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Gregg Allman Still Dreams (Relix Revisited)

Well what do you think that you guys did that made the Allman Brothers unique besides the jazz bit and the two amazing guitar players and the two drummers, but what in your mind, made them better than everybody else?

I don’t really know, you know, I can guess. I don’t know if we had more stamina, or got around more, or played more freebies, we played a shitload of freebies. After we’d play someplace Satuday night, let’s say we were in Philly, or Long Island, anywhere, Stonybrook some school, or what have you, you know we played a lot of colleges, anyway if it was like spring or fall, on Sunday, the day we were off, we’d try to find the nearest park and find enough people, I mean you know you start setting up the band, people just show up to help ya, to help you find some electricity, you know, we always just managed. Every time.

Because you loved to play so much right?

Yeah and the people—hey free music, shit yeah we’ll get you a long extension cord, and we’ll plug it into that guy’s house, he’s not there. We played longer than anybody. We didn’t play long because the Dead played long. We played long because the songs were long.

And then you’d just go out to the stratosphere.

Oh yeah, and we still do. That’s what makes it new and refreshing. We’re going to have to get you to write our bio.

Did you want to write songs before Duane said, “Just go write your own songs?”

It was just one of those things that you gotta do. I hadn’t [risen to the occasion] by that time.

How did you know that you had what it took to write songs for this band you’d just been made a part of?

I had no idea. No idea. The more comfortable I got with it, the better I got at it. And seeing how when I turned in the first one that worked, “Dreams,” and it was learned on the spot, it pretty much sounds the same as it did that day.

What were you playing at the time?

Electric piano. We were still in Jacksonville when they put the bandanna around my eyes and led me into Dickey’s house because it had a big round room; it was a big Victorian. And the room was totally empty, round, and right in the middle, they took the bandanna off and there was a 1969 brand spankin’ new B3 Hammond and a brand new 1969 Leslie. There were about eight joints rolled on the bottom keyboard and they said, “We’ll see ya in a few days.”

It wasn’t your birthday, you just needed to have this.

Yeah. It was a great day. Shit, I wrote the whole first album in the next week!

I used to smoke weed, and the most amazing stories would just float out of me, but something changed.

That’s why I smoked a couple of bowls before I called ya! Well hell, they made me quit everything else. The way back machine. We should have had some damn electronics back then though you know, we should have filmed. I mean we have no films of back then.

So your brother didn’t write songs?

He wrote like prose, okay? We found a bunch of stuff that he wrote the other day, and I don’t know I saw Little Martha, his girlfriend that he had when he passed, he just called her Little Martha and we found the lyrics to “Little Martha.” And they won’t be published at all, not if I have anything to do with it, because I think the reason he never showed anybody, is because it was something he wanted to keep to himself for himself.

Did you actually write the lyrics to “Little Martha” as we know “Little Martha?” Did [Duane] have anything to do with that version of the song?

Oh I’ve never seen the lyrics, no, he never showed them to anybody. We just recently found them.

Do you have dreams about your brother?

I have dreams that I run into him on the road, where he’ll just be like walking by as I’m walkin in the back of the place, you know, or somethin like…I’ll say, “We’re okay man.” And he’ll say, “Hey how you doin,” “Come back here, lemme talk to ya!”

And he doesn’t come back?

Yeah, he does and I’ll say, “Where the hell you been, I mean, shit we missed ya. Come on in, let’s play.” And he says, “No, I had to step away from it, you know.” And I don’t know, but hey I’m doin this and that and the other thing, or helping somebody or something like that or… anyway, he just kind of fades off into the distance. That’s about it, but sometimes on stage, I can hear his music you know, almost as if like he’s playing it, you know. I mean you start getting his tones, and his you know, I don’t know. Of course they play the same kind of guitars through the same kind of amps and the same God, the same level of musicians, I mean they’re good, I mean he was good, he was 24, but I mean so is Derek, Derek’s good, and Warren’s good.

Do you think in some way that that tragedy made you stronger, made you who you are today?

Absolutely, little by little it did. As a matter of fact, in some ways it felt like a test, and I you know, it further had me asking “Why, why, why.” And then we all got together and everybody wanted to know what everybody else thought about it, and when they came to me I said you know, if we don’t keep playing, we’re gonna wind up either all junked-out or just losers.

Over the years, do you think you made peace with it, were you able to answer that “why?”

Uh, you’re not supposed to ask the “Why?” question, you’re really not. You’re not in that pay-bracket.

I think you can change the road that you’re going on, I mean you definitely did.

Oh, yeah I’d be dead by now, I would have been forgotten about by now.