TETON VILLAGE, Wyo. — Duane Betts has lived a few lives. From literally growing up as a homeschooled kid on the road with the Allman Brothers Band, to playing in his dad’s band Dickey Betts & Great Southern for a decade, to collaborating on nearly a dozen other projects such as Allman Betts Band, Backbone69, Whitestarr, Dawes, and Jamtown with G. Love and Donovan Frankenreiter, Betts now launched Palmetto Motel to support a new full-length record dropping end of summer. He’ll kick off a run of west coast dates this Friday at the Mangy Moose.
“The record is done and I’m really proud of it,” said Betts from Sarasota, Florida. “I wrote some of the material during the pandemic, and that’s tied to Jackson Hole, and then some of it was written down at my dad’s house in Florida. Then we recorded it at Derek Trucks’ and Susan Tedeschi’s studio in Jacksonville, Florida last spring.”
Duane will be playing the same Mangy Moose stage that his father Dickey performed on in 2004. Being on the road with his dad for several years was on-the-fly tutelage.
“It’s always great to play music with family,” Duane said from Sarasota, Florida. “And though you don’t always realize it at the time, those are some of the memories that I’ll cherish most.”
“I got to really experience and learn a lot from playing with some really great musicians in that band [Great Southern]. Watching my dad be a bandleader—whether it was as kid and not in the band with him, or whether it was later when I was in the band that he was leading—you really learn a lot by his mannerisms of him conducting the band. Or, if he thought that he didn’t play especially well at a show, to have a good sense of humor about it. Learned a lot about taking the good with the bad. You gotta do your best and hope for the best. And other times it seems like you can’t do any wrong if it’s a really great night. But yeah, you have to stay tough and keep grinding, I mean, it’s tough on the road. You’re voice might be gone and you’ve gotta do five more shows in a row, and you just have to make it work.”
Duane’s forthcoming LP is a follow-up to the debut 2018 EP, Sketches of American Music, which contained five co-written originals by Duane and songwriter Stoll Vaughn, as well as a cover of Dickey Bett’s “California Blues.”
Ox Presents Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel, 9 p.m. Saturday at the Mangy Moose in Teton Village. $29. MangyMoose.com.
