Play All Night Playlist Project Chapter 9: The Journey Begins

You don’t, can’t, “listen” to the Allman Brothers, you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it. Miller Francis Jr.

Welcome to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. This issue presents the 13th edition into the Play All Night Playlist Project.

“Chapter 9: The Journey Begins (May through December 1969) focuses on the first year of the Allman Brothers Band’s career. The playlist includes the debut album and a one-disc live set from a series of February 1970 Fillmore East shows opening for the Grateful Dead.

• Spotify

• Youtube

Here are all past entries in the Playlist Project:

Play All Night Playlist Project

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An Experimental Blues Rock Music Feast

Some really choice primary sources survive of the band’s first public appearances as the Allman Brothers Band in Georgia. This includes a flyer, a ticket stub (below), and radio advertisement for their first shows in Macon (May 2-3, 1969) and a cover story on their May 11, 1969 Piedmont Park performance in The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s alternative newspaper.¹

Ticket for ABB’s first Macon shows. From Duaneallman.info

I’ll tackle these chronologically, first with the Macon show at the College Discotheque, 652 Mulberry Street.²

Phil Walden³ called the Allman Brothers Band

the most inventive experimental blues rock group in existence today…performing live in an Experimental Blues Rock Music Feast.

Audiences should prepare

to be musically educated as you experience the Allman Brothers.

The radio ad ended with a wink.

Heads welcome.

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experimental

music feast

inventive

experience

musically educated

Keep these words/phrases in mind as you listen to the playlists. They are incredibly accurate descriptions of the music of the Allman Brothers Band and really do represent Duane and his band’s vision for music and Phil Walden & company’s attempts to promote it.

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You don’t, can’t, listen to the Allman Brothers, you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it.

The promotions failed to rally much interest in the show, with less than 40 folks in attendance.⁴ Everything changed one week later when the Allman Brothers Band trekked to Atlanta to play Piedmont Park.

The following week, Duane appeared on the cover of The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s alternative newspaper. Miller Francis Jr. wrote the story of the ABB’s May 11, 1969 in Atlanta.⁵

Francis was first to document the magic of the original Allman Brothers Band in print.

And he was effusive in his praise.

There are times when it's easy to think that the rock and roll musician is the most militant, subversive, effective, whole, together, powerful force for radical change on this planet; other times you know it's true.

A two-page photo spread accompanied the story. It began:

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS play a form of what some might want to call ‘hard blues’ but that term merely relates their music to what we already recognize and accept as valid; it says nothing of their real achievements.

The ABB didn’t merely imitate Black music, they created something wholly new from the influence:

What informs their creation is not Black music but the experience of young white tribesmen in experiencing Black music. After all, Ray Charles, and what he means, is a crucial part of the lives of this new generation of non-Blacks.

Thus Black music can be approached creatively by our musicians if the jumping off place is our experience of that music rather than the music itself.

NB: This is something Jaimoe said I got particularly right in Play All Night—that unlike a lot of white musicians who “mimicked everyone they thought was so great,” the ABB “allowed themselves to come through” in the music.⁶

Col. Bruce Hampton, frontman of the Hampton Grease Band⁷ was there as well.

They were on fire. The intent of the essence were there. It was just pure as hell. You could feel the purity in the fire in the intensity: nobody was playing checkers or talking business. This was music for music's sake.

Twiggs Lyndon photo of ABB at Piedmont Park and that angle today.

Are You Experienced?

Francis heard and, more importantly experienced exactly what Duane and his mates wanted him to hear:

You don't, can't, "listen" to the Allman Brothers; you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it, you "let it out and let it in" (the Beatles) and enter into an experience through which you are changed. You catch a glimpse of the kind of world we are becoming and you know more than ever the horrendous load of bullshit we'll have to drop off on the way in order to give birth to that kind of world.

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LINER NOTES

These are the sounds and inspiration the ABB tried to capture in their music. Their debut album certainly augured well for the band, even if they were an exponentially better band live than in the studio

• The Allman Brothers Band (1969)

• Bear’s Sonic Journals: Live at Fillmore East, February 1970 (first released 1997)

That the Allman Brothers’ music translated poorly in the studio and therefore in the marketplace remained a frustration for the band, its label, and fans—until At Fillmore East broke the band into the mainstream in 1971. Until then, the ABB trod a more traditional path, of studio albums and relentless touring. The group spent the first nine months of that journey sharpening their sound and building a reputation as a “don’t miss” live act. In August 1969 they recorded their debut album, The Allman Brothers Band. It failed to dent the charts. EXCERPT FROM PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN AND THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EAST