I think the first time I was at Red Rocks was my first gig as a member of the Allman Brothers Band, June of 1999.
It's a funny thing... I started touring at nine or ten years old, and for the first ten, fifteen, almost twenty years of your career, you're the youngest guy on stage and the youngest guy in the room.
But I think what makes a band great is that you're not trying to be someone else ever. At no point do you want it to become nostalgic; you never want to be a cover band for anybody.
You hear it in the great musicians, whether it's a drummer or a horn player or a guitar player - you hear them take those breaths. You can feel that there's something they're trying to tell you.
You hear a great Art Blakey drum solo or Elvin Jones, and you can tell when they're taking a breath. You can tell when they're loading up for something big. There's just this humanity in it, and I think that's important as well.
I live in Jacksonville, Florida, but Atlanta always feels like the hometown gig.
But every so often we'll get to this place where everyone in the room is fully focused on what's happening. You see it happens in sports sometimes, when there's a really important moment. It's a great thing when you can get to those places, when you look up you don't see a bunch of phones out.
When you're dealing with the age of Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram, then everything becomes very selfish and cynical.
We were just touring Europe, and I noticed that we'd go to all these beautiful places, and everyone's just taking a picture of themselves. I don't understand that at all. And I feel like that extends to music. I think we've lost the script a little bit.