Today in rock history the Allman Brothers recorded In Memory of Elizabeth Reed at their classic Live at Fillmore East show. Unfortunately, it brings back a not-so-good memory for me as follows.
The starter wife and I were in the terminal stages of marriage and were going to a counselor to basically figure out how to get unmarried. After a particularly tense session with the counselor, she directed us to ride home in silence, decompress and not try to discuss anything along the way. “Let the juices cool” were her words.
I had the “Allman Brothers Live” in the CD player so I cranked it up and proceeded to ride down the road listening to Hot ‘Lanta followed by In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. About five minutes into Elizabeth Reed, the ex asked “What is this we’re listening to – some kind of torture music ?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She replied “This is awful.”
I responded “You just don’t know good music” which was not exactly my smartest response to have made to someone who wasn’t too happy with me to begin with.
Nevertheless, I turned the volume down a bit and we drove the rest of the way home from Waldorf in silence. She moved out a short time afterwards. So much for the marriage counsellor’s ‘let the juices cool’ advice.
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed was inspired by a tombstone that Dickey Betts saw in a Macon, Georgia graveyard. Even if the ex didn’t appreciate it, the song was and still remains one of the greatest instrumentals ever recorded. Listen to this video and as you do so follow the description of the song below. (For reference, it was around the 5:05 – 5:45 mark, just before Gregg’s organ solo, when the ex lost it. Funny, but kinda sad too how I remember that very moment and her reaction every time I hear this song.)
In this performance, taken from the March 13, 1971 (first show) concert by the group,[10] Betts opens the song with ethereal volume swells on his guitar, giving the aural impression of violins.[11][12] Slowly the first theme begins to emerge, Duane Allman‘s guitar joining Betts in a dual lead that variously doubles the melody,[13] provides a harmony line,[14] or provides counterpoint.[13] The tempo then picks up in the next section[12] to a Santana-like,[2] quasi-Latin beat, a strong second-theme melody driven by unison playing and harmonized guitars arising.[9]
Betts next solos[11][12] from the start of the second theme.[15] This leads into an organ solo from Gregg Allman, with the two guitars playing rhythm figures in the background. Throughout, percussionists Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson play in unison, laying what has been described as “a thick bed of ride-snare rhythm for the soloists to luxuriate upon.”[16]
Duane Allman then[12] starts quietly rephrasing the first theme, gradually building to a high-pitched climax, Berry Oakley‘s bass guitar playing a strong counterpoint against the band’s trademark percussion. Allman cools into a reverie, then starts again, finding an even more furious peak.[15] Parts of this solo would draw comparison to John Coltrane and his sheets of sound,[15] other parts to Miles Davis‘ classic Kind of Blue album. Duane Allman biographer Randy Poe wrote that “[Allman]’s playing jazz in a rock context” reflected the emerging jazz fusion movement, only in reverse.[12] Allman himself told writer Robert Palmer at that time, “that kind of playing comes from Miles and Coltrane, and particularly Kind of Blue. I’ve listened to that album so many times that for the past couple of years, I haven’t hardly listened to anything else.”[12] Almost two decades later, Palmer would write of the Allmans, “that if the musicians hadn’t quite scaled Coltrane-like heights, they had come as close as any rock band was likely to get.”[17] Rolling Stone would say in 2002 that the song’s performance found the musicians “lock[ed] together … with the grace and passion of the tightest jazz musicians,”[18] while in 2008, it said the trills, crawls, and sustain of the guitar work represented “the language of jazz charged with electric R&B futurism.”[9]
Following the Duane Allman solo the band drops off to a relatively brief but to-the-point percussion break by Trucks and Johanson reflecting Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb‘s work.[12] The full band then enters to recap the mid-tempo second theme, finishing the song abruptly.[12] Several silent beats pass before the Fillmore audience erupts in riotous applause. From Wiki.com