Earlier today we premiered
“Happily Married Man” from Skydog:
The Duane Allman Retrospective, the
seven-CD, 129-song box set which is
set for release on Friday, March 19.
Today also marks opening night of
the Allman Brothers Band’s 2013
Beacon Theatre run. In conjunction
with both of these development, we
present this article on Duane
Allman’s life and music, which
originally appeared in our April-May
2009 cover story on the ABB, which
celebrated the group’s 40th
anniversary.
Electric guitarists defined the rock
era. A handful of players with
signatures as recognizable as the
great poets of history created a
landscape that we still enjoy long
after they’re gone. There will never
be another Duane Allman, just as
there will never be another Jimi
Hendrix or Jerry Garcia, but
generations of unborn players will
continue to explore the new vistas
that these visionaries charted.
Like Hendrix, Allman’s impact is
particularly remarkable in that his
achievements were accomplished in
only a few years. Considering that
The Allman Brothers Band is
celebrating its 40th anniversary
this year, it’s amazing to think
that Duane’s defining contributions
to the band’s profile took place
over the course of just two studio
albums, part of a third and a live
recording. Nevertheless the band’s
signature, multi-show stand at New
York’s Beacon Theater in March is an
open tribute to Duane’s influence,
not just on the Allman Brothers
sound itself, but on American music
in general.
“We’re making the whole Beacon run a
tribute to Duane,” says Warren
Haynes, who took over Duane’s role
in the band 20 years ago, “and
bringing in as many people who were
connected with him as possible. His
presence is felt quite a lot in the
overall spirit of what we’re doing
these days. We’re trying to really
honor that and trying to even
second-guess what his vision would
have been and try to imagine where
it would have gone.” How does
someone who made such a brief
appearance on the public stage
manage to have such a lasting
impact?
The first time you hear him play,
Duane Allman alters your perception
of how the electric guitar is
capable of sounding. Duane’s sound
marries seemingly contradictory
elements, at once elegant and raw,
balanced perilously on the scales of
rhythmic and melodic demand. His
single-note guitar lines are
magnificently phrased constructions
played with an arresting vibrato
tone, a delicate floral interlace
with the resilience of tree bark.
His rhythm work is always perfectly
suited to the needs of the
composition, played with the
precision of blues and R&B masters
yet fierce in service of the flow
and every bit as aggressive as his
lead work. Duane’s playing lends
urgency to its context, even at
moments of reflection.
But Duane’s signature is his slide
guitar playing, a chimerical
Excalibur of a sound many would
imitate but none could wield as he
could. Duane’s slide playing sounds
like the cry of a human voice, like
the clarion call of church bells,
like birdsong on a spring morning.
Most importantly, Duane never
stopped trying to grow as a musician,
exploring a connection between
blues, rock, country and jazz that
is still being plumbed today.
His spirit guides the Allman
Brothers every night.
“It was his band and in a very real
way it still is his band,” says
Derek Trucks, the gifted young
guitarist who is celebrating his
tenth year with the ABB. “With the
guys that knew him who are still in
the band you can see Duane’s
presence and shadow moving at times.
They’re very conscious of his
original intention. It still guides
the band in a way. He was such a
powerful musical persona, such a
powerful personality. Some of the
ground rules he laid down 40 years
ago are still driving the ship.
That’s a serious presence.”
Duane was born in 1946, a year
before his brother Gregg, in
Nashville, Tennessee. The boys’
widowed mother moved the family to
Florida but Gregg and Duane visited
their grandmother back in Tennessee
during the summer. Their obsession
with music dates back to one of
those visits, a story that resonates
because it connects them to the kind
of epiphany that every music lover
experiences. Gregg and Duane went to
a concert in Nashville by Jackie
Wilson and B.B. King that inspired
them to form a band. Back in Florida,
the brothers began to play together
in various groups. Though they both
started out on guitar, Duane
advanced quickly as a player. It
didn’t take long for other musicians
to start noticing him.
“I was playing in Pensacola on the
beach with a band called The Five
Minutes,” says drummer and later
producer Johnny Sandlin. “One night
the Allmans played there. We played
inside in the bar and they played
outside on the patio, which was for
the younger kids. We went to see
them on our breaks and they just
blew us away. Duane was the best
guitar player I’d ever heard. He was
the greatest even before he started
playing slide. He’d play one of
those Yardbirds songs and it was
just amazing the way he could
manipulate the volume control on the
guitar. He could play where it
sounded like backwards guitar.” The
brothers joined up with Sandlin’s
band, eventually moving out to St.
Louis and working under different
names. “We had a pretty decent band
with The Five Minutes and when we
hooked up with Duane we felt that
nobody could stop us,” says Sandlin,
“and Gregg was such a good singer.”
In St. Louis the band built a
following and became managed by Bill
McEuen of The Nitty Gritty Dirt
Band. McEuen brought the group out
to Los Angeles, where they recorded
two albums under the name Hour Glass.
The experience was bitter. “We were
used to playing four nights a week
and we never thought about image or
anything,” says Sandlin. “When we
got out to L.A. it was like
everything was turned upside down,
it was more about your image than
your musical ability. We were signed
to Liberty and they wanted us to
make hit singles and be like Gary
Puckett and the Union Gap.” The only
positive to come out of the L.A.
experience was that Duane started to
play slide guitar. “Duane was sick
and he was taking some Coricidin and
he used the empty bottle for a slide,”
says Sandlin. “He had heard Taj
Mahal’s The Natch’l Blues, at that
point Jesse Ed Davis was playing
slide with Taj. Duane really took to
it and started learning to play it.
He started playing it on three or
four songs during our sets. He was a
little rough at first. But
‘Statesboro Blues’ was on that
record and I guess that’s the
arrangement Duane took it from. It
took him a while to get the
intonation down but by the third or
fourth gig he really had it. It made
it all the more frustrating that we
weren’t able to play live.”
The band went to Rick Hall’s Fame
Studios in Alabama and cut some
demos that they felt represented
their sound, including the very good
“B.B. King Medley,” but Liberty
rejected the tapes. “They said, ‘We
hate it, we don’t put out stuff like
this,’” Sandlin recalls. “We put our
heart and soul into it and everybody
loved it, it still sounds good to me
to this day. But they didn’t like it,
so that was really the end of the
band.”
Rick Hall liked Duane’s playing so
much, though, that he asked him to
join the session team at Fame [see
article on Fame pg.37]. House
guitarist Jimmy Johnson already knew
Duane from producing the Hour Glass
demos.
“He could play rhythm, acoustic,
anything you want,” says Johnson.
"He couldn’t read a chart but he had
this amazing talent. You hear this
all the time but Duane really had
it. He’d hear a song one time and
you didn’t have to tell him – you
play any chord in the song and he
would know right where it was. “We
would always talk about guitars. He
played a Stratocaster and a Gibson
Les Paul. He always used a Fuzz
Face. That was basically for
distortion. He’d line up about ten
of those nine-volt batteries and he
figured out a way to drain the power
in those batteries down to about a
third. He always said that they
sounded ten times better when they
would almost be powered out. It gave
him the more textured distortion he
was looking for.” Johnson was
particularly impressed with Duane’s
thirst to play. “He had the guitar
in his hands at least eight to ten
hours a day,” Johnson recalls. "I
don’t know anybody who did that. He
was such a prolific player, he knew
everything about his guitar, about
the neck of his guitar, where to
play, how to play, where the sounds
were, the best place for the good
sounds. People that bend strings
like he did, there are pushers and
pullers, and Duane pushed more than
he pulled. He’d put two fingers
together and get two strings and
bend them up, you didn’t see him
pulling them down, it was mainly
pushing up. “When it came to slide,
forget it,” Johnson laughs. “I think
part of what made his sound on slide
is how familiar he was with the
instrument. He did it out of love,
y’know? Sitting around the studio he
always had the guitar around his
neck, playing it, even when he
wasn’t on a session. He made me feel
bad. I was saying, ‘God, I gotta get
me on the Duane Allman program.’
That’s how special he was.”
Within a year Duane made his
reputation as a session star. He was
on the historic Aretha Franklin Soul
‘69 sessions and even suggested
material for Percy Sledge and Wilson
Pickett to cover. “Duane never
really liked being a studio guy,
showing up at ten in the morning and
playing whatever was required,”
explains bassist David Hood. “But he
was good at it. We played on a lot
of good records together. One of the
songs that was his idea to cut was
the Percy Sledge version of ‘Kind
Woman,’ the Buffalo Springfield
song.”
Hood also recalls the legendary
anecdote in which Duane convinced
Wilson Pickett to record “Hey Jude.”
“We had all gone to eat lunch and
Duane stayed back at the studio with
Wilson and convinced him to cut the
song,” says Hood. “It was a really
unusual thing to suggest because it
was a big hit for The Beatles at the
time and the idea of taking them
head on was a pretty far-fetched
idea but Duane thought it was a good
idea.”
Though his time as a studio musician
brought Duane to the attention of
Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, who
signed him to a contract, his goal
always remained to lead his own
band. Between sessions he began work
on a solo album, pieces of which
have emerged over the years, but it
was never completed. Instead, Wexler
turned Duane’s contract over to Phil
Walden, who was starting Capricorn
Records and wanted to record Duane
leading a trio. When Duane showed up
with his band, though, it was a
sextet – he and his brother with
bassist Berry Oakley and guitarist
Dickey Betts from the Jacksonville
band The Second Coming and two
drummers, Jai Johanny Johanson and
Butch Trucks.
“Duane called me to come hear the
band in Daytona,” recalls Sandlin,
who became Capricorn’s house
producer. “It was one of the
earliest gigs and may have been a
glorified rehearsal. It was
wonderful. You could sense that this
was the beginning of something.”
In September 1969 The Allman
Brothers Band recorded its first
album that included the classic
songs “Dreams” and “Whipping Post,”
but the band’s reputation was made
onstage, especially during the free
Sunday concerts at Atlanta’s
Piedmont Park that inspired a
generation of musicians to play the
loose-limbed improvisational music
that became known as Southern Rock
and lives on today in the jamband
aesthetic.
The style combined the energy and
dynamics of blues-based guitar rock
with the modal improvisations
introduced by jazz visionaries Miles
Davis and John Coltrane. The Allman
Brothers didn’t really catch on at
radio even after making an
outstanding album in 1970, Idlewild
South, but Duane became a household
name after joining with Eric Clapton
to make what may be the greatest
rock record ever, Layla and Other
Assorted Rock Songs.
Producer Tom Dowd decided to make
the next Allman’s release a live
album, recording on March 12 and 13,
1971 for what became The Allman
Brothers Band At Fillmore East. It
was a breakthrough recording that
sealed the group’s reputation.
Promoter Bill Graham chose them to
headline the final show at the
Fillmore East that July. Three
months later Duane was gone, killed
in a motorcycle accident on October
29.
When an artist dies at such a
creative peak there is always an
open question about what they would
have achieved had they lived. Those
who knew Duane felt he was on the
verge of even bigger things. Tom
Dowd, a veteran jazz engineer and
producer, called Fillmore East “the
greatest fusion album I’ve ever
heard.” Sandlin agrees. “They talk
about Southern Rock,” he says, “but
Duane was heading toward jazz. He
was listening to Miles and Coltrane.
He loved Coltrane. Duane was working
on an arrangement of ‘My Favorite
Things.’”
Warren Haynes has followed through
on Duane’s interest in combining
rock and jazz elements through
Allman Brothers compositions like
“Kind of Bird” and in
Coltrane-inspired jams with his own
group, Gov’t Mule. He recently
marveled at the fact that the ABB is
celebrating its 40th anniversary the
same year Davis’ Kind of Blue turns
50.
“Now it makes sense,” he says. “At
the time they seemed further apart.
It’s interesting when you think
about Duane’s roots in blues and R&B.
As he was growing as a musician,
jazz musicians were becoming much
more important to him. He talked a
lot about how important Coltrane was
in influencing him. It’s almost a
cliché to say that you’ve been
influenced by John Coltrane these
days because it’s so obvious that
he’s an icon. But for somebody in
the early ‘70s to actually take that
influence into a rock or pop
sensibility was quite a stretch.
Perhaps Duane helped to make
Coltrane a universal influence in
ways he didn’t even realize, the
same way that people like Duane and
Clapton contributed to the
rediscovery of Robert Johnson.”
Bonnie Bramlett and her daughter
Becca will be among the many guests
to join the Brothers during the
Beacon run, remembering not just
Duane but Delaney Bramlett, who died
last December. Duane played on the
Delaney and Bonnie album Motel Shot,
and Delaney played “Come On In My
Kitchen” at Duane’s funeral.
“We knew each other from back in the
day, even before the Allman
Brothers, when Johnny Sandlin was
the drummer,” says Bonnie. “Oh,
Delaney and Duane just hit it sooo
off. They were like brothers.”
In Bonnie’s ruminations about the
days when “we were all not famous
together” she pointed out a
different kind of influence that
Duane was part of.
“Back then there weren’t many white
people doing the black expression,”
she says. “We just did what we liked.
We liked to play the blues. We were
aware that we were crossing color
lines, not only with black musicians
being played on white stations but
with white musicians being played on
black stations. There was never a
picture of Booker T and the MGs on
their album cover. Delaney and
Bonnie got signed to Stax and they
thought we were black. And Duane was
a big part of this because he played
on all the Atlantic stuff with
Aretha and Wilson Pickett and other
R&B singers.”
Bonnie’s observation was
particularly poignant because just
as we were talking, Barack Obama was
in the midst of crossing the
ultimate color line by taking the
oath of office as President of the
United States.
“The color lines were being
destroyed by the Muscle Shoals guys
and the Memphis guys,” she concludes.
“It was a sign of the times when we
went from just doing what we wanted
to do to becoming successful by
doing it.”