Gregg Allman, the younger brother of Duane, died this week at his Savannah home due to complications from his ongoing liver problems. As Gregg was, in some ways, the second Allman Brother and the second member of that band to pass on this year, this week features two Jams in Gregg’s memory. The first comes from the time he spent in Los Angeles with Duane, before Duane began forming what would be the Allman Brothers Band, in a group called The Hourglass:
(HT: NJT)
The second comes from the ABB’s biggest album, and it’s a song Gregg wrote about his brother’s then-recent death:
When I was in high school, my dad took me to Kalamazoo to hear Gregg with his solo group. We had great seats, and the band played “Whipping Post.”
In 2016, Allman received an honorary doctorate degree from Mercer University, which was presented to him by Jimmy Carter.
Butch Trucks, drummer, Allman Brothers Band founding member, and uncle of modern guitar legend Derek, died this week. Even as the ABB tapered off its touring schedule and eventually concluded its historic run, Trucks continued a vibrant performance life, playing both with established musicians like his band mates and forming new bands with younger players.
One of Trucks’ lesser publicized projects was his personal blog. He started it about a month before this site went live, and it remains the most memorable thing I read online during that period. After speaking, essentially exclusively, through his drumming for decades, his unfiltered, direct, intelligent written communication revealed more of the personality behind his rhythm. And the writing was revealing. He wrote about controversial points in the band’s history, racism, Duane, Dickey, Skynyrd, the reality of his own upbringing, and more, and he even read and responded to reader comments. A rare opportunity to peer inside the active mind of one of the many pillars of rock and roll. The second half of 2011 was his busiest time on the site, which felt like it should have been shut down at any moment by a band PR rep, and he didn’t post there after 2013, but it is essential reading for any fan of the Allmans.
If you want to read something else, here’s an interview with Trucks and Jaimoe, the band’s other original drummer, in connection with the 40th anniversary tour two years ago. Otherwise, I’d recommend leaving all that behind for now and getting into these jams.
While the idea of writing about the cartographic results of ESPN SportsNation polls long has percolated in my mind, it (obviously to you, erstwhile ALDLAND reader) never took off. In part I suspect this is because there’s little categorical variety in the types of conclusions we ordinarily draw from these maps, those being 1) the one state associated with the obvious minority view holds out, probably irrationally, against the weight of a nationwide majority and 2) shoot, there really aren’t too many people with internet connections in Mississippi are there? After a very short time, this would become boring to read and write.
We are living in the post-peak-SportsNation world, though, which means that, if this thing’s going to work at all, we’ve got to try it now, but with a slightly different angle of approach. Instead of focusing on the people who supported a poll choice, we’ll look at those states where the voters were not able to reach consensus.
For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of these voting maps, ESPN assigns colors to each of the poll options and presents each state as the color of the option most popular among that state’s voters. Where there is a tie between leading options, however, the state appears grey. These indecisive states are the focus here.
ESPN (I assume from the existence of this poll and Norm Macdonald’s late-night tweeting) has been televising the World Series of Poker this week, and SportsNation, in a totally happenstance, non-marketing-driven poll, casually asked, “How would you rate your poker game?” Here are the results:
I’m sort of cheating with the second featured film in ALDLAND’s Silent Film Series, because a) it already is a silent film and b) its selection largely has to do with the music indirectly associated with it. Still, I’m guessing most artists would be willing to cheat a little if it meant avoiding a sophomore slump, so I don’t feel bad at all.
And this short (7:23) movie really is kind of beautiful. It’s amateur footage shot on 8 millimeter film by members of the Capurso family depicting an outing to see the Yankees play the Tigers on a sunny summer afternoon at old Tigers Stadium on August 4, 1956. It opens with scenes of downtown Detroit as the family heads to the ballpark, where the Tigers would win a game that featured home runs by both Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline.
Of greater interest to me is the Tigers’ pitcher that day, Virgil “Fire” Trucks. He’s the great uncle of guitarist Derek Trucks and was no slouch on the mound. From a Peter Gammons profile piece:
Virgil Oliver Trucks was born on April 26, 1917. He won 177 Major League games from 1941 until he retired in 1958. Ted Williams once said he might have been “the hardest throwing right-hander I ever faced.”
He is one of four pitchers who threw two no-nos in a single season and he finished fifth in the American league MVP race in 1953 for the White Sox (he started that season with the Browns). And back when the Tigers won the 1945 World Series, Detroit’s great staff was called “TNT” — Dizzy Trout, (MVP) Hal Newhouser and Trucks were three of the best in the game.
…
Go back to the beginning. Andalusia of the Alabama-Florida League. 1938. Including the playoffs[, he] struck out 448 batters.
448. That, Sweet Melissa, is the most strikeouts ever recorded in an organized professional baseball season.
And for the full season, he was 25-6, with a 1.25 ERA and two no-hitters.
After a strong 1939 split between Alexandria and Beaumont, in 1940 he pitched for Beaumont in the Texas League and threw another no-hitter, in 1941 threw another no-no for Buffalo in the International League and by the time he made his debut on Sept. 27, 1941, he had four Minor League no-hitters on his resume.
Somewhere along the way, they tried to figure out how hard he threw. “They found an old Army gun,” says Trucks. “It read 105 miles an hour.”
Gammons’ piece is full of stories about Virgil, including how he helped the Tigers win the World Series after taking two years off to join the war effort, how he nearly became the only pitcher ever to throw three no-hitters in one season, how he’d add two more World Series rings to his total, and how he decided, after meeting with Derek– who keeps one of Virgil’s baseball cards on his Gibson– and learning that his great nephew is considered one of the best guitarists who ever lived, that maybe he ought to start listening to the Allman Brothers Band (the 95-year-old former pitcher’s nephew, Butch Trucks, was a founding member of that band, with which Derek now plays).
The younger member of the Capurso family who uploaded this added some generic classical music from the London Metropolitan Orchestra, but I maintain that it’s best experienced silently, the original audio being lost to technology, and the music of Virgil’s descendants yet to be born.
Today excepted, things have been a little sparse around here lately– maybe it’s the grip of March Madness, or maybe we’re all a little busier working to keep the lights on around here. To make up for it, here’s a double scoop of Friday Jams, again posted from the road, though this week at a much lower elevation:
I have been meaning to review Revelator since before it came out earlier this summer, and I was excited when my vinyl/CD package finally arrived a couple weeks ago. Revelator is the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s first album, though it’s hardly the first release for any of the eleven members of the band.
To understand this band and this recording, you have to know that the named members of the band, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, were independently successful musicians before they got married in 2001, a matrimonial match made in music heaven. Tedeschi sang the blues with soul and fire as a solo act. Trucks, the nephew of Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, has been wowing audiences with his guitar since he was a child, later joining his uncle’s band and leading his own outfit, the Derek Trucks Band. The two did collaborate over the last ten years. The DTB didn’t add a permanent lead singer until Mike Mattison joined for 2006’s Songlines, and Tedeschi sang a track on 2002’s Joyful Noise and 2009’s excellent (and Grammy-winning) Already Free. The two also joined their guitars with Eric Clapton’s as a part of Slowhand’s Crossroads tours. Although they followed the wedding ceremony, these and other collaborations were like musical flirtations or dates between the two, who largely appeared to live separate, if overlapping, professional lives.
Revelator, though, represents the marriage. Keep reading…
When British singer Amy Winehouse died late last month of as-yet-unknown causes, media sources were surprisingly quick to note the significance of her age at death, twenty-seven years old, the same age at which a number of the most famous Western musicians died. The following is a briefly annotated list of the members of the so-called “27 Club,” with a couple notable mentions for those who nearly qualified.
(Unsurprisingly, the cause of death of many of these individuals is not entirely clear, so I’ll include the official cause of death, along with any other rumored causes, as available.) Keep reading…
ALDLAND 