As reliable as the return of fall foliage and pumpkin spice everything, a sure sign that it’s autumn in New York is the Tedeschi Trucks Band setting up shop at the Beacon Theatre for its annual residency. On Friday, the TTB will kick off its six-show stay at the venerable Upper West Side venue, marking the Florida-based band’s ninth annual Beacon run.
To ensure a special experience for the band and audience alike, guitar maestro Derek Trucks says the band pays close attention to putting together the song list for each night of the run.
“We keep track of what we played every night of every tour, and we always dig back into what we played at the Beacon the last few years and try not to repeat the script,” Trucks tells The Post. “There’s always a lot of new material we have worked up by the time we get to the Beacon, and we try to repeat as little as possible.”
That said, what’s worked out on paper doesn’t always happen on stage. “I mean, you’ll be in the middle of a show and just totally abort the setlist and kind of [call an] audible,” says Trucks, a Jacksonville Jaguars fan, using a football term.
The TTB’s Beacon run follows in the footsteps of the Allman Brothers Band’s — of which Trucks was a member — storied residencies there. Those shows featured guest appearances from musical heavyweights, a tradition Trucks, his singer/guitarist wife Susan Tedeschi and their bandmates are keeping alive. Their past guests include everyone from Ravi Coltrane and fellow former Allman member Warren Haynes to members of Los Lobos, Wilco and Phish.
Trucks says he and Tedeschi “start reaching out pretty far in advance” to lock in the guests.
“We’ve had some amazing sit-ins over the years, and that goes back to the Allman Brothers there, too,” says Trucks. “That was just always the place. I mean, it’s New York and people are often there. We have a lot of friends that live up there that happen to be world-class legends. In some ways, it’s the only time we get to see them.”
Last month, the TTB surprised fans at the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia when it played the entire Derek and the Dominos album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.” Guitarists Trey Anastasio, of Phish, and Doyle Bramhall III sat in. The connections between the TTB and the 1970 album run deep: Trucks is named after the band name on the record, which features Eric Clapton and the late Duane Allman, whom Trucks eventually replaced in the Allman Brothers. And Trucks and Bramhall were bandmates in Clapton’s touring group.
“Trey showed up loaded for bear,” Trucks enthuses. “He showed up ready to go. It was a lot of fun, man. I was really happy to do that. And then I was doing research online, I was trying to look up the lyrics to ‘I Am Yours’ and where they came from, and I saw that the release date of the record was Susan’s birthdate. So I thought that was pretty great. I was named after the record, and Susan was born the day it came out, so it made the whole thing hit pretty close to home.”
Trucks and Tedeschi reunited with Clapton at the British legend’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas last week.
On Friday, the day the band opens the Beacon run, it will digitally release “High and Mighty,” a four-song EP originally released for Record Store Day.
“I mean, certain songs take on different meanings,” the guitarist says. “The tune ‘All My Friends,’ we recorded because our friend who wrote the song, Scott Boyer, passed way, and Gregg Allman had passed and he had recorded the song on his first solo record. The tune was recorded thinking about who the song is about. Then with the Kofi thing, it just needed to be out there” — TTB member Kofi Burbridge died in February. “And then songs that are the songs we recorded with that version of the band, it felt like that was important.”