It was 20 years ago today. Remembering Allen Woody.

When you enjoy music as I do, you feel as if you know the musicians in your favorite bands. You buy the records, you go to the shows, you watch the videos, and read the articles. You get excited if they or their representative likes your tweet. Music that you like can create a very personal and emotional connection between you and those musicians. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to actually get to know the musicians a little bit. I had that privilege with Gov't Mule during their earlier days, and in particular, Allen Woody, who died 20 years ago, August 26, 2000. I can't put this any better than Warren Haynes did on Facebook, but I will add my two cents here. 

Shortly after I graduated from college, I finally got a job in a record store - I'd tried since I was 16. It was a small Turtle's Record Store in Donelson, TN. I worked with some very cool people - friends to this day. It became known very quickly that I was a geek for the Allman Brothers Band. Dreams, the 4 CD retrospective, came out the summer of 1989. They had hired Warren Haynes on guitar and Allen Woody on bass and were going out on tour. Warren had been touring with the Dickey Betts Band, and the joke goes that Allen was hired because he came to the audition with more gear than anybody else, including an 18 string bass!!

 

Anyway, as happens in small retail stores, you chat with customers. Well, one day, when I wasn't at work, an older man came in and was looking for Allman Brothers music. A coworker chatted with him when he revealed that his son had recently been hired as the bass player. My coworker mentioned a coworker - me - was a superfan. The man left, and that seemed like that. At some point during the next few months, I received a surprise when I got to work. Allen had come into the store - again on my day off - and left his business card for me. Believe me, I was on cloud nine, an actual member of the Allman Brothers Band, albeit a new one, had given me his personal information!

It was another year or so before he came back in. Although we were in a new & larger space, I recognized him immediately. I think I'd seen the Allman Brothers at least once in the interim. I introduced myself. He peppered me with requests, the "do you have...?" that record store people are so familiar with. He was looking for all sorts of stuff that hadn't been released on CD yet. This was in the VERY early days of CDs. He asked about Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra and the Beatles, and I don't remember what else. But this was the beginning of a pattern that continued until the year he died. When Allen was off tour he would come to visit my record store. They weren't coordinated visits, we didn't talk about my work schedule, but he did keep it up after I returned to Nashville from Baton Rouge, six years later, and at a new store. 

When Gov't Mule started, I was living in Baton Rouge. A friend sent me a care package with a promotional cassette of the first Gov't Mule record. I'd read a blurb about Gov't Mule, and I was anxious to hear some music from this new power trio. Well, Warren's voice and guitar are mesmerizing. and it was a power trio; that was enough for me to get hooked, but of course, they had to open the album with a true-to-the-original cover of Son House's "Grinning In Your Face." Besides being a stunner of an opening track, it was a serendipitous moment. I had just picked up a copy of Son House's Father of the Delta Blues. It knocked me out; completely.

 

I was a blues fiend and had been listening to all the delta blues. None of which prepared me for Son House. Son House was connected to something elemental. He sang from a place so much deeper than any other musician I'd heard. I listened to that record for days on end. At some point, I thought the acapella songs on that record would make great covers in the right hands.

Little did I know Warren Haynes was gonna fulfill my wish! Anyway, Gov't Mule would become my primary musical focus. No, Gov't Mule became everything to me. I needed more of everything they did. I traded tapes waiting anxiously to see them live, I found a Gov't Mule listserv (anybody remember those?!?) to talk with other fans, and finally, I became a live audio taper. At that point, it was off to the races for Jai.

Live audio taping became my primary hobby. I was already going to the shows, now I would be able to record them, relive the experience, and share that all-important live music experience with friends. It gave me an excuse to go to more shows. Live audio taping is the urbane version of the field recordings anthropologists and archivists were doing. Recording gear got more portable and cheaper. Gradually it became quite a past-time among the middle-class white boys. They would go to clubs and auditoriums, record the concert, keep the tapes, sell them (unfortunately, without the band's consent), and trade them. Most people who have a superficial understanding of taping think hippies and the Grateful Dead. What happened there was an amped-up version of what was happening in jazz clubs, blues clubs, and bluegrass festivals. Gov't Mule developed an extraordinarily liberal recording policy and a strong network of tapers very quickly after they started touring in 1994. I started going to Mule shows all throughout the South and beyond. Part of being a taper back then was getting in the club during soundcheck. The bands who allowed taping would alert the clubs. This advance warning afforded the taper early access to the venue without much fuss. The more you did that, the closer you got to the crew and the musicians. 

That's what happened with the Mule and me. Of course, it was easy for them to recognize one of the only black Mule concert goers, especially in those early years, let alone, the only black taper I ever met. I was back in Nashville and working at a flagship record store near Vanderbilt. I gave Woody one of my business cards and invited him to stop by the store whenever he could, and he did. We would chat at the store, then I'd be at the next show where we'd chat before and after. I got to eat dinner with them, have drinks at the bar with them, hang on the bus and in the hotel room with them. It was so much fun, and that was how our relationship existed. He was so fascinating to me. He seemed so gruff and curt from the stage, but man, could he tell stories. When I first started listening to the band, it was all about Warren. The more I listened to tapes and went to shows, the more Allen was where I focused my attention. He was a very creative bass player. He had a monster tone and was a really unpredictable player, he was fun, he had fun, and he was really kind! 

I was never close enough to the band to know what was really happening behind the curtain, but Woody proved to be very important to me, more important than I realized until his funeral. Sitting there with some Mule friends and seeing his Dad, my first point of contact, his daughter, and the members of the Allman Brothers family, I was heartbroken. I mourned for a long while. I followed the Mule through the Deep End period (They did two albums and tours with a variety of legends and peers on bass as a way to honor Woody and make a transition.), excited to hear what the band would do next. I struggled with the quartet version of the band but slowly recognized the mourning that they had undergone and the growth that they were experiencing. The band is in a great place now. The music is incredible, the venues are larger, and the audiences are younger. I doubt I would be able to load in my taping gear at soundcheck these days. I can hear Allen every time they pull out "Gameface" or "She Said, She Said"/"Tomorrow Never Knows." I wonder what he would've done with something like "Stone Cold Rage" or "Revolution Come Revolution Go." I haven't actually said it but, I miss Allen Woody. My world is definitely more boring without him rattling some bottles off the wall.