3 March : The Allman Brothers Band

It’s funny how memory works, what sticks and what doesn’t. The first time I remember hearing the Allman Brothers was when Annie Nightingale played Jessica on her weekend request show on Radio 1. I was at school and mentioned it in French class. I was in 6th year trying to upgrade my O-Level French from a bare pass to something better (and I did 🙂 ) so probably late 1976. Whoever I was talking to lent me a copy of a double compilation album called The Road Goes Ever On, released in 1975. At some point around then I bought that compilation, and still have it.

I’ve had an on/off relationship with them ever since. I’ve never doubted their ability, but my tastes and their output have crisscrossed over the years.

Their debut album came out in the US in late 1969 but, as usual, took a while to make its way over the Atlantic. New Musical Express reviewed it in late March 1970 so I guess it was available from early March. Given time, wrote Nick Logan, the band could give Chicago a run for their money. Well: yes.

Lester Bangs, writing in Rolling Stone 21 February, was more positive:

The Allman Brothers are a rather heavy white blues group out of Muscle Shoals. They look like the post-teen punk band rehearsing next door, and there is little in their music that we haven’t heard before. And both they and their album are a gas.

It’s a good debut album, full of what made them such a great band even if they were still in the process of becoming what they were soon to be. Perversely, I think the key to their sound wasn’t so much blues, as Nick Logan and Lester Bangs both assert, but the mix of influences brought by the band members, and all present on this album: blues, R and B, country, jazz, western swing, and, on the opener Don’t Want You No More, Latin in a Santana vein, even though that track finishes with upwardly spiraling guitar scales that are diagnostic of the early Allman’s sound. Every Hungry Woman also reminds me of Abraxas-era Santana.

Where the blues are to the fore, they’re the blues of T-Bone Walker with those fancy 9th chords. Underlying it all is the twin-drum sound of Trucks and Johanson and the fine, slinky bass playing of Berry Oakley.

It isn’t perfect. Black Hearted Woman reminds me too much of Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic and a couple of songs do nothing for me. But Dreams and Whipping Post are Allmans classics, pointing in the direction they’re heading.

Well worth a listen. It’s all on Spotify. It’s also a YouTube playlist (below).