Play All Night Playlist Project Chapter 8: A Home in Macon
We’re doing what we want to do more than anything else, and if we can make a living at it too, that’s just beautiful. Berry Oakley
Welcome to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. For new subscribers, I typically post six to eight times a month, depending on when the muse strikes.
I recently updated the subscription benefits to include a free copy of Play All Night for my annual paid subscribers.
The Play All Night Playlist Project
For me, one of the joys of reading music history is that it opens up my ears (and therefore my soul) to new jams. It can be challenging, though, to wend through the discographies of the subjects in any book.
Duane and the Allman Brothers Band’s music and its influence is no exception to this rule.
Their catalog is vast and their influences (and the music they influenced) are myriad.
In response, I’ve created the Play All Night Playlist Project. Here’s an index of what I’ve created thus far:
We’re doing what we want to do more than anything else, and if we can make a living at it too, that’s just beautiful. Berry Oakley
Excerpt from Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East
In Macon, the Allman Brothers Band forged their brotherhood as players and as people. The atmosphere offered the band a laid-back environment in which to grow its sound. In the relative calm of Macon, the ABB grew ever more determined to present themselves not as rock stars but as a band of everyday people.
In February 2021, I trekked to Macon to write the final draft of what became Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East. I holed up in a small apartment in downtown in the same neighborhood where the members of the Allman Brothers Band lived in 1969, including the infamous “Hippie Crash Pad” right next door to the Beall mansion where the first album cover photo was taken.1
I walked daily to Rose Hill Cemetery with my dog Fender and contemplated the story I was trying to tell.
I thought about this band of hippies moving to a small southern town in Middle Georgia and the magical music they created together.
Place helped me connect to the story.2 In this case it was Macon. I finished the second draft in New York City and the third in Muscle Shoals.3
The Chapter 8 playlist is just shy of two hours of music representing the first calendar year of the Allman Brothers Band. It includes their earliest demos, their first album, among other tracks.
Reminder that this list is not comprehensive, nor is it intended to be. I hope that it’ll inspire you to check out even more of the music of the ABB and the tunes that shaped their sound.
LINER NOTES
Though the playlists are free for all, liner notes are reserved for paid subscribers.
“Trouble No More” (Demo)
“Dreams” (Demo)
The Allman Brothers Band album
Demos are interesting to me. They’re unfinished, of course, which adds a rawness to them that I’ve always liked. They are also guides for the band. So they can *hear* what they’re doing and learn what needs improvement. When the Allman Brothers Band arrived in Macon in April 1969, they recorded four songs at what was then Redwal, later Capricorn, Studios4—all four made their debut album: “Trouble No More” and “Dreams” have both been officially released. “Don’t Want You No More”—a cover of the Spencer Davis Group and Gregg’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” would kick off the album, but remain unreleased.
It’s remarkable how tight the band was after less than a month playing together. Having said that, both “Trouble No More” and “Dreams” sound pretty raw to me. The whole band seems somewhat tentative compared to Duane, who by this point had 6+ months in residence at FAME under his belt.
Listen to the “Trouble No More” demo, then the version on The Allman Brothers Band (better, but still kinda stiff), then the version from Eat a Peach, recorded at the Fillmore in March 1971. That’s where you can really hear the development of the band’s sound and approach. The demo is really fast and a bit choppy, the studio cut more languid and smooth. The EAP version is fast and fiery.
“Dreams” is my favorite from this record and is among my favorite songs of all-time. It’s different than the demo version, including a slide solo from Duane — who’s the only guitarist on the track according to Gregg’s memoir.5 By September 1971, the ABB were stretching out “Dreams” to 19+ minutes.6
Every song from the debut album was in the band’s setlist throughout the 2000s.
Miles Davis “All Blues”
John Coltrane “My Favorite Things”
Cannonball Adderley “One for Daddy-O”
The first two are among the most important songs to the development of the ABB’s sound. The feel of “Dreams” comes directly from “All Blues”—Jaimoe copped his drum part directly from Jimmy Cobb’s original. I threw in a live “My Favorite Things” since I already included the studio version on the Chapter 1 playlist.7 Adderley was a key member of Davis’s band for Kind of Blue, with Coltrane, and I just dig this track immensely.
From Coltrane and Miles Davis, Duane and the band learned ways to incorporate improvisational concepts and ideas into their own music. Like their jazz exemplars, solos would be extemporaneous, with bandmates providing support with their own improvised chords, rhythms, and countermelodies. Soloists would loosely adhere to song format and structure, but pontaneity was essential. “The whole sound evolved and developed out of that spontaneous jamming,” said Butch.
Spencer Davis Group “Don’t Want You No More”
Dickey and Berry’s band the Second Coming opened their sets with this Spencer Davis Group tune (post-Steve Winwood). The ABB adopted the Second Coming’s basic arrangement but shortened it from nine minutes on a March 1969 bootleg from Jacksonville to 2:24 on their debut album. Unlike the Second Coming’s vocal arrangement, the ABB recorded “Don’t Want You No More” with Dickey and Duane harmonizing the vocal melody lines on guitar: a band hallmark.
I have always been intrigued by this song and feel like it demonstrates Betts and Oakley’s talents as arrangers. There was something special they heard in the original and their version carried over into the birth of the ABB. “Don’t Want You No More” always preceded Gregg’s “It’s Not My Cross to Bear”—often opening shows in the 1990s.
The Grateful Dead “Dark Star”
This is the track that best highlights for me the similarity in approach between Phil Lesh and Berry Oakley. Lesh plays lead bass throughout, never losing the rhythm while having an intense musical conversation, holding the music together while playing along with and encouraging Garcia. The jam revolves around Lesh, as every Allman Brothers Band jam would revolve around Oakley.
Donovan “There is a Mountain” and Herbie Mann “There is a Mountain” The Allman Brothers turned this cut into a tour-de-force improvisational instrumental, one that extended beyond 30 minutes on most nights. I’ve always found Donovan’s original somewhat vapid and when I first heard it was surprised the ABB chose to cover it. A couple of years ago, Richard Brent of the Big House Museum in Macon introduced Herbie Mann’s version to me, and he’s made a compelling case that might’ve been Duane’s inspiration for the cover. It was in the earliest versions of ABB setlists.8
Junior Wells “You Don’t Love Me”
This cut has a really interesting backstory. Willie Cobbs recorded “You Don’t Love Me,” in 1961. He claimed to have heard it from a field holler but it really was just his adaptation and retitling of Bo Diddley's 1955 “She's Fine, She's Mine.”9 The first version we have of the ABB playing it is 7/10/70 at SUNY Stonybrook, it’s less than seven minutes long. By the following year, the band would routinely stretch it out to 20+ minutes.10
Elmore James “The Sky Is Crying” “Done Somebody Wrong”
Elmore James is the sine qua non of electric bottleneck slide guitar. These are two of his most well-known songs. “The Sky Is Crying” is somewhat of a foreshadow—the band would later play it at Duane’s funeral. “Done Somebody Wrong” is on At Fillmore East and features Duane’s overdriven, harmonica-like slide tone that he got directly from Elmore James.
Thanks for reading, until next time.
Spoke specifically about that here:
Wrote about this in An AAASLH Guide to Making Public History, “Place Is at the Heart of How We See the Past.”
Thanks Greg #lwkut.
It was always just one studio, but always called Capricorn Studios.
Dickey called the studio “a padded cell” and left mid-recording. He carried contempt for studios for years thereafter. They were, he said, “a prostitution of music.”
I never miss a chance to post the “Dreams to end all Dreams” 9/19/71 SUNY Stonybrook.
Here’s the earliest “Mountain Jam” we have, 5/4/69 Macon’s Central City Park
Subsequent adaptations include the Megatons “Shimmy She Wobble” and Jamaican singer Dawn Penn “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)” as well as Stephen Stills & Al Kooper’s Super Session, and even Ike and Tina Turner.
It was 19:06 on At Fillmore East (including the famous “Play all night!” at 16:18).