Allman Brothers Band “Hittin' the Note”
Hello. My name is Matty and I’m a hypocrite.
It all started back in the 80s, when I was a teenager and really into guitar solos. For most of 1987, I just played “White Room,” by Cream, on repeat. I’d wait for Clapton’s wah wah to step forward and then I’d marvel at the “get a load of this” confidence of his playing. Around the same time, I believed a rumor that Allen Collins, from Lynyrd Skynyrd, played the “Free Bird” solo faster than a hummingbird. A couple of years later, I graduated to the twin guitar solos from “Hotel California” and the fleet-footed coda to “Sultans of Swing.” But then, in 1990, just before my sixteenth birthday, I was introduced to Television’s “Marquee Moon.” And I never thought about guitar solos, or music for that matter, the same way again.
After “Marquee Moon,” I did willingly attend a few Grateful Dead shows. I even saw Phish play twice before my twenty-first birthday. But, by my senior year of college, I had fully and finally coughed up all of the free-spirited, funkless guitar solos from my guts. At that point, it was 1995 and the dawn of “Jam Bands” as we had come to know them. Previously, people would talk about “jams” and “jamming,” but “Jam Bands” was not a genre. I’d heard the phrase used as a slight, but never seriously. So, I consulted the early internet and learned that the term was meant to describe improvisational Jazz bands rather than music played by fraternity brothers for undergrads who drank from red Solo cups. I cynically wondered what Coleman Hawkins had to do with all that songless crap I heard in sweaty, Polo-filled, campus bars. I didn’t know much about anything back then, but I knew the difference between heady Jazz and shitty music that kids played while getting shitty.
In spite of its suspect genealogy, though, the term “Jam Bands” stuck. In fact, it reigned supreme in parts of America in the 1990s. There was the club and college Jam Band circuit, dominated by the likes of moe., God Street Wine and the like. Then there was the MTV and amphitheater version, headed by Blues Traveler and The Spin Doctors. And finally, way up in the sky, there were the arena-sized Jam Bands — The Dead, Phish and, eventually, the Dave Matthews Band. These bands, and many more, all united for the annual H.O.R.D.E. festival and were obsessed over on Jamebase.com.
Publicly, my case against was studied but aggressive: I appreciated — even valued — improvisation in music. But I also demanded structure, whether it was in the form of the song, or the mode of the sound or the narrative of the dynamic. Without those things, and in the wrong hands, jams sounded unmoored. They sounded dangerous, like drunk children running with scissors. And I would not abide by the theater of it all — the pre-game spectacle, the lightweight Hippie ethos and the generally stoned lack of discernment. To my mind, some of these Jam bands were only nominally playing music. What they were really doing was perpetuating the idea that there are no rules. That you cannot distinguish good from bad. And that it’s all about the positive vibes, bro.
That was my public position. And I stuck with it for years. Privately, though, I knew it barely held water. The truth was that I simply and desperately wanted to be different. But also correct. I wanted to choose my music and not have the crowd choose it for me. The bedrock of my righteousness was music critic Robert Christgau, who had apparently listened to every album released in the 60s, 70s and 80s and who was able to reduce each of those records to a single sentence of empirical evaluation. Unlike Lester Bangs, Christgau did not insert himself into his writing. And unlike Greil Marcus, he seemed unconcerned about what the music signified culturally. Christgau simply graded it bad or good, with as few words as possible. He published several books that organized his reviews, alphabetically and by year. And, before I left college, those books had become the basis of my assumptions and the proof of my convictions. Robert Christgau did not like The Grateful Dead or Phish. He liked Television and The New York Dolls. Period.
In college, the Indie Rock crowd didn’t like Classic Rock and really didn’t like Jam Bands. And so, in an early act of hypocrisy, I ceded my musical preferences to the Indie Rock clique plus the Christgau algorithm. Fortunately, at the time, there was tons of exciting Indie stuff to explore. There was hushed songwriter stuff like Cat Power and Elliott Smith and Palace. And there was progressive Punk from Fugazi and Sleater Kinney. I dove into all of it. But, the ones that stuck — the ones that really got me — were Pavement and Built to Spill and Yo La Tengo and Stereolab and Wilco. Those bands eventually took places on the top shelf alongside my all time favorite bands (not named The Beatles or The Stones) — Television, The Velvet Underground and The Feelies. I’ve spent more than half of my life with those bands. And I don’t regret a day of it. But, in truth, I think I always knew that my love for these bands was built on the suppression of a great lie. It was a lie that I could barely see, much less articulate. But, today, with some perspective, I realize something that should have been fairly obvious all along — the bands that I loved, loved to jam.
Yes. I was late to the revelation. Many writers, but especially Steven Hyden, have written about the Jamification of Indie Rock and the Indiefication of Jam Bands. Whereas in 1995, battle lines were clearly drawn, by 2015, The National and War on Drugs could share oxygen with The String Cheese Incident and Galactic. It was hard to deny the miscegenation. And it was even harder to defend the snobbishness required to use the term “Jam Band” pejoratively. My avoidance had cost me a good deal. While I was eye-rolling in the direction of Phish, I missed out on Medeski, Martin and Wood and My Morning Jacket. And while I was fake gagging at the mention of Blues Traveler, Ben Harper and the North Mississippi Allstars passed me by. I don’t regret the Perpetual Groove jokes or the Disco Biscuits cheap shots. And I’d be fine if I never heard The Spin Doctors ever again. But the thing I do regret — the thing that has gnawed at me since I was a teenager — is the fact that I’ve never given the Allman Brothers Band a fair shake.
The Allmans are the Jam Band that I skirted for decades. I owned a few Grateful Dead albums. I once even wore a tie dye, scalped tickets to The Dead at MSG and bought cheap weed that was probably not weed from a guy in Washington Square Park. I saw Phish in concert and, due to my occasional residence in Vermont, I respectfully declined to comment on the band. But I never had a great excuse for skipping out on The Allmans. Outside of “Eat a Peach” and “Brothers and Sisters” and that one Beacon Theater show I got roped into in 1997, I knew woefully little about them. I knew I liked “Whipping Post” somewhat and “Midnight Rider” more. I knew that I did not particularly like “Blue Sky” and actually disliked “Ramblin’ Man.” I knew that, along with The Dead, they are the patron saints of the whole fucking thing. Other than that, I just had a million assumptions about them, most of them wrong.
I assumed, for example, that they were The Dead meets Skynyrd. That they were junkie messes. That they broke up more than they were together. That they were good ole boys. That they stole The Blues. Yes — I knew Duane’s reputation as a guitarist. I had spent some time with Derek and The Dominos. And I knew that Gregg was a helluva singer. And a bunch of my friends who truly, deeply loved music and who were open minded and curious, also loved The Allmans. So, I knew that there was probably a “there” there. But, I was conflicted. On the one hand, it’s hard to get started with the Allman Brothers in middle-age, many years after their last concert, and many more years after I started resisting Jam Bands. But, on the other hand, this is my lot in life. I need to understand. Moreover, I need to find meaning in the music of bands when they are past their prime. And I had this sense that my way back in to The Jam, and quite possibly my redemption, was through The Allmans. They would be my musical sherpas — my spiritual talismans. They just had to be.
Almost immediately I understood why it was hard to get a handle on the Allman Brothers Band. For one thing, they were at least five different bands. There was the original line-up with Duane and Berry. Then there’s the version after Duane and Berry died, when they became superstars and when Dickey began to take the reins. There’s the late 70s comeback version that was bloated, drunk and stoned. There’s the 90s band with Warren Haynes injecting new life while Dickey spiraled. And, finally, there’s the 2000s, post-Dickey version, when Derek Trucks joined, and when Gregg got back on track.
There is no really precedent for a band to have suffered such devastating loss and to have persevered in the way The Allmans did. Fleetwood Mac changed lead singers before Lindsey and Stevie, but it was always Mick’s band. And it was not as though Peter Green or Jeremy Spencer had suddenly died. The Temptations, like the Allmans, eventually operated like an institution as much as they did as a group. Key members left, briefly returned, struggled with addiction and left again. But The Temptations were a vocal group and not a band. The closest equivalent, of course, is Lynyrd Skynyrd, who suffered unfathomable loss in 1977 and then went dark for a decade. While they did return and eventually recorded and toured again, those later permutations were more a Southern Rock brand than a band. The Allman Brothers are the only band to have suffered so much, withstood so much change, and, against all odds, emerge triumphantly. How that happened exactly and whether that premise was actually true was the thing I needed to figure out.
While my investigation spanned several decades and piles of recordings, there was actually less source material than I feared. Those five versions of The Allmans produced over thirty albums, but only twelve were recorded in a studio. And when I considered that eight of those records were released before 1981, I figured that I could get a sense of the basic songbook and musical modes semi-efficiently. Obviously, I could not discount the live albums or bootlegs that partly defined their legacy. But, I hoped that I could at least get a sense of who they were as writers and recording artists.
On the basis of those twelve records, I struggled to place The Allmans. They were not like anyone else. They were occasionally like the band that made “Ramblin Man” and “Blue Sky.” And very sporadically like the one that made “Midnight Rider.” “Whipping Post” was possibly their platonic state — a true statement of purpose. Soon after, when Dickey Betts took the wheel, they became superstars. But I was not especially wowed by that second version of the band. Dickie’s songs and playing had a breezy Country air about them. And, the older he got, the showier he got. When Warren Haynes got named Vice President in the 90s, the band occasionally sounded like an elite, Blues cover band. There was greatness even in that. But it was not what I had come looking for after all these years.
However, before all that — when Duane led the band — and after all of that — when Derek Trucks arrived — the Allman Brothers were nothing short of amazing. They were the promise of something higher and deeper than The Dead. Their southernness was more beautiful than Skynyrd’s. And they brought more to The Blues than Cream or Zeppelin. These were all surprising realizations for me. But what I was most astounded by was their jazziness. At their best, The Allmans were an elite Jazz fusion band. They could play Jump and Bebop and, even, Modal Jazz, all while keeping one foot in the Delta. For extended periods in the early 1970s and, then again in the 2000s, they could sound like Miles Davis’ “Rock band” or like The Band, had Levon been in charge. It’s not every song or every performance. But it’s there. And it was there from the beginning. And they had it. And they lost it. And then they found it again. It wasn’t just the inspiration to do it. It was the capacity to do it, together, as a unit.
As much as I was wrong about their music, I was perhaps equally so about what the band signified. Growing up in the late 70s and 80s, I thought of them as bikers with instruments. I pictured Dickie’s slightly hostile mustache. I picture bandanas and Harleys and backstage fights and Jack Daniels and heroin. And, while all of that is partially true, it obscures the formative and the final meaning of The Allman Brothers. They were a family band. They were brothers. They were multiracial. They were a unit. They lived together — at home and on the road. When I opened up the gatefold of their debut, I saw six young men, naked, together in a stream. They were kind of a Hippie ideal. Moreover, they were an archetype of the mythopoetic men’s movement — vulnerable, but howling and free. They were a modern Brotopia before that idea got co-opted and toxic. But, most of this was lost on me somewhere between the motorcycle crashes, Cher and the Beacon Theater.
After weeks living with their music, I better understood the extraordinary beginning and the terrible middle of the story. I began to disabuse myself of my shitty biases and was sincerely curious about how the story ended. Not their twenty year ascent to the top of Jam Band mountain. Not how Gregg died. Or why Dickey was fired or why Warren called it quits. I knew most of that. I wanted to know how the music sounded at the end. Did they ever make good on the promise of “Hot Lanta” and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed"? Did they ever make good on the promise that those six, naked guys in the stream made in 1970?
To find out, I pressed play on “Hittin’ the Note,” their final studio album, released in 2003. Seventy five minutes later, the album was over. I pressed play again. And I did the same thing a half dozen times that week. In the end, I got my answers. And I was kind of astonished and definitely humbled. I was a hypocrite. The Allman Brothers were a Jam Band. So, apparently, I liked a Jam Band. I could not help but marvel at what they were able to conjure in the end. Over eleven, mostly original songs and a couple dozen extended jams, they somehow honor the original ideals — or at least the ones that I was interested in. They are alternately bluesy and jazzy. They veer into Latin rhythms much more than they do into Country Swing. Gregg, Butch and Jaimoe were all near or past fifty at the time, but they all sound positively vital. In fact, this band sounds every bit the equal of the one who recorded “Live at The Fillmore.” The songs on “Hittin’ the Note” may not always be as daring, but the playing certainly is.
“Hittin’ the Note” was not made for newcomers. It’s an unusually long record and the songs have callbacks to backstories and musical ideas introduced many years before. In 2003, and because of Warren’s devotion to The Blues, the band is generally heavier and more deeply rooted than their early 70s incarnation. But, with the arrival of Derek Trucks and his slide guitar, the band could also stretch out and climb higher than I imagined. I would not suggest that this is a top three Allmans’ album. However, even as a rookie and an outsider, I feel comfortable saying that this band is as locked in as the original version, when Duane and Dickey were on the guitars.
In fact, it seems hard to imagine that the original version could have made this record. It’s not that Derek and Warren are better players than Duane and Dickey — though they may be. It’s more that they don’t seem to be coke or heroin addicts. In that way, it’s impossible to imagine the original band surviving and making this album. Warren and Derek revered the legacy. They studied it. They honored it. Meanwhile, by 2003, Gregg was briefly, mostly healthy. And Butch and Jaimoe sound nimble and athletic, without once becoming a two man drum circle. There’s no ramblin’ or gamblin’ with this band. They begin in the Delta and breathlessly swing into Georgia, New York and, even, Cuba.
“High Cost of Living” is both the album’s apex and its thesis. It’s message is clear and credible: if you drink and drug and fuck around, you’re gonna pay a price. Over eight minutes, the band sets a big, bluesy hook and pumps the Hammond. This is not the sort of song that relies on a single lick, though. It’s not George Thoroughgood fare. It’s the kind of song that would absolutely kill in a beer commercial. What separates it from Classic Rock radio fare, though, are the jams. The first one appears a couple minutes in, and is more of a jazzy, mini-jam. It’s the appetizer. The second one, though — several minutes later — is a feast. There are swells and angles to it that are far away from a Blues solo without ever really straying from the melody. It’s a virtuosic couple of minutes in a song that otherwise sounds like patented, highly competent Allman Brothers.
When “Hittin’ the Note” came out, much was made about Derek Trucks' playing in Dickie Betts’ spot and much was made about Gregg Allman’s “return to form.” In truth, it is not so easy to locate Gregg’s actual role in the album. He gets five songwriting credits and lead vocal credits. But it’s also clear that Warren Haynes is the chief operator in this version of the band. In a couple of cases, and especially on the straight Blues numbers, it’s not even obvious whether Gregg or Warren is singing lead. None of this diminishes the accomplishment. Rather, it’s to point out the great service and loyalty Haynes provided to Gregg and the band. He is at the center of everything on “Hittin’ the Note.”
The most competent, if least exciting, songs are those that stay most loyal to The Blues. “Firing Line” is the album’s opener — a straight, muscular number that predicts The Black Keys. It’s a solid, if modest introduction. Gregg sounds weathered, but good. And it’s also a great set up for the more incendiary jams that follow. On “Woman Across the River,” the Blues get funkier and the singer knows he’s done the woman wrong. Conversely, on “Maydell,” the Blues swing more and it’s she that’s done him wrong. As a trio, they are among the straightest tracks on the album. There are solos but not a whole lot of improvisation. They sound easy and fun, but you also hear the precision within them.
“Desdemona” starts of slow and contemplative, not unlike "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” But, over the course of nine minutes it picks up a head of steam. The jams cook, leaving The Blues behind for Salsa and Free Jazz. And while occasionally showy, they never sound lost or out of step. At times, they manage to sound equally like The Dead and Santana, but better than both. Amazingly, this is not the piece de resistance. Towards the end of the record, on “Instrumental Illness,” they attempt to outdo “Desdemona,” but only partially succeed. Unencumbered by lyrics or by the structure of traditional form, they get really free and really fast. The bottom of the band is incredible here — dancing frequently, exploring the limits elsewhere and gathering themselves when necessary. Jaimoe and Butch are the stars of this jam without ever stealing the scene. The guitars, as always, are stunning, but they do occasionally get ahead of themselves. Eccentric and modal more than bluesy or Southern, this is probably the closest they get to my “Marquee Moon.”
There are, of course, other songs worth mentioning. “Rocking Horse” restates what “Firing Line” introduced, though less succinctly. And “Old Friend” is a Blues stomper played mostly on acoustic slide without a single member of the original Allman Brothers Band. It’s mostly Warren and Derek doing things that only they can do. And doing it with great reverence for the form they love and for the band they once worshipped and eventually rescued. At the time, of course, nobody knew this was the end. The band had not sounded that good in years. Maybe ever. Critics and fans responded in kind. It was not a blockbuster. It was not a renaissance or a “return to form.” It was something better. It was an unthinkable miracle. Certainly, it’s odd that Gregg, Butch and Jaimoe do not appear on the closing track of the final Allman Brothers album. But, also, many years later, it sounds like a proper farewell — like Warren and Derek saying to the founding members, “Thanks guys. We love you. And we’ll take it from here.”
That’s exactly what happened. Warren and Derek announced in 2014 that they’d be leaving the band. Gregg announced that he was sick again and that the Allman Brothers Band was really done, for good this time. Within three years, both Greg and Butch were gone. Of the founding members, two didn’t make it to thirty. And two didn’t make it to seventy. Sadly, that makes sense. The fact that the band survived to make something like “Hittin’ the Note” makes much less sense.
There’s a whole lot of wreckage in the Allman Brothers’ journey. There were the deaths. And the drugs. And the fights between brothers. And the breakups. And the “what ifs.” But, what about my damage — my reckoning? Where do I go now, knowing what I know now? Do I pretend that I still hate Jam Bands, when, apparently, I do not? Is that a greater crime than the cliche of becoming a middle-aged Indie Rock Dad who embraces Jam Bands? Honestly, I’m not so sure. Do I go check out a reconstituted version of Widespread Panic and write a “think piece” about them? Do I press play on past prime Spin Doctors — grab a hacky sack, roll a joint and listen to their latest, “If the River was Whiskey”? Or do I maybe just face facts. I hate Jam Bands. And I am also a hypocrite.