Now, for a start, without the sources of information that the Internet brought to the party, I’d probably have remained blissfully ignorant of the man’s existence. For a start, if I hadn’t signed up for the Allman Brothers Band mailing list the Allmans element in Hughesy’s CD collection would probably would probably have stayed at the Dreams box set, Fillmore East and, possibly, Hitting The Note and the Live at the Beacon DVD (if I’d become aware of their existence, which is, in itself, a dubious proposition).
As it was, given the Allmans’ taper friendly attitude I’d built up a substantial collection of official and unofficial live material. Over the past few years there have been a couple of official live Archive releases which I’ve dutifully bought since supporting the artist’s official releases is supposed to be part of the taper/trader mindset.
And without the taper/trader influence I wouldn’t have picked up on the quality of the more recent additions to the Allmans’ mix.
Looking at them in turn, there’s Warren Haynes, who fills much the same role on the American music scene that Joe Camilleri does Down Under. Like ChickenMan, he’s everywhere.
Haynes and bass player Allen Woody were part of the Allmans line-up in the mid-nineties and had a little power trio called Govt Mule as a way of picking up an additional income stream while the Brothers were on R&R. When their side project had reached the point where the Allmans duty was getting in the way of a developing career, out they went.
The replacements, Jack Pearson on guitar and Oteil Burbridge on bass, brought a couple of new ingredients to the mix, notably some stunning slide work from Pearson and (I kit you not) a scat-singing bass solo from Burbridge. While these things were going down I started to read about this young guitar-slinger Derek Trucks, nephew of drummer Butch. He turned up on the odd unofficial recording of an Allmans show, and it was obvious the kid was rather good.
Derek had his own outfit, predictably called the Derek Trucks Band, and they were taper friendly, so I started to pick up the odd DTB show here and there as well. Without the Internet, of course, I probably wouldn’t have heard of him until much later, if I heard of him at all.