By: Dr. Matt Warnock
If the Allman Brothers Band’s career had to be summed up in two words or less they would be determination and longevity. Having recently celebrated their fortieth anniversary as a band, this group of Southern rockers has weathered drastic changes in the music industry, fallouts with record labels, changes in technology and personal tragedy to remain as one of the most famous and successful classic rock bands in the history of the genre. While many people remember the band from their early days in the 1970’s, when they were tearing up the charts, the band is still going strong today as they continue to put on concerts that rival anything they’ve done throughout their multi-decade history.
The Allman Brothers Band is currently gearing up to begin their March 2010 concert series at the United Palace Theater in New York City. For those who can’t travel to the show, or even get tickets if they can be there, each concert will be webcast live from the theater through Moogis. What is Moogis you ask? Moogis is a subscription-based website that provides streaming webcasts of live and archived concerts. Currently the site features concerts solely by the ABB, but there are plans to expand to other bands and genres of music in the near future.
Subscribers to the site will need a high-speed broadband internet connection and a decent computer to derive the most from the streaming experience, while the site takes care of the rest. This includes access to the live webcasts from the 2009 fortieth anniversary run, and the 2010 shows, plus over fifty archived ABB concerts, and giving fans a chance to interact through forums and live chat rooms. Apart from experiencing these concerts live as they stream across the web, the site provides access to these shows, through their archives, twenty-four hours a day, for the duration of the year-long subscription.
Allman Brothers Band drummer and Moogis founder Butch Trucks recently sat down with Guitar International Magazine to talk about the Moogis experience, the secret to the bands longevity and his life as a computer enthusiast and gamer.
***
Matt Warnock: You’re a pretty tech savvy guy, who’s been into computers long before developing Moogis. How did you first become involved in computers and online technology?
Butch Trucks: It’s pretty complicated and convoluted. I’m the kind of guy, and a lot of drummers tend to be this way, when I was a kid I would get all my Christmas gifts and the first thing I’d do is take them all apart. Then I’d try and put them all back together again. I’m pretty good at figuring out how things work, so I always thought that the computer was designed just for me. [Laughs]
I got my first 450 XL from a company named Zeos, way back during DOS, long before Windows. I started to look at the computer and realized that its design was pretty straight forward. So I threw out all the manuals and started to figure out how it worked on my own, and after several years of spending a great deal of time with tech support I really got my head around those systems.
You’re probably too young to remember, but this was back in the day where if you got a new game, program or even something like new speakers it was a week-long adventure just trying to get it to work. I’ve been into computers since right about the time that the first personal computers came out, which led me into gaming and programming. I’m actually fooling around a bit on World of Warcraft right now, nothing too complicated, just some basic maintenance stuff. Do you play WoW?
Matt: No, but a lot of my friends and students do, I’m a teacher. It seems to be something that’s popular across the board, with a wide range of people, young and old.
Butch: Well for me, it’s been my salvation on the road. The hard part of touring is dealing with the down time. We finish a show, climb into the tour bus and head to the next city, usually hanging in the hotel all night and the next day before heading to the gig. I don’t like watching television so gaming is perfect for me. Every hotel these days has a broadband connection, and I just bought a new Alien Wear laptop, so I can bring my games with me on the road.
By being a gamer I’ve learned that this is where the communities of today are being formed. We used to come home from school and go down the street and play baseball or football, whatever the season was. Now, kids come home and log on to social networking sites, online games, or whatever, and that’s where they socialize. In a way it’s kind of cool.
I think they’re missing out on a lot of outdoor exercise and what now, but they do end up spending a lot of time with people who like what they like, not just the kids who happen to live down the street. They can go to these sites and hang out with like minded people, no matter where they live or what they’re into, video games, certain types of music, whatever.
What I’ve been trying to do with Moogis is similar to this type of interaction. A few years ago I started a jam-band music label, right at the time when the whole music label scene was really falling on its face. After several releases we realized that we were wasting our time, money and everything else, and I came very close to just shutting the whole thing down.
For as long as I’ve been around record labels have controlled the industry from two fronts, they controlled the exposure point, radio, and the distribution point, record stores. With the invention and absolute dominance of the internet, the record companies can’t control these fronts anymore and it’s wreaking havoc on their business.
When I started about forty years ago, if you didn’t get on a major label you couldn’t get on the radio or in record stores, so basically you had no career. These days, everyone is buying their music on the internet and spending more and more time listening and watching artists online.
All this got me thinking that I didn’t need to shut down my label, I just needed to shift the paradigm of the business into more of a community based setup. If you go to Moogis the first thing you’ll see is the forum section, where people can join for free to share their ideas on music, the industry, their favorite bands and songs, that sort of thing.
There are also the live chat rooms that we feature during the concerts. People can log in and talk about the show as it’s happening live in front of them on the screen, which a lot of people took advantage of during our first run of concerts last year.
I had people tell me that the music we played was some of the best they’ve ever heard, but it was still a toss up as to what was more entertaining, the music or what was going on in the chat rooms. Laughs It was just incredible, just one belly laugh after another. Our die-hard fans that know us so well kept everyone on their toes with their comments on the band and the music. It just kept going all night long throughout the show.
That’s part of what I’m trying to do, bring in new elements to enhance the concert going experience. You can’t do this stuff at a live show. You can talk to people, but it’s hard to carry on a conversation while the music’s going on. It adds a new and interesting element to the concert that hasn’t been done before. It adds a community element to it, even people who don’t want to watch the concert, can still participate in the conversations going on in the forums.
It’s been slow going at first, but things are really picking up as we gear up for the March shows. So far the site’s only featured the Allman Brothers Band, but we’re looking to expand on that shortly.
Matt: I was just going to ask, do you have plans to expand your artist roster by adding other bands and other genres of music?
Butch: We have a group that we’ve met with that are very highly connected within the industry, who’s handling a lot of our online marketing. We met with them last month and decided that we’ll keep our focus on the Allman Brothers Band until the March shows come around, and then starting in April we’ll look to expand the site to include other bands and genres of music.
Starting this April we’re going expand the site so that you can log on almost every night of the week and see a new band performing live on the site. We’re going to wire five or six clubs up around the country, so that all these young new bands will be able to play. And two or three times a week we’ll take a mobile unit to a Dave Matthews or Gov’t Mule type concert. So we’ll really try and run the gamut of the jam-band scene.
It’ll give people a chance to see the big-name bands, but also give the younger bands a chance to get some national exposure, which is very hard to come by these days. We’re also going to make sure that the bands that we feature on the site are paid fairly and have a chance to make some decent money from their concerts. I’m sure you’re aware of how bad the record labels have screwed artists over the years, and it’s really taken its toll on both sides of the industry.
Being in the Allman Brothers Band I think we’re one of the few bands that’s been around long enough to have been screwed by every major label out there. Laughs We’re in court with Sony and Universal right now, we have two lawsuits against them in court right now. We had no choice. It just got so bad that we had to do something about it. I’m trying to create the site so that none of this stuff happens.
I won’t sign a band unless they buy into my philosophy that this is an artist-friendly site where the artist is going to benefit from their creation. This is the legacy I want to leave behind. I see it as a no brainer. This is where it’s going to go.
I think we all know that even the big TV networks are struggling. I mean, who wants to watch twenty minutes of commercials every hour just to watch a TV show? And cable isn’t much better. I have every channel on my TV known to man and I still can’t find anything to watch most nights. Laughs
The internet is ultimately going to be where everybody goes, and it’s already happening. People can now plug the internet into their computers, TV’s, phones etc, and go to their favorite sites to check out what’s going on, and I expect Moogis is going to be the favorite site for jam-band fans out there.
As we expand we’ll take this idea to other genres, to blues, to jazz, other genres where this model works. Fans tend to get into a band in these genres and stick with them for a long time.
Pop music isn’t even on my radar right now. People tend to go through pop bands almost daily, and I don’t think that’s the right formula to build the long-term community that we’re doing with Moogis. Those communities are more suited for sites like Facebook, that are constantly changing and in flux.
Matt: Is Moogis going to continue to be a subscription service going forward, or are people going to be able to buy tickets to individual shows?
Butch: The way we’re doing it now is strictly subscription, you pay one fee and that gets you all of the shows for a year. All of the people who signed up last year for the fortieth anniversary run, including the sixty-five guest performers with Clapton and everyone, are still watching those shows. For the price of one in-person ticket, they’ve been able to watch all fifteen shows live, and continue to watch them over the past year on the site.
One of the things that we’re really trying to do is present the concerts with the best quality we can. Last year we were pretty close to high-def, with the streaming, and this year I think we’ll pull it off. If you’ve got a broadband connection and high-def capabilities you’ll be able to enjoy the shows with some of the best quality picture available today.
Matt: It seems like a computer savvy guy like yourself has probably been thinking this stuff over for years waiting for the technology to catch up to your vision.
Butch: You go it, exactly. When I first came up with this idea, and I tried to get it funded and online, the best thing that happened was that I didn’t. When I first thought of this the best we could have done is get a small, four-inch video up on the screen with very sketchy quality. It would have been extremely pixilated because the band width just wasn’t out there at the time. More importantly the compression wasn’t there to deliver a really good picture at anywhere near the bandwidth needed.
We’re really able to send a music higher definition signal these days over a much smaller bandwidth. It’s just getting better and better. There’s more bandwidth available to the general public, and the compression on the frontend is much better. We’re getting to the point where, if you have a good cable or DSL connection, you can get a high def signal. Put that up there on your TV and it’s way better than a normal TV signal.
It’s not quite Blue-Ray quality yet, but it’s better than watching a TV show. This year we’re trying to get it up to Blue-Ray quality, to true high def, and I think we’re going to pull it off.
Matt: Most bands wouldn’t get to this point in their careers, where they can open their own streaming website, simply because bands come and go very quickly these days. The Allman Brothers have been around for forty years, and stuck with it through many changes in the industry and of course the personal tragedies that you’ve experienced as a band. What has been the one thing that keeps you going night after night after all these years?
Butch: The music. Last year, the fifteen shows at the Beacon were absolutely magic, every show. We did sixty or seventy shows overall last year and every one of them was just magic, that never happens, I don’t care who you are. It’s inexplicable. We’re just at the top of our games and though we’re playing the same songs as we were forty years ago, they’re not the same songs we were playing forty years ago. We’ve really grown as a band and the music is growing all the time.
We go on tour now, I’m sixty-three years old, and when I’m walking up to my drums I’m wondering if I’m even going to make it up those three steps.[Laughs] By the time we’re five minutes into the first song I’m Superman. I’ve got all this energy and it’s something that happens that’s just inexplicable. I feel like a teenager, I’m sky high, and every show last year was like this. There were no down nights.
As long as that continues, this will continue. I want to archive this magical experience with Moogis. If you can’t come out to New York to catch the shows live, log on to Moogis and you’ll have the best seats in the house.
***
Links
Moogis Homepage
Allman Brothers Homepage
A Decade of Hits 1969-1979 on Amazon
