I'll get in trouble if I don't like this album. This is one of the most iconic live albums of all time by a band everyone seems to love. But I immediately know I'm in trouble when the running time is over and hour and the track list is only 7 songs. It makes me think of easily one of the worst albums I've heard thus far by fellow jam-band The Grateful Dead. Unlike The Grateful Dead I do like a fair amount of Allman Brothers music, so maybe this won't be so bad.
I really like the Allman sound- nothing wrong with classic blues-based rock, especially when it's sung by... uh, one of the Allman Brothers? I'm sure someone will correct me on which one it is. I also love the classic late-60s guitar distortion- sharp but crunchy. "Statesboro Blues" is an OK leadoff but it felt a bit long for a 4-minute number. Might have something to do with the relatively flat solos.
The album starts off with a pair of 12-bar blues numbers which is unfortunate. "Done Somebody Wrong" is announced as a new song but it's hard to take that claim seriously. It doesn't sound exactly like "Statesboro Blues" but it doesn't offer anything really new. These kind of songs need to be broken up with something else. I'm also worried that 2 songs in only 8 minutes have passed. How are they going to fill up another hour? I've also just noticed something weird for a live album... the songs are fading out at the end.
"Stormy Monday" is a slight twist on the standard I-IV-V 12-bar progression which is nice. But it's still a 12-bar blues song. The only major difference is it's played in 6/8 instead of 4/4 and it's much slower than the first 2 songs. The song is extended out to 9 minutes by a number of standard solos by the guitarists and organ players. I'm unimpressed.
So apparently we're going to get to our full runtime with a few longer songs. First up is "You Don't Love Me" at nearly 20 minutes. The hook on this one is interesting. The main riff takes up an extra 3 measures at the end of each passage. If I counted correctly that turns this into a 27-bar blues song, which is neat, but it's rooted in a standard I-IV-V progression which is getting really old. After about 7 minutes there's a slow unaccompanied guitar solo. Then the drummers join in- that's right, I said drummers. I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but having two drummers in a rock band is pretty pointless, especially when it's done the way The Allman Brothers Band does it. For the most part both drummers are playing identical parts which doesn't add any depth, just more noise.
At minute 14 the band starts up a standard blues jam. There's no doubt these guys can play and have a great sound. I just wish they'd do something interesting. Now I'm at 16:30 and I'm listening to another meandering unaccompanied guitar solo. Luckily I've had a recent injection of caffeine. The song closes out with a slow anthemic groove. It might have been neat if there was more buildup. Cruelly the bass player at the end of the song teases "Whipping Post" before the fade out, but that's not the next song on the album.
"Hot 'Lanta" is a furious minor-key blues rocker that perplexingly doesn't feature lyrics. Why wouldn't the Allman's want to use their fantastic vocalist on every track? It's really an unfortunate choice. "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" is a pretty nice haunting lounge number, but 4 minutes in and I still haven't heard a word from Mr. Allman. I do like the instrumental song "Jessica" so it's not like it's beyond the band to make a good song without lyrics. But that song has such an outstanding hook and multiple movements, so it doesn't matter if there are words to it. So far the instrumental passages on At Fillmore East aren't delivering the goods.
Credit where due: There is a particularly fiery guitar section near the end of "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed". I don't like how long it took to get there with almost nothing happening between the song's first few minutes and the last.
Thankfully "Whipping Post" does close out the festivities. That opening riff is really fantastic, and the verse going into the chorus is pretty much perfect before coming back around to that funky 11-beat riff. The version on their first album is epic in spite of its relatively meager 5-minute runtime.
Which is where I start having a serious problem with the At Fillmore East version. I guess because it became the band's biggest hit, and rightfully so, that means the live versions needed to be uselessly extended, in this case to 23 minutes. How do they justify stretching the song to more than 4 times its original length? After spending only 1 minute and 30 seconds on the first verse and chorus the band goes into a 4 minute solo section that is certainly impressive, but holy fuck is not needed. It's not like it's divided up into different passages, it's just the verse riff played over and over and over while the guitarists do their thing.
Then the second verse quickly comes and goes. The original song only had two verses before the brief but satisfying solo section, then a storming breakdown before a scorching last chorus. Here I sit more than 15 minutes before the end of the song and it's just going and going. Playing a riff this long really forces you to analyse and figure out how boring it can be.
Whoa... hold up... maybe something's about to happen. Everything just got really quiet and slow. Oh no, please don't let this be a minimalist improvisation piece. At this point they're not even playing "Whipping Post". They're not even playing anything remotely awesome. This is just totally wrong. If you're going to extend a live version of a song to almost half and hour, especially a song as cool as "Whipping Post" the different movements need to exude some sort of swagger to them. No one listens to "Whipping Post" to weep, but that's what this 5-minute passage in the live version of "Whipping Post" is seemingly trying to make me do.
Anyway, eventually the verse riff kicks back in. Mr. Allman's voice has had the last 13 minutes off, and yet he barely sounds interested in what's supposed to be a screeching final "SOMETIMES I FEEL!!!" All that supposed build up and he might as well have farted over the final chorus. Instead of ending with a dramatic final chord like on the studio version, this version kinda jangles around for the last 5 minutes of it's runtime.
In case you can't tell I'm pretty angry. It's been a while since I've gotten so worked up over a band's interpretation of its own song, but The Allman Brothers Band really shat all over an insanely good piece of music. Unless you really like The Allman Brothers Band this album is a waste of time- standard blues material stretched to interminable length. 1 star.
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