f48 “I
believe it helped at the time. He was like one of the family and we could talk with our eyes almost. There was just total communication, which is some- thing you have to have in the studio. If there’s any unspoken crap going on between you and the pro-
ducer the music suffers. Anyway Tom died in 2002 and so after then, when the subject of recording would come up, I would just change the subject… even though I’d kept writing. Writing is something that oozes out of you.”
“I was on tour with the Allman Brothers Band the latter part of summer 2009, up at the top of the country either Detroit or Minneapolis or somewhere, and my manager called me and said, ‘Listen, at the end of the tour, on your way home (I live in Savan- nah, Georgia), I want you to stop by Memphis, I want you to meet somebody, it’s really important. You can’t miss him, he’s way beyond six feet… T-Bone Burnett.’ Actually he’s about seven-two, he’s a monster… I mean, you go to give him a hug you got your head in his chest. So, I got there… Peabody Hotel, Memphis. I was- n’t wholeheartedly into it, thinking I want to be home with my dogs and girlfriend.”
“But anyway, he came in and we got to talking. One of the first things he said was what a hero Tommy Dowd was to him. And I thought ‘this guy can’t be all bad’. And then we started talking about different recording techniques and different ways of doing things. He goes back to the old school. He knows microphones that are kind of square, usually they have RCA across the top, with the big holes in them. Well he uses those for the room mics to mic the whole thing, and it gives such a warm sound, I swear. And he only uses tape, two and a quarter inch tape. He gets it all mixed down and changes it to digital.”
“I started feeling more relaxed and more like I wanna get in the studio. So, he said “Listen, this good friend of mine gave me this modem and it has, literally, a couple of thousand old, like Billie Holliday, old blues songs. Some of them are not as old as others but certainly a lot of them are public domain. I’m going to send you about 25 of these things and what I want you to do is make ‘em yours. You might have some trouble understanding them because there’s a lot of noise… that 78 rpm sound with a bad sty- lus. Take your time doing it, there’s absolutely no deadline or any- thing, I want all this to be just relaxed and as a matter of fact… I just want to hear it ooze out of you. Don’t force nothing’.“
“And so I got to work. Went back to Savannah and spent about seven weeks on those songs and I called him back ‘I’ve got them’ and he said ‘Well good. Let me set the date at the studio’ and then he said ‘Oh, by the way, we won’t be needing your band.’ Well that almost just stopped everything, ‘cause I mean, think about it, it’s almost an insult. He said ‘It’s just a thing I’ve got in my head’ and I said ‘Let me call you back’ and I hung up. I was angry. I thought about it… and I thought back when the Allman Brothers first met Tommy Dowd and they’d just finished the Capri- corn Studios in Macon, Georgia. They were brand new, they were eight-track, had an eight-track Studer in there. Back then, you know, eight-tracks, that was all you needed… it’s still probably all you need. Anyhow, they’d just finished it and said ‘All right, you guys, it’s yours… go for it’. And Tommy wanted us to come down to Miami and I thought, man, ‘This is bullshit’. Everybody in the band was just like, ‘What does he mean? Why can’t he come up here?’ We had to load all our shit up… and back then we were busted broke! Then I remembered my brother saying ‘Man it is his sandbox… it’s his toys. We’re being invited down there so, I say, go!’ So I thought about that, and that was one of the best things… meeting and getting to know Tommy Dowd.”
“So I called T-Bone back and said ‘All right I’m with you. Mind
you, I haven’t heard who is in the band’. Little did I know he had Mac Rebennack (Dr. John). You get with Mac, he’ll figure out his stuff and your stuff and their stuff. He’s probably the finest blues pianist alive today. He’s an old friend of mine. He was on my second solo record called Playing Up A Storm. We even wrote one of the songs on there. We sat down under the piano and wrote it. That was back in the ’70s where everybody was a little bit in the fog and, thank God, I’m now 16 years clean and sober… I would recommend it to anybody.”
“And so I thought ‘What the hell Gregory’. I’m not any kind of prima donna or anything like that. I said ‘If for nothing else, go for the adventure’ and, of course, my band understood right away. They said, ‘Man, just get it done and let’s ride’. And so I went down there and I opened the door and Mac was standing right there… ‘Hey bro!’ I said ‘What’re you doing down here?’ and he said, ‘Well I came down here to play with some blonde-headed dude from
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