MUSIC: The Allman Brothers Band celebrates 40th anniversary at Red Rock

    If anything, the fireworks seemed anticlimactic.
    Lighting up the night sky between sets at the Sandbar at Red Rock on Sunday night, they didn’t quite match the explosiveness of the group of musicians taking a quick breather in the wings.
    Celebrating their 40th anniversary on a tour that brought them to Vegas for the first time in nearly six years, the Allman Brothers Band plunged headfirst into their deep catalog and rarely seemed to come up for air.
    At the center of it all were guitarists Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, whose verbose, expressive soloing knew no bounds. They took already dense jams such as “End of the Line” and “Ain’t Wastin’ No More Time” and buffered them with still more six-string hellfire, playing as if their fingertips were coated in steel.
    Coupled with a thick wall of percussion and Gregg Allman’s (pictured at right) equally sultry and stern growl and voodoo organ, and you had a sound potent enough to make couples dance in the beer lines.
    It all made for an interesting dynamic: Haynes and Trucks’ playing is fiery and immediate, but the band as a whole is never in a hurry to get where they’re going.  
    They’re all conversational instrumentalists, musical storytellers, and they seldom settle for the abridged version of anything.
    And so it was easy to get lost in the band’s tunes on Sunday, as even well-worn staples like “Midnight Rider” and “Whipping Post” got tinkered with just enough to keep them feeling a lot fresher than they have any right to be considering how many times the band has played them over the years.  
    “Time goes by like hurricanes and faster things,” Allman sang at one point, even though it seemed to stand still on this particular night.