Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman

by Galadrielle Allman

Her sons were having a real effect on those kids. She watched a fourteen-year-old girl in Bermuda shorts, her hair in a ponytail, stand in front of Gregg, then dreamily drift back to Duane, then right back to Gregg as if she were in a trance. For a moment Jerry could see her boys through that girl’s eyes. They were handsome boys, lit with a glow from within. They were remarkable, and she was so proud.

  Soon Duane and Gregg moved on from the Y and started playing house parties. They went through a series of band names: the Uniques, the Shufflers, and finally, the Escorts. It was hard to find guys who played well and owned their own gear, and harder still to find guys who took playing as seriously as Duane did. Each new incarnation of the band became a little more professional. On weekends the Escorts traveled as far as Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, to play fraternity parties and proms, bringing home travel stories and pocket money. The measure of freedom the brothers had was rare and impressive to their friends.

  Duane and Gregg started haunting the nightclubs down by the Daytona shore. Duane was quick to introduce himself to owners and managers. He met other young musicians, black and white, wherever he found them. He wanted to learn everything he could. That’s how he and Gregg met Floyd Miles. Floyd was a young black kid with the voice and presence of an older, seasoned performer. He fronted a vocal group called the Untils, who were backed by a white band called the Houserockers. They could tear through “Twist and Shout” and “Land of a Thousand Dances,” then smooth out with a tune like “Daddy’s Home.” They had a standing gig at a club on the ocean pier, and kids would roll in off the beach and get mesmerized. Floyd had style and a strong set of pipes. At sixteen years old, he already had a wealth of experience and had lived on his own for a year. Duane and Gregg took turns sitting in on guitar with the Houserockers and they invited Floyd to come hang out at their house. He hesitated at first, but he did come.

  It was an unusual thing for white kids and black kids to become friends. Beaches, schools, restaurants, and clubs were all segregated in Florida, and a nightly curfew was strictly enforced. If a black person went out on the white side of Daytona after dark, the police would be called. But music was an exception; young black musicians had talent that even bigoted white people wanted to enjoy, so rules were bent when it came to performers. Music was a force of change in the lives of young people.

  Gregg didn’t seem to entirely realize what he had. However, Duane heard something developing in his baby brother that he didn’t have himself: a voice. Duane told Jo Jane, “If I had that voice, I could rule the world.”

  Even though he was still shy about it, Gregg had great pitch and natural control over his voice, and emotion just poured out of him when he sang a song he really liked. Duane had the passion and confidence, but singing wasn’t his gift. He asked Floyd to show Gregg the ropes.

  Soon Floyd was teaching Gregg how to sing from his diaphragm, and how to protect his throat. Duane and Gregg snuck Floyd into parties to see their new band play, and sometimes hid him in the kitchen to watch from the doorway of white clubs. Floyd took the brothers to his neighborhood record store and eventually to George’s Place, a nightclub where white kids were not often seen. Jerry said Duane looked like a marshmallow in a cup of hot chocolate, the only white face there.

  Duane would pick up his guitar case and head out the front door, his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and drive his mother’s car over the high bridge, to the other side of the river, the neighborhood whites had ugly names for: Darktown, Niggertown.

  The trees were taller there, the roads narrow and lined with churches and bars, little cinder-block houses, people sitting on concrete porches in metal folding chairs in the dark. He went to George’s Place and sat by the small stage with Floyd. He was happy to be there and he was never afraid. Why would he be? He had friends and he made more, just by playing and being smooth. He was young and strange, with his long hair and pegged pants, but he was always kind and respectful.

  He’d ask to sit in with a band, usually an R&B cover act of guys not much older than him, and he’d catch on quick. He shared the stage well, knowing how to stand back and support with rhythm until the other player looked him in the eye and nodded ever so slightly, just tipping his head to the floor, and Duane would step into the empty space carved for him in the song and fill it with a hot lick. The sound of his guitar whipped through the room, funky and changeable, then he’d drop down into the rhythm and the other player would laugh with his eyes. Damn! Where did you come from? Duane would nod and smile back, thinking, What is better than this? Playing your way into a world that doesn’t belong to you? A world your mama can’t follow you into? Music filled up the space between people, moving their hips. Songs about love and longing, bald-faced and fearless. It felt good to play so sweet and earnest, then rock the room and forget where you were altogether. You forgot the walls, the floor, the bridge over the dark water that divided the town. You moved and found your body in the music. It was everything, and he was making it.

  Jerry wasn’t keen at first on her boy’s friendship with Floyd, a fact that is hard to imagine now that she and Floyd have been friends for more than forty years. She was a white woman of a generation in the South raised in racism, and back then she saw black people as belonging to a separate and lower class. But her boys were not deterred when she loudly tossed out slanderous names and washed the glasses they had used—twice.

  “He’s a musician, Ma” was all the explanation they felt was needed.

  Floyd stayed and Jerry grew to know him and love him. Jerry grew, period.

  Eventually the Escorts moved up to playing in nightclubs they were too young to enter legally as patrons. Jerry would go down and introduce herself to the owners, so they’d know the boys weren’t on their own and couldn’t be taken advantage of. She made Duane and Gregg join the local union and pay their dues out of their earnings. If they were going to do this thing, they were going to learn to be professionals, as far as she was concerned. Duane insisted that they buy matching suits to wear onstage. They took publicity photos at a local studio, and made calling cards to give to club owners. They looked like clean-cut young men with a slight bohemian edge, their carefully combed hair touching their mandarin collars.

  Duane was making up his mind to leave school. The more he played, the more he wanted to play, and school was feeling like a waste of precious time. He wasn’t getting away with anything. Jerry knew he was skipping class and no amount of yelling was getting through to him. Duane would say what he always said. “I will never use anything they’re teaching at that school. I can read. I can write. What more do I need?” If she really started screaming at him, he’d just leave the house and stay away for a day or two.

  The dynamic of their family of three was a complicated balancing act. Duane and Jerry were both strong-willed and fiery, and Gregory was left to retreat into himself, or step up and become the peacemaker. When his mama questioned him about Duane, he would tell her just enough to keep her satisfied. She kept a closer eye on Gregg because she knew he was more likely to listen to her. He was gentle and easygoing. Duane did what he wanted, regardless. The best she could hope for was that he would do what he wanted to do while staying under her roof. Myrtle and even Janie wondered whether Jerry working so hard was the real issue with the boys; they suggested she had taken on too much at the restaurant. They didn’t understand her ambition or her desire to give her sons nice things. She had raised them to take care of themselves. They had the right to make choices of their own. They were young men. She even understood and respected their rebelliousness, up to a point.

  Daytona was a small community, and the drinking and smoking, the beer heists from the local liquor store and the speeding through town, were not going unnoticed. Patti’s father would yell at Jerry over the phone, telling her to keep that wild boy away from his daughter. Mr. Hicks gave her pitying looks. Gregg’s grades started to dip down, too. All he thought about was his little girlfriend. Jerry was getting sick and
tired of her neighbors’ talk. She wasn’t going to let her sons become juvenile delinquents and something had to be done to rein them in.

  In 1962, when Gregg was a sophomore and Duane should have been a junior, she decided to send them both back to Castle Heights Military Academy. Duane had missed so much school that Jerry hired a special tutor so he could pass the entrance exam, but he was still held back and enrolled as a sophomore, a further indignity. The upper school was even more rigid than the lower school had been. Their hair was clipped close to their scalps, their uniforms were heavy, and classes, drills, and inspections accounted for almost every waking moment. Defiance and broken rules were met with swift corporal punishment and total loss of freedom.

  Duane took his guitar, his record collection, and a portable record player off to school. Music remained his focus. He holed up in his dorm room, practicing guitar while listening to records. He held records still with his big toe while he figured out riffs, controlling the flow of music. He and Gregg formed a band called the Misfits and performed at school parties, but it wasn’t enough to divert Duane or keep him there for very long.

  Within the year, Duane left Castle Heights with his guitar case in hand and hitchhiked to Nashville, where he boarded a bus home to Daytona without telling anyone but Gregg—AWOL.

  After being home alone with his furious mother for a couple of weeks, he couldn’t take the heat and went back to school and hid out in Gregg’s dorm room. Jo Jane later teased him that he was the only guy who ever ran away to boarding school. He didn’t stay very long, and when he returned home again he refused to return to Seabreeze High School, no matter what Jerry said. He was finished with high school for good.

  “Wait, Granny. When did Duane drop out of high school?” I asked.

  “Which time? He was in and out of school.”

  “Was he just a sophomore? Like, fifteen or sixteen years old? Didn’t you try and stop him?” I asked.

  My granny reared up in her chair and seemed to grow a few inches taller, her voice hard and loud, her eyes blazing.

  “Galadrielle, I’d like to see you try and tell a boy taller than you and stronger than you what to do! I couldn’t stop Duane from doing anything he wanted to do!”

  I was glimpsing her as she must have been fifty years ago—strong enough to handle two young men on her own through sheer force of will. Whether she could control them or not, she was clearly a force to be reckoned with. I had never seen this side of her before, but I was certain my father had.

  She said, “I’ll tell you what I did. I told him: ‘You sure as hell aren’t going to lie around my house or walk the beach like you’ve been doing.’ I said, ‘If you don’t work, I won’t work, either, and we will both sit right here all day, staring at each other and starving!’ ” She was quiet for a moment, and then Granny said, “Duane would have become a killer if he hadn’t found that guitar.”

  Duane did go to work. He found a job playing music in a strip joint. Jerry saw it for what it was—an opportunity to be a paid musician—and she didn’t stand in his way. In fact, she let Duane borrow her car, as long as it was sitting safely in the driveway when she woke up to go to work. He didn’t have his driver’s license yet, but he was a workingman now.

  Bucky Walter’s Five O’Clock Club was on the opposite side of the river. The live trio that played for the dancers was looking for a bass player and Duane went to check it out. He took a job washing dishes in the kitchen and chatted up the players during their breaks. He talked them into letting him sit in with them.

  Duane took to the nightlife without skipping a beat. There was a world going on out there, bodies moving, cars screeching, girls shaking, and bands swinging. Duane was headed that way, and why walk when you can run? He smoked cigarettes and let his hair grow back down over his collar. He pressed his long-sleeve shirts and shined up his dress shoes. He didn’t look like a kid of sixteen; he carried himself like a man. He brought home money and lived his own life. Music was everywhere, in everything, a light shining brighter than every other. Duane’s ears and mind were wide open now. He saw the beauty and promise in it, and it called to him. He slept with his radio in his ear, and turned it up loud in his mama’s car coming home from playing at work.

  Duane played bass, because that’s what the band needed; he’d stand in front of a piano player who played only the black keys. It was an after-hours joint that would often get busted for selling cheap liquor in top-shelf bottles. When the police came by, the rest of the band would hide Duane away in the girls’ dressing room or make him hunch down in a car in the parking lot.

  Duane looked into the little crowd of men seated at small round tables with glazed eyes. They were only hearing the backbeat, the one-two coming off the hips of the girl’s slow shimmy. The music was just the water she was swimming in, this sweat-shiny mermaid gliding in place through waves of smoke. Duane didn’t care. He wasn’t playing for the men anyhow. He was following the song through its changes and keeping pace with the beat, he was learning every minute, and it felt good to forget what he was trying to do, and just do it, like breathing. It was happening. The life in this dark club was a mysterious brew served in a chipped cup—his first taste of another world. He was on the inside now, building this thick atmosphere brick by brick, part of a rhythm section, no longer a spectator. Even on this little stage, he could feel it was where he belonged. This was his classroom; these cats laying down this sleazy groove were his teachers and he was going for a gold star.

  Gregg hated Castle Heights, too, but he managed to stay for almost two years. The work was never a problem, but he was heartsick over being separated from Vicki. She told him she would wait for him, but he learned on a home visit that she was dating a football player. He decided to drop out, too, and when he finally stirred up his courage to leave, he was determined to go with dignity. He put on his full dress uniform and walked into the headmaster’s office. He said, “If you see me getting smaller, it’s because I’m leaving.”

  Once Gregg was home, music took up its rightful place in their lives again, and it remained the most powerful thing he and Duane shared. Duane wanted Gregg to quit high school so they could really hit the road. Jerry backed him off quick, saying, “You do what you want with your life, but you leave your brother alone.”

  Jerry enrolled Gregg in Seabreeze High and he stayed until he graduated in the summer of 1965.

  In their room Duane and Gregg listened to everything: corny crooners and perky pop stars, blues criers and rhythm kings, and the Beatles, oh God, the Beatles. Their heads were just swimming with Beatles harmonies and the brilliant simplicity of their melodies. How could so much power and feeling hide in so few chords?

  Their garage smelled of cool, dusty concrete. The walls were lined with metal shelves of gardening supplies and cardboard boxes. Duane and Gregg set up little amps and played out there for hours, woodshedding with the door raised up for air when it got too hot, standing facing the road, and whole afternoons passed within a Beatles song like “This Boy.” Neighborhood kids were drawn to the sound and sat in their driveway to listen to them practice. The brothers ran through the same song over and over until they got it down, perfect, and then moved on to another. They played every day for months. Then at night, Duane and Gregg would lie in their beds in the dark and sing the harmonies until they were just right. What was left to do as a young band that the Beatles hadn’t already done better? Duane was determined to learn from them and keep going.

  Their biggest break came in the spring of 1965, when the Escorts were offered a chance to open up for the Beach Boys at the City Island Ball Park. The only trouble was, they had to share the limelight with their local rivals, the Nightcrawlers, who always seemed to be a step ahead of them. They had recorded a song that became a regional hit on the radio called “Little Black Egg.” The envy and frustration of hearing their rivals’ song played around town lit a fire under Duane. They practiced constantly for that gig, and when the time came, they knew th
ey had to blow the Nightcrawlers out of the water.

  The Nightcrawlers and the Escorts were told to set up side by side on the big stage, and trade off tunes, one band and then the other. If they hadn’t felt like rivals before, this gig would have done it. The Escorts had worked so hard and it showed. Their tones were better, their energy higher, and at the end of the night, they felt great.

  Duane couldn’t stop talking about everything that was to come. They were going to hit the road and be a real professional outfit! It just wasn’t happening fast enough. The rest of the guys sat quietly listening, thinking about all the other things they wanted to do more than take off and play. No one had the drive or focus that Duane did, and even if they had, their folks would have killed them. They had to admit they were not ready to make a career out of their high school band; they wanted to go to college, even Gregg.

  Gregg had a taste for playing, of course, but he had a fallback plan. He wanted go to dental school and get himself a stable career, but he learned to keep quiet about it around his brother. He didn’t want to disappoint Duane, and he never had his brother’s blind faith that they could succeed as musicians. Gregg imagined a house on the water, a wife, money in his pocket, cars, and nice clothes. Duane didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to keep playing. Gregg would slip off with his girl and miss practice, and Duane would ignore him as punishment, disappearing for a few days and never saying where he’d been.

  Granny says, “Duane could see Gregg’s talent long before he saw it in himself.”

  When Gregory told me about this notion of becoming an oral surgeon, I searched his face to see if he was kidding, but no joke—that was his teenage plan for the future. I tried to imagine him with a Pat Boone haircut and a white coat, smiling over open mouths all day, pulling teeth. It is impossible to picture.

  When I asked Gregory how he and Duane got along in their early bands, especially in the moments when Gregg considered moving on, he said, “Well, let me see.” He paused.