Happy 50th Anniversary to the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat A Peach, originally released February 12, 1972.
Eat A Peach (1972) sounds like this: on a March drive from the bitter cold of Worcester, Massachusetts, all the way down to Miami, my friends and I stopped overnight in North Carolina. The next morning, around sunrise, it was my turn behind the wheel. I put the record on and drove a beautiful hour-and-a-half, not another car on a tree-lined stretch of freeway, the warm southern sun streaming into the car while the rest of my friends slept. It’s not just that I associate the sound of the album with that memory, it’s that Eat A Peach sounds exactly like that kind of morning feels.
But Eat A Peach is not all peace and light, even though it sure does sound like it. Or, as the very first lyric on the album puts it: “Last Sunday morning, the sunshine felt like rain.”
Its perfection is what makes it so sad, a brilliantly captured moment in time that faded immediately, like getting a photo of the last second of a sunset. With guitarist Duane Allman passing away in a motorcycle accident during the album’s recording, and bassist Berry Oakley dying just a year later, Eat A Peach is in some ways the last pure thing in the Allmans’ history, before the band was defined by tragedy.
The record finds a folk-country sound joining the more traditional blues that the Allmans were famous for, with the guitar histrionics of their live show making their way onto the record. “Blue Sky,” for example, features Allman harmonizing on guitar with Dickey Betts’ solo, the sort of thing the guitar duo might do live to ratchet up the tension in something like “Whipping Post,” but that is done here to accent the pastoral sound of the track. This sound, found on other songs like “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” and “Melissa,” contributes to the at-peace feeling of Eat A Peach. That feeling comes not in spite of the tragedy, but through it—the band’s healing mechanism.
Of course, there’s plenty of good, old-fashioned Allman Brothers Band blues playing on this album, because there is no other way to celebrate the life of Duane Allman than to let him rip through songs like Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out,” Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More,” or the Allman original “Stand Back.” The album’s second track, “Les Brers in A Minor,” is a thrilling instrumental blues that capitalizes on that dual guitar sound; it’s a thundering, almost experimental song that shows that the band was as cutting-edge as it was traditional.
But the centerpiece of Eat A Peach is another animal entirely: “Mountain Jam.” The thirty-three-minute exploration of Donovan’s “First There Is A Mountain” is a portrait of a band at the height of its powers. Each individual member, from Berry Oakley’s surprisingly agile bass solo to Duane’s meditative closing, consistently hits improvisational magic over an impossibly long timespan.
But more than a collection of solos, “Mountain Jam” is perfect because of the interplay between band members—the impeccable shift into 6/8 for the shift into the finale, the seemingly telepathic rise and fall of dynamics, the openings left for Oakley and Gregg Allman to poke through with understated countermelodies. If you’re curious about exactly how good the Allmans were in 1971, this version of “Mountain Jam” was played immediately after the version of “Whipping Post” that appears on At Fillmore East (1971), for maybe one of the best hours of rock music a band ever put on stage.
Because it is not completely free-form improv—key moments, licks, and orders of solos remain somewhat predictable across performances—there is nothing like “Mountain Jam” in the classic rock canon. While crazy long instrumental passages are a staple of psychedelia, many of these explorations exist to bewilder (see, for example, the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”). “Mountain Jam,” by contrast, offers a place to rest. While other bands sought to explore the far reaches of the universe with their improvisation, the Allmans built a home.
The counterpoint to “Mountain Jam” is “Little Martha,” a tender instrumental acoustic duet between Duane and Betts. While it’s the opposite of the maximalism found elsewhere on Eat A Peach in many ways, it puts a period on the album’s central premise: that it is possible to build a place in the universe, amid all of the violence and pain and sadness, where the sun shines through the trees and everything feels okay. Until their very last concert in 2014, The Allman Brothers Band played this studio version of “Little Martha” over the PA system as the audience filed out, to remind us that this feeling was, and has always been, the band’s central mission.
Even though Jaimoe and Betts are the only surviving members of the Eat A Peach lineup, and the band no longer plays, we’re all still part of that project. When I hear that rolling piano at the start of the record, I feel like it’s possible. The band so beautifully crafted their sound that when we step out on a quiet southern morning and see the sun stream down onto the open road, we feel it. And, for those of us who live where it’s cold and rainy, like it is outside my window this morning, all we have to do is put on Eat A Peach.
LISTEN: