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

by Galadrielle Allman

  They had a connection that was deepening by the day, built by the hour in their rehearsal space. Every free day they had was spent rehearsing. Their list of songs was growing, melodies strengthening with repetition. Bridges were lifted between parts that at first seemed unconnected, verse and chorus falling into place.

  They were already beginning to tighten up material for their second album.

  All Donna ever wanted was time alone with Duane; that was her happiness. Duane had a gift for slowing down time when he was by her side, and minutes moved like cold honey. The curving vowels in his voice were a warm current, and she wanted to be everywhere he had been, and asked him to tell her. His hands were gentle, but he was always hungry. To be able to give him anything he wanted was her joy. But their life was full of people, always coming and going. She would wake up in the pale light that filtered through their high bedroom window, the street’s dim glow bouncing off the sky-blue walls. Heat rose off of Duane’s body, his breathing deep and steady, and Donna could dip down into the deepest part of sleep, a different level of rest than she could ever find alone. She tried to stay up and consider his sleeping face, only hers to see. She adored his face, framed by his fine hair and thick, strong muttonchops, scratchy against her cheek. His cheekbones were sharp enough to cast shadows of their own. The tips of his teeth rested on his chapped lower lip, and his eyelids moved in strange dreamy circles, searching for something in a dream. She could make him jump by touching his bony knees with her cold feet. She inhaled his smell, part tobacco and sweet sweat, and tried to memorize the feeling of being tucked tightly against him, his spoon, and make it last forever.

  Duane woke up from another dream of a new song. He picked up his acoustic guitar and played the riff, and was so excited he couldn’t wait to record it. He made Jim Hawkins, one of Capricorn’s engineers, get out of bed and meet him at the studio so he could record the tune before it got away. Twiggs met him there, too, and sat in the control room watching with Jim as Duane intently tore into a complex pattern, almost sounding like an elaborate madrigal from the Renaissance. Twiggs broke into a huge grin, turned to Jim, and said, “Which one of us is going to tell him that’s ‘Classical Gas’?”

  Duane was unknowingly playing the song Donna had asked him if he knew when they first met.

  When the band was home, the wives would gather and cook large meals and everyone would come. The men would play in the music room until the meal was served, then Berry would raise his glass of wine and stand up. Having everyone in his band and everyone they loved around a dining table felt like a significant accomplishment, and he acknowledged it with a toast.

  The Big House and its many pleasures were difficult to leave, but the moment the big Winnebago merged onto the highway and picked up speed, it felt like something heavy lifted off everyone, and excitement would build. Duane called these days their study of the three R’s: reds, Ripple, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk—downers, cheap wine, and experimental jazz, the crucial components of surviving the rough road. They had an eight-track player and a pile of Twiggs’s tapes, a little taste of everything from the Carter Family to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, which they kept on heavy rotation, fascinated by the interplay between Davis, Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley. They strummed their acoustic guitars when they were lucid enough. They stoned themselves into a state of grace, the road pulsing beneath them.

  Dates stacked up like money, and playing one gig after another, they fell into a deep groove. Everyone went through moods, manic ups and low downs, and whole days were blotted out with drugs to sleep on the drive. They paused in tiny towns for food at roadside diners and truck stops, telling jokes and smoking in parking lots, finally pulling up to venues in the late afternoons. They’d set up the gear and run through a sound check, then nap on the floor before playing all night. It was a grind and a gift. Nineteen seventy was dedicated to the road, and it took everything from them.

  Touring was a relentless endurance test: the shitty food they could hardly eat, the desperate lack of sleep, the cycles of highs and hangovers. They lived in places stripped of any personal objects: dusty, depressing hotel rooms. The music was the only solace left, but it was total. Playing to crowds changed their chemistry with a flood of pure energy to the bloodstream. It was almost instantaneous; within the first moments of the first song they’d laugh at the joy of it, after the misery of the day. No one would believe what they went through, and how bad they’d felt just hours before.

  The band often opened with “Statesboro Blues” taking off at a clip, and the audience would get to their feet. “Trouble No More” was a swaying hip shaker, Duane chasing Gregg, sounding every bit the big brother, following his Baybro’s words with his own sassy back talk. Then Dickey’s clean tone cut through like a blade. “Dreams” was a gentle groove building to Duane’s lead, rolling out like an elaborate story in a voice as complex and full of yearning as his brother’s. They knew how to build their set brick by brick, drawing people in and leading them through changes from emotional intensity to rocking fun. The songs created their own dimension. A song was started, became vast, and they wandered inside it. Time collapsed; the show felt endless one moment and was over the next.

  The silence that followed a show felt shocking. Their ears would ring, blown out and buzzing. Their clothes would be soaked through with sweat; even their shoes were damp with effort. It took a while for verbal thoughts to return. To walk offstage and be approached wasn’t always easy, hands to shake, questions to answer when they were still stripped down, illuminated and floating, under the spell of the music. Whatever they had drunk, smoked, or ingested earlier had burnt off and left them, but the music was its own high, strong enough to blow through anything, a feeling far past any other. After gigs, they got together with new friends and went to their hotel rooms to play some more. They forgot how to wind down.

  They lived in an extreme state where time flowed differently. Long hours of waiting and traveling were eclipsed by brief bursts of playing, those few hours that were deep and seemed limitless, but were then fleeting. Night stood in for day, the most energized time, when the highs were waxing, waning only with the light of the rising sun. At dawn, they had to choose to keep going, try a new substance to maintain, or give in to a little sleep.

  I gathered together a list of all the known concerts the Allman Brothers Band played from 1969 to 1971, consolidated from fan sites, tape traders’ lists, and the notes in their road manager’s date book, all in an effort to get my arms around the scope of my father’s touring life. The list is absolutely staggering in its breadth and there are many other shows that cannot be accounted for because they left no paper trail or were free shows they played in parks all across the country. Duane spent many nights sitting in with other bands and recording in studios. He spent very few, if any, days without his guitar in hand.

  Loading their gear in and out, the massive amps and road cases, the hours spent waiting to play and finally the playing—giving everything for hours, sweat dripping, ferocious amounts of energy burned—the thought of it exhausted me utterly. I felt each entry on my list as an effort, and I marveled at the days without rest, the distance between destinations, the Christmas away from home, the thousands and thousands of miles under their wheels. Then I think of my father, and I can feel his hand on my shoulder, smiling, bemused, shaking his head: Little girl, don’t you see? This long list of shows is a string of pearls, each glowing stage a treasure savored. Every gig was a few precious hours of pleasure and danger, focus without struggle, and painless above all. The person you were when you stepped offstage hardly mattered. Your buzzing body, your dazzled and restless mind only wanted to get back there, a guitar in your hands and a crowd before you. Life was just waiting until you could play again, and there was never any question: Music is worth anything and everything it takes, and what it gives can never be measured. My father plants a phantom kiss on my forehead and I understand.

  (photo credit 18.1)

  Delan
ey Bramlett wanted a slide player for the album he and Bonnie were recording for Atlantic Records, To Bonnie from Delaney. Ry Cooder was his first choice, but he wasn’t free, so Jerry Wexler recommended Duane. As soon as he said it, Delaney wondered why he hadn’t thought of Duane himself.

  Tom Dowd brought Duane into Studio A at Criteria Studios in Miami, the largest of the two rooms at Criteria. It was an expansive space with wood floors and a high ceiling, vast enough to accommodate an entire orchestra. Duane sat down alone, facing the control room.

  “Duane was out in the studio and Tommy and I were in the control room,” Albhy Galuten, the engineer for the album, recalled. “With each song Tommy would get about a minute and a half in and Duane would go, ‘I’ve got it.’ We’d go back to the top, play it again, and he’d get it in one take. Unbelievable. I just sat there with my mouth open the whole time.”

  Duane felt as at home with Delaney and Bonnie as he did with their music. Delaney and Duane had a common passion for country blues, and for Robert Johnson in particular. Delaney was originally from Mississippi and came by it honest, as my granny would say. His southern heritage, his unshakable confidence and great talent made him a figure of integrity and inspiration for many other musicians, including Duane.

  I drove myself from Johnny Sandlin’s place in Alabama to Bonnie Bramlett’s house on a hill in Nashville, not far from where the boys had lived as kids. As soon as my feet touched down in her dirt driveway, I was greeted by a couple of little dogs and had Bonnie’s arms around my neck. We spent the better part of the next two days in Bonnie’s car, driving around the city and talking. She pointed out the retirement home where Myrtle Allman had lived at the end of her life. Gregg had taken her there to visit his grandmother when Bonnie was playing with the Allman Brothers in the mid-seventies. We drove past the massive houses on Music Row. Back at her house in the evening, Bonnie sat in her easy chair and propped one foot against the wall, rocking herself constantly, searching for the motion of the highway moving under the tour bus, a remnant of years spent on the road. She began to speak about Duane.

  “Delaney and he hit it off. They did, they did. He was like Duane’s big brother. Duane had always been the big brother for everyone and he got tired of it. He’d say, ‘No one loves that band more than me, but I need a break. Can I come with you?’ And we’d say, ‘Come on!’ Duane would meet us wherever we were, and stay four or five nights, then he’d go back. He didn’t like California, but he had to go there for work, beyond the Brothers. He had a lot of his own work going on. Truth is, he hardly talked about any of that. Maybe he did with Delaney. With me, Duane talked about music as a natural thing we both had. It was innate knowledge … knowing something that has never been taught to you. Having an automatic editing system so you know not to overdo or underdo. It’s just a knowledge of where to begin and where to end. If you can take the leap of faith to start, then it’s what you do in the middle until you land. You know you have to start at point A and end at point B. The recovery is the middle. Sometimes you free-fall in the middle for a minute. That to me is genius. How do you break out of free fall and come back? That’s a hot lick! That’s what a hot lick is. That’s Duane’s style of recovery. The way you do it when you make mistakes, how you clean it up—that is who you are. That’s your voice.

  “Duane, when he really hit a killer lick, he’d grin, like—‘You hear that? How about that shit?’ You’re standing there, blowing your own freaking mind! The feeling that you get when you’re really on is safety.… I am finally safe. This is my space. I now know what I’m doing. Nobody can ever say I’m not doing this right. I may have fucked up the rest of my life, can’t balance a checkbook, and everything else—but try to touch me here in this circle of light.” Bonnie’s dark eyes were fierce. We were listening to her most recent recording, a series of gospel songs. Her voice is strong and raw enough to bring tears to my eyes with a single note, and I swallowed hard to keep them down.

  “I could fuck up my life, I could ruin everything around me,” she said. “But that was always perfect.”

  I thought of the last time I saw Gregg at one of his solo shows, in San Rafael, California. Right before he stepped onstage, he held out his hand to me and it was shaking. “Isn’t it crazy?” he said. “I’m nervous right now. This show is no big thing, and I’m shaking! You know, you can control it with your mind.” He looked at his hand like a kid trying to bend a spoon with telepathy, but the shaking only shifted slightly. He stretched his fingers and slapped his palms together, and walked right onto the stage. When the white light hit him, he looked still and strong. His hands pressed down the keys of his Hammond organ and the song rolled out like water, just easy. With the music rolling, he was completely at ease.

  Gregg is something of a changeling. He has always had the ability to pull his energy in and almost disappear in front of you. He can clear a room without a word or a gesture, and it never feels rude or mean. You don’t even realize that your sudden decision to leave him alone is coming from him, but it is. Gregg could look right through you and make you disappear, too. You could only connect with him if he wanted you to. Other times he seems taller than everyone else in the room: funny, bright, and magnetic. I don’t know if he is aware of his adaptability, but it’s helped him survive his public life. I am learning that Duane was different, always direct, and present, grounded in the moment. He carried the confidence he had when he played at all times.

  “Not to be ugly or arrogant about it. Not everybody has that little extra,” Bonnie said. “It’s an innate knowledge that you can be the best and you are the best. It’s a knowledge you never want to say. Isn’t that strange? That’s humbleness. Geraldine taught them to be humble. Those Allman brothers were nice boys.”

  When Eric Clapton needed a reprieve from the rigors of a hectic tour with Blind Faith, his new project with Steve Winwood, he made his way to California to stay with Delaney and Bonnie. They were the opening act in the United States for the Blind Faith tour, and Clapton marveled at how much fun they seemed to be having every night. The intimate music of Blind Faith didn’t seem particularly well suited to the massive halls they could fill due to their status as a “supergroup.” Their first free show at London’s Hyde Park on June 7, 1969, drew 150,000 fans. Exhausted and dissatisfied with the tour, Eric retreated to Delaney’s ranch and began sitting in with their band in a low-key way. It was a nice change for him, to play for enjoyment, without pressure or hoopla.

  “We were boot camp for a lot of players,” Bonnie said. “Delaney was a rough customer. It was hard. Duane was pretty tough as well. Delaney and Duane had high expectations. The folks we played with knew the minute they left, they were better than when they came.” Duane and Delaney had different styles of communicating with other players. “If Duane was playing twins with someone other than Dickey, he’d expect them to be right on, and if they weren’t there, he’d just step back. He’d just step away from them. That spoke volumes. Eric used to do that, too. If people wanted to turn playing into a contest, Eric would turn his guitar down and step back. Eric and Duane were a lot alike when it came to confrontation: Don’t want it. Would prefer not to. It’s like the communication when you’re doing twin guitars. Delaney and I sang harmonies, twins, everything together. We breathed at the same time, everything. That’s kind of what you have to do when you’re playing twin guitars. One person has to take the other’s style, which Dickey did to Duane and which I did to Delaney. When you’re leading the style, if you’re going to piss with the tall dogs you better make some foam in the sand. Don’t be trying to take me somewhere: That’s the understanding between you. So, Duane could understand us—what we were doing with our voices.”

  King Curtis, the masterful saxophone player, was such a frequent houseguest at Delaney and Bonnie’s home, he had his own room. Duane and Curtis first met in January 1969 at an Aretha Franklin session in New York City. They had chemistry, personally and musically, and when the two of them joined Delaney Bramle
tt, they felt like the Three Musketeers. They sat in together in Manhattan nightclubs, taking over stages wherever they went for drinks. King Curtis knew everyone on the scene in the Village and up in Harlem. Curtis would come sit in with the Brothers when they played in New York, too.

  Jaimoe remembers him sitting in on “Stormy Monday” once, and the Brothers had their own take on the tune. Duane didn’t say anything to Curtis before they played; he liked to throw players curveballs now and then. Curtis was a master, and he could find his own way. Duane kept an amused eye on him, and as the change rolled around once, Curtis raised his eyes to Duane with a question in them. Duane gave him the walrus-whisker smile and winked. When it rolled around again, Curtis was on it inside and out and Duane was nodding and laughing. Look sharp and get ready.

  King Curtis and his wife, Modine, joined Bonnie, Delaney, and Duane for a few long weekends at Jerry Wexler’s home in Montauk, New York, at the eastern end of Long Island, listening to his massive record collection and playing acoustic guitars on his porch in the dark. “We’d go out clam digging, listening to Jerry telling Billie Holiday stories,” Bonnie recalled. Curtis brought a little motorcycle with them and Duane wanted to take Bonnie for a ride.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Delaney says. “Don’t go fast with her.”

  Jerry had a long driveway to the road, and as they started down it, Bonnie said, “Take me just a little fast, Duane.”

  Duane gunned the engine full tilt with Bonnie wrapped around his waist and screaming into the wind. When he reached the road, he pulled over and Bonnie hopped off. “You son of a bitch! You scared the hell out of me!”