Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture with historian Bob Beatty

Long Live the ABB

Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture with historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East' www.longlivetheabb.com

  1. 1d ago

    Spend money on experiences, not things

    Greetings from Stockholm. We’re visiting our daughter Tyler, who’s here for a study abroad. While touring Scandinavia, this adage/wisdom from my cousin Brad came to mind. Here’s the full conversation: Thanks for reading, y’all. Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. MUSHROOM MAGICIANS (Founding Members): Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty PAID MEMBERS: Chris Harvey, Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    3 min

  2. May 31

    Greetings from Earth School

    The Unending Conversation The first time I encountered Kenneth Burke’s concept of the Unending Conversation was in 1997. It was my first semester of graduate school in a class called, Modern Rhetorical Theory. I’ve carried the ideal that life is an unending conversation ever since. It’s a central precept of my teaching, my writing, my way of seeing the world. The good thing is, I’m surrounded by people who do likewise. Earth School This video is from an upcoming episode of Conversation from the Crossroads with Richard M Josey, my pal and fellow maker of good trouble. He hipped me to his term, Earth School—the idea that a life well-lived means continuing to learn, to grow. People get it instantly when I use the term Earth School. It’s not something I have to explain. I offer it to you as a way to think about the kind of ancestor you want to be. Music is the ultimate unending conversation This is very much true for the Allman Brothers and extended family of bands/musicians. The core of this publication is in my subhead: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture. Long Live the ABB is the lens I use to explore those ideas. Here’s one example of that in action, my comments on a Karl Paulnack’s truly magical “2003 Address to the Parents of the Freshman Class”—Why Music Matters: The Unending Conversation. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman & the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT This episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. 🍄 MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS 🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty 🍑 PEACH🍑 PALS🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin Thanks for joining me on the journey. Until next time… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    2 min

  3. May 30 ·  Bonus

    The Allman Brothers story is a story of the South. And that is also my story.

    The Allman Brothers Band’s story intersects with my own. I grew up in a South still shaped by segregation, Massive Resistance, and decisions that kept Black communities excluded from the means of power. The integrated Allman Brothers Band offered a powerful informal protest against the South's racial mores. How I found liberation in history. FULL EPISODE This video is an excerpt from a recent Conversation from the Crossroads: “I wanted to get in the game” History, storytelling, and making sense of the South Lagniappe Sending this one out again. Very proud of this collaboration with my daughter Ryan. VIDEO ESSAY: “Walk out on that stage and do it.” Bill Graham, Fillmore East, and the mighty Allman Brothers Band 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT MERCH Fillmore East ad. Jimmy Carter in an ABB t-shirt. Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. Join now. 🍄 MUSHROOM🍄 MAGICIANS 🍄 Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty 🍑 PEACH🍑 PALS🍑 Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    3 min

  4. May 28

    The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: the founding ethos of the Allman Brothers Band

    A clip from a recent podcast with John Lynskey, where we talked about the Allman Brothers Band as the ultimate team—players locked in with improvised intensity that very few bands ever match. Put simply, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That ethos was a founding principle of the band, and it inspired both of our professional lives as teachers and historians. When our conversation turned to the uniqueness of the Allman Brothers’ approach, John nailed a key difference between the Allmans and the Grateful Dead: the Allmans always found that crossroads home. And don’t miss the shout-out to the original Gov’t Mule—some of the most intense rock and roll either of us has ever experienced. FULL EPISODE Lagniappe In the full episode, we discussed our amazement at seeing the Warren Haynes/Allen Woody version of the Allman Brothers Band. Here’s an example from the last year they were in the band: “Dreams” 5/1/96. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Long Live the ABB, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    4 min

  5. May 14

    "Like-minded people have a way of finding each other" Brotherhood, lost tapes, and keeping the Allman Brothers story alive

    Episode Overview John Lynskey taught history at Miami’s Columbus High School for thirty years, coached for twenty, and served as assistant principal for seven. Upon retirement, he moved to Macon to work hands-on with the Big House Museum, where he had served on the board since day one. He has produced more than two dozen archival releases for the Allman Brothers Band, co-wrote Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg with drummer Bill Connell, and spent two decades as a driving force behind Hittin’ the Note magazine. But I knew John well before I knew of his connection to the Allman Brothers Band. In the early 1990s at UCF, some of my good buddies were Columbus guys, John’s guys. Lynskey was their history teacher and coach, full stop. Decades later, Mario sent a photo at John’s retirement. Talk about mushroom magic. Mario’s text arrived within minutes of it dawning on me that their beloved history teacher was John Lynskey, my fellow Allman Brothers historian and whose work I’ve been mining for decades. Our Crossroads John and I share multiple intersections. We are historians who found the Allman Brothers Band through the music and grew fascinated with the entirety of their story. We both understand what it means to sit in an archive and chase a review that might not surface for five months after an album dropped. We believe music is a primary source, a band is a team, and community is what happens when like-minded people stop pretending they don’t need each other. When I launched Play All Night in Miami in October 2022, John flew down to host an event. Like the teacher and coach he is, Lynskey teed me up to tell Duane’s remarkable story in a bookstore packed with his students. That night I met Abel Sanchez of MiamiStadium on Instagram, a sports, history, and culture site that became a model for my work at Long Live the ABB. The Conversation (Picking up where we left off in part 1) During the 1989 Dreams reunion, John saw two shows he never thought would happen at Sunrise Musical Theatre in Fort Lauderdale. He knew who Warren Haynes was. Allen Woody was a revelation. He blew the room away. Dickey was still in his ABBsolute prime. Haynes pushed him into a different role—the push-pull that had been missing since Duane. We agreed Dan Toler and Dickey played too similarly for that tension to exist. We talked about my first show—November 13, 1993. I went expecting a nostalgia act. I got on the bus that night. I was unaware that Dickey had just returned from a rough patch and the Florida dates were a test run. The band broke out “Mountain Jam” for the first time in years. It was a concession from Dickey upon returning to the band. I asked John for archival favorites by year. 5/2/70 Swarthmore; 3/13/70 Warehouse, NOLA; 2/28/71 Brewer Fieldhouse with John’s favorite “Dreams;” 4/8/72 Manley Fieldhouse; 9/26/73 Nassau Coliseum. We talked about the dearth of Duane era bootlegs. Mike Callahan, the band’s soundman, apparently had a footlocker full of tapes. The footlocker disappeared when he got sideways with disreputable people. It’s probably sitting at the bottom of Tampa Bay. Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg is one of my favorite books in the Allman Brothers canon. The book fills gaps. Duane’s first marriage. The Anchor Motel brawl with Shriners in Nashville. The Boutwell Studios session in Birmingham where the tapes vanished. Duane and Gregg running into Yardbirds Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in New York—young musicians chatting, none of them knowing what they would become. I asked John for his favorite projects. Hittin’ the Note ran twenty years. The Trouble No More box set gave John an unlimited word count and earned Grammy consideration. The Laid Back deluxe reissue gathered everything Gregg recorded in that era. A Gregg Allman documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, is coming to seventy-five theaters this summer. Like-minded people have a way of finding each other. John has watched it happen through Columbus High School and through the music of the Allman Brothers Band. Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Resources * Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505. * Bill Connell with John Lynskey, Allman Joy: Keeping the Beat with Duane and Gregg (2023). * Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (1995). * Abel Sanchez, Miami Stadium on Instagram—www.instagram.com/@miamistadium This episode brought to you by the paid members of the Long Live the ABB community. MUSHROOM MAGICIANS: Steve Marshall, Brent W. Hammond, Ken Lupson, Laura McCarty PAID MEMBERS: Allen Barnes, Baileys Mike, sswoger, Bob Johnson, Bruce Miles, Buddy Lewis, Caroline Doolittle, Chuck Zumwalt, Clifford Morse, Craig Stephens, Dennis Newton, Denny, Ed Ashton, Ed Pokorny, F. D., Frank Young, Gary Wonwayout, Gary Williamson, George Holman, James Reynolds, James Yerrill, JD Guitar, Jeff Kushmerek, Jeff Schein, Jerry K, JoaquinDinero, Joe, Joe Sokohl, Joel Berger, Joel Tanzer, John Dolan, John Haughey, Jordan David, Joseph Lilly, Kenton Lee, Kevin Walker, Kurt Nielsen, Mark Leitner, Martha Haynes, Peter Poulos, Phillip Page, Preston Root, Randy Woodall, Ray Tillman, Robert Porter, Rose Brandt, Surrender Cobra, Taylor Kropp, Tim Langan (Hot ‘Lanta Tim), Tina Christopher, Tom Pragliola, Tony Gioia, Wade McCurdy, Bob and Laura, Gary Smith, Wiszowa, Cwktwo, Hlnbkt, Cabinetsales, Art Dobie, Stanleyglennie8, Danbookin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    1h 1m

  6. Apr 30

    "I wanted to get in the game" History, storytelling, and making sense of the South

    Episode Overview A native of Miami, Sebastian Garcia’s parents emigrated from Colombia with a clear theory of his success in America: a career in medicine, law, or engineering. He entered the University of Central Florida as a biomedical sciences major and lasted two semesters before adding a second major in history. His work spans a narrative series about the First Seminole War and his master’s thesis about a 1920s Irish Catholic governor undone by a Protestant radio station that formed specifically to destroy him. Sebastian and I met when I came back to UCF in 2022 on the Play All Night book launch tour. He ran the department podcast. He was sharp, curious, and engaged. It remains one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. Our Crossroads Sebastian and I each hold undergraduate and graduate history degrees from the University of Central Florida. Same department decades apart. In October 2022, the department hosted me for a homecoming in the truest sense of the word. Sebastian interviewed me about Play All Night for Knights HistoryCast. He came prepared. And the book hit the right notes for him. It was a joy to sit with a young historian at my alma mater who understood exactly what I was trying to do and why. We share a conviction that history belongs outside the walls of the academy, in history as storytelling in audio, video, prose, in whatever medium puts the story in front of people who need it. Sebastian was already living that when we met four years ago. Following his work and career continues to be a joy. “History doesn’t change. Our interpretations do.” The Conversation Sebastian called it liberation: the moment history stopped being an academic subject and became a way of seeing the world. It happened in a history class, tracking how the present shaped the people doing the writing. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. A first-generation Colombian American, Sebastian grew up in a Spanish-speaking Miami neighborhood. English came from school and television. UCF, four hours north, was a genuine culture shock—the first time he was consistently around people who didn’t look or sound like him. He’s still working out what “southerner” means. Orlando taught him the question exists in the first place. We spent considerable time on public memory. Monuments and memorials are historical arguments set in stone and what doesn’t earn mention means as much as what does, even more. That conversation led to his latest endeavor, The Memory of Negro Fort, a podcast series about a British fortification in the Florida panhandle that became the largest autonomous community of freedom seekers in American history. Andrew Jackson destroyed it in 1816, illegally, sparking the first of three American wars against Florida’s Seminoles. Sebastian wrote his master’s thesis on Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. An Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, Smith’s radio presence was powerful enough that opponents founded a radio station, WHAP (We Hold America Protestant) in response. Sebastian argues that public optimism that radio could rectify social rot, didn’t collapse in the 1930s with Father Coughlin and Benito Mussolini. The trust in the new technology cratered in the 1920s. Smith is an example of his thesis. We closed on community—family, his fiancée, the professors worth keeping close, the difference between being in an institution and having a home in one. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Resources * Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505. * Bob Beatty and Sebastian Garcia, Knights HistoryCast, October 2022. https://knightshistorycast.podbean.com/e/episode-24-dr-bob-beatty-and-play-all-night-duane-allman-and-the-journey-to-fillmore-east/. Paid members of Long Live the ABB receive early access to Conversation from the Crossroads episodes. * Matthew J. Clavin, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community (New York: New York University Press, 2019). * Sebastian Garcia * The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast * Instagram * David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (New York: Random House, 1999). * Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). * Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). * David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). * Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986). * Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    1h 41m

  7. Apr 21

    “The words 'no access' aren't in my vocabulary” Authenticity, roller derby, and breaking cycles

    Episode Overview Jessica Dawkins grew up on a rural Indiana farm, raised by a single mother born in East Tennessee and a grandmother whose family had lived on a mountain ridge straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border for two centuries. When Indian Removal came, the men walked West and died on the trail. The women and children hid in caves for four months. What followed for generations was poverty, addiction, silence, and the slow erasure of who they were. Jessica knew by second grade that none of it was her fault. She just had to turn eighteen and get out. Music was a refuge. She was on the radio at fifteen, backstage at Deer Creek by seventeen, living between a dorm in Bloomington and a boyfriend’s band house in Louisville by eighteen. Motherhood rearranged her life. Education gave her language for what she already understood. She landed in history because a gold-leafed book caught her eye in a dark hallway she wasn’t supposed to walk through, and she opened it, and a map of Louisville in 1852 fell into her hands, and she found her house on it. That was the moment it all clicked for her. Jessica is a proud member of Generation X, a Southerner raised north of Ohio River, a single mother who broke every cycle she inherited, and a rock & roll bad ass who cofounded a roller derby league because nobody was going to tell her she couldn’t. We share a frequency—music, history, the South, daughters, and the belief that honesty and integrity is the only leadership strategy worth pursuing. Our Crossroads Jessica and I met through our professional careers as historians. We connected in myriad ways. We are both Gen Xers. We each grew up Southerners in places that don’t always register as the South. Jessica grew up on a farm in Indiana, with roots in the mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up in Stuart, a small beach town a hundred miles north of Miami. We are parents of daughters and conscious every day of breaking the cycles we inherited. We believe local history belongs to the people who live it, institutions exist to serve their communities, and honesty is the only leadership strategy that holds. That is a hill we have each died on. The Conversation We started with roller derby, that’s where Jessica starts her own rock & roll story—at the roller rink racing with her best friend and eventually co-founding the Derby City Roller Girls in Louisville in 2006. Twenty-five women in matching satin jackets who built a business from the ground up, trained as athletes, and faced judgment from people who couldn’t reconcile hot pants with professional ambition. She puts roller derby on her resume because it was entrepreneurship, team leadership, and community building wrapped in fishnet stockings and set to the Beastie Boys. From there we went to family—a mountain ridge in East Tennessee, the Cherokee women who hid in caves, the poverty and addiction and silence that followed for generations. Jessica knew by second grade that she had been born into something that was not her fault. She counted the years until she turned eighteen. We talked about motherhood. Her daughters—twenty-three and fourteen. She drew lines and held them, not out of strictness but out of intention. She raised them the way she wished she had been raised, which is the whole point of breaking cycles. We talked about education. She failed out of Indiana University because music mattered more than French credits. She went back to community college at twenty-six with a toddler and no money. Financial aid eligible because she had a dependent. A local scholarship because nobody else applied. A national scholarship because the foundation believed in non-traditional students. Every door opened because she knocked on it—or because it was unlocked and she walked through anyway. We talked about GenX as a leadership superpower. Jessica realized hers when she was the only person her job who could run both the cash register and a point-of-sale system. She speaks in fluent Boomer, Millennial, and Zoomer. We talked about Louisville—her 250-year-old city with no history museum, where history has been told through the plantation owners who saved their houses. Jessica loves it anyway. She made it her home on purpose thirty years ago and has spent her career trying to make its institutions worthy of the people they serve. She believes a museum is no different than a restaurant—you hope they come in, enjoy themselves for an hour and a half, and walk out wanting to bring friends. She went from saying “welcome” to saying “this place belongs to you.” Upgrade to support the Conversation from the Crossroads. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Unique swag from LLtABB Jimmy Carter. I’ve always loved this Walt McNamee shot of then-candidate Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt. Carter is speaking to reporters July 4 weekend 1976, shortly after the band’s break-up and Gregg’s testimony in a federal drug case. I tagged the barn in the back with Long Live the ABB shroom 2 from Psychodelik Pete. Fillmore East ad. This is an adaptation of an original newspaper advertisement for the original Fillmore East recording sessions. I replaced Johnny Winter’s face with the LLtABB shroom and moved the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, a spot they EARNED after Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    1h 33m

  8. Apr 12

    "There is a rabbit dissipating into thin air and coming back as an elephant running down the highway." The magic of music and the community it conjures

    Episode Overview Adam Choit runs The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast—hundreds of episodes in, built from a simple compulsion to share a band he couldn’t stop thinking about. That impulse is the throughline of this conversation: what it means to love music so completely that you build something around it, and why that act of building pulls others in. Adam loved TTB so much he built a podcast around them. Somewhere north of 200 episodes, he has created a genuine community—not a fan club, not a forum, but an ongoing conversation about a great Southern band that has earned its renown the hard way: one town, one gig, one song, one note at a time. We talk setlists, repertoire, the amazing Learning to Live Together documentary, Leon Russell, and the legacy of Mad Dogs and Englishmen. But the real subject is community—how it forms, why it sustains, and what music makes possible that nothing else quite does. Our Crossroads Adam and I found each other through a shared frequency. Tedeschi Trucks Band got us there, but what kept us talking was something bigger—the recognition that the bands we love become a kind of architecture for the rest of our lives. Adam put it plainly early in our conversation: the reason we jibe so well isn’t just our love of Tedeschi Trucks Band—it’s that we are unabashed about it. Neither of us traffics in cool detachment. I came to the Allman Brothers the way he came to TTB: a little late, all-consumed, unable to imagine how I’d missed it but knowing that you get a band when the muses appear. Then you spend the rest of your life making up for lost ground. We aren’t two fans talking shop—we were two people who had each built a community around a shared love of music and were now asking the same question: what do you do with a community once you have one? The Conversation Adam walked through the moment Tedeschi Trucks Band grabbed him and shared his fear someone else would do the podcast first. That fear is a signal worth paying attention to: when you can’t keep the ideas from coming, you stop asking whether and start asking how fast. From there we got into what makes a TTB show different from a night of good live music. It isn’t just the music—it’s the vibe onstage and in the room working in concert. Derek and Susan have always played for the audience, not at it. That’s an Allman Brothers idea, a jazz aesthetic—the audience feeds the performance, and the performance feeds the audience back. Dickey Betts talked about creating a transcendental experience. Derek and Susan say the same, as did Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. We talked setlists—how Derek Trucks builds a show, and the moves fans learn to read in real time. It’s almost as if Derek composes a live set the way a writer builds an argument: nothing out of place, no jarring transitions, tension and release working in harmony. Adam can feel the moves coming. I can too. The conversation kept pulling toward Leon Russell—his orbit, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen story, the relationship he built with Susan that lasted until the day he died. We landed on what I think is a core TTB thesis: Derek and Susan saw Mad Dogs and said, “We want everything about this concept except the dysfunction.” They built something to last. And it ABBsolutely has. 🍄Play All Night! Duane Allman the Journey to Fillmore East🍄 BUY PLAY ALL NIGHT Resources * Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505 * Adam Choit, The Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Band Podcast * Learning to Live Together (Jesse Lauter, 2021) * Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971) “Doctor prescribes, great band supplies” Tedeschi Trucks Band - Future Soul Since Adam and I spoke, Tedeschi Trucks Band released yet another BANGER. I knew I was going to love it, that’s how it’s been with every TTB album. But I connected so deeply with I Am the Moon—the album, the entire project, the concept, and the stories I found the songs—I tempered my expectations. There was no need. It’s another non-skippable album from Derek, Susan, & co. What can I say? They hit the note for me. Lagniappes Two ABBsolutely terrific interviews with Derek Trucks, who shows, once again, how well artists respond to a thoughtful interviewer. Both of these pieces really draw out some great stuff from Derek. The Bluegrass Situation “Tedeschi Trucks Band Have Done It Again” This one was so good, I completely forgot the interview was for a bluegrass publication until Justin Hiltner brought it up midway through. Premier Guitar “Derek Trucks’ Forward Motion” By my pal and fellow Allman Brothers historian/obsessive Alan Paul—a cover story, to boot! Alan’s been covering the ABB beat for a long time and has built a level of trust that really shines through in this piece. Upgrade to support Conversation from the Crossroads This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.longlivetheabb.com/subscribe

    1h 18m
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Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture with historian Dr. Bob Beatty, author of 'Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East' www.longlivetheabb.com

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