SH: When you’re thinking about Colonel Bruce and missing him or other recently departed loved ones like Butch Trucks or Gregg Allman, what are ways you feel best honors your memories of them?

DT: I think the most direct way is the way you play and the way you protect the integrity of what you try to do. When I think about Butch at his best, I think about him on the drum kit, just giving it every ounce that he had. To me, that’s him at his best. Just wide open, totally tapped into the thing and just giving it. He would just as soon drop on stage. That’s the feeling I always got from him.

Gregg just had that thing, man. He was a part of this Southern gothic story. He kind of was the keeper of the mojo in a way. When he went, it was kind of the last chapter in a lot of ways. He was such a gentleman. He was a quintessential rock star in a lot of ways, and there’s thousands of stories about him, but I think about the way he was with my kids on the tour bus when they were young, and the way he always was around my wife or the way he was around my mom. He was always such a gentleman.

The Colonel’s thing is more all-encompassing, where you just think about certain things with a certain kind of depth. It’s uncompromising. I’ve known him so long, and he was such a part of the family that when I think of him, it’s his presence and just his humanity. When I think of him, that’s the feeling I always get where you just miss him. There’s the outlandish stuff certainly, when you first meet him or when you’re around him, the things that just kind of blow your head open. There’s tons of those, but it’s really all the stuff underneath that that I really think about all the time.

Those are the things that when I think about those guys, you try to implement those things. You try to carry those parts of them, the best of who they were. You try to keep that stuff intact. When you do, if you do play their music, you try to do it with the right amount of gravity. You want to make sure that you mean it and you’re not doing it because the crowd wants to hear it. You just never want it to be cheap. I feel like anytime you touch certain things, there needs to be some reverence. It always needs to have that whiff of sacred, and I don’t want to ever overdo it. I feel like that gets done more often than it should a lot of times. But, yeah, it’s an ongoing thing, it’s not a picture you can put on your amp or something. You got to mean it. It’s a practice.

So enjoy Derek's down to earth and astute commentary. My favorite from this:

I feel like with almost any religion, any great music, there’s this seed that gets you into it. There’s these moments that you have, these great epiphanies, and it’s really pure in the beginning. And then you just hang your hat on the fact that that’s there. You get further and further away from the whole point, you don’t realize the piece of shit that you turned into.