Greetings from Nashville and welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.
Today’s post is brought to you by the Allman Brothers Band’s Dreams box set and one of my all-time favorite photographs of the original band, taken 1/27/70 at the Grand Canyon.
Grand Canyon photo from Dreams box set. 📷Twiggs Lyndon
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I love this photograph
This photo was on the first page of the booklet that came with the Dreams box set—a killer historical overview of the band that spurred my interest in the band’s history.
Bought this magazine ad (not a poster) on ebay before the turn of the century. I’ve had it reframed at least twice.
Dreams (I’ll Never See)
Traveling the nation as an integrated band of hippies was a hard road, something I talk about a bit here (I have it queued to my main point).
I’m not sure if it’s the photograph itself, the accompanying text (see below), the name of the box set, or the song itself, but his photo has always evoked “Dreams” to me.
The photo captures both the despair of the first verse
Went up on the mountain, to see what I could see. The whole world was falling, right down in front of me.
and the resolve of the second
Pull myself together, put on a new face. Climb down off that hilltop, get back in the race.”
The Backstory
Twiggs Lyndon, the ABB’s first road manager, snapped the photo on January 27, 1970.2
The band was on its way home to Macon from California.
Twiggs was quite the character. He had served as road manager for Little Richard, where he met Jimi Hendrix, and R&B stars, where he met Jaimoe well before they signed on with the Allman Brothers Band.
Twiggs was also an incredible photographer.
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He snapped some killer shots of the Allman Brothers Band in their earliest days, like this one from Piedmont Park May 11, 1969. If you follow me on social media,3 you’ve seen Twiggs’s handiwork as I post his shots pretty often.
Here’s Twiggs in action underneath Dickey’s left elbow. I included this photo in Play All Night specifically because it’s got Twiggs.
The group made a stop at the Grand Canyon on their way back from their first tour West.
Here’s Twiggs on how the Allman Brothers Band ended up opening for one of their heroes at Fillmore West in San Francisco.
They were hired to open a Fillmore East show for Blood, Sweat and Tears. This was a major steppingstone for the Allman Brothers, but they didn't really go over with the crowd that Blood, Sweat and Tears drew. After the show, Kip Cohen apologized to me, and while we were making small talk he asked,
“Who did the band like? Who were their influences, who would they themselves buy a ticket to see?”
I named off some people—B.B. King, Grateful Dead, Roland Kirk, in that order.
We went back to the club circuit. We were in Philadelphia, less than a month later, when we heard they were booked to play the Fillmore West in a week. We made it out there in the van, and found they were on a bill with Buddy Guy, and the headliner was B.B. King.
After the weekend, I went into the office to get paid, and Bill Graham was there to see me. He said, “I love your band; how did they enjoy playing here?”
I said, “They never thought they'd be able to play with B.B. King; that was heaven for them.”
He says to me, “He was y'all's first choice wasn't he? I felt so bad, having put you on that bill in New York, I wanted to make it up to you. I asked Kip Cohen to find out who the Allman Brothers liked best, and he told me the first act you named was B.B. King and the second was the Grateful Dead. Now you've got two weeks to get back to the Fillmore East 'cause I've got you booked there with the Dead.”4
The ABB played Fillmore West January 15, 16, 17, 18, 1970.
Poster from the ABB’s January 1970 Fillmore West appearance.
On Monday, January 26, they played University of California-Riverside.
The band spent an afternoon “playing soulful rock on the grassy knoll near the bell tower.” Bruce Harvie recalled the group set up its gear and “proceed[ed] to blow for 3 hours or so” for a small, appreciative audience.5
This one’s also documented, thanks to photographer Bruce D. Henderson. I included two of his shots in Play All Night, including this one.6
Dickey Betts is leaning back hitting a note as Berry Oakley smiles at him. Jaimoe’s drums and roadcase are marked “Jai Johanny Johanson,” his stage name at the time.
And the Grand Canyon?
Following the afternoon show at UC-Riverside, the Allman Brothers Band drove 450 miles to the Grand Canyon. The stop was Twiggs’s idea.
They arrived, Gregg wrote, at “the crack of fucking dawn. Twiggs said the lighting was just right.”7
Damn straight.
It’s an incredible photo, framed beautifully. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the original or the original in full color but that doesn’t matter. Every time I look at it I can’t help but think of “Dreams” and its message of hope.8
Apparently Gregg was pretty sick. “They had to prop me up—I was freezing cold, I was shaking, and I had a fever.”
Here are some other shots Twiggs took that day. Google “Allman Brothers+Grand Canyon” for the rest.
Back to the Dreams box set
As promised, here’s that text from the Dreams booklet.
The bold highlights are mine, to emphasize the deep musical and cultural influence of the Allman Brothers Band. In many ways, these themes drive content here at Long Live the ABB.9
"My songs are wide-awake dreams and wide-awake nightmares" Gregg Allman
The Allman Brothers story is inescapably about the cultural forces at work in the American South in the post World War II era, the churning emotional climate responsible for the “New South” that emerged in the early '70s and culminated in Jimmy Carter's presidency.
This is the band that reclaimed rock 'n' roll from the British invasions of the 1960s.
Rock 'n' roll was rooted in the American South, in delta blues, urban rhythm and blues and country music, but after its first flowering in the mid-to-late 50s, the Beatles spearheaded a recasting of the very nature of the music, reshaping the basic forms using ideas taken from a variety of sources, including the European folk and classical traditions.
By the time the British rock of the '60s reached its apotheosis with the wild soloing jams of Cream, the differences between British and American rock were starkly drawn.
The British version was innately theatrical, overstated to a near-operatic level. The American rock mainstream was epitomized by the softer, more introspective and country-oriented conception of folk rock and the West Coast bands.
At the point where fans of American and British rock were squared off in an apparently irreconcilable battle, the Allman Brothers arrived to synthesize both traditions in a groundbreaking style that paved the way for the future development of the music.
Musically, the Allman Brothers were one of the most exciting live rock bands to ever take the stage. Lead guitarist Duane "Skydog" Allman played with the power, grace and originality few rockers have ever achieved, while Dickey Betts complemented Allman with a ringing, country-influenced style that created a distinctive two-guitar harmonic structure.
The rhythm section, powered by bassist Berry Oakley and the propulsive double-drum pulse of Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson, was capable of previously unheard-of rock drive as well as the tricky nuance of a jazz section.
Add to this one of the greatest white blues singers of his generation, Gregg Allman, and you have a band that literally redefined the direction and possibilities open to rock 'n' roll.
The Allman Brothers not only created Southern rock10, but also, by virtue of the harmonic inventions of Allman/ Betts and the creativity of the rhythm section, anticipated the direction American jazz was moving toward at the same time. In their own way, the Allman Brothers were the rock equivalent of the legendary Miles Davis band that featured the interplay of saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.
Appropriately enough, the Davis quintet of Kind of Blue fame was a key influence on the Brothers, but what made the group truly visionary was its ability to meld that influence with the seemingly disparate approach of the revolutionary British guitar band, the Yardbirds (a group that took its name from another legendary saxophonist, Charlie Parker).
Probably because I got the Dreams and 1970 Ludlow Garage set at the same time. The latter was the first Duane I owned that wasn’t At Fillmore East or Eat a Peach.
The ABB’s Southern rock bonafides are an unpopular, inconvenient fact for many in Shroom Nation, something I am reminded of every time I post about it on social media.
Love the post!! Twiggs was a great photographer, so much history with the band.