Where Penn ends at 8th Street is an apartment house. In 1969 and a bit, it was called The Zoo. Jan Jackson, Tom Jones and Dave Hoffman, friends from college, lived in an upstairs apartment. I was visiting on a Sunday morning in Spring 1969, May 11th.

Three guys came in the front door. I recognized one as Berry Oakley, the bass player from The Roeman’s who’d played in my hometown in South Georgia. Someone said one of the other hippie guys played guitar with Aretha Franklin. They announced they were a new band up from Macon to play in Piedmont Park. The other guy had led them to a friend at The Zoo for attitude adjustment prior to the gig.

Free music in Piedmont Park was starting to be a regular Sunday event at that time. We wandered over eager to see who would play today. The stone steps were like hip hullabaloo. Some of the best musicians Atlanta had to offer had graced the steps, but so had some neophytes not yet ready for the stage, and even some who would never be ready.

The Allman Brothers looked like just another group of longhaired hippie musicians, but they had two drummers and one was black. That was unusual in 1969 Atlanta. The instant they started to play two more things became obvious. Two guitars were playing leads that intertwined around each other seductively, and these guys were so much better than anything we’d ever heard live. The bite and snarl of the blues rocked along on propulsive rhythms. The songs were old blues and originals, but all were like nothing heard before.  Recognizable fragments of other songs were sneaking through, but as soon as recognized they submerged again to let something else arise. “Wasn’t that Donovan’s song about a mountain?”

Usually when bands played people walked dogs, threw Frisbees, barbecued, and just enjoyed Atlanta’s park on a Spring Sunday.  Today everything else came to a halt. White, black,  young, and older all focused totally on the Allman’s music. The crowd was a dancing party focused towards the stone steps.

The next week’s community newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird, devoted the cover to a picture of Duane Allman in his STP t-shirt playing on the stone steps at Piedmont. The accompanying article stated that everyone there that day knew they had experienced something extraordinary and unforgettable, and it was too big to stay just in Atlanta, or the South, or the US.

The community followed The Allman Brothers to gigs both free and paid; they were a guarantee of an outstanding musical experience.

The Brothers again played Piedmont Park July 7th, 1969 with The Grateful Dead for a free concert after the First Atlanta Pop Festival. Their set amazed the festival goers still in town. Then they joined the Dead to jam at the end of the evening and more than held their own. Now they really found their musical niche, and the secret was out. 

The Brothers recently returned to play Piedmont 9/8/7 and the infusion of new blood plus the vets, made the groove live again.

Check a more complete story of that evening at www.thestripproject.com

http://www.thestripproject.com/Hippies_Stories/Entries/2007/5/19_Dead_in_Piedmont_Park.html