In late October of last year, rock legends The Allman Brothers Band played their final shows together in a six-night run at New York’s Beacon Theater, topping it off with a final performance that spanned three full sets and two encores. The members of the storied Southern rock ensemble went their separate ways after that night, but most of them will meet up again—if not onstage, then backstage—at the upcoming Wanee, a music festival started by the band in 2005.
Butch Trucks, drummer and founding Allman Brothers member, will perform at the Florida festival with some Very Special Friends, as will his former bandmates Gregg Allman, Warren Haynes (with Gov’t Mule) and Jaimoe (with his Jasssz Band). Trucks recently took some time to discuss with us the origins of Wanee, his music camp Roots Rock Revival, those final Beacon shows and even the possibility of a future Allman Brothers reunion.
I wanted to start by talking a little about Wanee Festival, which is coming up in the next couple of weeks. This is your first since the last shows with the Allman Brothers Band, so how are you feeling going into this one?
Well, you know, it’s actually my baby—I came up with the idea years ago, so I’m really, really proud of the way it developed. I mean, Jesus, for my money that’s the best festival going these days. We found the right place—the climate is usually just perfect, and people have really turned out. It’ll be fun. We’ll all be up there playing. We may not be playing as the Allman Brothers, but we’ll be playing a lot of the Allman Brothers stuff. It’ll be good to see everybody, because I haven’t seen everybody in a while—and mostly you just get to play. I’m just bored stiff from not playing. I mean, playing’s an addiction, you know? You just kind of need to do it, and I haven’t done it enough. I’m very much looking forward to it.
When you came up with the idea, was it always something you wanted to build up, so that it would last after the Allman Brothers stopped playing together?
Basically what I saw coming—and this was fifteen years ago—I knew that the day was gonna come when Derek [Trucks] and Warren [Haynes]—especially Derek—would wanna be out doing their own thing and really not have a whole lot of time for the Allman Brothers. So my idea was, rather than doing long summer tours, we’d just do four three-day festivals—one in the Southeast, one in the Northeast, one in the Midwest and one in the far West. That made it as far as Dickey Betts, and Dickey thinks so much of me that if it’s my idea, then he ain’t doing it. So he said, “Okay, you guys go play, but I ain’t gonna be there.” So we had to wait until Dickey was no longer in the band before we could even start doing it. Jon Stoll, the old promoter for Fantasma down here, had been telling me about the Spirit of Suwanee Park and how perfect it would be, and when he took me up there, I went, yeah. So the first year that we were able to, we did it, and it’s been going strong ever since. Things just kept getting bigger, and I think Fantasma just wasn’t quite up to handling it, so LiveNation stepped in, and we partnered up with them. And the last few years have just been incredible. It’s just so damn much fun, you know? You can’t do anything but have fun. [Laughs]
You’re billed for Wanee as Butch Trucks and Very Special Friends. Who’s going to be playing with you in the band?
Well, Oteil [Burbridge] and Marc [Quiñones] and Bruce Katz—Bruce played keyboard with Gregg [Allman] and a lot of other people—my son Vaylor, another guitar player by the name of Dave Yoke from Atlanta, and Lamar Williams Jr. is gonna sing. So it’ll be a pretty kick ass set.
Have you guys played together as a band like this?
Oh no. Come on—we don’t really need to. Everybody knows this material inside and out. The only thing that needed any practice at all was my son and Dave Yoke to get together and work out who’s gonna play which part on those guitar harmonies. And luckily they both live in Atlanta, and they’ve been doing that for the past month or so, so they’ll have all that down. So we should sound like a fairly well-rehearsed band of professionals that actually do know what they’re doing.
It’ll be great to see you and Oteil back up on stage together again.
He’ll be there—everybody’ll be there. I mean, the big rumor that’s going around, of course, is that there’s gonna be a mini Brothers reunion. Everybody but Derek is gonna be there. And who knows? Now, come Peach Festival, it’s gonna be even more likely—there’s gonna be even more people there. I’m really looking forward to Peach Festival—I think it could be possibly the beginning of putting the band back together. We’ll see.
With Butch Trucks and Friends, are you pretty much going to focus on Allman Brothers material?
Yeah, that’s all we’re doing. We’re playing a couple of old blues tunes, but nothing that the Allman Brothers wouldn’t play. [Laughs] We’re making no qualms about it—it’s an Allman Brothers tribute band. We don’t have enough time to start a brand new band, you know? If we didn’t have the material and everything all there and ready to go, this would probably be pretty impossible, but the fact that we all know this and can get together and play a 90 minute set without any real rehearsal makes it possible. Plus, I like the music. It’s fun—it’s what’s kept me coming back the past 45 years.
So, without playing shows to occupy your time, what have you been busy with lately?
I’ve been doing several things. I’ve been going around teaching classes, that kind of thing. There’s this franchise called the School of Rock, and I’ve been going around and giving lessons and doing little concerts with those kids. And promoting this thing I have [had] for the past two years up in the Catskills, called Roots Rock Revival. And that’s what I’ve been doing—getting out with the young kids who are in rock and roll school, who are my audience—the people who I need to get to and get them to roots rock. I did one [School of Rock] down here in West Palm Beach, and then there’s another two or three of them up in New Jersey. I went up there last week and did the same thing—taught some classes, had a little concert with the kids. And it’s really fun, it really is. You know, Roots Rock Revival is where that kid Taz—Brandon [Niederauer]—that’s where he was discovered. It was the first Roots Rock Revival two years ago when he first showed up on the scene, and boy, he’s about to take over. I’m proud of him.
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.
