The weather was lousy — cold, wet and windy — and the location was new, about a dozen subway stops north. But the Allman Brothers Band brought the springtime — sunshine, peaches and robust harmony guitars — to New York, as they have virtually every March since 1989, on the second night of their 2010 residency at the United Palace Theater in Harlem on Friday.
Watch Warren Haynes rock an acoustic set and get the lowdown on this year’s Allman Brothers’ run.
The Allmans opened with a dig at their usual home this time of year: New York skyline shots on the screen behind the band during the first-album medley of “Don’t Want You No More” and “Ain’t My Cross to Bear” included one of the Beacon Theatre with a red circle and a slash through it. (The venue has been taken over by a Cirque de Soleil production.) The audience booed accordingly. There have been troubles uptown too: The Allmans cancelled their March 22-27nd shows at United Palace because of an “unforeseen family matter,” according to a statement issued last week. The run ends on March 20th.
But the group was, from the start on March 12th, at peakin’-Beacon strength. Gregg Allman’s voice — precociously fierce and weathered in 1969, genuinely raw and vulnerable for the last couple of decades — carried “Ain’t My Cross to Bear” with scarred authority, against guitarist Derek Trucks’ snake-crawl lines of slide guitar and bursts of fuzzy sustain. Trucks and guitarist Warren Haynes hung together, spitting licks as the rhythm section built up to the segue into “You Don’t Love Me,” and ended the song by trading choruses like gunfire — an effect as familiar as the version on 1971’s At Fillmore East but fresh and stunning on impact.
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Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily