward effects in the ’80s, then in the ’90s had some edgy encounters with distortion pedals during his time in the services of John Zorn’s cacophonous avant-noisecore improv band, Naked City.

He’s famously known for using the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay early in his career before switching in 1999 to the Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, the looping pedal that has remained in his arsenal ever since.

Frisell has cut back on effects considerably in recent years, allowing his innate musicianship and melodic gifts to shine through with stunning clarity and intention. As ever, what he plays is surprising, rendered with a tasteful, painterly approach.

GP talked to Frisell about his latest Blue Note release, 2022’s Four, with pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist-clarinetist Greg Tardy and drummer Johnathan Blake. He also shed light on his philosophy of the instrument, his approach in a band setting and his current arsenal of guitars, which includes a blue Telecaster that belonged to his late friend and colleague Robert Quine, who made his mark with proto-punkers Richard Hell & the Voidoids (their 1977 album, Blank Generation, is a definitive anthem for that era) and during the early ’80s with Lou Reed (circa Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts and Live in Italy).

In Philip Watson’s recent biography on you, Beautiful Dreamer, he brings up your meeting with Robert Quine in the early ’80s at music journalist Chip Stern’s apartment on the Upper West Side. So essentially, we have Chip to thank for bringing you and Quine together, which led to your early experiments with the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay pedal. And the rest is history.

Yeah, Chip was right there when Quine brought it to a jam we had. And as soon as I saw it working, it was sort of this instantaneous thing. I just knew what to do with it. It was like it was made for me or something. And Quine was sort of amazed when I started playing it. His mouth was hanging open just watching me play. I swear, it was like... Somehow it was just all laid out. It just fit with the way my brain was working.

You’ve done so much over time with looping and backward guitar. But on the new album, Four, you only dial up looping on one tune, “Dog on a Roof.”

Well, I thought I was going to make it through the whole record without using that thing. I’ve been using it less and less lately.

Your 2019 album Valentine had some backward effects on it.

Yeah, a little bit. But the last few months of being out there playing, I haven’t used any effects at all. Reverb is about the only effect that I’m using these days.

What pedal do you currently use for looping?

It’s a Line 6 DL4 pedal. I had the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay for quite a while before that bit the dust. Then I had a DigiTech 8 Second Delay, which was also another thing that Quine introduced me to. He always was the first guy to get that new stuff. Then I got the Line 6, and that’s pretty much been it for me for 20 or more years.

But really, I’m sort of getting pretty burned out on effects. The last few months I haven’t been using anything at all. I did a solo gig a couple of months ago, and that’s the kind of situation where I always would rely on it so much. But I was proud of myself: I did the whole gig without using any pedals or anything, just playing by myself. That was sort of the true test, I guess.

It affected the way I hear structures in the music, so you carry that over into how you play without them. So if you take the box away, the effect is still in your imagination. Now it’s almost like I’m trying to get at some of that stuff that I would have done with the delay, but I’m just doing it with my hands.

You’re emulating the effect to the point where it becomes part of your vocabulary.

Yeah, which is kind of great. It’s like you learn something from the machine. It will teach you something that you figure out how to do yourself.

I went back and listened to your first album from 1982, In Line, and that is a startlingly singular statement at that moment. On the title track, for instance, there’s layers of guitars, lots of loops, no discernible time. It’s like a different language for the instrument back then, and it sounds as amazing and refreshing today as it did 40 years ago.

Wow. I haven’t listened to that in so long.

And that debut album introduced a tune that you would continue to play over your career, “Throughout.”

Oh, yeah. I feel like that was sort of the first song that I ever wrote that was like an actual bit of inspiration. It just came out in a couple seconds. I don’t know how that happened and I keep trying to get back to that. Something like that happens and you think, Man, it’s so easy to write a song. But then it’s like, Okay, try to write another one.

On the new album, you reprise your compositions “Good Dog, Happy Man,” “Monroe” and “Lookout for Hope.” What is your attitude about approaching your own tunes that you had previously recorded before?

As I get older, I notice that happening more. For example, I first tried to play “The Days of Wine and Roses” maybe 50 years ago, and as the years go by you keep discovering more and more about the tune. It keeps revealing more and more stuff. So I was aware of that happening with standard tunes.

But what’s weird about getting older, it starts happening with my own tunes. So if I come back to one of my own tunes that I haven’t played in a while, I’ll see it in a completely different way or I’ll notice things that are in it that I didn’t even know were there before. In this case of playing some of my old tunes on Four, it’s really thrilling for me to hear someone else interpret them.

I don’t know if these guys ever even heard those tunes before. I know Greg Tardy played “Monroe” before, but to hear what the other guys’ take on it would be hearing it for the first time, it just brings a whole new life to the song.

With anything I write, I don’t have any hard and fast idea of what it’s supposed to be. I just want it to be a way to get us into playing some music together, and I want to be surprised, and even startled sometimes. So it’s just nice to see what these guys have to say about it.

I’ve noticed that whether it’s you playing a standard or reinterpreting a tune of your own, you do this thing where you’ll leave out fragments of the melody or parts of a chord. Rather than a Joe Pass approach, where you’re putting all of the information in the tune – the basslines, the full chords, the melody – you’re picking and choosing a triad to suggest a chord or part of a line to imply a harmonic shape. It’s kind of a Monkian approach. Jim Hall did that too. Where does that come from for you?

Probably in everything I do there’s going to be some sort of Jim Hall influence in there. But also Monk. I think about Monk every day. He’s like the master of how you can stick with a melody and find infinite variety in that without leaving it, really. And that idea of leaving space: You don’t have to say everything. If the melody is really internalized in you, you begin to hear it the way Monk plays it, where you might just play a piece of the melody and internalize the rest. And it never goes away, but it becomes this springboard for all this other stuff to happen.

The other thing about leaving space in a song is that you want to hear what someone else has to say about it. You know, you can’t just keep pumping it out yourself. You have to leave room for other people to get a word in too. Like with this new album, it’s really more about four people just having a conversation. It’s not like there’s a real soloist anywhere. It’s more about just four people talking.

Four may be one of your least guitaristic albums, in a sense. You don’t even play on “Always,” which is a solo piano piece. And the tune “Claude Utley” is almost a drum showcase for Johnathan Blake. So the album is very conversational, and in some cases you leave the conversation entirely.

Yeah, and that’s the way it would be if you’re sitting around with some people and having a conversation. You know, you’re not talking all the time. You sit there and you check out what somebody else has to say. And then maybe you get your own thing in there at some point.

The dialoguing that you do with Greg Tardy on the Americana piece, “The Pioneers,” reminds me of the intimate duo album you did with him, More Than Enough. Maybe that one got overlooked when it came out in 2019 on the vinyl-only label, Newvelle Records, but it was a fantastic album.

Yeah, that was so great. And it is a little hard to find. Actually, the deal with Newvelle is, the masters revert back to the artist after a few years, so Greg was talking about putting it out as a CD in the near future. So probably more people might get to hear it, eventually.

It has some beautiful examples of you two playing on jazz standards, like Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” and Thelonious Monk’s “Ask Me Now,” as well as two of your own tunes, “Monica Jane” and “Worried Woman,” the latter which you also recorded on Four.

Yeah, Greg’s been such a great musical partner. I love playing with him. He played on that History, Mystery album that I made a while back [2008]. And we’ve done a lot of gigging together over the years. He’s amazing.

Your very tender “Waltz for Hal Willner” on Four is for the late producer, who you first worked with in 1981 on his Nino Rota tribute record, Amarcord Nino Rota. He subsequently produced several albums that you played on, including Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather, the Disney tribute album Stay Awake, Allen Ginsberg’s The Lion for Real, David Sanborn’s Another Hand, the Charles Mingus tribute album Weird Nightmare, Laurie Anderson’s Life on a String and Lucinda Williams’ West, not to mention your own albums that he produced, Unspeakable and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.

Yeah, Hal passed so quickly from COVID during the pandemic, within the first month or so. Such a shock there. This piece “Waltz for Hal Willner” is actually an older thing that was part of this Allen Ginsberg tribute project that I did with Hal called Kaddish [which had its world premiere in 2012 at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory and was later performed at UCLA in 2013]. It was an almost nursery rhyme kind of song that appeared in this piece we had done for Ginsberg, and somehow that melody kept coming back to me. And I kept thinking about Hal with that one.

Kaddish was the first time where he specifically said, “I don’t want you to play guitar on it, I just want you to just write the music.” And that was Hal’s way of acknowledging that I could write music. It seemed like everything I did with him would present me with some opportunity, and it was like something that I didn’t even realize that I could do myself.

But Hal would just push me through the door, and I’d have to deal with it. It was always like that with Hal. He knew more of what I was capable of than I did. You know, he trusted me like crazy, from the very first meeting with him in 1980, when no one knew who I was and he asked me to play on that Nino Rota record he produced. He didn’t know me; he just had a feeling about me.

Another song on your new album, “Lookout for Hope,” was the title of your 1987 album. You also recorded it with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron on 1991’s LIVE. Then you did it again with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner on 1998’s Gone, Just Like a Train. It seems like a work in progress.

Yeah, originally the actual form of it was kind of complex. There was something in the form that was kind of odd and sort of awkward, so we didn’t really play it live very much back then. When I did that album with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner, I completely dispensed with the whole counter line that was going underneath it. So I super simplified it and just opened it wide open, and that just made it easier to just play.

But then later on, I felt like I missed some of what I had originally written. So finally now, 35 years since I wrote that tune, I feel like I finally got it straight the way I wanted. It sort of solidified into this form that we’re playing on this new record. So “Lookout for Hope” was more of this struggle over all this time before I finally felt like I got it right.

It’s like “The Days of Wine and Roses.” You’ve probably played that a hundred different ways on gigs over time.

I hope so. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

You said in an interview with John Schaefer from the 2022 New York Guitar Festival, “Every note I play is like a question.” That’s a really interesting way to think about it. So in essence, you’re doing call-and-response with yourself.

Yeah, I really believe that: Every note is a question. It’s like on a micro scale and on a macro scale. If you take your instrument and just hit one note on one string, it’s like, “Okay, what are you going to do next?” But it will lead you to something else somehow.

And it’s the same thing even with a song: You learn one song and it’ll lead to something else. Like when we were just talking about “The Days of Wine and Roses,” I immediately started thinking about Henry Mancini’s other great tune, “Moon River.” It’s like they keep talking to each other somehow.

You play a phrase or play a little bit of a melody, and it’s like a conversation. Even with yourself, it’s a conversation. You play those first couple of notes on “The Days of Wine and Roses”… that’s a question. And then you answer that question, and it starts snowballing from there.

So the question could be, “The days?” And the answer could either be, “Of wine and roses,” or just, “roses.”

Yeah! Or just a blank response, like, “I don’t know.” Or think of some other completely unrelated response.

That’s what Monk did. He left out a lot of notes playing “Sweet Lorraine” or “Sweet and Lovely” or “Dinah.” When he was playing any standard, especially solo, he really was having a call-and-response with himself.

Definitely. With him, I started noticing how leaving out notes of a chord also is like a huge thing. That happened with Monk. I’m always learning from him. It’s like he’s constantly giving you a lesson or something.

A few years ago, I was playing his tune “Well You Needn’t” and I kept finding all these little details in it that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d find new things. Like I discovered that I was messing up one chord on the bridge. I was playing a Db7th chord, because that’s what everybody plays and all my schooling tells me that. And I thought, Okay, I think I’m finished now; I got everything totally together.

I finally learned this song. But then I found this Blindfold Test with Monk from Downbeat where they played him other people playing his songs. And so that chord in question – I think it was Phineas Newborn playing the song, and Monk goes, “No, no, you can’t play it that way. That chord shouldn’t have a seventh in it.”

So I was thinking it’s C, E, G, Bb, D, but he says it’s gotta be C, E, G, D. And when you leave out that one note, it sounds totally different. And that’s the opposite of what they teach you in Berklee, where it’s this thing about stacking everything up from the bottom to the top, like a pile of books or something. You just keep stacking the notes on top of each other. But if you start taking away some of the notes in the middle, all these other amazing things start happening.

Is it possible to teach a Bill Frisell methodology? Maybe the first lesson is: Leave out notes in the middle of a chord.

Yeah, with a lot of guitar books, it’s about, “How can you make this G major chord something or other sharp this, flat that, and make it into this gigantic six-note chord?” I mean, there’s so much information there. Again, I go back to Jim Hall. He played that way, where you try to pick out a couple notes within that whole rainbow of possibilities, and then it starts to set up a whole other rainbow, just with one or two notes.

Or take Monk: He’s just a master of the idea of you play the root of the chord and one or two other notes that can say so much. And that’s what makes Monk sort of almost possible on the guitar. It’s not like he’s playing all 10-fingered chords on the piano all the time, which kind of wipes out what you can do on the guitar. Instead, he makes it more accessible to where you can actually play what he played.

He played a low A, then he played a C# and a D#, and I can actually do that on the guitar. Part of that comes from just my limitations technically. If I could, maybe I would stick all the Joe Pass stuff in there too. But I can’t really do that, so I just try to make little stabs at it.

We all have to deal with our limitations. For me, I can’t actually physically play everything that I wish I could, so I’m going to just imply it or try to take a stab at something that hits close to home.

I guess the comparison would be Oscar Peterson, where he’s just blazing on the piano on every tune, filling in so much information, and Monk, where he’s leaving so much out that it’s hip. Two entirely different aesthetics on the same instrument, like you and Joe Pass.

I mean, I wish I could do that Joe Pass stuff. I remember one time I heard John McLaughlin in the mid ’70s. Now, I love John McLaughlin. He’s just a huge hero for me, right? But I went and heard him with Shakti, and I almost quit playing. I was like, I give up. It’s too much. I can’t. There’s no way I could ever do this. It was a terrible moment for me.

Then after a while, I was like, Well, fuck it! Whatever it is that I can do, I’ll just try to do it anyway. So I sort of gave up trying to play like John McLaughlin in that moment and I said, Okay, I’m going to just try to do the best I can do with whatever little bit I’ve got. And it sort of got me back playing again.

There’s quite a bit of room there between Jimmie Dodd and John McLaughlin.

[laughs] Yeah! And there are so many ways to express yourself. I mean, Robert Johnson couldn’t play like Segovia. And they’re both about as heavy music as you could possibly imagine.

That’s what’s so incredible about the guitar. When you think about it, Segovia, Robert Johnson, John McLaughlin, Jim Hall, Sonny Sharrock, Johnny Smith, Johnny Winter, Derek Bailey, Wes Montgomery and Jimi Hendrix are all playing the same instrument, tuned the same way. And it’s like, “What?!”

That Quine guitar that you recently played on tour, the blue Telecaster: Did you ever record with it?

The only time I recorded with it was on that McCoy Tyner record [2008’s Guitars]. On that record it was just a straight, normal Telecaster. But since then, I put a humbucking pickup in it. I don’t know if that’s sacrilegious, but I think Quine would be okay with it.

How many different instruments did you play on the new album?

Just two. Mainly, I played my Jay Black Telecaster. I also played a 1966 Telecaster on “Monroe,” but all the other stuff is done with that Jay Black Tele. I got it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it has these Jeff Callahan humbucker pickups in it, so it’s quiet. But they sound more like P-90s. It’s really a good guitar.

You saw Jimi Hendrix in concert, didn’t you?

Yeah! I saw him twice. The first time was in a gymnasium kind of room at a college near where I grew up. The audio of that gig [on February 14, 1968 at Regis College Fieldhouse in Denver] is actually available on YouTube.

It wasn’t the tour he did with the Monkees; it must’ve been his second tour in the States. Soft Machine was opening for him. Are You Experienced had just come out, and I didn’t know what was going on at this concert. It was just so shocking. I don’t even know if they had much of a PA; you’re just hearing the amps coming off the stage, basically. And the whole combination of the way he sang with the guitar and the massiveness of the sound... It was just too much to comprehend, for sure.

Then I saw him again the following year at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver [on September 1, 1968]. I think it might have been the last gig that he did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, and I remember there was something going on, like he was upset about something during the concert.

By that time, my parents had moved to New Jersey and I was going to school in Greeley. I came to visit them during the Christmas break and ended up going to the Fillmore East to see Blood, Sweat & Tears [on December 28, 1969]. And the amazing thing was, some unknown band from Georgia was opening that night for Blood, Sweat & Tears called the Allman Brothers Band.

This was before they had recorded anything. They came out and were like, “Oh, hi, we’re kind of nervous being in New York for the first time.” It was their Fillmore East debut and they just fuckin’ kicked ass!

This was just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys played the New Year’s Eve concert, which became the famous live album from the Fillmore East. I remember noticing on the Fillmore marquee, it said: “Jimi Hendrix, Dec. 31,” and I’m thinking, Oh, I already saw Jimi Hendrix. I don’t need this. Man, I wish I had gone to that!

You once told me of another eye-opening guitar encounter: seeing Larry Coryell for the first time at Red Rocks.

Yeah, that was another amazing experience. He was playing a Super 400 with a DeArmond pickup, and he was getting it to feedback and everything. At one point during his solo, he walked back to his amp and just sort of rolled the volume knob on the amp with his forearm. It was so loud and wild!

Hearing Coryell and having heard Jimi Hendrix just a few months before that too… Talk about having your brain explode!

Order Four by Bill Frisell here.

Back in the late ‘60s, our latest cover star – Bill Frisell – had the enviable experience of witnessing Jimi Hendrix in his prime.

In this interview extract from our most recent issue, Frisell recollects being overwhelmed by the high priest of psychedelic rock when attending a live show at a sports hall in Denver in 1968.

Having watched Hendrix perform for a second time at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, he later passed up the opportunity to catch the guitarist’s Band of Gypsys New Year’s performances at the Fillmore East – a regret mitigated only by seeing the Allman Brothers Band’s debut at the legendary venue.

“I saw [Jimi Hendrix] twice. The first time was in a gymnasium kind of room at a college near where I grew up. The audio of that gig [on February 14, 1968 at Regis College Fieldhouse in Denver] is actually available on YouTube.

“It wasn’t the tour he did with the Monkees; it must’ve been his second tour in the States. Soft Machine was opening for him. Are You Experienced had just come out, and I didn’t know what was going on at this concert.

“It was just so shocking. I don’t even know if they had much of a PA; you’re just hearing the amps coming off the stage, basically. And the whole combination of the way he sang with the guitar and the massiveness of the sound... It was just too much to comprehend, for sure.

“Then I saw him again at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver [on September 1, 1968]. I think it might have been the last gig that he did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, and I remember there was something going on, like he was upset about something during the concert.

“By that time, my parents had moved to New Jersey and I was going to school in Greeley. I came to visit them during the Christmas break and ended up going to the Fillmore East to see Blood, Sweat & Tears [on December 28, 1969].

“And the amazing thing was, some unknown band from Georgia was opening that night for Blood, Sweat & Tears called the Allman Brothers Band. This was before they had recorded anything. They came out and were like, ‘Oh, hi, we’re kind of nervous being in New York for the first time.’

“It was their Fillmore East debut and they just fuckin’ kicked ass! This was just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys played the New Year’s Eve concert, which became the famous live album from the Fillmore East.

“I remember noticing on the Fillmore marquee, it said: “Jimi Hendrix, Dec. 31,” and I’m thinking, Oh, I already saw Jimi Hendrix. I don’t need this.

“Man, I wish I had gone to that!”

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul is a deep dive into the time before and after 1973’s Brothers and Sisters.

It was not only the band’s best-selling album, at over seven million copies sold, but it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Brothers and Sisters the book delves into the making of the album, while also presenting a broader cultural history of the era, based on first-person interviews, historical documents and deep research and a trove of never-before-heard interviews conducted by the band’s “Tour Mystic,” Kirk West.

The five-year period between Duane Allman’s 1971 death and the Allman Brothers Band’s 1976 breakup was a remarkable run for the group that helped define the era, rock history and American culture and politics.

They played a major role in electing President Jimmy Carter; were intimately linked with the Grateful Dead; and inspired the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the entire Southern Rock genre.

Gregg Allman’s marriage to the iconic star Cher also put the couple at the vanguard of a newly emerging celebrity media culture.

A wide range of fascinating, crucial characters pass through the pages of Brothers and Sisters. Not only Jimmy Carter and Cher, but Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, actress Susan Sarandon and Native American activists.

The book includes several extensive chapters on the Jam at Watkins Glen, the concert featuring the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band that drew over 600,000 people to a small town in upstate New York and will celebrate its 50th anniversary the week of the book’s July 2023 release.

Brothers and Sisters includes the deepest reporting and writing yet about the bond between the Allmans and the Dead and just what drove them apart.

There are also chapters about the making of Gregg Allman’s Laid Back and Dickey Betts’ Highway Call, solo debuts that have been largely overlooked.

The book also contains the complete inside story behind Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which was largely based on his experiences touring with the Allman Brothers Band for a 1973 Rolling Stone cover story.

Brothers and Sisters is enlivened by content from Kirk West’s never-heard interviews.

“Kirk was researching a book while the band was broken up in 1986 and 1987 and he interviewed all the surviving members extensively: Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, as well as many other friends and associates,” says Paul.

“The subjects were talking to someone they deeply trusted, the band was twice broken up with no plans to reunite and everyone was bracingly honest and deeply reflective and insightful.

“The interviews were an absolute gold mine, most of which not even Kirk had ever listened to. I am thrilled to get them out to fans of the band. I can’t wait to share this book and start talking about it!”

Pre-order Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul (St. Martin’s Press; July 25, 2023) here.

Scott Sharrard has no shortage of talents. The acclaimed guitarist, singer, songwriter and bandleader likewise has no dearth of providence. He was born on the very day his future lodestar, blues virtuoso Freddie King, died. Sharrard’s father, himself a guitarist, guided his son, exposing him to the Allman Brothers Band, the Band and Little Feat. Sharrard would describe these experiences as “Big Bang moments."

In the years ahead, he built generational bridges to his triumvirate of top groups, and they beckoned to him. After studying music in Milwaukee and developing his chops, Sharrard formed a band with Gregg Allman’s saxophonist Jay Collins, resulting in his becoming lead guitarist from 2008 to 2017 with the Gregg Allman Band.

Thus, the first plank was set. Sharrard formed the second plank by establishing the CKS Band with keyboardist Bruce Katz of Allman’s band and drummer Randy Ciarlante of the Band. He had the honor of playing at Levon Helm’s farewell concert, and Helm’s daughter Amy has regularly sung with Sharrard, especially his Brickyard Band.

He has now laid the third plank by joining Little Feat while forging a bridge to his Midwest roots with his new album Rustbelt, an Immediate Family Records release. 

Sharrard spoke with Guitar Player to trace out his journey and discuss the road up ahead.

What prompted your passion for Little Feat?

It was my dad playing their songs at home. Their album Waiting for Columbus grabbed me when I was eight. In 1988, I saw them during their Let It Roll tour and on Saturday Night Live. 

I admired their flawless blend of different styles of American music, their unique mix of heartfelt ballads and gonzo, Mad Magazine-type boogie stuff. They also had big Band influences, especially with how co-founder Bill Payne innovatively used synthesizers. Songwriting was crucial for them. Their lyrics hit me where it counts.

Now you’re branching out to another band in your pantheon. How did this occur?

I met Bill sitting in with the Doobie Brothers while touring with Gregg. Eventually they adopted many people from Gregg’s camp: our tour manager, sound guy and percussionist Marc Quinones. Little Feat’s singer/songwriter/bandleader Paul Barrere became ill in 2019 and couldn’t do a couple of tours. Larry Campbell, formerly musical director of the Levon Helm Band, and his wife, singer Teresa Williams, were booked to open for the band but couldn’t perform the last two gigs. Bill asked around the Doobie Brothers camp; Tom Johnston, Pat Simmons and Marc recommended me.

I did the first show the day Paul died. That was tough. I rose to the challenge and gave a worthy performance on their behalf. Afterward, they said, “You’re in the band now.” It was Paul passing me the baton from beyond.

I’ve already played six gigs with Little Feat. I haven’t wiped the smile off my face. We’re about to tour, celebrating the legacy along with a fresh lineup. We’ve been writing a lot and preparing a new album.

Is there a bridge between the Brickyard Band and Little Feat?

I assembled the Brickyard Band as a modern Little Feat, just as diverse and cohesive. Singer/songwriter Moses Patrou was my inspiration. We became friends playing with Jay Collins, who also played with Little Feat and Gregg.

I always wanted to be in a band with another singer/songwriter in it. Moses is also a percussionist, drummer and keyboard player. The Brickyard Band was five guys sounding like eight. Little Feat was my template when making [2012’s] Scott Sharrard and the Brickyard Band.

Which guitars do you use with Little Feat?

Little Feat requires its own scenario. I’m trying to complement guitarist/trumpet player Fred Tackett, who has been with the band since the ’80s. Fred has a remarkable guitar style, not only evident with Little Feat but also on records with Rickie Lee Jones, Bob Seger and Tom Waits, to name a few.

I also need the sound of Barrere and Lowell George, the band’s other co-founder. To achieve this, I got a couple of Stratocasters for slide. Formerly I played slide in standard tuning. With Little Feat, I’m playing mostly in open A, like Lowell, and a couple of songs in open G.

I got my new Heritage H137 guitar, made in the original Gibson factory in Kalamazoo. It’s like a Les Paul Junior with two pickups. I’m using that for standard tuning. I have my Custom Shop standard-tuning Gibson CS-336 circa 2002 with OX4 Pickups, the guitar that I’m mostly associated with, the one I played live with Gregg.

What are your gear preferences?

To achieve Little Feat’s slide sound, you need a unity gain compressor. Origin Effects makes a pedal called a SlideRig designed to recreate that sound. I have that on my pedalboard. I’ve started working with Orange Amplifiers. I’m overwhelmed by their AD30 amplifier, which I have with two 12s. I got my trusty 1966 Fender Vibrolux Reverb. I’m running both in parallel simultaneously. I also use a Heptode phaser, because Paul often used one in the ’70s.

Are there other Little Feat albums that stand out?

My personal favorites are Sailin’ Shoes and their live album Waiting for Columbus. There are numerous gems throughout their records. They had several writers. Bill, Paul and Lowell George are renowned, but Fred Tackett also wrote songs, namely the beautiful “Fool Yourself” and, with Lowell, “Be One Now” on Down on the Farm. Perhaps my favorite Little Feat song is “Long Distance Love,” which I recorded for a video last year.

My southern friends call Detroit “North Memphis.” There’s a long history of southern music migrating to the Midwest. My mentors were originally southern – Willie Higgins, Lee Gates and Milwaukee Slim, blues musicians who pushed me toward going deeper down the well where American music comes from.

What is Little Feat’s legacy?

They influenced Led Zeppelin and Bonnie Raitt, for starters. They wouldn’t be the way we know them without Little Feat. Little Feat massively influenced my career.

Who influenced Little Feat?

Lowell’s steeped in New Orleans’ funk influence. Bill’s rooted in that city’s piano tradition. He’d cite Little Richard, Professor Longhair and James Booker. Bill’s songwriting influences range from Dylan and the Beatles to colleagues like Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Allen Toussaint. Little Feat covered many of Allen’s songs.

I see that you feature Payne on Rustbelt. That’s yet another bridge and a perfect segue. In addition to being a paean to the region, is Rustbelt autobiographical?

All my albums are, to some extent. My family is from the Rust Belt going back generations. I was born in Ann Arbor. I spent the ’80s in Dearborn, outside Detroit, under the strain of a crushed urban environment. I then moved to Minnesota, Pennsylvania and, finally, to Wisconsin. My grandparents were union workers with lakefront vacation houses, with paid retirement. Then my parents were left out to pasture fighting the corporate world to survive. There’s another part of being in a crossroads generation.

The Midwest, however, has a different psychology that’s in my DNA. It’s socially, politically, culturally, gastronomically and artistically mixed-up, chaotic and noisy. That describes my mentality making this record. A great impetus arose while touring with my band from 2017 to 2019 through the Midwest, going over roads I traveled as a kid moving from town to town. It led me to thinking about my kids and the passage of time.

Rustbelt was a three-year work in progress because of Covid. Otherwise, it would have been done last year. We shelved it for 14 months. I entirely recorded it once and re-recorded half of it, all the while rewriting most of the lyrics and music. I’ve never recorded like that. It’s my sixth solo album, and my most personal. It’s a turning point, because for the first time I’m keenly focused on songwriting, which I had looked upon as something you only do with blind inspiration. It’s a craft, like playing a great guitar solo, something you hone and deepen.

I wrote nearly 30 songs and pared it down to nine. It’s a concept album about loss, transition and being a father, husband and musician. I realized they were story songs, touchstones reflecting upon my origins and people I’ve known.

“Gratitude” and “Anne Marie” are particularly introspective.

I wrote “Gratitude,” a secular gospel song, for my wife, Albane. We’ve been through a lot, and she’s a real inspiration. Amy Helm’s on vocals. Anne Marie, my wife’s grandmother, deeply affected my life. We visited her in the south of France. It was like stepping into a Van Gogh painting. She didn’t speak English. We communicated through food and music. Her husband was a Nazi prisoner of war. While writing one night, the song landed in my lap. Justin Schipper’s on pedal steel and Bill Payne’s on piano.

“Michigan Sunset” is the album’s epic song.

Amy and Justin also appear on “Michigan Sunset,” another composition that suddenly came to me. It’s about my namesake, Scott Smith, the lead singer in my dad’s band. Scott was a conscientious objector who was drafted in ’69. On his first tour of duty, he was put on the frontline as a medic and killed immediately.

It was a big responsibility to be named after a gifted person who was stolen. I would imagine Scott’s death when I was a kid. I’ve tried to live up to his ghost. I found my life’s role is to play consistently with my heroes. Scott Smith would be the same age as many of them, maybe would even be one of them. Vietnam was American foreign policy’s original sin. That’s why you must revisit that time.

I was unsure about this song. I played it for songwriter Gary Nicholson. He said, “It’s your song. Don’t let anybody but you sing it and play it.” That professional nod pushed me over the edge, giving me the guts to try it. “Michigan Sunset” has touchstones to my childhood, things I’d always hear from my family, like, “cold in my blood.” “Michigan Sunset” and “My Only True Friend,” which I wrote for Gregg, are most my important compositions.

Are “Too Many Losers” and “Rising Tide” metaphors for the upheavals the Rust Belt has undergone?

Not necessarily. My favorite line on the record is, “Too many losers are coming up winners.” You can guess whom that’s about. I wrote “Rising Tide” in the winter of 2017, a tumultuous year personally and for the country. For me, it’s prophetic about the unraveling we’ve experienced up through the present and expresses my belief that we’d taken a dangerous turn with a calamity lying in wait.

The song’s about the wisdom of no escape and challenging the dying of the light. Duality and contradiction are good fodder for songcraft. I’m proud of the outro trade off with Dan Littleton. I’ve never recorded such a long duel. Dan’s among my favorite guitarists. His distinct sound elevates the music. I discovered him playing with Amy. He’s outstanding on her Didn’t It Rain album.

How does the instrumental title track fit into the album’s structure?

Two versions play throughout like an actual record, front to back. It’s an old-school approach linking some of the different tunes creating an instrumental journey from the Midwest to NYC. The first version in the album order features Justin’s unique use of effects with the pedal steel. He also adds some baritone guitar.

It’s the album’s sonic palate cleanser. It ends with keyboard wizard Brian Charette’s Rhodes solo. “Rustbelt Reprise” reinterprets the initial version and continues the guitar tradeoff between Dan Littleton and me from “Rising Tide.” Dan has an unconventional approach to melody and tone in his lead playing.

Your blues vocals pack a wallop.

I caught a bit of Gregg on the way out. I was alongside him for a decade. I’ve tried to incorporate whatever I can from him. I’ve other influences such as Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and Johnny Adams but I don’t aim to sound like anyone.

Rustbelt has many impressive backing vocals, notably on “Only Human.”

The crème de la crème, Catherine Russell, is on that, with Charlie Drayton on drums. She’s almost her own gospel choir. Catherine also sings choruses on “Michigan Sunset.” Our singers are an embarrassment of riches, such as Dan Littleton’s wife, Elizabeth Mitchell. They’re associated with Amy and the team at Levon Helm Studios. The secret weapon, vocally, is Adam Minkoff, who plays the shit out of a bass. Adam and Catherine are together on “On the Run Again.”

“On the Run Again” contains vivid imagery, such as “Hope is like a candle that you try your best to hold.”

Some imagery seems literal, but it’s not. A favorite lyric is, “I left you on the beach with a diamond in your hand.” The ring isn’t on her finger; did she say yes or no? I decided to leave it ambiguous. I’ve never written songs with so many long verses, something I associate with my favorite writers Warren Zevon, Dylan, Elvis Costello and Waits, and, from an earlier time, Cole Porter. I’m happy with the lyrical arc. It’s my signature song describing a dedicated musician’s life.

“Bad New” exudes conflict and danger, especially with its abrupt ending.

That’s also a song about being a musician and being a man. It’s Jekyll and Hyde in reverse. It’s a live-show staple sometimes lasting 12 minutes. “Bad News” and “On the Run Again,” Rustbelt’s opening songs, are companions, musically and lyrically.

When we approached the conclusion, drummer Eric Kalb asked, “How do we end it?” We had often played it live, never ending the song that way. We made Rustbelt in two recording studios. One closed due to Covid, the other underwent major renovation. For a while, we couldn’t get the studio.

The rhythm section recorded “Bad News” live. I overdubbed the solo in my apartment in one take with a plug-in, without amplifiers. It’s an old Fano SP6 built by guitarist [and luthier] Dennis Fano, with a Lollar P-90 in the neck, the only pickup I use on solos.

I used an Origins Effects RevivalDrive for the overdrive and a Strymon Flint for the spring reverb. I had a Scuffham Amp plug-in set up to be like a Dumble, and I used a Tweed Deluxe. You can move around the virtual mics. My producer Charlie Martinez and I were happy with the tone.

Do your covers on Rustbelt spotlight any of your personal icons?

I chose “I Ain’t Gonna Worry” by Mississippi’s Tommy Tate to arouse interest in his incredible blues singing and songwriting. Check out his Koko Sessions. He died in 2017. I know Dr. John’s “A Losing Battle” from another mentor, guitarist/songwriter Stokes from Milwaukee. We regularly played it together. Since he died in between my albums, I dedicated it to him, recording it alone with two microphones and a laptop. It’s my finale, since it doesn’t get more Rust Belt than Stokes.

What other guitars and gear do you use?

Throughout I used my Heritage, Fano and Stratocasters, one with a Stratoblaster, with a loud bridge pickup for slide work. On one or two songs, I use a BNG guitar from Israel. They make a beautiful hollowbody guitar with P-90s.

Acoustics-wise, I use my 1964 Martin 000-18. My dad passed it down to me. I use a Farida for Nashville tuning, where you put all the thin strings from a 12-string and don’t use the thick strings, making a six-string sounds like a mandolin. I combine that with my Mule Resonator guitar on several songs.

On “Michigan Sunset” and “Anne Marie,” the main guitar characters are a Mule Resonator, a Nashville-tuned strumming guitar and a regular strumming guitar, usually my Gibson Dove. My Heritage and Farida are from Kalamazoo, Michigan and my Mule Resonator is from Saginaw, Michigan. How Rust Belt can you get?

Is Rustbelt a watershed for you?

With past recordings, I felt I was coming on fast and going to knock it out. Now I don’t care what anybody has to say or thinks about it. I did this one for me. This was a bloodletting.

Buy Rustbelt by Scott Sharrard here.

In 1971, rock and roll guitar was barely in its teens. But, remarkably, what started as R&B- and western-swing-infused three-chord rave-ups had grown to incorporate elements of folk, Chicago blues, modal jazz, Indian classical music and flamenco. The music of the 1960s – especially that of the Beatles – proved that the pop charts could deliver expressive, high-quality artistry that rivaled that produced in jazz clubs and symphonic halls. The music of the time also became the de facto voice of one of the most significant cultural upheavals in American history.

As the new decade dawned, musicians were presented with a blank canvas on which they created what can rightfully be seen as the rock era’s belle époch. Indeed, many famous artists released their defining masterpieces during this fertile 12-month period.

Guitar Player has celebrated the 50th anniversary of this magic year with features on some of the greatest albums from 1971. Now, with it just about over, let’s have one final celebration of the albums, artists and guitarists that made the year so significant.

Power (Chords) to the People

The Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy was an ambitious project that established them as major players, but it was 1971’s Who’s Next that is often considered their crowning achievement.

Ex. 1 is loosely based on the pugilistic power chords Pete Townshend delivers during epic anthems like “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The consummate rock rhythm player, Townshend didn’t merely “strum.” Rather, he attacked his strings with powerful percussive jabs, pioneering a style that would evolve into punk and metal in the hands of the next generation. When playing this example, try using a short, controlled wrist motion, striking the lowest strings with extra oompf! 

Going for Soul

A 2020 Rolling Stone poll cited Marvin Gaye’s 1971 release What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time, and though polls are subjective and art isn’t easily quantifiable, the album’s merit is unquestionable. Gaye’s emotive vocals and heartfelt lyrics are front and center on this song cycle about a Vietnam vet returning home to find his country in turmoil. However, the unsung heroes of this and many other great Motown releases are the Funk Brothers, a loose collection of studio musicians who played uncredited on dozens of hits.

Ex. 2 recalls guitarist Robert White’s pulsating chord work on the title track, a clever combination of jazz harmony and funk rhythm. To play the percussive “scratch” strums (indicated by Xs), simply loosen your fret-hand’s grip on the neck without taking your fingers off the strings. This will effectively mute the strings, so that, when strummed, they produce the hollow, pitchless “chick” sound that is a signature of funk guitar.

Sticking It to the '70s

The Rolling Stones were indisputably one of the most popular and influential musical acts of the ’60s. As the decade drew to a close, however, dark clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon. The band experienced the death of founding member Brian Jones and watched in horror as the Hells Angels security detail they hired for a 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway murdered one attendee and brutalized several others. 

They also sought to extricate themselves from management and recording contracts. Come 1971, the band returned with their own label, a new iconic tongue-and-lips logo, and arguably their finest record to date, Sticky Fingers.

Around this time, Keith Richards had fully embraced open-G tuning (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D), and Ex. 3 takes inspiration from his clever riffage and chord voicings on such Stones classics as “Brown Sugar” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” 

Meeting of the Masters

Miles Davis was a pioneer of multiple styles of jazz, including bebop, cool, hard-bop, and modal jazz, and when he incorporated electronic instruments and rock beats on 1969’s Bitches Brew, jazz-rock fusion was born. 

Two years later, former Davis guitarist John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a quintet that blended jazz harmony and improvisation, Indian classical scales and rock instrumentation into an incendiary mix. Their 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, was a hit with rock audiences and established them as the premier fusion band of their time.

Ex. 4 is modeled after “Meeting of the Spirits,” a track that begins with McLaughlin’s hauntingly exotic arpeggiated chords before exploding into an impassioned exploration around the Phrygian-dominant mode (1, b2, 3, 4, 5, 6, b7). 

Tapping Into English Moods

Without a doubt, 1971 was a landmark year for progressive rock, a style of music that drew heavily on European classical influences.

Ex. 5 is an homage to guitarist Steve Howe’s use of classical guitar techniques to enliven songs such as “Roundabout” and the solo piece “Mood for a Day” that were featured on Yes’s brilliant album Fragile.

Another significant prog release from 1971 was Genesis’s Nursery Cryme. Although not as well-known as Fragile, the record did herald the debut of Steve Hackett, a guitarist who employed fretboard tapping several years before Eddie Van Halen.

Ex. 6 recalls his approach on “Return of the Giant Hogweed,” but unlike Van Halen, Hackett would tap the strings with the edge of his pick instead of using a fingertip. 

A Case of the Blues

Although often labeled as a folk artist, Joni Mitchell drew inspiration from many sources. Throughout her storied career, the eclectic composer has melded elements of jazz, pop, blues, and electronica in with her songwriting and has collaborated with artists as varied as David Crosby, Charles Mingus and Pat Metheny. 

Mitchell often wrote and performed in a wide variety of open tunings, many of her own design, but for 1971’s Blue, her instrument of choice was often a four-string Appalachian dulcimer.

Because of variances in string thickness, it’s impossible to match the dulcimer’s tuning and timbre on a standard guitar, but for Ex. 7’s approximation of “A Case of You,” we tuned the top two strings down a whole step, to A and D, respectively, and the G string up a whole step to A, resulting in two unison A strings. This makes our tuning, low to high, E, A, D, A, A D.

If you stick to the top four strings, it evokes the droning unisons, octaves and 5ths associated with dulcimer tunings. Perhaps the larger lesson here is inspirational and not technical. Mitchell’s fearless artistic exploration and constant experimentation is a beautiful reminder to step outside of our comfort zones. 

My Back Pages

As 1971 dawned, Led Zeppelin – the supergroup that Jimmy Page had formed in the wake of the Yardbirds’ dissolution – was already in full flight, but it was their fourth album (generally referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, but officially named by the four cryptic symbols that adorned a sticker on the album’s wrapper) that would cement their legacy as the greatest hard rock band of all time.

Ex. 8 is inspired by the outro to “Black Dog” and demonstrates Page’s clever appropriation of country and blues licks to extend rock’s lead vocabulary beyond simple pentatonic scales. Centered on an A dominant-7 tonality, it makes effective use of b3, b5, and b7 color tones (the C, Eb, and G notes, respectively).

For our final example, we’ve chosen to template what is perhaps the most culturally iconic and controversial guitar lick from 1971; Page’s intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Recent lawsuits have pointed out a similarity to Spirit’s 1969 track “Taurus,” but to our ears, both songs are based on a common musical trope – an A minor chord arpeggio with a bass note that descends down in half steps. Its use in rock music predates Spirit (Google: Ace of Cups “Simplicity” 1968). And, like a 12-bar blues shuffle, it’s arguably fair game when songwriting.

What makes Page’s take on this cliché stand out is his incorporation of contrary motion between the outer voices, with ascending notes on top pitted against descending bass notes. This is a cleverly appealing compositional move, which we’ve also used for Ex. 9.

Although we’ve covered several albums with an enduring legacy, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the major releases that turned 50 this past year. David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, John Lennon’s Imagine, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On are among the many great albums making a compelling case that 1971 was in fact the guitar’s – and modern music’s – greatest year.

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd. “The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes. Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time. Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the 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.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened. It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained. This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach. They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment – offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made – not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy – the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmores East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

 “New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade – and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights – March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 – as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs. “I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go. When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine. “Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.” Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out. I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could. 

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth. Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers. Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette recalls another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately. “We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio. “We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it. This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[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, and 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 for a double album – slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album. “All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches – from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’ 

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.” 

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends. “He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that. I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte. “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him. Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old. And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

Released in 1971 on Capricorn Records, At Fillmore East captures the Allman Brothers – guitarists Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, keyboardist/singer Gregg Allman, bassist Berry Oakley, and drummers Jaimoe and Butch Trucks – in the zone and at the peak of their powers.

All one can hope for when buying a live record is to hear the self-conscious studio restraints vanish and the intangible elements of spirit and heart make their way to tape for the ages. At Fillmore East delivers in spades.

“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” exemplifies the Allman Brothers’ magic. This Dickey Betts-penned composition ebbs, flows, peaks and simmers, while the entire group melds into a musical army.

This track is a mystical journey that never leaves the high altitude of stellar. It starts seductively with the iconic Am9 - Am, Am9 - D changes, and with volume swells and cinematic unison harmonies that preface a boulder rolling down a hill. Dickey and Duane play great solos, and the band churns in support.

Other tracks, like “Statesboro Blues,” still hold up 50 years after the fact as quintessential blues-rock tracks. Duane’s Les Paul through a Marshall sounds like a flamethrower, while he exhibits a slide technique so exceptional, it’s still the high bar for guitarists to aspire to.

Absolutely no one before Duane sounded like him, and his contributions to the Allman Brothers and Derek & the Dominos’ Layla sessions – not to mention his contributions to Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann and Wilson Pickett – are part of the significant legacy this young man left us before his untimely death at 24.

While the group is informed by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Blind Willie Johnson and the like, they take the next step of redefining the blues guitar as they hear and feel it. The listener gets to hear them innovate the genre.

“Done Somebody Wrong” features a great Gregg Allman vocal, to which Duane answers by making the guitar seem like another human voice, while Dickey digs in, never to be upstaged or diminished.

Speaking of which, Mr. Betts has a style we could all learn from. He plants himself with a pentatonic idea so thoroughly, he torturously depletes its every possibility before ascending to the next chapter.

His solos are like a slow walk up a dark stairway in a movie thriller.

Dickey’s artistry blossomed on the post-Duane LP Brothers and Sisters, and his original gem “Jessica” shows him at the top of his game. Together, Duane and Dickey are the quintessential guitar duo, and they pioneered and defined the timeless marriage of harmony guitars.

It’s safe to say At Fillmore East influenced and opened the door for Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvin Bishop, Dixie Dregs and other influential southern rock groups that followed. 

The Allman Brothers’ influence was so distilled and true, most of those groups couldn’t help but retain the language and spirit of the southern rock genre the Allmans helped create.

Pick up a copy of At Fillmore East here.

Lying awake under the moonlight in rural Acadian Louisiana, Dylan LeBlanc absorbed the nightly riot of sounds rising from the nearby swamps. Hooting owls, a chorus of insects and the eerie shriek of wild cats made up the evening soundtrack outside the wooden shack where he wrote much of 2019’s Renegade, his fourth album and his first for ATO Records.

“It’s so quiet out there, but the insects and the animals are very, very loud,” he says. “I remember seeing a bobcat and hearing it scream, and just listening to the different sounds of nature.”

You can hear the mystery and tension of bayou country all over Renegade, though not in the traditional sense. This is LeBlanc’s least-Americana sounding album to date. Ethereal vocals float above drums awash in reverb. Keyboards shimmer, and guitars crackle on the verge of breaking up, then soar into scorching leads.

LeBlanc was biding his time between tours, living on a self-sustaining farm near Lafayette where he worked in exchange for a cottage to live in, when he began writing Renegade. The Shreveport, Louisiana, native often made the two-hour drive to New Orleans, soaking up life experiences that he poured into his songs. “A lot of the songs were other people’s stories,” he says. “You meet these characters who have seen things that you couldn’t even imagine.

“When I wrote ‘Bang Bang Bang,’” he says by way of illustration, “I had met a very old African-American man who in the Civil Rights era was married to a white woman and had a mixed child. And they were both shot in a riot. It caused so much hate in him. The song is about how long it took him to let that go and how hate breeds more hate and doesn’t help anything.”

LeBlanc brought his new songs and the eerie vibe of the swamp back to Nashville to cut his new album in three days, shedding his singer-songwriter skin and plugging in with his backing band, the Pollies. He and the group set up with producer Dave Cobb, put up some mics and let the licks fly.

“Dave wants it as live as possible, which was great, because I feel like we are a pretty good live band,” LeBlanc says. “And we’d been playing a lot of those songs, at least half of them, for about six, seven, eight months on the road. So when we got in there, we were pretty well oiled and ready to smash it home.”

I hear people like Tom Petty and Peter Buck in your playing. Who are your biggest guitar influences?

Lindsey Buckingham is one of my favorite guitar players. I just love the way he plays. It’s so peaceful and melodic. George Harrison’s another big one. Obviously, Mike Campbell is a big influence. Peter Buck is amazing. I love Django Reinhardt. I love Neil Young.

That’s an eclectic group. What is it about them that you gravitate to?

They don’t overplay. Guitar should be utilized for making a song really interesting. It should be enhancing a song sonically and making it more interesting. Mike Campbell, for instance, and Lindsey Buckingham, they play the hook. They come up with great hooks on their guitars, and that is really invaluable when it comes to songwriting.

That makes me think of Campbell’s opening hook on “American Girl,” which is just one jangling open chord.

Yeah, one chord. Everything about that song is a hook. The bass line’s a hook. That was Tom Petty’s best ability, musically, as far as I’m concerned. He wrote 10 different hooks in every single song.

Were you ever into more virtuosic players?

I like guys like Leo Kottke, Tommy Emmanuel – just great guitar players who do instrumental stuff. I never was into really fast players. At some certain point, guitar solos became uncool, so on my new album I tried to play as many different solos as I possibly could that were melodic and interesting.

What techniques or tricks did you pick up from those guys?

A lot of the things that I learned from them have to do with your right hand. Like how they switch back and forth from different picking patterns. I really pay attention to that more than I would pay attention to how fast they’re playing, or whatever.

I had a conversation with Chris Wood from the Wood Brothers, who, to me, is one of the best bass players of our time. He and I were talking about how important rhythm is, and how there’s rhythm in everything. There’s rhythm in the lead part. You can’t do anything without it.

We need to put it into young players’ heads that they need to study rhythm more than they need to study anything else. And your right hand is where the rhythm is – unless you’re left-handed.

There’s a lot more electric guitar on Renegade than on your previous albums. What prompted you to pick up the electric?

I started playing acoustic guitar with this band called the Pollies, and they’re just a really solid rock and roll band. But sonically, it just didn’t get that edge that I was looking for. So I started writing songs geared to this band – songs that I knew we would be able to bring alive in a heavier, broader way that was bigger and more driving.

I wanted to create a live show that got people’s energy up and hearts pumping. Make people move. I just thought, this is our moment to bring great, cool, melodic songs back in a really forceful way that makes people go, “Wow!”

On “Born Again,” there’s some interplay and harmony guitar parts that are straight out of Thin Lizzy.

We always loved that kind of what I call “guitarmony.” [Pollies guitarist] Jay Burgess and I always did that growing up. We’re from the South, and the Allman Brothers were a really big influence on us, as were Wilco and stuff like that. We listened to a lot of records where the guitarists harmonize their parts.

You get some cool atmospheric tones. What amps and pedals were you using?

I used a ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb. Jay used a ’74 Princeton. There was a Super Reverb from the ’60s that Cobb used on the electric guitar that he played. All the overdrive is an Electro-Harmonix LPB-1 Nano pedal. To me, it makes the amp sound like it’s naturally breaking up. I’ll use this other boost on my Box of Rock reverb pedal. I just leave that on, and then I hit the LPB-1 for the overdrive.

I pretty much just played a ’61 Reissue SG the entire time. I played a 1960 Gibson J-200 on all the acoustic tracks and a 1945 000-15 Martin. It was amazing.

Any other favorites in your collection?

I have a Duesenberg Starplayer TV Fullerton that I play all the time. I also have a Gibson ES-390. it’s a smaller-bodied hollowbody guitar based on the old 330. And then I have an ES-359, which is also a smaller-bodied Gibson Sunburst.

I usually carry about four electric guitars and two acoustics with me on the road, and they all have different tunings for different songs. I love them dearly.

Do they each have certain qualities that draw you to them?

Yeah. I love hollowbody guitars just because they’re so warm. I never really liked a guitar that was too bright, especially for electric guitar. I like a neck pickup that has a very thick and warm tone to fill up space when you’re playing rhythm and a bridge pickup that cuts through for when you want to play a lead or a solo. That’s why I bought my Duesenberg, because it does that really well.

Dave Cobb has become the most in-demand producer in Nashville. What did you like about working with him?

He records everything. He’s very much got that Rolling Stones mentality where he just hits “record” and you literally record everything all day. You don’t turn the tape machine off. And it was just live, man. What you hear is what you get. It’s just us playing and jamming in RCA Studio A, live as hell and just banging them out.

Buy Renegade here.

Anyone can get a good sound with a Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amps, but not many players can drop jaws with that rig like Dickey Betts and the late, great Duane Allman. 

Their full, thick tones are right in your face on this classic live cut from At Fillmore East, with Betts fretting his riffs and Allman playing his 60s Gibson SG with a glass slide made from a Coricidin cold medicine bottle. 

Betts’ tone is slightly cleaner than Allman’s – due, in part, to his choice of 100-watt Marshalls (Allman used a 50-watter) – and he wrenches snarling rock tones from his Les Paul that bark with dynamics and tension. 

Allman’s tone is smooth, luscious and almost impossibly sweet.

The roots of Duane's use of the Coricidin bottle were explained by Gregg Allman in the Muscle Shoals documentary (see clip below, from 1:07). The way Gregg tells it, he convinced Duane to go on a horseback ride. Duane fell from the horse, damaging his left elbow. He couldn't play and blamed his brother and wouldn't speak to him. One day, Gregg went round to visit with the first Taj Mahal album and a bottle of Coricidin, a cough medicine, leaving them on his doorstep.

A couple of hours later, Gregg gets a call asking him to come over: Duane had been listening to Jesse Ed Davis on the Taj Mahal album and learned to copy him, using the Coricidin bottle as a slide. 

Gregg still has the bottle.

Buy The Allman Brothers At Fillmore East

Slide guitar legend Duane Allman left behind such an amazing musical legacy that it’s hard to believe he died when he was only 24. Described by his friend Eric Clapton as “the musical brother I'd never had but wished I did,” “Skydog” slid a Coricidin glass pill bottle across the strings of a succession of Strats, Les Pauls, and a ’61 Les Paul/SG to devastating effect.

Here are five killer cuts from Duane’s brief but brilliant career as a session player and lead guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band.

“The Weight” – 'This Girl’s in Love with You,' 1969

Duane was hired as a full-time session guitarist at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1968. The studio’s owner, Rick Hall, set him to work on sessions with the likes of Percy Sledge, Otis Rush, Wilson Pickett and Clarence Carter. 

When Aretha Franklin came in to record the Band classic “The Weight,” Duane kicked the track off with some incendiary slide playing. Apparently, he was using a CBS-era Strat at the time.

“Hey Jude” – 'Hey Jude,' 1969

While Wilson Pickett recorded hits like “Mustang Sally” and “Land of 1000 Dances” at Fame Studios, he only agreed to cut “Hey Jude” after some cheeky goading from Duane. 

When Pickett commented that a Beatles tune wouldn’t fit his style, Duane responded with the immortal line, “What’s wrong, you don’t got the balls to sing it?” Wilson took the bait, natch, and recorded a version that almost eclipses the original.

“Statesboro Blues” – 'At Fillmore East,' 1971

If you want to know why so many guitarists kneel at the altar of Duane Allman, this blistering run-through of Blind Willie McTell’s 1928 classic blues will set you straight.

Duane’s slide playing on the Allman Brothers Band's live At Fillmore East double album really is as good as it gets. The heartfelt introduction by Fillmore East owner Bill Graham says it all.

“Trouble No More” – 'The Allman Brothers Band,' 1969

Although The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut album wasn’t a commercial success at the time of its release, it has subsequently become a classic. 

The band’s throbbing take on Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” was the first track in the album’s running order to feature Duane’s slide guitar. Here's an interesting fact: the album, a classic example of southern rock, was recorded at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York.

“Layla” – 'Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,' 1970

Duane’s incendiary playing on Wilson Pickett’s version of “Hey Jude” blew Eric Clapton’s mind. “I had to know who that was immediately,” Clapton said, and sure enough the two men would soon collaborate on the Layla... album. 

Ok, the latter part of the title track could have stood some editing but the guitar duel between Eric and Duane is pretty damn cool.

The Allman Brothers Band is set to release a recording of their last-ever show with leader Duane Allman, entitled The Final Note.

The set, recorded to handheld cassette by then-18-year-old journalist Sam Idas, was captured on October 17, 1971 at the Painters Mill Music Fair in Owings Mills, Maryland, and features some of the band’s most notable hits, including Statesboro Blues and Whipping Post.

Just 12 days after the show, the guitarist was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident aged only 24.

The release will include never-before-published photos from that night’s show, extensive liner notes from Allman Brothers Band archivist John Lynskey, plus a photo of the actual cassette Idas used.

“My only intention was to record the interview [with Gregg Allman],” Idas says. “This was a brand-new cassette recorder with an internal microphone, and I had one 60-minute cassette tape. I was sitting there with the recorder in my lap, and I remember thinking 'Why don't I try this out? I can record the concert!' It was a totally spontaneous decision.”

The Final Note will be available from October 16, and the setlist is as follows:

1. Statesboro Blues
2. Trouble No More
3. Don't Keep Me Wondering
4. One Way Out
5. In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed
6. Hot 'lanta
7. Whipping Post