Together with The Grateful Dead, the Allmans are widely blamed for today’s proliferation of pointless jam bands. Rather unfair for, as Live At Fillmore East proves, the Allmans’ southern blues-rock improvisations always took place within carefully structured parameters. This “Deluxe Edition” adds half a dozen extra tracks, three of which originally appeared on Eat A Peach, including the audacious 34-minute extemporisation around “First There Is A Mountain”, which is almost longer than Donovan’s entire career. The additions are far from arbitrary, for the extra tracks were all recorded at the same Fillmore gigs. The result is a newly coherent two-and-a-half-hour concert experience.
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