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

by Galadrielle Allman

  Donna began to wonder how she had gotten here, so far from herself. Duane could be so crass and cold. After playing a show, he told Donna the concert hall had smelled like girls’ wet panties as soon as he struck a chord. He joked that she was lucky I was born with red hair, or he would wonder if I was his, when he knew he was the only man she’d ever been with. Just mean for the sake of being mean.

  In a moment of pure exhaustion, he tried to put the pressure he felt into words, saying, “What is this now? I have you and a baby? And I’m gonna die young.”

  Women and children were soft and sticky traps. A man would be wise to take to heart the warnings in his favorite blues songs about low-down women. But here is the rough stuff, bitter and strong: the small paper bindles of heroin, line upon line of cocaine, girlfriends in Atlanta and Los Angeles taken out on the road, teenage groupies used up and cast off. They were all so young, I tell myself. “It was a different time,” Jaimoe says to me. The truth of the matter was, only one person was straying, and it wasn’t my mother.

  Red Dog said Duane pitched a bitch when he found a couple of needles hidden in the Winnebago, while they were parked somewhere in rural North Carolina between gigs. Duane paced the length of the caravan, holding the syringes by their empty bellies with fire in his eyes.

  “Look, I ain’t calling anyone out. I’m talking to everybody. I am gonna say this once. This shit will not fly. I don’t care who is doing this.” He paused and held a point in the air with his eyes resting on his brother’s bent head. “If I see another needle, that’s it. There will be no conversation, no hard feelings, but this shit is out of the question and you will be gone.”

  A little while down the road, he and Dickey were having an argument when Duane grabbed his arm, looking for track marks.

  “You can say what you think we all ought to do, and I’ll listen, but you’re not going to check my arms,” Dickey said.

  Duane apologized the next day. Dickey told him he knew they were all taking things a little too far, and Duane was right to worry. But Dickey was his own man with his own choices to make, and Duane needed to understand that. He wasn’t going to be dictated to that way.

  Cocaine, marijuana, and MDA. Soma and sleeping pills and Robitussin AC, mescaline, LSD and mushrooms, whisky, wine, and heroin. You keep phone numbers scrawled on scraps of paper, but soon you don’t have to call. They just come and wait by the back door when you come to town, and enter the backstage rooms smiling wide. You remember the face of the guy in Boston, in Philly, in New York City who knows how to get you what you want. Folded glassine paper sleeves and a tightly rolled bill, hidden needles and a blackened spoon. The ritual of preparation, the private moment with pills rolling loosely in your palm, the cold beer popped open, the warm, half-empty bottle of red wine, a razor tapping gently through a pile of powder, a little spoon or a long fingernail, a deep inhale, and soon you are restored to yourself. A pulsing energy belongs to you, shining from your eyes, and everything is easier. You see the same ease in the faces all around you. The music blooms in your hands and floats above the crowd, and builds to ferocious crescendos that rock your body. You are in it and of it, fed and freed by the music and the high.

  Drugs were taking hold in a deeper way, no longer just a diversion or a way to escape the rigors of the road. Along with the inspirational sound of Coltrane and Bird came the darker story of the relationships between the players and heroin. Heroin stood like an unopened door that might lead more deeply into the songs, and soon Gregg and then Duane stepped through it, the entire band of Brothers behind him. Heroin was easily available and cheap, even in Macon. I asked Johnny Sandlin about the effects of heroin on the band and he said, honestly, at least in the beginning, it was mostly positive. Heroin could give you at once a deep feeling of privacy and an expansiveness, an absence of all discomfort, social and physical. All neurotic static cleared. Heroin was a direct channel into certainty. You felt you had what you needed. In the space it cleared, with each player relaxed and vigilant, they could conjure a pillar of fire. My father and all of the members of the band and crew, with the single exception of Butch Trucks, had fallen in love with heroin. The only thing Duane was more enthralled by was cocaine, and the way he was living, the two walked hand in hand, one taking over when the other trailed off. Cocaine was everywhere; they called it vitamin C. It was coming from sources both high and low, in the pockets of both the business moguls and the creeps who wanted a way in the stage door. Duane told Donna they were either up on it or up looking for more. While no one spelled it out explicitly, drugs were often part of the exchange for playing: payment for services rendered, especially in Miami, where the path to South America was worn smooth and easy.

  When I first met Jim Marshall, the photographer who took the picture for the cover of At Fillmore East, he told me the familiar story about his great cover shot of the band laughing together. They were all moody and hard to loosen up, until a guy Duane recognized walked by and he ran after him. He returned with a little bag in his palm and a gleam in his eye. Everybody cracked up, and Jim caught the moment.

  Jim grabbed my hand, looked into my eyes, and asked me if I’d ever done cocaine. Before I could answer he said in a conspiratorial tone, “Your daddy loved cocaine. He loved it.” He said it like it was personal and important information. Maybe it is.

  Donna says she didn’t see any of it; they kept the hardest drugs out of the house. There was in fact a rule about leaving hard stuff in the garages out back. She wasn’t aware of other girls gathering around Duane, either, until she found a love letter from a girl in Boston tucked into the small compartment of his guitar case that read “I’ll never forget the night we spent together.” She had been looking for the signed divorce papers that had finally arrived from Patti. She wanted to show them to Linda. When she confronted Duane, he said, “If you go looking for shit, you’re going to find it.”

  Donna never heard the name Dixie, but everyone else did. Dixie and her friends lived in a house on Taft Street near Piedmont Park in Atlanta, and they notoriously welcomed bands that passed through town. They became known as the Taft Street Girls. When any of the Brothers stayed overnight in Atlanta for “business,” it was clear the meetings were taking place in bed. All the girls the band met and enjoyed on the road were an open secret, rarely discussed. Groupies were part of another life entirely—a road perk like a good meal or pocket money, an irresistible comfort—but the proximity of the Taft Street Girls to Macon was troubling.

  In what little time the band had when they weren’t touring, they would retreat together to the cabin they called Idlewild South, named after the packed and frenetic New York City airport now known as JFK. People were in and out all the time; the name was apt. They were still at work on songs for their second album, which would be named after the cabin. Out in the country with no close neighbors to complain, they pulled their extension cords out into the yard and played under the blue sky. One afternoon they were running through a new tune while their wives and girlfriends cooked in the little kitchen. “People, can you feel it? Love is everywhere!” The girls couldn’t help but see the irony. Love was getting starved out in Macon, Georgia, so they made up a chorus of their own: “Practice what you preach! Practice what you preach!”

  Hard drugs and groupies were there from the first day. I had imagined an early innocence in 1969, when marijuana and marriage were all anyone wanted, but that’s a child’s fantasy. When everyone was living together at the hippie crash pad on College Street, the men used to go to the local colleges and check girls out of their dorms for the night like library books. If our mothers didn’t know, it’s partly because they didn’t want to know.

  I know the tale of a communal case of crabs that forced everyone to sit around a hotel room together with their cocks lathered, laughing, which seemed funny until it was mentioned they had gotten into this mess by “pulling a train,” a poetic way to say a single girl took on all of them.

  There was Twiggs’s le
gendary carousel full of slides, each one a different teenage girl, naked and splayed, and his habit of passing around copies of the statutory rape laws in the different states they passed through. There were stories of girls who waited by the side of the road topless and climbed into the Winnebago ready to be the jackpot in a poker game. Blowjobs were given on the side stage, within sight of the crowd. They balled on moving motorcycles, on the hoods of cars still warm from a ride, in gas station restrooms during a quick refueling, in Rose Hill Cemetery on graves in the moonlight with other men’s wives.

  I was often told that my father wasn’t the one who got up to this mischief, that he’d opt out by holding up the book he was reading, but he held his most private cards very close.

  The crazy thing is, I wanted to know. Even as I felt a dark rage growing in me, I never shut down the storytellers.

  I will always identify with the women, the ones at home and even the girls on the road. But I understand that the temptation for a pack of twenty-year-old rock stars was impossible to resist. If you were generating the kind of heat they were putting out onstage, it would have been impossible to go to bed and shiver alone. My question, though, is why did they marry and have babies so young? Did they need a different kind of life at home, a soft place to fall? Or did they get trapped when our mothers got pregnant? Did they really think of their families that way? Or did they just want it all? Well, they got it all, but it didn’t come cheap.

  (photo credit 20.1)

  After touring America with Blind Faith, a band that seemed to collapse under the weight of the musicians’ collective fame, Eric Clapton was in a moment of transition. Immediately dubbed a “supergroup,” convinced to rush their first album to market and play enormous venues rather than the intimate theaters they would have preferred, the band had to pad their set with hits from their previous bands, Cream and Traffic. The pressures of stardom were eclipsing the pleasure of playing. Meanwhile, the opening band on the Blind Faith tour, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, played with great joy every night. After the tour, Blind Faith came apart, even with their album still on the British charts. Eric sought refuge at Delaney and Bonnie’s home in Los Angeles and they became close friends. For the better part of the next year, he collaborated with the couple, an experience that culminated in a live album, On Tour with Eric Clapton. In the studio, Delaney helped produce Clapton’s first, eponymous solo album, co-writing songs and famously encouraging him to sing. Shortly after bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon, and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock parted ways with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, they each returned to play with Clapton. Neither Delaney nor Bonnie took their exodus well.

  While working with Eric in England, the band was christened Derek and the Dominos, in another bid for Clapton to remain somewhat anonymous. He wanted the music to speak for itself. They recorded behind Eric’s close friend George Harrison on his first album after the dissolution of the Beatles, All Things Must Pass. It was during that project that Eric fell in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie, and the pain of that unrequited love fueled the writing of Layla and Other Love Songs. The album he wrote for the love he couldn’t have won her in the end, and it reached far beyond her, into the wider culture, where it is revered as one of the great masterpieces of rock and roll.

  I’ve pored over many books and magazines about the Layla sessions, trying to understand the connection between my father and Eric that was so evident in the songs. The most revealing insights came from an unlikely source. A London-based musician named Sam Hare interviewed Eric in 1997 for his dissertation. At the time, Sam was a photography student at Norwich School of Art and Design, where he was asked to pick any subject he was passionate about for his final project. He chose the Allman Brothers Band and their influence on popular music. Sam knew he needed a primary source for his paper and decided to take a chance and write to Eric Clapton. To his great surprise, Clapton responded and they had a remarkable conversation. While the interview was never intended for wider publication, it came to the attention of the then-president of Hittin’ the Note magazine, who printed it, much to the surprise of Hare. The interview in its entirety has since been available to anyone willing to search for it online. The quotes contained here are from that interview.

  “There were a lot of complications in my life. I’d fallen in love with someone else’s wife, and all of this coming—that’s what I was writing songs about. But there was also a tremendous bonding going on—the likes of which I’ve never known since,” Eric said.

  When they were ready to go into the studio to record, Eric thought of Tom Dowd, the producer he had first worked with on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. Dowd was in the vanguard of music recording, an ingenious inventor who had found his calling as a producer. Many producers try to leave their stamp on the albums they cut, but Tom was an invisible guiding hand that enabled many artists to reach their full potential. At Atlantic Records he oversaw the creations of masterpieces by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and a continuing list of artists in every conceivable genre of music. He was a happy and calm man, with a contagious smile and natural elegance. A technical innovator, he is credited as the first to record popular music in stereo. He invented faders, the sliding switches on recording consoles that could be raised and lowered smoothly. This single idea enabled him to play the soundboard as an instrument itself, using his ear to guide the mix. He had the mind and soul of an artist, and his ability to communicate with musicians and put them at ease was unparalleled.

  Tom had great respect for Duane’s talent and his ear, and he understood the range of influences the Allman Brothers were drawing from. He loved the band, and when they gave him a gold pendant of their mushroom logo, Tom wore it every day for the rest of his life. Duane and Tom had become close during their many shared Atlantic sessions, including Idlewild South, the Brothers’ second album, which had been completed just before the Dominos arrived at Criteria. When Tom mentioned that Eric was on his way, Duane asked if he could come by the sessions. Duane had long admired and respected Clapton. The Yardbirds were one of his first inspirations; the Allman Joys covered their songs. Duane and Gregg had driven for hours to see Cream play when they lived in Los Angeles.

  Tom invited Eric to see the Allman Brothers play; he was eager to introduce them. Eric had called Tom years before to ask who played the guitar solo on the back end of Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” Tom had a feeling Duane would push Eric and the Dominos in a new direction. Karl Richardson, an engineer on the sessions, remembered that Clapton had trepidations at the prospect of playing with Duane; he said he wasn’t sure he could match him. Karl said, “He seemed scared to death.”

  Albhy Galuten, another engineer and keyboard player on the sessions, had a somewhat different take. “Eric was nervous that he might let Duane down by not being a good enough guitar player to pull his own weight. He wasn’t nervous about what people would think, but he wanted to be up to snuff as a musician. After seeing the band play, you can see why he would be nervous.”

  It was a beautiful late August night for an outdoor concert in front of the Miami Beach Convention Center, and Tom had led Eric and the other members of the Dominos to a cordoned-off spot just in front of the stage where they had an excellent view of Duane. When he spotted Eric, Duane froze for a moment. Eric was moved by the power of the music. “There was like the perfect kind of weather,” Eric said. “It was dark, it was balmy and hot and there was a strong breeze. They all had really, really long hair—right down to their waists almost; it was blowing back in the wind, and it was so picturesque. The music was unbelievable, because they were doing all of that harmony playing … it was fantastically worked out and very strong.”

  Tom couldn’t wait to get them back to Criteria.

  The Brothers and the Dominos went back to the studio after the show and they all stayed to jam. Only Jaimoe chose not to play. “I went in there, and I really wasn’t knocked out about anything they were doing. I went back out to
the Winnebago and did what we always did—listened to Sonny Williams, or Coltrane or Miles, or somebody. I was out there just smoking and listening to tapes. What we were doing was a hell of a lot more interesting than what Eric Clapton was doing in there.” It was clear to him, too, that Duane was the only one Eric wanted. “He wanted Duane to play on his record and, shit, why not?” Jaimoe didn’t perceive Clapton as a threat to the Brothers, but the rest of the band worried. Eric could offer Duane the wider world, and not someday soon, but right away.

  The Dominos had been at work in the studio for about ten days and had completed three songs. “We didn’t have very much material. I started recording anything I could think of,” Eric remembered. “It almost started from the night of the concert, because they all came back to the studio after the show. We started right then and there and it was just … I think the best way to describe it is that up until the point that we connected with them, we were really firing blanks. We’d been in the studio for a couple of weeks and we were getting nothing done because really it was just about me trying to kind of stimulate myself with the guitar.”

  Duane walked into the studio, sat down with his guitar, and learned the fragmented beginnings of the songs Eric had written. His focus and precision impressed the most experienced producer in modern music and astounded the young engineers. Eric asked Duane to come back and play on the album. Duane agreed, and when he returned, he walked in with a whole new energy, clapping his hands together and saying, “Let’s get this thing done.”