Did you know Zappa well?
BT: Yeah, fairly well. Yeah we did several shows with him early on. He was such an influence on us. One of the first what I would call truly great shows I ever saw was in, probably, 1967. The band I was with went to New York to audition to play one of the clubs there and Zappa was playing. It was one of the first public performances of “Absolutely Free” and it had a timpani and about 20 people onstage. They did “Suzy Creamcheese” and all this performance art, and it was just amazing.
I had no idea that a rock and roll band could get up and sound like that. My background before I got into rock and roll was classical music and that’s all I knew. [But when I saw Zappa] it was so big—it was so huge, the sound coming from that stage. It reminded me of Beethoven. Up to that point, I had been listening to the Ventures, the early Beatles and Chuck Berry, which had its place but was pretty simple. It is three chords and it’s not exactly what you call big and sophisticated. Hearing Zappa and hearing them doing “Absolutely Free” blew my mind. It just changed my whole concept of what you could do with rock and roll or with what you called rock—it ain’t rock and roll anymore, it’s something else. It’s evolved into something else. And you can label it whatever you want but it’s still music. It’s all music.
It’s the idea that you know you have these great songs and you could stretch them in the great beyond but yet they’re these compositions too…
BT: Yeah. Now, Zappa added a lot of classical stuff. What we tended to do was bring in jazz. That first year or two all we listened to was John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and Charlie Parker and Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson and people like that. But we did not listen to contemporary music. We did not listen to our peers. We made a conscious decision not to. We didn’t want to be influenced by people that were doing the same thing we were doing. So what we did was we went other places to pull in new influences so that our music would sound different. It wouldn’t be the same stuff. And mostly we went to ‘Trane and Miles. That’s where so much comes from. Listen to “Dreams.” That’s “My Favorite Things.” We almost never play it without somebody playing a lick out of “My Favorite Things.”
In ’09, we had Lenny White sit in with us and he played “Dreams” with us and he said, “Man, I don’t know this song.” He said, “What do I do?” I said, “Well, do you know ‘My Favorite Things’ by John Coltrane?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Play that.” He said, “Okay.” And it was incredible.
A slew of guests sat in with the Allman Brothers Band during its 2009 Beacon run. Some had direct connections to Duane and others were young musicians influenced by the Allman Brothers Band. Of all the guests who sat in, which collaboration was the most surprisingly successful?
BT: Oh God. Taj Mahal blew us all away. I mean, nobody expected that. He’s an old fuck. He just blew us away and then that night with Bonnie Bramlett and Bekka Bramlett and Susan Tedeschi when we did “The Weight” with the three of them. That was amazing. That was just amazing.
That was my favorite night, actually, of that run. With Bonnie up there it felt the most natural.
BT: Oh that night was incredible. As was the night we had Tommy Talton and Scott Boyer [of Cowboy]. Scott got up and did “All My Friends” and “Please Be With Me.” I just can’t listen to “Please Be With Me” without crying. That’s one of the last songs that Duane ever played on. And he thought it sucked. He came back from that session—from that Cowboy session—and he thought it was just terrible. The vibes were so bad because [Cowboy] was falling apart. It was all falling apart—they were all mad at each other. They had no idea how good the music was.
When Duane died, it didn’t sink in. There are some things you just can’t accept. In fact, there’s still part of me that doesn’t accept that. I still have dreams that I run into him. I have dreams that I’m out somewhere and there’s Duane. And I go, “Where the fuck you been?” He goes, “Oh I been hanging out, doing this, that and another.” There’s part of me that hasn’t turned loose of him. Right after he died, it just didn’t sink in. We went through the funeral and everything else. Then one day I was sitting in my house listening to that song from Cowboy, and I just started crying. And I couldn’t quit. I cried for an hour. I mean, I just could not stop. It just all came out. It hit me. He’s gone. And I just kept listening to that song over and over and over and over and it’s just so beautiful. He just played so beautiful on that song. And it was just such a beautiful song. I still can’t listen to that song without getting teary eyed. I just can’t. It will be 40 years this October when he passed away.
The band has a lot more liberty to dig into its canon during its Beacon run. Can you walk us through how your setlists are composed at this point and how much you try to balance the standards with deeper cuts and covers?
BT: It’s one of the things—when Dickey was around, we just couldn’t do that. Dickey couldn’t remember more than one set at a time. For the first few years after ’89 we went out and every night was the same set. It was every night, the same damn set, and a lot of people go to more than one show. And then finally we got him to do two different sets or three sets. And then it became a game with the people that were coming to more than one show—counting how many different sets we were doing so that they could buy tickets on nights where we’d be playing another set then the one they had already seen. Then you’d hear bitching or complaining. Dickey just couldn’t remember more than a few songs at one time. Even a song that he wrote, that he’d been playing for 35 years—unless he played it in the last few days—he couldn’t remember it. But with this band, these guys, we could get on stage tomorrow with no rehearsal and play every damn song we’ve played for the past several years and not make a mistake. We can remember the songs. So it really opens things up.
We’ve got a very, very large repertoire. Every night we’ve got 60 or 70 songs to choose from and Warren Haynes is usually the one that puts it together. Warren is a singer and a guitar player and he knows how to put the set together. He knows Gregg doesn’t like to sing more than three songs in a row so he works out the set so that Gregg’s not singing more than three at a time and then he gets a break. Plus, being a guitar player he knows what key we’re in and rearranges the set so there is a flow. If I were putting the set together, we probably have a whole night in A [laughter] since I do know theory.
So he puts together a set list and then we circulate that between everyone and then everyone comes back with “Well, I like this but I don’t like this. Let’s change this. Let’s change this.” And then by the time we get to the show we’ve got the set list and, on the way to the show, our manager calls in the set to the production managers. By the time we get there, he has everything printed up and the set list is sitting next to everybody’s spot. So that’s the way it happens. Warren is basically the guy that gets the ball rolling and then we all contribute to the final product. It’s great, especially at the Beacon.
We try very, very hard not to repeat songs. And we have enough songs in our repertoire to pretty much play 13 shows without ever repeating a song. Now, of course, there’s songs like “Statesboro Blues,” “One Way Out” and “Southbound” that we are going to repeat and jam out in different ways—they are part of the repertoire—and “Midnight Rider” and “Melissa.” These songs we tend to repeat. But the bigger ones, the more epic tunes, like “Elizabeth Reed,” we try not to play it too much. We’ll do “Elizabeth Reed” one night, “Les Brers” another night and “Jessica” another night. We’ve got a new one we started doing again “Kind of Bird” [a Warren Haynes/Dickey Betts original from the ‘90s]
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