‘A Really Good Gig’
The band Great Caesar’s Ghost has released “Live at the Stephen Talkhouse,” documenting its Aug. 13, 2015, performance there with Butch Trucks, a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band.
“It was a really good gig,” said Larry Schmid, who founded Great Caesar’s Ghost in 2004. “We had a very good night. That’s what prompted us to actually make a disc.”
Mr. Trucks agreed, said Mr. Schmid, who lives in Bridgehampton and owns Applewild Farms there. “He was very enthusiastic.” Mr. Trucks had arrived from France the day before the performance, allowing just one group rehearsal. “It’s amazing he played as well as he did,” Mr. Schmid said. “He was on fire.”
Prior to Mr. Trucks’s involvement, one of the band’s first performances, featuring the guitarist G.E. Smith, who lives in Amagansett, was recorded, released on CD, and broadcast on satellite and terrestrial radio. “Things happened in a hurry,” Mr. Schmid said last year.
He met Mr. Trucks, who lives in France and Florida, through a mutual acquaintance who had given Mr. Trucks some of the band’s recordings. They first played together in 2011.
Selections on “Live at the Stephen Talkhouse” include music of the Allman Brothers Band, the renowned Southern group that wove rock ’n’ roll, jazz, blues, and psychedelia into long, soulful improvisations, and the Grateful Dead, who bore stylistic similarities to the Allmans.
Accordingly, several of the songs performed by Great Caesar’s Ghost and Mr. Trucks stretch beyond the 10-minute mark. Mr. Schmid and Peter Michne, who is known as Bosco, trade guitar solos, each spinning into lengthy, hypnotic improvisations as the players behind them — Mr. Trucks and Ed DiCaprio on drums, Keith Hill on keyboards, and Klyph Black on bass — slowly build the songs’ intensity.
The group is tight and fluid; sonically, their performance is a remarkably faithful homage to the Allman Brothers, who disbanded in 2014 after surviving the deaths of two founding members, the dismissal of another, and a seven-year dormancy.
“As soon as he started to play, you heard the whole Allman Brothers thing,” Mr. Black, the band’s newest member, said of Mr. Trucks. “That was so great. Ed is an incredible, really great drummer, and as soon as Butch sat down, you heard the Allman Brothers. I was honored to play with him, and to play with that band.”
Michael Mazzaraco and Kevin Santacroce, sound engineers at the Talkhouse and musicians in their own right, recorded the performance. The “Live at the Stephen Talkhouse” CD, which features photography by Fabian Rodriguez, an Amagansett resident who is also a musician, is available at CDBaby.com. Digital tracks are also available there, at Apple’s iTunes store, and at other online retailers. The album has been featured on Sirius XM Satellite Radio’s Deep Tracks channel.
“It’s a labor of love for us,” Mr. Schmid said of his band. “We’re not under the illusion that we’re going to do anything other than celebrate great music. It’s a lot of fun, and the music on the record has, hopefully, been respected.”
With Mr. Trucks on drums, Great Caesar’s Ghost will return to the Stephen Talkhouse on Aug. 6.