Eat a Peach is among a selection of Allman stuff I keep around because my dad likes it. Or liked it. Or owned it, anyway. As a kid the artwork inside the gatefold sleeve was more interesting to me than the music, and I don’t have distinct memories of the record playing, only pulling it off the shelf to look at the fantastically sized fruit in the flatbed and the naked lady in the sky. My dad was playing mostly classical on vinyl by the time I was old enough to dig through the stacks, since most of the new stuff was coming into the house on tapes and later CDs. By that time maybe The Allman Brothers seemed to my dad like a throwback to a more freewheeling time in his life. Even though it’s lyric-less, I bet he played “Little Martha” when he was courting my mom.
When I put the record on today, I expected more blues than country, but even more than either of those influences I heard a jam band like the ones I avoided in the 1990s. I should have known since the second side of each disc is taken up by what is presumably an excerpt of a much longer “Mountain Jam.” The jam is bluesy, but it’s also prog-y and fusion-y and not very country. Dicky Betts gets his down-home licks in elsewhere on the first sides of the discs, and that’s something to look forward to when you’re jammed halfway up the mountain on one of the flipsides. If you’re like me, during the 19- and 15-minute mountain jams, you look over at the turntable to see how far from the runout grooves the stylus still lies.
The C side (Side III on my copy) is where the blues really come to the fore. “One Way Out” is a cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson tune and is particularly good. “Blue Sky” meanders back into jam band territory with a strong country feeling, but it also features some impressive soloing from composer Betts. As is typical of the genre (these are the archetypes, after all), the soloing goes on far too long before the vocals kick back in and the song wraps up. Then the pleasant little aforementioned instrumental interlude bearing my mother’s name, and then Side IV is the also aforementioned long-form “Mountain Jam (Cont’d).” This one starts out with some cool bass solo work and has Betts playing some dissonant notes that give his guitar solos an atonal feel in places, which I respect for making me feel uncomfortable when I wasn’t expecting anything unusual.
Author Denis Johnson died a few days ago, and I probably should have written about him instead of Allman, but Johnson’s best known book’s title is an allusion to a line from a song by Lou Reed, the subject of my first rock ’n’ roll eulogy, so I’m taking that as a sign to stay in this lane. Gregg Allman died a couple days ago, and now he and Brother Duane play songs on another plane. Eat a Peach. Play it again.
