Mountain Jam

"Mountain Jam" is an improvised instrumental jam by The Allman Brothers Band, based on Donovan's 1967 hit song "There Is a Mountain". Performed throughout the group's career, "Mountain Jam" was originally released in 1972 on the album Eat a Peach, as recorded at the Fillmore East concert hall in March 1971 (during the same sessions that produced their prior live double album At Fillmore East). It is this rendition, that takes up two sides of that vinyl album,^[1] that is best known. As a composition, it is credited to all six band members – Duane Allman, Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jai Johanny Johanson, Berry Oakley, and Butch Trucks – as well as to Donovan Leitch.

Other live recordings were released on the Allmans albums Fillmore East, February 1970, Live at Ludlow Garage: 1970, Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival: July 3 & 5, 1970, The Fillmore Concerts, and deluxe edition of At Fillmore East (1971). Notably, Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival: July 3 & 5, 1970 contains two recordings of the song, the second of which features guest musicians Johnny Winter on slide guitar and Thom Doucette on harmonica. Renditions by the 2000s era of the group can be found on the retrospective live albums Cream of the Crop 2003, The Fox Box (2004), and Warner Theatre, Erie, PA 7-19-05. A performance from the band's final concert in 2014 is included on the album Final Concert 10-28-14.

Writers such as musician-critic Tony Glover for Rolling Stone and group biographer Scott Freeman have examined at length the structure regarding, and extolled the virtues of, the Eat a Peach performance.^[2][3] Not quite as enthusiastic is Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic, who assesses it as "a sprawling 33-minute jam that may feature a lot of great playing, but is certainly a little hard for anyone outside of diehards to sit through."^[4]

The Mountain Jam festival, held in Upstate New York beginning in 2005 and at which the Allmans appeared twice, is named after the instrumental.^[5]

Duane Allman was not a fan of Donovan in particular, but liked the happy-sounding melody and found it a good underpinning for improvisation.^[6] It had joined the group's convert repertoire by May 1969;^[7] the first known recording of a performance was done on May 4, 1969, at Central City Park in Macon, Georgia. It represented the kind of open-ended numbers that the group was employing to demonstrate their instrumental abilities and soon became of the highlights of their shows.^[7] By early 1970, performances were stretching to a half hour in length.^[8] However, the performances were often rambling and without direction.^[3] It continued to evolve,^[7] and gained more specificity and focused sectioning.^[3] It was typically the closing number of their shows.^[8]

An April 1970 performance at Ludlow Garage, a music venue in Cincinnati, produced a 44-minute "Mountain Jam" that was released two decades later on the album Live at Ludlow Garage: 1970.^[8] One writer, the Duane Allman biographer Randy Poe, has felt this superior to the Eat a Peach rendition.^[8] In contrast, Bruce Eder of AllMusic considers it "searing though somewhat disjointed",^[9] and David Browne of Rolling Stone says that "only die-hard Allmanites will want to wade through" it at its "forty-four mind-boggling minutes" of length.^[10]

Two July 1970 performances of "Mountain Jam" occurred at the 1970 Atlanta International Pop Festival, the first that was interrupted by a rain delay and the second, two days later, with guest musician Johnny Winter joining in.^[11] Both performances also featured quasi-member Thom Doucette on harmonica.^[8] While a couple of Allman Brothers numbers appeared on the 1971 triple live album The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies, "Mountain Jam" was not one of them; that would have to wait for the 2003 release Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival: July 3 & 5, 1970, which included both day's performances.^[12] Writer Thom Jurek considers the second performance to be superior to the Eat a Peach one.^[12]

There was much interplay in the development of this song between The Allman Brothers Band and another highly influential jam band, the Grateful Dead. According to the book Bill Graham Presents, one night at the Fillmore East in early 1970, when The Allman Brothers were there with the Grateful Dead and Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, stagehand Allan Arkush came into an area where Duane Allman, Peter Green, and Jerry Garcia were jamming together on "There Is a Mountain".^[13] In its full band form, "Mountain Jam" can be heard in a 31-minute rendition from the Allman Brothers' regular set during these shows, as captured on the record Fillmore East, February 1970.^[8] In The Music Box, John Metzger said, "... The highlight of this album ... is the nearly 31-minute 'Mountain Jam' that drips with a colorfully electrified intensity."^[14]

Preceding this, the Grateful Dead had briefly referenced "There Is a Mountain," both live and in studio. They can be heard quoting a few bars of it in their song "Alligator" on their 1968 album Anthem of the Sun. An example of the Garcia incorporating the "There Is a Mountain" riff can be heard at the 4:53 mark on the version of "Alligator" they performed at their August 21, 1968, show at the Fillmore West. They also played a 55-second sequence hinting at "There Is a Mountain" to transition between "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" and "Not Fade Away" on November 6, 1970, at Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York.^[15] It is unclear whether any of these uses were an influence on Duane Allman adopting "There Is a Mountain" for use by the Allman Brothers beginning in 1969.

Conversely, subsequent to the Eat a Peach release, at the conclusion of the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen on July 28, 1973, there was a 22:57 version of "Mountain Jam" performed by members of the Allmans, the Dead, and the third act on the festival bill, The Band.^[16] Still another collaboration came at the end of 1973, when Garcia was among those joining the Allmans for "Mountain Jam" at the end of a long, nationally broadcast New Year's Eve show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.^[17]

Some 33:41 in length in its March 1971 performance that ended up on the 1972 Eat a Peach album, the beginning of it had actually already been heard the year prior, coming immediately out of the conclusion of "Whipping Post", the final track of At Fillmore East, before being faded out.^[2]

The performance starts quietly with Butch Trucks' tympani beat fading in, soon followed by Duane Allman stating the theme against counterfigures from Dickey Betts; Jaimoe comes in with drums, followed by the rest of the band members, and when Trucks returns to his drum kit the main melody is played in unison.^[3] It then switches into a swing-like shuffle.^[3] The general feel of the arrangement is that of rock music mixed with jazz improvisation.^[2]

The instrumental then features solos from all of the band members. Duane Allman starts with a guitar solo, after which Gregg Allman solos on Hammond organ, followed by a guitar solo by Dickey Betts.^[3] Betts' part features prominent interplay with Berry Oakley on bass.^[2] This winds down and Duane plays bird call effects on slide guitar;^[3] these echo the ones Duane had played the previous year at the conclusion of the Derek and the Dominos classic recording "Layla".^[8]

As this point, midway through the performance, there is a drum duet by Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson, later joined by a bass solo by Oakley.^[3] This is where the two sides of the original vinyl record are split, with some amount of overlap provided so as to preserve continuity.^[2]

Then the whole band returns.^[3] Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun" is quoted musically in the piece, roughly 22 minutes in. Duane leads the group with the next section producing some of his best-known slide guitar work,^[3] 23 minutes in. The contemporaneous review of Eat a Peach in Rolling Stone said that "Duane takes off on a truly possessed solo, walking that knife-edge between mellow and madness – the old devil/saint demon that exists in every artist pouring out through his fingers."^[2]

This quiets down, then, led by Duane's lead guitar,^[3] is a section of the hymn "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"^[2] a little past the 27 minutes mark. It is something that Duane Allman worked into "Mountain Jam" many of the times it was played.^[8] It was also something that Gregg Allman would casually play on guitar during off-days, and altogether the hymn had found an important presence within the Allman Brothers community.^[3] As such it would be played by the band at Duane Allman's funeral later in 1971.^[8] Writer Scott Freeman says of Duane's playing during this second half of the Eat a Peach performance "carries a sad beauty; he may have sounded as good, but never better."^[3]

The band returns to playing the "There Is a Mountain" theme in unison, followed by waves of chords and ensemble sound with Trucks back on tympani.^[2][3] The recording ends with Duane thanking the audience for coming and introduces his bandmates then himself.^[3]

As with the previous album, no overdubs were made to the Fillmore East recording.^[7] Gregg Allman later said that the inclusion of "Mountain Jam" on the next record after At Fillmore East had always been intended, hence the incorporation of its start at the conclusion of "Whipping Post", and that it was not added simply to fill out Eat a Peach after Duane's passing.^[7][6] However, Butch Trucks later said that had Duane not died, it would not have been included and Eat a Peach would have been only a single album.^[8] In any case, writer Randy Poe considers it an "almost eerie foreshadowing" of what was to come.^[8]

The contemporaneous review of Eat a Peach in Rolling Stone by Tony Glover was quite praising of all aspects of "Mountain Jam".^[2] In 1979, The Rolling Stone Album Guide said that the performance "abounds in breathtaking musical interplay".^[1] Group biographer Alan Paul considers it lacking in some of the immediate urgency that At Fillmore East was known for.^[7] Two of the group's members subsequently voiced criticism of that particular performance's playing of "Mountain Jam", with Trucks characterizing it as mediocre and Betts as their worst effort.^[7] Part of this self-criticism may have been due to – despite Duane giving a count-in – the band botching the re-entrance after the bass solo, with Trucks in particular out of synch for a while.^[3] In any case, the March 1971 performance was the only proper multi-track recording they had of it, and it was considered an important number from the Duane Allman era, so they used it for Eat a Peach.^[7][8]

"Mountain Jam" remained a part of the Allman Brothers' rotating concert repertoire for the remainder of the group's existence,^[18] although not always as the show closer that it had once been. Indeed, the group unusually opened a show with it in 2000, as a way of introducing their sound with replacement member Jimmy Herring on guitar.^[19] The band's lineup subsequently stabilized with Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes as the two guitarists, Oteil Burbridge on bass, and Marc Quiñones on additional percussion. By 2008, the group was sometimes both opening shows with "Mountain Jam" and then reprising it at the show's end.^[20]

In the group's final show, at the Beacon Theatre in 2014, portions of "Mountain Jam" were again played twice, both early in the first set and toward the end of the third set, the latter with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" incorporated.^[21] This show was later released as the album Final Concert 10-28-14.^[22]

In these years, "Mountain Jam" was sometimes the vehicle for band explorations;^[19] in doing so they were encouraged by their longtime roadie Red Dog, who noted that in the early days the band played "Mountain Jam" differently every night.^[7] These experiments include a story told of a show at the PNC Bank Arts Center in 2000 where guitarists Trucks and Herring and bassist Burbridge detuned their instruments during the section before the drum solos.^[19] Several minutes of distorted electronic noises and abstract effects followed.^[23] This taking of the number "off the rails" and "to Mars", as Derek Trucks later characterized it, caused Gregg Allman to speak angrily to them after the show.^[7] But Gregg soon apologized, saying that back in the day he and his brother Duane had frequently had the same disagreements about how far to stray musically during a piece and that the guitarists should do what they do.^[7][19]