I was excited that “Kind of Bird” came back last year.

BT: It’s very ironic but Warren and Dickey wrote “Kind of Bird” and Dickey couldn’t play it. I’m serious. I mean, we got in the studio, and he didn’t have the chops to play the song that he wrote. So we worked on it and worked on it in the studio and we finally got it that one time and that’s the one that’s on the record. Then we tried to play it live after that, and he just couldn’t do it. So we just dropped it from the list and now we started playing it again. Warren started playing it with Gov’t Mule so, we decided to add it back and it’s a lot of fun.

That song is a great example of how you have revived some deeper canon cuts.

BT: I mean it goes to a lot of different places. And what’s cool about it is, even the way we recorded it, it goes to a lot of different places but when we play it live we can take it other places. It’s the cool thing about jamming, is you can go a different place every night. I mean, you know, most of these songs never sound the same way twice.

I know you plan to stream this year’s run on Moogis. What are you plans for Moogis in 2011?

BT: You can actually go to Moogis.com and see five days for free. So if you haven’t seen it go to Moogis.com, and you can log in and you can enjoy every bit of it, including every show from 2009 and every show from last year’s United Palace run and last year’s Wanee festival. They’re all there. And you can do it for five days for free. And then if you want to be part of this year’s festivities, you have to subscribe. The cost of subscription is a little more than I would like but we have no choice. Once we get more subscribers the price will come down. But in order to pay for the cost of production, we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

We have just made a deal with MSG and they are going to start promoting Moogis the first part of March. So for the first time we’re actually going to get a lot of promotion— I mean a lot. They’re getting one of our concerts from last year on Comcast video on demand, which goes to like 20 million homes and then they’re going to start promoting the hell out of Moogis on Cablevision, which goes to about 10 million homes. So for the first time we’re actually going to get some marketing. The one thing I have learned is it’s hard to sell something if people don’t know it exists. So hopefully we’ll get enough subscribers this year to where we can get the cost down and build this into what I want.

I want Moogis to be a jamband website where there is five or six clubs around the country wired with four or five cameras and multi-track audio. For a small monthly subscription fee, you’ll be able to log onto Moogis every night of the week and see a concert—a live concert from somewhere in the country. And it won’t be just the Allman Brothers, it will be every jamband out there.

What I want Moogis to become is the new music paradigm because right now it is hard for young bands. I am going to start with jambands and then do the same thing with jazz, the same thing with country and then, eventually, I’m even going to do contemporary Christian music. I mean it’s very sophisticated stuff. I’m an atheist but still, music is music. And some of this contemporary Christian music is very good. It’s extremely good. I see Moogis becoming in the future—like the Facebook of music. It’s the new place where bands can go and get a national, and even international audience. Cause right now they don’t have it. There’s no radio. There’s no place for a young band to go.

As you know, traditional radio doesn’t capture the feel of a live jamband anyway…

BT: Yeah, what we’re doing is flipping the whole model upside down. In the old days, we had to pay to make our record. Atlantic Records gave us a $100,000 advance but then we’d spend $150,000 in the studio making the fuckin’ record and then they owned it. Forever. What we’re doing is flipping it upside down. We’re paying for all the production costs and then all we’re getting from the band is the right to stream it live. You can’t download it. But we’ll stream it live and then we’ll archive it so that you can go see it, and then the bands will own the product. So what we’ll give each band is five hard drives from each camera and an audio recording. So that if they want to they can go and re-edit and remix and make their own DVD or make their own CD—which most of these young bands—they could never afford to do.

I’m hoping to leave this as my legacy when I die—a place where bands and musicians can actually go and make a living playing music. ‘Cause right now they can’t do it. I mean, there’s so many good bands out there and they’re having to sell cars during the day to feed their family you know? It’s not right. It’s not the way it ought to be. A musician should be able to make a living playing music.

In a sense, the Allman Brothers Band and the entire jamband scene was ahead of the game—touring is the only way bands make money these days.

BT: The major labels will not sign a band like this. They won’t do it. Right now, it would be hard for the Allman Brothers to get a contract with a major label. I mean if we wanted one, which we don’t. But if we did, I doubt if we could get a contract with what you would call a major label. They’re all going broke. They can’t sell records. Gregg just went to number four on Billboard with 36,000 sells. [10 years ago] that number it wouldn’t have been the top 100. Shit. 10 years ago the top album was multi-platinum. The top single was multi-platinum. And if you were in the top 10 you were at least gold, half a million copies. And now Gregg went to number 4 with 36,000 sells. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t stay there very long, but he did get to number 4.

But that is the way it is these days. And you have to live with that. You can’t sit around and moan and groan that the old paradigm’s gone. I mean, there is a new paradigm. And the new paradigm is the Internet. And I’m going to do my best to make Moogis the brand for the new paradigm. I mean, I want to create a community website where people can come and be exposed to new bands and new music and talk to all their friends about it. I mean I’m serious. We’ll have forums. We’ll have chat rooms. I’ll send camera crews out to tour to spend a few days on the road with all these jambands. If you want to know about this band you can go to part of the website and see a 5 to 10 minute video about them. Then if you really like them, then next week maybe they’re playing and you can come and watch the concert.

So that’s what I’m doing right now with the Allman Brothers at the Beacon and Wanee. We’re putting this up as proof of concept. And once we get enough people—we can show investors. If we need investors—I’m hoping we get enough subscribers that we don’t need them and then we can do it ourselves and we won’t have somebody else owning part of the company. We can be very free with it. We can, you know, cut the costs down to nothing and not have to worry about an investor screaming that they’re not making billions, you know? We don’t care about making billions. It’s about putting up something new and allowing music to grow and allowing musicians to make a living.

Finally, after the Beacon run and Wanee, do the Brothers have any plans to tour in 2011?

BT: We’re going to do some playing but I’m afraid Gregg…Gregg recorded that album of his last year and last year after all the playing we did in ‘09, we had kind of all agreed to not do too much playing last year. So Gregg had planned on releasing that solo album of his and then going on tour last summer but then he had a liver transplant so he couldn’t do it. So they had to put off releasing his album until this January and this summer he’s having to do the tour to promote his record. It’s kind of cut into how many shows we can do as the Allman Brothers. But we are doing some things, and, I can’t tell you what they are, but rather than doing a lot of shows, we’re going to do a few and they’re going to be very special.

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