50th Anniversary Allman Brothers Band Retrospective Coming Next Month

Set for release on February 28th is the Allman Brothers Band's career-spanning 50th anniversary box set, Trouble No More: 50th Anniversary Collection. The set will be available is available as a 10 LP, five CD, or digital set.

According to the press release:

(The box set) was produced by Allman Brothers Band historians and aficionados Bill Levenson, John Lynskey, and Kirk West — and offers a massive selection of 61 Allman Brothers Band classics, live performances and rarities from across their 45-year career — and includes seven previously unreleased tracks that take you from the very beginning until the very end.

The collection is bookended with a live performance of 'Trouble No More' from the Allman Brothers Band’s final show at New York’s Beacon Theatre that brought the band’s legend to a close and which brings this retrospective full circle.

Around the time of the Allmans' 2008 Beacon dates, we caught up with the late-Gregg Allman and he explained that the band was particularly hot at that point: “We have some new stuff. The shows have been wonderful. Man, I've never been so glad to get out there and play. I swear, I felt like I was 20-years-old. There's two or three new things, and we've embellished on a couple of tunes that have gone into these pretty wild jams.”

The drummer Butch Trucks' musical connection to both Gregg and Duane Allman could not be overstated. Just prior to his 2017 death, he recalled to us the backstory to perhaps the Allman Brothers Band's most timeless song, “Melissa”: “That's the first song Gregg ever wrote. He wrote it. . . 'couldn't come up with a name for it. He knew he wanted it to be some girl, but he went down to the local 7-11 and there's some lady in there was screaming for her daughter – ‘Hey, Melissa! Melissa!' — Y'know, and that clicked. Greg said, ‘That's it! That's the name.' I remember when I first met Duane and Greg. He (Gregg) had just written this song. This was 1968, '67. We'd sit in their house in Daytona Beach and pretty. . . get really stoned, and Duane just fell in love with that song. He’d sit there (and say), 'Sing ‘Melissa,' sing 'Melissa,' and we’d sit there and Greg would just sing that song over and over, and we’d hear it eight or ten times every night.”