This post brought to you by Tedeschi Trucks Band I Am the Moon. I am prescribing this for you each Friday for the next month. Full dose is the entire 2+ hours of what I call psychedelic swamp sunshine music. If you have limited time, you can get by with a dose of just volume I. Crescent.
Happy Jacksonville Jam Day
March 23, 2024 is the 55th anniversary of the jam that birthed the Allman Brothers Band in the room at the bottom left of the Gray House in Jacksonville’s Riverside neighborhood. All but Gregg gathered on March 23, 1969 for a jam—after which Duane blocked the doorway and exclaimed:
“Anybody here not gonna play in my band is going to have to fight their way out“
Here’s video of Derek Trucks and his parents Chris (Butch’s brother) unveiling the historical marker at the Gray House.
I added the ABB’s version of the Spencer Davis Group’s “Don’t Want You No More,” which they adapted from the Second Coming’s cover arrangement. It’s the Allman Brothers Band and their rawest for sure.
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Breaking Up, Reuniting, Breaking Up, Reuniting
Last fall, I gave a presentation at the Soundscapes of the South, an international conference of music scholars held at Capricorn Studios in Macon.
I ended part 1 with the band’s 1976 break-up, the 1979 10th anniversary reunion, and a second break-up in 1982.Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records went bankrupt. The studio abandoned.
The Allman Brothers Band had more or less severed its connections with Macon. Things changed before the close of the decade.
The group got back together in 1989 to promote Dreams, a six-album, 4-cd box set from nearly every era of the ABB and most of their solo projects.2
The set was brilliantly packaged. It fit this groundbreaking southern band. The liner notes were a 32p booklet that included the first extensive history on the ABB since the mid-1970s.
The text, look, and layout of the package oozes Southern gothic, the front page dedicated to departed brothers.
The next page began with this all-timer from Gregg Allman:
“My songs are wide-awake dreams and wide-awake nightmares.”
The photograph that accompanied the quote and the opening essay was of the band at the Grand Canyon.3 I can’t help but think of these lines from the album’s title track “Dreams” whenever I see it.
“Went up on the mountain, to see what I could see.
The whole world was falling, right down in front of me.”
The group’s communal experience in Macon was a key part of that story.
It referenced eating at the H&H Restaurant, living and practicing at the Big House, and visits to Rose Hill Cemetery.
It’s not the Dreams box set that draws Allman Brothers fans from around the world to make the pilgrimage to Macon, but the release certainly helped rekindle the Macon mythos—a site of great importance to the music the Allman Brothers Band made for the world.
Mama Louise’s H&H Restaurant, taken in 1997, my first trip to Macon.
Rose Hill Cemetery
I wrote some on Rose Hill in Part 1. In addition to the cemetery being a peaceful, somewhat discreet place the band passed time, it was also the backdrop for early promo shots.
Rose Hill provided Dickey Betts with the title for his landmark instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”4
Rose Hill’s hold on fan imagination a mythos all its own that this statue (below) of Martha Ellis inspired Duane Allman’s “Little Martha.” It did not.
The band themselves got into the mix on this one.
They sent a letter [BELOW] to the Georgia Allman Brothers Band Association in 1990 disavowing any connection between Martha Ellis’s grave and Duane’s song.
Snapped this one at the Middle Georgia Archives in Macon.
I’ve been visiting Macon regularly since 1997. My first visit I stopped at Rose Hill, at the H&H Restaurant, and ABB Tour Mystic Kirk West’s archives room at the Big House at 2321 Vineville Avenue in Macon.
That room was once the band’s practice space in its communal home from 1970-73. Today, that home houses a museum dedicated to the Allman Brothers Band.
I’m not sure Capricorn Studios would be functional as a historic space, much less operating as a studio, were it not for the efforts of Kirk and his wife Kirsten to preserve the Big House and help Macon reestablish its connections to the Allman Brothers Band legacy.
In Macon, the Allman Brothers Band launched a movement in southern music that endures to this day. The Big House museum honors that legacy.
My brick at the Big House Museum in Macon
Random Notes
Dreams box set. As important the packaging and look of the Dreams box set was to me in the band’s image to my minds eye, turns out the good work was just dumb luck. As Kirk West told Chairman
Polygram art dept just went for it with little to no input from anybody… [producer Bill] Levenson approved the artwork … the box set artwork was a success but a lot of the promo stuff was just wrong… there was NO ABB management at the time so there wasn’t anyone to veto bad art ...
It actually got worse, Kirk continued:
even after regrouping Epic couldn’t get it right…left handed guitar players for instance… [below]5
Booklet and back cover from early editions of Seven Turns had Dickey, Warren, and Woody all playing left-handed. (And Butch’s high-hat is on the wrong side too…)
you should have seen some of the artwork they offered for the cover… 7 Turns… they had a photo of seven terns (the bird) flying over a road in the forest… just bad bad bad… unawares …
I went on a Beatles’ binge again recently—all books by/about insiders. Of the three, I enjoyed Emrick’s the most. Bramwell’s next, then Kenneth Womack’s book on Mal Evans. None of them are essential rock & roll reading, but all were entertaining in their own right.
Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans. Mal was an old pal from Liverpool who became the band’s roadie/go-fer. It’s a sad story with a tragic ending.
Here,There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. Author Geoff Emrick worked at EMI’s recording studio at Abbey Road, eventually ending up as engineer on a number of Beatles’ albums, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This one gave a lot of insight into the Beatles’ artistic process—particularly as they transitioned from touring musicians into studio maestros.
Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles. Tony Bramwell’s book was quite a ride! Like Mal, Bramwell is a mate from the Liverpool days. The ultimate of Beatles’ insiders, he holds nothing back—particularly his disdain for Yoko Ono.6
My Effin’ Life, Geddy Lee. Not going to go deep into my longstanding love for Rush here but suffice it to say they were seminal in my understanding of the breadth of possibilities within music. This book is really well done, including chapters on his parents’ experience in the Holocaust. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. Insightful, thorough, vulnerable. You name it.
Levon: From Down in the Delta to the Birth of the Band and Beyond. Never a bad thing for me to brush up on the greatness of the Band and the dysfunction that tore them apart. Intraband dynamics fascinate me. Can’t say this book added a whole lot to my understanding, but it certainly reinforced Helm’s intense resentment of Robbie Robertson.7
I’ve just started Joel Selvin’s Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon. I am steeling myself for some ugly shit.
Langiappes
Where’s all this content coming from? If you follow me on social media, you’ll notice I’ve been a lot more active posting video content. I’m experimenting with the medium, learning as I go and—most importantly (& as
Here’s an initial attempt at compiling my recent NYC trip to see TTBeacon: Tedeschi Trucks Band’s regular Beacon Theatre appearance. I traveled all over Manhattan tracking down music history and Allman Brothers-related sites:
“What’s wrong with this image?” I texted my dude Davis, a southpaw. “Playing guitar the correct way,” he wrote back. This is a guy who turned my dobro upside down and started wailing on slide. UPSIDE DOWN. Ya tu sabes.
Speaking of the Beatles and the Band, I’ve got a whole post rolling around in my head about The Last Waltz and the Rooftop Concert from the Get Back movie/Let It Be sessions.
