On any given night, Southern blues rocker Devon Allman will look over at Duane Betts and experience a bit of déjà vu.
He sees Betts’s famous father Dickey, who for decades shared the stage with Allman’s famous father Gregg in the Allman Brothers Band.
“It’s pretty wild looking over (at Duane). I swear sometimes I’m looking over at Dickey,” Allman said from a tour stop in Birmingham, Alabama, early this month.
The younger Betts is the special guest on the maiden tour of Allman’s months-old Devon Allman Project. The show pulls into Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St., on Friday, May 25.
“We met in ‘89 on the Allman Brothers reunion tour. I was like 17, he was like 12,” Allman, 45, recalled. “Then we started to go out there and really work ourselves and we ran into each other in L.A., Atlanta and London. We’d end up on some of the same festivals and the same bills. We did a couple of cruises together where I would sit in with his dad. We just kind of kept in touch.”
The Devon Allman Project, a six-piece band comprised of “six cats that all play at the top of their game,” is the latest musical incarnation for Allman, whose nearly 20-year Southern rock and blues career has included fronting a couple of bands and performing solo, recording nine albums along the way. Allman put it together late last year, months after his father died in spring 2017 of liver cancer at the age of 69.
During our phone call, Allman gave us a preview of Friday’s show and his new band, and said his father would be proud that his legacy and music is resonating with a new generation of fans.
Months of silence, then a big comeback: “When my father passed, I was like, you know, I’ve never taken a year off. I’m going to do it now and kind of huddle around my family and deal with this. When I started to realize, hey, I can’t sit around forever, I got to get back to work. I just thought it would be cool to come back a lot bigger and stronger. So instead of a four-piece band, I have a six and we’re bringing Duane out. ... Duane is just really killing it. And we close the show with a round of tipping our hats to our heroes, and that includes our dads.”
Keeping dad’s memory and music alive: “I think he would be proud today knowing that a bit of that catalogue still gets to move people. We’ve had instances almost every night on this tour where people are weeping. I think that’s a testament. I think we’re reminding them of a pretty glorious time of their lives.” To help kind of summon that energy in some older folks is really amazing, and to see the younger kids that maybe didn’t get to see our dads still get to experience that flavor of music has been really cool.
Giving young people an alternative: “The crap they play on the radio is like the fast food of music. People are starting to realize that fast food isn’t all that great for you. The same thing with music. I think the more plastic crap with no soul out there that they feed the kids on the airwaves and the internet, the smart ones are going to go, ‘Man, this isn’t music, this isn’t soulful.’ And it doesn’t mean that it has to be our genre; I’m not trying to be a music snob within our genre. I listen to thrash metal. I listen to Nigerian jazz, and, no kidding, everything in between. But the stuff like the drum machines and synthesizers. Some people can make art out of it and a lot of other people just make a lot of noise with it.”
Bigger, badder super band: “I’ve always tried to kind of shake it up. I had a band called Honey Tribe. I was in a band called Royal Southern Brotherhood. Then I did the solo thing for a few years. This is called the Devon Allman Project. It’s badass; it’s six cats that all play at the top of their game. I kind of stole the best cats from St. Louis and then I got Nicholas David who was on the TV show ‘The Voice,’ the finalist. He’s a badass keyboard player and just a helluva cat. We’ve got a cat (R. Scott Bryan) who was in Sheryl Crow’s band during her big years. He’s our percussionist and background vocalist. They are all really cool.”
When he’s not on stage, you might find him in the kitchen: “Oh hell yes I cook. I have a hot sauce, it’s award-winning and we sell a lot of it. It’s actually really good. ... I don’t cook on the road; the road isn’t very conducive of bringing out all your spices and utensils. ... I do have barbecues or big dinners at my house for my band.”
