Gregg Allman, 1947-2017

I was saddened to hear this after­noon of Gregg Allman’s passing. 

I inter­viewed him in 2011, for the MSN web­site. The cur­rent pod people who admin­is­trate said site have dis­ap­peared almost all of its con­tent pri­or to whenev­er they took con­trol of it, but I have a draft saved, and I thought it would be apt to post it, as a trib­ute. It runs below. 

“It’s a funky day out­side,” Gregg Allman observes of the grey cold Manhattan after­noon he sees from his 15^th-floor win­dow at a quiet Upper East Side hotel. The rock legend him­self is rel­at­ively cozy, albeit a little on the tired side. He’s in town to flog his new solo album, Low Country Blues, his first such effort in 14 years and a pro­ject instig­ated largely by near-ubiquitous pro­du­cer T‑Bone Burnett, who of late has spe­cial­ized in revital­iz­ing both the careers and muses of rock gods of a cer­tain age (c.f., Robert Plant’s col­lab­or­a­tion with Allison Krauss, Raising Sand). Allman, whose main pro­ject, a little combo known as The Allman Brothers Band, still gets plenty of work (the group will return to New York in March to resume its much cel­eb­rated sort-of res­id­ency at the Beacon Theater for a mara­thon run of con­certs), didn’t neces­sar­ily need the stretch­ing, but after meet­ing Burnett (of whom Allman had in fact very little con­scious­ness of) the sing­er, gui­tar­ist and organ­ist figured a little artist­ic adven­ture might be in order. Which meant work­ing with some new musi­cians (includ­ing Burnett’s much-vaunted rhythm sec­tion of bassist Dennis Crouch and drum­mer Jay Bellerose, and gui­tar­ist Doyle Bramhall II) and one old friend (Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, on piano) to lay out a selec­tion of vin­tage blues tunes in a very intim­ate and old school record­ing style. The mak­ing of the record was fol­lowed by anoth­er, more fright­en­ing mile­stone in Allman’s life, which has already seen plenty of tragedy and trouble (includ­ing the death of his beloved broth­er, the great gui­tar­ist Duane Allman, in a motor­cycle acci­dent in 1971, not to men­tion a half a dozen mar­riages): the musi­cian, after long bat­tling Hepatitis C via med­ic­a­tion, was obliged to under­go a liv­er trans­plant. Today, ruddy and red-cheeked, soft-spoken and just a trifle abstrac­ted, he seems less a man with a couple of new leases on life than a troubadour wise in the ways of music­al enchant­ment who’s just happy to have been giv­en the chance to keep on keep­in’ on.

MSN MUSIC: In pre­par­a­tion for this talk, I was listen­ing to The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore ’71 and hear­ing all the dif­fer­ent things that were going on in the music at that time: there’s blues, there’s impro­visa­tion that’s almost in a Coltrane style, there’s a little bit of psy­che­del­ica. And it reminded me that the late pro­du­cer Tom Dowd, who you worked with so extens­ively, was intim­ately con­nec­ted with those styles–he was in the stu­dio for both Cream’s Disraeli Gears and Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Thinking about how all that music must have affected you made me won­der if you still listen to a lot of those dif­fer­ent things yourself?

GREGG ALLMAN: From time to time I do. In my car, I keep a real good stash of music, as well as hav­ing the XM and Sirius radio. ‘Cause if I’m going to drive in a car, man, I want to hear some sound. That’s the best time to listen to it. So I don’t know why, but for some reas­on I was get­ting some gas at this place and I went inside and saw on the counter, it said “Pavarotti;” there was one of his records there for sale. I thought,” I think I’ll just go, man, I’ll listen to that.” And it was like 2 weeks before I was through with it. And God, it was so many great licks going down in there. I mean this guy’s got a throat. Ooh. I mean man, I don’t see how Sting ever got up the balls to sing with Luciano Pavarotti. Whoa. I think he might have held his own. He did. But there are not too many oth­er bass play­ers I know could have done it!

MSN MUSIC: No, that’s for sure. Let’s talk about how this record came into being. Your man­ager hooked you up with T‑Bone, is that correct?

GREGG ALLMAN: I was just going to meet him, and I did fig­ure the idea of record­ing would come up. I wasn’t sure ‘cause Michael did­n’t tell me he was a pro­du­cer. He just said, I want you to meet this fel­low. I wasn’t too keen on it, because I’d just fin­ished a long tour and I just wanted to go home, and I didn’t want to step in Memphis on my way home. I had nev­er heard the man’s name. I did­n’t know who T‑Bone Burnett was. I mean I’m just one of the ones that had­n’t. I learned he’s had some big things, and a lot of them were recently. But our paths had nev­er crossed.

He has some very, very dif­fer­ent, very old school ways of record­ing. Some of them are old school enough you could say they’re back in the school that my grand­fath­er went to. I mean, for room tone he would use one of those old square RCA mikes, with those let­ters on top, you know. I think it was next door to a rib­bon mike! I remem­ber that being the funki­est micro­phone, but I mean it picked up that warm sound that he wanted. And once he got that, he could bring it up or down, that par­tic­u­lar qual­ity. It was like, “How much cheese do you want on this pizza?”

MSN MUSIC: Elvis Costello has worked with T‑Bone extens­ively, and also very recently, and when I spoke with Costello last fall he was say­ing that T‑Bone cre­ates an envir­on­ment where all the play­ers can really hear each other.

GREGG ALLMAN: Oh yeah. Oh, def­in­itely. He does that. I did­n’t really know that any­body had been there in that stu­dio before us, but after I got think­ing about it, I said, you know, “Everything is laid out here per­fectly. This is get­ting scar­i­er by the moment!” It seems like the most obvi­ous thing, to set up the room so that all the play­ers had to be look­ing at each oth­er. We were able to see every­body right in the face but were still sep­ar­ated sound-wise. That was the most fun I ever had record­ing, I think, in my life. The only thing I can com­pare it to is, well, I was a spec­tat­or and a par­tial play­er on [Derek and the Dominoes’] Layla or at least with that band, because we did a long jam and recor­ded that and it was released later on. But pri­or to that, I stayed down there and watched the ses­sions. And it was some­thing else, watch­ing Layla. It was great. Making Low Country Blues really reminded me of that.

With T‑Bone, it was kind of inter­est­ing to let him take the reins. When I met him in Memphis, he was stay­ing at the Peabody Hotel, and he was doing a study of Sun Studios, because he was aim­ing to build a rep­lica of the room on this piece of land that he’s got next to his house. That is so cool. We just got to talk­ing and, man, one of the first few things he said was about Tommy Dowd, and how much he admired him. And then he brought up this idea, he said he had this hard drive that had thou­sands of old songs on it. And that he would peel off about 45 of them, and I could just sift through that and come up with fif­teen I’d like to record. That was fine. And then, the next meet­ing he had he tells me, “Sorry but you can­’t bring your own band.” Well that just about erased it. I said, man, I just–I laughed. I said, I need to think on this. And I did. A couple weeks. I was kind of pissed off actu­ally. And then I thought about some­thing my broth­er told me once. Something that happened once when we think­ing about work­ing with Tommy Dowd. We had met him, and the first thing he says, “I want you to come down to Miami to record.” And we had found out that they had just fin­ished the Capricorn Studios where Duane and I were already at, and we could stay home and record if we wanted to, because we had settled down in Macon there real nicely. And so any­way, I thought at the time, “What do we want to go to Miami for?” Tommy’s stu­dio was in this sec­tion of town where they parked all the pro­duce trucks at night, you know. You’d nev­er find it unless some­body took you there. But I remem­ber Duane say­ing, “Look, it’s his sand box, it’s his stu­dio, it’s what he’s used to work­ing with. We know what we got here. Let’s just take it down and do it.” And I thought about that. And I thought, “It’s been 14 years and you know maybe I ought to just go with this one.”

And so I took off on down there and I mean less than two weeks later T‑Bone said, “Wrap,” and it was a wrap. I could barely believe it. And he hadn’t told me who was in the band until I got there. They did­n’t tell me it was some of my good old friends that I’ve already played with. Mac Rebennack, Dr. John, who played on the 1976 record that I made, my second solo album, Playing Up A Storm. It was so much fun. It really was.

MSN MUSIC: It was a little dif­fer­ent play­ing with Dr. John now than it was then, I’ve gathered.

GREGG ALLMAN: Yeah, cause we were both up in the clouds back then. Yeah. He’s become quite the fel­low. He’s so friendly in his hap­pi­ness. He’s got hap­pi­ness. He looks like he found that legit­im­ately happy place.

MSN MUSIC: It was after this record that you had the liv­er trans­plant sur­gery. Before that point, Hepatitis C is treated with the drug inter­fer­on, in a regi­men of weekly shots over the course of almost a year; that’s pretty brutal.

GREGG ALLMAN: That’s right. It makes you feel so lousy. And then by Saturday night you just start to feel like a human being, here come the fuckin’ shot again on Monday. And then two big pills you take with it. Together. They get in there and cook. That’s some kind of suck.

MSN MUSIC: So to go through all that, and then get the news that the treat­ment did­n’t take; that’s got to mess with your head somehow.

GREGG ALLMAN: Oh yeah. Oh hell yeah. And dur­ing the damn thing they would kind of, not joke, but they would kind of touch on the trans­plant sub­ject. Then I thought to myself, I won­der what this is going to come to. God. That’s the most pain­ful thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life. It’s like when you build a ship inside of a glass bottle. Because you’ve got a rib cage here it’s got to go inside of there. So it’s like they’re build­ing that ship inside my body. They’re actu­ally doing it. They had to get more room, so they had this machine goes down inside your ribs, spreads you inside, so they can get in there and work. And that’s ser­i­ously pain­ful. But I came out of it OK. And now I’m just approach­ing my 7^th month. The 23^rd of June.

MSN MUSIC: And you’re com­ing back strong with the live work. I see you and the Allman Brothers Band have got anoth­er stint lined up for the Beacon. Are you excited?

GREGG ALLMAN: I really am. That is such a great place to play. I played there recently, actu­ally, with T‑Bone and his Speaking Clock Revue. They did shows in Boston, New York, San Francisco. T‑Bone asked me to come along. And I was still in bed. I said, “Man, I’m not going to make that.” But then I though, “Yes, I’m going to make that.” I did. It came off without a hitch. It was really good. It was a little pain­ful, but hey. Where they cut, where they stitched, where it hurts, that’s not the part of the body where you sing from.