Guest Book

Since we all have the horrible taste in our mouths courtesy of the Billboard review, I want to throw in this pre-Beacon article from the Times. Long live the ABB! March 10, 2002 Long-Haired Country Boys Back in the Big City That Loves Them By KURT OPPRECHT he Allman Brothers Band's annual mid-March stand at the Beacon Theater has become as sure a sign of spring as the reappearance of robins and bellybuttons. For most of a decade, the guitar-slingers, originally from Georgia, have started their annual North American tour in the heart of Manhattan. And, believe it or not, New York feels like home. Butch Trucks, the drummer and an original band member, said New Yorkers were the first ones to embrace the Allman Brothers, starting in 1970 at the Fillmore East, in the first show the band ever headlined. "The Fillmore crowd took to what we were doing right off the bat," Mr. Trucks said last week in a telephone interview. "And it's been like that for 30-some-odd years now." But why do New Yorkers, who endlessly fret about their hipness quotients, still have so much enthusiasm for such a bluesy, down-home sound? "People in the biggest city in the world need the comfort bands, as well," said Bob Buchmann, a disc jockey and program director at WAXQ-FM, the classic rock station known as Q104.3. "And there's a lot of comfort and a lot of memories that are very much alive when you go to see the Allman Brothers. The Allman Brothers will sell the Beacon out every March for as long as they care to play it." Things have changed for the band, which formed in 1969, since the days when it could sell out four straight shows at Madison Square Garden. The band now plays smaller places, but the intimacy of the 2,894-seat Beacon, filled with the responsive New York crowd, is what the band thrives on. The Allmans will give nine shows at the Beacon, on Broadway at 74th Street, from Thursday to March 24, and most of them are sold out. "Playing the Beacon is always what cranks the year up," Mr. Trucks said. The band, known for songs like "Whipping Post," "One Way Out" and "Ramblin' Man," has been through the usual "Behind the Music" pathologies of substance abuse and personality conflicts. But not only has the band survived, it is financially independent of a label, recording new music and touring on its own terms. "The last two years are as much fun as I've had since before Duane died," Mr. Trucks said, referring to the 1971 death of Duane Allman, one of the band's founders, in a motorcycle crash. Mr. Trucks keeps an apartment in the city, and says he could be considered a New Yorker himself. Still, after all these years, the Allmans are truly at home out on the roads, both Northern and Southern. "There are certain nights when you hit that spark, and it's like going to church," he said. "There's nothing quite like it." After the Beacon, the Allmans will go into the studio to work on their next album, scheduled to be released early next year. By then, it will be just about time for the band to come back to its Northern home.