Expect to Hear More From the Allman Brothers Band/Gregg Allman Catalog
Gregg Allman may be gone, but we haven’t heard the last of him.
It’s likely that the vaults — Allman’s own and particularly the Allman Brothers Band‘s — will yield quite a bit of music in the coming years.
Allmans manager Bert Holman tells us that, “We’ll keep putting things out as long as there’s an appetite for it” via the group’s own Allman Brothers Records label, which earlier this year released “The Fox Box,” a compilation from a three-night stand at the Fox theatre during 2004.
Other releases currently in motion including individual digital release of six 2003 shows from the Instant Live series as well as a “best of 2003” four-disc set that Holman says will “cull the best songs and put together a mega-concert in terms of sequencing.”
The organization is also planning a package featuring multiple shows by the original Allmans lineup at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and is looking into releasing a July 19, 2005 concert at the Warner Theatre in Earie, Pa., that is considered by Allmans aficionados to be one of the best the group ever played, a “ferocious” late-period show in Fresno, Calif., before a small (2,000 people and a physical release of the Allmans’ final concert, from Oct. 28, 2014 at New York’s Beacon Theatre, out in physical form. Something from Jack Pearson’s tenure (1997-1999) with the group will also be released at some point, according to Holman.
Gregg Allman’s final studio album, Southern Blood, is due out in September, and Allmans guitarist Warren Haynes tells us that there are songs he was working on with Allman that may yield another track down the line:
“There’s one song that may present itself. Everything else I think we finished and recorded… We wrote a lot of songs together and he was never in a hurry to finish them. He always had a much more relaxed approach, and in some cases we should stop working on a song and we’d say, ‘Yeah, we’ll get back to that at another time’ and he was that way from the first time I met him. He just never wanted to rush the songwriting process, and a lot of us kinda come from that school of, ‘We’re in the moment now. Let’s keep this going! And in each case we would always get back together and finish the tunes when the time was right.”
Allman’s son Devon Allman, meanwhile, tells us that he and the family plan to keep a close watch over what comes out in the future:
“I just want to make sure that his music lives forever and is treated with respect and integrity…There’s some things in the vault, and that’s certainly up to the family and management to kind of oversee.”
Allman died last Saturday (May 27) at the age of 69 from liver cancer. A private funeral will be held Saturday (June 3) in Macon, Ga.
Gary Graff is an award-winning music journalist who not only covers music but has written books on Bob Seger, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.
