Derek Trucks on Why He Had to Audition for the Allman Brothers Band

In a Nashville Now first, Rolling Stone’s country music podcast went to Bonnaroo for a live episode with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. But the interview with the husband-and-wife duo of Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks didn’t go quite as planned — a storm of lightning, wind, and heavy rain forced the evacuation of the festival.

“Find a grounded structure, either a permanent restroom or a car,” a rep for Bonnaroo and the press tent, where the podcast was being filmed, told the audience of mostly music and journalism students at Belmont University in Nashville and Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro.

“We go out of the tent,” Trucks says. “And into the trailer,” Tedeschi adds.

Yet the Tedeschi Trucks Band, like Bonnaroo, will not be deterred. After the gates reopened and live music resumed on the stages, the 12-piece group played a blistering set on the What stage that highlighted songs off their new album, Future Soul. The next day, they joined Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now in the cabin studio to talk about the performance, the logistics and finances of touring with such a large band, and how the couple first met.

There were also Trucks’ recollections of his time playing in the Allman Brothers Band. Despite his uncle Butch Trucks being one of the group’s drummers, alongside the now last living original member Jaimoe, Trucks says he still had to audition.

“I was 19. It was basically, ‘Don’t screw up this rehearsal and you got it,” he says. “But you didn’t have the gig until you had the gig.”

Watch Tedeschi Trucks’ full episode below, including their evacuation from the press room, mid-interview.

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by Deputy Editor, Head of Country Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, the Black Crowes, Carly Pearce, Amy Grant, Luke Grimes, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Adam Mac, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Ne-Yo, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, Love on the Spectrum‘s Tyler White, Willie Nelson scholar John Spong, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.

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