The music of the Allman Brothers Band has always given us a bluesy something to jam to, a level of musicianship and Southern song mastery that can only be a gift from the gods. And in his final days, as his body surrendered to liver cancer, as old age and the road and the bottle took everything but his voice, Gregg Allman – the sensei of the Allman Brothers Band – gave us one final gift, ten songs on an album called Southern Blood.

SiriusXM did the ABB-lovin’ world a solid when they paid tribute to Gregg last week and presented a song-by-song listening party of the album on Deep Tracks featuring incredible insights by the record’s producer, Don Was. Gregg is in fine form on Southern Blood, his voice is strong and the song selection and production are first rate. The album is an album of covers with the exception of the first song, an original Gregg composition called “My Only True Friend” (the “friend” Gregg refers to is the road). The ten tracks showcase the versatility and style and emotional commitment that made Gregg a blues legend, and he covers songs by Bob Dylan, Willie Dixon and Jackson Brown in a wonderful performance that combines ballads with Southern rock and straight-up blues.

It’s surely worth a spin, and depending on the state of mind and the degree of intoxication and your own spiritual trip, it can be a tearful experience. Thanks for everything Gregg, this is not goodbye my friend, just a transition in the road that goes on forever.

♦

My Bluesy Brotherhood

This is an excerpt from my recent book, Lessons From The Good Books, What a Reading Addiction Taught Me About America, Music & Sports ©2016. The “Lessons” are set off in bold type.

Kiss drummer Peter Criss was good friends with John Belushi.  Belushi had a soundproof room where he would blast music by the Allman Brothers Band.

By the time I first heard the Allman Brothers Band, Duane Allman was nearly two years gone. I was 12 years old and was riding with my oldest sister in her VW bug. On a classic push-button AM, listening to 93 KHJ radio in Los Angeles, I heard “Ramblin’ Man.” The singer said he was “… born in the back seat of a Greyhound Bus.” I believed him. To say the song changed my life would be melodramatic, to say that the song and the band and the music it would lead me to discover made my life a groovier trip would be an understatement. Lynyrd Skynyrd founder Ronnie Van Zant said, “I’m the prince of Dixie, Duane Allman was the king and I’m the prince.” Duane Allman was the soul of the Allman Brothers Band, his vision provided the road map, his personality the group’s cosmic energy, his slide guitar the throbbing V8 engine. In his 24 years, he mastered the human touch in much the same way he mastered a Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Strat. Duane wrote down his goals for the year 1969: “… I will take love wherever I find it and offer it to anyone who will take it … ”  If his guitar skills were heaven sent, then so was his spirit. Lemmy Kilmister said, “Of course when you die you become more brilliant by about 58 percent.” By all accounts, Duane was a life force, he lives on not in legend but in the everlasting truth of the American blues, in the twinkle of an eye that still glimmers. At the last public concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, the Allman Brothers Band took the stage at 2:30 AM and finished at about 7 AM.  When the concert ended and they finally opened the doors, sunlight streamed in, prompting Duane Allman to say as he was dragging out his guitar: “Goddamn, it’s like leaving church.” If you listen to that performance, immortalized on the band’s third LP Live at the Fillmore East, then you have the ideal snapshot of the way Duane played, and lived. Gregg Allman’s description of Duane on a motorcycle is an apt one for his everyday existence: “On a bike Duane had two speeds: 90 and parked.” Life had no limits that the right attitude couldn’t overcome. Duane once jumped from the third-floor roof into the pool at the San Francisco Travelodge. Back in their adopted home in Macon, Georgia, Duane is buried with a silver dollar in one pocket, a throwin’ knife in another and a couple of joints in his shirt pocket. Gregg played “Melissa” on one of Duane’s guitars at his funeral. An unbearable heartbreak if not for the music that remains.

There’s a famous saying uttered around the world that goes something like: “Any day you hear the song ‘Jessica’ by the Allman Brothers is a good day.” OK, maybe that’s only said at my house, but it’s still a signature song by an unbeatable band. Author Alan Paul said it right: “The Allman Brothers Band, I believe, has no equal.” They are clearly one of the best American bands in history, and in my estimation, if not for Bob Dylan, they would rank as the best American rock act of all time just ahead of Metallica, Sinatra, the Eagles and Van Halen. Rolling Stone ranks four members of the band among the greatest guitar players of all time: Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks. And then there’s this from former ABB bass player Allen Woody: “Gregg Allman is the best blues singer that’s ever been poured into a white body.” Duane and Gregg were born in Nashville and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, but as far as the ABB was concerned, they were a band from Macon. They named the lake cabin in Macon where they played music, partied and made a loyalty pact “Idlewild South” and gave their second album the same title. What drew the band to Macon was surely the hospitality of the people, but it’s possible that there was a celestial element. Phil and Alan Walden founded Capricorn Records in Macon in 1969, essentially riding on the success of Otis Redding. Capricorn became the Southern Rock recording standard. Phil Walden had a front-row seat for just about everything that happened when rowdy young Southern musicians started to put their unique spin on the traditional blues. He said, “Ronnie Van Zant [Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer] wasn’t afraid of anybody in the world except for Dickey Betts, and nobody made Dickey nervous except Toy Caldwell [founder/lead guitarist for The Marshall Tucker Band].” It wasn’t long before this Southern phenomenon became a widespread rock music phenomenon. The first Allman Brothers gig played in Los Angeles (when they were performing as Hour Glass in the late 1960s) was at the Hullabaloo Club, where they opened for The Doors. Things would get significantly bigger. In 1973 The Band, the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead played in front of 600,000 people in Watkins Glen, New York. Regardless of the scale, no matter the level of acclaim or the wattage of stardom, the band really was a brotherhood. Having “brothers” in the name was never a Duane-and-Gregg thing, it was an all-of-us thing. Musicians, crew and family all lived together—in the same Macon house. Dickey Betts wrote “Blue Sky” for his Chippewa wife in the living room of that house, what is known as The Big House. The brotherhood made them resilient. It enabled them to anticipate and feed off of and precisely blend their instruments during epic out-of-body experiences like “Mountain Jam, ”… a massive improvisation that started with a seed called “There Is a Mountain,” a song by Donovan. Throughout the Brothers’ musical journey, when a member would fall, another would appear, seemingly cut from the same cloth, somehow channeling the mysticism and idealism of Duane Allman. When Gregg saw Derek Trucks play for the first time in 1990, Derek was not yet 10 years old. And the band never lost sight of the blues, the natural soil that holds the seeds of truth, struggle, our national identity. The Brothers’ anthem, “Statesboro Blues,” was originally written by Blind Willie McTell in 1928.

At some point, the band started taking pure psilocybin mushroom pills, and not long after, mushrooms started popping up everywhere—on album sleeves, T-shirts, the walls of public buildings. There were flying mushrooms, mushroom cars, multicolor mushrooms, mushroom planets and mushrooms in your head, man. As “lips” are to the Stones, mushrooms are to the Allman Brothers Band. There are lots of us who may have turned onto a ’shroom buzz, but you don’t have to go to any magic garden or be in an altered state to dig the Allman Brothers. John Belushi was trippin’ on it, and while I’m far from a ramblin’ man, their music and beauty will always be part of my trip.