we all love that. One of Gregg’s favorite band was Pink Floyd. It's not like he was trying to fight that. But Gregg wanted to have a song-oriented band. Listen to Hourglass and their early stuff. They were three minutes song, bang, and that was the vision. Gregg said he wanted to get it back to that. He wanted to have the band that he and his brother had swore they would put to- gether, and he wanted to kind of rewrite history in a way for him to do this group. He asked for me and the guys in the band to help him do it. We worked our asses off to get as close to the vi- sion of what that thing would be without Duane. I always say that Sutherland [David "Vid" Sutherland], our tour manager, Chank, who was always on the road with us, Mark Quiñones, it took four men to make one Duane! At times you can throw in a Lehman [manager Michael Lehman] or Don Was; when those decisions would come up, it's really 6 people. When you look at Southern Blood they got that record done. I'm talking about motivating and inspiring him. Gregg, like any great artists had flaws he was easily distracted. Whether it was drugs or girls, there was always something in the way of him fulfilling his dream of having the band that he wanted.


Chank Middleton: With Gregg’s band, we called it structured music, not a jam band. Not a lot of long solos. Some solos, but not long solos. Keep the structure, you know what song you were lis- tening to the whole while they were playing. Sometimes the Brothers get off into a jam in the middle of a song, even a person like me who heard a song a thousand times, they would get off on a jam so long you would wonder what song they were playing! Warren and Derek did their thing with their long guitar solos. I would tell Gregg, when you’re out with them just play and have fun. When you’re with your band, you do it your way. When Warren and Derek came into the band, Gregg was messed up. When they led, he didn’t mind, as long as he didn't have to deal with it. When he sobered up, he tried to take the reins, but it was too late to take the reins. I even asked him “How long have you felt this way about the guitar solos?” And he looked at me and he went “ever since Duane was in the band.” It


made me understand, he never really liked it, but he was too afraid to stand up to Duane. It was Duane’s band and he was just a part of it. That made me realize how he felt about what we called our structured music, how he had been feeling all those years. But he was drunk, and when he sobered up, it was too late, they were used to doing it the way they had always done it.


Brennan Carley: There’s a bunch of songs that he recorded with the Brothers that he also played with his own band: Midnight Rider, Whipping Post, Melissa and so on. The arrangements of those were very dif- ferent than they were when he played them with the Allman Brothers. Scott Sharrard: “Whipping Pos”t is a great exam- ple because when he wrote that song, it was in four-four, like the way we played it, in the Gregg Allman Band and recorded it on Back to Macon Live. He also recorded that on a great record called Searching for Simplicity. Nobody knows about that record unless you're like a real Gregg Allman fan. It's a great record, Jack Pearson’s on that, one of my favorite guitar players. Whipping Post is a great example of the story. He always told us, he brought it in exactly like that to the Allman Brothers Band, they took a break, he came back, and Berry [Oakley] was doing that baseline in nine. He really liked that version of it, but he wanted to get back to how he originally wrote it. Chank Middleton: He was trying to get more of an R&B feel to it. The majority of the changes were that he slowed it down. Even with Scott’s [Sharrard] songs, like” Love Like Kerosene. “In Muscle Shoals when they slowed it down, it sounded soooo good. Even Scott thought the slowed down version sounds better than the fast version.


Brennan Carley: If Gregg were alive now is there anything that he was trying to do or that he wanted to do musically any di- rection that you think he left unexplored? Scott Sharrard: I would have liked to think he still had a couple more songs in him. But I don't know. Reimagine it for a second if he wasn't ter- minally ill. There was no question of time,


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