In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the late Duane Allman as the second greatest guitarist of all time, bested only by Jimi Hendrix. Decades earlier, Hendrix's music had inspired the guitarist to go in a new direction, and it would define the rest of his tragically short-lived career.
The story comes from folk guitarist Jeff Hanna, who first discovered Allman’s talents when he and his brother Gregg were plying their trade as Allman Joys. For a while, Hanna — a cofounder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — lived with the brothers during a brief stay in Nashville, and later that year, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album was released, Allman began a journey that would take him down a new musical path.
“Duane was the first electric guitar guy I ever knew because I was an acoustic folky guy,” Hanna says in conversation with Otis Gibbs. “He played a Telecaster with a Strat neck at the time, and it had a fuzz box, I think it was a Fuzz Face, inside the guitar. He could sit in a room and play, not plugged in, and it was spellbinding. He was that good.”
However, he says the band didn't amplify his guitar playing in the right light, which is perhaps why the freedom of Hendrix's power trio arrested him as it did.
After a while of living together, he says that Duane Allman grew tired of their communal living situation and sourced his own apartment with Dirt Band drummer, Jimmy Fadden. Hanna was a frequent visitor.
“We were sitting in Duane’s apartment,” he recounts. “Are You Experienced had just come out, and we're all just going deep in marijuana. And I think we were there for, like, two days just getting stoned to listen to this record.
“After about the fourth or fifth playing of this album, Duane's got this little stinky amp and a Strat, and I'm going, ‘Well, that's not Jimi playing.’ It was Duane playing that stuff back at us, and we're all just going, ‘Damn.’”
It was a moment that exemplified just how special the guitarist’s talents were. And just like how seeing Buddy Guy’s trio play in London inspired Eric Clapton to leave the Bluesbreakers and form Cream, Are You Experienced inspired Allman to form his own trio.
“He said, ‘Guess what I'm doing? I'm going to leave. I'm going to get a trio together!’ And he's just killing it, man. That was pretty ballsy to be playing the record, first off, and then saying ‘I can do that’ [laughs]. He loved Hendrix.”
However, unlike Clapton on the other side of the Atlantic, Allman’s trio dreams never quite materialized. In 2007, Dickey Betts told Guitar World that the trio — which included future Allman Brothers Band members Berry Oakley on bass, and Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson on drums — even secured a record deal with Atlantic, with early recordings captured at Muscle Shoals.
“Their group was supposed to be a power trio, like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream,” he explains. “But Duane had to sing, and Jaimoe doesn’t play drums in that style at all.
“Berry brought back some demos of the stuff they were doing, and even though it was good, they weren’t going to be able to stand up next to Hendrix and guys like that.”
Allman instead found his calling in the much more expansive instrumentation of the Allman Brothers Band, carving his name into southern and blues rock folklore in the process.
Indeed, Betts once said he hated having to tackle Duane Allman’s slide parts, but knew he had to persevere if his band, continuing after he died in 1971, was going to honor him in the right way.
Later, his connection to Clapton became far more literal as he starred on Derek and the Dominos' only album, forming a remarkable partnership with Slowhand that embodied the blues tradition.
And elsewhere, Derek Trucks, who would become part of the Allman Brothers Band lineage years later, has named the slide player who was just as influential as Duane in making him a better slide guitar player.
