SWANSONG FOR A GREAT SOUTHERN SOUL MAN
As frontman of the allman Brothers Band, Gregg allman was the soulful embodiment of america’s southern rock movement in the seventies.
a hard-living singer, keyboardist and songwriter, he was never scared to lay his feelings on the line — and he does so one last time on this powerful farewell.
allman died, aged 69, in may due to complications from liver cancer, and he was in failing health when he made his final recordings in alabama.
and, while his singing on southern Blood lacks the pure lung power of his younger days, this is a compelling swansong. ‘I hope you’re haunted by the music of my soul when I’m gone,’ he reflects on my only true friend, a song that finds him candidly contemplating his own mortality in the same way that David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Glen Campbell did on their closing musical dispatches.
He goes on to tackle tim Buckley’s once I Was and Bob Dylan’s Going Going Gone with a similar sense of yearning before drafting in soulmate Jackson Browne to supply backing vocals on Browne’s song for adam, a touching ballad about the death of a friend.
Eight of the ten tracks here are covers, but that does little to diminish the album’s emotional depth, with producer Don Was cleverly framing nashvilleborn Gregg’s bluesy voice with trademark retro- soul touches — gospel harmonies, piping horns — and the strains of an eight-piece band which had been on the road with the singer right up until his last live show in atlanta in october 2016.
for all its weightiness, southern Blood isn’t dull. allman, whose drink and drug addictions took their toll before he entered rehab in the nineties, lived the rock star lifestyle to
the hilt. His seven marriages included a tumultuous, three-year union with Cher in the Seventies — the unlikely couple even recorded an album together before divorcing — and there are songs here that find him looking back fondly on his better days, with I Love The Life I Live a strident, bar- room blues piece and the Little Feat cover Willin’ a celebration of life on the road.
Like his guitarist brother Duane, tragically killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971 just as the Allman Brothers were beginning to make real headway, Gregg became obsessed with music after seeing Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson perform live in Florida in the Sixties, and the legacy of that early interest in soul music informs two of the covers here — the gritty Percy Sledge ballad Out Of Left Field and Johnny Jenkins’ funky Blind Bats And Swamp Rats.
The most resonant number is Song For Adam, with Allman admitting that Jackson Browne’s poignant words prompted thoughts of his late brother as he was recording the track in the same Muscle Shoals studio the Allman Brothers used to take their first tentative steps as a band. It caps a fitting farewell to a giant of American rock.
NEIL YOUNG has been dipping into his extensive archives — with mixed results — for the past eight years. Hitchhiker, an acoustic LP made in a single afternoon in August 1976, when Young was 30, captures him at his breathtaking best.
The ten-track album was rejected by Young’s label at the time as it was considered too raw.
But it’s the stripped- back simplicity of the performances that make it so appealing four decades on, with the Canadian’s highpitched voice backed by guitar, harmonica and — on The Old Country Waltz — piano.
Most of the songs here eventually surfaced, with overdubs and more rounded backing, on later albums. Powderfinger, Ride My Llama and the surreal Pocahontas cropped up on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps.
Campaigner, which takes an unexpectedly sympathetic view of disgraced American president Richard Nixon, made it onto 1977’s Decade.
But, with two songs, Hawaii and Give Me Strength, available for the first time, Hitchhiker offers an intimate snapshot of a mercurial talent on a creative roll.