RIP Gregg
A true American treasure
EAPFP

RIP Gregg. Thanks for the memories

Rest Easy Gregg....

RIP Sir.

The ABB is my favorite band, like most of you, so this hit me hard yesterday. Music can have a very emotional impact on some people while some people could care less. Listening to a live version of Mountain Jam while sitting on a high mountain in CO while elk hunting is a yearly tradition for me. This loss hurts. I went to church last night after hearing the news and was treated to a Memorial Day service. You know what, he made music that touched my soul, but at the same time shot himself in the foot to avoid the draft and made some very poor life choices. He really was “No Angel” and I had a little perspective change consideration the many folks that gave lives for our freedom that won’t receive the headlines or accolades. I’ll miss the music but is it tempered by the fact that he was an artist and not a hero. God bless those who gave their all and may Gregg have found peace.

Helping my wife prepare the Memorial Day cookout and she asked me to grab something from the fridge. I opened the door and right at eye level was a carton of Whipping Cream- gonna be that way for a while, I guess.

Helping my wife prepare the Memorial Day cookout and she asked me to grab something from the fridge. I opened the door and right at eye level was a carton of Whipping Cream- gonna be that way for a while, I guess.

A lot of nice words and thoughts expressing appreciation of what Gregg brought to the world. I've pondered many. I went to the Chuck Berry Tribute at the City Winery last night. I taped the show and the ride home. I had a nice Gregg, DB, Warren, & Woody acoustic boot playing, top down, tripod up in the back seat, in my own way I was taking him on a last city ride, 55 min's of Gregg sharing, It seemed appropriate at the time, That video will never be public, it'll most likely stay between my wife, Gregg, & I.

The video I'm talking about is one I shot from '09 in NJ. It's only a 3 song grab before security asked me to put it away. The last song displays the soul pouring out of Gregg as he puts his special stamp on Dylan's Just Like A Woman. It's not complete, but the 6min's starting @9:50 minute mark say what my words can not.

from The Gregg Allman Tour-- Will the Circle Be Unbroken

[Edited on 5/28/2017 by IF]

My wife said it well--It's the end of an era. A world without Gregg in it is a different place.

Gregg fought the good fight and gave his all for music. I would have understood if he retired from the road following his liver transplant years ago, but music was truly his life. I think he was far sicker than most fans realized over the past few years, but he kept doing it out of love. Love for music, love for his fans, love for the life of a touring musician.

One of the other posts in this thread made a good point. Without Gregg's contributions, the original ABB could have easily been some obscure jamband playing 20 minute guitar solos. People like me would have still loved them, but it would have reached a narrower group of people. Gregg's songs and vocals grounded the music, in the best possible sense of the word, made it more accessible and real and tangible. He took the celestial music of the spheres being conjured up by Duane and Dickey and Berry and Jaimoe and Butch and made sure it still had one foot on Planet Earth.

Thanks in part to Gregg, I got to spend 7 years of my life working at Hittin' the Note, making a living around some of the best music ever created by humans. I got to see the Allmans many times and it was my privilege to serve their fans and get to write about the music I love. I cherish that opportunity and I thank Gregg for helping give me that experience.

Thank you, Brother Gregg. 🙁

Rest easy Midnight Rider ... 🙁

Met Gregg after the last Beacon Run.
One of the best ABB moments of my life !!!
RIP Gregg, your in a better place.

Funeral arrangements had not been finalized Saturday. But Lehman said Allman would be buried alongside his late brother, founding Allman Brothers guitarist Duane Allman, at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, where the band got its start nearly five decades ago.
"That's in his wishes," Lehman said.

Tears.

It's obvious that Gregg has touched all our lives,personally I have had a difficult time over the last six years and it was the ABB and especially Gregg who got me through some very dark times.

Expected but still a shock when the news comes down. Peace and strength to his family and friends.

Im old enough to have heard the original, five man, Leavell, Enlightened Rogues, a couple of Dickey/Derek shows,
And several Derek/Warren shows including some Beacon dates. Lucky.

I have always stayed with the ABB and Dead no matter what else came and went. Grateful to both groups.

Sometimes too much drama but the music nearly always top shelf.

The music is it really and thanks for that, Gregg.

totally devastated....knew it was coming...but still.... Gregg & the ABB have been a large part of my life since 1969. He has left us a legacy of incredible music.....and that's the only way I'll get through this....play it long and loud....Rest In Peace Gregg.

Just devastating news. RIP Gregg. Thank you for all the great music.

Some of them in that band up there:

Duane,- guitar
Danny Toler - Guitar
Berry - Bass
Butch - Drums
Gregg - Hammond and vocals

It ain't just that the road went on forever to eternity, so did the band. And there's others that sit in with them to jam. Gregg's eternity is being in Duane's band. Now that's a legacy!

He was welcomed. I think it sounded like this:

[Edited on 5/28/2017 by gina]

RIP Gregg. Thank you.

[Edited on 5/29/2017 by jszfunk]

[Edited on 5/29/2017 by jszfunk]

RIP Gregg

RIP Gregg

RIP Gregg

I was camping in the Red River Gorge area and when your in a holler, cell service is very spotty. When I reached a area where I had service my phone lit up with missed calls and messages.
I first checked a message from my son Evan and that's when I learned of Gregg's death.
I was / am devastated just as I'm sure many others are as well.
So I went up on the mountain to see what I could see,
the whole world was fallin' right down in front of me.
I felt as if my Soul was broken.

Yet
With the help of God and true friends, I come to realize
I still had two strong legs, and even wings to fly

And oh I, ain't wastin' time no more
Cause time goes by like hurricanes, and faster things

Evan was at the Capitol Theater NY for 2 nights seeing Phil and Friends where they did this tribute to Gregg

https://jam.buzz/watch-phil-lesh-friends-pay-tribute-gregg-allman-midnight-rider-cap/

He said it was a very heartfelt experience from the band and the crowd

Thank You Gregg for sharing your Gift and Love of Music with us all

[Edited on 5/29/2017 by Ayla]

Very very sad.

Walked by the Beacon and saw the signs in Gregg's memory.

Just brought tears remembering all the joy Gregg brought to my life in that building.

From the moment I first heard Gregg sing in late 1970 I knew my life would never be the same.

I am so grateful to Gregg for all he's given.

RIP brother.

Thank you bro for everything -- on and on your fans could go about how much they love ya -- Music Hall April 1974 -- Burlington Vt. Jan. 2011 -- & too many ABB shows in between for this boy

Take care and know that you are loved

There is little I can say that has not been said here already. Gregg Allman was great bluesman- he paid his dues many times over. Rest in Great Natural Peace Brother Gregg- we'll all miss you.

Some UK newspaper obituaries:

“Foxy ladies — there were oodles of them,” the singer Gregg Allman recalled in an autobiography so salacious that it was memorably described as a licentious catalogue of “the perks of being a tall, blond, intricately bewhiskered white rock god in skinny jeans who can bellow the blues like a black man”.

On tour the Allman Brothers’ road manager would make a chart with the legal age of consent in every state. Gregg Allman made maximum use of it. After a gig he would have four or five women in different hotel rooms. His explanation was that he didn’t have the heart to turn them away. His band nickname was Coyotus Maximus.

Allman, whose days began slowly, struggled for decades with cocaine, heroin and alcohol addictions. When the band chartered a Boeing 720 he was touched to find that someone had spelt Welcome Allman Bros in cocaine on the bar. The message was almost certainly the work of John “Scooter” Herring, their road manager, who served as Gregg’s personal valet and drug dealer. Herring was convicted in 1976 on five counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and was jailed for 75 years.

Allman testified against him in return for immunity from prosecution, a betrayal that resulted in the Allman Brothers breaking up and his bandmates refusing to have anything to do with him. For years afterwards Allman was heckled at concerts by members of the audience shouting “Nark” at him.

He went into rehab numerous times, eventually cleaning up in the 1990s. However, being convivial to a fault the years of abuse had left their legacy and he had a liver transplant in 2010.

Close friends knew him as Gregory, but his older brother Duane Allman, who played guitar in the group until his death in a motorcycle accident in 1971, called him Baybrah, a contraction of baby brother. The singer Cher, to whom he was married for three years, called him Gui Gui. He called her Chooch.

“She smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell. She was hot to trot, and we made some serious love,” he said of their tempestuous, soap opera-style marriage. He later blamed her celebrity lifestyle for their break-up, although she might equally have cited his drug abuse and womanising.

He married often, becoming a regular customer of his divorce lawyers. After having his first child, Michael Sean, with his girlfriend Mary Lynn Sutton, he married Shelley Kay Winters in 1971, who gave birth to his son, Devon, the lead singer with Honeytribe. In 1973 he married Janice Mulkey, and Cher two years later. Their son Elijah Blue is a singer and guitarist. In 1979 he married Julie Bindas, with whom he had daughter, Delilah Island. They divorced in 1984 and he married Danielle Galliano. Their marriage was annulled in 1994. He married Stacey Fountain in 2001 and Shannon Williams became his seventh wife in 2016. He also had a daughter, Layla Brooklyn, with another girlfriend, Shelby Blackburn.

At times his lifestyle was in danger of obscuring his musical talent and influence, which was significant. With the Allman Brothers his soulful voice and vibrant organ playing defined the genre known as southern rock, a fusion of rock’n’roll, blues and country that influenced bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top, whose Billy Gibbons paid tribute to the “dark richness” of Allman’s singing and keyboard playing.

The group’s biggest hit singles, Ramblin’ Man and Jessica, which became the theme tune for the TV show Top Gear, had a country influence, but the group was most famous for its kinetic, eat-all-you-can jam fests, showcased on albums such as At Fillmore East and Eat a Peach, on which single songs were stretched out for more than 20 minutes.

It was an approach that sometimes produced moments of self-indulgence, yet at its best the group’s improvised interplay was touched with an almost telepathic genius. “We were like Lewis and Clark, man — musical adventurers, explorers,” Allman said. “We stuck to our guns. They tried to make us pop. They tried to dress us up. They tried all kinds of gimmicks and we told them: ‘Hey, put it where the sun don’t shine.’ ”

Gregory LeNoir Allman was born in December 1947 in Nashville, Tennes- see. He was two when his father, Willis Turner Allman, an army lieutenant who had fought in Normandy and was on vacation from the Korean War, was murdered by a stranger to whom he had offered a ride home from a bar. Their mother, Geraldine, refused a suggestion that she should place her sons in an army orphanage, although they were educated at a military academy.

To avoid being sent to Vietnam, Allman decided to make himself ineligible for the draft. He bought a medical manual, studied the foot chart and, after getting drunk to numb the pain, blasted a hole through his moccasin with a pistol.

After his mother had moved the family to Florida in 1958 he used the proceeds from a paper round to buy a cheap guitar, but it was commandeered by his brother, who swiftly eclipsed him. He learnt to play keyboards at a restaurant where his mother worked and acquired an electric piano. The brothers joined a racially integrated band called the House Rockers to the consternation of their mother, who had grown up in the South during segregation. “We had to turn her on to the blacks,” Allman told Cameron Crowe in a Rolling Stone cover story.

As a young journalist in the 1970s Crowe had gone on the road with the Allmans and witnessed at first-hand that in Gregg Allman they boasted a lead singer who wasn’t so much a stereotype as the man who helped to forge the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll template before it turned into a cliché.

“Allman blasted a hole in his foot with a pistol to avoid being drafted

While making the Oscar-winning film Almost Famous, Crowe’s main source for the excesses of the movie’s fictional rock’n’roll band was Gregg Allman and his hellraising band.

Before the formation of the Allman Brothers in 1969, they had failed to find success under other names, including the Allman Joys and the Hour Glass. The group was on the verge of a commercial breakthrough in 1971 when Duane was killed. A year later Berry Oakley, the bassist, died in a similar crash.

Allman sank into a drug addiction, but resolved to carry on. Brothers and Sisters, the group’s first release after the double tragedy, was a life-affirming affair that topped the album charts and sold seven million copies.

After the band broke up in 1976 Allman enjoyed intermittent success as a solo artist. He traded on his hard living, delivering his “I’ve lived the blues and survived to tell the tale” shtick with an engaging charm, in a candid book and on TV chat shows. He had recently completed an album, Southern Blood.

He insisted that he had no regrets about his turbulent life, but in the final line of his autobiography he was moved to admit: “I don’t know if I’d do it again. If somebody offered me a second round, I think I’d have to pass.”

Gregg Allman, musician, was born on December 8, 1947. He died from liver cancer on May 27, 2017, aged 69

(The Times)

As the distinctively raw and soulful voice of the Allman Brothers Band, as well as one its main songwriters and keyboard player, Gregg Allman was a major contributor to the movement that became known as southern rock, which included the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band. Allman, who has died aged 69 after treatment for liver cancer, also enjoyed a long though intermittent career as a solo artist, as well as experiencing a period of high-profile showbiz glitziness through his marriage to the pop superstar Cher in the mid-1970s.

The best work by the Allman Brothers Band is now regarded as some of the most influential of the 1970s, and the group’s 90s reformation, after splitting up for most of the 80s, brought their intricate fusion of blues, rock, soul and a hint of jazz to a new generation of listeners.

Gregg and his guitar-playing older brother, Duane, had worked together from the early 60s as the Escorts, the Allman Joys and the Hour Glass before forming the Allman Brothers in 1969. Their third album, At Fillmore East (1971), launched them into the mainstream, reaching 13 on the US album chart and showcasing the extraordinary power and musical scope of the band’s live performances. Statesboro Blues, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Gregg’s angstful composition Whipping Post became definitive pieces in the band’s repertoire. However, this triumph was soured by Duane’s death in a motorcycle accident later that year.

The band vowed to carry on, a decision vindicated by the success of Eat a Peach (1972), which sold a million copies in the US and reached No 4. The following year they topped the US chart with Brothers and Sisters, which gave them their biggest hit single with the country-flavoured Ramblin’ Man (it fell one short of the No 1 spot), and another durable calling-card with the instrumental Jessica, which became a radio favourite and later the theme tune to the television motoring show Top Gear.

The band were playing arenas and stadiums, earning $100,000 per show and flying in a chartered Boeing 720. Win, Lose or Draw (1975) reached No 5 on the US album chart, but heavy drug use and internal frictions (not least over Allman’s LA lifestyle with Cher and his pursuit of a solo career) threatened the band’s stability. The group were not happy with the record despite its success, and in 1976 tensions reached breaking point when Allman testified at the trial of the band’s security man, Scooter Herring, who was subsequently jailed for distributing cocaine. The band were disgusted by what Allman had done, and the group disintegrated.

Son of Willis Allman, a US army captain, and his wife, Geraldine (nee Robins), Gregg was born in Nashville, Tennessee, about a year after Duane. In 1949, Geraldine found herself responsible for raising her sons when Willis was shot and killed during a robbery by a hitchhiker he had picked up. She trained as an accountant and sent the brothers to Castle Heights military academy in Lebanon, Tennessee. In 1959 she moved the family to Daytona Beach, Florida.

In 1960 Gregg bought himself a cheap acoustic guitar from Sears, though it was Duane who proved the virtuoso of the family, with Gregg gravitating to keyboards (the Hammond B3 organ became his signature instrument). The pair played with a racially mixed band, the House Rockers, and worked their way through various combos before forming the Allman Joys, going on tour in 1965 after Gregg graduated from Seabreeze high school. By 1967 they had formed the Hour Glass and moved to Los Angeles, where they made a couple of unsuccessful psychedelic-flavoured pop albums for Liberty Records.

While Gregg stayed in LA, the other band members returned to Florida, where Duane joined a band in Jacksonville, the 31st of February, led by the drummer Butch Trucks. Duane persuaded Gregg to join as lead vocalist. Along with the guitarist Richard Betts, percussionist Jai Johanny Johanson (alias Jaimoe) and bass player Berry Oakley, Trucks and the brothers formed the Allman Brothers Band. Their self-titled debut album was released on the Capricorn label in 1969, and a follow-up, Idlewild South, the following year.

Gregg’s solo career began in 1973 with the album Laid Back, which won considerable critical acclaim and reached 13 on the Billboard album chart, as well as spinning off the moody Top 20 hit Midnight Rider (previously recorded by the Allman Brothers on Idlewild South). It was his highest-charting solo release until Low Country Blues (2011), which went to No 5, though he made the Top 50 with The Gregg Allman Tour (1974) and Playin’ Up a Storm (1977), and reached No 30 with I’m No Angel (1987). The album he made with Cher, Two the Hard Way (1977), flopped disastrously. The couple divorced after three years of marriage, in 1978.

Also in 1978 the Allman Brothers Band reunited for the album Enlightened Rogues, which gave them a Top 30 hit with Crazy Love. With the Capricorn label falling into bankruptcy they signed a deal with Arista, for whom they made Reach for the Sky (1980) and Brothers of the Road (1981), but split up again in 1982.

The band’s 20th anniversary in 1989 prompted not only the excellent box set compilation Dreams (named after one of Gregg’s early songs for the band), but also another comeback. This delivered a satisfying album in Seven Turns (1990), the title track and Good Clean Fun becoming hits. The group re-established itself as a popular touring act, making further albums including Shades of Two Worlds (1992), An Evening With the Allman Brothers: First Set (recorded during their 1992 residency at the Beacon theatre, New York, which would become a recurring engagement for the band), and Where It All Begins (1994). Their last studio album was Hittin’ the Note (2003).

In 2007, Allman was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which he blamed on a dirty tattoo needle. In 2010 he had a liver transplant, and went into rehab in 2012 in an attempt to beat alcohol and drug addictions. In 2014, another run of shows at the Beacon theatre was curtailed when he contracted bronchitis.

The live album All My Friends: Celebrating the Songs and Voice of Gregg Allman (2015) featured Gregg alongside Dr John, Eric Church, Jackson Browne, John Hiatt and others, and in the same year he released Gregg Allman Live: Back to Macon GA. Health problems forced him to cancel his 2016 summer tour, and his last concert was at his own Laid Back festival in Atlanta in 2016.

In 1995 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Allman Brothers Band. In 2012 he published the memoir My Cross to Bear, a warts-and-all record of his arduous rocker’s life, written with Alan Light.

He is survived by his seventh wife, Shannon, and five children, Michael, Devon, Elijah Blue, Island and Layla.

Gregory LeNoir “Gregg” Allman, singer, musician and songwriter, born 8 December 1947; died 27 May 2017

(The Guardian)

Gregg Allman, who has died of liver cancer aged 69, was the co-founder, lead singer and Hammond organ player of the Allman Brothers Band, whose mixture of blues and rock and extended, jazz-flavoured guitar solos created the distinctive sound labelled Southern Rock, which would shape the style of groups such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Black Crowes.

The band’s fluid, duelling guitar sound would prove hugely influential in the US, although in Britain they remain best known for Jessica, a twanging instrumental track that became the theme music for BBC Television’s Top Gear.

Allman’s own life was punctuated by several tragic deaths, multiple marriages and addiction, and this was reflected in his characteristic singing style, a wailing cry of anguish, seen on songs he wrote and performed like Whipping Post, with its aching lyrics: “Sometimes I feel like I been tied to the whippin’ post … Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.” He was also a skilled interpreter of classic works from the blues canon, such as Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues.

Gregory LeNoir Allman was born on December 8 1947 in Nashville, Tennessee, to Willis and Geraldine. His father, a US Army captain, was shot and killed by a hitchhiker whom he had offered a lift in 1949.

In 1959 the family moved to Daytona in Florida and Gregg and his brother Duane, after attending an R & B concert, swore that this was what they would dedicate their lives to doing. The pair formed, first, the Kings, and then, after high school, in 1965, the Allman Joys. To avoid being drafted by the military young Gregg shot himself in the foot.

Allman would remember those days of grinding out a living playing rough bars across the south-eastern states of America when he “used to get on my knees and pray we’d get a break – it was so hard.”

The break came in 1967 when the brothers relocated to Los Angeles. Here, renamed Hour Glass, they cut two albums for Liberty Records, but the band acrimoniously split from Liberty and Duane Allman moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he made a name for himself playing on R & B recording sessions.

In 1969 the brothers were reunited in Macon, Georgia, where, with a group of like-minded, multi-racial musicians, they formed the Allman Brothers Band on the new Capricorn label.

Both the eponymous debut album and the 1970 follow-up Idlewild South received little attention. But those two LPs contained songs that would become Allman standards, many of them Gregg Allman compositions, such as Whipping Post, Midnight Rider and Dreams. Meanwhile, as a live band the Allmans were attracting a devoted following.

Then in 1971 came the release of the double album At Filmore East, which captured the band in live performance. Suddenly the Allmans were ranked among the most popular American bands and Gregg, with his long blonde hair and beatific features, found himself a hippy pin-up. Eric Clapton invited Duane to join his seminal “Layla” sessions.

When Duane, the band’s leader and guitarist, was killed in a motorcycle accident in October 1971 – the bassist Berry Oakley would suffer a similar fate a year later – the Allmans soldiered on, releasing Eat a Peach, a mix of live and studio recordings, in 1972. Their 1973 album Brothers and Sisters topped the US charts and featured the catchy seven-minute instrumental track Jessica, written by the guitarist and de facto leader Dickey Betts.

In 1974 the band headlined the first ever concert at Knebworth, attracting some 60,000 revellers, but their British popularity would fade and, for decades after, Gregg Allman would rarely set foot outside the US. By now his dependency on heroin, cocaine and bourbon was derailing his creativity and the Allman Brothers Band too lost focus. Gregg married the pop singer, Cher, in 1975, and moved to Hollywood. They made an album together but it bombed.

The Allman Brothers Band campaigned in support of Jimmy Carter’s run at the White House in 1976, then dissolved acrimoniously, the split propelled by a sense of betrayal after Allman testified against his road manager Scooter Herring in a cocaine trial. For her part, Cher found Allman’s drug intake impossible to deal with and the couple broke up in 1978.

The Allman Brothers Band reformed that year and released two sub-standard albums before again splitting in 1982. Gregg would spend most of the 1980s drunk, stoned and adrift – he was jailed for five days for driving while drunk – while the Allman Brothers Band periodically reformed and splintered. When the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 Gregg Allman was so inebriated that he could not make it through his speech.

Mortified, he finally managed to detox properly. Sobriety brought him greater enjoyment of live performance and, once again, the Allman Brothers Band were among the highest grossing live performers in the US.

Having been given a diagnosis of Hepatitis C in 2007, Allman received a liver transplant in 2010. At the same time he recorded Low Country Blues, his sixth solo album, produced by T-Bone Burnett; it was released to great acclaim in 2011 and brought Allman back to Britain. While in the country he spoke with feeling about the perils of drug and alcohol addiction.

In 2012 he published an autobiography, My Cross To Bear. In 2014 the band played their final concerts at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The return of liver cancer meant that Allman had to curtail his touring. He managed to record a final album with the producer Don Was; it is as yet unreleased.

Gregg Allman was married seven times; he is survived by his wife Shannon, whom he married in 2013, and by three sons and two daughters.

Gregg Allman, musician, born December 8 1947, died May 27 2017

(The Daily Telegraph)

[Edited on 5/29/2017 by Shavian]

I will miss Gregg and the music he made that was so much a part of my life.

But the connections I have made to all you wonderful people is a gift 1,000 times greater. Thank you Gregg.

Sat., July 17, 1971 at a friend's summer party I first heard this amazing organ music coming from the living room. I immediately stopped talking in mid-sentence to go and find out who this band was. The song was Hot 'Lanta and it was on a new album called The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East. I was hooked. Almost exactly one year later, July 13, 1972, one of my older sisters took me to my first live concert, The Allman Brothers Band at Gaelic Park in NYC. Needless to say, I was blown away and became a lifelong ABB fan.
Hearing the very sad news of Gregg's passing, I couldn't help but think back to the first time I heard the unmistakeable sound of his Hammond B-3 and when he did sing, that distinctive and beautiful voice. Gregg's voice and the Brothers' incredible music has truly been the soundtrack of my life in so many way.
This has been a tough year already for fans of this great brotherhood; Brother Butch, Brother Bruce and now Brother Gregg. Godspeed and thanks to you all for bringing so much joy, happiness and love to so many of us for so long. Peace.