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Georgia. You’re my session, that’s great!’ I knew it was going to be good then. Anyway, the rest of the guys came in and we started out with Floating Bridge and we got it in two takes. After I got through arranging this stuff, that’s the one I felt just fell in… into my arrangement. It was the easiest to arrange. I did all the arrange- ments although there’s places where T-Bone made suggestions. That’s what a pro ducer’s for… they hear stuff that you can’t. One song got a little wordy and he said, ‘Man, why don’t you drop this word and that word and just sing this’. Little things like that, just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.”


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“Everything was done live in the studio except the horns… which came later, except on Blind Man. Because, for the horns, the intro is decided by the vocal. There is no count-up so you had to do it that way. It’s [Gregg sings to demonstrate] ‘Blind man, standing on the corner’ … the horns are directed by the vocal and then, until the drums come in, you don’t have a beat. At first we were just going for the intro and that intro came out so good I just said ‘Keep going’. So we actually did that all in one piece. I’d packed enough clothes because I planned on staying about three weeks. Like… every other album I’ve ever cut, it’s been like that. Man, in twelve days I was on my way back home. My part was done”.


mention to Gregg that I particularly like the album’s only original track Just Another Rider and wonder at what point that song came on on board. “Me and Warren Haines wrote that. It was about halfway through the session and T-Bone he says, ‘Gregg I owe you an apology. I never asked you if you had anything in your bag over there that you want to cut’. He said, ‘I’m sorry, it was totally an oversight on my part’. I said that I might have a couple of things. Well there was three of them in there but I thought that one would quite fit in with what we were doing a lot better and I played it for him and the band. Well, the band already had it while I was playing it down. They are real good. The bass was all upright. I never recorded with an upright bass before. You sing with an electric bass, sing with an upright and the difference in the sound of your voice, I mean, you can hear. On this record, get some headphones, get real quiet, turn it up good and loud, and you can hear me breathing. You can hear every single vibration of my voice and you can hear more than any other record I’ve listened to of myself singing. It’s just a small difference but boy it’s an effective one.”


“When my band heard the finished album they loved it. I mean, it hit them again that they weren’t on it, and that was hard. But they all said I did the right thing. And they started picking out favourite songs… and they just really love it now. They say ‘Let’s learn another one off the record’. And there’s a couple of them like Tears, Tears, Tears that we play the hell out of. I talked to T- Bone not too long ago and I said ‘Man, how do you feel about doing this again’? He said ‘Man I can’t wait. You’re the one that’s all busy, you know’. He said ‘But I tell you what, I have been think- ing about a different approach’… and so I’ll be very interested to see what kind of ideas he’s got, ‘cause I’ve got some myself. And I’ve written some since then”.


www.greggallman.com F


Photo: Dave Peabody


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