Whipping Post (song) - Impact

Impact

Despite its length, the live "Whipping Post" received considerable progressive rock radio airplay during the early 1970s, especially late at night or on weekends. Such airplay led to "Whipping Post" becoming one of the band's more familiar and popular songs, and would help give At Fillmore East its reputation as having, as The Rolling Stone Record Guide wrote in 1979, "no wasted notes, no pointless jams, no half-realized vocals—everything counts", and of being, as Rolling Stone wrote in 2002, "the finest live rock performance ever committed to vinyl." VH1 would say that "Whipping Post" was "what the band would become famous for, an endless climb of heightening drama staked out by the twin-guitar exorcisms of Duane and Dickey Betts and the cool, measured, almost jazz-like response of the rhythm section."

The song also acquired a quasi-legendary role in early 1970s rock concerts, when audience members at other artists' concerts would semi-jokingly yell out "Whipping Post!" as a request between numbers, echoing the fan captured on At Fillmore East. Jackson Browne took note of this occurring during his concerts of the time. Another such instance from 1974 in Helsinki affected rock guitarist and composer Frank Zappa, as described below. Later this same yell-out-at-a-concert "role" would be taken over to a far greater extent by Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird", although the "Whipping Post" tradition made something of a later comeback at indie rock shows.

With the advent of album oriented rock radio formats in the 1980s and later, "Whipping Post" became less visible in the rock consciousness, but upon the reformation of the Allmans in 1989 and their perennial touring it held a regular slot in the group's concert set list rotation. Musicians continued to study it: Hal Leonard Corporation published a multi-volume sheet music book of the Allman Brothers' work in 1995, and it took 42 pages to transcribe all the guitar solos in the At Fillmore East rendition of the song. "Whipping Post" has also made an impression on writers and been frequently referred to in literature. Ron Rash's 2006 novel The World Made Straight features a character listening to the opening bass line of the song at so loud and close a volume that the speakers shake. Douglas Palermo's 2004 Learning to Live imagines future aliens exploring a desolate Earth and discovering the At Fillmore East recording; the aliens study it and eventually succumb to an overdose of emotion, Tim McCleaf's 2004 novella For They Know Not What They Do uses the song as a metaphor for suffering, while Mary Kay Andrews' novel Little Bitty Lies refers to the song as an example of "soul-scorching blues". In non-fiction, John C. Leggett and Suzanne Malm's 1995 work The Eighteen Stages of Love uses "Whipping Post" as a metaphor for a romantic relationship in which the participants masochistically stay in though it has gone bad. In comedic context, the song was featured in the 2008 My Name Is Earl television series episode "Joy in a Bubble", in which Joy gets sick and Earl has to perform all of her regular duties.