In The Wall Street Journal, Gavin Edwards reviews a new book by Alan Paul on the Allman Brothers Band, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s. Edwards writes:
“Anyone can boil a potato, but not everyone can make gravy,” said rock promoter Bill Graham on the day he died in 1991. He was praising the Allman Brothers Band, who blended country music, blues grooves and jazz flourishes with cornmeal-gravy guitar solos, establishing the recipe for both jam bands and what would come to be known as Southern rock.
The mythic figure at the center of the Allman Brothers was Duane Allman, the redheaded guitar genius who ignited the recording sessions for Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” who played slide with an empty bottle of cold medication on his ring finger, and who led the band through epic improvisations on tracks like “Whipping Post.” The other founding members were Duane’s younger brother, Gregg (nicknamed “PB” by his bandmates, short for “Pretty Boy”), on vocals and organ; guitarist Dickey Betts, whose first professional gig was playing music on a circus midway; Mr. Betts’s buddy Berry Oakley on bass; and two drummers, the rock warrior Butch Trucks and the jazz philosopher Johnie Lee Johnson, aka Jaimoe. After their first jam session, Duane barred the door and told the other musicians: “Anybody in this room who’s not going to play in my band, you’ve got to fight your way out.”
Despite being based in Macon, Ga., the band disliked the term “Southern rock”: “All rock ’n’ roll came from the South; it is Southern by definition,” said Gregg Allman. “You might as well call it ‘rock rock.’” As they built their following, the band careened into every possible pitfall of music stardom, from addiction to toxic ego battles to disastrous business deals. Although the Allman Brothers broke up more than once, they persisted from 1969 to 2014, ultimately entering the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as haggard but respected elders.
The journalist Alan Paul devoted his 2012 oral history “One Way Out” to the band’s early years. He has expanded his frame—even while focusing on the making of a single record—with “Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s.”
“Brothers and Sisters” is nominally about the 1973 album of the same title, recorded after the deaths of Duane Allman and Oakley, both of whom were killed in motorcycle accidents one year apart. Although the LP spent five weeks at No. 1 and included the hit “Ramblin’ Man,” few people would call it the album that defined the decade, despite the overheated subtitle of this book. (Three nominations for LPs that arguably achieved that cultural impact: Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”; the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack; and Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life.”)
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