Midnight Riders: The Road Goes on Forever for the Allman Brothers Band

On Oct 28, the Allman Brothers Band, one of America’s most loved and revered rock bands, played their final concert at the Beacon Theater in New York, a venue where they have played over 230 shows since 1989. (Allman Brothers Final Concert ).

Maybe that explains why, for the past few months, I have been listening non-stop to the Allman Brothers Band, as if I was answering some kind of a telepathic call I could not ignore. I have been playing the Allman Brothers in my car. On my morning runs. In my head.  All the time.

Over a 45-year career, the Allman Brothers Band has earned a place in a pantheon of pop culture Gods that includes the Beatles, the Stones, and the Grateful Dead. They are a quintessentially American rock band. In their music, you can feel the heat and humidity of Alabama cotton plantations, hear the freight trains at night on the Mississippi railroad tracks, and taste the hot summer peaches from Georgia.

The first time I heard the Allman Brothers Band was sometime in 1981. For those of us from that generation, the Allman Brothers, along with bands like the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, represented experimentation and freestyle improvisation that made them appealing to rock connoisseurs. It was a time when the purple haze and the fumes of cannabis from Woodstock had barely cleared, the Beatles and the Stones were being overplayed, and interesting sounds were emerging in the clear finger-picking of Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits and the searing guitar tone of Carlos Santana that was set in the backdrop of the pulsating Latin American rhythms.

The air on college campuses was crackling with the sounds of blazing chillums. Homemade stereo systems in dorm rooms were blasting the music of bands like Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Deep Purple. Serious listeners were studying Frank Zappa and taking apart the opaque lyrics of Donald Fagen of Steely Dan.  Jazz rock fusion was all the rage – Shakti, Weather Report, Spyrogyra, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever were pushing the frontiers of musical experimentation.

The Allman Brothers had a relatively small but a fanatic following, especially among musicians. They stood out as an improvisational jam band with strong roots in American blues music, a form that had been introduced indirectly into India by British bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers featuring Eric Clapton, and to a lesser extent, by Jagger-Richards of the Stones, and Jeremy Spencer of early Fleetwood Mac, all of whom took their music directly from the Chicago blues scene, which in the sixties was dominated by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others that recorded under the Chess label.

Brothers Duane and Gregg Allman, while taking inspiration from contemporary blues musicians like Taj Mahal,  went further back to listen to blues pioneers like Blind Willie McTell and Sonny Boy Williamson from the ‘30s and the ‘40’s, and fashioned it all into a unique sound during session work at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which came to define a brand new genre called southern rock, whose latter-day proponents included Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band, among others.

The Allman Brothers broke the standard format by having 2 drummers, 2 guitar players, a keyboard player, bass player, and an occasional harmonica player, and delivered extended performances which sometimes went all night and into the early mornings. Band leader Duane effortlessly pied- pipered  the band and the audiences through musical meanderings  of awesome Amazonian breadth and beauty during the band’s live shows across the nation, captured in rare videos  ( such as this one) which take us along on spiritually immersive sonic experiences .

As a guitar player, I remember listening to the wailing, screeching sound of Duane Allman’s guitar and wondering how on earth he got that sound. I learned later that he played the slide – a medicine bottle placed on his ring finger that turned a fretted instrument with discrete notes, into something akin to a human voice that rose and fell in pitch and intensity in a continuous function. The Allman Brothers Live at The Fillmore East, recorded in 1971 and released a few months before Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident, remains one of the most seminal rock albums of all time. Fittingly, it opens with Statesboro Blues , the song that inspired Duane to pick up a slide , one  that demonstrates Duane’s mastery over  slide guitar technique and has since become a standard in every Allman Brothers concert. Duane Allman remains the single most important figure to popularize the slide guitar, a form of playing that goes back to early blues musicians on plantations who would play with a broken bottle neck or a knife to get that mournful sound associated with the blues .

The music of the Allman Brothers Band provides access to an audio portal through which the roots of American blues music in the suffering and longing of African slaves in southern plantations can be heard  in tantalizing and enigmatic vignettes .  The log-in and password are embedded in Gregg’s gritty vocals, Duane and Dickey’s twin leads, Butch and Jaimoe’s drum attacks. You log in, and you tap right into the mother lode itself. It is a musical tradition bequeathed to the most faithful among us , especially into the caring and responsible hands of young and incredibly gifted musicians like the Allman Brothers who have passed it on freely to the yearning masses. Across the pond, in the U.K, Eric Clapton has traced his own musical influences all the way back to Robert Johnson from the Mississippi delta , and has been bringing it to us over the years through songs like  Crossroads Blues .

Musical proficiency is one thing.  The ability to take people along for a musical journey is another. The Allmans demonstrated both in style. I saw them a few years back, and time lost all meaning for a few hours as the band took me and 30,000 others along on one such journey. The band line-up had endured much upheaval since the untimely deaths of Duane and bassist Berry Oakley in the early seventies, the rancor and acrimony surrounding Gregg’s testimony against his own band-mates for drug possession, the unceremonious firing of guitarist Dickey Betts by fax message, and Gregg’s own battles with alcohol, a disastrous marriage to pop diva Cher, and a liver transplant. Through it all, the Allman Brothers sound – defined by Gregg’s vocals and Duane’s slide guitar – has stayed true.

It’s a sound that has been faithfully maintained by guitar virtuoso and long-time band member Warren Haynes, and the next generation’s guitar prodigy Derek Trucks -drummer Butch Trucks’ nephew- who carries the torch with a sound  that’s part Elmore James, part Duane Allman, part sarod player Ali Akbar Khan – and yet all his own. It’s as if the Allman Brothers Band has finally allowed its Indian devotees into the innermost sanctum.

There are many things to celebrate about the music of the Allman Brothers band – the popularization of American blues, the experimental improvisations influenced by jazz, and the monumental  individual talent of the band members.  There are many things to learn from their journey . We learn about how to build and maintain a community through ups and downs of career success and failure. We learn about protecting and nurturing a craft at any cost and providing uplifting experiences to people despite the personal trials and tribulations. As Gregg Allman sings with feeling in one his songs, sometimes you feel like you’re tied to a Whipping Post . But the road goes on forever for the Allman Brothers band.