“There are lots of different forms of communication, but music is absolutely the purest one.”
- Duane Allman
If you're a guitar lover, I mean a person who has an obsessive attachment to the instrument and the people who play it well, you likely had this moment. The moment you heard someone play that changed everything - that made you say, “Whoa, this is different. This speaks to me in a new way.” If you were 13 years old like I was when it happened , you probably didn't actually think it, you just felt it in a way you couldn't describe.
I heard lots of guitars growing up in the 60s. Once the Beatles showed up, they ruled the world. Every kid in America wanted to play one. The music of that decade and the next three beyond it reflected the guitar's dominance.
When I was not yet a teenager, the most talked about guitar player was Jimi Hendrix. He was held up as the near mythical high priest in rock culture. I wanted to like him. I felt like I was supposed to. I understood that he was some kind of innovative genius, like Picasso with a guitar, but what I heard of his music didn't move me. It was too abstract and feedbacky and dissonant...just give me a melody, please.
Sometime in the summer that I turned 13, I bought a record I must have seen reviewed or talked about, The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East. I knew nothing about them but I gambled and laid down $6.98 for the double live album. Where I got that money, who knows. The cover intrigued me. It was just a black and white photo of the band members sitting in front of and amongst a wall of speakers and equipment. They were laughing and smiling at some unknown joke or road story. Rock and roll looked like the best life ever. But it's what was inside that double live record that changed it all for me.
The very first song they kicked into, after some guy said to the crowd, “Okay, the Allman Brothers Band,” was what I now know was an old blues standard by Blind Willie McTell, Statesboro Blues. It was sure new to me, though. What I heard was a slide guitar that spoke a new and beautiful language that I didn't know existed. The guy playing it was having a conversation with those that were gathered to listen. He was dispensing wisdom with a glass bottle and six strings, playing slide guitar in a completely fresh way. I was hearing a guitar genius named Duane Allman. He was the godfather of the band that bore his and his little brother Gregg's name, The Allman Brothers Band. What I heard on the record was a group of musicians that sounded like they had been playing the blues together since the night after Robert Johnson sold his soul - like old, battered, road-weary veterans doing the only thing they knew how to do - PLAY.
What dawned on me at some point was that those old souls were only ten or twelve years older than me. How did they get that maturity of sound? I still can't get my head around how seasoned they were at such young ages. More on the band itself at another time. Today I wanted to mention the passing of Duane Allman.
Duane was born in 1946 in Nashville, TN. In their early teens, his younger brother, Gregg, started playing guitar first – but once Duane took it up, he was on fire with it. He became good real fast. When he was in his mid-teens he saw B.B. King perform live and it shot him into orbit. He told his brother, “We gotta get into this.” And they did. They formed a couple of bands that didn't do much – The Allman Joys and The Hour Glass. Those were learning experiences. In 1968, Duane showed up at FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama wanting to catch on as a session guitarist for some of the heavyweights coming through to record. After hearing him play, the studio signed him on and he recorded memorable tracks for legends like Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. It was Pickett who gave him the nickname “Skydog” for his soaring, other-wordly guitar solos. Eric Clapton said of hearing the recording of Allman's guitar on Pickett's cover of Hey Jude , “I had to know who that was immediately — right now.” You might know that it's Duane Allman's iconic riff on Layla, the song by Clapton's band, Derek and the Dominoes.
During 1968/69, the pieces are coming together for what would become the lineup of The Allman Brothers Band. Allman's session work had also impressed Atlantic Records executive producer Jerry Wexler, who signed Allman and his new band to a contract. The Allman Brothers put out their first album in 1969 and their second in 1970, both to little fanfare.
In January of 1969, Duane went to see Johnny Winter at the Fillmore East in New York. He told a friend that within a year he would be on that stage. Sure enough, that December, The Allman Brothers played the Fillmore. Early in 1971, the band played there again and what would become their Live at Fillmore East album was recorded then. It is considered by many, myself included, the greatest live album ever. It was released for sale on July 6, 1971. The response was immediate. The Allman Brothers were a thing, big time.
Duane didn't get to bask in the glow of success long. Three and a half months later, on October 29, 1971, he was killed in a motorcycle wreck in Macon, Georgia. Gone at the age of 24. The Allman Brothers continued on with massive success, tragedies, deaths, and turmoil. That's a whole saga that many books have been written about. At their best, The Allman Brothers delivered some of the finest music America has ever produced - music that will endure. Without Duane Allman, it would never have been.