How The Grateful Dead Quietly Rebuilt Themselves Out Of The Allman Brothers

Oteil Burbridge spent seventeen years as the Allman Brothers Band’s longest-serving bassist. Then in 2015 he sat down in Phil Lesh’s chair in the Grateful Dead, and he turns out to be the proof that these were never really two separate bands.

The story usually gets told as a friendship, two jam bands who shared a stage at Watkins Glen in front of 600,000 people. But the Allman Brothers didn’t invent their own template when they formed in Macon in 1969. They borrowed the 1968 Grateful Dead’s, two drummers and long open-ended jams and all, and their showpiece “Mountain Jam” grew from the seed on Anthem of the Sun. Garcia called them “a younger, Southern version of us.” When the Dead’s gear didn’t make it to Atlanta in 1970 they simply played the show through Duane Allman’s PA. After Watkins Glen the two bands basically stopped, and what looks like a fifty-year merge is really a twenty-year silence in the middle of it.

What brought it back wasn’t nostalgia. It was personnel. Phil Lesh pulled Jimmy Herring and Warren Haynes into Phil and Friends; Haynes was brought in to replace Duane Allman and then hired to fill Jerry Garcia’s chair. Susan Tedeschi sang with the surviving members as The Other Ones in 2002, and her husband Derek Trucks was an Allman Brother. Oteil is the only person who was a full member of both bands, and the two-drummer attack that would break a normal bassist is, in his own words, “easier” after seventeen years of exactly that. Sourced from Blair Jackson’s “Garcia,” Bill Kreutzmann’s “Deal,” and the Blush and Budnick oral history, it runs from Donna Jean Godchaux’s Muscle Shoals roots to March 2026 at the Beacon, where Garcia’s Tiger guitar turned up in the Allman Brothers’ own house.