He submerged his own presence as much as possible

Part 9 of an annotated read of Tom Nolan's 1976 Allman Brothers Band biography

Welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern Music, History, & Culture.

Before I get to Part 9 of my annotated read of The Allman Brothers Band: A Biography in Words and Pictures by Tom Nolan, I thought I'd share a few things I recently published.

📖 3 favorite reads in 2024. This is the second year I have contributed to Shepherd.com’s three favorite reads list.¹

🎶 Allman Brothers Band “Dreams” 7/9/70. Don't let another day go by without experiencing this beautifully recorded Duane-era “Dreams.”²

🎥 My weekend with Warren. Highlight video of the Warren Haynes Band at the Ryman 10/5/24 and an in-store at Vinyl Tap records in East Nashville 10/6/24.

🍄 David Goldflies interview. I released this over the course of several weeks, this is our full interview from front to back. I had a really good time talking with David about the Allman Brothers Band. Y'all will really dig it.

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Speaking of Dreams

I mentioned in the past that I have been playing around with video creation. I'm intentionally restricting myself to basic tools of social media apps and my Windows computer. I’m having a shit-ton of fun putting photographs of the Allman Brothers Band together with quotes, 15-45-second snippets of music, and almost always a mushroom gif. If you're on social media, you will have seen them.

This one is one of my favorites.

I have always been intrigued by the photograph, which I only learned in the past decade or so was taken at Lake Bradford in Tallahassee FL. The Spanish Moss on the trees & the stained concrete picnic tables reminds me of the Florida of my youth.

It's a particularly compelling image of Duane and Gregg: two Florida boys on a rare break between gigs. For whatever reason the scene felt like “Dreams” (and y'all already know that 9/19/71 is the “Dreams to End All Dreams.”³)

Here's another digital short, a photo from Fillmore East, Duane on “Mountain Jam” from those recordings, a killer quote from Jaimoe, & the shroom.

I'm getting pretty good response with these things. And it's been hella fun working on them.

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On to today’s post

Part 9 of my annotated read of the Allman Brothers Band: A Biography.

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Here’s Parts 1-8: Dr. B’s Marginalia

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Pages I’m commenting on today⁶

Click image to view in full page.

Click image to view in full page.

Reminder: Marginalia

The book’s text is in this font

My commentary (marginalia) is in this font.

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Previously on Long Live the ABB…

Bunky Odom: “It all comes back to going out there, having the will to do it, and going forward. Playing for the American public. They was a real, true people’s band.”

I believe this is the first time the term “People’s Band” appeared in print. As I wrote in an earlier post, the term was always unofficial.

But damn if it doesn’t sum up the founding ethos of the Allman Brothers Band.

“The People’s Band” became a rallying cry with the 1971 promotion of At Fillmore East. (More on that later.)

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Here’s where the book picks back up.

Click image to open full book.

Although the band traveled from the first with what Jon Landau estimates to have been $40,000 worth of equipment,

That equipment came courtesy of Buster Lipham of Lipham’s Music store in Gainesville, Florida. Lipham advanced the Allman Brothers Band tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gear in 1969 & 1970, which the band repaid in monthly installments.⁴

What makes an instrument iconic? is about one of those purchases, a 1961 Gibson Les Paul (that most call an SG⁵) that Dickey picked up in 1970. He played it throughout early-to-mid 1971 when he gave it to Duane to leave in open-E tuning for songs he played slide on.

little money was available for anything besides amplifiers; these were months of personal sacrifice, lightened somewhat by the ingenuity of road people Twiggs and Red Dog.

“The ingenuity of road people” glosses over the fact that Twiggs Lyndon and Red Dog gave their military benefit checks to the band for support in this era.

Let me say it a different way: they believed in the band so much that employees gave their own money to the effort. That is why the roadies appeared on the back cover of At Fillmore East.

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BACK TO THE BOOK

Butch Trucks gives high marks to manager Walden for his conduct and attitude during this period.

“Anything we needed, Phil Walden would just shell out the money. He had just about reached rock bottom before we made a penny. Everybody in the business, all these people were telling him, man, forget it! They ain’t black, they’re from the South—they ain’t got a chance. The only way this band could make it, they said, is if you get that organ player out front, get some velvet pants on him and stick a salami in his crotch.

And Phil never once said a word to us about changing our music, or that we weren’t visual enough or any of that. By the time we made that live album, the first album that was at all successful, we were almost half a million dollars in debt to him; but still, he had never complained to us. I don’t care what happens, I’ll love and respect him until the day I die, because that took a lot of faith and a lot of guts.”

These two paragraphs were true in 1975 and they remain true today. Phil Walden was as important to the success of the Allman Brothers Band as any non-musician. At Fillmore East was payoff for his belief in and support of Duane’s artistic vision.

Marginalia reserved for paid subscribers of Long Live the ABB