Like capturing lightning in a bottle, the Fillmore East shows presented a band as the absolute height of their creative powers, before death and discord would bring them back down to earth. Thanks to success of early hits like "Whipping Post" and "Dreams" from their debut album, they recruited top talent, most notably producer-extraordinaire Tom Dowd, to craft their second album, Idlewild South, the next year. These two albums, combined with a hearty clutch of well-rehearsed and re-interpreted classic covers, provided the groundwork for their impressive 1971 live performances. Although the Allman Brothers Band would enjoy two strong selling albums in the wake of this release, creatively they were at their zenith at this early point in their career.
Some hail this as the best live album ever recorded. I think it depends on your definition of great live music. For me the Allman Brothers live have fallen somewhere between the Grateful Dead (yawn) and Deep Purple (white knuckles) on the live music spectrum. All three were notorious for going way off script, no doubt, with live versions of three-to-five minutes songs exploding out to more than twenty or even thirty minutes. Where the differences become apparent is in the process: to "jam" as a band, like the Grateful Dead, or take solos and demonstrate exceptional instrumental prowess, as was Purple's calling card. Having given Fillmore East a few spins this week, it's pretty clear the Allmans liked to jam, but there is clearly more instrumental fire than their colleagues in the Dead. So, naturally, as the Purple partisan that I am, I like this album far more than Two From the Vault, but not nearly as much as Made In Japan. For example, "You Don't Love Me" follows a fairly well defined structure with solos, while "Mountain Jam" is more of a band effort (across 33 minutes, no less), and the live "Whipping Post" falls somewhere between the two.
At Fillmore East has a complicated release history. The original problem was there was more material than a two-disc vinyl album could hold, so three songs that probably should have been here all along ("One Way Out", "Mountain Jam", and "Trouble No More" were kicked over to the double-LP live/studio hybrid album Eat a Peach. Those songs were later restored to renamed re-release, The Fillmore Concerts along with "Drunken Hearted Boy" and "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'", but also kept on Peach to maintain the original flavor of that album. Since "Mountain Jam" was too long to fit on a single side, it was re-stitched together in the CD era, and, yay, now I've got two identical versions hogging over 66 minutes of real estate in my music library. Anyway, a "deluxe" version of Fillmore took all of the original and added tracks, re-ordered them, and then added "Midnight Rider" to create what today passes as the "official" version of the album. Confused yet? Not to be outdone, a six-disc package containing all of the Fillmore shows was released, to the delight of those desiring four versions of just about every song.
The Allmans' relationship with Southern rock in general was somewhat unusual. Although they share a great deal of imagery with their Southern peers, sonically they come across a bit more progressive. There isn't a lot of "redneck" pride like you would hear on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, something that probably started to work against them by mid-decade as tastes veered away from from long-form interpretive live performances. I listened to the 1973 Cow Palace show the other day and it was clear that the Grateful Dead were increasingly influencing them, turning "Whipping Post" into a 25 minute noodling snorefest nicknamed "Tripping Post". By 1975's Win, Lose or Draw, it was abundantly clear the cracks were all over the band, marred by two deaths and internal feuding among the band members, probably exacerbated by rampant drug use, an unfortunate "fringe benefit" of unstable touring partners like the aforementioned Grateful Dead. Like most people, I have little to no interest in the 1980's reformation of the band following the hiatus after that album.
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