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

by Galadrielle Allman

  Jasper County, South Carolina, January 30, 1967

  To Whom it May Concern, Howard Duane Allman, age 20, Patricia Ann Chandlee, age 19, united in the bonds of matrimony.

  Their typed names hover above the printed lines of the form. I don’t know how they ended up in South Carolina or why they married there alone, but the date overlaps with the time the band was recording the second Hour Glass album back in Los Angeles.

  Patti did not return to L.A. with Duane, and other than that brief time he left the band, I don’t know that they ever lived together at all.

  The second Hour Glass album, Power of Love, came out in March 1968, and the band went out on the road to promote it. They even returned home to Daytona and played the Martinique and the Pier, their teenage haunts. The songs they had worked so hard to craft, Gregg’s original songs and the blues songs, didn’t quite play in the clubs back home. People wanted the same thing they had always wanted: the hits of the day played for dancing and relaxing. Going from the Fillmore to the Martinique was hard, like stepping back into shoes that no longer fit.

  Duane went to shoot a game of pool at Frank’s Pool Hall in Daytona wearing a brass bell around his neck on a strip of hide, a trinket he must have picked up in a head shop or a stall filled with junk jewelry in Venice Beach. Walking out on to Main Street, he got heckled by some kid.

  “What’s that you got on? A necklace? Are you a boy or a girl? I can’t tell!”

  Duane looked into the kid’s eyes with all the dignity and gravity of an elder, slipped the bell over his head and placed it around the kid’s neck, patted his shoulder, and walked away. The boy gathered the bell between his fingers and rang it, watching Duane strut up the street, his shoulders squared and proud.

  Hour Glass went on to play the Comic Book Club in Jacksonville. That night, Duane and Berry Oakley met for the first time. Berry’s beautiful girlfriend, Linda, introduced them. Linda was six feet tall and curvy, with huge blue eyes, and once you saw her, you didn’t forget her. Duane remembered her right away. She loved the Allman Joys and had hung out at the Allmans’ house a few times. They were really nice guys, and she knew Berry would love their music. Linda dragged him to see them play. He was worn-out from playing with his own band.

  Berry was a beautiful, badass bass player from sweet home Chicago, with brown hair flowing down his back, bright blue eyes, and freckles sprinkled across his nose. Berry was steeped in the electric blues. He’d played in bands as a guitarist and a bass player since high school. He had landed in Jacksonville and started another band, the Second Coming. He hoped Duane would come and see them play. He had a hot guitar player named Dickey Betts.

  Berry’s spacey smile was open and warm, quiet and watchful. He was a fine cat, and spiritual. He talked with total passion about how important it was to spread the love by playing live as much as they possibly could. He wanted to bring like-minded people together and raise them up with music. Duane really dug him, and promised to get in touch soon to jam.

  Hour Glass continued on to Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, then took some of the money they were making and headed to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. They wanted to record a demo their own way, without compromise, and on their home turf. Coming off the road, they were loose and strong. They played a medley of B. B. King songs and a couple of Gregg’s originals. The room sounded perfect, and they were so comfortable, they cut all the tracks in a single night. They were excited by the sound they captured there and couldn’t wait to play it for Dallas Smith and the powers that be at Liberty Records. It was a declaration of intent.

  Dallas could hardly get off the phone long enough to listen to the music. He wasn’t interested in recording a blues band. Maybe it was time for them to part ways, he said. Duane was shaking with anger. It was over.

  They didn’t have time to dwell on it and get down. They still had some dates to play in Cleveland and St. Louis, where they could hang out for a while and try to think things through.

  Donna woke up at the first click, the unmistakable sound of Denny Golden tossing stones against her window. Her sister Joanie sighed in her sleep and turned toward the wall. Denny called out Donna’s name in a loud stage whisper that soon became a drunken shout. Ignoring him wasn’t going to work. She knew he wanted her to come outside and sit in the backyard in the dark with him. He didn’t seem to hear her when she said no. She wasn’t sure how she had gotten herself into this situation. They had just met a month or two before, when he asked her out on her first real date.

  Denny was a public school boy who came by Incarnate Word Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school outside St. Louis, to meet girls in the afternoon when classes ended. He had a nice enough face, pale and serious, and when he asked her out, Donna was happy. No one had ever asked her out before. As long as they were never alone, her parents didn’t mind, which surprised Donna a little. She was sixteen, but they rarely treated her like it. Her father drove them to the Two Plus Two Club to dance with their friends, or to the movies, where they kissed the whole time. Right away, Denny started leaving tightly folded squares of frayed notebook paper in her mailbox, notes so full of yearning she had no idea what to say to him when she saw him after reading them.

  “Donna, you are the sweetest and most wonderfulest girl I know,” he wrote, as if the word wonderful wasn’t big enough.

  In his school picture, he wore a suit and tie. His dark hair was combed flat and parted on the side, and she thought she could see something like mystery in his eyes, but she wasn’t sure. She let him take her to the homecoming dance, but he wrecked it by showing up half drunk. Now he just wanted to apologize over and over again.

  Donna had already told Denny she couldn’t see him anymore. He was scaring her a little. Maybe scaring wasn’t the right word. He was overwhelming her. She couldn’t even figure out how she felt about him. Maybe that was just because he drank so much. She didn’t like it. She tried to explain that her father had heard Denny ranting in his yard and wasn’t happy about it. Denny’s next note read, “I am not going to stop until you tell me goodbye, but I hope you don’t. I think that [I should] apologize to your dad, and then maybe we could go to a game.”

  She leaned out the window and whispered, “Denny, go home!”

  It went quiet outside, but she stayed by the window, looking at the gray moonlit grass where he had stood until she was sure he was really gone.

  After school, the girls in Donna’s class changed out of their uniforms and into outfits that followed another sort of dress code: plaid A-line skirts, prim shirts with Peter Pan collars, and cardigans in matching colors. For a really special touch, some girls took their sweaters to a local convent where the nuns carefully embroidered monograms onto them. Hair was worn teased into bubbles and decorated with headbands and bows like Patty Duke’s. To maintain the look, you had to sleep in hard plastic curlers and back-comb your hair into a nest in the morning with a rattail comb and blast it with clouds of hairspray. Donna’s mother, Tommie Jean, understood better than anyone how important it was to have just the right clothes, but she was working with a very tight budget. Donna would ask for a Villager blouse and her mom would buy a less expensive imitation with an odd ruffled collar instead. She’d ask for a pair of stylish slip-on shoes and her mom would buy gold old-lady sandals that came folded in a pouch like a pair of house slippers. It was humiliating. Donna poked through patterns at the fabric store, looking for pantsuits and A-line dresses to show her mom. Her mom spent hours in the evenings sitting at her sewing machine, its tiny bright light shining on her lovely face. Donna wished she could be as beautiful and glamorous as her mother. Her mom’s room was a world unto itself—polished, sweet smelling, and off-limits to her children. When she was very young, Donna would sneak in and sit at her mother’s vanity to sniff her waxy red lipsticks and golden perfumes, and look into her tidy drawers of folded stockings and silky things. She would lean into her mother’s closet and press her face into the cool rayon dresses and feel a pining pull in her
chest like romantic love. Now she stood in her parents’ doorway and remembered the feeling sadly, without going inside.

  Donna got a summer job at a soda fountain in Clayton to earn shopping money. She made malts and open-faced sandwiches drenched in gravy for $1.07 an hour. She bought herself a shiny green pack of Salems and forced herself to smoke a whole one before her shift. They tasted awful and made her woozy, but she felt graceful and kind of French holding a lit cigarette. No one called her Bean Pole or Bunny Teeth anymore. After years of painful orthodontia, including medieval headgear that forced her teeth into place, Donna was blossoming into a pretty teen.

  When her family moved to a new house on Dawn Valley Drive just before the start of Donna’s junior year of high school, it was a radical change. She and Joanie were finally allowed to go to a secular school, and the family went to church only on Sunday now, in a modern neighborhood church with none of All Souls’ mystery. It was easy to disappear at Parkway High School. Donna wasn’t sure how to start up conversations with new girls, and clothing was more important than ever. When she walked down a hallway full of boys, she wondered how she looked or if they were looking at her at all.

  She still relied on her friends from Incarnate Word, like Maureen and Mary Jo, who were actually more worldly than most, even though they went to Catholic school. Maureen was a beautiful, rebellious blonde who managed to make her school uniform look ironic and sexy just by standing with her hand on her hip, smiling. She had been suspended from school once for peeking at the nuns while they showered during a school retreat. Donna and Maureen talked on the phone until their ears were hot.

  Mary Jo was different—small, dark-haired, and fine-boned. She would bend her head to the side and assess things with serious eyes. Mary Jo knew all kinds of people from hanging out at teen clubs like the Castaway, where she taught Donna how to dance the shing-a-ling, swiveling her hips to the groove. The guys Mary Jo knew made Denny Golden seem like a child. They were mostly local musicians. Mary Jo would light two Salems and hand her one, the smoke ballooning in the colored lights, blue and red. Donna wished they could just stay there, drifting in the streaming songs, dancing together.

  Tommie Jean was busy decorating their new house. She picked metallic floral wallpaper for the downstairs bathroom and thick shag carpeting for the den, and reupholstered the sofas in patterned orange velveteen. The house had a modern split-level floor plan; the front door opened onto a wide landing with wrought-iron railings. Swinging saloon doors opened into the kitchen, which had a padded breakfast booth like in a restaurant.

  Tommie Jean ruled the Dawn Valley house with vigor and intensity. Nothing could get cleaned well or quickly enough to please her. It was a physical relief when her husband came home at night. She greeted Gil with a long list of grievances. The teenagers were driving her crazy with their smart mouths and loud music. He had to do something. Once the kids were sorted out behind closed doors, she could finally breathe freely and treat Gil like a husband.

  Donna did her homework without being asked and kept her grades high. After Catholic school, public high school seemed easy. She took typing and shorthand, which she especially liked for use as a secret code, and home economics, where she learned to sew and bake. Practical subjects were novel and fun compared to her previous school’s heavy academics and religious instruction.

  Donna was quiet and rarely gave her parents trouble, unless Joanie was driving her crazy, following her around. Donna’s worst offense was being moody and withdrawn, occasionally rolling her eyes or being sarcastic. Once she called her brother a fruit and her father slapped her so swiftly she was too shocked to cry. As loose as life seemed now, there were still rules and her mother’s yelling and her father’s hand enforced them. Donna realized that when either of her parents made quick moves toward her, she couldn’t help but flinch, expecting a sudden smack, and that made her very sad. Still, she loved them.

  She didn’t get to spend much time with her father, so when he offered to teach her how to drive she jumped at the chance. He took her out in his Volkswagen Bug and sat beside her with calm confidence radiating from his eyes. As they rode through their suburban neighborhood on the newly paved roads, Donna found it challenging to maneuver the little bubble of a car; it was hilly and the streets looped around blindly into cul-de-sacs. Her daddy was patient. He didn’t yell when she made horrible scraping sounds with the clutch and he didn’t let her give up until she could angle the car into a tight parking space and do a three-point turn without stalling. When she pulled back into their driveway, he put his hand on her head and said, “You did good, kid.”

  By the summer of 1967, Donna could drive herself downtown to Gaslight Square, a long stretch of nightclubs and coffee shops where folk music spilled out onto the street. Boys her age had hair past their collars, long sideburns, mustaches, and trim beards. Downtown girls wore their hair long and silky with their skirts well above the knee. There was energy all around her.

  Mary Jo invited Donna to go to a love-in. Donna wasn’t sure what it was, but she wanted to check it out. Young people sat cross-legged in circles in Forest Park, singing songs, hugging and kissing, painting hearts on their cheeks and laughing. Girls danced barefoot in the grass in colorful patterned dresses, their faces bright with sweet, simple joy. A boy with long blond hair gave Donna a droopy little daisy with a silent smile. It was such a lovely gesture. Her mother was standing in the front yard when she got home. She showed her the flower and Tommie Jean smiled. Donna was kind of surprised, for some reason. Then she asked Donna if she knew the boy.

  “No, mom. He was a hippie. You know, a flower child.”

  Her mother looked at her like she was speaking a foreign language. Her parents were so straight. They didn’t drink or smoke or swear and they could never imagine the way the world was changing, right now. Soon they complained that Donna’s bleach-blond bangs were hanging in her eyes and her black mascara was too thick. Tommie Jean would catch her on the way out the door and try to wipe off her eye makeup and tug down the hem of her skirt, until Donna wriggled free and ran to her car.

  Life was basically uneventful. School and home, dinner in the kitchen with her siblings, homework and sleep. Maybe one good phone call. She could feel herself outgrowing her family in a way she couldn’t explain. She wanted to retreat to her room and listen to the Beatles and Buffalo Springfield. Love songs helped her imagine what love could be and she could feel it, just by closing her eyes.

  Daydreaming in class one afternoon, Donna was jarred awake when her teacher asked her to step into the hall. She couldn’t imagine what she had done wrong. Her stomach went sour when she saw her father standing tall beside a row of lockers in the hallway, looking serious around the mouth. He said he needed to take her home. She couldn’t remember later exactly how her daddy told her; she could only remember his hand on her back while they walked out to his car, and how afraid she felt not knowing what was going on.

  Her father took her out of school to tell her that Denny Golden, the first boy who had ever liked her, had fallen into a diabetic coma and died suddenly after his high school graduation party. Her parents were afraid she would find out at school and decided it was best that they tell her at home. Alone in her room, she took out Denny’s love notes and arranged them in front of her on her bed, a half-moon of folded squares. She couldn’t bring herself to read them, but she didn’t want to put them away, either. She thought of Denny’s mother, and how kind she had always been to her. Donna gathered his letters into her cupped palms, a pile as light as the bones of a bird. Poor Denny.

  She was almost eighteen when Donna met another boy she liked, a painter named Dennis Gregorian. He wasn’t exactly a flower child; he was darker and more mysterious than that, like Bob Dylan, with long brown hair and a full mouth. She thought his face was beautiful. He lived in a rented room in a run-down boardinghouse in Gaslight Square. He and his brother John were runaways, cruising around town in their big all-American heap of a car. Dennis
told her they were broke. They siphoned gas from strangers’ cars at night to keep their own car running. When Dennis and John picked Donna up after school, girls would stare and wrap their arms more tightly around their books. Sometimes Donna went back to his room and they kissed a little, but usually they took drives in Forest Park and sat in the sun, talking about art and music. Being with Dennis was easy and sweet, with just a faint feeling of something more serious beginning to happen underneath.

  On April 4, 1968, a few minutes after six o’clock in the evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. As the news of his murder spread, people began taking to the streets all over the country in outrage and sorrow. The Roosmann house was quiet; no one was talking about what had happened. Donna had snuck out of the house to go dancing at the Starlight Ballroom with Mary Jo, unaware of the assassination in Tennessee. As people gathered, word of King’s death shocked the teen club into silence. No one there was sure how to mark the horrible moment, except to spend it quietly together.

  Riots were erupting all over the country. Chicago and Washington, D.C., were burning. Louisville, Baltimore, Kansas City, and a hundred other American cities were overcome by riots that led to occupations by the National Guard, called in to restore order. Thousands of people were injured and arrested, buildings were destroyed, power was knocked out, curfews were imposed, and even as the revolts went on for days, it still felt to many like no response could ever be great enough to express the damage done to the world. King’s death was an immeasurable loss.

  Donna was only dimly aware of the scale of the trauma that was tearing the country apart, but in a way, it effected a rupture in her life as well. She leaned into her parents’ bedroom door late that night, and whispered that she was home. From their bed, her parents could smell the pungent reek of cigarette smoke on their daughter’s clothes. Her mother started to shout.