If you could pervert the space-time continuum, then you would certainly have made sure that flatbed truck at the corner of Hillcrest Avenue and Bartlett had made its left turn a lot quicker on that late afternoon on Oct. 29, 1971. If it had, then Duane Allman wouldn’t have had to swerve to avoid it, clipping the back of the truck and becoming airborne, his Harley-Davidson Sportster careening wildly, landing on top of him.

That huge loss to rock’s mighty canon is felt even sharper with the release of The Allman Brothers Band: Live from A&R Studios, New York, August 26, 1971. Recorded only eight weeks before Duane’s final ride, it shows what the Allman Brothers were like without that taint and burden of tragedy stalking them; when they still had the joyful recklessness without any of the pain. Without that shadow of sorrow hanging over them, they were a different band, with a cocky swagger and a telepathic connection between them, pulling sounds out of each other’s psyche, then building towering edifices of sound, attitude, grace and even a little impatience.

Why impatience? They were a band going places, and they were going there fast. You can hear it in the insistence of “One Way Out,” or in the innuendo and promises of the sextastic “Stormy Monday,” or the haughty squall of Duane’s guitar on “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” bolstered by the seen-it-all voice of his then 23-year-old younger brother. Recorded just a month after the release of At Fillmore East, this nine-song set, aired over New York FM station WPLJ, is nearly as fine—in fact, it is so well-recorded that you can even hear the tinkling of missed notes on “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a song that has been compared to Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” But here, those sheets are woven out of 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton. But the most spectacular moment on the disc is “Medley: You Don’t Love Me/Soul Serenade.” It would be worth the price of the record only to hear Duane honor his friend King Curtis, who had been recently murdered near his Harlem home, but it’s Allman’s sonorous solo eight minutes into the medley where his guitar seems to be actually speaking a coded, but strangely understandable English—a marvel of human emotion and genius technique.