The Allman Brothers’ appearance at Piedmont Park on May 11 1969 earned a cover story in the Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s alternative newspaper. Attendees told of a band that created exciting, cohesive music with improvisation and freedom. “They set up about 2 o’clock and proceeded to blow everybody’s mind within eye and ear range for the next several hours. The general opinion going through the crowd was that these guys could stand up against the best—Hendrix, Cream, etc.” Steve Wise called it “incredible music—shows how irrelevant, silly most verbiage is. Including this.” Philip Lane recalled the concert as “a physical and spiritual experience, six guys all playing as one giant organism.” “You don’t, can’t, ‘listen’ to the Allman Brothers,” began Miller Francis Jr. in the Bird. “You feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it and enter into an experience through which you are changed.” The Allman Brothers were “fantastically together,” authentic interpreters of Black music, drawing “as heavily from the blues as the experience of young white tribesmen can without exploiting its source.” The musicians “play a form of what some might want to call ‘hard blues’ but that term says nothing of their real achievements. What informs their creation is not Black music but the experience of young white tribesmen in experiencing Black music. Thus Black music can be approached creatively by our musicians if the jumping off place is our experience of that music rather than the music itself.” The Allman Brothers Band, Francis concluded, “know all this, and a lot more.” EXCERPT FROM 🍄PLAY ALL NIGHT! DUANE ALLMAN & THE JOURNEY TO FILLMORE EAST 📷Twiggs