Butch Trucks
When we started, it was so intense: it was like a religion. And when you played with Duane Allman, you either gave it your all or you got out.
We did 300 shows in our first two years.
There will always be kids in every generation that understand that Lady Gaga is not music, it's theater.
We've been lucky because quite a few young people keep coming to see us play. We couldn't tour as much as we do if we could only count on the baby boomers.
I take my laptop with me on the road. When I come home, I log onto AOL, go to the Web site, and answer questions.
A lot of the cities where we have a strong following, we don't even get to every year anymore. But Stony Brook was a place that, from the very first time we went, the chemistry was right. They loved us, and we loved them, and we just kept going back and going back.
After 'Win, Lose or Draw' we were workin' on another album that nobody's ever heard, and it's a good thing nobody heard it.
'Enlightened Rogues' we made like the earlier ones: whatever tune came up, whatever direction it went in, that's the way it went. That's what we'll always do. I think if we ever stop doin' that, we ought to quit.
Our first album was kind of simple, but it had that fire, that energy that we have to have.
There's this new band that just started with us called the Dave Matthews Band. My God! I mean, I like those guys. Plus, Dave Matthews looks just like Forrest Gump.
Blues Traveler is hot, and Big Head Todd, the Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies - all of 'em.
Our approach is more the jazz approach, where you learn to play your instrument as well as you can, develop your craft, and then communicate with each other. That's the focus, not trying to give some message or entertain or have a good light show or whatever.
With The Allman Brothers, we made two studio records that were OK, but the first really great album was the live one, 'At Fillmore East.' We were a live band, and it's one of the reasons we were able to stick around for 45 years.
Back when Napster first came along, I started telling everybody Napster was like shooting yourself in the foot because you're stealing music. The record companies don't pay for us to make records - the bands do.
It wasn't unusual for an Allman Brothers record to cost $300,000.
There's always going to be a percentage of the kids out there who want to hear people who can actually play and sing.
My hearing after 50 years of playing music sometimes isn't too great.
Something happens when the music starts, and all that tiredness just goes away. When it's going like that, I'll take on any 20-year-old hot-shot drummer who wants to try me.
After we did the last Allman Brothers Band show, my wife and I just packed up and went to France for pretty much all of 2015, and I just got bored; I got the itch. I wanna play.
As long as all four of my limbs keep moving and I can still sit up straight and play hard rock and roll for 2 and a half to 3 hours, I'm gonna keep doing it, and I'm gonna do it the way I do it.
To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.
Sometimes you're gonna jump off a cliff and land flat on your face. Then you just get up and go again. But sometimes you dive off the cliff and start soaring with the eagles, and that's when you find new music, places that you've never been before.
Putting together two powerful sets is always difficult. After you really pour it out one night, it's hard to pour it out the next night.
Johnny Winter doesn't know the word 'subtlety.' But it works, it works.
To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.
With the jam bands I've seen, it's about music, and it's about theory, and it's about making everyone feel better with music.
The music became secondary to being rock stars.
A jam means it's not structured - let it go. Let it go here, let it go there.
There's nothing - nothing - like the magic of playing music.
I've never thought too much of 'Rolling Stone.' The first thing I'd do is look at about 50 or 60 of the drummers they have ahead of me and go, 'Oh yeah, right!'
We never thought that we would be more than an opening act.
I love Lucille Ball. But you don't call that Shakespeare. It's just entertainment, you know. And if you like that, then go have a ball, have fun.
There obviously are a hell of a lot of people that love Lady Gaga. But to me, she's been the theatre of the absurd. And the more absurd it is, the bigger she got.
We went on to become the No. 1 band in the country for three or four years. And that was probably the worst thing that could have happened to us.
I'm boring as hell. I just sit around and talk philosophy.
See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.
Country's cool if you like that kind of thing, but it doesn't have the complexity or - what's the word? - subtlety.
The trouble is that you get fans who tell you you're great no matter how big an idiot you are.