Category Archives: Music

1970 Columbia High Prom with The Allman Brother’s Band

promIn 1970 Dekalb County’s Columbia High School signed a contract for a local band some students said were amazing.  Soon after their live album ‘At Fillmore East’ made them super stars. The Allman Brothers showed their stuff and honored the contract to play their prom in the gym.  A prom to brag about for years. Dekalb Police had to call in Ga State troopers to help handle gate crashers. Mark (David) Chapman was a 9th grader; later he would gain infamy by killing John Lennon.

Mass Music -Allman Brothers Band

The Great Speckled Bird Dec. 8, 1969 Vol 2 #39 pg 2-5

Mass Music

 Each of the record albums discussed here could be termed a masterpiece worthy of a full-length “rave.” But the Review format can often be nothing more than a limitation on that form of struggle for liberation called Criticism (Mao); while details of each album under consideration are easily fitted into this established form, larger, cross-influential questions may require a capsulized, comparative look at more than one source. Especially in an age of coming together. The important thing is to turn the reader on to the dynamics of our Mass Music, an esthetic, cultural and political form commonly referred to as Rock & Roll-from its explosive origins and for some time to come the metaphor and energy of change for the revolutionary youth movement.

The blues is a musical and political form of expression created and developed by black men and women learning to survive in a non-communal,-non-collective, non-nonliterate Amerika: the birth of the “I.” As part of the detribalization of young people throughout the world, this form finds sudden relevance to those who are undergoing the reverse experience: the death of the “I.”

The Allman Brothers Band brings to their involvement in the blues form a dignity and coolness that allows them to transcend the histrionics and sensationalisms that have often characterized and marred the success of their white co-practitioners. The Allman Brothers Band (ATCO Capricorn SD 33-308) is a brilliant, solid album of white blues. Duane Allman, one of the finest guitarists in all rock, has for the most part chosen as his instrument the electric slide guitar, potentially the most sensational soundmaker of all. Johnny Winter has turned us on to the flashy brilliance of his slide guitar pyrotechnics, but Duane Allman seems intentionally to underemphasize just those copyrighted aspects of this particular piece of musical technology (there is one blatant Winterism on one track in which the famous guitar/vocal simultaneous riff is followed by a hearty laugh from the band, just to let us they know they know we know).

Allman’s use of his instrument is on a different plane, a more group-oriented one which allows for virtuosity but insists on its transmutation into a  larger gestalt of sound. Vocals are almost by definition the weak spot in any white blues band, since pronunciations, inflections and word usage are not easy to transmit across cultural barriers as the non-verbal utterings of musical instruments. Either you get into a black imitative role as singer (in which, for the most part, you can be judged only in degrees away from miserableness—Johnny Winter and John Mayall are two successes) or you take what you can from the blues vocal forms and do your own thing (Mick Jagger, Elvis Presley). Greg Allman has to be counted among those in the former category, but substantial praise is due him for the restraint and dignity he brings to the role; watching him sing is quite a cultural shock experience. He “sounds” of raw pain and gutsy life styles while his face looks like a figure from Renaissance painting. Greg Allman’s contributions on organ seem to flow more out of the Ray Charles sound than out of Jimmy Smith, i.e. closer to the rock end of the blues. (On this first record, the organ is poorly mixed and some of the excitement of the Allman Brothers’ sound is lost). 2nd lead guitarist Dick Betts is a superlative instrumentalist in his own right, and his inclusion reinforces the group orientation for these super musicians. Berry Oakley is without question one of the heaviest and most swinging bassists in the music. Two drummers (one black, one white) provide adequate rhythmic punctuation and flow for the riffs and improvisations of the Allman Brothers Band, somehow coming off even better on record than in live performance.

There is very little to say by way of criticism except that the music of the Allman Brothers Band is among the very, very best of blues played by white young people.

Just as The Allman Brothers Band reveals the incredible impact of the blues form on white mass musicians. Emergency! by The Tony Williams Lifetime (Polydor 25-3001) bears witness to the impact black-white hybrid of Rock & Roll on the young black musician. For several years drummer for the Miles Davis group, Tony Williams now fronts one of the most exciting musical creations around. Built around the guitar/organ/drums sound (with more emphasis on the drums than we are usually accustomed to), the Lifetime expands this limited format into a swirling, churning mass of pure, mind-blowing electric waves of sound.

Emergency! is a two-record album, heavier than anything you’ve probably heard before (dig it one of two ways: either get into the whole thing at once, reeling under its impact, or sample a side along with other music, letting it be assimilated over a longer, more secure, span of time). Few drummers, especially in a style related to Rock & Roll (which has not yet developed a spectrum of talents and styles equal to that of vocalist and solo-oriented instrumentalist) can draw a spotlight over to their work, but Tony Williams can and does throughout all 4 sides of this album; the word “musical” is inadequate but useful in describing what he does with percussion. Larry Young is a monster talent on organ, requiring everything from the listener just to keep head above drowning water. British guitarist John McLaughlin provides a high plane for the group, keeping it all up there in a cosmic kind of esthetic space, using all the distortion and feedback techniques we have been accustomed to since Peter Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, but in an even more free, liberated area of expression.

The weak point in this music, as in the new jazz recording by Pharoah Sanders, Karma, is in the verbal statements interspersed (spoken rather than sung on Emergency!) throughout the separate pieces; the idea is a good one, a spoken, intimate voice now and then emerging over the sheer volume of instrumental sound, but the Content is not on the same high level as the music-just as the white blues vocalists’ delivery has never been up to the power charged blues lyrics they inform. The tighter, more restricted form of the Rock & Roll song has provided Jimi Hendrix, for example, a more workable approach to this dilemma than the wide open territory of the Tony Williams Lifetime. As Mass Music forms itself, the Jimi Hendrix solution will approach the Tony Williams problem, and the sounds will become more and more exciting as convergence takes place.

In A Silent Way (Columbia CS 9875) is a journey into pure esthetic space, a tough, lyrical album of musical ripples and thunders that provides one of the perfect meetings, and fusions, of the Black western tradition of jazz with the new electric sound of a revolutionary youth music. What is it? Jazz, Rock, Jazz-Rock, or, as the liner notes suggest, a music of NEW DIRECTIONS? The closer we come to a musical synesthesia, the less adequate our verbalisms will become. It is almost impossible to describe-the incredible beauty of the music on this album. Tony Williams and John McLaughlin of Emergency! are here, as are Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea (electric pianos) and Joe Zawinul (electric piano and organ); also Davis’ saxophonist Wayne Shorter, doing his best work ever; Dave Holland on bass; Miles Davis brooding through it all with his distinctive, untouchable trumpet. In A Silent Way is a profound statement of the impact of western civilization on the African tribal experience, and the rebirth of the collective psyche (and musics) of the colony within the heart of the mother country, a musical Trojan horse. The Band (Capitol STAO-132), the second album by the creators of Music From Big Pink, is also not approachable through words. It travels freely through planes passing directly through the core of human experience. Plus it’s fun, and you can dance to it! The music of The Band comes closer to the synesthesia that will mark the birth of a new being on this planet than any other music made by white young people.

Drawing from three worlds of oppression—black, working class white, and youth—The Band weaves a cross-cultural web of Ray Charles (a much underestimated influence on their total sound), Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, and The Coasters and Bob Dylan.  All strains becoming one, with no one strain dominant—a new music, tribal, collective, communal, music of brothers totally involved in the transition from the “I” to the “We.” A restructuring of white western experience, a look by the new tribal man at the still extant cultural artifacts and fossils of a dying “civilization.” Perhaps the most significant re-examination of the function of words in music in all of Rock.

King Harvest has surely come.

—miller francis, jr.

First There is a Mountain … Creative Loafing on The Allman Brothers Band

Creative Loafing Dec 28, 1981 vol 20 #31 

First There is a Mountain …

firstthere

It’s Sunday, May 11, 1969. Around noon. A group of us, just on the heavy side of 20 years, are walking south along the “Strip,” the loosely demarcated Midtown section of Peachtree Street that lies somewhere between 14th and 5lh Streets. We pass the DayGlo-colored Catacombs nightclub at 14th — past Bradshaw’s Cafe and the Peachtree Art Theatre heading, by a circuitous  route, for Piedmont Park and some live music at the weekly “be-in.”

Bell-bottomed jeans, zippered boots, tie-dyed shirts, blanket ponchos. Dressed in the times. The conversation floats and convects like smoke in the air. Vietnam, local rock ‘n’ roll bands, a rising young black politician named Maynard Jackson, police harassment of hippies, Nixon. Teddy Kennedy is in town for the weekend, looking like a solid bet for a presidential bid in the coming decade.

firstthereis2But the topic seems to flow consistently back to music, the “poetry of this generation.” Radar, The Hampton Grease Band, Jeff Fspina, Eric Quincv Tale, Chakra, The Sweet Younguns. These are the solid local acts that we catch at such venues as the Bowery, The Bottom of The Barrel, The Golden Horn, The Twelfth Gate, the Bistro, the Catacombs and, best of all, for free at Piedmont Park. Grabbing a quick bite at the Roxy Delicatessen we ramble out the back door and take a short cut down llth Street, dropping almost 100 feet off the Peachtree Street ridge into the park. The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s underground newspaper, has negotiated with the city to allow rock bands to play the park on weekends.

The exclusive Piedmont Driving Club used to race horses here on a meadow below Cheatham’s strategic Confederate entrenchments. Now, 100 years later, the hip community, the flower children of Atlanta, have adopted it as a meeting place to congregate and listen to their music — the “Piedmont  green of a city park,” as local spokesman Barry Weinstock characterized the venue.

Prepared to boogie, we enter the park by the VFW Club — stride up a small hill and across the ball fields. There’s a strong fragrance from the flowering linden trees that ring the fields. Here once stretched the 1895 Grand Plaza with its landscaped radial walkways, where Booker T. Washington was allowed to stroll and John Philip Sousa marched his band.

Rock bands have been setting up here since the previous spring. In inclement weather, they play under the adjacent, 1920’s-era pavilion. As we approach the steps we see about 50 colorfully dressed people milling around them.

It’s a sparkling afternoon — cool, breezy with the sun bright and streaming through the elm trees that overhang the steps. The light reflects a bluish cast off the granite blocks. Long-haired roadies are arranging equipment for a band. Speakers and Marshall amplifiers line the back wall of the terrace and wrap around it facing out towards the lake.

A crowd is forming slowly. Bird staffers are standing and watching, discussing how the band drove up from Macon that morning on the spur of the moment — no one had heard of them. A black family is barbecuing ribs on the nearby granite grill. A Frisbee zips close overhead — dogs and children cavort about — a tambourine jangles. The smells of patchouli, cigarettes and marijuana diffuse through the cool air.

A tall, lean young man with long reddish blond hair, sideburns grown shaggy into his moustache, emerges from the crowd. He is an unusual looking dude, even for this crowd. Carrying a vintage Gibson Les Paul electric guitar slung over his shoulder, he walks to one of the Marshall amps and plugs in. Another man, remarkably similar in appearance, sits down at the organ. The two drummers, one black the other white, take their positions. They are followed, by a messianic-looking bass guitarist and another guitar player.

Discordant tune-up notes puncture the air. There are now over 100 people gathered around — standing, some perched on the granite walls and planters, others sprawled on the ground, two or three have climbed into the trees.

The band members turn to the blond guitarist. Shoulders rolled forward like a boxer, he smiles confidently, reaches into his pocket and extracts what looks to be a long Coricidin pill bottle. He places it on the ring finger of his left hand, knocks the pick-up switch of his guitar into the forward position, nods to the band and snaps his fingers:

“Alright gentlemen, I…2…3…4.” Duane Allman, his long hair flying in the wind, pulls his slide down the fretboard into Muddy Waters’ classic tune, “Trouble No More.”

Butch Trucks and Jaimo are laying down their syncopated rhythms in metered rolls, playing off each other, punctuating and driving the blues rhythm. Berry Oakley’s Gibson bass is humming deeply. Dickey Bett’s liquid  guitar switches easily from lead to rhythm and harmonic counterpoint around Duane’s slidework. Gregg Allman’s keyboard weaves into the melody, his raspy lyrics cutting into the music with righteous intonations: “Don’t care how long you’re gone— Don’t care how long you stay — Good kind treatment — Bring you home someday.”

And the masterful slide guitar of Duane Allman responds, ringing out in clear tones and full vibrato with a deep melodic range and clarity perhaps not heard here since John Philip Sousa led his band down the Grand Plaza with “Stars And Stripes Forever.”

“Some day baby — you ain’t gonna trouble— poor me — anymore.” Duane’s final licks glide the song back to earth, his last note sustaining through several bars as Dickey’s vigorous cascade puts the coda on the song.

 The Allman Brothers Band has begun its Atlanta debut.

Bill Graham, the late music promoter, was interviewed for this story just hours before he died in a helicopter crash in California on Oct. 25. He recalled, “…and what you got with Duane was what you get from those few guys who…,yeah, they’ve got all that technical stuff down, but he really got the essence of what the black man, the black musician, gave us. That’s the soulful aspect of picking, and all the technical prowess in the world doesn’t give you that.

“I don’t want to disrespect any artist. I can give you some half-a-dozen guitar players that the world thinks, you know, are the cat’s meow. But there’s no soul; it’s dipped in water, it’s not dipped in soul of any kind. They can make those riffs work — but that’s all they are. And musicians knew that! Otis Redding knew that, Aretha Franklin knows that, and Ray Charles knows that!

“And Duane was one of those players who had the technical proficiency, but never sold it. He never sold anything on his guitar… there was no, ‘Can you top this?’ He never tried to beat you. He always wanted to play with you. I remember Eric Clapton told me years ago that one of the things he loved about Duane was he just wanted to play with you — he didn’t try to show you anything.”

This May 11, 1969, concert was the first in a long line of free concerts the band performed at Piedmont Park. This spring afternoon they blow up a storm, playing traditional blues numbers and original songs written by Gregg Allman in collaboration with the other band members. Newly formed, they have been rehearsing together only two months, but there is a cohesive vibrancy to their playing that is hard to describe. The following week’s issue of the Bird features Bill Fibben’s full-page photograph of Duane Allman on its cover, and peppered within are descriptions and interpretations of the day. “For the rest of us there is, was and shall remain Music…. Sunday it was the ALLMAN BROTHERS, an aggregation soon to be too important to play Piedmont Park…their music is compulsion and became at our reception propulsion…it overwhelms verbal communication…The general opinion going through the crowd was that these guys could stand up against the best — Hendrix, Cream, etc. I am not alone in the opinion that they may be one of the great pop music discoveries ofl969.”

Miller Francis, nationally known music critic for the Bird, would write his first of many reviews of the group: “You don’t, can’t listen’ to the Allman Brothers; you feel it , hear it, move with it, absorb it.”

But what appeared to be an almost overnight success was actually a strenuous ascent. The Allman Brothers Band had coalesced from the permutations of many musical collaborations. By early 1969, Duane Allman had established a reputation as a solid session guitarist at Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. About that time, Atlantic Records Vice President Jerry Wexler bought Allman’s contract from Fame and resold it to Capricorn President Phil Walden.

Capricorn at first wanted to structure a Claptonesque group around Allman, featuring him as the star. Duane eschewed the spotlight, however, opting to hold together his newly formed band. Walden laid out the hard cash for the equipment and moved them up to Macon that March.

Berry Oakley’s widow, Linda Oakley Miller, recollects that, “At first we all lived in Macon in an old Victorian House on College Street that Phil rented for us. Our daughter, Brittany, was born that April. There was little money, everyone slept on mattresses on the floor, but the positive energy from Duane and the growing quality of the music sustained us.”

The spartan communal life was subsidized in part by the small salary of road manager Twiggs Lvndon and the generosity of Louise Hudson (Mamma Louise), proprietor of the H&H Restaurant across from the Capricorn Studios at Cotton and Forsythe Streets. Mamma Louise dished up some of the finest “vittles” in town, along with an encouraging word when “her boys” needed it. The band practiced and rehearsed tirelessly during the day, often playing for free in Macon’s Central City Park.

At night, a short stroll down to the bottom of College Street took them into Rose Hill, a picturesque antebellum cemetery carved into the bluff’s along the Ocmulgee River. Here was a sanctuary for the musicians to stretch out and experiment, playing acoustically amidst the Italianate brick terraces, marble angels and lush vegetation planted by Simri Rose 150 years ago.

Sometimes at Rose Hill the musicians would wander among the headstones of the “humble and exalted” gathering inspiration  from the inscriptions. Most probably they chanced upon the monument of the famous relocated Macon citizen, W.L. “Young” Stribling, the “King of The Canebrakes.” In the ’20 and ’30s he was a world heavyweight boxing contender, a protégé of Jack Dempsey and the fighter Gene Tunney “wouldn’t fight.” Stribling was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident at the height of his career a few miles from the cemetery.

Phil Walden concentrated the band’s live concerts in smaller club ;and college venues in the Southeast, bringing them along slowly, like a good boxing manager would handle his prizefighter.

They shuttled often that summer between Macon and Atlanta to play free concerts in Piedmont Park, trying out new songs, arrangements and jams. The mere presence of Duane began to enkindle rapport with the growing crowds. His improvisational long jumps on the slide or straight lead guitar carried the audience with him on his melodic explorations — in and out of different keys and back, the playing improving at each hearing — temporarily transposing us out of the social turmoil and daily hassles.

Joe Roman, an Atlanta music promoter, remembers Duane dropping by The Twelfth Gate coffee house after one of the Piedmont concerts that summer to offer a donation and talk with the other musicians and clientele. “Duane was down to earth; he didn’t have a rock star complex.” Others recall that Duane was always approachable and genuinely interested in people.

Visitors to Piedmont Park ere just as likely to see him mingling with the crowd to watch other acts on any given weekend when he happened to be in town. He passed through not only with his band but by himself, en route to Atlantic session work in New York or Muscle Shoals. Often he would stay at a particular apartment overlooking the park. There was a grassy promontory nearby where he liked to take his acoustic guitar late at night and play. In the evenings you might catch him jamming at the Bowery or Twelfth Gate with such groups as the fledgling Lynyrd Skynyrd band. Duane would frequently offer encouragement. “You gotta sort yourself out and sort the music you hear out,” he’d say. “Then find something to hang your notes on. You hang your notes on your attitude and on yourself.”

The summer of ’69 was also a watershed period for musical promotion in Atlanta. Organizations like the Bird, Nexus House, Atlantis Rising, the Universal Life Church and the Twelfth Gate had all nurtured the free music in Piedmont Park, serving as inspiration for the emergence of hip entrepreneurs.

Musician Alex Janoulis and his wife had started up the Dynamic Talent Agency. Steve Cole had formed his Discovery, Incorporated. Both companies began as booking agencies and expanded into promotional companies, teaming up with organizations like Frank Hughes’ Electric Collage Light Show to promote some memorable pay and free concerts within the next several years.

Promoter Alex Cooley and his partners were putting together the first Atlanta Pop Festival, bringing in such headliners as the Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and the Chicago Transit Authority. It was held at the Atlanta International Raceway on July 4. Working along with Cooley was Ed Shane, operations manager for Atlanta’s WPLO-FM radio and popular emcee for local concerts. Shane had, by the summer of 1969, captured the ears of Atlanta’s younger listeners with his formula of playing favorite cuts off of long-playing albums and keeping a music/ commercials ratio of 8:1 rather than the monotonous 2:1 prevalent today. Shane’s self trained ear and low-key delivery served him well as he helped build the radio station from a pilot project at Georgia State University in 1968 to an institution of regional esteem at its location at Peachtree and Fifth Streets.

In September, the ABB flew to New York City to record their first album at Atlantic Studios and swung back through Piedmont Park on Sept. 21 for the Atlanta “Mini Pop Festival” promoted as a rally for the recently fire-bombed Atlantis Rising.

This concert took place on a portable stage at the north end of the ball fields, adjacent to where the old Sergeant Pepper-style bandstand stood for the Cotton States Exhibition. The weather held and the ABB, along with the Hampton Grease Band, Brick Wall, the Sweet Younguns, and the Booger Band, filled the freshly cut fields with  appreciative people. That day, the twin guitar leads of Allman and Belts, counterpoised at opposite ends of the stage, were creating something new out of their extemporaneous rhapsodies.

Miller Francis’ critique in the following issue of the Bird captured the feeling: “The Allman Brothers were there to prove that they are in better shape than ever….When they closed the show with their bluesy arrangement of Donovan’s ‘First There Is A Mountain,’ the spirit of the people in attendance approached that of a Grateful Dead concert.”

In October 1969 the Allmans were back at the park, headlining the three-day Piedmont Music Festival which began on Oct. 17. Co-producers the Universal Life Church and Atlantis Rising also brought in some national names. At $l-a-day optional donation, it was a real deal.

The temperature dropped into the 40’s that first evening and the eclectic audience of hippies and straights huddled close as the music and the glow from the Electric Collage Light Show helped provide an illusion of warmth. Berry Oakley and Dickey Belts’ old band.,The Second Coming, played, followed by Joe South, Boz Scaggs and Mother Earth, with Tracv Nelson energetically belting out her boozy lyrics through a feeble sound system.

Saturday was better, but it all peaked Sunday. The smell and feel of autumn was in the air and the crowds had grown from hundreds into thousands as the word had spread. With the audio problems finally resolved, local band Radar started things off. Berry and Butch joined in with Larry Rhinehardt of the Second Coming for a musical reunion. The day seemed to last forever as the music progressed.

That evening the sunset painted an indigo hued horizon over Pcachtree Street, silhouetting the newly emergent spires of Colony Square. The Brothers, playing for the third day in a row, closed the program with a transcendental version of “Mountain Jam.” Duane’s polychromatic melody, running like  a thoroughbred through the fields, synchronizcd with Betts and Oakley’s phrasing to hold the spectators spellbound.

The Piedmont Park Music Festival ended with two couples being married on stage by the minister of the Universal Life Church. The festival was declared a success and profits were channeled back into the community. The music scene seemed to be developing in Atlanta, gaining momentum. Hopes were high as eyes looked ahead to more music in the Park the following Spring.

In November, the ABB’S first album was released. Miller Francis gave it a rave review. Later that month, the band was in town for the Turkey Trip at the Georgian Terrace Ballroom. They stopped by WPLO-FM and Ed Shane broadcast his first formal interview with Duane. Shane asked him to compare concert venues. “Well, any time you’re getting paid for something, you feel like you’re obligated to do so much,” Duane replied. “That’s why playing the park is such a good thing, because people don’t even expect you to be there. And if you’re there to play, that’s really groovy….About the nicest way you can play is just for nothing, you know. And it’s not really for nothing — it’s for your own personal satisfaction and other people’s, rather than for any kind of financial thing.”

The first winter of the new decade in Atlanta ushered in the Laundromat Craft Cooperative at 979 Peachtree Street. Counterculture businesses along the strip were flourishing. Sandalwood incensed headshops and colorful boutiques like Sexy Sadie’s blossomed forth from dusty vacant buildings alongside of porn shops and honky tonks. In the evenings, traffic queued for blocks along Peachtree as all manner of culture rolled by to gawk and rubberneck at the spontaneous Street theater and panorama of freaks parading down the sidewalks.

Freddie Bauer and Steve Rash, local media entrepreneurs, were experimenting with a music video program called “The Now Explosion” which aired on channel 36. Bauer and Rash would later film and record the Second Annual Atlanta Pop Festival, going on to produce and direct such movies as The Buddy Holly Story.

Music promoters discovered the funky old Sports Arena over on Chester Avenue. Murray Silver, Jr. (Jerry Lee Lewis’ biographer) and Alex Cooley started booking such album-sellers here as John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter and Delaney and Bonnie. Groups played on a rented, wooden stage. Ventilation was not the best. Some say at certain concerts you could get a contact high on the back row. but the converted wrestling hippodrome was known to resonate spectacularly.

In March 1970 the Allman Brothers, riding on the moderate success of their album, got second billing with Santana at the Municipal Auditorium. The “old barn” as it was nicknamed also had an exemplary reputation for its acoustics and ability to focus and merge the energy of performer and listener.  A favorite venue of opera singers, even the great Curuso sang here in his prime.

Miller Francis recalls: “The Allman Brothers were great, though — It’s hard to describe what happens between Atlanta and the Allman Brothers, but their music brought the house down. It’s terrific to have them back here, but it did seem strange hearing them in the setting of the Municipal Auditorium for up to six bucks instead of for free in Piedmont Park — seems like  success should work the other way around. We hope to see them back in the park this summer.”

In April The Great Speckled Bird was banned in Macon, but the Allman Brothers Band had found a home. And through their donations, free concerts for charitable causes and other acts of good will, they were winning the affection of “movers and shakers” like “Machine Gun” Ronnie Thompson, mayor of the Fall Line city.

On Saturday, May 9, 1970, the ABB stole the show from headliner Smith at the Georgia Tech Coliseum.When a scheduled Grateful Dead concert was threatened at the Sport’s Arena the next day because of waylaid equipment, Duane donated his sound system and the show went on. Many who attended the concert remembered it as one of the best ever at that venue. Spirit, music and chemicals blended as the Dead jammed with members of the ABB. Jerry Garcia and Duane Allman exchanged riffs — igniting a musical conflagration that thrilled the crowd as the protean Donovan improvisation flowed into “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.”

That summer, Sam Massell was the new mayor of Atlanta who talked of the hippies having “the right to live this life they have chosen.” But the Strip was metamorphosing  in  a vein similar to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. The soft drugs were hardening, motorcycle gangs were moving in — injecting paranoia into the community. As crime increased, arrests and police confrontations multiplied. In response to public outcries, Massell deployed more police throughout the Strip, driving the freaks off the street in a series of purges. Permits for music in Piedmont Park became hard to acquire. The People’s Peace Festival officially “did not occur” and bands “did not appear,” however a large crowd did gather on June 7 and, according to the Bird,  it, “…was a line Sunday with free food. spontaneous music and swimming in the lake.” Everyone in attendance talked of the coming Cosmic Carnival.

Envisioned and promoted as the state-of the-art new trend in musical happenings, the Cosmic Carnival was set for the Atlanta Braves Stadium on June 13. In addition to  the Allman Brothers, there were to be such groups as Traffic (with Steve Winwood), Ten Years After, Mothers of Invention, Albert King, Mountain and It’s A Beautiful Day, which featured George LaFlamme on electric violin. Disappointment appeared in the guises of rainy weather, poor sound and discouraging ticket sales, which resulted in several groups pulling out at the last minute. Promoter Forrest Hamilton remembers that he was discussing the financial loss from the only 19,000 attendees with Duane and the new ABB road manager, Willie Perkins, during a break in one of the dugouts, when Duane informed him to forget about paying them, that the band was playing for free.

The following day, the ABB were back in Piedmont Park playing for free again. Gone were the ragged Ford Econoline vans of the prior year, and in their place was a new Winnebago.

Excitement had been building for the second annual Atlanta Pop Festival promoted on the radio stations as a Woodstock amid the pecan trees. It was held July 3-5 at the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Ga., a farming community  just  south of Macon.

An estimated 400,000 people attended the festival, rivaling Woodstock in attendance and performers. Only about 50,000 people actually paid to get in before the gates were finally thrown open on the second day to end a siege. Promoters Alex Cooley and Steven Kapelow later said they thought they broke even.

There was some bad acid, sporadic violence, but generally it was just too damn hot for hassles. Temperatures and humidity soared to record levels that weekend and the densely packed crowds made it even hotter.

Hendrix was there, two months before his death, along with John Sebastian, Procol Harum, the Chambers Brothers, Jethro Tull, the Bob Seger System, Spirit, Johnny Winters and Ten Years After. B.B. King came on about10:30 Friday night in his three-piece  suit playing in 98-degree heat with the sweat streaming onto his guitar, Lucille, while he belted out those majestically anguished trills and tremolos.

Of course, the Allman Brothers were there. Willie Perkins recollects Duane flying in late Friday from Atlantic session work, jumping on his motorcycle and speeding down to Byron just in time to open the ABB’S first set. “Statesboro Blues” was recorded that evening and appears on the album  The First Great Rock Festival of the Seventies.

The ABB played the last day as well, and late at night. Duane jammed with Johnny Winter and Leslie West in a sizzling rendition of “Mountain Jam.” each musician raved up with searing guitar runs as the sun began to rise. When it was finished, though, we all knew who the best guitarist was onstage.

As Byron was drawing to a close, another landmark event was taking shape for later  that month — one that would also be filmed and sound tracked and then, like Byron, never released. Andy Barker, mayor of Love Valley, N.C., was bringing in the ABB to headline the Love Valley Rock Festival set for July 17-19 in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The little North Carolina town with a population  of 72 played host to 75,000 people.

The festival was remarkably peaceful, attributed aptly by Norman Cousins in The Saturday Review: “Mayor Barker handled the event with the kind of aplomb, friendliness and wisdom that is badly needed at a time when too many people seem eager to connect their prejudices to their temper and to believe the worst of one another.”

The excellent motion picture of the concert was instructive of Duane’s guitar abilities. Guitar Player magazine later published an article describing his method of playing slide.

Arlen Roth, the writer, assumed that Duane used the free fingers of his left hand to damp the strings behind the glass slide as he fingcr picked with his right. All slide players do this, Roth stated, to keep extraneous notes from sounding and to minimize overtones. However, the Love Valley film clearly show that Duane did not damp down. He apparently had such a fine touch that he could control the intonation and sustain simply by the agile pressure he exerted on his pill bottle! Resurgent Capricorn Records President Phil Walden reminisced earlier this month on Allman’s ability. “Duane had this miraculous command of his instrument… great finesse — a wonderful touch and impeccable taste.” he said. “That’s what initially attracted me to his playing. It was in the era when a lot of the real fast-speedy players were the darling of the business…[Duane] was the guy that refused to indulge himself in that kind of playing….It’s not only important what he played, but what he didn’t play. His music had just enough polish and just enough rawness — it had just the right edge on it.”

Allman’s influence can be perceived in the phrasings of a diversity of musicians, from the acoustics of Leo Kottke to the blues of Eric Clapton and the jazz of Pat Metheny. Drivin’ ‘N’ Cryin’ guitarist Buren Fowler emphatically affirms that Allman is his favorite player. The lyrics of country artist Travis Tritt  lament “…I still miss Duane Allman.” Black blues guitarist Michael Hill of The Black Rock Coalition credits Duane’s slide playing with inspiring him on the bottle neck.

The fast-paced summer of 1970 accelerated for Duane as he continued to split off from the band for brief periods to do Atlantic session work in Muscle Shoals, Miami and New York. At the suggestion of Jerry Wexler, Delaney Bramlett decided to use him as a session slide guitarist for his new album. “Duane was the greatest guitar player I ever played with,” Delaney has said of his friend.

Duane went on to jam often with the D&B band. One such concert introduced Allman  to jazz flautist Herbie Mann a chance meeting that would later bring the two musicians together for Mann’s Push Push album.

Musicians and professional critics agree that the peak of Duane’s session work occurred during the recording of Layla & Other assorted Love Songs. The tracks for the album were cut in late August and early September at Tom Dowd’s Criteria Studios in Miami — bringing together perhaps the two best white guitarists in the world. That fall, amateur critics here in Atlanta were heard to remark that the record should have been credited as “Duane And The Dominoes.”

In September, Hcndrix was dead and Joplin would follow in another month. The ABB was on a southern circuit allowing them to play for free in Piedmont Park again on Sept. 27 with Eric Quincy Tate, the Avenue Of Happiness, Stump Brothers and Chakra. The only known audio recording of the band playing here was made by Atlantan Marty Feldman, who taped “Mountain Jam” as the band played beneath the pavilion. This was the last time the band ever played the Park.

That fall the ABB spent a good deal of time in New York City. Bill Graham and Public Television were filming groups at his Fillmore East and the Allman Brothers were shot doing a four-song set. This short piece, long forgotten, was relocated recently by Allman authority Ron Currens. It is among the only known video of Duane and shows clearly his versatility as a guitarist.

The ABB closed out 1970 at the Warehouse  in New Orleans with a spirited New Years Eve concert. The year had ripened the band into a nationally prominent group, cemented by the recent release of their second album, Idlewild South.

With only a brief holiday respite. Discovery Incorporated was bringing the Brothers back to Atlanta for a sold-out concert at the Municipal Auditorium on Jan. 16. The evening was cold and crisp. The expectant crowd packed into the “old barn” for a night of hot music. The band had recently retained Carlo Sound out of Nashville to tour with them and the difference in the acoustic quality was astounding. ,

The Hampton Grease Band opened the show for the Brothers with their unique jazz-rock style. Over the years, this group had created a solid following in the Atlanta area and they would soon cut their own album and go on to play Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.

Around 9:30 p.m. the Brothers took the stage. The park days appeared to be over — the ABB had finally hit the big time. Duane stepped to the mike to wish everyone happy New Year the band was glad to be back where it all started playing for their first real fans again. There were those in attendance who were bitter, complaining about having to pay up to $5 for the sounds that had been given away free to them in the “Piedmont green” amphitheater.

But then Duane started to sweep into the elegant opening bars of “Statesboro Blues,” the music perfectly amplified and separated by the expertise of Carlo Sound…Frank Hughes’ magical light show flicked on…the elevated mirror ball sending rays spangling from the ceiling…matches were being struck…the air redolent with that old intimate smell. Suddenly, it didn’t matter — “Hell, yeah! Play all night!”

The familiar music was all around us  “Midnight Rider,” “Elizabeth Reed,” “Don’t Want You No More.” “Not My Cross To Bear,” rolling into something we hadn’t heard before. “Hotlanta,” an ABB original, was m being played appassionato — for the first time. Duane dedicated it to all of us.

The band finished the concert with a tortuous “Whipping Post” and left the stage.  But the crowd wasn’t about to let them go.  Stomping, hollering and whistling, they had  to hear it again — once more — for old times sake. The Brothers, coaxed back, took thcir positions again. Duane, his long white shirt wet with sweat, walked to the microphone. “Here’s one we all have a lot of fun with,” he said.

And as those two haunting guitar melodies floated in counterpoint over the kettle drums in “Mountain Jam,” the air seemed to incandesce and catch fire — emitting its own energy. Thousands of clapping hands were keeping time as that lilting musical koan built its magical elevations in the night. Musician Tony Glover has said that “… anybody who heard [Duane] on a good night knows how close he could come to going right through the roof of the sky.” This was one of those nights.

By now the big music promoters were starting to extend their markets into the Atlanta area, supplanting the local guild. That spring, a New York entrepreneur by the name of Howard Stein started booking rock bands here. His logo was a face caricature of Jean Harlow which he used in all his ads. Rolling Stone and The New York Times published articles about the imminent “death of Atlanta’s hip Strip” due to biker gang/hippie feuds, rip-offs and heroin trafficking. Even the Bird was lamenting these symptoms. However, in April the community rallied with the People’s Fair in the Park featuring Horse Roscoe, The Stump Brothers, Alex Taylor and Wet Willie.

The free concerts in Piedmont Park came to a somber end, however, on Independence Day, 1971. Any hopes of resurrecting the music were squashed in the aftermath of a series of shootings that began later that month and continued. The specter of Altamont, Calif. seemed to loom grotesquely over the “Piedmont green.”

But while there wasn’t much happening musically in the park, there were big things shaking at the ticket venues. Howard Stein was bringing the Allmans back to town for two sold-out concerts at the Municipal Auditorium on July 17. Their Live At The Fillmore East had just been released. Atlantans Ron Currens and Bill Ector attended both performances, and later wrote moving stories describing the day, which appeared in Les Brers magazine.

For most of us in Atlanta, it was the last time we ever saw Duane Allman. Photographer Carter Tomassi was there that day shooting stills for the Bird. His shot of Duane and Berry on the stage door balcony of the auditorium between shows remains a classic.

Running on adrenaline now, the ABB were entering the last leg of the marathon touring nd recording schedule that had begun over two years ago. Their place as one of the premier rock and roll bands in the world was nailed by their triumphant Fillmore album going gold. Tracks were starting to be laid down for their next album, which would be called Eat A Peach. Atlanta artist Flournoy Holmes, who would do the artwork for the cover, remembered talking with Duane that September about the job. He recalls that “Duane had just bought a purple motorcycle and said he wanted me to paint his and Berry’s bikes — after they finished up their tour.”

The tour wound up in mid-October on the East Coast after an intensive western swing, part of which would later be chronicled by Grover Lewis in a tabloid expose in Rolling Stone. Duane stayed in New York for a few weeks, kicking back and relaxing, visiting friends like musician John Hammond and Deering Howe, the band’s first real vacation in two years a time to reap the harvest of their Herculean efforts.

The day before Duane flew back to Macon, he called Grover Sassman, the local Harley-Davidson dealer, to arrange for new tires to be put on his bike, and ordered a new helmet. “When Duane came by to settle up with me,” Sassman recalls, “I remember he climbed on his bike, took the new helmet and cut the chin strap in two. I told him that wasn’t a good idea, but he just smiled and rode off. Duane’s cycle was a Harlcy Davidson Sportster HLCH, I think it was a 1970 model. It was a modified chopper with fork legs. He had bought it second-hand from a local kid. The extended forks increase the distance from the handlebars to the shock absorbers on the front wheels and hurt handling at low speeds. All the manufacturers highly discourage them.”

The late afternoon of Friday, Oct. 29, Duane and roadie Kim Payne rode their bikes over to the “Big House” on Vineville Avenue. In the early days most of the band had lived in this large 1920’s structure perched on the higher elevations of Macon’s Vineville Historic District. That evening everyone was gathering for a surprise birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda.

The Halloween atmosphere was festive and upbeat. The band members joked and talked about the new album, a European tour in 1972, and especially about the new music they were composing and arranging. Linda Oakley Miller recollects that Duane was enjoying himself as he carved jack-o-lanterns out of the pumpkins for the kids.

Around 5:30 p.m., Duane said he was going over to his house on Burton Avenue and planned to meet up with everyone later. Waving goodbye, he slipped his helmet on and mounted his motorcycle.

Hillcrest Avenue is a straight stretch of road which runs westward from Pio Nono Avenue in a level grade for about half a mile, where it plunges abruptly down a steep hill. Bartlett Avenue, at the bottom of the incline, leads north to the city’s main rail yards.

And it was here that Duane Allman, traveling westward down Hillcrest that evening, came unexpectedly upon a truck making a partial turn onto Bartlett. Swerving to his left, Duane lost control of the bike and went down, skidding almost 100 feet through the crossroads. The Macon Telegraph reported that Duane had sustained a severe head wound and massive injuries to the torso. He died on the operating table three hours later. He was 24 years old.

The news of Duane’s death spread like a foul specter shrouding across the atmosphere in Atlanta. The bright autumn leaves seemed to pale — the pungent October smells soured in the wake of the tragedy.

Musicians and friends from all over attended the funeral in Macon. Poignant requiems were played, then Jerry Wexler stepped forward to give a moving eulogy. Pausing often to compose himself, he closed by saying, “…Those of us who were privileged to know Duane will remember him from all the studios, backstage dressing rooms, the Downtowners, the Holiday Inns, the Sheratons, the late nights relaxing after the sessions, the whisky and the music talk, playing back cassettes until night gave way to dawn, the meals and the pool games, and fishing in Miami and Long Island, this young beautiful man who we love so dearly but who is not lost to us because we have his music, and the music is imperishable.”

If you enter Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon off of Riverside Drive, you can ramble through its narrow streets — past Eglantine and Soldiers Square to Carnation Ridge. There, you come upon a small terrace midway down a grassy vale. A well-worn path beckons you down a gentle incline to where two of the most frequently visited graves lay overlooking the Ocmulgee River. Here lies Duane Allman, nonpareil of the slide guitar;

Next to him is his “brother,” Berry Oakley — killed in a motorcycle accident within nearly a year, and within two blocks of Duane’s crash.

The area is always well tended, regardless of the season. Flowers, sometimes stuck in long-necked beer bottles, adorn the marble slabs. Faithful reproductions of each musician’s guitar as well as favorite quotes are etched into their expanses. The two angels which used to sit at the foot of each tomb have been stolen, but there is no graffiti scrawled by vandals here as there is in other parts of the cemetery. White oak and hickory overhang a variegated understory. Visitors find this place peaceful and inspirational.

Ninety miles to the north, Piedmont Park sparkles like a green jewel in the dense setting of its metropolis. Twenty years has brought not a few changes here. Fairways have been turned back into meadows and fields. Drought and overuse have taken down some of the older trees.

Music is still played here, but not on the steps or ballfields anymore. Jazz, classical, rap and sometimes blues genres find a venue on the Carter Inaugural Stage. At night the homeless seek refuge under the pavilion.

Looking westward from the steps, the horizon is now monopolized by high-rises pushed up from the Midtown bedrock casting long geometric shadows over the “Strip.”

Sometimes, though, walking through the area, you catch a glimpse through a dusty store window of a faded psychedelic postr maybe the whiff of a discarded essential oil or the faint rustle of a tambourine. And then, like the mysterious fragment of a hologram, the whole era is suddenly reconstituted in all its vibrancy. And you remember that “It was a time of grace,” as George Leonard described it, “…when all in life that had been gray and two-dimensional seemed to explode into unexpected color and depth, rich with new smells and sounds and the imminence of miracles.”

There are places in Piedmont Park where late at night, if you listen closely and the wind is right, there comes howling up sweetly, through the magnolia and oak, a melodious sound, glissading with an unmistakable, ethereal vibrato. And then, it lingers briefly on the fragrant air.

As Richard Albero said in a 1973 Guitar Player tribute, “Wail on, Skydog!” Play all damn night!

Since the death of Duane Allman and that of bassist Berry Oakley in 1972, the Allman Brothers Band has benefited from the expertise of a variety of musicians, such as keyboardist Chuck Leavell, late bassist Lamar Williams and guitarist Les Dudek. The band of today is reminiscent of the old 1971 group in makeup and style. In addition to core players Gregg Allman, Dickey Belts, Jaimo and Butch Trucks, current bassist Alien Woody and guitarist Warren Haynes round the group out.

ABB road manager Kirk West says the band is up for the sold-out, four-night live recording session scheduled for Dec. 28-31 at the historic old Macon Auditorium. Famed recording engineer Tom Dowd will produce the sessions, synthesizing the best cuts into a single CD package, about as long as the Live At The Fillmore album.

West says the sales of the new band’s last two releases have not reflected their success at the box office or the rave reviews left in the wake of their tours. He is optimistic however, that the release of their Macon live set will usher back in the post-Fillmore golden days.

With their expanded repertoire, the band plans to play a mixture of new and old numbers. Who knows, they might even break into “Mountain Jam” if the spirit hits them.

 

The Bird on The Allman Brothers Band

The Great Speckled Bird Vol 2 # 11 April 19, 1969 

The Allman Brothers play a form of what some might want to call “hard blues” but that term merely relates their music to what we already recognize and accept as valid; it says nothing of their real achievements. What informs their creation is not black music but the experience of young white tribesmen in experiencing black music. After all. Ray Charles, and what he means, is a crucial part of the lives of this new generation of non-blacks. Thus black music can be approached creatively by our musicians if the jumping off place is our experience of that music rather than the music itself.

Quote of the Week:

Policeman, after complimenting Barry for getting together such a pleasant, orderly crowd, “You can stay in the park all night for all we care.”

A leaflet drawn up by our “leader” says “Last week we were attacked. Some of us were shot. We were jailed, the culprits have not been caught The police did not and have never protected us” yet the same self-appointed “leader” personally takes it upon himself to represent the community by asking “permission” from the same power structure which exploits us, permission to listen to music which belongs to us, permission to meet together in a park which also belongs to us! The Man can’t bust our music. -don’t count on it.

Definition of MUSIC AS POWER. A perfectly straight middle-aged man stood near the band in the park Sunday, mesmerized for two hours at sounds which took him places he never knew existed. After the band took a break, his remark, more than a little unconvincing even to him as he said it, was, “That’s just a lot of noise. ” He knows things he doesn’t know he knows, and the character of our generation is determined by just those things.

Rock & Roll, our New Music, is sound for the head and body, orchestrated, electric, cosmic music that will rip you up by your corporate America roots and set you down just inside the Gates of Eden outside of which, we’ve known for some time now, there are no truths. You don’t, can’t, “listen” to the Allman Brothers; you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it, you “let it out and let it in” (the Beatles) and enter into an experience through which you are changed. You catch a glimpse of the kind of world we are becoming and you know more than ever the horrendous load of bullshit we’ll have to drop off on the way in order to give birth to that kind of world.

A rampant fear of the mythical dragon of “Communism” (a la J. Edgar), nourished and fed by the power structure, flows throughout the hip community of Atlanta like a poison fragmenting us, blocking any efforts at organization, and our self-appointed “leader” holds up an SDS button, and says, “I transcend this.”

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS

Duane Allman-Guitar & Vocal

Gregg Allman-Lead Vocal & Organ

Berry Oakley-Bassist

Butch Trucks-Drums

Dickey Betts-Guitar

Jai Johnny Johnson-Drums

Class prejudice the whole “redneck” concept—destroys the community from within, rendering it impotent, and our “leader” organizes us around contempt for the working man.

The Colony 400 monster rises in our very midst, attempting to determine how we will live our lives, and our self-appointed “leader” tell us hat “fear” and “paranoia” are our only enemies.

The Allman Brothers from Macon, Georgia, are a fantastically together group of young rock and roll musicians whose music draws as heavily from the blues: as the experience of young white tribesmen can without exploiting its source—a few steps farther and you get a merely talented farce like Johnny Winter. Since our generation is tribal, totally unlike our parents and grandparents and their parents, it is only natural that we would turn to the black man, whose tribal roots go so much deeper and do not have thousands of years of bullshit “civilization” to cut them off from these roots, for forms with which to relate to the new world. The history of the black man in America is the history of tribal man in an alienated, fragmented, capitalistic, literate, industrial, “I”-oriented culture; young people are simply showing good sense when they attempt to co-opt black culture (just as the dying order desperately attempts to put its stamp on the culture of its youth)—but creating and redefining our own culture in terms of the new space-age tribalism is the crucial struggle and follows as naturally from where we are at now as Grace Slick follows Patti Page. The blues, the entire complex of music which has come out of the experience of the black man in America, belongs to forms and patterns and relationships to experience of which we now have only the tiniest fraction of an inkling (even that is a hell of a lot). The black man’s blues (whether manifested in Lightnin’ Hopkins or Smokey Robinson and the Miracles) flows out of him while our “blues” is wrenched out bloody like a prematurely pulled tooth. Contrast the shouting subtleties and the rock- like soul of a Mahalia Jackson with the strained histrionics of a Janis Joplin (who, somewhere down under her package, probably does have some soul of her own). Art is not a product, it is a process: the blues—whether country or urban, acoustic or electric, raw or commercial -cannot be copied from records or concerts or books on black culture. The musical language of the black man cannot be co-opted simply because it happens to be powerful and sings of things we are just now recognizing as more valid than what we have been hung up in for centuries. Our music must develop its own power, its own forms, its own patterns of relationship with our tribal roots and our space-age technology in an unbroken line all the way down into our preliterate origins and all the way out into unknown galaxies.

The Allman Brothers know all this, and a lot more.

What we find in Piedmont Park on Sundays is a celebration of the awareness of the tribal experience. It in no way resembles the mass media bullshit image of the Haight-Ashbury community of “hippies” living like stoned zombie children off the sweat of others; it is an integrated collectivity of many different kinds of people intermeshed in an unbroken psychic web that transcends class, color, age and sex, and makes all of these things meaningful only within the context of the struggle to crush the power structure that stifles all of us.

The “political” manifestation of the Sunday Piedmont Park experience undid everything the music had built up. The sounds produced a together, militant, upright, powerful group of people involved in a psychic community struggling to become physical, to become “political” in the largest sense of the term. The politics of the “open” microphone is the equivalent of a band in which only a “lead” guitarist is amplified-it belongs to the past along with “teachers” and “employers” and “managers” and “leaders.” If we must have raps with our music, let them be unamplified groups planning whatever action they deem necessary. If hundreds of tribalists get sufficiently turned on, each one on be his own open microphone.

The Merry-Go-Round exudes an odor of capitalist shit that you can smell all the way down in the park, and we are told by our self-appointed “leader” that our enemy is “violence.”

Capitalism the logical extension of the word “I” exploits the life style of our movement and our current self-appointed “leader” attempts to organize his own ego trip.

The only happening at the park Sunday which approached the power and the glory of the music was the waving red flag, another nonverbal experience which colored the events of the entire day and night.

UPS:

The tribal altar of Piedmont Park-stone pillars on either side of a two-stage stairway, level after level of people, sitting on the grass, on the steps, on the pillars, with the band, behind, in front, on all sides, across the top outlined by sun and sky, milling around, surrounding and enveloping and being enveloped by the music in an unbroken web of tribal psyche, sun, trees, grass, grass, music, animals, man woman and child all vibrating as one out of tune with die seats of established power and in tune with other communities wherever our music is being played

One together person reading Cummings’ “I sing of Olaf” to an overwhelmed audience unused to hearing those most militant statements—

“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

“There is some shit I will not eat”

Black saxophonist coming out of the crowd to jam with the band

New tribesmen passing their own version of the peace pipe

Phil Weldon rapping gently but forcibly about the red flag blazing above the stone pillar

Angry interchanges between Barry Weinstock and members of the community at midnight Sunday when it became obvious to everyone that spending the night in the park would accomplish not one fucking thing for anyone except those who dig spending the night in the park with the blessing, approval and “permission” of their city “fathers”

The power structure takes policemen out of our community and sends them into black neighborhoods to do their rotten thing and gives us our very own detective to soothe our ruffled white middle class beautiful gentle people (i.e. non- violent) feathers, and our self-appointed “leader” leads us to believe that we have won a great victory.

DOWN OF THE DAY-Barry Weinstock asking the band to stop playing so he could go into his rap!

The most subversive manifestation of the power of our music is its ability to weld an entire park full of every type of person from all walks of life into one, throbbing pulsation of experience.

 

Grease at Emory

The Hampton Grease Band were a main stay of the community and seemed always ready to play for a good cause. This show was memorable because I was at Emory and knew the Young Republicans who supported Nixon and his Vietnam policy. They stopped just short of being pro-war activists.

We had driven to Emory’s AMB, really enjoyed the Greaseband experience of that evening, even though Young Republicans could be heard outside trying to be disruptive. I had driven The Celestial Omnibus, my hippie VW bus. We returned to leave and the bus would not go backwards.   We assumed a flat tire but found more when we checked in the dark. ‘Someone’ had slashed all four tires to ribbons; their idea of debate. Luckily a friend ran Mother’s Tire Company on Ponce de Leon and brought over four replacements.

 

What’s Grease? (Interview with Bruce Hampton) before he became a Colonel

(Interview with Bruce Hampton)

Grease rap What’s Grease?

It’s a concept of music. It’s a concept of life. It means lobster eggs and ointment. It means basically to suck, yeah, basically to suck. It’s hard to define.

What kind of music is it?

Suckrock. It’s a combination between suckrock and ointment. Grease is a form of life; it’s also a form of music. It’s all a form of eggs; it all leads back to eggs.

Who understands your music here in Atlanta?

About three people. Every once in a while when we’re playing, people will say, “What’s that they’re doing?” They can’t get into what we’re doing because they’re looking for some local psychedelic be-bop band. What we try to do is create power. We just try to destroy. See, our main ambition in life aside from growing a bosom on top of our heads is to die on stage and when we die on stage that will be when we ultimately reach Grease. People are scared of us around here and they don’t let us play much. What they’re really afraid of is that, if they listen, they’ll find out that they’re really as much of what we’re playing about as we are. We try to be as honest as possible. It’s complete sincerity. There’s no put-on, no stage act.

What about technical ability?

You need to learn how to play. Everything has to be together and to destroy and it’s not a question of having a lot of technical capability. The goal is complete expression, and when you completely attain this expression, you won’t sound like anybody. You have your own sound and you just destroy. What we want people to do is just climb in and hear Grease and to destroy. Yeah, that’s it.

“Give me a gun, and I ‘ll blow your fucking head —Bruce Hampton

Like most heavy rock groups, the Hampton Grease Band suffers from overhype. The public has been drenched with news of their comings and goings, their backstage fighting, their messy private lives, their overt attempts to cash in on any current fad. Still, the band feels that in spite of the television, radio, and press coverage of their not-so-innocent antics, the music will endure. According to guitarist Harold Kelling, “Our music reflects BOLTS,” and this seems to be the real strength behind Grease.

One of the heaviest rock groups in the country, the HGB totals in at 785 pounds, not including equipment. They are 109 years old and come from Krele (pronounced krel), “eight light earth years away from this planet,” according to vocalist Bruce Hampton. What has always held them together is their hatred of the Band’s bassist, Charlie, whom they hold at arm’s length because of a Business Law degree from Oglethorpe College. Yet, Charlie is their leader. According to guitarist Glenn Phillips, “Charlie’s my big brother- my father image.” Manager for the HGB is Steve Cole of Discovery: “We first met Steve at the Catacombs- he said we were a good soul band and that if we put on coats and ties and worked on our act, he’d make us a lot of money!”

Unlike most rock groups, the Grease Band is heavily into political struggles: “We stand on our record,” they say when asked to define their politics. . Deeply into the study of communications media, just how hip the HGB is is illustrated by the fact that their politics was formulated not from the book, not even from the movie, but from the television show of “My Friend Flicka”!

Not content to rest on their laurels as musicians and entertainers, the Hampton Grease Band likes to get involved. For February they are planning the First International News Festival which will bring together in Montgomery, Alabama, for the first time Frank McGee, Sander Vanocur, Jerry Psenka, John Doyle, Hal Suit, Walter Cronkite and other news heavies. Hampton says there will be no police. Emcee will be Big Bill Hill, disc jockey from Chicago, fresh from his triumph at the Ann Arbor News Festival.

The HGB is currently working on production of a mammoth one-record album for BITE label which will be an exploration of the musical world of Norma Tanega as seen through the eyes of Immanuel Kant; it will be called Who Ate the World? or, more simply, FLAPS. Sample verse: “CANADE DOWN AND GROPE UNTIL, AROUND THE PEAK AT VQLTAG’S WILL. THE CRAYON FORTH AND SIX SHALL SPEAK, SATEEMUS BLONE CABLATIC GEEK.”

Two experiences that sum up the soul of the Hampton Grease Band most effectively are the time several years ago when Bruce Hampton was playing records in his grandmother’s basement, and she came downstairs yelling, “Turn off that goddam music –it sounds like bees\” Another time the band was playing the Catacombs “coffeehouse” and the Mother David underground establishment threw them out because their music was too loud, too electric, and too rock and roll: “They said we weren’t underground—they said we were sewerground!”

Suck Rock – Hampton Grease Band

The Great Speckled Bird Oct 13, 1969 Vol. 2 #31 pg. 11

Suck Rock

The Hampton Grease Band is one of the most important staples in Atlanta’s fast-growing youth community of identification. We know they’re great, they are always there, and sometimes they’re better than-at other times; but unlike other rock groups in the area, the Hampton Grease Band seems to be taking on a community function in which music—rock and roll music, loud music, electric music, violent music, the high energy force for change that John Sinclair has talked about—serves as a spring in which a community can periodically refresh itself, a musical fountain of youth consciousness.

The HGB consists of vocalist (and now saxophonist Bruce Hampton (Taurus), guitarists Glenn Phillips (Aries) and Harold Kelling (Leo), bassist Charlie Phillips (Libra), and drummer Ted Levine (Pisces). Usually they do a long suite-type of thing which includes many different songs drawn from different periods in the development of rock, maybe laced with a couple of campy pieces, some from a Southern hymnal, some from nowhere you’re familiar with, all placed within the context of a free-floating cosmic music inspired by the best expressions of revolutionary black music in Amerika.

At the old Catacombs two years ago, the HGB seemed to be into a Paul Butterfield/Mike Bloomfield white blues thing, with jazz overtones; Hampton was just as insane then as he is now, but more into a self-destruction bag -one night he made use of an obviously spontaneous nose-bleed to turn one set into a horrific bash of monster, crashing blues rock; another night he seemed to be going absolutely wild and threw a drum set into the audience. The Grease Band still digs rock theatrics, but now more often that not expressed in the music itself. They have incorporated into their musical interaction a vocal shout, an antiphonal, non-verbal call and response series of shouts and yelps and exhortations. Hampton now honks and screams on a saxophone, and is experimenting successfully with jazz vocal techniques introduced into American black music by Pharoah Sanders’ group (it sounds like a hip yodel). His vocals are not as uptight as they once were. Whether shouting out some Howlin’ Wolf blues, running through “Rock Around the Clock,” or telling us about “Mr. Bones,” the strain in the voice is going, and the wonderful things Hampton is doing with the yodel technique indicate that he is even more seriously fashioning a vocal relationship with his instrumental pyrotechnics of the band. Hampton’s priorities are not misplaced: his foray into the territory marked by the great black vocalisms of Amerika stems from inspiration, not exploitation.

Instrumentally, what can you say about the Hampton Grease Band except that they are one of the best rockbands anywhere. Guitarists Glenn Phillps and Harold Kelling are fantastic soloists who prove that virtuosity need not be stultifying; together they do a sort of dual battle improvisational collective onslaught of she senses that free-floats with the bass-drum rhythm in a world we don’t often visit except through chemicals or through some equally shattering experience. Charlie Phillips, bassist for the group, is one of the most exciting, firmly swinging in the field; he answers, speaks to, comments on, disagrees, attacks, undercuts, supports, embraces and becomes one with the musical gestalt through which his own instrumental voice is carried. Now the band has a new drummer, Ted Levine, who is the best one they have ever had, a powerhouse of energy that finally provides the rhythmic foundation they have always needed. Together, they are simply dynamite.

At the same time the HGB moves forward, it seems also to reach farther back into its roots. While traveling freely into the cosmic territory of Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, they will suddenly bring up the rear with Little Richard, or their versions of “That’ll Be The Day,” or “Walk Don’t Run.” It’s not a gimmick; they are saying that both approaches work well, they both express different phases, different levels or planes of the new. On a sunlit September Sunday in Piedmont Park, the Grease Band played what they consider to be the best thing they’ve done. The next Sunday was cloudy and rainy, and music turned into blue uniforms, tear gas, clubs and guns and blood. The following Sunday, the Hampton Grease Band, and other rock groups in the community, brought us all full circle back to free music in the park with a long, inter-connected set that seemed to sum up musically the history of our experience. They were heavily into their blues thing, their jazz thing, their basic rock thing; they made sounds drawn from the Ventures, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, soul, some original stuff, but now they are beginning to reflect the impact of white country music in a campy version of “Wolverton Mountain,” then “San Antonio Rose,” and even in a familiar Southern hymn, “Rock of Ages.”

We don’t recognize them often enough, we don’t “think” about them because they are so much a part of us. We remember them from earlier days, the first band to play in Piedmont Park, the first electric rock band to play at the old Catacombs. We know them from student get-togethers, teeny-bopper clubs in the suburbs, the Lotus “underground” film days at the Peachtree Art Theatre, the Bird birthday party, many beautiful Piedmont Park Saturdays and Sundays—and one ugly one—followed by the Sunday of free music that we won for ourselves by defending our people, our community, from the system that builds Colony Squares it can see and destroys invisible communities of human beings it doesn’t even recognize. There is nothing in the High Mausoleum of “Art” that can approach the relationship between artistic creation and aesthetic response that the Hampton Grease Band has given to Atlanta’s youth community. One kind of art hangs up on the wall, somebody owns it. The other belongs to the people who put the system and its values up against the wall. Hail, hail rock and roll!

-miller francis Jr.

Nothing but The Blues, Johnny Jenkins

The Great Speckled Bird 9/28/70 vol 3 #38 11

Nothing but The Blues, Johnny Jenkins

Ton Ton Macoute  was recorded in Macon, Georgia at Capricorn Records, at an 8-track studio built “in memory of Otis Redding” by Phil Walden, manager o£ Johnny Jenkins and countless black Rhythm & Blues artists, and owner of Redwal Music, Inc. Walden also manages the Allman Brothers Band, and because the  Bird has from the first turned on to the music of the Allman Bros., we were sent a preview copy of Ton Ton Macoute! By Johnny Jenkins a couple of months back It flipped us out. Unlike so many albums that you really dig on first hearing, this one just gets better and better the more you listen to it.

So Charlie, Ron and I set up a trip to the Macon studio and Redwal offices, and an interview with Johnny Jenkins. We thought we’d devote some space in the Bird to Jenkins, tell folks just how good a bluesman he is, and maybe generate some support for bringing him to Atlanta for a live performance. The first thing we found out is that Johnny Jenkins definitely does not think of himself as a rock & roll singer: he is blues people, has been playing blues for almost fifteen years, and doesn’t even like Ton Ton Macoute!, not so much for what it is but rather because he had so little to do with it. Why Johnny Jenkins is turned off to the album that bears his name and face has a lot to do with the fact that he is a black musician working in a white-controlled industry. The name of the game is capitalism; the dynamic to watch is how well record selling gets along with white racism.

We assumed that the situation that produced Ton Ton Macoute! was simple—a fantastic, but unknown vocalist had put together some unbelievably heavy arrangements of a Dr. John song, “I Walk On Gilded Splinters”; 3 strong blues associated with other per- formers, “Leaving Trunk” (Sleepy John Estes), “Rollin’ Stone” (Muddy Waters), “Dimples” (John Lee Hooker), done up in lighter, more rock than blues, arrangements; “Sick and Tired” by Chris Kenner, one of my very favorite rock & roll hits of the fifties; “Bad News” by John D. Loudermilk, reformulated to hold its own in a sound as different from Johnny Cash as you can get; a remarkable version of Dylan’s “Down Along the Cove” (Duane Allman’s slide guitar on this one is so good it hurts!); and a couple of ‘Cajun’ or ‘voodoo’-sounding (whatever that means) songs, “Blind Bats and Swamp Rats” and “Voodoo in You” by Jackie Avery, a musician local to the Macon music scene which produced Ton Ton Macoute!

By the time the “official” version of the album had come out, including printed credits inside the double fold, we had realized that the “sound” of the record was definitely Allman Brothers-not just Duane (whose slide work will stand your hair on end throughout both sides), Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks who play on the album—but the whole thing: arrangements, instrumental details, the process of bringing black originated blues riffs way over the hill to the rock & roll end of the spectrum. Sweat and grease become an Allman Bros. blues grace and polish. Johnny Jenkins, on the other hand, has one of the blackest vocal deliveries you’ll every hear. We wondered just how the thing came together.

When we got to Macon, we sought out Redwal Music, Inc. Roger Cowles, our host, showed us through their offices—walls covered with gold records and certificates of Phil Walden’s successful management and promotion of such soul artists as Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, etc. We heard some of Capricorn Records’ new unreleased material on tape (most of it, except for some Allman Bros. we got just a taste of very white, very commercial, and very bad). Cowles asked two black secretaries to accompany us to Johnny Jenkins’ apartment in order to serve as “translators” or “interpreters” for what Cowles called Jenkins’ “stoned funk” speech. Finally we were off and headed for the housing project where Johnny lives with his wife and two younger children, Calvin and Junior.

When we arrived, we found Johnny Jenkins into a child care thing. One of his kids is a baby, only a few months old, and on this very hot day in  Georgia, he had to interrupt our rap several times to see to Calvin’s bad temper. Jenkins’ warmth and humor put us at ease right away, and as soon as we all realized that there would be no heavy communications barrier, the two women split, laughing and more than a little embarrassed (as we all were). With the aid of a tape recorder, we began rapping with Johnny Jenkins—getting into his background as a blues musician.

“Well, it was back 12 or 13 years ago, before that. An old fellow I knew then was playing guitar- played a blues type thing. I used to stand around a lot, listening to what he was playing. I liked the sound of his guitar, what he was doing with it, but I’d never played one, and I didn’t have one of my own at the time. But I became so interested that the old man gave me one of ’em, and that’s how I came about owning my first guitar.

“I was born in Swift Creek, Georgia, and before I came to Macon, the city limits of Macon, I used to play at the filling stations, and most of the people around there was white. I was playing hillbilly then, nobody was paying me, you know, and I was playing hillbilly. Shoot, I got to where I could sing just about anything Hank Williams ever put out! Hank Williams, Red Foley-just me and a guitar. Man, I used to hang around those filling stations and play hillbilly!

“Later I got involved with Pat T. Cake; we were making a small amount of money, you know, cigarette fare. I started doing jobs in fraternities, small clubs here and there, but we still hadn’t got established, at least not the way we wanted to be. From then, it was one thing and another. After a while, we cut this song called “Love Twist, “and that’s when Otis (Redding) started doing regular work, so we got better equipment, transportation. We began to understand ourselves, get a lot more self confidence. On thing -the gigs began to start getting kinda heavy, the distances started getting pretty far, you know, and I didn’t care too much about flying in an airplane. And that kinda messed up our trio, you know. So Phil (Walden) had trouble booking me for gigs, so he started booking me places not more than a few hundred miles away. Otis started getting on the road, and he wanted me to go on the road and play behind him, and this still called for airplane flying, and I just couldn’t see no end to it. I feel that there is always an end to every beginning, but you don’t have to press it, man. I don’t believe in pressing it.”

When we told Johnny how fantastic we thought Ton Ton Macoute was. We were surprised to hear  him express  only a grudging acceptance of that praise.

“Well, actually, “he said, “at the time we set up this album thing, I was all tied up, and the guys were free in the studio , so I’d just overdub my voice, and they  would already have the rest of the sound down.  They’d retrack it, you see? It was already set up for me when I went to the studio. “We began to understand just how strongly influenced the music was by the Allman Bros. and other musicians at Capricorn. “I wasn’t there with the guys when they were making the rest of it, you know. More blues would be my style if I had been there. Actually it would be ALL BLUES because that’s my feeling, you know-the blues. This psychedelic idea came through the guys at the studio, you know—it goes along with what’s happening in the world today, you know? But really, you can’t make a person what he’s not, you know. A fellow has to give out what’s inside him. ” We were, frankly, not expecting this view of what we thought was an outa-sight album of his music.

“So you have mixed feelings about the album?”

“I feel more at home with the blues, strictly blues. That’s me. I don’t know how you’d classify the blues, how you’d talk about the blues. It’s a mixed thing, man. It’s about the hardship of a man, I feel, the past of a man. He never had a million dollars and wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his hand. Like a guy who’s never owned that jive, man, it’s hard for him.”

“When you hear a group like the Allman Bros., do you think their music is blues?”

“I don’t criticize those people. I think that the stuff they’re doing in their way is tops, in their thing. Because that’s what they feel, they know what they feel, and they do what they know, you know?”

We talked about Jenkins’ new audience—he played the Atlanta Pop Festival at 6 o’clock in the morning with three drummers, a vocal chorus and a large band backing him up—and we discovered that ever, “success” can be a mixed bag when you have little control over the “product.” Now that Ton Ton Macoute! is out in the record stores and picking up airplay and generating some excitement. the music of Johnny Jenkins is defined once and for all, and when he plays live performances he is expected to reproduce the sound of the album. “Another thing I don’t think is wise is trying to get the same sound live you got on the album. You make a record with 20 or 30 pieces, you know, and when you put in an appearance you’re playing with 25 pieces, and I just don’t think that’s right. There’s things in the record sound that people will be looking for, not just the vocal, not just the saxophone, but little things that might be hidden back in the album, so you try to get that whole sound -it’s all gotta be there just like you cut it.”

We asked him what he thought about playing “I Walk On Gilded Splinters,” “Down Along the Cove,” “Leaving Trunk,” and the other numbers on the record when he plays live.

“Well, I don’t really want to agree to it, I don’t feel it, man, I just don’t feel it. Cause it ain’t me. We mix it up, usually, things from the album, and things I really want to do. I have to keep myself together, you know? It’s hard, you know, to keep yourself concentrating on something you know you’re not involved in. Every now and then, you can dig into one of your own things, and really get it up!”

Jenkins often referred to his “next” album, how it would be “all blues,” his own material, but we wondered how such an album could happen when, once an artist is introduced, his audience comes to expect more of the same—and so much of Ton Ton Macoute! isn’t Johnny Jenkins at all but instead Duane Allman and the Capricorn studio musicians. We asked him if he thought his own music, all blues, would be marketable, given the demands of the music industry today. He was optimistic. “I think that all the music that comes to me should be able to do something for me now, you know? It’s all that I can put into it, it’s more than I can express, and there’s a whole lot in there.”

“Why do you think young white kids are beginning to listen to, and even play, blues music?”

“The kids have really been wanting to be free for a long period of time. And there’s quite a few things happening now that give them the privilege to do what they’ve been wanting to do . . . such as the way they dress, the music . . . People are gonna look for respect, deep, hard respect that their parents been teaching them at church. They been taught ‘about’ God, but the only God they’ve been taught is about has been a respectable, clean God, and the kids today, they’ve found out what God is really about, , the tramps he was involved with, the lepers, the filth he had to go through, how he healed the sores…” There’s just a  whole lotta truth the children are finding out their parents were lying about. I’ll put it this way: the parents weren’t very brilliant about it. They shoulda known there would be a time when kids would be aware of what was happening. ”

“So this is all coming out in the music?”

“It’s coming out all the way, man, in the music, in everything. And there’s nothing they can do about it. Cause then the kids’ kids come along! And I’ll tell you something else, too. Some of the parents are willing to go along with it, too, but they’re afraid. They done lied about so many other things, they’ve lived with that image for so long that it falls over into this thing here now. It’ll be a complete downfall; they’ll finally have to commit suicide, kill themselves because their minds will be so confused and mixed up. I know back when we were playing a lot of fraternities, we weren’t even allowed to associate with the kids, white kids. And in the fraternities I was playing in, the music got so heavy that it really didn’t matter, man. You could see it then, but you had to keep your cool, you know? But it was there anytime you could look into a person’s eyes. Now, you can look into their eyes, and there’s no turning away, you know? You can look deep into a person’s face now and see there’s something behind it. And it’s been hid by a mask, you know?”

“You think that’s breaking down now, that wall?”

“Yeah, man, the kids are free to speak, free to act.” .

Not too long before our trip, the mayor of Macon had stirred up a hornet’s nest by issuing a “Shoot to Kill” order directed at black militants organizing in Macon around demands by the black community on the white power structure. We asked Jenkins about the situation there. “Macon’s my home,” he said. “The leaders here are combined into one whole-the leaders-and they’re the ones that are working so hard together to keep things from being taken apart. But like I said, the citizens have a toehold, too! So it’ll all take place in the near future.”

Roger Cowles had left earlier to get a camera since we had neglected to bring a photographer with us; when he returned, he snapped a roll of film and we wound things up, ending by telling Johnny Jenkins how much we were looking forward to hearing him play in Atlanta.

Cowles took us to a soul food restaurant where black people and white longhaired musicians were taking lunch, and then we paid a visit to Capricorn studios itself, a large, mostly empty building in downtown Macon that Redwal is renovating with expansion of their existing 8 track recording studio in mind. Recording studios are exciting places to go; they must all look alike, evidently-we kept being reminded of Let it Be and Sympathy for the Devil . In addition to members of the Allman Bros. Band, Capricorn has a handful of crack musical technicians who serve as a “studio band” and play on almost every record put out by the Redwal people. While we were there organist Paul Hornsby was adding another track to really fine soul tune, and we rapped a bit with the engineers who were trying to get the sound mix just right. We also talked with Roger Cowles about the business end of the music industry, and it’s really frightening how totally dependent on profit the whole scene is. A studio like Capricorn costs a shitload of money, and the music of the Allman Bros., tour and record, has accounted for a large part of it. We asked Cowles just what percentage of profit Johnny Jenkins himself would make off an album like Ton Ton Macoute! Cowles replied, “About 2 per cent.” Incredible!

Driving back to Atlanta, we thought a lot about flat 2 per cent, about Walden & Associates, about musicians like Johnny Jenkins who we might never have heard of had he not been placed pretty much at the mercy and musical discretion of an industry controlled by white capitalists, and about how one’s attitude toward Ton Ton Macoute! depends to a large extent on who you are. We wonder if Johnny Jenkins will ever make an album which will satisfy him as much as his first one satisfies his new audience (us) and the studio people who produced it. –

“I don’t even know music,” Jenkins had said. “And so when I’m out there, I’m out there playing solely from feeling, because that’s all I have to offer. It can’t come from no pattern, no sheet of paper, no teacher, cause I’ve never been involved with that. Blues is feeling. If you’ve never had it hard, you don’t know what it’s like. So that’s the way I feel about the music. A cat that’s out there, and his voice has never been trained to do things, he’s just hollering, but he’s hollering with a soulful holler, and he’s just got it and it’s gonna come out-whoo-oo-oo! If it ain’t in him, it’s not gonna come out. Most of the time when I play, I won’t be looking the crowd over, I sing with my eyes closed. So I really won’t be trying to see the people, I’ll be trying to feel the people.”

Duane Allman and a lot of talented people at Redwal, Inc. in Macon have produced a beautiful album called Ton Ton Macoute! which makes use of the formidable vocal and harmonica talents of bluesman Johnny Jenkins. But maybe sometime soon Johnny Jenkins will get to make that album he can hear in his head right now—all blues, or maybe he might even sneak in one of those hillbilly songs by Hank Williams.

—miller francis.jr.

Talkin ‘bout My Generation

The Great Speckled Bird June 15, 1970 Vol. 3 #24 pg. 12

Talkin ‘bout My Generation

“I’m looking for me, You’re looking for you We’re looking at each other and we don’t know what to do;” -“The Seeker” by The Who

Our situation is different from that of our parents, and their parents, and generations upon generations of non-colored peoples of the West. Instead of millions of young “individuals,” what we have now is an entire generation moving headlong into a collective consciousness in which every division, contradiction and polarization looms large. On one level, there are the “hippies” and the “politicals.” Within the “hippies” are the peace freaks and also the street fighters. Within the “politicals” there are the “Marxist-Leninists” and “anarcho-syndicalists.” Within the “Marxist-Leninists” there are those who lean toward Mao and the Black Panther Party, and those who really warm up to Stalin, not to mention those who groove on Trotsky. Within the “anarcho- syndicalists” there are those who refuse to relate to print and organization at all and retire to the farm, and then there are those who still struggle “on the scene’ within established Movement forms and structures. A few of these still can dig Jerry Rubin, but others say even his “followers” are politically way beyond the adolescence of their “leader.” Some of these strains try to come together as Weatherman or White Panthers, but no one thinks that young people stand together.

One of the worlds in which some of these groups, or “consciousnesses,” overlap is in the world of Rock and Roll music. The “freaks” dig it, live it, get their opinions, “the story,” from it. Some of them want and work for an anti-capitalist Rock & Roll Liberation Front:’ others don’t care too much about all those millions of dollars ripped off from us while we scrounge up meals and rent and bail money to survive in an anti- human capitalist economy. Both of these groups place great significance in the phenomenon of Woodstock, and the “politicals” within the “hippies” have even formulated a tribal concept of “nation” based on the event at White Lake, New York. The hard core “politicals” wish Rock music were not so loud, so omnipresent, and so goddam popular; they feel sure that the whole Rock & Roll lifestyle—dope, hair, nudity, communes, music, etc.—are all part of a capitalist diversionary tactic designed to channel energies away from “building an international socialist movement.””Woodstock”—and all it meant—is their NEMESIS. Those “radicals” who are more “liberal” than the hard core can take it or leave it, and sometimes they even smile on Rock & Roll as the best possible way to draw big crowds to hear the speakers they most want to push.

What is disastrous for the evolving youth consciousness across the Western world is the fact that this new generation does not see its parts as merely different, complementary elements of what is essentially the same thing—a new tribalized Western human being with, for the first time in centuries, political and esthetic consciousness capable of finding a  meaningful role for itself in the Third World revolution is restructuring the globe with new priorities. The first generation of non-colored Westerners who can move beyond “MAN” and ”woman” into Sister/Brother.

At Woodstock, perhaps the most important single event occurred— ironically— in the form of violence. And not violence against Amerika but rather violence by brother against brother. During a beautiful set by The Who, including much of Tommy, Abbie Hoffman who was bumming on acid, a fucked-up head, and suffering from Future Shock because he didn’t really understand what was happening, leapt to the microphone and piously announced, “I think this is a pile of shit!” Abbie tells his version of the incident in Woodstock Nation, although I don’t believe he claims this particular statement (“Free John Sinclair” is what he does claim, and that’s a lot more dignified and responsible). Nevertheless, I’ve got it on tape, and hundreds of thousands of people freaked out on this sweeping condemnation of the music of The Who, Woodstock, the “cultural revolution,” etc. Considering the level of consciousness those hundreds of thousands of young people were at, the exploding sunrise, Tommy, what Sly and the Family Stone had done earlier, Hoffman’s seizure of the mike and his “pile of shit” denunciation were incredible acts of violence.

The second act of violence was physical: Peter Townshend, dean of Rock guitarists, himself bumming on a dose of acid he had unwillingly sipped from a cup of coffee, quite aware of the contradictions at Woodstock, struck Hoffman with his guitar-hard, heavy, like the music. And, ironically, a lot of folks dug it, especially the peace freaks who wanted to see Hoffman as an “outside agitator,” a scruffy, insolent, ego-tripping thorn in the side of Woodstock the “nation” he would later name and define for Amerika in the Chicago Conspiracy trial.. But nobody knew quite what to make of the violent confrontation between these two brothers, both of them for some time figures for emulation by the masses. One the author of Revolution for the Hell of It, the other the composer of “My Generation,” both distributed by Amerikan capitalist industries, both more than subversive. Most accounts of Woodstock didn’t even report this incident; some did, but didn’t know quite what to make of it. “Politicals” who had no head equipment with which to understand the Woodstock phenomenon could relate to nothing at all except this incident, but even they had trouble claiming it because they couldn’t accept Abbie Hoffman as one of their own. Problems, problems! Most people preferred not to relate to the incident at all -it didn’t “really” happen, and even if it did, it was only an isolated incident. The golden legend of Woodstock was so much more beautiful without it.

But Hoffman himself was so freaked out that he had to write an entire book articulating, to himself and us, what took place. Woodstock Nation is about a bummer at White Lake that “culminated with a battle onstage with The Who.” “One of those rare acid trips when everything caves in. I learned enough shit from it, though, that maybe it wasn’t such a bummer after all. All I can say is, man, I took a heavy trip!” Hoffman says the confrontation with Townsend “symbolizes my amity-emnity attitude toward that particular rock . group and the whole rock world in general. Clearly I love their music and sense in it the energy to liberate millions of minds. On the other hand, I feel compelled to challenge their role in the community, to try and crack their plastic dome.”

Peter Townshend, who demanded The Who’s fee for playing at Woodstock and thus encouraged other Rock groups who played there to do the same, was denounced as a “Rock capitalist,” a pig, a foppish dilettante “artist” who was more interested in counting coin and playing Tommy for furs and tuxedos in ruling class opera houses than he was in relating to “the needs of the people.” “Oh fucking hell,” Townshend says now (in Rolling Stone interview, May 14, 1970), “Woodstock wasn’t what rock’s about, not as far as I’m concerned. Quite honestly, I mean knock for knock, everything Abbie Hoffman said was very fair.” In addition, he says that The Who, in the wake of Altamont, will do free concerts, “but only concerts for causes.” “All kinds of bust funds. Good way to give Abbie Hoffman another punch in the stomach would be to give him the returns from a bust fund. I think I’d do it for him if he asked me.”

Regardless of what “politicals” may think or say Rock & Roll is more important to young people now than it has ever been, although the kind of importance it has is changing radically. At the same time. Rockers are realizing—listeners, musicians and middle men alike— that Rock & Roll must move beyond its consumer capitalist foundation or we will see summers of barbed wire Rock festivals, “Woodstock reservations,” and youths divided into Freaks and Consumers (one will be busted, jailed and murdered; the other will grow into loyal Amerikans with long hair). It may very well be that understanding the violent confrontation between Abbie Hoffman and Peter Townshend at Woodstock can help us understand more of what we are and what divides us, what we have to do before we can join in changing the world we live in. If, however, this contradiction among the people is not resolved, and we do not stand united Vas a Western revolutionary youth movement, then we will not be able to struggle to win a place in the new world. And that’s what it’s all about.

On Monday, June 22, at 8:30 we will have a chance to hear The Who direct, live, up front, here in Atlanta at the Municipal Auditorium. The Who are true children of Marx and Coca-Cola, and together they play a Rock & Roll that might be called Disciplined Sensationalism, a furious delight on any level-perverse pop lyrics, blues-rich Rock guitar, heavy bass and ferocious drumming. Most groups sweat to achieve wildness and fury; The Who, rather, tempers and disciplines their spirit so that every note, no matter how loud or exciting, is part of a whole of  unblemished perfection. Pick up on their new single, “The Seeker”—fantastic!—and a new masterpiece album, The Who Live at Leeds. If you have heard Tommy, the old things, plus what The Who are done on the new live album, and you still don’t go to hear The Who at the auditorium, then I can’t imagine while you’ve read this far in the first place. Why doncha all just just  f-f-f-fade away…

—miller francis, jr.

DOWN BEAT: Do you feel rock has anything to do with revolution? I’m referring to people like the MC5, for example.

TOWNSHEND: It hasn’t anything to do with it. The MC5 are presently trying to get out of that. They were a vehicle for revolutionaries who were interested in their own remuneration and their own good times. John Sinclair-ever since he was 15, every minute of his life he was free. Some people can do that, take care of their own problems, never need to work, and get along. Abbie Hoffman, too – he can take bad trips and never do a stroke of real work and live and go through his own particular kind of existence and come out. The MC5 were manufactured; at that point they were a good rock group, but they were used Revolution is something that happens. Wearing a badge saying “Revolution” means nothing.

Downbeat: What’s necessary for Amerika , if not revolution?

Townsend: What is necessary is a revolution, but you don’t get revolution by incitement. In a way every revolution that has ever happened has been incited: people have sat in back rooms and talked about it before it happened. In the US the revolution is a universal revolution. The whole of Amerika wants to have a revolution. Middle-aged people want a revolution to reduce the generation gap, which sours them – really sours them. Amerika has lost every ounce of prestige it ever had.

Amerikan youth has done nothing nothing— but live off the Amerikan system. That’s why in European universities Communist Russia and Mao have more respect than Amerikan youth. Chairman Mao has done quite a lot for change in his country.

DOWN BEAT: What about the Moratorium activities in Washington?

TOWNSHEND: I always feel two ways about demonstrations. Demonstrations are pointless, and yet I still feel myself doing them, just like I still feel myself writing songs about changing society. I know perfectly well nothing at all is going to change because of it. Still, if I had nothing better to do, I would be down there with the demonstrators. Cops have broken my head dozens of times, and I’ve always come out laughing. I always dug the cops, I dug what they had to do, I dug why they arrested me. But demonstrations are too impersonal, wars are too impersonal; confrontation is better, man-to-man.

DOWN BEAT: If rock isn’t revolutionary or even political-

TOWNSHEND: The best rock isn’t.

DOWN BEAT: – then what do you want your music to do?

TOWNSHEND: I want it to do what it already does.

-excerpted from Down Beat magazine, May 14, 1969