Photo by Larry Hulst
The Allman Brothers Band will return to New York for its annual run of March shows this Thursday. After moving uptown to the United Palace Theatre, the Allman Brothers will return to the Beacon Theatre for the first time since 2009. In addition to the usual parade of guests and deep cuts, this year’s Beacon run will also feature a few milestones, including the group’s 200th performance at the Beacon and the 40th Anniversary of the historic shows recorded for the live album At Fillmore East. The Allman Brothers Band has also returned to the public consciousness thanks in part to Gregg Allman’s new top ten album Low Country Blues. A week before the first night of the ABB’s run, founding drummer Butch Trucks discussed the band’s return to the Beacon, as well as the ongoing plans for his Moogis website.
After a year at the United Palace Theatre, The Allman Brothers Band will back at the Beacon this March. There was a lot of bad blood between the band and the Beacon’s management after they bumped the Allman’s annual run for an ill-fated Cirque du Soleil show. Ultimately, why did you decide to return to the Beacon this year?
BT: You know, it’s hard to say. I mean there was nothing wrong with the sound at United Palace. What was wrong was just the crowd. It’s just not the same—it’s just not. I’m sure it was the same people but, you know, you can’t smoke at United Palace. Anything. If they see any kind of smoke wafting from anywhere in that place you get kicked out. And you’ve been to the Beacon enough to know you can smoke there. You have the smell of reefer all night long. The floors are all sticky with beer and everything else. And there’s no drinking at United Palace. It’s just, it’s much looser at the Beacon. And Goddamn, this year will be 22 years of history [at the Beacon]. It’s quite a tradition. It sounds great, it feels great. It’s the best place in the world to play as far as I’m concerned.
I believe the ABB’s March 25 show this year will be your 200th performance at the Beacon.
BT: The only thing I can say is that it may turn out in the long run to be a good idea that we skipped last year after that ‘09 run ‘cause it would have been hard to top the ‘09 run. We had something like 67 guests, including Clapton. We were all kinds of worried about what are we going to do in 2010 and then it turned out that we didn’t have to worry about it. And now that we’re going back this year after not being there last year, we don’t have to worry about that. It’s special just because we’re coming back. Everybody’s pumped, everybody’s excited. It’s pretty much sold out already. Then we’ll put it up on the Internet and everybody can enjoy themselves.
This year the Allman Brothers Band will celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the recording the At Fillmore East album during the Beacon run. Does the band have plans to mark that anniversary?
BT: Yeah. Now, we actually recorded two nights at the Fillmore [March 12 and 13, 1971 but the ABB is not scheduled to perform on March 13 this year so we’ll wager the band will celebrate on March 12]. I’m not going to say it, but you can guess what we’re going to play that night. And I would imagine that “Mountain Jam” will last a long time. The odd thing is that “Mountain Jam” wasn’t even on the original Fillmore but since it was part of the recording it wound up being part of that re-release we did. Tom Dowd remixed and did that archival recording of the Fillmore East and “Mountain Jam” got stuck on there. You can hear the start of “Mountain Jam” at the end of the original Fillmore. But we left it off because of time. It’s too damn long. We already had a double album. And back then you could only get so much on a LP album—I think 33 minutes a side was all you could do. We had a double album already without “Mountain Jam.” Then that wound up being two sides of Eat a Peach. But then once everything went to CDs, then time wasn’t so much a consideration, so we were able to put out a CD with all of it on there. [ At Fillmore East also features contributions from Elvin Bishop and Gregg Allman’s upcoming touring partner Steve Miller, both of whom could conceivably join the band this run].
The Allman Brothers Band’s New York City run traditionally kicks off the band’s year and includes some new original songs or covers. Do you plan to debut any new originals this year?
BT: You know, probably not. I mean the sad thing is—well, it’s sad in some ways but it’s not in other ways—is that all our songwriters are working on albums for other bands. Derek [Trucks] is working with Susan Tedeshi and putting together a new band and Warren is starting a new band—the Warren Haynes Band. Gregg just finished doing a solo record himself. These are our songwriters, and they’re tending to focus more on their own stuff than on the Allman Brothers. [Their mentality is] when we get together with the Allman Brothers, this is when we play and have fun. But their focus as far as what they’re building for the future is their own careers. There’s no doubt about it: The Allman Brothers are winding down. Another three to five years is probably all we’ll do. But there’s also no doubt about it—when we get together as the Allman Brothers, that’s the most fun that Derek, Warren, Gregg or any of them have the whole year. Every one of them will tell you that. But they’re still planning for their futures so their original stuff tends to go more in that direction.
We’ve had several new songs, but not a whole lot. What we tend to do is take a lot of the old material and just rework it. If you’ve heard “Black Hearted Woman” in the last year or two, you’ll know we took that ending and turned it into a pretty intense thing. “Rocking Horse” has also totally changed in the last couple of years. That’s what we’ve been doing more and more and more of—either pulling out an old blues tune like “Woman Across the River” or reworking some of our own songs so they sound fresh.
I had a lot of fun playing that Bob Dylan song “Blind Willie McTell.” It’s odd because when we first started it I didn’t like it and then—the more we got into it—the more I got into that groove and now it is one of my favorite songs of the night.
That song in particular fit really well into the repertoire.
BT: That’s what we’ve been doing more and more of—just pulling out songs and making them our own. “Blind Willie McTell” is a Dylan song but we got it from The Band and then we did it our way. It’s what we do. We don’t play a Muddy Waters song the way Muddy Waters played it. We “Allmanize” it. We’ve been using that word for [our approach]. We don’t do “The Weight” like The Band, we don’t do it like Aretha. We do it kind of in-between. We do it like we do it. And there’s a little bit of The Band, there’s a little bit of Aretha but it’s mostly the Allman Brothers. So in that sense there will be new material. Whether it’s brand new, newly written material or not, I don’t know. I may be surprised. We may get to rehearsal and somebody may have written two or three songs. I don’t know. I just don’t know until we get to rehearsal.
While promoting his solo album, Gregg has mentioned in a few interviews that he hopes to bring the Allman Brothers Band into the studio to work with T-Bone Burnett.
BT: Yeah exactly. But then again most of his solo album is covers. There’s only one original tune on that album. He and T-Bone Burnett pulled out a bunch of old blues tunes that people hadn’t heard before and there’s only one original song on that album.
How do you see the material on Gregg’s album in relation in the new originals and covers he’s brought to the Brothers? Obviously his solo work tends to be more soul-oriented and performance-driven.
BT: This is what Gregg likes to do. I mean Gregg’s tunes tend to be much more songs, they’re much more intimate. They don’t get so esoteric and out in left field. And with the Allman Brothers, we’ll go wherever the spirit moves. Sometimes it moves in strange places, but, we jam. We jam a lot. It’s seldom that the same song will sound the same twice. But with Gregg, that’s kind of the way he likes it. He likes to have the songs and he likes them to be consistent and that’s Gregg.
Way back in the beginning, we really had a difficult time with that. He brought “Whipping Post” to the band as a slow ballad. And, as you may have noticed, that ain’t the way it turned out [laughter]. And he almost quit the band over that. He got really pissed off about what we did to “Whipping Post” and Duane sat him down and told him to shut up. And Gregg has obviously come to appreciate what we did with “Whipping Post.” It’s definitely one of the great rock and roll closers of all time. To the point to where back in the ‘70s, it didn’t matter who was playing, somebody in the crowd at some point would scream out “Play ‘Whipping Post.’” It didn’t matter who was playing.
And Frank Zappa told us this story: He said, “You know, about six or eight times, in-between songs, somebody would scream out while we’re playing, “Play ‘Whipping Post!’” And he said, we were walking off the stage in Germany one night and somebody screamed “Play ‘Whipping Post,’” and he said, “I looked at everybody in the band and I said, next time some motherfucker yells that out we gonna play it.” And they learned it and he said that’s one of their favorite songs of all times. And they did a great job. If you’ve ever heard Zappa’s version of “Whipping Post,” it was incredible. He had Ian Underwood playing with him at the time. I forget who the singer was but he sang the hell out of it. They played it all the time, but it was because somebody screamed “Play ‘Whipping Post’” too many times and Zappa was the kind of guy that would do that. He was something special. We’ll miss him.
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]
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.
