time to re-issue this don nix classic
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Saturday, May 1, 2021
the duane allman programme...
Jimmy Johnson : “Duane Allman could play rhythm, acoustic, anything you want,” says Johnson. "He couldn’t read a chart but he had this amazing talent. You hear this all the time but Duane really had it. He’d hear a song one time and you didn’t have to tell him – you play any chord in the song and he would know right where it was.
“We would always talk about guitars. He played a Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul. He always used a Fuzz Face. That was basically for distortion. He’d line up about ten of those nine-volt batteries and he figured out a way to drain the power in those batteries down to about a third. He always said that they sounded ten times better when they would almost be powered out. It gave him the more textured distortion he was looking for.” Johnson was particularly impressed with Duane’s thirst to play.
“He had the guitar in his hands at least eight to ten hours a day,” Johnson recalls. "I don’t know anybody who did that. He was such a prolific player, he knew everything about his guitar, about the neck of his guitar, where to play, how to play, where the sounds were, the best place for the good sounds. People that bend strings like he did, there are pushers and pullers, and Duane pushed more than he pulled. He’d put two fingers together and get two strings and bend them up, you didn’t see him pulling them down, it was mainly pushing up.
“When it came to slide, forget it,” Johnson laughs. “I think part of what made his sound on slide is how familiar he was with the instrument. He did it out of love, y’know? Sitting around the studio he always had the guitar around his neck, playing it, even when he wasn’t on a session. He made me feel bad. I was saying, ‘God, I gotta get me on the Duane Allman program.’ That’s how special he was.”
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