Earthing The Midnight Riders
Allmans Cher Jimmy Carter Ween Alan Paul etc
Below is an article I was asked to write for the Orlando Weekly, a newspaper in Florida, by its then editor , international man of cultural intrigue Georgio “the dove” Valentino who - after a decade or so in Europe (mostly in Belgium) had returned to his native USA to sit for a while and take his bearings. This was before the first Trumpian term of 2016. Georgio had grown up in Florida, listening to the Smiths, Paul Quinn, Josef K, Chuck Berry, The Doors, Echo and the Bunnymen and the Damned as a person like him was destined to do. Just deal with it. He had also written for a paper in Brussels for many years (while playing his music throughout the backroads and byways of the cold world) and indeed lived in a tower in the oldest part of town much like Richard Gere would have done, were he ever to be asked to play a Floridian Gothly youth drifting in early 2000s Europa, thinking of writing a book about the fururist poet Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti. Yes, someone would have had to make that character up, surely.
I digress, Georgio had the keys to a newspaper and needed an expert voice on the Allman Brothers, or at least one who could strike a convincing series of notes in regard to their ouvre, aura and mystique. I - a grown hick from a pacific colony - took the call and answered it. Here is the original text I sent across the wires….
I’m writing these words from a long way away from Jacksonville, Florida, where the Allman Brothers Band are to get a “historical marker”, a plaque put down at the house they all moved in together and got to being one of the greatest combos of the classic rock era and the one to launch the louche, moustachioed, Les Pauled up single flowering branch that was known as “Southern Rock”. I’m writing from the outer hills of Melbourne, Australia to be exact. I’ve never been to Georgia or Florida, two of the United States that are associated with the Allman Brothers. But I’ve been there, like I’ve been to many other of those states, from within their songs. Music can do that, move you through time and space in an instant, fill your mind with feverish dreams. Sometimes distorting and bending time, sometimes flashing scenes before your mind, scenes from other peoples lives that you take to be as good as your own. I could have done some ground research for these words and this story to better earth my words but the music I have always liked the most has just a little bit of earth and grit (and maybe a whiff of exhaust smoke) but is also capable of flight and fancy as well. So I thought if I could keep it in this realm, this other worldly place, it would actually be more authentic and pure. Rock’n’roll was quicker and more true than the internet! I would have first stared at the cover of the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East album in about 1974 in Mt Gambier, South Australia, a town that ran on its timber mills and surrounding dairy farms right at the bottom, inside haunch of the country. A wet, windy and green place. Raw. The front cover showed Gregg Allman laughing heartly with his head thrown back, though he never seemed that happy go lucky in his music. He specialized in moaning, grunting and casting a gloomy young mans spell of blues. Though I was the young man. He would have been still in his twenties (the album was already three years l’d by the time I got to it) yet, like his contemporary in Led Zeppelins Robert Plant, he inhabited this world weary tone and voice that that very convincingly intimated a world he was totally lost to, full of dangerous fates and dark shadows. There was always a haunting presence from the past. Always misunderstood and always a mean woman fooling with his mind. At the time, it seemed that the Allman Brothers were a band like many others. They looked pretty regular, there were people in my town that could have walked out of that album cover. But to listen to them now is to marvel at their individual skills and their power and focus as a unit. In some ways, Gregg could be compared with one other young, gifted player of the time and that was Steve Winwood, with the impossibly rich voice, the Hammond organ playing as well as guitar and the long, jazz and r&b arrangements. By 1974 the Allman Brother called Duane had already left the world of men and women and so had bass player Berry Oakley. More ghosts and tragedy. More blues. The band seemed to have arrived like a crashing wave and were thrown onto the beach, with two of them unable to land and retreating back with the surging water. Music from the vaults provided a double album to follow up called Eat A Peach and then they had to step into their own boots for real. Which they did with the album Brothers And Sisters. Guitarist Dickie Betts belting out his classic rambling Man like a cowboy champ at the plate. They seemed like warlords at the feast. In my teens, in that country South Australian town, my friends and I drove through the spectacular boredom of our empty nights smoking weed and listening slack brained to the still gorgeous groove of the epic song “Dreams”. I listen now and wait for the moment when Duanes’ slide finds a perfect tone and sustained energy and he hovers there in arpeggiated pleasure before leaping up an octave . We bought albums by anybody associated with them, specifically Tommy Talton and Cowboy. Gregg married Cher and they released Allman and Woman and the whole band went to the White House to wear cool threads on the lawn with Jimmy Carter. We read that people yelled “Whippin’ Post” into the void much like they did to Skynyrd with “Freebird!” and they do to those other Gods from the Golden Age Of Leather, the Blue Oyster Cult with their cries of “More Cowbell!”. Who are “they”? Moronic spectators is who! Fools! Parrots! Know nothing clowns! Then there were the drug busts and disgrace and the Brothers weren’t brothers no more. For a while. Gregg seemed to live way inside such a badass image he appeared in movies as someone not unlike the man he was supposed to be. He had been troubled and now he was trouble. But he had led a charmed life. One producer and one studio for every album he made except the last. I like to hear of charmed lives, they are rare. So the house they all found each other as a band in is going to have a plaque put down. They will finally be earthed in Florida, where they always recorded and where Gregg lived. I can see pictures of it through the internet. The magic box. It looks like a crazy museum a fellow used to have in his garage back in Mt Gambier South Australia. My favourite kinds of museums are 100% country. Folk lore and myth lying side by side with matchboxes and bottle tops. A good try at earthing the Midnight Riders.
An interview I did in early 2023 for my triple R radio show with Alan Paul who had just issued a great book about the Allman Brothers at their commercial peak called Brothers And Sisters. It was an exhaustive, illuminating talk and goes for about 58 minutes.
Alan Paul substack
The Allman Brothers museum at THE BIG HOUSE.
https://thebighousemuseum.com/
Classic Allmans from 1970 at the Fillmore East
Dickie Betts leading the band into Rambling Man before it was released. Just after Duanes death and still featuring Berry Oakley on bass who was to die 9 days later.
Gregg playing solo on Letterman in 1982
Related clips
Tommy Talton and Cowboy. (Tommy was a long standing guitar player for Greggs solo shows)
Dean Ween Group - Dickie Betts
Gregg Allman and Cher in 1975.
The Allman Brothers and President Jimmy Carter (RIP)
Opening scenes of the movie RUSH featuring Gregg Allman
Random Dixie Mafia story