Gregg Allman

southcoastukes

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Losing Gregg hits pretty hard,

Here's something from the "Idelwild South":



Post your own favorites.

Peace -
 
I love this live cover of 'I Walk On Gilded Splinters'. R.I.P.

 
Best concert ever attended- Allman Brothers & Grateful Dead at RFK stadium. Second best - Allman Brothers at Merriweather Post Pavilion.
 
Had the privilege of seeing Gregg Allman play at the Stone Pony (little bar in Asbury Park at the Jersey shore). Stellar! RIP
 
The news about Gregg caught me by surprise. It took me a while to understand why I was so taken aback. After a bit of reflection I thought to share some of what it’s about to me.

I was fortunate enough to be “on the scene” when the Allman Brothers Band first took off. The last local small venue tours they made in Georgia were at a number of small colleges. I was in school up there and they came to play at our gym. They tore it up.

They were something new, all right. Blues, Rock, Soul, and a heavy dose of Modern Jazz. The two drummers gave an incredible rhythmic foundation to the two guitarists with Gregg soaring in on the B3.

I’m not sure that many folks appreciate the impact they made down south, in part because that original band was just a brief-lived ensemble. Two years after they played our gym, Gregg’s bother Duane died in a motorcycle accident. The Allman Brothers were never the Allman “Brothers” again. Almost a year to the day after that, the bassist, Barry Oakley died in another motorcycle accident just a little bit down the highway from where Duane met his end.

I think a lot of outsiders who caught on to their music after the fact looked at them as the originators of Southern Rock. You could say that; you could say that the southern rockers who came after owed almost everything to them, but the Allmans really disliked the term and the sorts of things that came to be associated with it.
Here are a few quotes:

Guitarist Dickey Betts was most vocal about this classification, which he considered unfair: "I think it’s limiting. I’d rather just be known as a progressive rock band from the South. I’m damned proud of who I am and where I’m from, but I hate the term ‘Southern rock.’ I think calling us that pigeonholed us and forced people to expect certain types of music from us that I don’t think are fair." Gregg Allman also saw the "southern rock" tag as redundant, saying it was like saying "rock rock". The band was certainly at the forefront of the genre's popularity in the early 1970s; the breakthrough of At Fillmore East led their hometown of Macon to become flooded with "southern rock" groups. Despite this, the group has continued to remove themselves from the term. "The problem I have is a lot of people associate it with rednecks and rebel flags and backward mentality. That has never been representative of the Allman Brothers Band," said guitarist Warren Haynes.

These guys were the “New South”. At the time they came to play our gym they were living in their infamous “Hippie Crash Pad” eating on a tab at the H & H Soul Food restaurant and taking the general sort of risk a bunch of long-haired guys running around with a black guy (Jaimoe) would take in a place like Macon in those days. George Wallace was still Governor in Alabama; in Georgia it was Lester Maddox.

But another fellow came to our campus that fall; he was making a long shot run for Governor of Georgia, and even though most of us couldn’t vote, he felt it was important to talk to us, get our support and at least get the votes of those who were 21. I got to shake the fellow’s hand myself. That was Jimmy Carter. And lo & behold, he got elected! The first southern governor since the end of reconstruction who didn’t run on a segregationist platform (or in a very few cases simply try to ignore the issue of race). One of the first things Jimmy did on taking office was to hang a portrait of MLK in the Georgia statehouse.

It was a new day! A day when we could look forward to the end of the denigration of so many of our fellow southerners. And imagine how we felt when Jimmy again came out of nowhere to win the Presidency! With that sort of example in our nation’s highest office, wouldn’t harmony finally reign in the sweet southland?

Did the Allmans have anything to do with all that? Probably something, though I don’t want to get too carried away. Nonetheless, there was a mutual admiration society; Carter was a big fan and the Allmans played a series of benefit concerts during Carter’s presidential campaign when other funds were almost non-existent. In a gesture of Christian forgiveness, he later reduced the sentence of their roadman on cocaine charges. And unfortunately that last statement is an indicator in some part of why the band declined.

But in that incredible meteoric rise, the height coming just before their national popularity, they created new forms of music and just as important, new attitudes. Their national popularity came about with the release of the Fillmore Live album, and you can say with that album they also cemented the “Jam Band” form and are probably the best to ever do it. They had followed me back down to New Orleans (or so it seemed) and were almost the house band at the famous “Warehouse” on the Mississippi riverfront on Tchoupitoulas, jamming until dawn and then often heading to the Quarters to play for free into the morning.

As enjoyable as live recordings can be, I’ve always felt that if I can’t be there live myself, a studio album is a musician’s more complete way of speaking to an absent listener. And the “Brothers” life was so brief that they only made two of those studio albums. The second, Idelwild South, is in my opinion the most realized work of that original grouping. It appears it has been posted in its entirety on YouTube. If you listen to nothing more than the first song (they’re all great!), then with that one, “Revival”, you get an insight into the spirit and feeling of those days: “People can you feel it, Love is Everywhere”.





And while the band lost much of its core early on, Gregg was the voice, Gregg survived, and when you heard that voice it brought back the hope and inspiration of those early days. And now that voice is gone.
 
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P.S:
It’s not like Gregg never did anything with his life after that initial impact. He overcame his own addictions, would continue to surround himself with top flight musicians and at the turn of the century was as soulful a singer as you could hope to hear:

 
Saw Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts et al play a show in a small place in New Orleans in the mid 1980's, memorable show even after all these years, Gregg on organ yellow hair all over the place....Dickey on guitar...long jamming songs........RIP
 
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