So Gregg Allman passed away on Saturday. When I was fourteen or so I was pretty into the Allman Bros, and never actually minded them later when I developed more punkish proclivities. I liked Gregg’s voice and Duane and Dicky’s guitars. The rhythm section rocked with two drummers. And how can you go wrong with a song whose ending was longer than most other bands’ singles? Maybe the best and worst of all their songs was the twenty-minute live version of “Whipping Post” from their Live at the Fillmore album. It particularly appealed to my overly dramatic early teen sensibilities.
Later, by my early twenties, I had long since come to my senses and become a punk rocker. After a stint in a Rochester band called the Bowery Boys, I sort of accidentally moved to Daytona Beach Florida. I was hitchiking to New Orleans, actually, and decided to do it by going around the coast all the way. I ran out of money in Daytona, got a job and stuck around for a while. Actually two whiles, but that is a story for another day.
I was the guitarist for a band called the (aptly named) Mess eventually, but on Sundays, when the band had off I would go to a bar that had an open mic jam session. Musicians got really cheap beer which even I could afford, so I was a regular jammer since I could hold my own in a few different styles.
Every local-born musician in that bar swore they were close personal friends with either Gregg or Duane since they both went to high school in Daytona, where they had a popular band, the Allman Joys. Most of the locals had a sad story of how Gregg and Duane “changed” once they became successful, but spoke of the music with a reverence bordering on worship. Thus I never quite lost my Allman Bros catalog even as I was playing in a punk band. And I was called upon to play “Whipping Post” more than one Sunday. For the record, I never met Gregg, as he never stopped in. Sigh, for a punk musician in the late seventies or early eighties this would have sounded tantamount to a confession of uncoolness, but I never really managed that part well in the first place so it wasn’t a problem for me.
Allman Joys
Here’s the strange thing. A couple of weeks ago, I was working with a great old plugin by Jeremy Evers called Atlantis Fx, and for the first time in decades, mostly because I could play it with my left hand, leaving my other one to jiggle the plugin controls, I played “Whipping Post,” sort of, through Atlantis. I was going to eventually work on it a bit and maybe post it to demonstrate the plugin, but then hey, Gregg died, so I guess I better get the thing out and give the guy his due, even though I never met him. Thus I give y’all “Whippit Post,” my dutiful homage to the man and the band.