The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

C6| Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Let’sbe

selective.

Peyton

Manning

retiring,

yes.

Taylor

Swift’s

tour

wrapping

up,no.

WHEN JUDY SHEINDLINre-

cently announced that she

would be packing it in as TV’s

beloved Judge Judy next year,

the announcement was widely

described as “the end of an

era.” At roughly the same mo-

ment, Bob Iger’s decision to

give up the rudder at Walt Dis-

ney Co. also marked the end of

an era. Then, when people

started talking about Tom

Brady leaving the New England

Patriots after 20 years of Hall

of Fame service, it held out the

tantalizing possibility that one

of the earth-shattering era-

endings to end all era-endings

might be right around the cor-

ner.

Those of us who consider

ourselves end-of-an-era aficio-

nados were enthralled by these

developments. Starved for con-

automotive end of an era since

Toyota stopped selling the Pre-

via on these shores.

What made Judge Judy’s an-

nouncement so exciting was

not because we era-ending en-

thusiasts wanted to see her re-

tire from the bench. It was be-

cause of the thrill we would get

from witnessing an end to an

era that truly qualified as an

era and not some rinky-dink,

bargain-basementfauxera.

The phrase “end of an era” is

bandied about with such infuri-

ating regularity that it has

cheapened the coin of the

realm. When Peyton Manning

hung up the cleats in March

2016, it inarguably marked the

‘W

hen Jaimoe

tells you to

do some-

thing, you

do it!”

That’s guitarist Derek Trucks, ex-

plaining why a phone call from the

drummer for the Allman Brothers

Band started the process of a reunion

show almost six years after the group

played their last show in 2014. The

show Tuesday in New York City was

billed as a concert by the Brothers and

built around the surviving core of the

group’s last and longest-lived itera-

tion. Jaimoe was the only founding

member on stage.

“I wanted to play music with my

brothers,” he says, explaining why he

jump-started the idea of celebrating

the band’s 50th anniversary. “Every-

one else is paying homage to the All-

man Brothers music—and some of us

are still here.”

Madison Square Garden was

packed for the show, despite mounting

Covid-19 fears that created a surreal

preshow atmosphere. It vanished al-

most as soon as the first notes were

played. Jaimoe, who was for so many

years hidden on the Allman Brothers’

back line, was the featured star, walk-

ing slowly across the stage at the start

of the show to rapturous applause and

taking the microphone by himself to

thank the crowd before the encore

four hours later.

“It just felt like no BS, and all about

music and love,” an exhausted Jaimoe,

75, said the next morning from the

back seat of a car heading home to

Connecticut. He had back surgery in

December and worked for months to

be ready to play.

Jaimoe was born Johnie Lee John-

son in Ocean Springs, Miss., and was

known as Jai Johnny until Rudolph

“Juicy” Carter, a saxophonist, affixed a

new nickname in the late 1960s. “He

kept saying, ‘Hey Jaimoe,’ and I was

looking around to see who he was

talking to, and he stuck his finger in

my chest and said, ‘Jaimoe!’” the

drummer recalls. The name stuck.

I have written a book about the All-

man Brothers (for which Jaimoe wrote

an afterword), have longstanding rela-

tionships with many of them and even

formed a tribute band to play their

music. Over the years, I’ve seen Jai-

moe’s character up close. I’ve watched

him treat a hotel janitor or a back-

stage security guard the same way he

treats a bandmate; listened to him pa-

tiently discuss a fan’s favorite Allman

Brothers show; seen him hobble on a

bad knee after a breakfast buffet

server to give her a tip; and observed

him slipping money to a young drum-

mer at a music festival with a vintage

kit in need of repair.

form the nascent Allman Brothers

Band’s improvisational approach,

which incorporated blues, country and

Western swing into a unique musical

approach that nodded toward the

Grateful Dead’s West Coast explora-

tions but never became as loosey-

goosey.

“Music is music, and there’s no

such things as jazz or rock ’n’ roll,”

Jaimoe says. “I wanted to be the

world’s greatest jazz drummer, and I

thought rock or funk were too easy—

then I got a chance and couldn’t play

what needed to be played. I had to

learn, and music was everything to

me.”

Like the Dead, the Allman Brothers

featured two drummers, an idea that

Jaimoe says Duane Allman took from

James Brown. The guitarist instinc-

tively knew that Butch Trucks (Derek’s

uncle) and Jaimoe were the pair he

needed. They met when Mr. Allman

dropped Jaimoe off at Mr. Trucks’s

Jacksonville doorstep and drove away.

“We took the drums inside, set

them up and just started playing—and

it worked,” Jaimoe recalls. “We just

listened to one another and played.

Butch was a great drummer. Almost

everything I’ve ever played that some-

one said was great was a reaction to

something he played.”

Jaimoe describes the early years of

the Allman Brothers as “just the great-

est thing in the world,” with like-

minded musicians learning from each

other, feeding off each other, con-

stantly exposing one another to new

ideas and spurring each other to

heights beyond what any of them

could have imagined on their own.

“It was like having your masters

and working on your doctorate—and

you’re doing it with Einstein,” he

says. “It was going great, so we

didn’t think about what would hap-

pen in a month. I think Duane did. He

always had a vision, but I had no

other thoughts except how great the

music we were playing was. The

whole world closed out.”

Shortly after its 1969 formation,

the group moved together to Macon,

Ga., where they lived communally, five

longhair whites and one African-

American drawing stares and hostility,

which only formed a deeper bond.

Duane died in 1971 and bassist Berry

Oakley the following year in eerily

similar motorcycle crashes, yet the

Allman Brothers Band kept pushing

on. Butch Trucks and Gregg Allman

both died in 2017.

Jaimoe has lived near Hartford,

Conn., for almost 30 years, along with

his wife, the choreographer and dance

educator Catherine Fellows Johnson.

Their daughter Cajai Fellows Johnson

has been acting on Broadway in “Fro-

zen.” Jahonie Johnson, a daughter

from a previous relationship, lives in

Georgia. Since the Allman Brothers’ fi-

nal show, Jaimoe has continued to

play with his own group, Jaimoe’s

Jasssz Band, and is forming shifting

groups tagged as Jaimoe and Friends.

“One thing I’ve learned in life is

hindsight ain’t no 20/20,” he says.

“People use that to try and change

what they did. I just try to be where I

am, and whatever I do, stay as true as

I can.”

WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL|ALAN PAUL

Jaimoe

At 75, the Allman Brothers Band’s drummer

still revels in ’music and love’

Jaimoe is the through line from the

Allman Brothers’ 1969 formation

through two breakups and two re-

unions to their final show to this

week’s show in New York. The drum-

mer was also the first person that gui-

tarist Duane Allman asked to join his

fledgling group in 1969. Jaimoe, who

had toured with soul singers Otis Red-

ding, Joe Tex and Percy Sledge, was

about to move to New York to try his

hand at playing jazz.

“I figured if I’m going to starve

playing music, it might as well be the

music I love—jazz. Then I jammed

once with Duane and all those

thoughts vanished,” says Jaimoe.

Still, his passion for jazz helped

‘Music is music,

and there’s

no such things

as jazz or

rock ’n’ roll.’

JOSH WOOL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

REVIEW

versation and

disdainful of

more generic

hobbies like

whittling or dodgeball, we col-

lect ends of eras the same way

that other people collect Beanie

Babies or A Flock of Seagulls

vinyl LPs.

We get together in local wa-

tering holes to banter about

some of the incontestably great

endings of eras: the U.S. going

off the gold standard in 1971,

F.W. Woolworth’s decline as a

municipal fixture, the last

broadcast of “Seinfeld” or

“M.A.S.H.” or “Walker, Texas

Ranger.” To this impressive list

of impossibly iconic era endings,

I would also throw in the recent

announcement that Dodge will

no longer make its Grand Cara-

van mini-van. This is the biggest

end of an era be-

cause he was widely

considered one of

the greatest quarter-

backs to play the

game. Conversely,

when Eli Manning,

his less gifted youn-

ger brother, an-

nounced his retire-

ment from the New

York Giants, it did

not mark the end of

an era in a transcontinental, co-

lossus-straddling sense. It was

more the end of a metropolitan

era, or at most a tri-state era.

Once upon a time, era-ending

buffs didn’t have much to work

with. That’s because eras rarely

ended, and there weren’t that

many of them in the first place.

For example, when the Mesozoic

era flamed out, it had been

around for 175 million years. No

era has ever topped it. More re-

cent era-endings of some merit

include the fall of the Roman

Empire, the collapse of Mayan

civilization and the death of the

eight-track tape player. These

were eras to be reckoned with.

But when we see in the New

Yorker that Taylor Swift’s last

tour marked the end of an era,

our reaction is: Get serious. If

you use the phrase “end of an

era” and you have to explain

what that era is, you have totally

misused the term. Taylor Swift

hasn’t been around long enough

to havelivedthrough an era,

much less to have ended one.

For a historical period to qual-

ify as a bona fide era it has to

have heft, clout, substance. And

it has to be something everybody

has heard of. Think the Roaring

Twenties. Think the Renaissance.

The decline of Tupperware as a

linchpin of American life marked

the end of an era. The death of

the 45 r.p.m. record marked the

end of an era. But a decision by

two high schools in rural Ohio to

stop an annual volleyball grudge

match on President’s Day would

not qualify.

If people ever stop repeating

idiotic conspiracy theories on

Twitter, that would really mark

the end of an era. When is that

likely to happen? Around the

same time as the end of the era

in which drivers stop overtak-

ing you on the right. PATRICK SMITH/GETTY IMAGES

MOVING

TARGETS

JOE

QUEENAN

Every Closing

Curtain Is Not the

‘End of an Era’