St. Cloud Times — The members of St. Cloud’s CloudHeads band noticed something about their set list: A good number of the songs were by the Allman Brothers Band.
“You didn’t even think about it. Those were the songs you wanted to play,” guitar player Harry Kent III said. “We just figured we’d take it a step farther.”
The four CloudHeads — Kent, Andy Ferkinhoff, Mark “Hazzy” Hasbrouk and Karl Konz — teamed up with Greg Jorgenson to form Allman Joy, a tribute to the Allman Brothers Band.
Allman Joy will make its debut in Oct. 23-24 shows at Pioneer Place on Fifth.
Like the original band, Allmann Joy has two guitar players (Hasbrouck and Kent) and a drummers (Konz). Jorgenson is on keyboard/organ, while Ferkinhoff plays bass guitar. For the most part, they share vocals duty.
“It’s a great band. It’s a great bunch of guys, really mellow,” Jorgenson said. “They really truly love the Allman Brothers.”
Even though the Allman Joy members are veterans of the St. Cloud music scene, this project has inspired genuine enthusiasm among them. The classic blues-rock band known for improvising has been an influential part of their musical lives.
“Every single tune I love,” Hasbrouk said. He said it might sound silly, but Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts is so unbelievably underrated that he’s almost on the level of a Mozart.
“Some of his musical pieces are just mind blowing,” Hasbrouck said.
“They can get that emotion out of you,” he said.
Ferkinhoff even won a talent competition as a kid playing “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Performing those songs with Allman Joy decades later, “it’s been, in my mind, a long time coming for me,” he said.
Jorgenson became an Allman Brothers Band fan in 1973 when he heard “Jessica,” which featured two keyboards and had a piano solo that Jorgenson loved.
“It’s been like a lifelong goal of mine to be able to play that,” he said. He’ll get his wish in a little more than a week.
2 is better than one (times two)
Kent says he’s drawn to the Allman Brother Band in part because of its two-guitar combo.
“They play a lot of the same scales, but every song … can have a totally different feel to it,” he said. The two-drummer setup also is impressive. “I didn’t even know that was a possibility” before the Allman Brothers Band, Kent said.
Ferkinhoff said when he was learning to play, he enjoyed trying the Allman Brothers Band bass lines.
“You may think it’s an easy song, but they throw this twist in there,” he said.
Of course, the Allman Brothers Band didn’t stop there, also having two drummers (and sometimes adding more percussionists). Allman Joy may add another percussionist for the show, too.
The Allman Brothers Band has a wild history to match the complexity of its blend of blues-rock, Hasbrouk noted. That includes the murder of Duane and Gregg Allman’s father, Duane’s motorcycle death at age 24 and bassist Berry Oakley’s motorcycle death about a year after Duane’s, in the same area where Duane died. Duane Allman’s death had made Oakley despondent before his own.
“It’s a pretty sad story,” Hasbrock said. “It’s an amazing story, too, though. When they first started, they played for about a year, and they didn’t have any breaks. For how great they were, they were basically just playing dives and not getting the exposure they needed.”
That changed with the band’s 1971 album “At Fillmore East,” which some still consider one of the greatest live albums ever.
That album, “it captures what they’re totally all about,” Hasbrouk said. “We were contemplating doing that album, (but) there are so many songs that we love that aren’t on it that we wanted to play.”
The Allman Joy band members are hopeful they’ll get many chances to play the songs they love. Many tribute bands play one show and they’re done, Ferkinhoff noted.
“We’re going to attempt to keep it going,” he said. The band would love to be booked a couple of times every other month.
But for now, the group is looking forward to its debut show. And yes, there will be some Allman Brothers Band-style improvisation.
“We’re not going to play them as long as the Allman Brothers do,” Hasbrouck said, noting this is a different audience than the acid-tripping ones that watched the band decades ago. “This is probably a more focused crowd. They’ll appreciate the jamming, but I don’t think they want to hear ‘Whipping Post’ going 20 minutes.”
