The Allman Brother are Floridians Duane and Gregg, Duane providing guitar and Gregg keyboards and vocals. Lead guitar duties are doubled up with Dickey Betts, and there are two drummers Jai Johanny Johnson and the improbably named Butch Trucks, leaving just Berry Oakley on bass. The band members seem to have shared a tragic penchant for dying in motorcycle accidents – Duane Allman not long after this recording, Berry Oakley the year after.
They’re not a band I’d heard of, although I may have heard one of their hits and not known it. This is a live album very much in the style of the Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead, with extended jam sessions (one lasting the whole side of one of the albums). The Allmans are more bluesy, with the album opening with some fairly typical blues standards (covers of tracks by old Bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell). Here we get a taste of Allman D.’s characteristic slide guitar, high, slidey, slightly distorted, kind of reminded me somebody letting the air out of a balloon. It all sounded to me like the kind of thing we’ve had from Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton many times over already, and it was interesting to discover that Allman D and Clapton were musical soulmates and had spent a fair bit of time playing together, Allman almost ending up on Layla until he remembered he was supposed to be on tour with his own band.
Things get a bit more non-standard on Disc Two, with the jazz-funk instrumental Hot ‘Lanta and then a couple of lengthy blues-jazz-rock fusion jams based on tracks from prior Allman albums – In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Whipping Post. Here things take on a really jazzy turn, with a Thelonius Monk kind of drop to percussion driving fragmented soloing from all the band in turn, returning to the main refrain from time to time to keep it together. John Coltrane was apparently a big influence on some of the soloing motifs. They’re a little like the Grateful Dead, but slightly more rocky and a little less jazzy in term of the soundscape. There’s some good interplay between the two guitarists as well.
Ultimately with these kinds of extended jams, a lot depends on how much you feel like you’re going on a journey, and if that journey has a clear destination. The Allman Brothers did wander off into the swamp occasionally (or maybe the Everglades), so it’s more a case of just enjoying the ride, but from time to time they really do some interesting stuff.
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