Gregg Allman - Southern Blood

In my feeble mind, he had nothing to prove.  Being a part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame meant a lot to him.  His place in music history, and his legacy as part of the Allman Brothers Band is secure.  I have the feeling that as Gregg Allman, solo artist, he must have thought he still had something to prove, if not to himself, then to his fans every night on the concert stage.  He need not have worried on that score.  His fans were with him regardless of whether he was in a big band started by his big brother Duane or in his own band.

When Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks announced that 2014 would be their last year as part of the Allman Brothers Band, the proverbial writing was on the wall.  Butch Trucks didn't want to read that writing, and he wasn't shy about saying as much.  If Jaimoe had any opinions about the Allman Brothers Band finally calling it a day, I never heard him express any feelings publicly one way or the other.  But it was Brother Gregg who made it official.  Publicly, he expressed the need to concentrate on his own career.  What we in the listening public didn't know at that time was that Gregg Allman was slowly dying.

The liver cancer that he had prior to his liver transplant in 2010 had returned in 2012, and this time it spread to one of his lungs.  Rather than go through further cancer treatment (as a spouse of a cancer survivor, I know that chemo and radiation therapy are tough), he accepted his time on Earth was short.  He wanted to be at the top of his game until he could no longer perform.  His feeling was that cancer treatment would affect his voice, a situation he thought unacceptable.  It was with that same determination to give all to his fans that he decided to make one final album, a gift for his fans and a chance to say goodbye and thank you to us in his own way.  That album, Southern Blood, dropped today, three and a half months after he breathed his last in late May.

Until now Gregg Allman's last musical statement was 2011’s Low Country Blues.  That record, made with T-Bone Burnett, contained covers of old blues songs and one original song he wrote with Warren Haynes (Just Another Rider).  I think Low Country Blues is a fine album.  But it bugged Gregg that he didn't record it with his own band.  That would change with Southern Blood.  When he decided to make this album, it was going to be with his own road band instead of studio musicians, and he was going to do it at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.  This is the same studio where his brother Duane made his first musical mark when he recorded Hey Jude with Wilson Pickett in 1968.  Duane and Gregg’s band Hourglass recorded their BB King Medley here [it’s on the Duane Allman Anthology].  Gregg's own musical circle would indeed remain unbroken.

Like Low Country Blues before it, Southern Blood is filled with covers and one final original song.  Gregg wanted to tell the story of where he's been, and where he was going.  The songs he chose to tell that story sound like they were written especially for him, but of course they weren't - they just fit that well.  Gregg's song choices were impeccable, and as there are several surprises as to the songs themselves and who wrote them, he demonstrated he still had a few musical tricks up his sleeve.  While the content on Southern Blood is mostly covers like Low Country Blues, the production sounds like 1997’s Searching for Simplicity, while the feel is like Laid Back, Gregg’s first solo album.  Like that first album, there are female choir voices, a steel guitar here and there, and the recording itself has a very warm feeling to it.  According to producer Don Was, the songs were recorded mostly live.  Gregg had been playing with this group of musicians for years, and they were tight.  This album demonstrates how tight they were.

The songs:

My Only True Friend – The only Gregg Allman original on the album, this would be the last of his own songs that he would record.  Written with guitarist Scott Sharrard, this is Gregg Allman’s ode to life on the road.  Sharrard said he was staying at Allman’s home and working on songs a few years ago when he “had a vivid dream where Gregg was talking to Duane.” He remembered the words and started working on a song he envisioned “as a conversation across the universe between Duane and Gregg.”  This song speaks to Gregg’s journey, that he was nearing the end of his life, and that he wanted people to remember him long after he's gone.  A humble and sensitive man, Gregg Allman underestimated his own importance to the fans who loved him.  He need not have worried that he would be forgotten.

Once I Was – One of Gregg Allman’s favorite songwriters was Tim Buckley.  He used to play this song for an audience of one – Scott Sharrard.  When it came time to make the record, Sharrard convinced Don Was of the need to put this one down.  Always thought of as a rhythm & blues purist, one forgets that Gregg had a folkie side, the product of his association with Jackson Browne.  This song is the first surprise of several on Southern Blood.

Going Going Gone – A Bob Dylan original that first appeared on the Planet Waves album he did with The Band in 1974, the original context of the title involved Dylan’s impending split with his first wife Sara.  The circumstances of Gregg’s recording of this song make these dark lyrics even more dark:

I've just reached a place
Where the willow don't bend
There's not much more to be said
It's the top of the end
I'm going
I'm going
I'm gone

I'm closin' the book
On the pages and the text
And I don't really care
What happens next
I'm just going
I'm going
I'm gone

I been hangin' on threads
I been playin' it straight
Now, I've just got to cut loose
Before it gets late
So I'm going
I'm going
I'm gone

Black Muddy River – From Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, this slow ballad first appeared on the Grateful Dead’s In The Dark album [1987].  Gregg was never a Deadhead [that was Dickey Betts’ thing], so this song is a bit of surprise.  In Gregg’s hands, this turns into a full-blown country song, complete with steel guitars and [for the first time] mandolins.

I Love The Life I Live – I forget with whom he did the interview [it might have been The Big Interview with Dan Rather], Gregg said that he and his brother Duane always listened to the blues greats on Nashville’s WLAC, that they especially liked Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, and that they owned everything Howlin’ Wolf ever cut.  It’s no surprise that Gregg would include something from Muddy Waters on Southern Blood.  Gregg did Muddy’s I Can’t Be Satisfied on Low Country Blues.  Here’s another Muddy Waters song which I like much more than the original.  Gregg’s “unreconstructed Southern masculinity” oozes from every note he sings.  You can almost see the swagger in his walk when you hear this.

Willin – Brother Gregg finally does something from Little Feat.  It first appeared on 1972’s Sailin’ Shoes, this is an ode to living the life of a trucker, with bad weed and cheap wine.

Blind Bats And Swamp Rats – This funky [yes. you read that correctly] song is as fun as it is unexpected.  The song title was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I heard it before.  Then it came to me – Johnny Jenkins, Ton-Ton Macoute! – the Duane Allman solo album that got away.  After Dickey Betts left the Allman Brothers Band, the Brothers had started to play Dr. John’s I Walk on Gilded Splinters from the same album [Duane played on it].   Gilded Splinters worked extremely well for the Brothers, and Brother Gregg does an equally fine job with Blind Bats and Swamp Rats.  This is my favorite from Southern Blood.

Out Of Left Field – This is a Percy Sledge song written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham.  Gregg liked Percy Sledge.  He once recorded a demo of When a Man Loves a Woman [which can be found on One More Try: An Anthology].  Given these lyrics, this song tells me he’s singing about his wife Shannon.  After his previous marriage ended he publicly mused that he probably wouldn’t marry again.  But as the song says, “fate stumbled in…”

When least expected

Fate stumbles in

Bringing light to the darkness

Oh, what a friend

I needed someone to call my own

Suddenly, out left field

Out left field, out left field

Love came along, ooh

Love Like Kerosene – I first heard this one on Gregg Allman Live: Back To Macon, GA.  Scott Sharrard wrote this one.  Gregg and the band give a very spirited performance.

Song For Adam – Gregg Allman’s history with Jackson Browne is well-documented, so I won’t rehash it here.  Browne wrote this song in memory of a friend who died from an apparent suicide.  But it reminded Gregg of someone else who died young – his brother Duane.  Gregg made a demo of this song in 1974.  That demo can also be found on One More Try: An Anthology.  He never put the song on an album until now.  According to producer Don Was, “once Duane passed away, I think it really reminded him of his brother. He’d always wanted to record it.”  If you didn’t know the story behind the song, one could easily think it was about Duane. 

Well, I still remember laughing
With our backs against the wall
So free of fear, we never thought
That one of us might fall

Given everything I’ve read about the early days of the Allman Brothers Band, this describes Duane and Gregg to a T.  Those were the good times, then came the bad.  The original lyric went like this:

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him long

And when I stood myself beside him, I never thought I was as strong

Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song

Well I'm not the one to say I know, but I'm hoping he was wrong

Gregg changed the words very subtly, but when he did the meaning changed and you know that he’s singing about Duane:

And when I stood myself behind, I never felt so strong…

Here’s the gut punch – when he sang this line, he couldn’t do the line after it.  It was too emotional for him, and he choked up. If you’re listening on headphones, you can hear his voice crack:

Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song…

Duane Allman never finished his metaphorical song.  Don Was is a pretty good producer, and when he heard Gregg stop suddenly in mid-song, he must have known he was onto something cosmic and left it that way.  Gregg heard this mix of the song the night before he went to sleep for the final time.  He liked what he heard and told Don Was to leave it the way he heard it.

David Bowie did it with Blackstar, and Warren Zevon did it with The Wind.  Leonard Cohen did it with So You Want It Darker.  As each man found out he was dying, each decided to make a final statement to say “goodbye” on their own terms.  They pulled it off rather well.  I believe Gregg did what he set out to do in making Southern Blood.  This album is simply stunning.

Walter Becker - RIP

Walter Becker died on Sunday.  He was 67.  If you don’t know who he is, stop reading now.

Becker’s partner in Steely Dan [Donald Fagen] wrote this about him today:  Walter had a very rough childhood - I’ll spare you the details. Luckily, he was smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter. He was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny. Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art. We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues…

Walter Becker started out as a guitar player, but when Steely Dan formed, he switched to bass.  When you have two guitarists with the caliber of Denny Dias and Skunk Baxter, your guitar services become somewhat redundant, hence the switch to bass.  Steely Dan stopped touring after Pretzel Logic and became a studio concern.  The composition of Steely Dan varied from album to album.  It even varied from song to song.  If Becker needed to play guitar, he’d play it.  If he needed to play bass, he’d play it, though that became a lesser need once Becker and Fagen met Chuck Rainey.  What was Walter Becker’s role in Steely Dan?  Did he write the music, or did he write the words?  In an interview I read from nine years ago, Walter Becker was asked about the division of labor between himself and Donald Fagen:

Can you give a nutshell breakdown of the division of labor in Steely Dan? It’s hard for an outsider to know who’s responsible for what.

Yeah, I think that with most partnerships that run for a certain amount of time—and ours has run for a pretty long time—the division of labor is very ad hoc. So whatever needs to be done, sometimes I’ve got something to start with, sometimes Donald’s got something to start with. Sometimes we really work very closely, collaboratively on every little silly millimeter on the writing of the song and certainly of the records, and sometimes less so. And so over the course of the partnership, I think we’ve done all sorts of different things different ways, and probably that still is changing in a way, because if I can speculate on Donald’s behalf, I think there is a level of perfection, polish, sophistication, and abundance of detail and structural stuff that he wants to hear in his music that I sort of ran out of patience to do. My attention span is not that good anymore, and I sort of believe—and maybe the lyrics somewhere say this—that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Steely Dan’s music was different.  While many a group from the 1970s went for high volume and was for the most part in 4/4 time, Steely Dan took the jazz route.  In 1993, Walter Becker said “we thought superimposing jazz harmonies on pop songs was subversive.”  Fagen and Becker are somewhat like Tom Waits in the themes they write about.  They look at humanity’s dark side, and sang anything but love songs.  Kid Charlemagne was based on LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, Cousin Dupree is somewhat incestuous [the dude loves his cousin], Rikki Don’t Lose the Number and Everything You Did are about infidelity, Everyone’s Gone to the Movies is an ode to pornography, Hey Nineteen addresses cradle-robbing, and so on.  It’s sex, drugs and jazz for these guys.

Why would a band name themselves after a dildo from a William Burroughs novel?  I’m not a big Steely Dan fan – I won’t pretend that I was/am.  .  She Who Must Be Obeyed especially doesn’t like them.  I can take Donald Fagen’s vocals in small doses only.  But [and there is always a ‘but’], I like Aja, a lot [The Royal Scam is a close second].  A friend from the old Ohio neighborhood, whose parents didn’t think much of public school education [and these days with mandatory testing, teaching to the test and federal funding that is dependent on test scores, can you blame them?], went to prep school in Connecticut.  When he returned for summer break, he introduced me to Steely Dan.  More specifically, he introduced me to Aja.  It’s one of those albums [like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon] that you can ‘test drive’ a stereo you might want to buy.  It sounded so good you could play it on a shitty portable eight-track player [how’s THAT for dating one’s self?] and it would sound ok.  That came in very handy, for when I moved to Colorado in July 1978, all I had to listen to was a few eight-track tapes [one of which was Aja] and that shitty portable eight-track player. 

Until we finally moved into our little house on the prairie in March 1979, that’s all I had.  I still like Aja a lot.  After Aja came the song for a film called FM.  The song – FM [No Static At All] – that I thought was very cool [I still do].  Walter Becker didn’t play much lead guitar because he chose not to.  He and Donald Fagen were perfectionists, almost to a fault.  They hired the best players of any instrument in the business, and such was Becker and Fagen’s reputation for being stern taskmasters that these seasoned studio pros craved their approval.  They didn’t always get it.  Walter Becker was the EF Hutton of guitar players.  When he played, people listened. He played lead guitar on FM – I noticed.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out that FM was an outtake from Aja.  No wonder I liked it…  I eagerly awaited their follow-up, and it came in 1980 with Gaucho.  I heard Hey Nineteen on the radio, and I absolutely hated it [and still do to this day].  Gaucho was for Steely Dan what The Long Run was for The Eagles – it was boring, it took too long to make, and it was the album that killed the group [Third World Man is ok].  And like The Long Run, Gaucho killed my interest in Steely Dan.  It also killed Donald Fagen’s and Walter Becker’s interest in each other, so it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who felt that way about that album.

Awhile back a Facebook friend of mine asked me what I thought about Steely Dan.  My answer was dismissive – “I liked them when I was a kid, then I grew up.”  But I’ve been doing a re-assessment over the last year.  Over time I grew to realize these guys were as crabby as I am.  And in this age where all music sounds the same, and everything is Unicorns and rainbows [cue the “millennial whoops” now], “different” from two old crabby, grouchy guys who write their own stuff, and who play real instruments with real musicians is just fine with me.

There isn’t much to add here.  In announcing his death, Walter Becker’s website simply read the following:

w a l t e r   b e c k e r              f e b .   2 0   1 9 5 0   —  s e p t .   0 3   2 0 1 7. 

I’ll keep it equally as simple – RIP Walter Becker.

Songs for the iPod:

Do It Again [Can't Buy a Thrill, 1972]

Showbiz Kids [Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973]

Rikki Don't Lose That Number [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Pretzel Logic [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

With a Gun [Pretzel Logic, 1974]

Charlie Freak [Pretzel Logic, 1974]
Black Friday [Katy Lied, 1975]

Doctor Wu [Katy Lied, 1975]

Kid Charlemagne [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Caves of Altamira [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Don't Take Me Alive [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Sign in Stranger [The Royal Scam, 1976]
Haitian Divorce [The Royal Scam, 1976]

The Royal Scam [The Royal Scam, 1976]

Deacon Blues [Aja, 1977]

Aja [Aja, 1977]

Peg [Aja, 1977]

Josie [Aja, 1977]

Black Cow [Aja, 1977]

Home at Last [Aja, 1977]

FM [No Static At All] [FM original soundtrack, 1978]

Down in the Bottom [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Junkie Girl [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]

Cousin Dupree [Two Against Nature, 2000]

Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]

Circus Money [Walter Becker - Circus Money, 2008]
Lucky Henry [Walter Becker - 11 Tracks of Whack, 1994]
Janie Runaway [Two Against Nature, 2000]
Third World Man [Gaucho, 1980]