Towards the end of Duane Betts’ video for “Heartache,” a melancholy song about grief written after his father died in April 2024, the 48-year-old guitarist etches the initials “FRB” in the sand. It seems like a riddle, or perhaps a non sequitur, until you realize Betts’ late father, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, was born Forrest Richard Betts. “It was something that was kind of thought about and plotted out as an easter egg—something very meaningful, but not obvious. We didn’t want to be too on the nose about any of the references,” the singer and guitarist says, speaking to Premier Guitar by phone from a summer home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the night before he’s scheduled to perform with the Allman Betts Family Revival in Vail, Colorado. “Some people don’t know that my dad’s first name is Forrest. They might not catch the initials.”
While inspired by the senior Betts’ death at age 80, “Heartache” is a universal ballad, on the edge of Neil Young-style folk-country and, yes, the Allman Brothers’ soulful southern rock. “I’ll wait, watch over you / Nothing I can do,” Betts sings, then repeats the phrase “there’s nothing you can do” multiple times before playing a solo that is both mournful and hopeful on his cherry-red 1961 Gibson ES-335, a guitar he inherited from his father. “I wrote that song down in Florida, shortly after my dad passed away, with my friend [singer-songwriter] Stoll Vaughan,” Betts says. “I had this haunting chorus melody, and I was mumbling ‘heartache,’ and it just went from there. It’s a universal feeling that everybody can relate to. It’s about loss and acceptance and getting through that process.
“It’s about everything and everyone that you’ve lost, you know?” he adds. “The lyric is simple, but it’s vulnerable and personal to me and I’m very proud of it.”
In the video, filmed in Malibu, California, last March, Betts, slender with long hair and a thin mustache, wears open-collar, earth-toned suits that can only be described as “Allman Brothers chic.” In one of these outfits, he wanders into the ocean; in another, he plunges into a pool. “Actually, I don’t think we wrecked any of them,” he says of the clothes. “The first one turned out okay. We just air-dryed it. It was a lot of fun. The pool was about 10 degrees colder than the ocean, and the ocean wasn’t warm.”
Betts made “Heartache” and the rest of his new album, Isle of Hope, with Dave Cobb, the Nashville producer who has worked with just about everybody, from the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb to pop star Teddy Swims, and has a knack for drawing out the country soul from raggedy-voiced singer-songwriters like Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell. Betts came across Cobb’s work while recording a session with guitarist J.D. Simo; while Betts was waiting for an Uber, “me and J.D. were getting some quality time,” and Betts played him a new tune called “Reckless.” “You know who would love to do this? Dave,” Simo told him.
Duane with his Gibson Dickey Betts Les Paul Gold Top prototype #1
Photo by Chris Brush
Duane Betts’ Gear
Guitars
1961 Gibson ES-335
Gibson Dickey Betts Les Paul Gold Top prototype #1
Cobb proved to be exactly as advertised while producing Isle of Hope, an album that balances laid-back, hymnlike tracks such as “Silver Afternoon,” “Best Wishes,” and the lead single “Heartache” with more hard-driving numbers like “Pills and Liquor,” “Down to Houston,” and the closing track “Keep My Hands Clean.” The latter songs capture the tight, barrelhouse swagger of early-1970s Rolling Stones, though they are surprisingly concise by the standards of the Allman Brothers diaspora. Throughout the album, potent slide-guitar solos—performed primarily by Betts and Johnny Stachela—add both fire and texture. Their guitar work often recalls Duane Allman’s playing alongside Eric Clapton on Derek & the Dominos’ “Layla.”
“Dave is a genius in the studio. He can frame things in his head while he’s playing in the band and map everything out perfectly and know where everything fits at all times. It’s what a producer is supposed to do—times 100,” Betts says, launching into a technical explanation of which portions of which studio takes wound up in the final track. “I wanted to have a vehicle like ‘Heartache’ to play a little differently. Dave set me up. I had the solo mapped out over different chords, over a different point in the song, and he changed it and gave me a nice path to just go at the end of the song, over those other chords. It turned out to be a great idea.”
Reproducing the album live has proved to be a challenge as the band rehearses for dates through the end of 2026 and early 2027—mostly because Betts’ road band has only two guitarists, which pushes him to play an acoustic or “an electric like an acoustic.” He adds: “You can’t play all the parts on the record. You have to be thoughtful. ‘Maybe the keyboard player can do something.’”
“We didn’t make a ‘guitar record,’ but there’s plenty of guitar playing on the record.”
Discussing the album, Betts has a habit of changing the subject to move the attention off of himself—his own songwriting, his own vision—and onto the other musicians who worked on the album, particularly his friend Simo on rhythm guitar. “I really wanted everybody to have their moments. J.D. doesn’t play any solos per se, but his guitar work on this record is just excellent,” Betts says. “We didn’t make a ‘guitar record,’ but there’s plenty of guitar playing on the record.”
The new album has a rawer, more spontaneous and live-in-the-studio feel than Betts’ solo debut, 2023’s Wild & Precious Life, a more star-studded affair that featured guests like Derek Trucks—himself the nephew of a late Allman Brothers Band member, founding drummer Butch Trucks—plus Marcus King and Nicki Bluhm. On Isle of Hope, Betts mostly plays an acoustic guitar, a pre-war Martin, although he uncorked the 335 in key moments, like the electric solo in “Heartache.” “I cut the solo after the band went home and got it,” he says.
Has Betts’ playing evolved since Wild & Precious Life? Not in his own estimation. “I don’t know if my playing has changed that much—I kind of play the way I play,” he says. “When given the opportunity to play over different chords, or a different style, you might play differently.”
Photo by Jean Frank
Because Isle of Hope is so clearly—and lovingly—dedicated to his late father, Duane has had even more opportunities than usual to reflect publicly on Dickey Betts’ legacy and influence. Betts was a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band in 1969, after he and former bandmate Berry Oakley accepted an invitation from guitarist Duane Allman to join an informal jam session at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That gathering ultimately led to the formation of one of Southern rock’s most influential bands.
Duane was born to Dickey Betts and his then-wife, Paulette, in 1978, seven years after his namesake, Duane Allman, was killed in a motorcycle accident. By that time, the Allman Brothers had broken up, then reformed, and were putting out rock albums like Enlightened Rogue during an era of punk and disco. They were touring regularly, and Dickey brought his son on the road. Duane was home-schooled and had a tutor, as he once told the Marin Independent Journal: “It was great. I loved it. ... It was mainly me and the adults. I didn’t get to socialize with kids my own age. I had to make up for that later.” Eventually, he left his father’s hometown of Sarasota, Florida, for his mother’s home base in Malibu. There, he earned his GED and began playing in bands, including Backbone69, whose lineup featured the sons of Roy Orbison, producer Lou Adler, and Berry Oakley.
Around age six or seven, Betts took up drums before switching to guitar. His first electric was a tiger-striped sunburst PRS prototype with a 5-way switch—a model that Paul Reed Smith had personally given to Dickey Betts and Warren Haynes.
“Most of the guitars I own are my dad’s, and it’s really a beautiful thing.”
“I really haven’t played it much,” Betts says. “Believe it or not, I sold it to a good friend because I just wasn’t using it. Then I bought it back. About 15 years later, I thought, ‘Man, it’d be cool to own my first guitar.’” He approached his friend and asked, “You’re not playing as much anymore—can I buy my guitar back?”
“That’s what friends are for,” Betts adds with a laugh.
“Most of the guitars I own are my dad’s, and it’s really a beautiful thing,” he continues. “He was so good at playing that Delta stuff on the National steel. He was such a master, and a student of those guys, and it was always so thrilling to hear him play that style.”
Photo by Bobbi Rich
Children of famous musicians sometimes spend their careers trying to distance themselves from their parents’ work. But Betts is happy to talk about his father, who was his primary guitar inspiration and frequent teacher. Although, he says, “It’s not like we spent an hour a day talking about guitar—or an hour every other day, even. I kind of wanted to learn on my own. I liked the challenge.”
Dickey, he says, “taught me about fundamentals. Like a Chuck Berry rhythm. Like a 12-bar blues. ‘Go listen to Freddie King, “Hideaway.”’ He was turning me on to stuff like that.”
Befitting his own generation, Betts also picked up on the guitar sounds of Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and combined their ideas with the John Coltrane records he was absorbing in his teens. “I forgot who said it: ‘Every rock ’n’ roll guitar player’—whether they’re punk rock, Steve Jones or whoever— ‘should have a little bit of Chuck Berry influence in them,’” Betts says. “That’s how my dad felt. I’m sure Keith Richards feels that way.”
“If you’re being truthful, it can’t be wrong.”
Betts has also forged a creative partnership with fellow Allman Brothers heir Devon Allman, the son of Gregg Allman, who died in 2017 at age 69. The two longtime friends formed the Allman Betts Band in 2018, embracing their shared musical heritage while occasionally inviting other second-generation musicians—among them Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank Zappa, and Tommy Prine, son of John Prine—to join them onstage.
After Dickey Betts’ death, Duane and Devon found common ground in a loss they both understood. “A lot of that goes without saying. We don’t sit and talk about it at length,” Betts says. “He knows. You just look at somebody, and you’re there for them—it’s an unspoken thing. He knows what it’s like.”
Betts says he has found similar understanding among other friends who have experienced the loss of a famous parent. “Alex Orbison lost his father at a young age,” he says. “They’re here in spirit. We’re in the same boat a little more.”
For all the practical lessons Dickey Betts taught his son about guitar—rooted in Chuck Berry riffs and blues fundamentals—it was a more philosophical piece of advice that left the deepest impression. As Duane has told interviewers, his father’s guiding principle was simple: “Go play to nature, and it can never be wrong.”
“He had an abstract way of thinking about art and music and life—the way he wrote some of his songs, like ‘Seven Turns,’” Betts says, referring to the Allman Brothers Band’s 1990 track. “I think what he meant was that god, nature, the universe—whatever higher power you believe in—can’t be wrong.”
“So if you’re being truthful, it can’t be wrong,” he continues. “If you can accurately emulate the movement of water, how could that ever be wrong? That’s god moving right in front of your eyes. He meant that you should try to reflect things that are beautiful and natural. Basically, try to have good taste.”
The MXR Flanger/Doubler recreates the original MXR rack unit in pedal form, capturing those classic all-analog flanger and doubler effects featured on hallmark recordings from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s designed for experimenters, offering the tools to blend and bend your signal into your own rich, multi-layered textures. Built around authentic bucket-brigade devices and the original control set, this pedal delivers the full range of sounds that made the rack unit a studio staple.
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The chameleonic Connecticut-based band Goose have covered a lot of musical ground during their career, offering a little bit of something for just about everyone. Starting out as a self-described “indie-groove” outfit, they were quickly adopted by the jam-band community thanks to the group’s enthusiastic embrace of improvisation, and utter disregard for musical boundaries. Goose’s collision of genres—both onstage and over the course of five studio albums—has smashed together folk, jazz, funk, R&B, pop, progressive, and psychedelic rock. Thus far, they have yet to fold Swedish death metal into the mix, but give them time and they surely will.
Fans can personalize and interpret a band in a multitude of ways, but what does founding guitarist, singer, and primary songwriter Rick Mitarotonda want listeners to appreciate about Goose?
“I don’t think I have any ideas of what I want people to understand about the band,” he says. “For us, I think the goal is to just follow our instincts and creativity and be authentic to ourselves. And continue to uncover and unravel what that is and what that could be.”
He lets that sink in, then continues, “Everyone’s got their own prism through which they see the world and how they relate to things, and there’s no way to know or understand or try to intellectualize what people seem to be thinking about us or what they think of what we do or anything like that. It’s unknowable. It’s not up to us what people make of what we do. It’s just up to us to try to do the best we can with what we have.”
For the group’s growing and fiercely loyal legion of devotees—an audience now large enough to fill amphitheaters, pavilions, and arenas—Goose are doing just fine with what they’ve got. The band’s three-hour-plus shows are fast becoming the stuff of legend for their “anything goes” ethos in the grand tradition of premier jam bands both past and present.
Mitarotonda used his Greg DeLuis Empress to track the entirety of Big Modern!
These aren’t just concerts; they’re more like communal experiences. And the group’s marathon improvs, led by Mitarotonda’s breakneck virtuosity, aren’t self-indulgent, murky ragmops. Each extended interlude is packed with fun, discovery, and a bit of high-wire danger, and carries a sharp emotional breakthrough. There isn’t anything calculated or predictable about Goose (the lineup also features guitarist-keyboardist Peter Anspach, bassist Trevor Weekz, and drummer Cotter Ellis); everything they do feels spontaneous and alive. Nowhere is this more evident than in their playful and promiscuous choice of covers, which can sashay from Laura Branigan to Bob Seger one night, Steppenwolf to A-ha the next.
How a band navigates success can be a tricky bit of business, particularly as it transitions from cult darlings to mainstream stars. Mitarotonda admits that Goose’s rocket-like ascent has presented some challenges. “Certain aspects of this are totally overwhelming,” he says. “There’s little junctures where things you do or things you intend get misinterpreted, and you have no control over it. That can be difficult to contend with. Plus, there’s a struggle to find a balance and wanting to have time to breathe and reflect and process and write and do other things in life that feed creativity amidst the constant ability to tour.”
“There’s no way to know or understand what people seem to be thinking about us or what they think of what we do.”—Rick Mitarotonda
Anspach, who joined Goose in 2017 following the departures of several guitarists and keyboardists, isn’t feeling the pressure. “There have been a lot of times where it’s felt like just tour, tour, tour,” he says. “The pace isn’t really locked down, though. Last year, we put out two albums [Everything Must Go and Chain Yer Dragon], but before that we were touring for two years without a new record. I think in general, we definitely want to keep making records. I don’t really see that slowing down just yet.”
Mitarotonda, for his part, isn’t letting fame affect his creative decisions. “We’re not that big where we’re at risk of jumping the shark,” he says with a smile.
For a band that consistently throws left curves to its audience, Goose’s new album, Big Modern!, is one hell of a wild ride. While it’s not a dedicated concept record—there’s no narrative story or stated theme—it does feel, in sometimes jarring ways, like an homage to the glory days of MTV-era 1980s. The sleek, pulsating groove of “Torero” recalls Jan Hammer’s lush, synthetic noir soundscapes in Miami Vice, while “Savenger” is a synth-pop pastiche that evokes the Human League, Howard Jones, and Mr. Mister. “Media” is a dense and chaotic cardio workout that combines Remain in Light-period Talking Heads with the Tubes at their commercial peak. And if you’re too lazy to search for Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” you can simply cue up “Pop,” a delicious power-pop knockout. It’s all over-caffeinated and overblown, wildly entertaining, and hooky as hell.
“We do as much as we can to keep things at a certain level, and we have a great guitar tech and audio team,” Anspach says of Goose’s live shows.
Photo by Juliana Bernstein
Peter Anspach’s Gear
Guitars
John Suhr Classic S
Gibson Firebird (belonging to producer D. James Goodwin)
Mitarotonda reasons that if Goose made an ’80s record, they did so unwittingly. “There’s no denying that’s a pretty consistent thread throughout,” he says. “It’s a very synth-heavy record. The drums and the guitar tones are big. A lot of things just pushed the material in that direction, but not in a contrived way. It’s funny, because obviously I wasn’t alive during the 1980s—I was born in 1990—but when I think about that period in time, it was like there was this big, superficial sense of forward momentum. Everybody was saying, ‘The future is now,’ and there were these extremes in sound and fashion. There was new technology coming very fast, and I think people were just inundated with stimulation. The aesthetic was loud, and I think that loudness is a perfect metaphor for the overstimulation that’s going on with technology right now.”
As has been the case since the early days of Goose, tunes are rarely born from jams. Much of the material on Big Modern! was written by Mitarotonda and his longtime collaborator, Matt Campbell. The two recorded “fairly fleshed out” demos that the guitarist says “really informed the trajectory of where we were going.”
“Usually, we kind of sketch out bare-bones demos and then fly by the seat of our pants hashing it out in a practice room,” he says. “This time, we went deeper with the demos, and it became a really valuable process because there were layers and textures that came out of it. We’d be working on a piece, and I’d say, ‘I want to add some bass on this.’ I would just track some bass, then play something and listen back to it, and I’d feel like it became a part of something. There were lots of weird little segments that stood out to me that just kind of added to the whole thing.”
Anspach listened to the demos and was faced with deciding between vintage ’80s-style keyboard textures or some level of dual-guitar attack. “There was a lot of keyboard stuff to learn and figure out for this record,” he says. “But there were also songs like ‘Torero,’ where I’m playing these keyboard layers, but then I switch to guitar. But we’ve developed the technology so that the synths can continue to play while I’m on guitar.”
Photo by Juliana Bernstein
Mitarotonda marvels at his bandmate’s multi-purpose capabilities. “Peter’s pretty clutch at all that,” he says. “On this record, we really built the shit out of these tracks to get them to sound really big. Then we had to try to figure out how to recreate it with just the four of us. There was a point when it was like, ‘Shit, do we need another guy to do some of this stuff?’ But Peter was like, ‘I can be three guys, actually.’ He figured out the game plan and the tech, and he’s playing guitar and four keyboards at the same time.”
“Torero” is one of the focus tracks on Big Modern!, but it almost didn’t see the light of day. The band road-tested it live to great effect before hitting the studio, but the song refused to behave once recording was underway. “We spent a whole day on it, and it just wasn’t there,” Mitarotonda recalls. “After dinner, we went back to it and figured out the arrangement and were just ripping takes. The energy that didn’t exist before became explosive. It was so cathartic, and the way Cotter dug into it, it was epic.”
So, too, is the guitarist’s splashy and exuberant solo, which hits like a ton of bricks. “Good 2B” features another turbulent lead break, but one that takes on a surreal quality as the song churns on. “That one presented some challenges because we knew we could really open the song up live,” Mitarotonda says. “Coming out of the drum break, there’s a ton of steam and it just wants to go on forever.”
His solo on the huge rocker “Salt” generates heat in a different way—it’s slow and full of legato lines, calling to mind George Benson’s unhurried manner of phrasing. “That was the biggest improv on the record,” he says. “We did a bunch of takes as a band, just trying out things, and they all went to different places. In the end, there was a long jam and it just seemed right to leave all those spaces between notes.”
“It’s a very synth-heavy record. The drums and the guitar tones are big.”—Rick Mitarotonda
For the most part, Mitarotonda improvised his solos while tracking with the full band. It’s taken him a while to adopt this approach, and he admits that when Anspach joined Goose, he still maintained a perfectionist’s attitude of crafting and nailing solos during the demo phase. “Peter finally said, ‘Dude, let’s just track it already.’ And he was right. Nothing can touch a holistic take when you’ve got everybody together. You just can’t fake that energy.”
Neither guitarist changed much about his guitar and gear setups for Big Modern! Mitarotonda relied on the same Greg DeLuis custom-made Empress model he’s been playing since 2023. “There’s only a couple of times I might pick up something else,” he says, “but I tracked the whole record with the DeLuis.” Likewise, he estimates that he recorded “perhaps 99 percent” of the album with his favorite amp, a 1960s Fender Deluxe, and “one tiny segment” with a vintage Marshall combo. “I’m not sure what kind,” he says with a smile. “I’ve always been a bit of a simpleton when it comes to gear.”
Anspach kept things basic, as well, using a John Suhr Classic S, as well as a Gibson Firebird that belongs to the band’s producer, D. James Goodwin. “That Firebird rips. It’s pretty sick,” Anspach says. Ampwise, he alternated between a 1960s Fender Princeton and a vintage 100-watt Hiwatt.
Photo by Juliana Bernstein
Controlling guitar sound in the studio is a far easier affair than achieving consistent onstage tone and balance—each venue offers its own variables, particularly for outdoor gigs, where sound waves are at the constant mercy of temperature and humidity.
“We try to deal with that as best we can,” Anspach says. “The fact is, it changes night to night, so you just have to embrace it and be like, ‘This is what we have to work with.’ We do as much as we can to keep things at a certain level, and we have a great guitar tech and audio team. There have been a few times where we’re feeling like something is really off, so you make little adjustments. Ultimately, you have no choice but to just ride the wave. The show goes on.”
Sometimes that show goes on without a soundcheck, as was the case last year at the Newport Folk Festival, when a series of thunderstorms and a shelter-in-place order threatened to nix Goose’s appearance entirely. When the weather cleared, the band took to the stage for a shortened set, which turned into a “you-had-to-be-there” moment when they were joined by Kenny Loggins for a high-octane performance of the singer’s cinematic mega-hit, “Danger Zone.”
“It was totally wild and hilarious,” Mitarotonda says. “We had no soundcheck, so it was pretty rough. Kenny couldn’t hear us, we couldn’t hear him, he couldn’t hear himself—it was crazy. We were literally in the danger zone with Kenny Loggins. It was quite the experience. Kenny’s the man.”
King Crimson members ADRIAN BELEW and TONY LEVIN, alongside STEVE VAI and TERRY BOZZIO approach the next chapter of BEAT. The quartet has announced a tour of the U.S. that will stage 40 appearances. The general on-sale is set for Friday, August 7 at 10AM local time. Tickets and VIP experiences will be available here: https://beat-official.com/tour. The artist pre-sale goes live on Tuesday, August 4 at Noon Eastern time with the password BEATTOUR. Fans can access the ticketing page and simply enter the code at checkout. All pre-sales will end at 10am local time Thursday, August 6.
