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 15th-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 7th month. The 23rd 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.
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