Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture with historian Bob Beatty

I had no idea what I was walking into when I saw the Allman Brothers Band for the first time, November 13, 1993. I walked in expecting moldy oldies; I left with my mind blown. My life has truly never been the same. I caught the second of a three-show run through Florida. I had no idea Dickey had just returned from a leave of absence.The band was fierce, powerful. Dickey was simply outstanding. Warren and Woody blew me away. I was ecstatic. The setlist featured only songs from the original band and songs from the Warren & Woody era. Several—“All Night Train” “Temptation Is a Gun” “Change My Way of Living” “Back Where It All Begins”—had been recorded for Where It All Begins but were yet to be released.The show ended in reverse order of the Fillmore East recordings, “Mountain Jam” and “Whipping Post.” Recall that “Mountain Jam” is holy to me. What I didn’t know was it was only the band’s second full “Mountain Jam” in nearly 20 years. (The first was the night before in Gainesville.)I’d hoped to hear “Mountain Jam” that night, not realizing had I caught any other show from 1989 to May 2000 I had no idea the band wouldn’t keep playing a song THAT good every chance they could. (Little did I know…)A staple of the original band’s sets since Jacksonville in March 1969, “Mountain Jam” stayed in the repertoire on the 1972 5-man band tour. The band played it throughout 1973. There are notable versions with the Grateful Dead, including at Watkins Glen in July and New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. But “Les Brers in A Minor” and “Jessica” were more common as a show’s extended romps. Then, with the exception of a few times in 1979 and tease in “Jessica” that began in the Warren & Woody era, “Mountain Jam” fell out of the lineup for good. Why? “Dickey flat-out refused to play it,” says John Lynskey, Resident Historian of the Big House Museum in a clip from our recent Conversation from the Crossroads. Dickey agreed to do so in November 1993 as a concession to his bandmates, to see if they still had the magic. They did. I heard it with my own ear.Here’s my full conversation with John where we talk about this and much more The Summer of Mountain Jam“Mountain Jam” returned to the setlist for good in summer 2000 following the band’s bitter divorce with Dickey Betts. Jimmy Herring subbed for Dickey that summer and the music he and Derek Trucks made together was truly sublime. Here’s one example, from the archives of my dear friend, the late Jules Fothergill: Derek Trucks- There were two or three nights where we really just let go. Right before the drum solo in “Mountain Jam” we detuned and went all the way out. Sometimes Oteil would go with us and sometimes he wouldn’t. There was one night though, I believe at the PNC Arts Center, when all three of us went and there was just no hope of coming back. It was funny because I think Gregg said something about it on the bus and then came back about twenty minutes later and said to me, “Don’t worry, me and my brother we used to have fights about that all the time. He loved going out. But you guys do whatever you want to do.” It was funny. It was worth it.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTBrought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.🍄MUSHROOM🍄MAGICIANS🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty 🍑 PEACH 🍑 PALS 🍑 Chris Harvey, Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, DanbookinLLtABB swag This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Greetings from Stockholm. We’re visiting our daughter Tyler, who’s here for a study abroad.While touring Scandinavia, this adage/wisdom from my cousin Brad came to mind.Here’s the full conversation:Thanks for reading, y’all.Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.MUSHROOM MAGICIANS (Founding Members): Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCartyPAID MEMBERS: Chris Harvey, Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

The Unending ConversationThe first time I encountered Kenneth Burke’s concept of the Unending Conversation was in 1997. It was my first semester of graduate school in a class called, Modern Rhetorical Theory. I’ve carried the ideal that life is an unending conversation ever since. It’s a central precept of my teaching, my writing, my way of seeing the world. The good thing is, I’m surrounded by people who do likewise. Earth SchoolThis video is from an upcoming episode of Conversation from the Crossroads with Richard M Josey, my pal and fellow maker of good trouble. He hipped me to his term, Earth School—the idea that a life well-lived means continuing to learn, to grow. People get it instantly when I use the term Earth School. It’s not something I have to explain. I offer it to you as a way to think about the kind of ancestor you want to be. Music is the ultimate unending conversationThis is very much true for the Allman Brothers and extended family of bands/musicians. The core of this publication is in my subhead: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. Long Live the ABB is the lens I use to explore those ideas. Here’s one example of that in action, my comments on a Karl Paulnack’s truly magical “2003 Address to the Parents of the Freshman Class”—Why Music Matters: The Unending Conversation. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTThis episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.🍄 MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS 🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty🍑 PEACH🍑 PALS🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, DanbookinThanks for joining me on the journey.Until next time… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

The Allman Brothers Band’s story intersects with my own. I grew up in a South still shaped by segregation, Massive Resistance, and decisions that kept Black communities excluded from the means of power. The integrated Allman Brothers Band offered a powerful informal protest against the South's racial mores. How I found liberation in history.FULL EPISODEThis video is an excerpt from a recent Conversation from the Crossroads: “I wanted to get in the game” History, storytelling, and making sense of the SouthLagniappeSending this one out again. Very proud of this collaboration with my daughter Ryan. VIDEO ESSAY: “Walk out on that stage and do it.” Bill Graham, Fillmore East, and the mighty Allman Brothers Band 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTMERCHFillmore East ad. Jimmy Carter in an ABB t-shirt. Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. Join now. 🍄 MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS 🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty🍑 PEACH🍑 PALS🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

A clip from a recent podcast with John Lynskey, where we talked about the Allman Brothers Band as the ultimate team—players locked in with improvised intensity that very few bands ever match. Put simply, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That ethos was a founding principle of the band, and it inspired both of our professional lives as teachers and historians. When our conversation turned to the uniqueness of the Allman Brothers’ approach, John nailed a key difference between the Allmans and the Grateful Dead: the Allmans always found that crossroads home. And don’t miss the shout-out to the original Gov’t Mule—some of the most intense rock and roll either of us has ever experienced.FULL EPISODELagniappeIn the full episode, we discussed our amazement at seeing the Warren Haynes/Allen Woody version of the Allman Brothers Band. Here’s an example from the last year they were in the band: “Dreams” 5/1/96.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTBrought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCartyPAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewJohn Lynskey taught history at Miami’s Columbus High School for thirty years, coached for twenty, and served as assistant principal for seven. Upon retirement, he moved to Macon to work hands-on with the Big House Museum, where he had served on the board since day one. He has produced more than two dozen archival releases for the Allman Brothers Band, co-wrote Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg with drummer Bill Connell, and spent two decades as a driving force behind Hittin’ the Note magazine. But I knew John well before I knew of his connection to the Allman Brothers Band. In the early 1990s at UCF, some of my good buddies were Columbus guys, John’s guys. Lynskey was their history teacher and coach, full stop. Decades later, Mario sent a photo at John’s retirement. Talk about mushroom magic. Mario’s text arrived within minutes of it dawning on me that their beloved history teacher was John Lynskey, my fellow Allman Brothers historian and whose work I’ve been mining for decades. Our CrossroadsJohn and I share multiple intersections. We are historians who found the Allman Brothers Band through the music and grew fascinated with the entirety of their story. We both understand what it means to sit in an archive and chase a review that might not surface for five months after an album dropped. We believe music is a primary source, a band is a team, and community is what happens when like-minded people stop pretending they don’t need each other.When I launched Play All Night in Miami in October 2022, John flew down to host an event. Like the teacher and coach he is, Lynskey teed me up to tell Duane’s remarkable story in a bookstore packed with his students. That night I met Abel Sanchez of MiamiStadium on Instagram, a sports, history, and culture site that became a model for my work at Long Live the ABB.The Conversation(Picking up where we left off in part 1)During the 1989 Dreams reunion, John saw two shows he never thought would happen at Sunrise Musical Theatre in Fort Lauderdale. He knew who Warren Haynes was. Allen Woody was a revelation. He blew the room away.Dickey was still in his ABBsolute prime. Haynes pushed him into a different role—the push-pull that had been missing since Duane. We agreed Dan Toler and Dickey played too similarly for that tension to exist. We talked about my first show—November 13, 1993. I went expecting a nostalgia act. I got on the bus that night. I was unaware that Dickey had just returned from a rough patch and the Florida dates were a test run. The band broke out “Mountain Jam” for the first time in years. It was a concession from Dickey upon returning to the band. I asked John for archival favorites by year. 5/2/70 Swarthmore; 3/13/70 Warehouse, NOLA; 2/28/71 Brewer Fieldhouse with John’s favorite “Dreams;” 4/8/72 Manley Fieldhouse; 9/26/73 Nassau Coliseum.We talked about the dearth of Duane era bootlegs. Mike Callahan, the band’s soundman, apparently had a footlocker full of tapes. The footlocker disappeared when he got sideways with disreputable people. It’s probably sitting at the bottom of Tampa Bay.Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg is one of my favorite books in the Allman Brothers canon. The book fills gaps. Duane’s first marriage. The Anchor Motel brawl with Shriners in Nashville. The Boutwell Studios session in Birmingham where the tapes vanished. Duane and Gregg running into Yardbirds Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in New York—young musicians chatting, none of them knowing what they would become. I asked John for his favorite projects. Hittin’ the Note ran twenty years. The Trouble No More box set gave John an unlimited word count and earned Grammy consideration. The Laid Back deluxe reissue gathered everything Gregg recorded in that era. A Gregg Allman documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, is coming to seventy-five theaters this summer.Like-minded people have a way of finding each other. John has watched it happen through Columbus High School and through the music of the Allman Brothers Band. Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTResources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.* Bill Connell with John Lynskey, Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg (2023).* Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (1995).* Abel Sanchez, Miami Stadium on Instagram—www.instagram.com/@miamistadiumThis episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community.MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCartyPAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewA native of Miami, Sebastian Garcia’s parents emigrated from Colombia with a clear theory of his success in America: a career in medicine, law, or engineering. He entered the University of Central Florida as a biomedical sciences major and lasted two semesters before adding a second major in history.His work spans a narrative series about the First Seminole War and his master’s thesis about a 1920s Irish Catholic governor undone by a Protestant radio station that formed specifically to destroy him. Sebastian and I met when I came back to UCF in 2022 on the Play All Night book launch tour. He ran the department podcast. He was sharp, curious, and engaged. It remains one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.Our CrossroadsSebastian and I each hold undergraduate and graduate history degrees from the University of Central Florida. Same department decades apart. In October 2022, the department hosted me for a homecoming in the truest sense of the word. Sebastian interviewed me about Play All Night for Knights HistoryCast.He came prepared. And the book hit the right notes for him. It was a joy to sit with a young historian at my alma mater who understood exactly what I was trying to do and why.We share a conviction that history belongs outside the walls of the academy, in history as storytelling in audio, video, prose, in whatever medium puts the story in front of people who need it. Sebastian was already living that when we met four years ago. Following his work and career continues to be a joy. “History doesn’t change. Our interpretations do.” The ConversationSebastian called it liberation: the moment history stopped being an academic subject and became a way of seeing the world. It happened in a history class, tracking how the present shaped the people doing the writing. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. A first-generation Colombian American, Sebastian grew up in a Spanish-speaking Miami neighborhood. English came from school and television. UCF, four hours north, was a genuine culture shock—the first time he was consistently around people who didn’t look or sound like him. He’s still working out what “southerner” means. Orlando taught him the question exists in the first place. We spent considerable time on public memory. Monuments and memorials are historical arguments set in stone and what doesn’t earn mention means as much as what does, even more. That conversation led to his latest endeavor, The Memory of Negro Fort, a podcast series about a British fortification in the Florida panhandle that became the largest autonomous community of freedom seekers in American history. Andrew Jackson destroyed it in 1816, illegally, sparking the first of three American wars against Florida’s Seminoles. Sebastian wrote his master’s thesis on Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. An Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, Smith’s radio presence was powerful enough that opponents founded a radio station, WHAP (We Hold America Protestant) in response. Sebastian argues that public optimism that radio could rectify social rot, didn’t collapse in the 1930s with Father Coughlin and Benito Mussolini. The trust in the new technology cratered in the 1920s. Smith is an example of his thesis. We closed on community—family, his fiancée, the professors worth keeping close, the difference between being in an institution and having a home in one.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTResources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.* Bob Beatty and Sebastian Garcia, Knights HistoryCast, October 2022. https://knightshistorycast.podbean.com/e/episode-24-dr-bob-beatty-and-play-all-night-duane-allman-and-the-journey-to-fillmore-east/.Paid members of Long Live the ABB receive early access to Conversation from the Crossroads episodes.* Matthew J. Clavin, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community (New York: New York University Press, 2019).* Sebastian Garcia * The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast* Instagram* David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (New York: Random House, 1999).* Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).* Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).* David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).* Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986).* Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

[Bonus preview episode of Conversation from the Crossroads for paid subscribers.]This is a story of my thesis for Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East, that At Fillmore East is the definitive artistic statement of the Allman Brothers Band. The book started as a Ph.D. dissertation on Duane Allman and the Allman Brothers Band. That was basically a long document that just proved I could complete this long Ph.D. process. My goal was always to turn it into a book. I asked a friend to read the dissertation. He called me and said, “You just wrote a book on At Fillmore East.”That blew my mind.At that point, I was stuck. I’d written a 500+ page dissertation weaving in every quote, every story I possibly could stating that Duane Allman had changed American music. What I hadn’t done to that point was explain how we know that to be true. My dissertation said At Fillmore East was the definitive artistic statement of Duane and the Allman Brothers Band. It didn’t answer why that was. Nor, how we know that.Though it became my thesis in Play All Night, I spent months grappling with what seemed an impossible task. How could I distill a sound that I find the BIGGEST in the universe, into one album, one place, one moment in time?Doing so, I had to completely rethink albums altogether. I’m not being nostalgic when I say that album releases since the streaming era are just not what they were in the LP/CD eras. Albums were somewhat rare, precious gifts from artists. We didn’t have video and audio of nearly every concert or television appearance.In Duane’s era, there were generally two ways to make a living playing music: playing live and AM radio hits, where the Allman Brothers found no room. Where they succeeded was on freeform FM radio, which was album-oriented.To that point, albums had been a collection of singles. The Beatles helped make them artistic statements. It became de rigueur to think of records holistically, as a statement.At Fillmore East was their third album. They’d released their self-titled debut—sporting a BANGER of a Southern gothic image—in 1969 and Idlewild South a year later. The debut flopped. Idlewild hit #38 but wasn’t a breakthrough hit.Reviews were positive about both albums. But by the time you get to the Idlewild reviews, many writers have seen the Allman Brothers live. “Yeah, this is good and everything, but if you’ve seen them live, this doesn’t even touch it. They’re so much better.”And from 1969-1971 the Allman Brothers Band are ABBsolute road dogs. Touring 300 days a year, playing an estimated 250 shows a year.And these were not just paying gigs, they’d often play anywhere they could find an outlet. Sometimes they’d show up at a park on an afternoon and jam. They were building their chops and an audience.The band found it difficult to capture that live sound in a studio because they thrived on the energy of playing in front of an audience. That synergy with the audience pushed the band. They loved the dynamic.So there was a lot at stake when they decided to record their third album live on the most important stage in rock: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.It was a bold decision.Why? This is something I explore in Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East extensively. At Fillmore East answers the questions: What was Duane/the ABB trying to do with music? How do we know that? And how do we know if they were successful?We know what they were trying to do because they said it. And it’s not just Duane—he sets the vision, but they all share a vision: improvisational music at the highest level performed in front of live audiences.At Fillmore East is how we know if they succeeded. Number one, it is the album they recorded when it was all on the line. “This is how we want to be remembered.” Because after two years of relentless touring, the Allman Brothers and their manager Phil Walden were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. There was talk of breaking up the band. And we’d remember them differently had the band broken up in 1971. They would be much more of an underground band, a secret maybe, instead of a the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band they became.The second way we know it was successful is because it sold well. It was a massive hit that saved the band, Walden, and Capricorn Records. This is a band that literally had all forms of American music in their fingers. They had blues. They had jazz. They had folk. They had country. They had string music, bluegrass-y stuff. They loved the power and dynamics of classical music.They looked to what San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were doing with their music. Expanding the American musical canon with psychedelic musical explorations.Like the Airplane and the Dead, the Allman Brothers Band created their own particular musical stew, a dish uniquely theirs. In my dissertation I called it “American music,” but that has always seemed inadequate.And At Fillmore East isn’t really Southern rock. It’s much bigger than that and has a sound completely its own. Released in 1971, Fillmore predates the 1973 explosion of Southern rock with Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band joining the Allman Brothers Band on the charts. The Allman Brothers in Duane’s era is altogether different. Reviewers lauded At Fillmore East in language that reflected the band’s own vision as they struggled to categorize the sound. This is true in countless reviews, from students in college newspapers to the great Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone.“I just don’t know how to tell you what I’m hearing, but it’s really awesome.”Their sound and attitude was southern and uniquely theirs. The Allman Brothers Band were doing something completely new. And new takes a little while sometimes to catch up.Phil Walden, manager/record company owner/booking agent (no conflicts of interest there), remembered frustration. “We were just afraid maybe this group was too musical. Like, they were just too good for the audience.”Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTThis episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community who receive preview episodes. Sign up now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewJessica Dawkins grew up on a rural Indiana farm, raised by a single mother born in East Tennessee and a grandmother whose family had lived on a mountain ridge straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border for two centuries. When Indian Removal came, the men walked West and died on the trail. The women and children hid in caves for four months. What followed for generations was poverty, addiction, silence, and the slow erasure of who they were. Jessica knew by second grade that none of it was her fault. She just had to turn eighteen and get out. Music was a refuge. She was on the radio at fifteen, backstage at Deer Creek by seventeen, living between a dorm in Bloomington and a boyfriend’s band house in Louisville by eighteen. Motherhood rearranged her life. Education gave her language for what she already understood. She landed in history because a gold-leafed book caught her eye in a dark hallway she wasn’t supposed to walk through, and she opened it, and a map of Louisville in 1852 fell into her hands, and she found her house on it. That was the moment it all clicked for her. Jessica is a proud member of Generation X, a Southerner raised north of Ohio River, a single mother who broke every cycle she inherited, and a rock & roll bad ass who cofounded a roller derby league because nobody was going to tell her she couldn’t. We share a frequency—music, history, the South, daughters, and the belief that honesty and integrity is the only leadership strategy worth pursuing.Our CrossroadsJessica and I met through our professional careers as historians. We connected in myriad ways. We are both Gen Xers. We each grew up Southerners in places that don’t always register as the South. Jessica grew up on a farm in Indiana, with roots in the mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up in Stuart, a small beach town a hundred miles north of Miami.We are parents of daughters and conscious every day of breaking the cycles we inherited. We believe local history belongs to the people who live it, institutions exist to serve their communities, and honesty is the only leadership strategy that holds. That is a hill we have each died on.The ConversationWe started with roller derby, that’s where Jessica starts her own rock & roll story—at the roller rink racing with her best friend and eventually co-founding the Derby City Roller Girls in Louisville in 2006. Twenty-five women in matching satin jackets who built a business from the ground up, trained as athletes, and faced judgment from people who couldn’t reconcile hot pants with professional ambition. She puts roller derby on her resume because it was entrepreneurship, team leadership, and community building wrapped in fishnet stockings and set to the Beastie Boys.From there we went to family—a mountain ridge in East Tennessee, the Cherokee women who hid in caves, the poverty and addiction and silence that followed for generations. Jessica knew by second grade that she had been born into something that was not her fault. She counted the years until she turned eighteen.We talked about motherhood. Her daughters—twenty-three and fourteen. She drew lines and held them, not out of strictness but out of intention. She raised them the way she wished she had been raised, which is the whole point of breaking cycles.We talked about education. She failed out of Indiana University because music mattered more than French credits. She went back to community college at twenty-six with a toddler and no money. Financial aid eligible because she had a dependent. A local scholarship because nobody else applied. A national scholarship because the foundation believed in non-traditional students. Every door opened because she knocked on it—or because it was unlocked and she walked through anyway.We talked about GenX as a leadership superpower. Jessica realized hers when she was the only person her job who could run both the cash register and a point-of-sale system. She speaks in fluent Boomer, Millennial, and Zoomer.We talked about Louisville—her 250-year-old city with no history museum, where history has been told through the plantation owners who saved their houses. Jessica loves it anyway. She made it her home on purpose thirty years ago and has spent her career trying to make its institutions worthy of the people they serve. She believes a museum is no different than a restaurant—you hope they come in, enjoy themselves for an hour and a half, and walk out wanting to bring friends. She went from saying “welcome” to saying “this place belongs to you.”Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTUnique swag from LLtABBJimmy Carter. I’ve always loved this Walt McNamee shot of then-candidate Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt. Carter is speaking to reporters July 4 weekend 1976, shortly after the band’s break-up and Gregg’s testimony in a federal drug case. I tagged the barn in the back with Long Live the ABB shroom 2 from Psychodelik Pete. Fillmore East ad. This is an adaptation of an original newspaper advertisement for the original Fillmore East recording sessions. I replaced Johnny Winter’s face with the LLtABB shroom and moved the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, a spot they EARNED after Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewDoug Peaches is an engineer who found the Allman Brothers during COVID, got wrecked by the first minute of “Statesboro Blues,” and spent the next several years chasing every Duane Allman bootleg he could find. He tracked down cassette traders, cleaned up recordings, and put them back into circulation. That work is how I found him. Since then I’ve watched him move through obsessions—Duane’s slide guitar, guitar in general, and now classical music—with the same intensity each time. He talks about conductors and Beethoven’s sketches the way he talks about the Gatlinburg tapes. He’s person who listens with everything he’s got, definitely my kinda people. Our CrossroadsDoug and I share the conviction that Duane Allman’s slide sound was meant for us. Not in some abstract way—in the way that makes you stomp your foot and rewind and call somebody and happily scream “Did you hear this?!” I’ve watched him grow from a bootleg hunter into someone who can sit in a symphony hall and hear the same conducting principles at work that Duane used with the neck of his Les Paul. He credits our concert-going crew for teaching him how to be present at live music. I credit him for reminding me that fresh ears on old recordings can crack open things the rest of us stopped hearing years ago.The ConversationWe started where Doug started—chess, COVID, and the opening bars of “Statesboro Blues” off the deluxe At Fillmore East. He talked about the moment it clicked, the six months of nothing but Duane playing slide in the car, and the realization that what he loved wasn’t just the guitar. It was Berry Oakley’s thumping bass underneath it. It was the whole.That led us into the 2014 The Fillmore Concerts box set and a running discussion about how essential Thom “Ace” Doucette’s harp is on “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” Juicy Carter’s out-of-tune squawking (he’s more charitable than I), and the fact that every version of every song across those four shows is different—yet every track they chose for the original record was the right one. Doug made the case for the 17-minute “Whipping Post” from the Saturday March 13 early show as the best of the lot. He made the case for the Fillmore “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’” as the definitive version. He also held up the Gatlinburg Sessions—the highest-generation cassette of Duane, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe, and Gregg working out material for Eat a Peach at a ski lodge near Gatlinburg. Duane on acoustic Dobro. Gregg singing Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was.” Dickey playing an early “Ramblin’ Man.” Easter eggs everywhere.From there we moved to the symphonic quality of the Allman Brothers—Butch Trucks and the timpani, the Beethoven-esque endings, the dynamics and decrescendos that separate them from bands that play four on the floor. Doug introduced sonata form—exposition, development, recapitulation—and mapped it onto “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Two themes, a long improvisational development, Gregg’s organ section, drums, the whole band back to the head. I talked about hearing Duane conduct the band with his playing, not just his body—pushing Dickey’s rhythm guitar, shaping Berry bass lines—and how Derek Trucks does the same thing with Tedeschi Trucks Band with almost no visible movement at all. Doug called it conducting from the instrument. It’s same thing Mozart did at the piano.We talked about conductors—what they do, why they matter, and why two performances of Beethoven’s 5th can sound like different pieces. Doug has attended forty-plus classical concerts since landing in Boston. He’s paying attention to which conductors bring personality and history to the score versus the ones just beating time. The best ones, he said, make their musicians feel safe enough to bring themselves. That’s Duane. That’s Derek.That brought us to Leonard Bernstein and the Omnibus lectures—scripted but performed as if improvised, with a live orchestra, in front of an audience. Bernstein on Bach. Bernstein projecting Beethoven’s three rejected endings onto the floor while conducting each one. Doug’s point was sharp: this kind of musical education barely exists today. We closed on our friends Steeln’ Peaches out of Orlando, Florida, and an upcoming symphonic concert in 2027 with the Ocala Symphony Orchestra. Doug wanted to know who wrote the arrangements, whether there’d be a conductor, and whether the band would let the orchestra vamp during the floating intro passages of “Elizabeth Reed.” I thought about the Big Band of Brothers project and John Harvey, a professor who created these arrangements out of pure love for the music. Carrying it forward in a new form is the whole point.Paid members of Long Live the ABB receive early access to Conversation from the Crossroads episodes. Resources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.* Doug Peaches on social media* Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dougpeaches/* Tik Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@doug.peaches * Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@dougpeaches* Big Band of Brothers, A Jazz Celebration of the Allman Brothers Bandhttps://www.bigbandofbrothers.com. * Leonard Bernstein, Omnibus television lectures https://www.leonardbernstein.com/about/educator/omnibus🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewAdam Choit runs The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast—hundreds of episodes in, built from a simple compulsion to share a band he couldn’t stop thinking about. That impulse is the throughline of this conversation: what it means to love music so completely that you build something around it, and why that act of building pulls others in. Adam loved TTB so much he built a podcast around them. Somewhere north of 200 episodes, he has created a genuine community—not a fan club, not a forum, but an ongoing conversation about a great Southern band that has earned its renown the hard way: one town, one gig, one song, one note at a time. We talk setlists, repertoire, the amazing Learning to Live Together documentary, Leon Russell, and the legacy of Mad Dogs and Englishmen. But the real subject is community—how it forms, why it sustains, and what music makes possible that nothing else quite does.Our CrossroadsAdam and I found each other through a shared frequency. Tedeschi Trucks Band got us there, but what kept us talking was something bigger—the recognition that the bands we love become a kind of architecture for the rest of our lives. Adam put it plainly early in our conversation: the reason we jibe so well isn’t just our love of Tedeschi Trucks Band—it’s that we are unabashed about it. Neither of us traffics in cool detachment. I came to the Allman Brothers the way he came to TTB: a little late, all-consumed, unable to imagine how I’d missed it but knowing that you get a band when the muses appear. Then you spend the rest of your life making up for lost ground. We aren’t two fans talking shop—we were two people who had each built a community around a shared love of music and were now asking the same question: what do you do with a community once you have one? The ConversationAdam walked through the moment Tedeschi Trucks Band grabbed him and shared his fear someone else would do the podcast first. That fear is a signal worth paying attention to: when you can’t keep the ideas from coming, you stop asking whether and start asking how fast.From there we got into what makes a TTB show different from a night of good live music. It isn’t just the music—it’s the vibe onstage and in the room working in concert. Derek and Susan have always played for the audience, not at it. That’s an Allman Brothers idea, a jazz aesthetic—the audience feeds the performance, and the performance feeds the audience back. Dickey Betts talked about creating a transcendental experience. Derek and Susan say the same, as did Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. We talked setlists—how Derek Trucks builds a show, and the moves fans learn to read in real time. It’s almost as if Derek composes a live set the way a writer builds an argument: nothing out of place, no jarring transitions, tension and release working in harmony. Adam can feel the moves coming. I can too. The conversation kept pulling toward Leon Russell—his orbit, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen story, the relationship he built with Susan that lasted until the day he died. We landed on what I think is a core TTB thesis: Derek and Susan saw Mad Dogs and said, “We want everything about this concept except the dysfunction.” They built something to last. And it ABBsolutely has.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTResources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Adam Choit, The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast* Learning to Live Together (Jesse Lauter, 2021)* Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971)“Doctor prescribes, great band supplies”Tedeschi Trucks Band - Future SoulSince Adam and I spoke, Tedeschi Trucks Band released yet another BANGER. I knew I was going to love it, that’s how it’s been with every TTB album. But I connected so deeply with I Am the Moon—the album, the entire project, the concept, and the stories I found the songs—I tempered my expectations. There was no need. It’s another non-skippable album from Derek, Susan, & co. What can I say? They hit the note for me. LagniappesTwo ABBsolutely terrific interviews with Derek Trucks, who shows, once again, how well artists respond to a thoughtful interviewer. Both of these pieces really draw out some great stuff from Derek. The Bluegrass Situation “Tedeschi Trucks Band Have Done It Again” This one was so good, I completely forgot the interview was for a bluegrass publication until Justin Hiltner brought it up midway through. Premier Guitar “Derek Trucks’ Forward Motion” By my pal and fellow Allman Brothers historian/obsessive Alan Paul—a cover story, to boot! Alan’s been covering the ABB beat for a long time and has built a level of trust that really shines through in this piece. Upgrade to support Conversation from the Crossroads This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Warren Haynes turns 66 today.It’s hard for me to even describe how much Warren has influenced me as a fan of the Allman Brothers, as a student of the Allman Brothers, as a scholar of the Allman Brothers.Haynes has been an ABBsolute constant from the minute I discovered the band in 1993. Back then, everybody talked about the magic that the band had recaptured in the Dreams reunion and subsequent tour.And sure enough, when I saw the Allman Brothers Band for the first time in November 1993 (with Warren and Allen Woody), I remember thinking, “I cannot believe this band is still this good.”Warren is probably one of the world’s most generous souls. It flows throughout his music. And it also comes through in the way he talks about the legacy of the Allman Brothers Band as a musical institution.Warren respects the heritage he is a part of.It’s one of his most endearing qualities.“I’ve always maintained that if I was going to join a band I grew up listening to, the Allman Brothers Band would be at the top of that list. It’s a once in a lifetime experience. And it’s also something you can never prepare for. No one is ever prepared for the opportunity to join a band that is an institution like that. I was preparing myself for an entirely different career trajectory and that just came along and disrupted the apple cart in a good way.”A 5-tool player.He’s obviously renown for his guitar playing. But Haynes is also a great singer, songwriter, and arranger. He is also a phenomenal onstage musical director. (I can only think about two or three times over 30+ years I’ve seen Warren live where he was not clearly the person directing things onstage.)Butch Trucks: “Warren is one of the greatest guitar players alive today. He is also a great singer and songwriter. He brings all of these elements to the band and a solid presence that gives us a real focal point when we play.He does take charge of the music when we play and I doubt if we could play the way we do if he didn’t. He does it in such a way that he pulls everyone together without stepping on anyone’s toes. It is a very tough thing to do and he does it very well.”In 1989, Warren and Allen Woody brought spirit to the Allman Brothers Band—an energy that kicked the band in the ass.“When the band called me in 89 about the reunion, one of the first things we talked about was that we needed to get back to 69, 70, 71 where the band started because if we could get back there, then the sky’s the limit. But we had to see if the new band and this new chemistry could capture that sound and that feeling.⁠ Dickey told me several times they felt like they just backed out of the music business because the environment that was going on at the time was so different, they felt like they didn’t belong.But then Robert Cray started having some success. Stevie Ray Vaughan came on the scene and was really knocking people out, and at the same time, the Grateful Dead’s audience was getting bigger and bigger. Dickey said to me, ‘You know, somewhere in between, there is us. So maybe it’s time for us to come back.’ ⁠So the Allman Brothers band came back by being themselves, and I think that’s why it lasted as long as it did. Now, people look at that music as being timeless.”The group’s Woodstock ‘94 set—the festival’s 25th anniversary—was a highlight.“I remember it being a pretty inspired performance. I mean, there was 300,000 people there, so just the adrenaline rush alone was making for some great music. But the Allman Brothers Band always walked on stage ready to take no prisoners.When I joined the band the first rehearsals were inspiring, but not to the extent that the first show was because it’s showtime, it goes up to another level. By the time we got to Woodstock in ’94, the band had been playing together for five years and was really strong.”Warren and DerekFrom 2001-2014, Warren and Derek Trucks anchored the longest-running Allman Brothers Band lineup. Their partnership was truly something special.“[Derek & I] were together in the Allman Brothers for about 13 years, but we had played hundreds of times on stage together prior to that. A healthy dose of rivalry can be a part of that, it just can’t be trying to outdo each other. We both come from a world in which we listen to a lot of the same music and love the same styles of music and the same approaches to music, so we’re kind of looking for the same result from what we are doing. Once that chemistry is established, being able to build upon it and play together week after week, month after month, year after year, takes it to a completely other level.”PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN & THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EASTHaynes made the Play All Night Wall of FameJimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewSean Gaillard discovered the Beatles in fifth grade when his British teacher demanded he listen to them as penance for foul language. When he first found the Allman Brothers, he saw Jaimoe front and center in the Brothers and Sisters gatefold. These entry points were invitations, and Sean has spent a lifetime of practice around the idea that the music we love isn’t just soundtrack. It’s also instruction.Sean is a teacher, school administrator, author, a podcaster, and music lover. He’s one of those people who moves seamlessly from Billy Preston to Butch Trucks to Booker T. and the MGs. He grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the intersection of the Five Royales, R.E.M.’s early recording career, and a record collection his parents built on Motown and Sinatra. He found the Beatles on his own, on a borrowed copy of the Blue album, side one opening with “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Sean’s framework—music as metaphor, music as leadership lesson, music as shared humanity—intersects so closely with my own, we often ride in parallel. Our CrossroadsYears before we ever met, Sean and I locked in over the final half of “Mountain Jam” from Eat a Peach. We discuss this in minute detail—the moment Butch comes in late, keeps playing until he finds where they are, and snaps back with intensity. That moment of recovery, of finding the note and holding it, is Sean’s leadership philosophy in miniature. It’s mine too, though I’d never framed it quite that cleanly before he did.Sean is Black, grew up Catholic in a nearly all-white school in Winston-Salem, and was told more than once that the Beatles weren’t his music. His answer to that was to go find Chuck Berry and Little Richard in the Beatles’ liner notes, follow the chain, and arrive at a fully integrated understanding of American music that nobody could take away from him. It meant something to Sean when he saw Jaimoe on the cover of At Fillmore East. Same when he saw Billy Preston’s name on the back cover of Let It Be. It meant something. Sean traces a direct line from those moments to his career, his teaching, and the kind of leader he decided to become. The ConversationWe open with Tedeschi Trucks Band performing “It Ain’t Fair”—Duane Allman’s track with Aretha Franklin—and that’s the right place to start, because this whole conversation is about what happens when people reach across the lines that are supposed to separate them and make something that belongs to everyone.Sean’s entry into the Beatles came through a British teacher who assigned them as grammar medicine, a generous neighbor with the Red and Blue albums. A needle drop on “Strawberry Fields Forever” closed the deal. His entry into the Allman Brothers came through “Jessica,” then Brothers and Sisters, then Jaimoe’s presence on the gatefold—a Black man, front and center, not in the background, not credited as a sideman but as a founding member of a band from the Deep South. Sean connects that directly to the band’s place in a larger story of integration: Duane convincing Wilson Pickett to cover “Hey Jude,” which put that slide guitar solo in front of Eric Clapton, which produced Layla. The circle remains unbroken.We talk about Hour Glass recording “Norwegian Wood”—Duane on electric sitar, a little Brubeck, a little Miles, the equation assembling itself before the band that would use it existed.We talk Gregg’s solo catalog, his unpolished gems, his amazing version of “Rain,” and Southern Blood. These are the conversations you can only have with someone who has listened as carefully as you have.A Beatles thread weaves throughout.Sean’s framework for John Lennon inviting Paul McCartney into the Quarrymen—recognizing a threat, choosing the band over the ego—is a sharp leadership argument. He applies the same lens to Duane assembling the Brothers: Butch’s classical precision, Oakley’s Mingus-inflected bass, Gregg’s voice as an instrument, Dickey’s second lead guitar, Jaimoe’s jazz. The band, not the individual, as the unit of analysis. These are lessons Sean has been teaching for thirty years.We spend real time on representation—what it meant to Sean as a young Black kid in a mostly white Catholic school to find integration not as policy but as practice inside the music he loved. Billy Preston on the Let It Be sessions. Lamar Williams and Jaimoe on the Brothers and Sisters gatefold. Booker T. and the MGs. Arthur Lee and Love. More than mere symbols, they were evidence that walls are optional.Of course we talk the South. Sean was born in California, raised in North Carolina, has lived in Boston, and has the particular relationship with the South that belongs to people who chose it—loving its pace and its music and its landscape while holding no illusions about what it has cost and keeps costing. His read on where we are right now is as clear-eyed and unsparing as anything I’ve heard said on this podcast. We close on “Dreams”—Dickey’s rhythm part, two chords, holding the groove while the whole thing opens up above it. Sean plays it that way. That’s my goal as well. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄BUY PLAY ALL NIGHTPaid members of Long Live the ABB receive early access to Conversation from the Crossroads episodes.Resources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.* Sean Gaillard—seangaillard.com* The Pepper Effect: Tap into the Magic of Creativity, Collaboration and Innovation* Vinyl Riffs with Sean Gaillard (podcast) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

[Conversation from the Crossroads bonus episode: East Village, NYC]I found this video from 2024 while searching for something else in my archives. I stop and visit 105 Second Avenue, the site of Fillmore East every time I go to New York. The East Village was not only ground zero for the Allman Brothers Band’s triumph at Bill Graham’s legendary venue, it was also my own introduction to New York City: December 1992. New Yorkers have told me I caught the last of the wild and wonderful and untamed New York. I certainly agree. The New York I visited in 1992 was a like foreign country to me, particularly the area around Fillmore East.In 1992, St. Marks Place was teeming with activity, on the stoops, in the shops, in the streets. Music was everywhere. So was weed and incense. It was a legit 24/7 operation—the city that never sleeps. The things I witnessed in the wee hours of the morning are forever burned into my mind. I must’ve walked by the Fillmore East building at least 100 times on that trip. It was long abandoned and nothing marked its significance. This was pre-internet, so I couldn’t just look it up.🍄Sharing is caring. Give the gift of music. 🍄It was there all along. I found this video from 2024 while searching for something else in my archives. It gives a good sense of the corner of Sixth Street and Second Avenue today. This photo gives a view of the entire building. Guests entered the auditorium under the marquee on Second Avenue. The black staircase at the top left of the photo is the building’s fire escape (which I talk about in the video).The theatre had several lives after 1971, most notably as the famous gay nightclub The Saint, called “the Vatican of Disco.” In 1996 it was razed and replaced with apartments, although the original façade and lobby remained intact as a bank. In 2021, a small photo exhibition on the site’s history remained in the lobby. The building was closed when I last visited in 2025. Upgrade to support the Conversation from the CrossroadsLagniappeVIDEO ESSAY: You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it! Fillmore East, Bill Graham, and the Allman Brothers Band. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewIt was a real honor when Big Rick—host of Rock Talk Studio podcast—put Play All Night on his annual best-of list. We’ve been fellow travelers in the rock & roll media world ever since. Rick reviews rock and roll books and documentaries every week on Rock Talk Studio, which means he reads about thirty books a year and watches somewhere around fifteen docs. That’s history graduate school by any other name. I figured it was time to return the favor. Rick and I both came to Leon Russell late and hard—and we talk Leon, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and the Mad Dogs and Englishmen films, books, and the albums. Our CrossroadsRick and I share a love of rock & roll books and movies and the joy of talking about them with someone who cares as much as you do. Follow the tendrils. Let one record/book/film lead you to the next. Loving music means wanting to understand where it came from. We both believe that if a piece of art doesn’t hit for you, that’s on you. And we both know that the best rock writing does what the best rock music does—it fills in the gaps and shows you something you couldn’t see before.The ConversationWe start with the Tedeschi Trucks Band 2015 LOCKN’ set and the re-release of the Mad Dogs universe—how we each came to Leon Russell, why Bill Janovitz’s biography is essential, and the fact that TTB is the last band on earth playing the Mad Dogs’ canon. Leon Russell stole the entire Delaney and Bonnie band to build Mad Dogs and Englishmen and the tendrils from that moment run everywhere—Derek and the Dominos, Rita Coolidge, even Tom Petty, whose story connects directly to Leon through Shelter Records and Denny Cordell.The two films anchor most of what follows: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971) and Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen (2021). Rick breaks down what he loves about Mad Dogs and Englishmen as a piece of filmmaking—the looseness, the sheer number of people on that stage, the Sly Stone-meets-James Brown vibe of it—and I point him toward some details worth watching for on the rewatch, particularly the way the women of that tour are present and visible in a way the era rarely allowed.Learning to Live Together gets its own extended treatment. Jesse Lauter’s decision to let the women carry the story. The room when everyone first walks in after fifty years. Leon doing the “Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen” unrehearsed, sparked from a conversation Derek Trucks had with Chris Robinson just before taking the stage. And what it looks like when a man at the end of his life feels the music move through him one more time. Derek and Susan as protectors of the sound. The fragility and the joy of it all in the same frame.We talk about the art of rereading and rewatching—why going back through the Janovitz book a second time is what let me catch Leon’s backstage reaction when Rita Coolidge sings “Bird on a Wire,” a detail that tells you everything about a grudge that never fully healed. Rick shares what slows him down: he falls into the music every time, disappears into the catalog of whoever he’s reading about, and has to find his way back. The Rita Coolidge and Jim Gordon story gets its due. What happened on that tour would end things immediately today. They protected Rita after that. Gordon’s trajectory from there is one of rock and roll’s most tragic stories, documented in Joel Selvin’s Drums and Demons.We closed on what makes a great rock and roll book or documentary: the behind-the-curtain creative moment, the spark you didn’t know existed. Rick put it simply—rock and roll is a giant puzzle, there are a gazillion pieces, a lot of them have been put together, but there’s still a lot missing. That’s why he keeps going. It’s why I do too.Support the conversation with a monthly or annual membership.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄ResourcesBob Beatty* Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* “When it’s gone, it’s gone”: Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa* The joy of musical discovery https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/the-joy-of-musical-discovery* Rock Talk Studio podcast https://rocktalkstudio.buzzsprout.com/* Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker: A Memoir* Peter Ames Carlin, Tonight in Jungle Land: Bruce Springsteen’s America and the Making of Born to Run* Bill Janovitz, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History* Learning to Live Together (documentary, 2021)* Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary, 1971)* Joel Selvin, Drums and Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon* Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Podcast with Adam Choit—Episode 171 (Jesse Lauter interview) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

The Conversation from the Crossroads podcast has launched! Thanks for all of the comments and the love. All six (to date) episodes are here www.longlivetheabb.com/podcast. Stay tuned, lots more coming. And while I have your attention… I know you wanna know how to best support my efforts. Upgrade to a monthly or annual membership. Paid memberships testify to our shared love of music and its meaning to life. They say, “Thank you, Bob. Your work hits the note for me.”The room where it happened: March 26, 1969March 26, 1969 is an important day in Allman Brothers Band history. Three days earlier, following a MONSTER jam with five of the original six Allman Brothers, Duane Allman called his younger brother Gregg home from L.A. Gregg arrived at the Gray House, the communal home of the Second Coming, Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley’s band, directly from the road. The sound was so powerful, it knocked him backwards. I tell the rest of the story in the above video. “You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it!” Fillmore East, Bill Graham, & the Allman Brothers BandReally proud of this video essay on Fillmore East, which I published March 13, 2026, the 55th anniversary of the Allman Brothers’ recording the bulk of At Fillmore East. www.longlivetheabb.com/p/fillmore-east-video-essayPlay All Night! goes globalBRASIL: “Duane Allman’s opinion on Eric Clapton”UNITED KINGDOM: “The guitarist Duane Allman thinks ‘wrote the book’ on being an icon” Speaking of the U.K.Guess which album ranked #1 in the BBC Music Magazine’s “21 greatest live albums of all time”? Solo projects in Shroom Nation“Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr. Announce New Album The Offering” I am a big (BIG) fan of Lamar Williams, Jr., who I first heard when he fronted Les Brers, the band Butch founded after the Allman Brothers’ retirement. And Oteil? Oteil’s simply the best.“Guitar legend Warren Haynes defies Southern rock, jam-band labels: ‘No one likes to be stereotyped’” Matt Wake is just a terrific interviewer. Every time he speaks to a musician from the ABB family tree, it’s clear he knows his ABB history well. Here, he offers to Haynes a genuine opportunity to reflect on his life and career. “Gabe Dixon presents sonic identity both distinct and intoxicating” Gabe Dixon was new to me when he joined Tedeschi Trucks Band as a sub for Kofi Burbridge (Oteil’s brother) in early 2019. Within a matter of weeks, Kofi died, and Dixon stepped into the chair permanently. He was a revelation onstage as a singer and on the keys. He’s also an amazing songwriter, penning some of my favorite songs on TTB’s epic 2022 release I Am the Moon: the title track, “Gravity,” and the glorious “Soul Sweet Song.” Derek Trucks plays Jerry Garcia’s guitar at the BeaconMy good friend @farmer_doug1 caught some great video of Derek in action doing what I think is one of his badest-ass moves…changing a string onstage. There’s just something about him sitting there while that music SWIRLS AROUND him…In this case, it’s on Jerry Garcia’s 13.5 lb. MONSTER of a guitar, Tiger.“It’s not for the faint of heart. You need to know what you’re doing to play that guitar” Derek Trucks reveals what it’s like to play Jerry Garcia’s record-breaking $11.56mn Tiger guitar “How Derek Trucks Ended Up Playing Jerry Garcia’s $12 Million ‘Tiger’ Guitar” Tedeschi Trucks Band just released another ABBsolute BANGERFuture Soul has joined my listening repertoire. My lord is it a great album! More to come. Maybe.For now, let this great review from my dude Doug Peaches suffice. Thanks for being here y’all.One of my favorite photos ever. Yours truly with my best friends & bandmates Troy & Steve visiting the Gray House in 2021. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewAhmad Ward and I have been rolling strong since the early days of the pandemic, when a small cohort of museum leaders got together just trying to make sense of things. He is a historian, a museum leader, a Southerner, a father, and one of the most honest people I know. Our CrossroadsAhmad and I met in the history museum field and stayed close because of what the work demands—honesty, courage, and a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable stuff. We navigate Southern identity differently, and we’ve always been frank with each other about it. History is our common language. Liberation is the goal.The ConversationWe started with what it means to be a Southerner—the many Souths, the Lost Cause mythology baked into the culture, and the work of deconstruction that history demands. I was raised with a version of Southern identity modeled on things I’ve spent my adult life unlearning. As a Black man, Ahmad lives that same reckoning from a different position entirely, and hearing him name it plainly has been life-changing for me.The Civil Rights Movement anchors our discussion. We contend it may be the most significant domestic American political and social movement of the 20th century—because of the stakes, the participants, and what it cost them. Ahmad has spent his career inside the institutions that carry that history forward—from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, where he works today.Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth gets his due. Ahmad and I share him as a hero. The bravest man I ever met—and I mean it. When I brought him to the History Center in 2004 for the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, the energy in that room was unlike anything I’ve experienced in a professional setting. We talked about what it means to do this work in this particular moment (February 2026) and what history offers when the present feels unstable. It doesn’t predict the future. But it does remind you that the struggle is much larger than any one of us, and that people with far less protection than we have put themselves in harm’s way anyway.We closed on Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in Hilton Head and the philosophy Ahmad lives by these days, “We work in brave spaces, because safe is subjective.” I answered with “Be who the younger you needed.”Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505Resources* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Birmingham Civil Rights Institute https://www.bcri.org* Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth* Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park https://exploremitchelville.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode OverviewTY Yoken produced Duane Allman Anthology Volume II. He got the job through sheer effort: an FM DJ and Duane fanatic who fed a steady diet of Duane tracks to the folks at Capricorn Records. His efforts made the case there was a second record’s worth of Duane Allman anthology material. When Phil Walden eventually called offering the opportunity to write the liner notes, TY said yes. Instead, he ended up producing the entire set.We’ve been friends since Jeff Kollath hosted an event with me and King Curtis biographer Timothy Hoover to launch Play All Night! at Crosstown Concourse in Memphis.From there, the conversation moves into freeform FM radio, the bootleg archive that preserved what broadcast stations captured, and what it meant to watch the 5-man band grieve in public.Our CrossroadsTy and I both came to this music the same way—obsessively, through record store cutout bins, FM radio, and the conviction that following Duane’s name on the back of an album would always lead somewhere worth going. He did it with a turntable and a 50,000-watt radio station. I did it with a Ph.D. dissertation and a book. The methodology is identical: find the name, pull the thread, don’t stop until you’ve heard everything.The ConversationWe started with Duane Allman Anthology Volume II itself—what TY heard when he put it on fresh this morning, what surprised him, what still holds up. “Dimples” comes out of the box hard, mixed from a second or third generation bootleg tape of Ludlow Garage April 1970 he brought to Macon himself. Johnny Sandlin and Ovie Sparks cleaned it up. Nobody knew what they had. That’s the whole story of this record in miniature.TY built the track list the way he built radio sets—by knowing the canon better than the people who owned it. Capricorn didn’t know where half of them came from. The record opens with “Happily Married Man,” a Muscle Shoals session track TY heard for the first time on full blast in the Capricorn studio—and knew immediately it had to lead. Johnny Sandlin pushed for “Leave My Blues at Home,” recorded on Ovation guitars. Phil Walden and Frank Fenter added Aretha Franklin after they were unable to work a deal with Clive Davis for a Laura Nyro track. What ended up on the record—”It Ain’t Fair,” with King Curtis, Duane, and Aretha—is one of the greatest studio tracks Duane ever cut.TY’s knowledge of Duane’s catalog brought to mind a puzzle I finally put together in 2025, this piece that ran September 29, 1970 in the Macon TelegraphDuane did not attend, neither did Clapton. They had planned to, but Clapton was distraught, and Duane stayed behind in Miami. That day they recorded an acoustic version of “Mean Old World” with Luther’s dad Jim Dickinson producing. The funeral trip wasn’t real, but the press release does appear to be. Freeform FM radio is another topic we cover. TY helped take over WOUR in Utica on June 1, 1973—50,000 watts, blank canvas. They broke Charlie Daniels out of there. They had Meatloaf live. Tom Petty. They played Duane Allman from tapes nobody else had, which was common in the FM freeform era. Listeners recorded those broadcasts and traded them. That’s how we have Syria Mosque 1971, Ludlow Garage 1970, and the like. TY himself seeded the archive with the 4/7/72 Manley Field House show https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/manley-fieldhouse-1972.We closed on grief, joy, and why this music still matters. TY watched the Allman Brothers play Manley Field House in April 1972—two months after Eat a Peach dropped, five months after Duane died. The 5-man band lived out their grief on stage in real time. Twenty years later, I received a cassette of the show and played it as loud as it would go, feeling every bit of that emotion coming through the speakers. A gift from my friend TY, 25 years before we ever met. Support the conversation with a membership.🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄ResourcesPlay All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East, Bob Beatty—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Duane Allman: An Anthology (Capricorn Records, 1972)* Duane Allman: An Anthology Vol. II (Capricorn Records, 1974)* Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective (Rounder, 2013)New Mexico museums/historic sites* Taylor-Mesilla Historic Site https://nmhistoricsites.org/taylor-mesilla* Tinkertown Museum, Sandia Park, New Mexico—https://tinkertown.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I am very proud to present  “You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it” Fillmore East, Bill Graham, & the Allman Brothers Band, a video essay I’ve long in the works in collaboration with my daughter, Ryan.Thank you to paid members of Long Live the ABB for your support of this project.Upgrade to a paid membership.Here’s a quick note in preface to the video essay: “You got something you wanna say? Walk out on that stage and do it” Fillmore East, Bill Graham, & the Allman Brothers Band.A student at New York University asked to interview me about Bill Graham and Fillmore East, (particularly) and West for a documentary project.As I explained to Caroline, I’m not a historian of Bill Graham, but Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East documents well his connection to the Allman Brothers Band story and how important he was in breaking their career and as the premier promoter in rock.What follows is the conversation that emerged from our discussion. (I’ll put a link to her final product, the documentary she was working on in the show notes.)Bill GrahamI’m not a Bill Graham scholar, only as much as it attaches to the Allman Brothers Band, but his story fascinates me. Born in Berlin and orphaned in the Holocaust, Graham grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from City College of New York with a business degree or, as he called it, “efficiency expert.”Drafted in 1951, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the Korean War. He began his career in the service industry in New York City restaurants. After military service, he worked in the resorts of the Catskills, where he honed skills that later defined him—logistics, people management, and showmanship.Graham had a genuine love for theatre and trained to be an actor. His acting career never took off, but his connections to that world led directly to his groundbreaking career in rock promotion.Fast-forward to 1965. Graham, now in San Francisco, has just taken over as manager of the political satirists the Mime Troupe, after their leader’s arrest on obscenity charges.He rents the Fillmore Auditorium for a benefit concert for legal defense. The November 6, 1965 show was transformative for Graham.He initially approached the event with a practical, almost reluctant mindset. His primary goal was to support the Mime Troupe.What unfolded fundamentally reshaped his trajectory and that of rock music. The concert featured a diverse mix of local bands, including Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs. Poets and other performers brought more countercultural spirit.Graham saw the Fillmore Auditorium as a space that could host electrifying, immersive performances. The raw energy, the packed audience, and the seamless interplay of music, performance, and activism left an impression. Graham saw music draw massive, passionate crowds while serving as a platform for a broader cultural movement.The benefit sparked his understanding of the importance of live music, the live music experience, to the youth counterculture. It catalyzed his shift to becoming a central figure in the burgeoning Bay Area music scene, leading to his stewardship of the Fillmore and his role as one of the most iconic concert promoters of the era.He eventually secured a permanent lease for the Fillmore Auditorium, 1805 Geary Street, San Francisco, which he operated until summer 1968, when he opened Fillmore West at 10 South Van Ness Ave.Dig this video? Upgrade now.Fillmore East, East Village, NYCHe’s so successful in San Francisco that he decides to open a venue in New York City. He buys the somewhat derelict Village Theatre in the heart of the East Village, 105 Second Avenue. He opens it as a rock palace: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.Graham was a professional who had come up in the Borscht Belt. He understood guest service, and he gave his best to provide excellent value for the entertainment dollar. Built in 1926 as a Yiddish theatre, it was one of those glorious movie/vaudeville palaces built in the years between World Wars I and II.The building was in pretty poor condition when Graham took over in 1968. The Fillmore East had an odd configuration. Its narrow lobby fronted on Second Avenue. The theatre itself sat back beginning about a half-block east along 6th Street.It sat around 2,700. It had an orchestra section and one long balcony. The shows themselves were always an event.Graham said, “I wanted Fillmore East to be the white man’s Apollo Theatre. ‘You got the stuff? You got something you want to say? Walk out on that stage and do it!’ When you walked out on the stage at Fillmore East, you knew. Sound, lights, special effects, light show. ‘You want to show the world your stuff? Do it here.’” “The Fillmore East,” he said, “became what I had hoped it would be.”The building shared a block with New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and NYU students were essential to Graham’s operation, adapting and improving upon things he’d learned in San Francisco about lighting, sound, and stage management. Above all, live music was an experience for musicians and audience alike. Graham cared about his audience. He invested in sound, invested in the light show.Bill Graham presentsI always think about the The Last Waltz, which he promoted at Winterland in San Francisco. A lavish event he threw on Thanksgiving Day 1976 to say goodbye to the Band, one of the greatest of their era. Graham served a full Thanksgiving dinner. He brought in ballroom dancers to entertain the crowd. The stage was beautifully set, complete with chandeliers from the San Francisco Opera House. The Last Waltz may have been Martin Scorsese’s film, but it’s a film about a Bill Graham production.Graham made money from rock promotion, but he provided quality—a lot of bang for the entertainment buck. He was foremost a businessman. He recognized artistry had value and he made money presenting it. He went into rock promotion thinking about money differently than the more idealistic young people of the San Francisco counterculture. He saw no problem making a good living providing settings for these important cultural events.Graham added to the mix unique artist pairings, eclectic bills that educated listeners and exposed his audiences to the highest level of entertainment he could afford. Graham staggered his bills so while the headliner got all the attention, he gave the audience something different at each step.“Freddie King didn’t mean anything in San Francisco at the time. But Quicksilver alone would sell out the hall. The ice cream was the Grateful Dead or Quicksilver or Jefferson Airplane. But the vegetables you had to go through to get to the ice cream might’ve been Lightnin’ Hopkins or Junior Wells.”At the Allman Brothers Band’s second Fillmore West appearance, January 1971, they were the middle band on a bill with Electric Hot Tuna. The opener was the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band, a 24-member steel drum ensemble from the Caribbean island. Other seemingly disparate pairings over the years include Rahsaan Roland Kirk with Jethro Tull, Woody Herman with the Who, and Miles Davis with Neil Young and Crazy Horse.Graham was an unlikely tastemaker. When he got started, he was ignorant of contemporary music. He preferred jazz, big band, and mambo. “From the very beginning,” he said, “I accepted the fact that I had no real personal knowledge of the rock scene of that era.”He didn’t listen to radio. He watched what crowds responded to and served them more of the same.“I don’t think Bill noticed our music much,” said Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. “He always loves it when the crowd gets off even if he doesn’t personally understand or personally dig the music.”Graham’s rosters were a genuine blending of cultures that art and music provideThe touring business remained pretty segregated and the musicians exposed him to Black performers like the Staple Singers, Bobby “Blue” Bland, James Brown, Chuck Berry, and “the ultimate” Otis Redding.A star on the Black rhythm & blues circuit, Redding had yet to break through to the white market. Said Redding’s manager Phil Walden “Otis had worked to white audiences but at white colleges in the South because it was a tradition. Black people always entertained white people down there.”The shows were a smash. Said Graham, “Otis Redding was by far the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison.”Graham’s rosters were a genuine blending of cultures, the kind only art, and specifically music, provides.Nearly every band started out playing blues and they were meeting their heroes.When B.B. King first played the Fillmore Auditorium, when Otis Redding first played it, they were shocked at how well the white audiences received them. Same was true when Aretha Franklin headlined Fillmore West March 1971.Graham exposed the musicians to different sounds. Introduced them to their heroes. And sometimes he altered their performances.Here’s one example from his autobiography.“I liked Ten Years After very much as a band but one aspect of their show personified a lot of my difficulty with rock and roll. The drum solo. The endless, seemingly nonmusical drum solo.Not that theirs was worse than any other. It was not even really bad drumming. It was just like eating dry Cheerios without milk and fruit.I wanted to set an example for all the bands as to what real drumming was all about. I was introduced to Buddy Rich. I told him I ran a place called the Fillmore in San Francisco and that on this certain show, I had a headliner from England, a group that was very good but they always did a drum solo I didn’t care for.I told Buddy I wanted to introduce his music to these kids. But that I also wanted them all to see what a drummer really did. What a real drummer was all about.The night of the show, we set up for Buddy Rich. Little old-fashioned bandstands to hold up the songbooks. Which the kids had never seen before. We set up this little midget drum kit for Buddy. One bass, one little snare, bang bang, that was it. Buddy sat down at the drums.As I was making the introduction, people were screaming, “ALVIN! TEN YEARS AFTER! ROCK AND ROLL!” The brass section stood up and played that opening riff from “Norwegian Wood.” Then Buddy took off.BAM BAM BAM BAM BOOM BOOM BOOM WHANGA WHANGA WHANGA BOOM!The entire room swerved. All the kids going to get something to eat turned around and looked at the stage. Buddy fucking wailed! The room was mesmerized. They were eating something they had never eaten before and they could not believe how good it was.They were just glued to the stage. He held that room for an hour. And he was great.Now I had prepared myself for what came next. I had rehearsed it eight thousand times. We were now in the break, setting up for Ten Years After. I walked into their dressing room.Ric Lee, their drummer, was at his drum pad warming up. He said, ‘Hey, Bill. How you doin’?’ I said, ‘Ric, how are you? Hey, man. Can’t wait for your solo tonight, baby!’He didn’t do one. They walked out and played a set of harsh rock and roll and if he took three seconds to go off by himself, that was it. It was great.”Here’s Bill Graham constructing a lineup using a jazz legend to teach a rock drummer a lesson. And in the meantime, showing his audience the root source of the music they loved so much.And again, it’s about the music. Bill Graham understood that. He cared about quality for the musicians and the audience. And he delivered that such that bands flocked to Graham’s Fillmores to record live albums. Not just the Allman Brothers Band, but dozens of records, many of them stone-cold classics. Here’s but a sampling of some of the standouts in my listening retinue.* Aretha Live at Fillmore West* King Curtis Live at Fillmore West (recorded at the same residency as Aretha)* Grateful Dead: Live/Dead (Fillmore West)* Albert King Tuesday Night in San Francisco and Wednesday Night in San Francisco Fillmore Auditorium)* Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys (Fillmore East)* Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Fillmore East)* Jefferson Airplane Bless Its Pointy Little Head (Fillmore East and West)* Miles Davis At Fillmore* The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper (Fillmore West)* Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s 4 Way Street (Fillmore East)This is not a comprehensive list, just my listening habits. And these are just full albums. It doesn’t count partial albums or tracks released on other albums.If that list isn’t proof enough, give a good listen to At Fillmore East. The music sounds ABBsolutely ALIVE.Much of that comes from Graham’s sound system. Producer Tom Dowd captured that sound brilliantly for that record and I’m 100% convinced the stellar sound has a lot to do with the album’s enduring success.“Fillmore” connotes quality.It was the gold standard.The biggest stage in rock.New York City.Artists understood that Bill Graham represented quality. Graham demanded artists meet his high standards. He trusted his gut and he had good taste.The Allman Brothers Band met the mark.“I played them because I thought they were really good and I thought the public would think so as well. The Allman Brothers made me feel good, in that particularly physical way. You may not move, but it affects your body as well as your emotions. The Allman Brothers have that ability to make me feel really good, to put out the good spirit within you.”Fillmore East was the pinnacle. It was where Duane and his bandmates recorded their make-or-break third album. And what they recorded of such high quality that even the word “Fillmore” connotes quality live music. The Allman Brothers themselves have a lot to do with that, of course.At Fillmore East is a record that has just endured. And as a historian of place, I can’t overlook the significance of the name, Fillmore East. It grounds the recording in situ, New York City’s East Village.The Light ShowBill Graham understood that the audience—the consumer, to put it in 21st-century terms—was vital to the experience. And the light show added to the magic.Two different light shows served Fillmore East: Joshua Light Show & Joe’s Lights. Graham hired him Joshua White in 1968 to run Fillmore East’s in-house light show. When White and Graham parted ways, Joe Raposo/Joe’s Lights replaced them. Like most places in New York City, space was tight at Fillmore East.The light show projected from behind the stage. And when you see Amalie Rothschild’s photos you can see the ingenuity at work. For example, Graham’s people invented a lazy Susan-like stage set-up—that would rotate the drums around. That infrastructure also pushed the musicians almost to the edge of the stage.Joe Cocker during the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour is almost standing in the audience. Now they have 30 people on stage—not a lot of room, but the Fillmore East was a very intimate space, as was true for most of the ballrooms and theatres that nurtured the rock scene of the late 1960s and 1970s.The light show was a vital part of the performance, and that was especially true for the Allman Brothers Band when they recorded At Fillmore East March 11-13, 1971. They weren’t headliners that weekend. They were an “Extra Added Attraction”—the middle band after the Elvin Bishop Group and before Johnny Winter.Alan Arkush:“I was a member of the light show by then and we weren’t booked to work that weekend because Johnny Winter was the headliner and Johnny Winter didn’t like a light show. We didn’t perform, we just came to see the shows. Duane saw me and he went, ‘Where’s the light show?’ I said, ‘We’re not hired to work this weekend.’ ‘What do you mean? I brought the whole family up here to see the thing.’They were one of the few bands he would ask that the stage lights to be lowered so people could really see the light show. Duane called Bill in San Francisco and Bill said, “Yeah, hire the light show. Will bring them on for you. If you guys want the light show, will do it. If it will make you feel more comfortable.”The light show had the effect Duane wanted. The bulk ofAt Fillmore East was recorded Saturday, March 13.Closing Fillmore EastOne reason Fillmore East is remembered as such an epic venue is because it had a really short lifespan.It opens in spring 1968, and by summer 71, Graham shuts it down due to what he saw as greed on behalf of artists’ managers and agents.Graham’s goodbye letter, featured in the Village Voice is pretty epic:“Ever since the creation of the Fillmores, it was my sole intention to do nothing more, or less, than present the finest contemporary artists in this country, on the best stages and in the most pleasant halls. The scene has changed and, in the long run, we are all to one degree or another at fault. All that I know is that what exists now is not what we started with, and what I see around me now does not seem to be a logical, creative extension of that beginning. Therefore, I am taking this opportunity to announce the closing of the Fillmores, and my eventual withdrawal from producing concerts.The Fillmore will become a thing of the past. I will remember with deep emotion and fondness the great and joyous moments of that past. I sincerely thank the artists and business associates who contributed to our success. But I warn the public to watch carefully for what the future will bring.The rock scene in this country was created by a need felt by the people, expressed by the musicians, and, I hope, aided to some degree by the efforts of the Fillmores.But whatever has become of that scene, wherever it turned into the music industry of festivals, 20,000-seat halls, miserable production quality, and second-rate promoters—however it went wrong—please, each of you, stop and think whether or not you allowed it, whether or not you supported it regardless of how little you received in return.”He chose the Allman Brothers Band to close the hall the weekend of June 25-27, 1971. The band themselves calls the late show June 26, the last public show at Fillmore East, as the greatest Allman Brothers Band show of all time. (It wasn’t recorded.) The final night, Allman Brothers Band played the final set at Fillmore East.Fillmore East was a product of its timeGraham’s was an era of experimentation, but that’s true for most musical eras. Graham had his finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist of his moment.Graham always understood it was about the show, not him. But he definitely impacted the cross-pollination. He used his bully pulpit to book bands he preferred, who he believed deserved to be heard.And this was important. Artists just need a chance to get in front of audiences. Graham was intentional about that, certainly with the Allman Brothers Band.The only time the Allman Brothers Band headlined Fillmore East was when they closed the venue. They hadn’t even released At Fillmore East yet (it released the following week).Yet Bill Graham chose this relative unknown southern band to close the hall. That’s how much they meant to him.“I wanted to build them into a headliner, and I thought they should have turned the corner sooner.”He did. And they had just recorded a landmark album at his venue that everybody knew was going to be a hit.Graham closed the Fillmore East with a big party. Had a bunch of artists play the final weekend—June 25, 26, 27, 1971.Allman Brothers Band closed all three nights.When the Beach Boys manager demanded to close on the 26th, Butch Trucks remembered, “Bill didn’t even look at him. He just said, ‘Well, you can go ahead and pack up your shit and get out of here. I’ve got my closing act.’”The band acknowledged that show as the greatest they ever played. Prior to the 11:30 show, the theatre had been cleared for a bomb threat.This was a really symbiotic relationship. They closed the venue with an epic 3+ hour show. Here’s how Graham described their set 24-hours later.“They got out on the stage about 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, and they didn’t get off till about 7:00 in the morning. And it’s not just that they played quantity, and for my amateur ears, in all my life, I’ve never heard the kind of music that this group plays: the finest contemporary music. We’re going to round it off with the best of them all, the Allman Brothers.”No recordings exist.The next night, the night of Graham’s introduction, was recorded and simulcast on radio. It was an invite-only music industry affair.The crowd was tame, to say the least. “Y’all are awful quiet,” Duane said, adding “too high” off mic.And then the Allman Brothers walked off the stage. That was it. Graham closed the venue for good.That was June 27, 1971.The theatre at 105 Second Avenue saw several attempts to recapture its former glory.The building operated as Villageast in 1972, before being rebranded as the NFE Theatre (New Fillmore East) in 1974. Following Graham’s objections, the use of the Fillmore name, it was christened Village East in 1975.The building’s most notable post-Graham chapter began in 1980 with its transformation into The Saint, a revolutionary gay nightclub known for a dazzling planetarium dome and cutting-edge lighting, The Saint closed in 1988.The theater portion met its final curtain in 1995, with complete demolition of the auditorium following in 1997, it is now an apartment complex.The original facade and lobby at 105 2nd Avenue remain. As late as 2023, it housed a (now-closed) bank branch with a small Fillmore East display in the lobby.Here’s yours truly at 105 2nd Avenue. I took this shot March 9, 2020, the day before the Brothers’ EPIC Madison Square Garden show, and the week the world shut down due to Covid.Upgrade to support the conversation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode overviewJeff Kollath and I go back nearly twenty years—two museum professionals, two Allman Brothers obsessives, two guys who follow liner notes wherever they lead. Jeff reached out wanting to talk. I said let’s record it. Part music history seminar, part genuine friendship, all nerd joy.Our CrossroadsJeff and I met in the museum field but bonded over the music. We share the same methodology—find a name in the liner notes, follow it somewhere, let it teach you—and the same instinct that loving something deeply means being honest about its failures. Jeff is the guy you want on your trivia team and his music recommendations are consistently 10/10. We both believe that loving a band honestly—including saying out loud when they blew it—is the truest form of fandom.The ConversationI’d sent Jeff “How Did it Get this Bad? Allman Arista Artistic Apocalypse”—an assignment for Record Time magazine to write about the Arista-era Allman Brothers.Jeff came in ready to defend Reach for the Sky and Brothers of the Road. He listened to start to finish, and came to the same conclusion I did: there’s almost nothing to defend. What followed was a reckoning with the Allman Brothers Band’s most troubled era—and the forces that created it.How it happened: the peak of 1973, the failed American Music Show tour of November-December 1974, the solo tours that favored Gregg over Dickey, Capricorn’s bankruptcy, and a signing to Arista Records that handed Clive Davis final say so. The result was a band stripped of its dynamics, forced to play at a pace and tempo that had nothing to do with how they made music—a band whose power has always lived in intentionality. Dickey yell-singing. Gregg disengaged. Mike Lawler’s keytar!Grateful Dead comparison runs throughout. Both bands exemplars of the counterculture of the 60s & 70s, both on Arista, both navigating the same cultural moment. Why did the Dead survive Clive? It comes down to artistic control, infrastructure, and the difference between a band organically contemporizing its sound and a band being pushed by a label to sound like something it isn’t.We gave the American Music Show got its due. Dickey’s November-December 1974 tour—Vassar Clements on fiddle; an R&B horn section; an acoustic bluegrass set; and glorious, psychedelic Western Swing takes on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”—remains one of the most ambitious and underappreciated chapters in the whole Allman Brothers story. It face-planted. We talked about why, and why the peak of 1973 made the eventual crash inevitable and devastating.As proof, a recently surfaced complete recording of Dickey’s American Music Show from Santa Monica on December 11, 1974—Dickey’s birthday. It deserved to be heard, so I put it out into the world.And we close where we started: loving this band means being willing to say when they blew it. The Arista records are the proof. The reclamation—Seven Turns, Shades of Two Worlds, everything that followed—is the payoff.Resourceslonglivetheabb🍄com* Vitamin ABB: Artistic Apocalypse https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/vitamin-abballmans-artistic-apocalypse* I finally did it…I listened to the Allman Brothers’ Arista albumshttps://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/arista1* The ABB’s Worst Album https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/the-abbs-worst-albumBob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Record Time magazine* Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band* Alan Paul One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band* Bill Janovitz, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History🍄MERCH🍄Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt, July 1976 with Long Live the ABB logo on boathouse in the background This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Lessons from Mad Dogs & Englishmen on International Women’s DayCommemoration is an important tool in my historian toolbox, particularly my work with museums and historic sites. We memorialize to remember—whether through archives or museum collections, historic sites, historical markers, books, programs, memorials to Duane (https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/remembering-duane-allman-part-2), you name it.It helps that we set times on the calendar to remind us, again, to reconsider the past as it relates to the present. During Black History Month, on International Women’s Day, and events like them, we reflect on change over time: where things have been, where they are today, and why. Two films about the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour—the eponymous 1971 film and the 2021 Learning to Live Together documentary—offered me the opportunity to consider change over time for women and rock & roll. This came from an interview for my Conversation from the Crossroads podcast. “Conversation” is as intentional a word choice as “Crossroads.”Great conversation, like jazz, begins at what looks like a single intersection, two fellow travelers talking—a way to explore the world through another’s eyes and experiences. The conversational format works well for me as an opportunity to curate my own thoughts in post-production. Such is the case with the attached video.Unlike any other rock & roll story of their era, women are represented as vital members of the creative equation from the get-go. The 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen film and the 2021 Learning to Live Together documentary each show this in on-/offstage moments from the 1970 tour and the 2015 reunion set with Tedeschi Trucks Band. Claudia Lennear, Pamela Polland, and Rita Coolidge shine as keepers of the story. As does Rita Coolidge’s courage in light of drummer Jim Gordon’s brutal assault on her during the tour. Women and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen legacy Rarely are women as well represented in the rock & roll story than in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the Joe Cocker/Leon Russell tour from 1970, the live album, the incredible film that came out of that. Fast forward to the twenty-teens, Tedeschi Trucks Band seizing the mantle, bringing that band back together and playing a reunion set. That became a documentary, Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen. Phenomenal documentary. Women are really well-represented across the board, not as objects, but as active participants in the rock & roll story. You can see them working out arrangements, how vital they are to the music, how vital they are to the entire ensemble. And they’re keepers of the history, as you see Jesse Lauter’s Learning to Live Together. This is me with Teresa Knox of The Church Studio in Tulsa, Leon Russell’s studio. It’s from a recent episode of Conversation from the Crossroads—Southern music, history and culture, Tulsa-style: longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa. Women are an important part of the band. And it shines through in these films. Rita Coolidge, in particular, has been a muse and inspiration but was ripped off by the lack of songwriting credits on “Layla” and “Groupie (Superstar).” How many millions of dollars she has lost on just those two records alone?! But it’s more than being ripped off musically. During the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, Coolidge endured a heinous attack at the hands of her boyfriend, drummer Jim Gordon, who called her out into the hallway away from others, and knocked her out cold without provocation. After the incident, everyone on the tour protected her. In 2025 (probably even 2000), an incident like that would have probably ended the tour. At the very least, Gordon would have been hauled off to jail and kicked off the tour. Rita’s sequence in the Learning to Live Together documentary shook me. She clearly knew she dodged a bullet with Gordon, who suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother Osa in a psychotic episode in 1983. (He spent his last 40+ years incarcerated.)Lagniappe Tribute: Cocker Power My video does not acknowledge Linda Wolf’s wonderful photography of the 1970 tour and the 2015 reunion. Her book Tribute: Cocker Power https://cockerpowerbook.com/ is wonderful—a must-have for any fan of rock & roll history, particularly rock & roll photography. Dig also Behind the Seen: Linda Wolf, which has some fantastic Mad Dogs & Englishmen tales. (Regarding the title of this post, yes, the pun’s intended.)Upgrade and support the conversation. Long Live the ABB on EtsyOriginal designs in collaboration with artists and graphic designers. https://www.etsy.com/shop/longlivetheABBCoda“The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” Gloria SteinemThanks for joining me at the crossroads. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I visited The Church Studio in September 2025 on my way to move my older daughter to Phoenix. That’s when I met Teresa Knox, the dogged historic preservationist and music lover who saved the studio Leon Russell founded in a church building in Tulsa. Tulsa, Oklahoma is a genuine crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture—and nowhere is that more evident than at The Church Studio, the century-old sanctuary that Leon Russell transformed into one of the most storied recording spaces in American music. Teresa Knox—founder, volunteer CEO, and graduate/founder of the School of Hard Knox—saved the building after decades of neglect and turned it into something that defies easy categorization: a working analog recording studio, a living archive, an audio engineering school, a community anchor, and one of the most compelling historic sites in the country.Our CrossroadsTeresa and I each feels history and place in our bones, whether standing in front of a building, a grave, or a stage. We share a foundational belief that historic sites only matter if they’re relevant, and that relevance has to be earned every single day. We’re both obsessives about provenance and authenticity—Teresa spent years restoring The Church Studio down to bedrock, following National Park Service standards to the letter, while I spent years researching Duane Allman . And we both came to our particular obsessions through music that hit us young and never let go—for Teresa, an eight-year-old girl discovering Leon Russell on a Slurpee cup; for me, a Florida kid hearing Southern rock and thinking, “Those are my people.”(She shared her Allman Brothers Slurpee cup with me.)The ConversationTeresa’s story begins with shame and pride in equal measure—growing up poor in Tulsa, learning everything she could about Oklahoma history and famous Oklahomans, and finding in Leon Russell a scraggly-haired kid from her exact hometown who made it onto a convenience store cup. That fierce pride in place became the engine for everything that followed, including buying (sight unseen) The Church, a dilapidated building in the Pearl District of Tulsa and spending six-and-a-half years restoring it.We dig into the deliberately hybrid business model that keeps the Church Studio alive—recording revenue, memberships, gate admissions, a bar, an audio engineering school, live music three days a week, and a digital content operation generating 1.5 to 2 million YouTube views a month. Teresa is clear-eyed about what historic sites can and can’t sustain, and her analysis of why the Church had to go back to being a working studio is some of the sharpest institutional thinking I’ve encountered.The preservation ethics conversation goes deep—the decision to leave the permastone exterior rather than strip it back to brick, the three distinct aesthetic periods layered inside the building, and the painful saga of the historic tax credit that got pulled after Teresa had already spent the money to qualify. I have some thoughts about the Oklahoma Historic Preservation Office. Teresa is more gracious than I am.The Founder’s Dilemma comes up—Teresa has read the book and recognized herself in it. Her strategic thinking about her own eventual exit, about making the institution bigger than Leon Russell and bigger than Teresa Knox, is the mark of a genuinely mature leader.We close on Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Learning to Live Together—the women of that tour, Rita Coolidge, Chris O’Dell, Claudia Lennear—and the throughline from Leon Russell to Delaney and Bonnie to the Allman Brothers Band and to the Tedeschi Trucks Band. She tells a great story of Derek Trucks arriving to the Church drenched in sweat after a six-mile scooter ride in 110-degree Tulsa heat and Susan Tedeschi teary over the Linda Wolf lenticular. That’s what this place does to people.Upgrade your membership to support the conversationAbout Teresa KnoxTeresa Knox is the founder and volunteer CEO of the Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma—Leon Russell’s historic recording studio, now a working analog studio, living archive, audio engineering school, and community music hub. She is the author of a wonderful book, Sanctuary of Sound. Find everything at thechurchstudio.com and schoolofhardknox.com.ResourcesBooks* Teresa Knox, Sanctuary of Sound: The Church Studio Story (2025)* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History by Bill JanovitzVideo/Film* This is Teresa Knox - The Church Studio | Tulsa Oklahoma (podcast interview I reference)* Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary)* Learning to Live Together (documentary)History institutions* OK Pop, Tulsa—https://okpop.org* Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa—https://bobdylancenter.com* Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa—https://woodyguthriecenter.orgPlay All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East🍄MERCH🍄 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode overviewThis episode of Conversations from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture features Jason Earle (Jason Earle), host of The Marinade with Jason Earle podcast and emerging singer-songwriter—for a wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation that explores creativity, Southern identity, community, and what it means to finally claim the artist within yourself.Jason’s podcast was a touchstone for me during the final stretch of writing Play All Night, discovered during a writing retreat in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That serendipitous connection set the stage for a friendship built on shared values, overlapping obsessions, and a mutual commitment to doing the hard work — creatively and personally.Our CrossroadsJason and I share more than a love of Southern music. Both of us have spent years reckoning with what it means to grow up Southern—the beauty and the ugliness, the duality that Patterson Hood named and that both of us have lived. Both of us came to our creative lives later than we planned, and both of us are leaning into it harder than ever. Jason’s journey through a decade-long relationship ending, the reclaiming of his Southern identity, and the making of his debut EP at 45 mirrors my own pivot from institutional historian to author, guitarist, and aspiring songwriter. The crossroads here is real.The ConversationWe covered a lot of ground—geography and how it shapes you, the moment you finally call yourself a songwriter, the Drive-By Truckers as a philosophical framework, community as survival, physical media as resistance, and what it feels like to finally belong on a stage. Jason opened up about emerging from the hardest chapter of his life and finding his most authentic creative self on the other side. I reflected on finishing Play All Night, stepping into my identity as a musician, and what it means to stop being afraid of letting the music come through. Neither of us planned to go this deep. That’s what made it work.Our conversation included the long, winding road of reclaiming Southern identity—the good, the complicated, and the parts that require ongoing work. We open up about how geography shaped us: small-town Florida, the Florida Gators, Jacksonville’s fertile creative scene, Nashville, and the music that threads through all of it. The Drive-By Truckers’ “duality of the Southern thing” serves as a touchstone.Jason shares candidly about emerging from a difficult personal chapter—a decade-long relationship that ended—and how leaning back into his Southern roots and creative life became a form of survival and, ultimately, renewal. His debut EP, recorded at 45, is the product of that reclamation.I reflect on parallel themes in his own journey: finishing Play All Night, stepping into my identity as a guitarist and aspiring songwriter, and the moment my creative life stopped being something I kept at arm’s length.Resources & Links* Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East by Bob Beatty — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* The Marinade with Jason Earle podcast — marinadepodcast.com* Jason Earle music on Instagram — instagram.com/jasonearlemusic* Drive-By Truckers — drivebytruckers.com* Orange Blossom Revue — orangeblossomrevue.com* Suwannee Roots Revival — suwanneerootsrevival.comAbout Jason EarleJason Earle is the host of The Marinade with Jason Earl, a podcast exploring creativity, and a singer-songwriter based in central Florida. His debut EP is expected in spring 2026. Follow his music journey at @JasonEarleMusic on Instagram and find the podcast at marinadepodcast.com and on all major streaming platforms. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

It’s official. I’ve launched Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern Music, History, and Culture, a podcast that is really me talking with the fascinating people that I encounter in my life. Here is the inaugural episode, a live event with my longtime pal, historian Kevin M. Levin of Civil War Memory.Here’s something interesting…The whole genesis of this was the conversations that I have with y’all on a regular basis about the interesting things you see based on the interesting things I’m pointing out here at LONGLIVETHEABB.COM.I realized I have a really cool community of people that I have worked with and have made friends with across my life. The kind of people who think about the world in interesting ways and are thoughtful about the ways they share that with other people.As y’all know, I’m a historian. I have a Ph.D. in history, but my career has been spent in history organizations like museums and archives and historic sites.It’s in that work that I recognized the myriad ways people interact with and see the world. And there are billions of lenses to use here, but often for me, it boils down to something my old man used to say.He would sit there with the newspaper and he’d go, “Here’s something interesting…” and he would share it. Now most of my life it annoyed me because he made everybody stop and listen to him. (Most of us can probably relate to something similar with an adult in our lives.) But the fact of the matter is my dad found the world interesting and shared that with us. With me. My mom was the same way and my grandparents regularly sent news clippings and stuff through the mail. And that’s what this whole thing is about. I always consider my work here to be that. “Hey! Here’s something I find interesting. You might too.”Writing and interpreting stories around Southern music, history, and culture is my jam. The crossroads theme is very intentional. It’s a blues theme. Robert Johnson. Carries from the deep in the American South, but it has African roots to it. (See https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/southern-gothic2.)Crossroads are the intersections of our lives. Where we intersect within ourselves and with other people. I hope you’ll join me in exploring these concepts in podcast form. There’ll be several elements to the show, but this series that I’m about to launch will be interviews. Edited some, but for the most part, I let them do their thing. I hope that it’ll spur conversation for you in your own world. Also to seek community. That’s my ulterior motive is community. ‘Cause that’s what the solution’s gonna be outta all this mess. All of it. Community is finding common cause. Music is a great common denominator. Art is a wonderful common denominator. It’s also there to challenge us and our understanding, as is a deeper look at history. Don’t be afraid to look at the bad parts of history. There’s nothing scary about it, the bad parts of history in my own family’s past. All I can do is atone for that as, as best I can.So welcome to the Crossroads. I’ll be releasing things as the spirit moves. I look forward to having you here. And here’s the deal. If you’ve been enjoying this for a while, it’s time to throw some money in for a paid membership to longlivetheabb.com. I’m cranking here and I certainly appreciate throwing some bones my way if you’re been appreciating what I’ve been throwing down. Either way, I’m gonna be doing what I’m doing.Upgrade to a paid membership.I appreciate having you here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Episode overviewJoin me and historian Kevin Levin for a wide-ranging conversation about public memory, Confederate monuments, the Lost Cause narrative, and why controlling how people remember the past has always been a political act. Along the way, the Allman Brothers Band make an inevitable — and illuminating — appearance.Our crossroadsKevin and I are both non-traditional historians who arrived at our research area from unexpected angles and built public audiences for serious scholarship outside academic silos. We share a foundational belief that memory—not just history—is the battlefield that matters, and that controlling how people remember the past is always a political act. We’re both obsessive about primary sources, whether that’s Kevin dismantling the Black Confederate myth through Confederate government records or me tracking a single newspaper clipping about Duane Allman across three decades. And perhaps most personally, we both came to a reckoning with the Lost Cause—me through my grandmother’s Reconstruction stories and my father’s Kappa Alpha hero worship of Lee, Kevin through a German wife who looked at Richmond’s Monument Avenue and simply asked, “What exactly is going on here?”The conversationThe blogosphere that was. The early 2000s Civil War blogosphere and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic blog and what we’ve lost as social media replaced reasoned dialogue with talking points, and why good-faith conversation is worth protecting.Memory vs. history. The distinction that runs through the whole episode: history is the past; memory is how we grapple with it. Memory is generational, emotional, and always in motion. A student coming-of-age through Black Lives Matter filters the Civil War differently than a grandparent shaped by Gone with the Wind — and both reactions make complete historical sense.The Lost Cause, explained. For listeners new to the term: the Lost Cause is the post-Civil War reframing of the Confederacy’s defeat as a noble, principled stand against industrial aggression — not a war fought to preserve slavery. We trace its roots and show how it was deliberately engineered, generation by generation, through monuments, textbooks, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.The monument landscape and how it changed. Kevin traces the evolution of Confederate monuments from cemetery markers (genuine grief) to courthouse squares and prominent boulevards (deliberate civic messaging). He explains why the placement and dedication language of early 20th-century monuments make their purpose unmistakable — and reflects on the stunning pace of change after the 2015 Charleston massacre and the 2020 murder of George Floyd, including his own Smithsonian piece incorrectly predicting Richmond’s Monument Avenue would stand.The Allman Brothers and the Confederate flag. I drop receipts: the band’s official 1974 summer tour poster featuring Robert E. Lee riding through the Confederate battle flag — at a moment when one-third of the band was Black. We unpack what that tells us about the pervasive success of the Lost Cause: that even an integrated, culturally progressive band raised in Southern schools absorbed the flag as a symbol of rebel identity, not white supremacy — even its use in massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.States’ rights — and the argument-ender. States’ rights in the service of what, exactly? When Northern states passed laws against federal fugitive slave enforcement, Southern states insisted on federal intervention. Moreover, as Kevin shows, the Confederacy was the most aggressive wielder of federal power in American history, drafting soldiers and impressing crops, livestock, and enslaved labor. Black Confederates: the myth, the reality. Kevin’s book addresses this directly. The short answer: the Confederate Congress did not authorize the enlistment of enslaved men as soldiers until March 13, 1865 — weeks before the war ended. A small number paraded in Richmond. They were housed in a jail cell. They were never given weapons. The myth of a significant Black Confederate fighting force is, as Bob puts it, “a made-up construct” — and its function is to obscure what the Confederate government actually did between 1861 and 1865: wage war to preserve slavery.What Germany can teach us. Kevin’s German wife has long noted, with pointed curiosity, that Americans have monuments to people who tried to establish an independent slaveholding republic. Bob reflects on a recent trip to Berlin — walking the line of the wall, standing in a city that has chosen to mark its shame everywhere, openly. Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans gets a mention as a comparative framework Americans would do well to engage with.The federal assault on public history. We are clear that what the current administration is doing to the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and federal funding for museums and history is unprecedented. There is no comparable moment from either party. This is the same impulse that drove the United Daughters of the Confederacy: if you can shape how people remember the past, you can shape how they see themselves — and what they’ll accept — in the present.Why difficult history matters. A conversation-closing reflection on why studying the painful parts of the American past is not a political act but a human one. History, both agree, is their Zen — the place where ego falls away and you find yourself a small speck in something much larger and more humbling than your own moment.Books & resources mentioned* Bob Beatty, Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505* Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)* Hilary N. Green, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2025)* John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005)* Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)* Tim Galsworthy, The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP (University of South Carolina Press, 2025)* C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1955)* Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1995)* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000)* Jim Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (The New Press, 1995) and Lies Across America (The New Press, 1999)* Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History (W.W. Norton, 2004)Thanks to KevinHere’s his blurb for Play All Night on Amazon“Play All Night! is more than just a history book. It is a love song to a band that has brought great joy to generations of diehard fans. An entertaining and illuminating exploration of the music of Duane Allman, the Allman Brothers Band, and the story behind the recording of one of the most iconic albums in rock history. This book was a pleasure to read.”—Kevin Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent MythKevin Levin is a historian, educator, and author based in Boston. He spent years in the classroom teaching the Civil War and its legacy, and continues teaching online at Kevin M. Levin/Civil War Memory. He is the author of numerous books https://cwmemory.com/books/.Long Live the ABB is hosted by Bob Beatty. New episodes explore Southern music, history, and culture through the lens of the Allman Brothers Band and the world that made them.Conversation from the Crossroads is people-powered. Pony up and join the fun.PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN AND THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EAST This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I was reminded of this adage when I opened my royalty statement from the University Press of Florida for Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East. To say it didn’t sell well in 2025 is an understatement. But it really doesn’t matter because I am having so much fun here with Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. I’ve got some exciting things on the horizon, including a full season of conversations with some of my inspirations—interesting people from my life. Above is a preview of one of these discussions. Support the Conversation! Upgrade to a paid membership.LagniappeFrogwings, May 3, 1998 Sunfest, West Palm Beach, FloridaAnother liberated from the archives. This was singer Edwin McCain’s last gig with Frogwings. He never recorded with the band, which was a shame as I much prefer his vocals and vibe to John Popper of Blues Traveler, who appears on Frogwings’ sole album Croakin’ at Toads. This set is missing “Hot ‘Lanta,” which they closed with. I have never tracked down that version. 🍄 MERCH (including this fantastic shirt)🍄Thanks for joining me on the journey. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

This past Sunday, I arrived home to Tennessee after a wonderful 7-night, 8-day trip to my home state of Florida to write/record some music, see some friends/family, and gather my thoughts after a pretty hectic 2025. I spent several hours in Lake Wales/Babson Park, Florida—where Dad grew up. I took a lot of photos, which I set to “Detlef Schrempf” by Band of Horses—a song that just felt right to me as I was scrolling the images. These two missives from the road give context to my journey.Greetings from MaconA reflection from the site of some of my favorite childhood memoriesLagniappeJust liberated two posts from behind the paywall. Both contain playlists to accompany Play All Night.🍄🍄‍🟫🍄Support the conversation🍄🍄‍🟫🍄Thanks for being here. I am grateful for you joining me at the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

My Florida writing retreat included a Magical History Tour to a couple of places that mean as much to me as any place on earth: Bok Tower and Babson Park, Florida.At Bok Tower (video), I sat under the Spanish moss-draped oaks for more than an hour, writing song lyrics as they came to me, but mostly just reflecting on this beautiful place that towered over the part of Polk County where my family hails.Babson Park is less than 10 miles from Bok Tower. My Granddaddy Bob and MaMa moved there in 1935 when Dad was 6 months old. They bought a small house in Elizabeth Manor, a defunct housing development around a small lake. My grandparents were chicken farmers, and bought property around the lake lot-by-lot. The road from Libby Road to the subdivision was a red clay road named for my family: Beatty Road.Below are two photos of the road sign. The first one is at the end of the road leading to the house (which is still standing). The second is at the corner of Libby Road and Beatty Road. Dad lived at the farm until he went to the University of Florida in 1952. He surely had his fill of farm living as I never saw him swing a hammer or turn a screwdriver in my life. He wasn’t as mechanically declined as he let on, but it made me so.My grandmother moved from the farm in 1970 when my grandfather died. She moved into a small house in Hillcrest Heights, a couple miles as the crow flies from the farm. Some of my happiest childhood memories are visiting her and my cousin at that home and swimming in Crooked Lake for hours on end. I mentioned in my last post, Greetings from Macon, place matters a lot to me. Place is what roots history in situ. I feel different when in these places. It’s why preservation is so important to me. When I think of the places that had some of the greatest impacts on my life, Babson Park and Lake Wales both rank high. It’s why I came to this particular part of Florida to do some reconnecting, which was my goal going into this season of life.LagniappeHere’s yours truly from a few years back opining on place in my book An AASLH Guide to Making Public History: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I’m on a weeklong writing/recording trip in my home state of Florida. I left Nashville (aka Narnia) Sunday. I took the long way around to see a dear friend in Birmingham for dinner and posted up in a very special spot in Macon for the night.I’m here in Davenport, Florida for the next couple of days. Upgrade to a monthly or yearly membership to keep the stories coming.Here’s a where my mind was as I was prepping to leave. VIDEO: Gettin’ the gear ready.VIDEO: This one’s for my fellow grinders.Snaps from the trip thus far.LagniappeThe young man I’m standing with outside of the H&H is Evan Bentzel, bass player for the Macon Music Revue. They released an album last year of Macon-related classics: PLAYLISTThanks for joining me on the journey. Glad to have you here at the Crossroads…Keep on truckin’Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

A bonus for paid subscribers. Thanks for showing me the love in a way that encourages me to keep following my muse.This one is a clip from a much longer conversation. (Stay tuned.)I packed a lot of ideas into this 3-minute video along with some video and photo footage of Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s hallowed hall at 105 2nd Avenue in New York City’s East Village.Be well.Much more to come, including a BIG announcement.Dig this stuff? Upgrade. You ain’t gonna miss the $5, it’ll give me a little encouragement, and it tells Substack that people care about southern music, history, & culture. (I don’t care about that except algorithms need titillation.)LagniappeThe Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen 1971 film is one of the greatest rock & roll movies in history. It’s recently been rereleased. Dig it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I’m guessing most of you who follow me probably feel like I do right now: truly grieved by what’s going on these days and wondering what you can do to see yourself and those you love through. I strongly believe community is an answer. I have always found community in music. The first time I felt it was listening to music (probably the Beatles) with someone else (probably my cousin Brad) who GOT IT—the excitement of what was coming out of the speakers. I wanted MORE OF IT. More of the sounds, of course. But sharing the music with others also kicked my voracious music jones into high gear. “You mean we can read and write and even talk about how awesome the music is?”Picking up guitar made the addiction worse. I could make my own music by myself. But it was an entirely different animal making music with others. That’s what I seek.CommunityThat’s because we thrive in community. It is essential to the human experience. And I celebrate the work and efforts of those working to build community wherever that may be. One of the earliest bandmates in my professional world is Eric Gray. We have maintained a long friendship over the years and miles. Eric was the development director at the History Center in Orlando, the museum I helped open in 2000. We bonded instantly as young fathers and Florida Gator fans.He remains as solid a cat I’ve ever encountered. The lessons I learned from him decades ago about community and nonprofits still resonate. I’ve passed them on to countless colleagues over the years. Conversation from the Crossroads live February 6 at 6pmBarley & Vinedowntown Orlando Eric and I are going to meet for beers and I’d love for y’all to join us. I don’t do the endorsement game at all, but my friend is running for office in Central Florida, a place that means a lot to me. It’s where I went to college (and the pros). It will always be home. I personally know Eric as a difference maker, a change agent, and as a community builder. I’ve waited for him to run for office for a long time and I would like the community I’ve gathered here at the Crossroads to meet someone genuinely committed to public service at a particularly fraught time in American life.There will be no pitch, no fundraising. I do support Eric. I have financially supported him because I believe in people like Eric.Because I believe in causes. I do. And I believe public institutions with effective leadership can help us through the mess we have found ourselves in. My friend is running for office. And you are my friend because you’re hanging here with me at the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.And I want to see some of y’all I haven’t seen in forever. Particularly my longtime Central Florida/Orlando bandmates with whom I made lots of good trouble over the years.For those local to Orlando, here are details.February 6, 6pmBarley & Vine Biergarten 2406 E Washington StOrlando, FL 32803Please come say hi if you’re nearby. I’d love to catch up. This post is public please share it with others.Special thanks to Jason Earle for helping me put this together. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

A couple of weeks ago, I visited my daughter in Phoenix and got a chance to tour the Musical Instrument Museum with my other daughter.The museum had an extensive collection of instruments, audio, and video and audio content from all over the world. THE WORLD. The place is expansive, even overwhelming at times. But their interpretation was top-notch in my book, enhancing the visual of thousands of instruments on display with audio tours of folks from those countries using those instruments. I created a video from my visit and figured some of y’all might enjoy the result. You’ll see some incredible gear, from homemade instruments to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s amp. And here’s a sweet Allman Brothers connection: Dickey’s Fender Bassman from Lipham Music in Gainesville, Florida (here’s more on that connection.)I’ve got it set to three songs, reflecting my mood as I compiled the footage.Lucero “My Best Girl” Allman Brothers Band “Statesboro Blues” (At Fillmore East outtake) Nancy Wilson “60B (Etown theme)”A note on processThere’s very little editing here. I knew I wanted to start with the Lucero song, which played in my head the entire visit. The videos more or less stayed where I initially placed them before adding music—pay attention to that when you get to the “Statesboro Blues.” The Nancy Wilson song is from the Cameron Crowe movie Elizabethtown. It mostly fit for length, but something about that drone sound just fit. Some other highlights Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Gibson L-5Charlie Christian’s Gibson ES-250 (maybe?) Louis Armstrong’s teacher’s axeGiven Armstrong’s influence on the world, it’s impossible to sum up the importance of this humble instrument. Conversation from the Crossroads is a true labor-of-love. Show some love back with an upgrade. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

This was BIG FUN y’all, hanging with Rick West primalbeet of the Southern Writers Guild.We talked writing, we talked about the South, and, of course, we talked music. A LOT OF IT. Rick took me down all kinds of Allman Brothers rabbit holes, and I got to do a real plug for Tedeschi Trucks Band as a quintessential Southern band, something few people ever seem to mention about them. I’ll be using things from this conversation in upcoming posts and other material. Grateful to Rick, MJ Polk, and Gray for inviting me into the conversation. UPGRADE NOW & SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION FOR THE WORK I DO. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

A bonus for paid subscribers. Thanks for showing me the love in a way that encourages me to keep following my muse.This one is a clip from a much longer conversation. (Stay tuned.)I packed a lot of ideas into this 3-minute video along with some video and photo footage of Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s hallowed hall at 105 2nd Avenue in New York City’s East Village.Be well.Much more to come, including a BIG announcement.Dig this stuff? Upgrade. You ain’t gonna miss the $5, it’ll give me a little encouragement, and it tells Substack that people care about southern music, history, & culture. (I don’t care about that except algorithms need titillation.)LagniappeThe Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen 1971 film is one of the greatest rock & roll movies in history. It’s recently been rereleased. Dig it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

On September 30, 1970, a puzzling announcement appeared in the Macon Telegraph.Duane Allman will play at funeral jam for HendrixIt didn’t happen.But it did result in a gorgeous acoustic take on Little Walter’s version of “Mean Old World” with Duane and Eric that appeared on Duane Allman: An Anthology “Mean Old World.”The story in the video.Pony up $5 for the full story and a whole lot more cool stuff.LagniappesT-Bone Walker recorded multiple versions of “Mean Old World.” His 1942 take is groundbreaking as the earliest blues electric guitar recording. It sounds vastly different than this 1959 take on Atlantic, which sounds closer to Duane & Clapton’s take.I didn’t capture Luther Dickinson telling the story about his dad recording “Mean Old World,” but I did get some snippets of Derek Trucks sitting in with the North Mississippi Allstars.Here’s one I’ve just uploaded.Thanks for being here y’all.And thanks for your paid subscription that affords me the headspace to share this with the world. (Yes, Conversation from the Crossroads is an international publication!) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

My reflections on Bob Weir 1/12/26 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Trying something new to gauge how Youtube treats my videos. This snippet is from a much longer conversation with historian and fellow music and record nerd Jeff Kollath. I’m hyping Scott Soriano’s Record Time magazine at the beginning of this clip. That’s where my print piece will show up. Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads.Bob WeirI get into some Grateful Dead talk right at the end of the video. There’s more coming on the Artista topic specifically, and my thoughts on Bob Weir’s death. In the meantime, I’ll turn the lectern over to the Reverend Brother Warren Haynes, who shared these words in Rolling Stone. He was like the missing link to the puzzle for the Grateful Dead’s music. All the parts made sense, all the pieces to the puzzle made sense. But Bob’s was the least predictable and the hardest to explain. It is something about what he brought to the table, what he added that just defied what came before.The first time we played together was at Wetlands in New York City. I had gotten a call inviting me down to sit in with Bob. It was a really unique experience. That Wetlands audience was so great, and there was nothing like it.We hit it off from the beginning. I had been working a lot with Phil [Lesh], but he and Bob were not doing a lot together. Then they mended their fences and started communicating again. And Bob joined our band, the quintet, that version of Phil and Friends onstage at the Beacon. Things just started moving in a really positive way. And I was getting to know Bob for the first time. He was a really easy person to talk to and hang with.There was this one show, Fourth of July, at [the Rothbury Festival in Michigan in 2009] that we did with the Dead. There was a moment in “Viola Lee Blues” where the band just stumbled upon this energy. It reminded me of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. It was some of the greatest collective music that I’ve ever been a part of. It came, and then it was gone, and we all felt it. We looked at each other like, “Wow, what was that?” And it’s because everybody was riding the wave and everybody, which includes the audience, was taking the exact same approach to the music, which was to just let it happen and let it flow through you. I could tell from the smile on Bob’s face and the smile on Phil’s face that we were all experiencing that same thing, which was what the Grateful Dead waited for in their intense improv search of the note.There was all this talk about that philosophy, how the Grateful Dead never rushed the magic. I remember Dickey Betts telling me one time that was the difference between the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. The Allman Brothers forced the magic to happen, and the Grateful Dead waited for it to happen. I always thought of it as both being beautiful approaches to music, but an interesting way to describe the differences between the two entities.All the times we played together, I would spend a lot of time onstage listening to what he was doing and adapting to it in my own way, doing the same thing that he does with trying to kind of augment his approach, which is what the jazz approach to music is all about — conversation. His thing was all about call and response, and his response was unique. The way he responded to what somebody else was playing was always unexpected.His love of music went all over the place: Buck Owens to traditional blues to R&B and Chuck Berry. Early on, he was listening to Indian classical music and stuff that the average person wasn’t really exposed to. One of the really interesting things about Bob’s songs is that they were deceptive. When you went to learn them, you would think, “Oh, this is pretty straight ahead.” And then you go, “It’s much more complex than it appears.” And he was complex, but in a very relaxed, mild mannered sort of way.He never stopped believing what he believed. He never stopped the messaging [of the 1960s counterculture]. He never outgrew that. It was who he was, what he felt, and what he felt from the beginning to the end.Obviously, the songs that he wrote are going to live forever. But, as a person, there was something about his demeanor that I’ll always think of. He always had an interesting twist in whatever conversation you were talking about, and he was much more informed on any given subject than a lot of us are. But his message was always subtle, it was always there. And his slant on how to look at things would always make you stop and think twice about the way you looked at it yourself.LagniappeThe Grateful Dead (with Duane, Gregg, and Peter Green) - “Dark Star”>“Spanish Jam” 2/11/1970 Fillmore East. That 26-min groove is from the Allman Brothers’ shows opening for the Dead in February 1970. The ABB’s shows have been released, I wrote about them here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Some thoughts after a visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame with my daughter Tyler.The museum had a new exhibit on Muscle Shoals that was outstanding. And there were quite a few Allman Brothers-related artifacts, photos, and stories.I’ll write more on both later. Today, I wanna share one of the coolest, new (to me) on display artifacts I encountered yesterday.Vassar’s fiddleVassar Clements was a bluegrass fiddler who was a key part of Dickey’s Highway Call album and American Music Show tour. He was a member of Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys, and was a pioneer country musician in collaborations with rock and rollers, first on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken and later with Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass side project Old & in the Way. And of course, his collaborations with Dickey.Dickey was particularly drawn to Vassar’s fiddle, which carried a mystique that I’ve written about before.Seeing Vassar’s fiddle gave me a chance to share a riff about my visit to the museum, the instrument’s story, and Dickey and Vassar’s partnership.LagniappeNew (to me) photo of Dickey and Vassar from the American Music Show Tour. (I cannot find details on the photo, if you have them, please share.)Upgrade to support the Conversation from the CrossroadsDickey Betts 12-11-74 Santa Monica Richard Betts American Music ShowUntil next time This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

“This year, I will be more thoughtful of my fellow man, exert more effort in each of my endeavors, professionally as well as personally. Take love wherever I find it and offer it to everyone who will take it. In this coming year, I will seek knowledge from those wiser than me and try to teach those who wish to learn from me. I love being alive, and I will be the best man I possibly can.” Duane Allman wrote these words in his diary January 1, 1969. He was 22 years old. He was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he had a contract with Rick Hall.The previous November, he had broken through with his blistering solo on “Hey Jude” with Wilson Pickett. That gave Duane the opportunity to start the Allman Brothers Band. In this photo from January 1969, Duane was in New York at Atlantic Studios to play with Aretha Franklin. (It is the session where he laid down solos on “The Weight” and the glorious “It Ain’t Fair.”)He’s on the precipice of ultimate stardom.I thought it’d be interesting to look at Duane in January of three years, 1969, 1970, and 1971. Three images, each 12 months apart, to give a sense of how he fulfilled that promise in his life. January 1969, Duane is in Muscle Shoals as a session guitarist and is working on a solo project. The latter is not going super well. He doesn’t jibe at all with Rick Hall, a pretty demanding producer who understands how to crank out hits quickly. Duane was a free spirit; his and Hall’s personalities clashed.In early February, Jaimoe arrives and moves in with Duane in Muscle Shoals. They begin their musical partnership. Berry Oakley shows up. It was a “Holy Shit!” moment for Duane and Berry and Jaimoe. Jaimoe describes their playing as like hearing Mahavishnu Orchestra for the first time.By the end of the month, Duane and Jaimoe leave Muscle Shoals for Jacksonville. They form the Allman Brothers Band March 23, 1969. Gregg arrives 3 days later. By April, they relocate to Macon, Georgia, home to Duane’s manager Phil Walden. They tour relentlessly for the next two-and-a-half years before their third album, At Fillmore East, breaks through.January 26, 1970 University of California, RiversidePhotographer Bruce Henderson took some great shots that day. Critic Joel Selvin, who’s written a ton of books, covered this show extensively in the student newspaper. It was a fantastic source for me for Play All Night. This is the Allman Brothers in January of 1970. They’re on their first trip West, to play mid-January shows with B.B. King and Buddy Guy at Fillmore West, They play the Whisky in LA down, and they play this free show before heading back east. So much about this photograph that I dearly love. Berry’s marching toward Dickey, who’s leaning back “hittin’ the note.” Duane is leaning in, concentrating. Anytime I see photos of this era, I look closely at what the band members are doing, how they’re interacting. The music sounds like they’re paying a lot of attention to each other or to their craft.And the photographs from the era certainly reflect that. Note on this imageThis looks like it’s just a casual jam or something. They’re just set up, hanging out. But as you see below, there’s several hundred people there in the audience. It was a pretty epic event for the students. Several guys got up on stage and got to play with the Allman Brothers.January 1971 again found them at Fillmore WestThis is a Jim Marshall photograph. A phenomenal shot of the Allman Brothers at Fillmore West in January 1971. The band played four nights in San Francisco—January 28-31. These were tune up shows for recording At Fillmore East, which they had booked to record in March 1971.Several of the shows have been released. They’re really great. They sound fantastic. And the coolest thing to me is hearing how the songs change, how they develop. The band was really pushing hard. By January 1971, they’d been on the road just shy of two years: 200, 250 gigs a year, 300 days on the road They were a road-hardened, tight band. The Allman Brothers were ready when they got to Fillmore East to record those shows. The thing I will point out to you, what I think about every time I listen to the record, is that every song was done on the first take.The stakes were as high as they could possibly be for them—the most important audience and the most important stage in rock: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. And they nailed it. They nailed it.And the tragedy of it all is that Duane dies in October 1971, 3 months after the album’s release. Duane is 24 years old. An adaptation of Duane’s diary entry is engraved on his tombstone (left). It is a fitting epitaph.In 1969, Duane Allman wrote himself a goal. A series of goals actually.And goals matter. Goals don’t mean you’re going to achieve exactly what you want exactly how you think you’re going to.Goals set a point in the horizon that says, “I’m going to work toward that.” We’re fortunate to have record of Duane’s thoughts going into what became a legacy-defining, meteoric three years for him and his band.His career is a reminder of the effort that goes into achievement of goals you set for yourself.And that’s a helluva lotta wisdom for a 22-year-old, huh?Chip in $5/month to support the Conversation from the Crossroads.SHARING IS CARING This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

I call this newsletter Conversation from the Crossroads. Crossroads is an intentional turn of phrase, a nod to Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.” Using the “Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture” motif, gives me a lot of room to interpret the band’s influence and impact.This is my take on one particular crossroads: that the Southern counterculture and the Southern Gothic tradition. 0:00 The Crossroads2:44 ABB clashed with norms5:15 Southern Gothic8:25 Hittin' the Note11:48 Southern Gothic imagery12:45 At Fillmore East/Duane's Death13:56 Rose Hill Cemetery/In Memory of Elizabeth Reed16:08 Crossroads of Southern Gothic and Southern counterculture19:08 Allman Brothers Band's legacy21:50 Impact of British Invasion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Don’t forget to leave a little something for Jimi Claus.Lagniappes Here’s some holiday goodies:Hour-long Christmas mix of classic 70s r&b and soul. I don’t know where I got this amazing mix, but it has been a go-to for me for many years now. Derek Trucks podcast interview on his and Susan’s relationship to the Mad Dogs & Englishmen movie and album. This is a fantastic piece with a very empathetic interviewer. Dickey Betts - the 1981 Duane Allman interview with Jas Obrecht. Part of a 1971 Guitar Player cover story in honor of the 10th anniversary of Duane’s death. I’ve mined this and other of Obrecht’s interviews pretty extensively over the years. Gregg Allman “Never Knew How Much” demo version that appeared on the long-out-of-print 1997 One More Try: An Anthology.Gregg Allman and Cher “Midnight Rider” - from the Cher show in 1975. This is, um, not all that great. Gabe Dixon “Night Spells #3” from TTB keyboardist extraordinaire. Gabe is one of the more prolific musicians around. This is from his Piano Spells series.A BIG THANKS to each of you for being here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Thirty+ years of fandom, thousands and thousands of hours of listening, hundreds of ABB & related shows, hours talking with friends, hundreds of thousands of words written: 85,000 in Play All Night, 144,000 in my Ph.D. dissertation, and tens of thousands more here on Substack and across the interwebs…And never.Not one time.Have I listened to Reach for the Sky or Brothers of the Road in their entirety. I finally listened this past week. I’ve been talking recently about Duane’s poor artistic decision to include Juicy Carter in the recording of At Fillmore East. Fortunately, Tom Dowd was there to talk Duane out of using Juicy for the Saturday shows, which comprise the majority of the album.No one was there to stop them when the band made its worst artistic decision: signing to Arista Records.I took the Arista plunge at the behest of Scott Soriano/Soriano’s Circus, who publishes Record Time. I just turned in my piece to him five minutes ago. I don’t even know if he’s going to like it.The records are ABBsolutely as bad as advertised. The band made a series of horrible decisions in 1980/81–adding the keytar/Mike Lawler, updating their sound with disco, signing away artistic control to Clive Davis of Arista.And the most egregious of all: kicking Jaimoe out of the band.All of these factors result in these two truly terrible albums. You don’t need to listen to the Arista albums. I’ve done the work. I have suffered for you, suffered mightily for Mushroom Nation, to let you know…Avoid these records. They are awful.LagniappeUnlike Brothers of the Road, Reach for the Sky has some redeeming qualities. Two songs are somewhat salvageable.One is “From the Madness of the West,” the Dickey instrumental. I don’t necessarily care for it. It’s way too speedy for me. But it favors two instrumentals I do love: “Pegasus,” from Enlightened Rogues and “True Gravity,” from Seven Turns. It’s also got the only formally composed drum part in Allman Brothers history. Butch wrote the drum jam, but was not given any songwriting credit.An unpolished gem on an otherwise forgettable album, “From the Madness of the West” is easily forgotten. Except for my boys Steeln’ Peaches out of Orlando. Incredible Allman Brothers’ tribute band that wails on “From the Madness of the West.”Dig it:The Allman Brothers version?It has a synth solo. Enough said.More at longlivetheabb.comThe Arista records have given me a fair amount of fodder. Here’s a sampling: This season, give the gift of rock Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore EastMERCHThese are all one-of-a-kind, unique-to-me designs.Hat and shirt adapted from an original Fillmore East sessions ad, I moved the ABB to the top of the bill, a spot they earned that weekend.Long Live the ABB shroom #1 Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirtUntil next time.Sharing is caring. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Had he lived, Duane Allman would’ve turned 79 on November 20, 2025. His was a truly remarkable, meteoric career. Here is the message I’ve sent out the last few years on Duane’s birthday.Duane Allman“Music is like a newspaper for people that can’t read. Rock & roll will tell you right where everything’s at. It’s just something to move your feet, man, and move your heart and make you feel good inside—forget about all the bullshit that’s going on for a while and fill up some of the dead space.”Duane had a tremendous impact on those he encountered. He inspired his bandmates and those around him. Gregg Allman“My brother, he had more faith in us than I ever did. He would push me and push me. ⁠He would say, ‘No, man! We’re better than all of them!’ and I would say, ‘Fuck you, man! How can you sit here and say that? Every corner you turn, man, someone’s gonna wipe your ass playing music.’ ⁠He didn’t seem to think that way.”Butch Trucks“He set fire to whoever he was working with. And that’s what he did to us. I mean, he was very much a messiah type.⁠ Duane never finished high school, but he was one of the more educated people I knew. He said, ‘Damn, I’m smarter than these people,’ so he went and got the books.” Dickey Betts“We had an immense amount of respect for each other, to the point where it was almost like, Don’t push me too far! I didn’t push him and he didn’t push me. We talked about being jealous of each other and how dangerous it was to think that way, and that we had to fight that feeling when we were onstage. He’d say, ‘When I listen to you play, I have to try hard to keep the jealousy thing at bay and not try to out-do you when I play my solo. But I still want to play my best!’ We’d laugh about what a thin line that was. We learned a lot from each other.⁠ When you think about it, I was only 25 and Duane was 23, and the things we were talking about were pretty mature for guys our age. Duane was one tough, cocksure guy. He had a strong belief in himself, and he was damn good. ⁠I was damn good too; I just didn’t believe in myself the way Duane did. It wasn’t until a few years later that I thought, Well, I guess I am pretty good too.”Derek Trucks“It was his band and in a very real way it still is his band. With the guys that knew him who are still in the band you can see Duane’s presence and shadow moving at times. They’re very conscious of his original intention. It still guides the band in a way. He was such a powerful musical persona, such a powerful personality. Some of the ground rules he laid down 40 years ago are still driving the ship. That’s a serious presence.” David Hood (The Swampers)“He was the first hippie I ever met. The rest of us had short hair and button-down collars. Even though we were in the music business, we looked pretty straight. All of a sudden this guy comes in with bellbottom pants and long hair and the mutton-chop sideburns and flowered shirts and everything. Duane was like a guy from another planet, almost. He was so different from the rest of us.”Bill Graham“What you got with Duane was what you get from those few guys who…yeah, they’ve got all that technical stuff down, but he really got the essence of what the Black man, the Black musician, gave us. That’s the soulful aspect of picking, and all the technical prowess in the world doesn’t give you that. ⁠I don’t want to disrespect any artist. I can give you some half a dozen guitar players that the world thinks, you know, are the cat’s meow. But there’s no soul; it’s dipped in water, it’s not dipped in soul of any kind. They can make those riffs work—but that’s all they are. And musicians knew that! Otis Redding knew that, Aretha Franklin knows that, and Ray Charles knows that! ⁠And Duane was one of those players who had the technical proficiency, but never sold it. He never sold anything on his guitar. There was no, ‘Can you top this?’ He never tried to beat you. He always wanted to play with you. I remember Eric Clapton told me years ago that one of the things he loved about Duane was he just wanted to play with you—he didn’t try to show you anything.” Red Dog“He was like the Pied Piper. I didn’t even know how to listen to music back in those days. I danced a lot, but music just took up space in the room. But from the minute I heard Duane Allman play, my ears just opened up. ⁠I heard him on “The Weight.” Of course, I didn’t even know that was him. It was just a lick with Duane playing slide, and I just loved the way that sounded. Then I heard him play live and it just opened my ears up even further.⁠ His charisma and straightforwardness would just reach out and grab you and suck you right into him.” Rick Hall (FAME Studios)“Duane Allman had the ability very pleasantly to get his way with people. He was convinced that Wilson Pickett should record a cover version of the Beatles’ song ‘Hey Jude.’ Wilson said, ‘Are you crazy? The Beatles have released it, it’s in the 20s, it’ll be number 1 in two weeks.’⁠ Duane replied, ‘That’s the whole point. I mean, it shows we’ve got balls. We’ll cover The Beatles, the biggest thing in the world. This is going to get the world’s attention that you, as a black act, have the guts to cut the same record which The Beatles have got out and that you think you can have a hit record with it.’⁠ Which is, of course, exactly what happened. That’s how Duane thought, which was an incredible attitude to have towards our business and our world.”Paul Hornsby (Hour Glass bandmate)“Duane was crazy—which helps. He was always nine steps ahead of himself and everybody else. He was just a real hyper guy. He was the kind of guy that you felt had something to say. He was always on the cutting edge of everything—from the clothes he wore to the music he played to the books he read. When he said something, everybody listened. When you heard him say something, some of it might be bullshit, but it was always interesting bullshit. “He was the kind of guy who could walk into a room and he had that charisma about him that caused everybody to notice him. Of course, in those early days, shoulder-length reddish-blond hair itself was quite a striking thing. Coming out of Alabama or Florida at that time, you would tend to notice somebody like that anyway. But he was noticed when we got to L.A., too.” Jerry Wexler (Atlantic Records)“There seemed to be no end to his resource, his musical roots. He had originality, taste, sensitivity. I started to use him on a number of different recordings and it’s very interesting to see the scope of his playing. Duane could play great acoustic, he could play bossa nova, he could play jazz, he could give you Wes Montgomery licks. He could play any kind of session. Country. Great slide—he taught a lot of people how to play slide guitar, or at least began them on the road.”Lagniappes* Long Live the ABB/Youtube Shorts youtube.com/@longlivetheabb/shorts. I’ve been posting daily here. Y’all might dig some of it.* Tedeschi Trucks Band St. Augustine Amphitheatre October 25, 2025. The last show of the tour. I wrote about it here: Life is short, buy the tickets.* Gregg Allman “Oncoming Traffic” Beacon Theatre, 3/19/05. I found this fantastic Herb Kossover photo and set it to one of my ABBsolute favorite Gregg tunes. Thanks for readingUntil next time… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Last night, I attended Cameron Crowe’s book event at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. It was one of the most loving tributes to the Allman Brothers Band I have ever been a part of.A pre-event photo montage set to music included Gregg’s “These Days” along with a bevy of photographs from that era. Crowe began with an emotional reading about his time with the Allman Brothers, his favorite band, and the chief inspiration for the Almost Famous storyline.It was a helluva way to open a set that kicked off a wonderful homage to the Best Damn Band in the Land.I didn’t record any of it. I stayed in the moment and listened to one of my favorite storytellers tell stories about my favorite band. I snapped some shots that featured the ABB, including some new-to-me photos. I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but I did hand a copy of Play All Night to someone with a backstage pass, and she said she’d pass it on.I came home and recorded this video (transcript below). More to come. Lots more.  In 1973, a 16-year-old Cameron Crowe wrote a cover story for Rolling Stone on the Allman Brothers Band. To this day, it remains the most in-depth, intimate look at the Allman Brothers Band at the ABBsolute peak of their fame. A tremendous story for Rolling Stone in and of itself, even if you didn’t know any of the backstory.But he turned the story of that article into the movie Almost Famous (2000). Throughout that whole movie, the thread is 16-year-old William Miller is trying to get the big interview with Russell Hammond, the guitarist of Stillwater. Eventually he gets the interview, turns in the story, and the band basically denies everything ‘cause they looked like dicks.In the true-to-life event, Gregg Allman seized Crowe’s interview tapes.I think Gregg had a lot of second thoughts about how much he had told Cameron Crowe. He took the tapes back. Now what I didn’t know until tonight, when I heard Crowe speak about his new book, The Uncool, I didn’t know how hard he actually took that. It was a real traumatic moment for him that was difficult for him to read.He talked about how traumatic this was on him. Eventually, the tapes come back, he’s able to write this story that is just this super in-depth, intimate look at a band that had tried so hard to get to where they were.And they got to where they were without two of their four founders, Berry Oakley and of course Duane Allman.Cameron Crowe, his Rolling Stone cover story and Almost Famous, had a profound impact on me as an Allman Brothers fan, and also as a writer and as a scholar. I’ve used a lot. Crowe is quoted and his pieces are cited extensively in Play All Night.The Uncool Any of us nerds who love rock and roll and want to be a part of it, always feel a little bit of that no matter what. (No matter how cool we end up feeling sometimes.)Go get his book, go see him if he comes to your town, because it was a powerful moment for him to talk about my all-time favorite band. Crowe’s emotions were palpable as he read from the book. And I was definitely swept up in some Mushroom Magic. And even if I didn’t know any of this backstory, Crowe’s is still the greatest feature on the Allman Brothers Band from that era. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Antebellum cemeteries in the heart of cotton country are about as Southern gothic as you can get.I posted video from my most recent Rose Hill visit on social media. A Tik Tok follower commented about how serene it was—a sentiment I share. But the comment also got me thinking about the layers of history buried beneath the monuments at Rose Hill Cemetery. The commercial hub of middle Georgia in the 19th century, Macon’s economy on depended on cotton, and cotton depended on slavery. The beauty of Rose Hill belies these hideous foundations.Antebellum cemeteries in the heart of cotton country are about as Southern gothic as you can get. That’s the gist of the brief video above.Dig this post? Support Conversation from the Crossroads with a paid subscription.Rose Hill & the Allman Brothers BandI’ve written quite a bit about Rose Hill. Here’s a sampling.🍑 Who is Elizabeth Reed? (She’s more than just inspiration for the song’s title). 🍄 Macon and the Legacy of the Allman Brothers Band Part 1 and Part 2. 🍑 Musings from the Crossroads Lagniappes* Rose Hill’s 1973 National Register of Historic Places nomination form is worth a read if you’re interested in its non-ABB history. * Footage from the Allman plot at Rose Hill February 2021 while I was in Macon to finish my first draft of Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.* Tombstone Eyes 5/1/96 A deep cut, Dickey worked on this song for a number of years and never (to my mind) quite got it right. It clearly meant a lot to him and is definitely about Rose Hill (“We used to hang out down by the railroad tracks”).Follow-upMagic of Macon/In Memory of Dickey Betts, a partnership with artist Psychodelik Pete to put his poster on t-shirts for a limited time. I announced I’d give a portion of the proceeds to the scholarship fund in Dickey’s honor. I’ve just made the first donation, a full 50% of the proceeds thus far. Thanks for the support y’all. Order your shirt here: etsy.longlivetheabb.comUntil next time… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

In April 2024, the Clarke County Historical Museum in Jackson, Alabama, invited me to speak at a historical marker dedication for the Allman Brothers Band’s March 1971 arrest in Jackson, Alabama. Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East is as much a local history as anything. I did my best to frame the conversation around the local connections. Not just the arrest, itself, but the ways the Allman Brothers Band’s story is a story of the small-town South. This relates to my own work in state and local history over parts of the last four(!!!) decades. With Play All Night, I did my best to tell a story that was interesting not only to fans and fellow hardcores, but to general readers. History is all about contingency; it’s about “if, then.” History is also less useful without context. It is the story of their lives in a particular time and place: the small-town South of the 1960s and 70s. One of my goals was to place the Allman Brothers Band’s story in situ. This video is that talk verbatim. What followed was a tour of the jail, which is now Bigbee Coffee Roasters.Below is a transcript, cleaned-up for print for paid readers of Long Live the ABBSeptember 1968Duane returns to the South for good. He is 21 and has just left Los Angeles in a fit of pique, quitting Hour Glass, his band with his brother Gregg, and fellow southerners Johnny Sandlin, Peter Carr, and Paul Hornsby.He returns to his hometown of Daytona Beach, Florida. Soon, he and Gregg sign on with the 31st of February, their friend and fellow Floridian Butch Trucks’s band. They play some gigs together and join on demos for the group’s second album. Duane is furious when Gregg abandons ship for L.A. to fulfill Hour Glass’ recording contract.October 1968In October, Duane makes his way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Duane’s first session is with Clarence Carter. In November, he plays on “Hey Jude” with Wilson Pickett. And that’s really where everything in the story comes together for Duane.(I’m leaving a lot out. I’ve written an entire book that covers all of this. You should buy it if you don’t already have a copy 🍄)November 1968: “Hey Jude”Anybody who was alive and was of radio listening age would’ve heard Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude” all over the radio in spring of 1969. With this incendiary guitar solo at the end, Duane Allman going toe-to-toe with “Wicked” Pickett.From that guitar solo, Duane Allman earns a contract with Rick Hall of FAME Studios in January 1969. By February, Phil Walden, manager of the late Otis Redding, buys out Duane’s contract.Duane doesn’t write. He doesn’t sing. He doesn’t even have a band. But “Hey Jude” gave him the chance to create a band his own way. After four years of intense grinding, Duane’s efforts begin to pay off.Enter JaimoeThe first guy to show up is Jai Johanny Johanson, Jaimoe. An African American drummer from the r&b circuit, Jaimoe was also a jazzhead. Duane’s band was already going to be playing Black music, a Black member adds authenticity in music and spirit.In February 1969, Jaimoe moves in with Duane in Muscle Shoals, in a cabin on Lake Wilson. They begin playing together in Muscle Shoals and are soon joined by bass player Berry Oakley, who’s in a band called the Second Coming out of Jacksonville.Duane has been courting Berry for about 6 months. They met after an Hour Glass show in Jacksonville in 1968. Berry’s band includes Dickey Betts, a hotshot guitarist whom Berry adores and is reluctant to leave behind. Duane’s already a hotshot guitarist, but he hears potential when he and Dickey play together.By March, Duane and Jaimoe relocate to Jacksonville, where the band grows to include a second drummer: old pal Butch Trucks.After several weeks jamming, Duane calls Gregg, who’s still in Los Angeles and says, “We got it shaking down here and all we need is you. The cats love to play. They’re all really into their instruments, they sing a little bit but there’s not a whole lot of writing going on so I need you to come and sing and write and round it all up and send it in some sort of direction.” It was, Gregg said, “The finest compliment I ever had.”March 1968: JacksonvilleDuane and Gregg were estranged when Duane put the band together. They had not been on speaking terms for about six months because Gregg quit the 31st of February and hightailed it back to L.A., where Liberty Records was going promote him as a star.Duane was pretty mad at him. But, as he told Jaimoe, “I can’t think of another motherfucker who can sing in this band except my brother. That’s who I really want.”Gregg shows up to Jacksonville on March 26, 1969. Duane, Jaimoe, Berry, Dickey, and Butch are playing “Trouble No More.” Gregg walks in, backs up against the wall with his hands up and says, “Jesus Christ, what a band!”He pulls Duane aside and says, “I’m not sure I can cut this.”Duane replies something to the effect of, “You little punk… How dare you? I got all these nice people here telling ‘em how great you are, and now you’re too afraid to sing.”“Count the damn thing off!” Gregg answers. And so begins the 45-year career of the Allman Brothers Band.Gregg joins a band with diverse musical backgrounds. Its emphasis is on southern music—ranging from rhythm and blues, blues, rock & roll, country, jazz, psychedelic music, etc. It’s a melting pot of talents and traditions.A story of resilienceThe original band stays together for a little over two years of backbreaking touring. In October 1971, right as the album At Fillmore East is breaking out, Duane dies in a motorcycle accident. One year and thirteen days later, Berry Oakley dies similarly right around the corner from where Duane was killed. In each case, the band continued on.That fact is why we’re here and why we continue to be here. Yes, it’s the music they put out, but also that they continue on in the face of adversity. It’s a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band, they’ve sold millions of albums. They stay together (more or less) for 45 years and survived a bitter divorce with Dickey Betts in 2000.“Southern change gonna come at last.”They are one of the most significant bands of their era and of their generation. They led the Southern counterculture and offered a voice for Southern youth. They answered Neil Young’s call in “Southern Man” in the music that they played, the company they kept, and their fierce commitment to inclusion. They created their own legacy for Southern music and led the way for the Southern rock genre.And the story could have only happened in the American South. L.A. has a pretty tight musical production method. That included pretty odious contract terms for up-and-coming musicians. In Duane and Gregg’s case, Liberty Records renamed them Hour Glass and dressed them up in psychedelic finery. It was a gimmick, and out of character for Duane.Liberty and producer Dallas Smith had had success with teen idol Bobby Vee, and it’s pretty apparent he had similar designs for Gregg. “Oh, this, this dude’s good looking and he’s got pipes and he’s got this blonde hair and he’s got all this charisma.” They were trying to make him the front man, and that frustrated Duane, who was the bandleader and a great guitarist.In April 1968, Hour Glass goes to Muscle Shoals and record demos for their second album. FAME is an independent studio, and they do things differently than in L.A. They’re having a good time recording because in the South things are a little looser. Hour Glass records these demos and they love them. Liberty Records rejected them altogether. The South, is a big, BIG part of this story. Five of the original Allman Brothers are southerners. (Berry Oakley’s actually from Chicago, but moved “down South as soon as I had enough sense.”) They’re Southerners who feel a deep sense of place. It’s where they have a certain comfort level. And they failed each time they left the South. And when Hour Glass breaks up, Duane determines to do it his way. He finds musicians who support his vision. And with Phil Walden as manager, they were able to grow their music and their sound without the pressure of having to record AM radio hits.Duane’s career lasts about four years: 1967-1971. It’s a really short, meteoric career. And the South was pivotal to it. When he comes back home for good in 1968, that’s when he makes the music that he’s most famous for.Muscle Shoals is where Duane grounded himself. “I got a little cabin on a lake by myself,” he said, “and just sat there and played, getting used to living without a bunch of jive Hollywood crap in my head.” Touring in the 70sTouring was an intense experience. The Allman Brothers Band represented the counterculture, and touring as hippies offered complications. “It was a different world,” Bruce Hamp­ton recalled. “It was life or death. You’d stop at a gas station and you’d wonder if you were going to die. That’s no joke. If you had long hair, you were a target.”Gregg described “perennial redneck questions: ‘Who them hippie boys and who’s the n——r in the band?’ We dealt with that second question quite a bit. Keep in mind, this was the 1960s, we were in the deep South, so having a Black guy in the group came up a lot. But Jaimoe was one of us and we weren’t going to change that for nobody.”In April 1970, road manager Twiggs Lyndon was arrested for the murder of a Buffalo club owner for not paying the band. Lyndon is found not guilty by reason of insanity; being on the road with the Allman Brothers literally cooked his brain. He served a year in a mental hospital/correctional institution.The band’s arrest in Jackson happens March 22, 1971, 9 days after the band finishes sessions for their landmark third album, At Fillmore East.I can only imagine how fearful Jaimoe was when the band was arrested. “That Black guy is scared to death,” Sheriff Rip Armistead told District Attorney Hardie Kimbrough. In response, they moved the white members of the band into Black section of the jail with Jaimoe. The authorities were concerned for the band’s safety. The Allman Brothers were complete unknowns, but they looked like shit, were carrying a ton of drugs, and might inspire some sort of youth rebellion if word got out they were in the local pokey. Jaimoe was right to be scared, but the powers that be were doing all they could to get them out of town as quickly as possible. As one of the local judges told me, “We weren’t much worried about drugs. It was bootlegging we were concerned with.”The case was resolved March 6, 1972. The charges were reduced from drug possession to disturbing the peace. The band members forfeited their bonds and bypassed Clarke County from that point forward. Gregg and Berry both referenced the case as they introduced “Hot ‘Lanta” on February 10, 1972 in Macon. Gregg dedicated the song to “the people in Jackson, Alabama—you know who you are” with Berry sarcastically adding, “Why we met some of the nicest folks down there!”In 2016, the Clarke County Historical Society published a piece on the arrest from the point of view of the Jackson authorities: “Famous Band Arrested in Jackson, Spent the Night in the Clarke County Jail in 1971” jibes (more or less) with ABB road manager Willie Perkins’s accounts in his books No Saints, No Saviors (2005) and Diary of a Rock and Roll Tour Manager (2022).The arrest in context The Allman Brothers were arrested the morning of March 22, 1971. They had just played a show at the Warehouse in New Orleans and were headed to a gig at the University of Montevallo that night. It was nine days after the Allman Brothers finished recording At Fillmore East, the groundbreaking live album they released after their two studio records hadn’t broken through. The band recorded their third album in their natural element: Live. It was a different approach to what Duane had to follow in New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles.More than 50 years later, the album continues to resonate as a clear documentation of Duane and his band’s artistic vision. It is a large band composing in the moment. Communicating musically, improvising.Listen to At Fillmore East closely. There’s not a single overdub. None. Zero. They patched two versions of “You Don’t Love Me” together, and they took out Thom Doucette’s harmonica solo in “Stormy Monday.”It is 78 minutes of beautiful music. I love how each musician inte­grates himself into the whole, how soloists conjure riffs on the fly, and how the band plays behind the soloists—pushing and prodding them forward, backwards, even sideways. At times the gui­tars stand out; other times it’s the drums. Sometimes it’s Gregg’s vocals or the magnificent, swirling sound of his Hammond B-3. Un­dergirding it all is a rock-solid foundation of ensemble playing, each musician making up his part as he goes along. It is a musical conversa­tion. And the Allman Brothers Band are among the premier musical conversationalists in the history of rock.To this day after hundreds (thousands?) of listens, I’m still hearing new things.At Fillmore East endures because it’s a well-conceived, brilliantly recorded album. Producer Tom Dowd captured that room beautifully. You can hear the collective exhale at the end of “Hot ‘Lanta” and an audience member yell out “Play all night!” in the quiet moments of “You Don’t Love Me.” And don’t forget: this is New York City, which has a continual murmur to it. You ever been to New York? There’s a lot of energy in New York City and rooms like Fillmore East are popping.And when the band is playing, that crowd is on edge. When the band is quiet, the crowd is whisper-quiet. They’re listening intently.And it worked.The band wanted to put a record out that sounded like them on stage. That’s what they were best known for, live performance. Live, Duane and bandmates expressed themselves most freely. Capricorn Records created a campaign to take advan­tage of the Allman Brothers’ reputation among the rock underground. “This is the People’s Band,” Phil Walden said. “Music is for the people and therefore we want to make this specially priced”—a double album for a single album price.Record buyers agreed. At Fillmore East was a remarkable commercial breakthrough for a band without a hit single, much less an integrated band of southerners with a predilection for jamming.The week before release of At Fillmore East, the Allman Brothers Band closed Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. It was their only time headlining at the venue whose name graces their most famous album. They still hadn’t had a hit record yet. They were on the cusp. People knew them, people expected a great record from them. “The word had got out,” booking agent Jonny Podell said. “The tastemakers—Bill Graham and Rolling Stone—had come out forcefully in favor of the Allman Brothers. The network of underground clubs, from Boston Tea Party to the Fillmore West, clearly supported the Allman Brothers, and would play them five times a year if they could.”The record was released July 6, 1971. Six weeks later, Duane Allman is dead. It’s a beautiful, brilliant record. It’s timeless. The record’s success is the pinnacle of Duane Allman’s musical jour­ney but marks only the beginning of his enduring influence. At Fill­more East birthed an explosion in southern music, with Duane’s surviving bandmates at the forefront of the “Southern rock” genre.Random notes: Alabama and the Allman Brothers BandJaimoe is from Gulfport, Mississippi, and would often play clubs all along the Gulf Coast. The Almond Joys did as well. Duane first made his name at FAME in Muscle Shoals.Chuck Leavell the piano player who replaced Duane in 1972, hails from Tuscaloosa. Paul Hornsby, of Hour Glass, is from that area as well. Hornsby became a big time producer for Capricorn. Johnny Sandlin, Hour Glass bandmate and producer of several Allman Brothers’ albums, is from Decatur.Some more obscure connections: Dickey named “Ramblin’ Man,” his most famous song, after Montgomery native Hank Williams’s song of the same name. That’s their one big hit, “Ramblin’ Man” hit #2 in 1973. Cher’s “Half Breed”—recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound—kept them from the top spot. Two years later, Gregg and Cher marry.Thanks for being here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Welcome back to Long Live the ABB: Conversations from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, & culture. Today’s post features what I once thought was inarguable: Brothers of the Road is the ABB’s worst album. Even Dickey agrees:I make my argument in the video above. Here’s a deeper dive on the record that led to the band’s second breakup in five years. Support Conversation from the Crossroads.[Edit of a post from 2024]August 4 is the anniversary of the release of Brothers of the Road (1981), universally reviled as the Allman Brothers Band’s worst album. Or so I thought. Turns out the album has some very vocal fans, and quite a few people who object to the very notion of a “worst” Allman Brothers Band album. (Everything can’t be At Fillmore East or Eat a Peach.)There are two reasons it’s the worst: * Jaimoe’s absence.* Clive Davis’s meddling.Support Conversation from the Crossroads.Dickey Betts“The one that none of us in the band liked at all was Brothers of the Road, because Clive Davis kind of ran a producer in on us. And they mixed out all of the guitar harmonies, and tried to really disco-pop it up, and we really were trying to do some kind of hit single jingle kind of stuff on there. (sings) ‘Straight from the heart, baby my love.’ You know, some of that shit.So even when we tried to make the best out of having to do some of those tunes, the guy mixed out some of the hardest work we did on it, and even simplified it from that. So none of us really liked that record. That's when we said ‘Hey, we're just going to split the Allman Brothers up until the disco period gets behind us.’”Longtime ABB insider Bud Snyder Snyder agreed with Dickey. The ABB needed no help with material. “There were so many personality things going on in that time period, which was probably a result of the record label and where music was at that time, with all the disco stuff. Still, to me, I think they were playing great music then. I don't particularly like those records, but I put a lot of the demos I recorded against those records, and I think you had more of the Allman Brothers spirit. I thought Clive Davis was nuts. We had recorded ‘Anything Goes,’ which later came out Gregg's I'm No Angel album. We had recorded that in 1982, and Clive Davis talked about how he didn't hear any hits, per se, in this thing. There was another song that we did on the Seven Turns album that Dickey wrote, called ‘Let Me Ride.’ Both those songs we cut in demos back in the early 80s, and Clive Davis said ‘No.’ ‘Anything Goes,’ when it got released, was a Power Pick for like 8 weeks on 110 stations. That was 1986-87. The Allman Brothers wanted to release that in 82, but Clive said ‘No.’”Rolling Stone “Did Arista break Up the Allmans?” After 15 years of erratic, often inspiring music-making, the Allman Brothers Band has split up again—and this time, it might be for good. Gregg Allman has left the group to pursue a solo project, and three other members—Butch Trucks, Dickey Betts and Chuck Leavell—have teamed with ex-Wet Willie vocalist Jimmy Hall and are playing some scattered dates. “It just all fell apart,” says Leavell of the Allmans. “And there’s always the Clive Davis factor.” Under the terms of their now terminated contract with Arista Records, Davis' label, the Allmans were given $500,000 to make each album. The only creative control that Arista had over the band—whose album sales have slumped in recent years—was the right to choose a producer. “I wanted them to work with an established, independent producer, not an engineer,” says Davis. Davis thus asked the band to send him material that he could play for potential studiomen. At first, the Allmans balked, saying that their best material is written in the studio. When the group finally relented and sent some demos, says Davis, “The producers to whom we sent them didn’t think they were strong enough.” But the Allmans’ manager, John Scher, says that Davis vetoed veteran producer Tom Dowd, among others, and has “improperly tried to censor” the group’s music. “By Clive’s locking us out of the studio, he kept Gregg and Dickey and everybody else from making a living. He forced everybody’s hand—and freed Arista from some serious financial obligations.” Scher asserts that the band is on hiatus and will record again when the legal situation is resolved.Creem In 1985, this update appeared. I have yet to track down how the case was settled. “Less interesting, no doubt, yet every bit as judicious, is the Allman Brothers’ suit against their former record label. Arista, claiming that the company’s refusal to allow the Allmans to record the last three albums on their contract caused irreparable harm to the band’s career and reputations.”Love for Brothers of the RoadI was/am surprised that it has any defenders, but it does. Here are several, with my comments below each.even Gregg hated the album.not sure what qualifies as “worst” if not BotR. this surprised meas did theseI’ve never heard anyone profess love for BotR.Not everything can be first, right?And which album is worse? One person offered up Reach for the Sky (1980)—the first time a synthesizer appeared on an Allman Brothers’ record. It’s a nearly equally sad record for sure. But it does have Jaimoe. Brothers does not.Someone else answered Win, Lose, or Draw and I had to think for a minute on that. Like Brothers, WLoD is a pretty desultory affair, but it has two ABBsolute classics if you ask me, the killer Muddy Waters cover “Can’t Lose What You Never Had” and Dickey’s magnificent “High Falls.”Brothers of the Road has nothing that even comes close. And did I mention it’s missing Jaimoe?And it’s not like people loved BotR upon release in 1981It was pretty universally panned. Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone - Brothers of the Road is a little lacking in personality, too. At its best, it has both the instrumental finesse and soul that have always made the Allman Brothers Band special. But in too many of the tunes, the group sounds like it’s marking time as it rolls down that long, lonesome road. Creem was even harsher - The whole album flows out in one well-crafted mellow ooze, as though it were the third Dickey Betts & Great Southern set or something. Mostly Gregg sounds tired here. It's funny, though, now that Brothers of the Road has virtually killed off my ragged hopes for the Allman Brothers Band, their last year's Reach for the Sky is beginning to sound more and more like a first-rate reunion set.Then there’s the album coverTake a look at it again. Was Dickey the only one who knew there was photo shoot that day? At least Butch has on a hat. But the rest of the guys? Gregg’s headed to a tiki bar. Mike Lawler’s going hunting. Frankie Toler’s rockin’ what looks like a Houston Astros’ alternate jersey.And the location? Who takes album cover photos standing by the side of a road at the edge of a nondescript field? The bizarre angle of the treeline makes it look like the Toler brothers are leaning to stand upright. Dan Toler (second from right) seems to be leaning into the slope, making you wonder why he’s not falling down. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. But I prefer my Allman Brothers Band way less produced than what they gave us in 1980-1981. Then again, they still rocked live, such as this show January 12, 1982 from the bandshell in Gainesville, Florida.LagniappeMy interview with David Goldflies, ABBassist during this era. Thanks for being here. If you liked this post, please share it with one person: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Shared the photos with paid subscribers yesterday along with a story (above the paywall) from Willie Perkins about the Great Southern Company, the ABB’s merchandising arm:Support storytelling. Upgrade today.This morning, I put the photos together in a video (above) along with a quick look at the Win, Lose, or Draw tour program book and the ABB’s fan club offerings in 1975.Dig it.Thank you for being here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

Ringo turned 85 today (July 7). I had to stop and share with y’all how mind-blowing that is to me. He’s outlived both my parents—Dad 5 years older, Mom 5 years younger—by a decade+.Not my favorite Beatle (that's Paul), nor the most essential (also Paul, but I could make an equal case for John), nor the most mystical (George), just that rock solid drummer with a great sense of humor who fit into the Fabs' craziness perfectly.Here are two things for y’all in honor of Mr. Starkey: * Video of the Ringo Starr exhibit here in Nashville that I set to “Get Back.” Ringo has some history in Music City, recording both Beaucoups of Blues (1970) and Look Up (2024) here. * One of my favorite Ringo moments, from the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh: “It Don’t Come Easy,” his #4 hit he recorded with George Harrison producing. Love seeing him pound the drums and sing with such force. Upgrade to keep the stories flowing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

It’s Berry’s birthday today: April 4, 1948. I thought I’d riff a bit on Berry while on a walk today. (Apologies for the wind noise at times.)I said a lot about Berry in Play All Night and am quite proud of the response I got from so many of y’all. One of the earliest “secrets” I learned all true believers shared, was an understanding of Berry’s immense importance to the ABB and how that carried through in the ABBassists who’ve followed—Lamar Williams, David Goldflies, Allen Woody, & Oteil Burbridge. And of course, a reverence for the 5-man band, the lineup that brought Berry’s bass to the forefront. And, of course, here’s my paean to Berry, titled from this wonderful Dickey Betts quote about Berry in the Second Coming: “We have one big guitar and two little ones. All we need now is a bass player!”Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps me keep telling these stories with care, context, and heart.SHARING IS CARING This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe