No. 698 – End of the Line

Performer: The Allman Brothers Band

Songwriters: Gregg Allman, Warren Haynes, John Jaworowicz, Allen Woody

Original Release: Shades of Two Worlds

Year: 1991

Definitive Version: An Evening with The Allman Brothers Band, First Set, 1992

I’d known the Allman Brothers since I was a kid, but until 1989, when I bought Live at Fillmore East, I didn’t really listen to them much for many years. By the end of the Eighties, they—like most of my favorite bands—were dead as far as being an active band.

But the Allmans then resurrected as the Nineties began. I bought Seven Turns in my first spate of CD membership-club purchases, but it was unmemorable. However, after Rolling Stone gave a positive review of Shades of Two Worlds, I gave them another shot. This time, the new lineup brought better songs to the table, and I played this album a lot, and the followup live album, An Evening With …, even more.

This song really stuck with me after Jenna and I parted ways. Given that and other similar—and sometimes more spectacular—failures involving women from southeastern Michigan, I determined that the problem involved geography. To find what I wanted, I had to get the Hell away from Flint (and Detroit to a lesser extent), preferably as soon as possible.

In retrospect, the real problem was that I was being too narrow-minded. I wanted someone who was intelligent and sophisticated as well as attractive, of course. In Flint, you could get one of the three, and if I had focused exclusively on the third attribute and accepted someone with, shall we say, a more morally casual attitude—someone who might be here today, gone tomorrow—I might have had a fun time in the mean time. But I was too focused on the long picture to my ultimate detriment.

So I had to get out. However, the jobs that I pursued in 1992 that didn’t pay off dried up. Most of those were cold-call situations where I’d send my materials unsolicited to the sports editor of a particular paper. I got a few hooks, but there weren’t any job openings at the time. That’s the way it goes, of course, and they said I’d hear from them again if something opened up.

Well, I knew I wasn’t going to hear back from Toronto, because it was a work-visa situation, and the easier solution for them would be to hire a Canadian. But the other newspapers had no such issues—and I never did hear from them. I retried a few, but this time I either got a terse no thanks, like from Akron, or I heard nothing. Maybe it wasn’t a lack of jobs but a lack of interest in my credentials.

Again, of course, I was being too narrow-minded. If I were to have adopted a, shall we say, more professionally casual attitude, I probably would have achieved my goal. But at the time, I was unwilling to compromise on two things. The first was the size of publication. I had, by this time, five solid years of newspaper experience, and I wasn’t willing to go back to a smaller paper even in a big city (to say nothing of the obligatory 50 percent pay cut).

The other was geographical. I’m a Midwestern boy, and I wasn’t particularly keen on heading either South or West. I did give Seattle a shot, but nothing came of it.

So there I was—going nowhere and not particularly happy about it. Like the man says, No matter how hard I run, I just can’t get away. End of the Line, indeed.