Think music is just for listening purposes? Think again.
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It was the summer of my 16th year. An awful year in all respects, and this was the beginning of a bad day. I had just bought what I thought was LSD but was actually PCP. My family had just broken up, riven by my father’s alcoholism and rage. By now he was drunk all day every day, my mother had left town with another man and my brother and I were living in a rooming house in our small Cape Cod town.
As the drug began to take hold it seemed to intensify all the negative feelings I had about myself and the world around me. Paranoia, yes that was part of it but it was more powerful than that, like my emotional guts had been torn out and everyone could see the sickness inside and around me; a miasma of self-conscious, anxious despair began to grip my mind.
My depth perception began to skewer; my feet couldn’t seem to measure properly to the ground. At times it was like stepping into a four-foot hole while the next step felt like I was walking up a steep incline, all of this throwing my gait into a slow-motion reeling stagger.
My vision was impaired, tunneling so that I could only see the central points I focused on and as the drug began to intensify even these became blurred. The people on our busy summer street were numerous but their facial features became blurred giving them a mummified sameness as they swished by ghostlike; the world was enshrouded in death.
If I could only get to the local beach about a mile away. There it would be peaceful and I could sit down in the sand, close my eyes and not move, become invisible. Seemed reasonable, but as I stumbled into the parking lot and looked onto the beach it was jammed with people and my dread increased. No room, too many people, this was a bad idea.
But, when I looked out on the ocean, there were two jetties extending out to the sea that penned the beach and nobody there! I headed to my left, each step an adventure, and slowly made my way over the rocks. There was a nice flat surfaced rock at the end and I plopped myself down on it with my back to the beach. I decided to stay there until I felt better or the cover of darkness came.
I don’t know how long I sat there but it seemed like forever. Just as my despair peaked my best friend Nick arrived with a rescue party and some rum to take the edge off. They crutched me off the jetty and into Nick’s car.
My memory of what happened next is hazy but I do know that later that night I ended up on the third story of the rooming house plopped in a corner still trying to buck the effects of the PCP. I couldn’t take my eyes off the open window a few feet away. The idea of suicide then was a frequent but comforting idea. As in, if things get worse I can always end the pain. This was different; more like a pressing compulsion that demanded completion. “Do it!”
Before I could act a song came on the stereo, “Dreams” by the Allman Brothers Band. Like all great music the song grabbed me by the lapels and figuratively jacked me up, Saying, “You, listen here!”
The first attraction was lyrical, a poem about broken dreams, loss, pain, betrayal and yet finding the strength and courage to keep on. The second was the voice: Gregg Allman’s bluesy growl fit the music and the tune perfectly. The third was the musicianship; Duane Allman’s sinewy wailing-slide guitar and Dickie Betts’ more melodic, jazzy-countryish playing in counterpoint and all of this anchored by a superb rhythm section. There was nothing showy or masturbatory about the music, each note fit and complimented the next, adding up to an authenticity and understanding of what it’s like to have a heart broken by life.
In this particular moment, the song helped me to feel confirmed, understood at just the time when I needed it most. If rock n’ roll has a masterpiece, this is it. Somehow I forgot about the window and sat back and let the music come to me.
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I have a large photograph of Duane Allman hanging in my office from a show back in 1971 in Central Park. His expression as he looks back toward the band behind him is slightly bemused but there is also a look of menace or challenge as if he is keeping the band in line, and urging them on. When I am reeling with my own demons or with a tough client I look to him for inspiration. I never met the man of course; he died tragically two weeks before I was finally set to see him live. He was 24 years old. By all accounts he was a visionary force who knew what wanted from the music, found it in the players he assembled and pursued his guitar playing and the vision relentlessly.
My wife has referred to the Allman Brothers as a guy band and in a way I suppose she’s right. They are a masculine bunch, but this is in the best sense of the word, music written and played by men. Dickie Betts is widely known as a guy not to trifle with and they were an integrated band touring the south in the sixties meeting the racism head on with a “fuck you” attitude. But the music appeals to women too. “Blue Sky” by Dickie Betts is a song that anyone who has felt the exhilaration, beauty, ache and loss of love can understand.
I chafe when uninformed people like to demean the band as “southern rock” or a “jam -band” or “hippy music.” Their roots are deeply steeped in Jazz, Blues, R&B and Country. If you don’t hear those influences, you ain’t listening. They innovate nightly and stay out of the pothole of playing the same songs the same way night after night like so many nostalgia acts nowadays.
♦◊♦
After Duane died, they lost bassist Berry Oakley also to a motorcycle accident. Then came the inevitable alcohol and drug fueled self-immolation that all bands seem to go through. For a while they lost their way and in the eyes of some, even their dignity, they put out some lousy albums, they fought with one another over money and the direction of the music. But they stayed with it, trying various iterations of the band until they resurrected themselves with amazing new talent and energy by adding guitar players Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks along with bassist Oteil Burbridge and percussionist Marc Quinones.
In October they will play a bunch of dates at the Beacon Theatre in New York City and then apparently call it quits on their 45-year career. I will be pulling every string I can to be there.
I still listen to “Dreams “and many other Allman Brothers songs most every day. If I were to say why it comes down to this: there is one unifying thread in the music that keeps me listening and always will: resilience, picking yourself up and going forward no matter what. A very special toughness is at the heart of the Allman Brothers music and what has sustained me through my own suffering: divorce, betrayal and addiction. It’s what got my attention when I was sixteen on that nightmare day and why I’m still listening 42 years later.
And so, to Gregg, Duane, Berry, Dickie, Butch, Marc, Warren Jaimoe, Derek et al., thanks from the bottom of my scarred but still beating heart.
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Photo credit: Mike Wren/flickr