When the Allman Brothers Band begins a two-hour set to close the Wanee Festival Saturday night, the seminal Southern rock act will be minus one of its two lead guitarists.
Derek Trucks, a former child prodigy who was 11 years old when he debuted professionally with the Allmans and Bob Dylan, agreed last fall to spend a brief sabbatical with Eric Clapton.
With rehearsals nearly under way for Clapton's European tour, Trucks will take this "once-in-a-lifetime chance," as he puts it, and trade licks on stage with Slowhand. Trucks' uncle, co-founding Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks, believes "the kid" will energize Clapton's shows.
"To be honest with you, he's the one who keeps raising the bar for us," the 58-year-old Trucks said. "Now it's everything we can do to keep up with him. Derek has a sense of musicality that I've never experienced with anyone else because he takes a solo and works it and builds it and rips your damn heart out.
"Every time, he does it differently. You never know what he's going to do next. He's a raving little genius."
Anyone with an appreciation of rock history knows what happened the last time Clapton borrowed a guitarist from the Allmans: Derek and the Dominos had already recorded a few tracks for their 1970 opus, "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs," when Duane Allman accepted Clapton's invitation to visit Tom Dowd's Criteria Recording Studios in North Miami.
Allman's wizardry on slide guitar raised Clapton's mettle significantly. The result was four-sided album that many critics consider the finest moment of Clapton's career; the classic riff Allman created to open the title track helped "Layla" become one of Clapton's signature songs.
Derek Trucks, whose self-titled band will leave for Europe after playing a midnight show that follows the Allman Brothers' set Friday night in the Florida Panhandle, met Clapton through guitarist Doyle Bramhall II.
Trucks' wife, blues artist Susan Tedeschi, hired Bramhall to work on her 2004 release, "Hope and Desire." Bramhall toured the U.S. with Clapton that year, and he's back for the next round, too. Trucks accepted a role in backing up Clapton on his 2005 album, "Back Home."
"I think maybe Doyle turned Clapton on to some of our records because he was familiar with the stuff we've done in our band," Trucks told the San Francisco Chronicle last month.
Trucks was 19 when he joined the Allman Brothers full-time seven years ago. In a band that's had 10 different lineups to record an album and tour extensively, the current incarnation began when guitarist-singer Warren Haynes returned in 2001. That was a year after keyboardist-singer Gregg Allman and the drumming duo of Butch Trucks and Jaimoe decided to dismiss the group's most prolific songwriter, founding guitarist-singer Dickey Betts.
Many of Betts' songs - "Jessica," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" and "No One to Run With" - remain integral parts of every tour.
Haynes and Trucks work together so fluidly, however, that Gregg Allman considers the interplay as sophisticated as the groundbreaking material that Duane Allman created with Betts from 1969-71.
Gregg Allman said: "The Allman Brothers Band today sounds as good as the band sounded when my brother was alive."
A motorcycle wreck in 1971 in Macon, Ga., killed Duane Allman at the age of 24. Founding bassist Berry Oakley died the same way, not far from his friend's crash site, a year later.
Such tragedies would destroy most bands, and the Allman Brothers' recurring bouts with substance abuse, divorce and insolvency hardly helped. As the decades rolled by, however, and the band rode a roller-coaster of public favor, it was no coincidence that Haynes' addition sparked favorable turning points in creativity and ticket sales.
Each time, the Allmans returned blues standards like "Hoochie-Coochie Man" to the delight of audiences that continue to draw a surprisingly young demographic, which knows the band was a source of creativity for second-generation acts like Widespread Panic, the Dave Matthews Band and moe.
Without Betts' country influences, jazz elements are more prominent because they flow more easily now from Haynes, Derek Trucks, bassist Oteil Burbridge and percussionist Marc Quinones.
Betts endured more comparisons to Duane Allman than any other guitarist who played in the band. Derek Trucks, however, isn't far behind. What's interesting about Trucks is that he's confident, talented and humble enough to carry "the next great slide-guitarist" mantle with aplomb.
The band does a scorching version of "Layla" with Trucks on lead, Haynes on vocals and Gregg on Bobby Whitlock's old piano part. Trucks would love to play the tune with Clapton.
"Eric brought up the Duane connection, but it was more off the cuff," Trucks told The Wall Street Journal recently. "It would be a thrill to play those tunes with him, but I think once the band gets together it will kind of lead itself. I know when and where I'm supposed to be for rehearsals, and that's about it."
Not surprisingly, Trucks and Haynes were eager last month when longtime band associate Kirk West suggested that the Allmans celebrate the 35th anniversary of the release of "Live from Fillmore East," cited by many critics as the best live album ever made, during the band's annual March stint at New York's Beacon Theatre.
That set was true to the original album, but nothing touched Butch Trucks more than the epiphany as "Mountain Jam" opened the second show of a 14-night run.
Had Duane Allman returned to the stage?
"When we finished the song, I turned around and looked at Marc (Quinones), and it was just so overwhelming," Trucks said. "I was crying, tears running down my cheeks."
