Joel Siegel

Butch Trucks and Jimo behind all of them, two drummers who had buried two founders and kept showing up to rehearsals anyway.

joel siegel covered the night for rolling stone's august thirtieth nineteen seventy three issue his line the one that became the thesis of the entire event was short at ten it was dark siegel wrote country dark and the allman brothers chewed em up and spit em out whole as they say let that number settle for a moment gently the way you might let a stone sink slowly through still water four hours ten at night until two in the morning not a set the length of a set not the forty or fifty minutes a band usually gives a festival crowd before the next act wheels its gear on four whole hours the kind of stretch that isn't really a performance any more so much as a long night lived out loud in front of people the clock turning past eleven past midnight past one and still the music going, still the field awake, still the band playing on into the dark.

Picture the darkness itself first, because a writer named Joel Siegel, covering that night for Rolling Stone, reached for exactly one word to hold it.

He called it country dark.

Sit with that for a moment.

A lot of people take it too far, and that's the problem.

Joel Siegel-

Mm

... another great journalist, um, Joel was a f- a great writer, but he would find the most arcane things to write about.