by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After those shows I watched Austin City Limits in its “ghetto” time slot on KPBS, midnight to 1
a.m., featuring the Tedeschi Trucks Band (no hyphen in the name even though it
represents the band’s co-leaders, guitarist Derek Trucks (whose uncle, Butch
Trucks, was the drummer for the original Allman Brothers Band — Derek himself
also played for a later edition of the Allman Brothers Band) and vocalist and
guitarist Susan Tedeschi, who are also husband and wife. (There’s an ironic
interview at the end of this show in which Trucks noted that they found it
easier to get married, have children and raise their family than it was to
co-lead a band together!) I’d heard of this group before as one of the many,
almost innumerable Allman Brothers spinoffs, but I’d never heard them before.
They turned out to be quite good, mainly due to Susan Tedeschi, who reminded me
a good deal of Bonnie Raitt — they’re both white women singers and blues
guitarists, they have similar vocal timbres and they manage to sing soulfully
without resorting to the ornamentation and “worrying” of their Black models —
and who proved herself as capable a lead guitarist as her husband.
Interestingly, they played only seven songs during this 50-minute appearance (Austin
City Limits runs in an hour-long time slot
but there are so many promos, interviews and “enhanced underwriting
opportunities,” PBS’s Newspeak for “commercials,” the bands actually get to
play for only 50 minutes and most Austin City Limits episode split the time between two music acts),
indicating a penchant for 1960’s-style long rock jams — the final song they
played, which I think was called “Midnght Down in Harley” (or was that supposed
to be “Harlem”?), began with a long, atmospheric guitar solo by Trucks that had
little to do with blues or with the song once it emerged from the textures and
Tedeschi began to sing. If this show had a flaw it’s that the Tedeschi Trucks
Band’s songs sound too similar to each other; aside from covers of the Box Tops’
“The Letter” and Tim Hardin’s “Bird on a Wire,” they were all mid-tempo
pop-blues that showed off Tedeschi’s voice effectively but pretty much plowed
the same musical territory.
