New Book In The Works On Allman Brothers Band’s ‘Brothers And Sisters’ Era
The volume will be a deep dive into the period surrounding the group’s seminal 1973 album that gives the book its title.
A new book by New York Times bestselling author Alan Paul, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s, will be published next year. It will be a deep dive into the period surrounding the group’s seminal 1973 album that gives the book its title.
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Paul is known, among other work, for 2014’s One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band, and for Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 2019. The book is due via St. Martin’s Press on July 25 next year, to mark the album’s 50th anniversary. It will contain first-person interviews, deep research, historical documents, and a trove of unheard interviews conducted by the band’s “Tour Mystic,” Kirk West.
“Kirk was researching a book while the band was broken up in 1986 and 1987,” says the author, “and he interviewed all the surviving members extensively: Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, as well as many other friends and associates. The subjects were talking to someone they deeply trusted, the band was twice broken up with no plans to reunite, and everyone was bracingly honest and deeply reflective and insightful.
“The interviews were an absolute gold mine, most of which not even Kirk had ever listened to. I am thrilled to get them out to fans of the band. I can’t wait to share this book and start talking about it!”
In an interview with Relix, Paul goes on: “I had to convince myself that it made sense to write a second book about the Allman Brothers Band, but I knew that there was a lot more to say about them and about their impact on America beyond music. The era that was the most crucial yet most under-explored was the time before and after Brothers and Sisters, an album recorded and released in 1973, and as I began researching the time period, I grew ever more excited about the project.”
He says of the album at the center of the upcoming project: “Brothers and Sisters became the Allman Brothers Band’s first true hit, pushing them to superstardom beyond their devoted circle of hardcore fans as they rose above being America’s great rock bands to become a national institution.
“Behind the album and its era was a larger story of America. It was also tremendously interesting and fun to dig deeply into the band’s relationship with the Grateful Dead and start figuring out why it abruptly ended after they pulled off the country’s biggest-ever rock festival together, drawing 600,000 people to Watkins Glen, New York.”
Buy or stream Brothers and Sisters.
