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This Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, which at the time was the largest pop-music festival ever, drawing some 600,000 to upstate New York to see the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, and the Band.
The event features prominently in a new book about the Allmans by Pittsburgh native Alan Paul. (For more on Paul’s Pittsburgh appearance this week, and a big local concert commemorating Watkins Glen, see below.)
Paul had previously written an acclaimed biography of Stevie Ray Vaughn (co-authored with Andy Aledort) and a memoir about his own days in China. But something keeps pulling him back to the Allmans, one of his earliest musical crushes and a frequent subject of his writing.
His path to his new book, “Brothers & Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s,” began when he was growing up in Squirrel Hill. Paul enjoyed writing, but began to realize he might be able to become a writer after learning his junior-high algebra teacher at Reizenstein Middle School was the brother of author Lee Gutkind, whose 1975 book about umpires, “The Best Seat in the House, But You Have to Stand!” Paul read as a young Pirates fan.
“That just made a huge impression on me,” Paul said last week by phone from his home in Maplewood, N.J.
A fan of the Allmans since age 12, Paul broadened his musical knowledge while studying at the University of Michigan, in the mid-’80s, and working in an Ann Arbor music bar that booked blues greats like Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor.
After college, Paul did some newspaper work, but his big break was freelancing for Guitar World magazine and Pulse!, the house publication of the once-massive Tower Records chain. In 1990, Pulse! had him write about the newly reformed Allmans (who’d first broken up in the ’70s) and their new album. It was largely that article, he said, that got him hired as Guitar World’s managing editor.
“That’s another way I could say the Allman Brothers changed my life,” said Paul, who these days even plays guitar and sings in the Allmans tribute band Friends of the Brothers.
Paul developed enough of a relationship with the band’s great guitarist, Dickey Betts, and tour manager Kirk West that he became an Allman insider. Eventually, that led to “One Way Out,” Paul’s 2014 book on the group, an oral history. He didn’t plan to write a second.
But after the band broke up again that year — this time for good — he found that members were more willing to talk. And he thought there was more to say about “Brothers & Sisters,” the group’s chart-topping 1973 album, with its hit single “Ramblin’ Man.”
“I just felt that era was a little overlooked, or a lot overlooked, both musically and culturally,” he said.
That was partly because of Watkins Glen, which for sheer numbers eclipsed Woodstock; partly because of the Allmans’ relationship to the Dead; and partly because of vocalist and keyboardist Gregg Allman’s 1975 marriage to Cher, something of a milestone in contemporary celebrity culture.
But the big surprise in the book might be Paul’s account of the Allmans’ influence on politics — specifically, through their relationship with Jimmy Carter, then governor of their home-base state of Georgia. “Jimmy Carter would not have been elected president without the Allman Brothers,” Paul said. “That’s what Jimmy Carter himself has always said, clearly and directly.”
The band met Carter in 1974 through their manager, Phil Walden. “Carter really was a fan of the band and of music in general,” said Paul, who added that Gregg Allman first bonded with Carter at the governor’s mansion over scotch and Carter’s new Elmore James LP.
Paul said the band played crucial fundraisers for Carter and shared his zeal for remaking the South. “They really shared that longing for a new South in terms of racial relations,” he said.
By the time Paul began work on the book in earnest, in 2021, Carter, then in his mid-90s, was no longer doing interviews. (He is now in hospice care.) Paul said other accounts of Carter — and the Allmans — have downplayed the significance of their relationship. Carter “was very, very proud of this connection,” he said.
“Brothers & Sisters” is also heavily informed by access Kirk West granted Paul to audio-cassette tapes containing many hours of interviews West conducted with band members in the ’80s, for his own never-realized book project.
This Thu., July 27, Paul visits to discuss the book at Cinderlands Warehouse, in the Strip District. Cinderlands is something of an Allman outpost itself, brewing beers named Gregg, Skydog, Soulshine, One Way Out, and the new Brothers and Sisters.
And two days after the Cinderlands event, on Sat., July 29, Hartwood Acres hosts the Thunderbird Summer Jam: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 Watkins Glen Summer Jam.
The all-day event features Chest Fever, a nationally touring The Band tribute act; Pittsburgh group theCAUSE playing the songs of the Dead; and, as the Allman Brothers, the Pittsburgh supergroup Butler Street Revival, with special guest Chuck Leavell, the former Allmans member who played on “Brothers & Sisters” and is also known for his work with The Rolling Stones. More information is here.
