Reaching out to the younger generation seems to be something that’s important to you. I have a friend who is a huge Allman Brothers fan, which he got from his father, and that music is something that brings them together, something that has been passed down. What does that mean to you, to have created this kind of generation-defying art that continues to reach new audiences, through the Allman Brothers’ music and now through these music schools?

Yeah, in fact that’s kind of what I have in mind with [Roots Rock Revival]. It’s growing every year. There’s a solid core of people that have become really good friends that are just gonna continue to come every year, and they’re bringing their friends with them, and we’re going out and finding new friends. Like I say, that’s why I’m doing a lot of these schools of rock and stuff like that, to go out and build that up. I think that’s the way we pass it on. What we call it is “beyond backstage,” because not only do we teach classes and give scenarios and everything else, but every night, after we have a jam with the band—with us guys that are the pros—then we have a guy sitting down front taking care of the sit-ins—and everybody gets to sit in with us. Plus, we’re living together—we’re there for four days. And we make ourselves very easily accessible to everybody. I mean, I just go out and sit in the yard and just talk to whoever happens to be there, you know? And every time I sit down for dinner, I’ll find a table of people that I don’t know, and I get to know them. It’s real nice thing. It works really well, and I think it’s a very good way to keep the tradition of what we did, and especially this kind of brotherhood that is developing. Everybody that goes to Roots Rock, they feel like they’re part of a brotherhood, which is very much what the Allman Brothers Band was about when we were putting all this music together. Very much a brotherhood—there was no bullshit at all. I mean, when you’re living in Macon, Georgia, five guys with hair down past their shoulders and a black guy walking around together, you better be real tight, because you might need some serious help at the blink of an eye. You never know what’ll pop up in front of you there. [Laughs]

I know that Oteil and the Dickinson Brothers and some others are a part of Roots Rock Revival as well. How did that all start?

Well, here again, it was something that I started. A friend of mine met this guy that owns this place in the Catskills—it’s a big, big, spread out resort. Basically what he does on the weekends is he has marriages up in the Catskills. It’s kind of odd, because he has to be prepared to do a wedding on the weekend, and then do a rock and roll camp all week. We have a gourmet chef there, and fine china and silverware and all that kind of stuff. [Laughs] I mean, the food is phenomenal. Then we get to play rock and roll and have seminars and classes all day long. And I got Oteil, and Luther and Cody Dickinson involved with me from the start, and then last year Bill Evans joined us. And what’s so really good about all these guys is not only are they all very good players, but they’re very good teachers—they know how to talk about what they’re doing. They have a really good way of communicating with the kids and explaining to them, hey, this is how it’s done. And then this last year when we brought Bill Evans into the works, then we were able to really incorporate a lot of jazz. And he’s the same way. He just loves improvisation, and he’s able to show these guys. You know, it’s jam music, but it’s not that much different [from jazz]. It’s probably what the Allman Brothers did more than anything else to come up with the original style that we did. We just brought Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and people like that into a blues-based approach to improvisation. And nobody’d ever done that before. I’m still waiting for somebody to raise the bar. I don’t know what’s going on—everybody’s seemed to have gotten terminally stupid.

I’d love to hear from you about the last run you had with the Allman Brothers Band at the Beacon Theater. How did you feel about those shows?

That last show at the Beacon was one of the most magical shows of my career. It really was. I mean, six hours and it felt like 30 minutes. I was playing with more power that night than I think I ever have in my 45 years of playing. It was just magical. And it was the fact that we were playing so goddamned well on the night that we were supposed to be splitting up that we started looking at each other and saying, “Hey, this is still going pretty damn good. Maybe we oughta revisit whether or not we want to stop doing this, you know?” It was still an awful lot of fun. So we all agreed to take the year off from the Allman Brothers, and—if we decide to do it—then we’ll come back next year, maybe at the Beacon, who knows. There’s still things to be ironed out, but we’ll see. And I’m not saying it’s happening; I’m just saying it’s possible.

I’m curious how you guys chose the setlists for that run.

Well, we kind of figured that that last week we really had to play a lot of the classics, because it’s the last time [the fans are] gonna hear them. That last night especially, we got quite a few in. We brought in some new material, but more than a normal Beacon run it was the classic stuff. After 45 years, you gotta go with what brung ya.

Speaking of that setlist, you guys kind of teased “Will the Circle be Unbroken” throughout the run, then played it as the closer of the third set for the final night. What does that song mean for the band, to have that sort of placement in the final setlist?

Back when Duane [Allman] and Berry [Oakley] were alive, if we had a theme song that would have to be it. Somewhere in every jam, at the end of every long “Whipping Post” or whatever, it’s gonna show up somewhere. So we just decided to glom onto it and play it all six of those nights in one form or another, and then the final night just do the whole song all full blown out with Gregg singing and everything else. I think we just started it out the first night with just two guitars playing it, then we just built, made it different. It’s like on the 40th anniversary, the song was “Little Martha,” so every night we started with “Little Martha” in one form or another. I mean, one night it would be all acoustic, one night it might have bass, then another night we might bring in the full band. We do things like that sometimes—it’s kind of a theme song for every night of the event.

What was behind the decision to not have guests, as opposed to regular Beacon runs?

Because this was about the final shows of this particular version—it was also about the final shows of the Allman Brothers Band, but it was in a big way about the final shows of this particular version, these seven people. So we just felt like it would be more appropriate just to do it and not let other people take up the space and just play ourselves, you know?

Thoughts of reunions aside, now that the Allman Brothers have split up, can we look forward to any archival releases in the near future?

Yeah, we still have two record companies, and we’ll continue to release archival stuff. All of that material we recorded at the Beacon all those years. Right now we’re working on that 40th anniversary run. We’re working on putting together the “best of” the 40th anniversary run. Of course, that’s gonna be more complicated—we’re gonna have to work out licenses. If Clapton would agree to let us put “Layla” on, or any song he did with us, that’s gonna take some negotiations. But that’s what we’re working on right now, and things like that will continue to come out. That [webcasting] thing that I did, Moogis, wasn’t financially successful, but we got one hell of a lot of material that belongs to the Allman Brothers that we’ll be releasing in the future. So people will be revisiting those Beacon shows for as long as they want. Plus, we still have quite a large collection of archives—you know, stuff from the old days—that we’re gonna continue to pick and choose from and release the best of. So even if we don’t play together live again, there’s still stuff going on.

Pages:« Previous Page