The Allman Brothers Band - One More Ride (Edited Song) (1970)

Here's something I'm pretty psyched about. I feel like I've created a "new classic Allman Brothers Band song from their heyday! Maybe not, but I'd be curious what you think.

I don't know anything about this song except that it was co-written in 1970 by band members Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts. It first appeared as an instrumental just under three minutes long on the 1988 box set "Dreams." Then an instrumental "remix" just under four minutes long appeared as a bonus track on a "super deluxe" edition of the "Idlewild South" album in 2015.

Yet there's another version of the song available only as a bootleg that's seven minutes long, and it has vocals by Gregg Allman, with perfectly good lyrics! So it's not really meant to be an instrumental after all. If you listen to the instrumental versions, there are long stretches where not much is happening, for instance no soloing. Clearly, those are the parts where the vocals were supposed to go.

Normally, I would just put the superior version with vocals on one of my stray tracks compilations. But unfortunately, the sound quality for that version sucks. It sounds really muddy and muffled. That's probably why that version is hard to find even on bootleg. So I decided to try to merge the two versions together.

First, I used a sound editing program to try to reduce the muddiness of the vocal version. I only had limited success, since I'm far from an expert in this kind of thing, and there's usually only so much even experts can do. But I think it helped some. Then I patched the vocal parts into the longer of the two instrumental versions. I had a hard time getting the timing just right, because there were slight changes in the speed of the song as it went along, in both versions, since they were recorded by fallible human beings many years before most recordings became computerized and the variability of drumming was lost in favor of metronome-like consistency (and soullessness). Still, after a lot of tinkering, I think I got pretty close on the timing.

I also had to put an instrumental version of the verse at the start of the song, because otherwise the vocals came in when the intro drumming bit was still going on, and it didn't sound good. I think this change works out fine, because there's a little guitar riff going on that keeps the instrumental version of the song interesting.

The end result doesn't sound perfect by any means, but hopefully it's close enough for horseshoes. One can clearly hear the change in sound quality each time the vocals come in. But I feel it's better to have it like that than have the whole song in poor sound quality.

By the way, the unreleased version is longer than the others in part because it has a drum solo in the middle that lasts for about two minutes. I don't think it's a big loss missing that, since most people aren't fans of drum solos (including myself). In fact, I think the song works a lot better here at four minutes long. It could and should have been played on the radio.

I've put the song on a stray tracks album for the band. Here's the link:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-allman-brothers-band-stormy-monday.html

I really like the vocal version of this song. I could totally imagine it being a regular concert staple for the band. I am baffled why the vocal version has been left officially unreleased until now. Surely the professionals could do a good job (better than mine!) improving the sound quality of that version, if there's a problem with it. But I think it's much more likely that there's no problem if one works from the master recordings, and it's the usual bootleg copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy problem that created the poor sound. So I don't see any excuse.

As mentioned above, a "super deluxe" version of "Idlewild South" has been released in recent years and the vocal version wasn't included on that, A box set of Duane Allman's guitar playing, "Skydog," was also released in recent years, and it wasn't included on that either, even though it features a very nice Duane Allman guitar solo. So I think the odds are low that that version will ever be officially released.

It's very baffling that this song slipped through the cracks, especially since the Allman Brothers Band were not prolific songwriters. It's not like the lyrics are objectionable, or it sounds too much like some other song, or it's a poor performance, etc... And I don't think the song was ever played live, either with vocals or as an instrumental. But at least there's this.

I put this together while I was working on posting another album of Allman Brothers Band stray tracks soon. I imagine I'll include this edit on that once I have that ready, unless I get feedback that I screwed this up somehow.