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The Allman Brothers Band’s ‘At Fillmore East’ Turns 50 | Anniversary Retrospective

July 3, 2021 Jeremy Levine
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Happy 50th Anniversary to The Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East, originally released July 6, 1971.

At the end of the very last show the Allman Brothers Band ever played, Jaimoe, one of their two drummers from day one, remarked that he had always wanted to be a jazz drummer. It was just hard to find steady work. When he met Duane Allman, he knew who he could be a jazz drummer with. 

According to Gregg Allman’s memoir My Cross To Bear, Jaimoe was teaching the Allmans about jazz on a regular basis, sitting them down to listen to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959) and John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things (1961) and letting a jazz sensibility seep into the blues and country palette that the band knew like the back of its hand. While the Allman Brothers Band never played jazz in a tonal sense (they refrained from the intense pushing at traditional scales that artists like Davis and Coltrane favored), their improvisation finds a similar, narrative stride. On every solo, you lean in to hear what’s going to happen next. Nothing they do exists to fill time so people can groove. At Fillmore East is the recording that puts that on display better than any other.

“You Don’t Love Me” is a blues. It fulfills three big blues criteria: it uses the blues scale, it uses twelve-bar blues format, it has blues lyrics. The Allmans stick to this script for part of their nineteen-minute reading, but celebrate it as jazz musicians would—they show another side of it.

The most interesting part comes after the jam’s second very quiet stretch, when Duane Allman leads the band into a repeating IV-I progression. The IV-I is a safe, peaceful progression; it feels like crawling into bed after a long day. It is not the blues. Then, once the band has caught on to those two chords, Allman quickly quotes “Joy To The World.” We have one big note, and the song is over, triumphant. 

What started out as a blues ends up somewhere very different. It carves out a new space for you. Maybe, by giving you a new sound at the end of a blues, you’ll see your own self and own pain in a different way. They won’t tell you what you should feel, but will create novel opportunities for you to feel.

Top-to-bottom, At Fillmore East is the story of a brilliant live band at the top of their game speaking directly to you. It is massive in the sense that it includes a band with two drummers and two guitarists playing on one of the most important stages of the era, but it is intimate in the sense that Duane’s tone is so thick that it cuts through everything else and goes straight to you, often saying more than the words. Gregg Allman’s singing seems to require all of his body’s power, and you can feel it viscerally. It has all of the intimacy of those jazz albums that Jaimoe was playing for the rest of the group, but with the attitude (and crowd noise) of live rock & roll. 

The three Allman originals (“Hot ‘Lanta,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” and “Whipping Post”) are given their ideal readings on this LP. “Hot ‘Lanta,” while serving as a solo showcase for both Allmans and guitarist Dickey Betts, is also proof that the Allmans had a ferocious three-man rhythm section in the form of Berry Oakley (bass), the aforementioned Jaimoe, and Butch Trucks (also on drums). The three of them dart around each other, with Oakley (always the most underrated part of the original lineup) running up and down the neck of the bass to round out the white spaces in the solos, while the two drummers keep a foundation and play simultaneous fills. 

“Whipping Post” closes the record with a special kind of anguish. As the song proper ends, things slow down while we stay in a minor key and get this unsettling feeling that something dangerous is in the air. When it’s time for the band to pick up the original tempo for the final chorus after the slow section, they hop back in the driver’s seat so fast that it’s clear that we never left the emotional and sonic space of “Whipping Post,” despite going on what felt like a faraway journey. 

After Gregg is done singing, the band drops back down to nothing. A quick “Frère Jacques” quote care of Duane puts us in a major key for just a moment, but then we’re thrown back into the nightmare, which we ride out until the song closes. No matter where we go (even when the band is quoting French nursery rhymes), we never lose sight of “Whipping Post,” and the only way to end the song is for Allman to howl out one last, weary chorus. They build up this massive infrastructure that makes their very simple musical acts—playing and singing with feeling—feel all the more special. 

At Fillmore East is then a big and elaborate way for a band to do what bands had been doing for decades before the Allmans showed up: try to reach people, in whatever way they can, through a set of stories, songs, and ways of playing built up by people who had come before them. It is both wrenching and beautiful, often at once. 

It’s also an album of a mostly white band playing in a tradition started by Black musicians, mostly playing songs by Black musicians, most of whom never got a big stage like the Fillmore East or a platinum live album. Most people I know can name the Allman Brothers Band but not Willie Cobbs. (I can only name Willie Cobbs because of At Fillmore East.) And so, if we’re going to celebrate At Fillmore East—which I think, with my whole being, we should—then we also need to celebrate the songwriters and the tradition that gave it life. 

So, in celebrating At Fillmore East, I’m also listening to Willie Cobbs, Blind Willie McTell, T-Bone Walker, and Elmore James—the writers of the material on At Fillmore East. To me celebrating this record is not just about celebrating the six people up on that stage; it means celebrating everything that is wrapped up in those performances and made them possible. This record is one very special night in that long history that continues to now.

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