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.
By the time we wound up in the Allman Brothers together, we had already played dozens if not over one hundred times together.”
— Warren Haynes
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.
It wasn’t one of us in the Duane role and one of us as Dickey; we had to throw all that stuff away.”
— Derek Trucks
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.
