47 f Low Countryman
One of the better blues albums of the past year came from a man better known as a rock star. Gregg Allman explains how it all came about to Dave Peabody.
G
regg Allman’s Low Country Blues has been, for me, one of the releases of the year. It’s an album of blues-based material that burns with a real passion from both Gregg and producer T-Bone Burnett. In some arenas Gregg may be a bona fide rock star but
on Low Country Blues he’s truly singing the blues with his whole heart and soul.
Allman’s life and career has had all the highs and lows that give weight to his committed vocal performance on this album. He has overcome ill health and a recent liver transplant to get out and tour and promote the new album. This particular day he’s in Lon- don to play a sold-out evening concert at the Barbican Hall. The sound check is scheduled for 3pm and I’ve arrived at his hotel 15 minutes early for the pre-arranged midday interview. Outside it’s bright and sunny and as my eyes adjust to the dark of the hotel lobby a deep American voice booms out “You here for Gregg?!” “Yes I am,” I reply. “Can always spot one.” I’m ushered to sit and my greeter informs me that Gregg is still asleep but will be ready for the interview at 12 and instructs me that on no account should I ask Gregg any questions about his brother or his wives. “I don’t intend to, I’m here to talk to Gregg about his new album.” And, after being escorted to a top floor suite and introduced to the man himself, that’s what I did… and Gregg was happy to talk about the album too… and in detail. But first I wanted to know when and where Gregg first heard the blues?
“I was nine when I went to my first concert. My momma took us to the Nashville Municipal Auditorium (Nashville is where I was born). It’s big… huge. It was one of those black revues where all the different stars would use the house band. I think it’s great when you get a huge band back there… get a choir, strings, horns. It was headlined by Jackie Wilson and under him was Otis Redding and, boy, it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen in my life… the whole thing! My brother kept saying ‘Man, this is better than the damn fair’ and he was just taken by it, so was I. When the house band took a break, BB King had his own band. There was a guy with a big pompadour, peroxide, sort of red, who had a big piece of furniture up there on the stage. He was playing a Ham- mond organ. That was my first taste of the Hammond, yes! And now BB he’s a good friend… him and my mother are good friends. We were in the cheap seats and our eyesight was a lot better back then. I didn’t pay any attention to what they had for a sound sys- tem, you know, I was so naïve. All that I knew is it changed my life that day. And my brother said ‘Man, we’ve got to get into some of this’… and I looked at him like he was nuts, like ‘What are you talking about?’ He just looked at me like I was crazy.”
Crazy or not, Duane and Gregg, the Allman Brothers, made a sizeable impact on the music scene with their band and self-titled first album which was released in 1969. Duane died in a tragic motorcycle accident in 1971 but Gregg has kept the band going in different formats, with occasional breaks, until the present day. He also pursued a solo career but hadn’t made a solo album for some 13 years. So the question was “How did the Low Country Blues project get started?”
“Tom Dowd was producer of 95 percent of the Allman Brothers
stuff, everything that wasn’t live, and even the Live At Fillmore East he produced that. He’d become like a father figure to me. I learned so much from him, so much about playing, about technique, about everything. Oh… we had got into drugs and he got us all back in one room and he just gave us the tongue-lashing of our lives.”
Photo: Tom Bunning
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