“Sometimes you’re gonna jump off a cliff and land flat on your face. Then you just get up and go again. But sometimes you dive off the cliff and start soaring with the eagles, and that’s when you find new music, places that you’ve never been before.”
― Butch Trucks
“When you’re good-looking, I think you usually don’t have to work as hard.”
― Butch Trucks
“I look at making a record and being in a recording studio as more of a craft; You have to be so much more careful and play simpler.”
― Butch Trucks
“Oh, he’s magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you’d never expect.”
― Butch Trucks
“I feel like the Cal Ripkin of rock n’ roll.”
― Butch Trucks
“A jam means it’s not structured – let it go. Let it go here, let it go there.”
― Butch Trucks
“You’re playing for yourself. And if you’re not playing for yourself, you’re an entertainer, doing it for the crowd.”
― Butch Trucks
“These people that dress up in spandex trousers with all the extraordinary makeup – I find it incredibly repulsive, always have.”
― Butch Trucks
“I loathe and detest heavy metal.”
― Butch Trucks
“A lot of these guys come up and say, ‘Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums.’ They don’t seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment – and painful.”
― Butch Trucks
“That whole Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame thing – at least half the people in there don’t have a place in any kind of hall of fame anywhere, in my opinion.”
― Butch Trucks
“Ginger Baker was never my favorite, but he was part of the group Cream that opened the door to what we did. They were the first band to really get into improvisation. They were an absolute necessity to what came later.”
― Butch Trucks
“For a long time, our only mode of travel was an Econoline van. Eleven of us, with nine sleeping in the back on two mattresses.”
― Butch Trucks
“Phil Walden had complete faith in us, and I’ll respect him forever for that. I think he sunk about $150,000 in us. He was close to bankruptcy a lot of the time, and Atlantic kept telling him we didn’t have a chance.”
― Butch Trucks
“My wife speaks very good French. She said she would miss lots of things in the U.S., but we can’t live there if Trump’s president.”
― Butch Trucks
“Donald Trump has been horrendous, saying things are bad because of Muslims or Mexicans. This is exactly what happened in the 1930s in Germany, and it’s gonna get worse.”
― Butch Trucks
“I’m not going to keep my mouth shut.”
― Butch Trucks
“We have a well and a garden. I crawl around in the mud and grow great vegetables.”
― Butch Trucks
“Majored in staying out of Vietnam.”
― Butch Trucks
“I’ve gotta be the only father begging his son to leave a six-figure job to go play in a rock n’ roll band!”
― Butch Trucks
“I’m enjoying the hell out of playing straight. It seems to be the case with everybody. We’re having a lot more fun. The energy is going into the music now, instead of all the side trips we got into in the ’70s.”
― Butch Trucks
“That was my first love growing up – classical orchestral music, especially Impressionism.”
― Butch Trucks
“I don’t think we listened to any rock n’ roll at all in the early days. It was Miles Davis and John Coltrane 95% of the time.”
― Butch Trucks
“We’re a live band. It’s what we do best.”
― Butch Trucks
“People feel entitled to take whatever’s online without paying for it.”
― Butch Trucks
“There are so many good, young bands out there who aren’t getting the attention they deserve.”
― Butch Trucks
“When we started the Allman Brothers Band, there was this great new technology that allowed us to get exposure: FM radio.”
― Butch Trucks
“I have done nothing my entire life but play music.”
― Butch Trucks
“I was going to go back to college and become a math teacher.”
― Butch Trucks
“Playing live is really the art form. You’re a lot freer, a lot looser. You’ve got people there that can give you feedback, and then you can play off of that. There’s so much more energy.”
― Butch Trucks
“Nobody is playing music like this, like the Allman Brothers, and there’s still a lot of fans out there, so that’s what we’re doing with Les Brers.”
― Butch Trucks
“We would work up a tune that would make me learn a drum pattern I hadn’t played before. In the early stages, the pattern wouldn’t just fall into place, and I would start thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the worse it would get.”
― Butch Trucks
“I remember somebody came in with Chicago Transit Authority, and we listened to it one time.”
― Butch Trucks
“We were either listening to jazz or Robert Johnson, the old blues man, but not to our peers.”
― Butch Trucks
“Duane lived life right on the edge. If you ever read Goethe’s Faust, Duane Allman was very much that kind of figure. His deal with Mephistopheles was to experience everything life has to offer, good and bad.”
― Butch Trucks
“The only way a musician can express feelings is playing.”
― Butch Trucks
“We all knew that asking another guitar player to step into Duane Allman’s shoes would not really be fair to anybody who had a conscience.”
― Butch Trucks
“One that really caught me was Joe Morello. He was the first drummer I ever saw that could do a roll with one hand. He would turn his hand over and use his fingertips to get the stick bouncing. He could sit there with his right hand doing stuff on the cymbals and tom-toms while he was doing a roll with his left on the snare drum.”
― Butch Trucks
“When I listened to Elvin Jones, man, for the first time I heard a drummer that had all the technique plus emotion, passion, feel, and just – good God!”
― Butch Trucks
“I like some things other people don’t like, and they like stuff I don’t like.”
― Butch Trucks
“When we started the Allman Brothers, it was all about the music.”
― Butch Trucks
“When we started Allman Brothers, Atlantic Records kept telling us there was no way it was going anywhere.”
― Butch Trucks
“Listen to John Coltrane. When he plays ‘A Love Supreme,’ that guy is totally into himself.”
― Butch Trucks
“This is show business, and there’s room for the shows and the personalities. But I think there’s also room for music, for people to play music, and there seems to be an audience developing that’s willing to go listen to music again, rather than just be blown away by drum machines and choreography.”
― Butch Trucks
“After being away from it for so long, it’s really nice to go out and have 10- or 15,000 people show up and enjoy it. It leaves you with a very good feeling.”
― Butch Trucks
“When I play, I stare at the left hand of whoever is playing lead. And I get to know what people are playing well enough that when they start going somewhere, once they arrive, I’m already there.”
― Butch Trucks
“Once we started headlining at the Fillmore East, we were free to play all night, at least for the second set. ‘Whipping Post’ could get lengthy.”
― Butch Trucks
“If there’s anybody who knew how to play in a studio, it was Duane Allman.”
― Butch Trucks
“Of all the songs we played, ‘Statesboro Blues’ was the most ripped-off.”
― Butch Trucks
“I have the distinction of being the only member of the Allman Brothers who has never missed a single show. I have played every single show the Allman Brothers have ever played.”
― Butch Trucks
“When we’re playing, when we’re really, really going… you’re just in the moment. You’re not thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, or anything else. The brain gets out of the way. Your body just does what it knows how to do, and it’s just… it’s like a religion.”
― Butch Trucks
“Eric Clapton has earned all of our respect. He is the greatest. He opened the doors for us. Without Cream, there is no Allman Brothers.”
― Butch Trucks
“The Allman Brothers 1969 to 1971… were all about… jumping off the cliff… Just taking music and being adventurous with it.”
― Butch Trucks
“When we started, it was so intense: it was like a religion. And when you played with Duane Allman, you either gave it your all or you got out.”
― Butch Trucks
“We did 300 shows in our first two years.”
― Butch Trucks
“There will always be kids in every generation that understand that Lady Gaga is not music, it’s theater.”
― Butch Trucks
“We’ve been lucky because quite a few young people keep coming to see us play. We couldn’t tour as much as we do if we could only count on the baby boomers.”
― Butch Trucks
“I take my laptop with me on the road. When I come home, I log onto AOL, go to the Web site, and answer questions.”
― Butch Trucks
“A lot of the cities where we have a strong following, we don’t even get to every year anymore. But Stony Brook was a place that, from the very first time we went, the chemistry was right. They loved us, and we loved them, and we just kept going back and going back.”
― Butch Trucks
“After ‘Win, Lose or Draw’ we were workin’ on another album that nobody’s ever heard, and it’s a good thing nobody heard it.”
― Butch Trucks
“’Enlightened Rogues’ we made like the earlier ones: whatever tune came up, whatever direction it went in, that’s the way it went. That’s what we’ll always do. I think if we ever stop doin’ that, we ought to quit.”
― Butch Trucks
“Our first album was kind of simple, but it had that fire, that energy that we have to have.”
― Butch Trucks
“There’s this new band that just started with us called the Dave Matthews Band. My God! I mean, I like those guys. Plus, Dave Matthews looks just like Forrest Gump.”
― Butch Trucks
“Blues Traveler is hot, and Big Head Todd, the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies – all of ’em.”
― Butch Trucks
“Our approach is more the jazz approach, where you learn to play your instrument as well as you can, develop your craft, and then communicate with each other. That’s the focus, not trying to give some message or entertain or have a good light show or whatever.”
― Butch Trucks
“With The Allman Brothers, we made two studio records that were OK, but the first really great album was the live one, ‘At Fillmore East.’ We were a live band, and it’s one of the reasons we were able to stick around for 45 years.”
― Butch Trucks
“Back when Napster first came along, I started telling everybody Napster was like shooting yourself in the foot because you’re stealing music. The record companies don’t pay for us to make records – the bands do.”
― Butch Trucks
“It wasn’t unusual for an Allman Brothers record to cost $300,000.”
― Butch Trucks
“There’s always going to be a percentage of the kids out there who want to hear people who can actually play and sing.”
― Butch Trucks
“My hearing after 50 years of playing music sometimes isn’t too great.”
― Butch Trucks
“Something happens when the music starts, and all that tiredness just goes away. When it’s going like that, I’ll take on any 20-year-old hot-shot drummer who wants to try me.”
― Butch Trucks
“After we did the last Allman Brothers Band show, my wife and I just packed up and went to France for pretty much all of 2015, and I just got bored; I got the itch. I wanna play.”
― Butch Trucks
“As long as all four of my limbs keep moving and I can still sit up straight and play hard rock and roll for 2 and a half to 3 hours, I’m gonna keep doing it, and I’m gonna do it the way I do it.”
― Butch Trucks
“To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you’ve got to put some time into it.”
― Butch Trucks
“Putting together two powerful sets is always difficult. After you really pour it out one night, it’s hard to pour it out the next night.”
― Butch Trucks
“Johnny Winter doesn’t know the word ‘subtlety.’ But it works, it works.”
― Butch Trucks
“To be honest, I don’t listen to much music! I’ve been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I’ll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.”
― Butch Trucks
“With the jam bands I’ve seen, it’s about music, and it’s about theory, and it’s about making everyone feel better with music.”
― Butch Trucks
“The music became secondary to being rock stars.”
― Butch Trucks
“There’s nothing – nothing – like the magic of playing music.”
― Butch Trucks
“I’ve never thought too much of ‘Rolling Stone.’ The first thing I’d do is look at about 50 or 60 of the drummers they have ahead of me and go, ‘Oh yeah, right!’”
― Butch Trucks
“We never thought that we would be more than an opening act.”
― Butch Trucks
“I love Lucille Ball. But you don’t call that Shakespeare. It’s just entertainment, you know. And if you like that, then go have a ball, have fun.”
― Butch Trucks
“There obviously are a hell of a lot of people that love Lady Gaga. But to me, she’s been the theatre of the absurd. And the more absurd it is, the bigger she got.”
― Butch Trucks
“We went on to become the No. 1 band in the country for three or four years. And that was probably the worst thing that could have happened to us.”
― Butch Trucks
“I’m boring as hell. I just sit around and talk philosophy.”
― Butch Trucks
“See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n’ roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.”
― Butch Trucks
“Country’s cool if you like that kind of thing, but it doesn’t have the complexity or – what’s the word? – subtlety.”
― Butch Trucks
“The trouble is that you get fans who tell you you’re great no matter how big an idiot you are.”
― Butch Trucks
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