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

by Galadrielle Allman

  “My brother beat the shit out of me just about every day of my life. I mean, he could just make you feel about this small,” he said, pinching his fingers together on a half inch of air. “Then, I got to be bigger than him and I fought back. One time, I was hanging out at this apartment that was owned by a club owner in town, just across the road from the club where we were set to play later that night, and here comes Duane. Drunk and pissed-off, cuz I have this beautiful honey sitting on my lap, a girl he liked, too. He walks up and says, ‘Baybro, did you go to the doctor and get that rash on your dick looked at?’ and I mean that did it. I was so pissed-off. I told him to get the fuck out, and he leaned in to punch me and I shoved him away. He was not expecting that, and we ended up out in the middle of the street, just brawling. We were just beating on each other, until finally, I clocked him in the ear and he was just laid out flat. The police came and everything, and I had to carry Duane home. Blood was coming out of his ear, and I was terrified, but that was the end of it. He never hit me again.”

  Gregg looked into my eyes for a moment, proud and strong, and I didn’t know what to say. Then he softened a little, mumbling something about how playing music together helped smooth things out between them, too.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what Gregg wanted. Duane never left any room for doubt about the plan. Giving up was not an option. Music was the only way forward. He wouldn’t let his baby brother walk away.

  When Gregg graduated from Seabreeze, they renamed their band the Allman Joys and hit the road hard. Their sets were so slick. They were a real pro club act, with long vamps between every song, and Duane talking in the low, melodic voice of an emcee: “Thank you, thank you very much … Bless your hearts. This next one is by James Brown, and he’ll be in town … soon.” They were so sharp in their matching suits, singing harmonies, and Duane was commanding, flinging out licks and leads like it was the easiest thing in the world.

  But before Gregg graduated from high school, before he and Duane hit the road as the Allman Joys, before their lives became completely devoted to playing, something happened in Duane’s life that was kept secret from everyone around him.

  In September 1964, when Duane was seventeen and his girlfriend Patti was sixteen, they had a baby girl.

  Learning that I am not my father’s only child was a confusing shock, and I chose to focus my outrage on how I found out. A woman armed with a tape recorder had traveled to Berkeley, California, in 1989 to interview my mother. She was a serious Allman Brothers fan who edited a photocopied newsletter called “Les Brers.” She and her boyfriend wanted to write a book about the band, and they had already spoken to Linda Oakley, Granny, and even Gregg. My mom was assured that this would be the first authorized telling of the band’s story, including the families’ perspectives, and she didn’t want to be left out. Although she had been approached many times, Donna had never given an interview about Duane before and she was nervous.

  On the tape, you can hear Donna’s hesitation and discomfort at first, but after an hour or so, she opens up and offers the woman a choice of wine, red or white, and completely lets down her guard. She describes meeting Duane, my birth, their breakup, and his death in great detail. Mom told her stories that were secret, stories I thought she would only ever tell me. Worse, she described things with a candor and openness I did not recognize at all, and listening to the tape, I felt jealous.

  Several weeks after the interview was done, the woman sent my mother a letter to ask her one more question: “Have you ever met the child Duane had with his first wife, Patti?”

  Donna called Gregg. “That baby died,” he said.

  Then she called Jerry, who said she had met Duane’s daughter. The woman writing the book about the band had brought her by her house. Jerry said the young woman did not look like Duane to her. She said she thought Duane believed the child had died at birth. Frankly she was not sure what he thought happened. Patti had given the baby up for adoption at birth, and when Duane and Patti later tried to find out about the baby, they could have been told anything.

  Donna called Jaimoe, but he said Duane had never mentioned a baby other than me. No one could tell Donna what she really wanted to know: Why hadn’t Duane told her?

  My mom flew to New York, where I was in college at the time, and told me while we rode a city bus to the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was sitting, and I swayed over her holding the chrome bar above my head. I don’t remember the words she used, or how I received them, only my anger slowly rising while I looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk. My next memory is of standing in front of the Calder circus inside a glass box in the museum’s lobby. I could hardly see it. My fury found its target in the woman with the tape recorder, this stranger who knew more about my family than I did.

  Patti’s parents hated Duane, and Jerry would barely tolerate the mention of Patti’s name. Patti’s father yelled into the phone, “If I see your son put his foot on my lawn, I’ll shoot his ass with rock salt!”

  Jerry screamed right back, “If you touch one hair on my son’s head, you better start looking for the red lights of the police car, coming to toss you in jail!” She would defend Duane with her life, which didn’t mean she wasn’t also absolutely furious. Duane wasn’t the one she blamed. She had always known these little girls traipsing in and out of her home were looking to trap her sons and make meal tickets out of them; Patti just confirmed her worst fears.

  Patti was sent to a home for unwed mothers in Jacksonville. While she was pregnant, she contracted rubella, and the baby was born deaf, with heart complications. The baby girl spent the early years of her life in an orphanage and then foster homes, until she was adopted by a couple at age five. Her new parents had a deaf relative and understood her needs. She was raised in Jacksonville, the same city I lived in until I was eleven.

  Later in life, Patti and her daughter found each other and formed a relationship.

  They visited my granny and gave her a school picture: a pale girl with brown eyes and dark brown curly hair with a sweet smile, a stranger.

  Twenty years after learning of her, I still cannot untangle how I feel. She makes me see that I built my identity on being Duane’s only child. The thing that I felt most special in me feels threatened by her existence, in a childish way.

  Stranger still, all I have of him, which never felt like enough to satisfy my need for him—the stories I have gathered, the relationships with our extended family, and even my name—suddenly feels like a great wealth of riches that she does not share, and I feel ashamed of that. Most of all, I am wounded by the thought that she cannot hear his music.

  The woman with the tape recorder got in touch with me just a short time ago and informed me that my sister wanted contact with me. I took her phone number and we began talking through emails and texts, brief polite notes, telling about our lives in the simplest terms. It’s hard to know what to say. She sends me pictures of herself and her son and daughter, and she even has a granddaughter. I can’t help but search all of their faces for some trace of my father. I cannot see him in them, and I have no way of knowing what that means.

  My mother reminds me that we have no way of knowing the truth of her paternity, but it seems unkind to ask her, after all this time, to take a test. There seems little harm in letting things stay where they have always been, in the mysterious gray area where my father kept his most personal moments. I wrote to Patti but she didn’t answer my letter. Her silence doesn’t surprise me, even though I remain disappointed and curious about her relationship with my father. Duane’s constant determination to keep his private life private seems to be holding fast. His will is still at work, and I accept it.

  When Gregg graduated from Seabreeze High School in 1965, the Allman Joys were freed up to spend their first summer as a traveling band. Jerry watched her boys packing the Chevy station wagon and trailer she had helped them buy to haul their gear. Her sons were grown and would wheel in and out of her life from now on. Duane was
loose-limbed and relaxed; he’d rest his big hands on his hips, narrow his eyes in thought. He’d be watchful and a little wary until a smile broke through. She tried to memorize him. Gregg had grown from cute to handsome in a season. His skin browned up like a biscuit and the summer sun made his blue eyes startling. They were a study in contrasts, her young men. She called them in for iced tea before they left, her voice cracking. She walked into her kitchen and poured herself a quick shot, standing at the kitchen sink, looking out into her empty backyard while the whisky warmed her throat and cleared her mind.

  The Allman Joys played their first serious out-of-town gig in Mobile, Alabama, at the Stork Club. They played six nights a week, six sets a night, covering songs from as many varied bands and genres as they heard on WLAC. They mastered Top 40 hits, rhythm and blues, and British rock with equal skill. They could play “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” with full harmonies, and “Walk Away Renée” to melt girls’ hearts, then fire off “What’d I Say” and just blow the roof off. They could chase a Beatles tune with a Bobby “Blue” Bland and a James Brown. Working up a set that could last all night took hours of practice. They needed dozens of songs in their pocket to take requests, so they traveled with a portable record player and bought hit singles along the way to update their set.

  When they couldn’t afford to crash in even the cheapest hotels, they slept on people’s floors in a heap under thin blankets and coats. They ate pancakes at midnight and again at noon, and fueled up on Coca-Cola and “blackbirds”—amphetamine pills—just to keep up the pace. They smoked cigarettes until they were hoarse and drank whisky to help them fall asleep. For Duane, it was heaven on earth.

  The more Duane played, the greater his need to play became. His life had real purpose and it found its expression in performing. Standing onstage and launching into a song tested him every single time. Once he figured out a riff, he started searching for the next piece of the puzzle, and there were always new passages to learn and new licks to try. The weight of his guitar strap over his shoulder, his instrument’s smooth neck gliding under his palm, the thickening of his fingertips and the quickening of his responses, all of it thrilled him. He was doing what he was born to do.

  At the outermost limit of their new adventure, they traveled to New York City to play at Trude Heller’s, a small club on West Ninth Street. Greenwich Village was a whole new world, teeming with freaks: college girls in miniskirts and black turtleneck sweaters, gay men in dandy suits, and fully tricked-out drag queens leaning in doorways wearing high-heeled shoes and wigs. Duane thought it looked like a damn anthill. Just watching the street hustle was a groove.

  They spent their pay on hip bell-bottoms at bohemian boutiques and took their new Beatle boots to the cobbler to have stacked heels added. They stayed at the Albert Hotel on East Tenth Street, a gloomy, Gothic brick structure built by the same architect who designed the Dakota apartments on Central Park West. The Albert had fallen on hard times and become home to poor traveling bands like the Blues Magoos and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

  The Allman Joys fell into a routine of playing long nights at Trude Heller’s, taking home a girl or three, waking up late for a pancake breakfast and an Orange Julius, dropping off their laundry, then heading back to Trude’s to practice before dinner, then doing it all over again. To make extra cash, they even took on the role of backup band for a flamboyant gay cabaret singer named Monti Rock III. Monti wore a full face of makeup and loaded himself down with baubles and bangles and worked the crowd at Trude’s. Bill Connell, the Allman Joys’ drummer, was fresh off the plane from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and couldn’t believe his eyes. Duane, Gregg, and Mike Alexander, their bass player, seemed to take Monti in stride. One look at the expression on Bill’s face and Duane gave him the nickname “the Novice.”

  Duane had already mastered this life. He had taken on all of the responsibilities of a bandleader, from talking to booking agents on pay phones and befriending club owners to planning all travel. He had high standards. He demanded shined shoes and pressed pants, polished instruments and punctuality, updated union cards. Daily practice before gigs was crucial to keep up with the growing demand for new songs. Bill felt it was the influence of Duane’s military education showing.

  But Duane was also still a kid. The guys made smoke bombs out of toilet paper rolls and firecrackers, using lit cigarettes as fuses. They’d set them in the glass phone booth across the way, then from their hotel room windows watch the smoke pour out, the fire trucks arriving, lights and sirens rolling. They stayed up late after playing, trading stories and worrying about Vietnam and the draft notices that were coming for each of them. Duane sent letters to Jo Jane, full of confidence that they were going to make it; there was no other plan.

  Back on the road, they practically wore a groove in the asphalt between New York and Nashville, then St. Louis and Daytona, Mobile and Tuscaloosa, before heading back to New York. All the traveling was wearing Gregg down. He hadn’t entirely let go of the idea of going to college, but Duane asked him to give the band one more year and Gregg couldn’t refuse him.

  Many cover songs the Allman Joys were playing had keyboard parts, and although guitar was his first love, Gregg had been drawn to keyboards for a long time. At Julian’s, a restaurant where Jerry now worked as a bookkeeper, a live band played in the bar for the happy-hour crowd. The band’s instruments included a Hammond B-3 organ with a Leslie—the special speaker that revolved around inside to create a vibrating sound that Gregg loved. When he was still in elementary school, Gregg had played around on that B-3, waiting for his mom to finish work. When he first sat down, he thought the thing had entirely too many buttons, but he was intrigued with it. Gregg got a Vox organ to help fill out the Allman Joys’ sound, and he even found a used Leslie that brought it pretty close to the ideal organ sound he could hear in his head.

  Duane knew success was within their reach. He encouraged the parents of the Sandpipers—a singing trio of girls they had backed in a Pensacola, Florida, club—to let their daughters join them in New York. A disc jockey liked the girls’ sound and set up an audition for them at Columbia Records with Bob Johnston, a producer who worked with Bob Dylan. The Allman Joys accompanied them, and even if nothing came of it, it was a new connection. John D. Loudermilk, the man who wrote “Tobacco Road” and many other hit songs, saw the Allman Joys play at the Briar Patch in Nashville. He was impressed by the effect they were having on the crowd and saw their potential. He invited them to hang out at his house in the country and gave them tips on the business and songwriting. He financed their first recording studio experience at Bradley’s Barn and introduced them to his influential friends, like Buddy Killen, head of Dial Records, and a fellow songwriter, John Hurley. He even took them out to breakfast with legendary guitarist Chet Atkins, who was so kind and open, the boys were almost able to overcome their nerves enough to talk to him.

  With Loudermilk’s support, the Allman Joys recorded their first single, a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”; it was released on Dial Records. Building on the strength of “Spoonful,” which was getting decent regional airplay, they filled the Fort Brandon Armory in Tuscaloosa with their biggest crowd yet and earned enough money for Duane and Gregg to buy Triumph motorcycles. The brothers rode out in front of the band’s station wagon and trailer, leading the way down the road.

  Linda, Berry Oakley’s wife, saw the Allman Joys perform when she was seventeen. I had no idea she knew them before Berry became the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band four years later. She told me about the first night she met them, in a club in Jacksonville.

  “Me and my girlfriends got to be their squeezes for the weekend. The Allman Joys played at the bottle club, the after-hours club—you bring your own bottle and they sold mixes and sodas, that’s when they really cut loose, and played the old blues. The Beachcomber would close at eleven or midnight, and they’d reopen and a whole new crew of clientele would come in. You could buy your mixers and that’s whe
n they would really get down to it. They were doing great R-and-B stuff and the best harmonies. They did ‘In the Midnight Hour’ and ‘Reach Out.’

  “They came over and sat with us and there were all these waitresses with sailor hip-huggers and lace-up shirts and they were all hot for the band. And here, these little high school girls come in there. It was just a change of pace. I remember Gregg coming up to my friend Marilyn and going, ‘Hi, blondie! What’s your name?’ She just turned into a puddle. They invited us to come see them at their little hotel, the 400 Court Motel on Philips Highway. Here we were, these virginal high school girls …

  “They took us to Philips Highway Plaza, the mall up there, and they went and bought Geraldine a stereo from Montgomery Ward for Christmas. We went through a package store and they got some Calvert’s Extra and some Cokes and we went back to the motel, and they were fixing us drinks. When Duane started to make a move on me, I told him I was dating David Brown. He said, ‘Let’s reminisce about old Dave.’ Your dad was so much fun. They were headed back to Daytona, and me and my friend said, ‘Oh, our world will never be the same!’ And they said, ‘You’ve gotta come down and see us!’

  “They gave us their address in Daytona, and of course we drove down there and it was all these people in and out of the house and their mom was at work, and we sat there and smoked too many cigarettes, and Duane was off with Patti. Nothing could be the same anymore, after you witnessed this. It was something else. There was definitely this magic going on. Things were changing everywhere: Vietnam and the protests and kids getting killed on campus, and peace and love and Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish, and it was so intense man, dig it, and ‘I Am the Walrus’ and Donovan and reefer and laying around on the floor, and let’s solve all the world’s problems! It was wonderful!”