Michael Buffalo Smith, Paul T. Riddle to promote new book on the Allman Brothers Band at Hub City Bookshop

By DAN ARMONAITIS

As a ninth grader at Byrnes High School in 1972, Spartanburg resident Michael Buffalo Smith received his introduction to the Allman Brothers Band.

A fellow student “brought the ‘At Fillmore East’ album to school,” Smith recalled recently. “We had a really cool teacher who would let us play records during study hall, so we were listening to that album and I was like, ‘man, that’s great, I love that.'”

Smith convinced his classmate to let him borrow the album, then took it home and recorded it to tape for personal use.

“At that time, all I had was a reel-to-reel recorder and I’d put the microphone up to the speaker of the stereo and record it,” Smith said with a laugh. “I’d listen to that tape over and over, and I got really hooked on the Allman Brothers.”

Smith eventually secured an official copy of the album, and the Allman Brothers Band ended up replacing The Beatles as his favorite rock band of all-time while also igniting his lifelong passion for southern rock.

Smith, a veteran music journalist who came to be known as “the ambassador of southern rock” following the creation of his GRITZ magazine in 1998, will made an appearance on Thursday, Jan. 30 at Hub City Bookshop in downtown Spartanburg to promote his latest book, “The Road Goes on Forever: Fifty Years of the Allman Brothers Band Music,” which was published by Mercer University Press.

Smith will be joined for the event, which starts at 6 p.m., by original Marshall Tucker Band drummer Paul T. Riddle, who will also share stories about his close relationship with the Allman Brothers Band, including getting to perform with the group on a live recording of “Jessica” that earned a 1996 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

“I like Michael’s work a lot,” Riddle said of the book’s author. “He writes the truth, which is very refreshing. I’m happy for him and glad he did a book on the Allman Brothers, who, along with Little Feat, are one of my two favorite bands.”

The book, hailed by acclaimed musician and former ABB member Chuck Leavell as “truly the ‘Bible’ of the Allman Brothers Band,” utilizes history, personal interviews and many collected documents to aid in the telling of the story of the humble beginnings and half-century career of the original southern rock band on the 50th anniversary of its formation.

An interview Smith did with Butch Trucks, which was conducted only a month before the ABB drummer took his own life in January 2017 and just a few months before fellow co-founder Gregg Allman died, is presented in its entirety in the book and concludes with Trucks saying, “There’s been talk of a fiftieth anniversary reunion in 2019, but truthfully, I doubt we will all still be alive by then. We’ll have to see.”

Smith said, “it gives me chills reading that now.”

The Allman Brothers Band endured plenty of tragedy early in its career. Lead and slide guitarist Duane Allman and bassist Berry Oakley were killed in separate motorcycle accidents within 13 months of one another in 1971 and 1972, but the group soldiered forward with fellow founding members Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Trucks and Jaimoe being joined by numerous other musicians throughout the years.

The Allman Brothers Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2012.

“I just always loved their music,” Riddle said. “It’s so diverse, and it was just so different. I mean, no one was like them. Not many bands had two drummers, especially going about the way Butchie and Jaimoe did it, and, you know, Dickey was influenced by (John) Coltrane and Charlie Parker as far as melodies go. Just think of the instrumental songs he wrote; they were just amazing.”

Riddle said the first time he saw a live performance by the Allman Brothers Band was in the pre-Marshall Tucker Band days when the group played The Ruins, a then-popular nightspot in Spartanburg.

“I sat up chairs and got in free and was on the front row,” Riddle recalled. “I’ll never get over it. It changed my life. .. They played ‘Don’t Keep Me Wondering,’ which is still one of my favorite songs that they ever did, and it was just the funkiest thing I had ever heard. It was just so incredible.”

While Smith never had the opportunity to see the Allman Brothers Band with Duane Allman or Oakley in the group, he attended at least 15 shows over the years and was particularly impressed by the unit that formed in 1989 and recorded the “Seven Turns” reunion album that was released a year later. That lineup included Gov’t Mule co-founders Warren Haynes and Allen Woody, the latter of whom died in 2000.

“I was doing Edge magazine in ’91,” Smith said, referring to an Upstate alt-weekly he created decades ago, “and my roommate at the time was (Spartanburg resident) Stephen Long, and we went to the Greenville Memorial Auditorium to see the Allmans, and it was so good that we went to Charlotte and saw them again the next night.”

In “The Road Goes on Forever: Fifty Years of the Allman Brothers Band Music,” Smith takes readers inside the “Big House” on Vineville Avenue in Macon, Georgia, where the band lived during its peak years and into Capricorn Studios where it recorded all of its orignal albums. It also shines a spotlight on Gregg Allman and Betts’ respective solo projects and includes a complete review of the group’s 40th anniversary Beacon Theatre residency in 2009 that found the Allman Brothers Band joined onstage by a veritable who’s who of contemporary music greats.

“Starting back in the late ’70s, once or twice a year, I would write down in a notebook (a list of) my personal favorite Top 50 albums of all-time,” Smith said. “Through the years, the list would change, but the thing that never changed was that ‘At Fillmore East’ was always number one. … I’m sure I’m not the first person to say it, but ‘At Fillmore East’ was by far the best live rock album ever done, and I told that to (producer) Tom Dowd when I interviewed him. That album is the cornerstone of what we call southern rock.”