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

by Galadrielle Allman

  Going through stacks of old magazines in a junk store in Athens, Georgia, when I was eighteen, I came across a yellowed copy of Rolling Stone from 1971 with a tribute to my father on the cover. The proprietor, a man in a top hat and cape, swooped down and grabbed the carefully bagged newsprint out of my hands and barked, “That is not for sale! You have no idea the value of that! Do you even know who Duane Allman is?”

  He turned his back on me and marched away with his treasure, muttering to himself.

  I didn’t know what to say. Would it feel worse if he believed me or if he didn’t? I thought about showing him my high school ID card. Would he embrace me and pour out his story of an Allman Brothers concert that changed his life? Would I suddenly be a celebrity guest instead of an annoying girl pawing at his prized possessions? Why did I deserve that glory? What could I tell him about Duane that he didn’t already know? Oddly, both options made me feel like a con, so I said nothing and ducked back out into the street, anonymously.

  When I turned twenty-one, I inherited the only objects my father ever really loved: two Gibson Les Paul guitars carved out of flaming hardwood. Twiggs Lyndon, the Brothers’ tour manager and Duane’s close friend, traded his beloved 1939 Ford Opera Coupe to Gregg for Duane’s most treasured guitar and kept it safe for me. Donna lent the other to Joey Marshall, the man who introduced her to Duane. Joey and Twiggs’s three brothers—John, A.J., and Skoots—returned the guitars to me in remarkable acts of generosity, considering their escalating value. The Lyndon brothers told me they knew if they had kept the guitar, Twiggs’s ghost would have visited each of them, shaking a lit Kool cigarette and yelling, “I told you to give that guitar to Galadrielle, damn it!”

  After hiding the guitar under my mother’s bed for years, I loaned both instruments to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Before I shipped them away, I touched them, but only very lightly. The guitars lay encased in their worn lilac-velvet-lined traveling cases, as solid and silky as coffins. I pressed my fingertips gently to their steel strings, but I didn’t pick up either of them. I didn’t want to disturb the sense that my father had held them. Now they are just beautiful pieces of sculpture, alone in the museum’s dim light.

  There are people who hungrily research my father’s gear, to learn the gauge and action of his strings, their necks’ precise widths. They look for serial numbers on the headstocks to find out the year the instruments were built. They can name the color of the stains rubbed into the guitars’ bodies and they know when Duane traded one instrument for another, and why. They must hope to learn the mystery of how he made his sounds. While I treasure his instruments, they seem abandoned to me, silenced by his absence in an irrevocable way, and I know his secrets are not in them. Like breath leaving a body, the music went with him and is gone.

  When I was in my early thirties, the cuff of a fancy silk shirt Eric Clapton gave my father during the Layla sessions appeared in my mailbox, sent by a stranger who said she once dated my uncle Gregg. The fragile purple silk shirt, decorated with batik peacocks, had been washed in a machine and was all but destroyed. The cuff was frayed and threadbare, with one small button barely hanging on. She wrote that she had auctioned the rest of the shirt on eBay, and the back panel alone had sold for fifteen thousand dollars. She planned to use the money to pay her way through school. Her letter continued for pages, with intimate details of her life. She told me not to be angry with my father for leaving me, but to be proud of his accomplishments.

  I marveled at the faded scrap of cloth in my hand, amazed that it had found its way to me, thirty years after it was his. I kept it in a box on my desk for several years, then loaned it to the museum that was built inside the home where I learned to walk: the Allman Brothers Museum at the Big House. The cuff is locked in a glass case in the room where the band once practiced. It rests beside Duane’s award from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Later, another fan showed me a necklace made from a few threads from the same shirt, suspended in a tiny glass vial hanging from a string. There are apparently several like it floating around out there.

  A group of friends pooled a ridiculously large sum of money to buy me a pair of very eccentric orange and black suede bowling shoes that belonged to my dad. Duane had left them behind in a girlfriend’s apartment in 1971, and the landlord had held them for ransom for decades. I sat with my hands tucked inside them for a long time.

  Clues about my father are scattered everywhere and I have learned to make a feast of scraps. A postcard Duane sent to a childhood friend, decorated with peace signs; lyrics to a song written on motel stationery; a little lock of his hair wrapped in velvet; glass pill bottles he used to play slide guitar; intricately tooled guitar straps; and a golden mushroom medallion he never got the chance to pick up from the jeweler. Ticket stubs, concert posters, and, most horribly, the hospital records from the day he died. The detritus of my father’s life is bought and sold. Everything he touched has turned to gold. The fragments of his life belong to strangers—strangers who do not consider themselves strangers.

  Last year, for the first time in my life, I saw a photograph of my parents together. In it, my mother is still wearing the hospital ID bracelet from my birth and my father is holding a baby rattle. They look young and fairly terrified. I stumbled on it while looking at a woman’s blog under the heading “Wail on, Skydog!” She had made it her mission to post a different photograph of Duane every Wednesday for several years. She is one of the many thousands of Allman Brothers fans connected by the lore of the band’s beginnings and the intensity of their music. All I could think when I saw it was how much it would have meant to me to see it before, when I was younger.

  Grown men have challenged me, saying they have seen more Allman Brothers Band concerts than I have. Cashiers have seen my last name on my credit card and held up long lines to tell me their concert memories. I have found myself in a tiny backstage elevator surrounded by four people, all wearing Duane Allman T-shirts. None of them knew who I was, and I wasn’t about to tell. I have met more than one man with my father’s face tattooed on his arm. I have thrown loose change into the hats of street musicians in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco while they randomly played “Midnight Rider” as I walked by. I envy the simple comfort and pleasure that fans take from my father’s music, and the happy extended family they feel they share. It confounds me that I am not alone in loving and missing him.

  I have listened intently to every song Duane ever recorded. I have hunted through magazine articles and newspaper clippings found in cardboard boxes in my granny’s garage. I have trolled the Internet for hundreds of hours, lost in the deep recesses of chat rooms and digitized archives. Somehow, it all made me feel like I knew less instead of more. The spotlight rendered Duane too simple and too perfect to know. The public stories were like Zen koans or fairy tales, recalling moments of kindness, wisdom, and genius. Lists of concert dates and long discussions of his influences and gear left me wanting something I could not name. The higher Duane ascended into the ether of fame and adulation, the more he felt lost to me in every meaningful way.

  I wanted something more personal. I wanted a way in to the beautiful beaded, bell-bottomed, patchouli-scented world captured in my mother’s sparse photo albums. There’s a picture of her wearing Duane’s striped pants, reclining on their bed in the Big House looking like a nymph. Duane holds me in his arms in another, my favorite, taken in their Bond Street apartment, standing in front of an Egyptian wall hanging from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. He’s wearing a red T-shirt that says “City Slicker” and grinning through his orange muttonchop mustache. I have treasured these images as fragile proof of our love. I have tried to build a lasting and resilient sense of where I come from.

  My mother’s silence and the transient nature of my connection to the men in the band conspired to make me feel like a bit of an outsider in my own family. Privacy and secrecy seemed to be twin values held by all, and my curiosity about my father seemed to run cou
nter to them. My wires were crossed. I was confused about what was public and what was private, and which side of the line my desire to know about Duane fell on.

  I dreaded pursuing his story as a reporter would, by asking uncomfortable questions and following every lead. I couldn’t imagine interviewing my family, but I knew that if I didn’t I would never be satisfied. At concerts, I had learned how to contain myself and wait for the proper time to talk. Now I read the silence of my father’s friends as a signal to back off, don’t ask. Wouldn’t they have told me about him by now if they wanted to? I couldn’t risk losing my place in our family by asking them to revisit the pain of losing Duane. Wasn’t asking my uncle for his memories very like a stranger asking him for his autograph? Wanting to know made me feel like everyone else who wants to know; it put me on the outside looking in. I was afraid to be another person with my hand out to the band, longing to feel special and acknowledged.

  One of the rare stories my mother did tell me was particularly haunting. She went to see the Brothers play a concert in Love Valley, North Carolina, and my father didn’t expect her to be there. When she and Linda Oakley, wife of Brothers bassist Berry Oakley, showed up, he asked her what she was doing there. He wanted her to be home with me. He was uptight and exhausted and said he was dreading an interview with someone important from the press. That night, he got very drunk, and instead of going into the bathroom, he threw off the covers of their hotel room bed and peed on the radiator. The next morning, Donna didn’t say a word about it, but before he left, Duane fixed her with a glare and said, “Don’t go airing our dirty laundry and putting our business in the street.”

  That single story really slowed me down. I dimly imagined crossing that line, invading the privacy of the people I love. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I knew it would isolate me even more. I didn’t feel entitled to ask, and I certainly didn’t feel entitled to write about what I learned for public consumption, and writing our story was at least part of what I wanted. I told myself that kind of public exposure would be the ultimate betrayal. But I wanted to be an artist in my own right, and books were my love. Writing was the only thing I ever wanted to do, and I was born into an incredible story: an epic tale starring a hero for the ages. How could I resist?

  The Allman Brothers Band has a particularly juicy backstory: bikers and booze, heroin and teenage groupies, even murder and prison. My mother moved us away from the band’s increasingly dangerous world when I was still a toddler, but I was aware of the darkness very early. My curiosity was stronger than my fear and my eyes were always open. There is a lot of dirty laundry in the extended Allman Brothers family and I came to realize that most if not all of it has been strung up and left flapping in the breeze for decades. I told myself I had nothing to fear.

  I let myself feel entitled to know where I came from, very gradually. I was especially curious about the stories that the women around me had to tell. Their lives were nowhere in evidence in magazines or books. The men’s life on the road was fairly well documented, but I knew it wasn’t the whole story. For the family, the music was not everything. The band was only one aspect of who the men were and who they could have been. The road took them farther away from who we needed them to be. They came home less connected to the people they left behind.

  Their music is beautiful and blameless, and now it is all we have. Allman Brothers songs capture and express the essence of an ideal family none of us got to have. The music doubled back and returned to us, even after it carried the men we loved and needed away. The world the brothers and sisters made together didn’t last, but it is forever immortalized in music, and the songs will not fade away.

  I was finally brave enough to ask for their memories—my mother and grandmother, the wives and children of our extended tribe, Duane’s cousin and friends. I added them to the memories of the band and their crew and greatly enriched my picture of Duane, as a man and a musician.

  My father did something most of us are desperate to do—he found his perfect mode of expression and he used it to move people. Playing guitar was his passion. It was all he ever wanted to do, and he did it with determination and joy. He became a conduit, creating music that seemed to come through him from a higher source. He hadn’t even begun to reach his full potential as a player or as a person. Duane was fearless and he was never satisfied.

  Learning about him changed my life completely. Finding the courage to ask questions and write about him has helped me begin to heal. I feel more deeply integrated into my family, and my father is integrated into my life. A missing piece that I thought could only be had by knowing him has been returned to me, assembled from all the gathered fragments, word by word. This story is my song of love, built around the lost chord.

  The growling voice and speed of the motorcycle thrilled her. It was a pretty thing, a Harley-Davidson with glossy curves and gleaming spokes, and big enough to feel secure. In helmet and goggles, Geraldine took flight down the river road behind her mother’s house, past stands of sugar maple and hickory trees and neat rows of tobacco plants lining the fields of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She wheeled downtown by the railroad tracks that divided Main Street, past the brick façades of shops shaded by fancy awnings, the wind on her pink cheeks. She had ridden her bicycle down the same roads in her childhood to visit neighbors, leaving her farm chores undone, forgetting to stoke the smokehouse fire or weed the kitchen garden. Her motorcycle gave her that same floating feeling of freedom for a while.

  Then Bill wrote home from the front in France during World War II: “That motorcycle better be gone by the time I get home, or you can choose: it or me.” Jerry thought, That decision won’t be as easy to make as he thinks. He didn’t realize that when she wanted to do something, she did it. She didn’t care how it looked or what other people thought. Like when she cut her long hair into a short crop—it was the new fashion and it felt light and easy, but her mother was so shocked she’d cried. And no one approved of the way she kept working, even after the babies came; she refused to give that up.

  Jerry needed a vehicle while Bill was away and the motorcycle was cheaper than a car and used far less gasoline. She was smart with money. During the Depression, she saw how no one could afford gas for their cars, so they disconnected the wheels from their chassis, hooked them up to mules, and called them Hoover carts. She even brought her sister Janie’s baby girl, Jo Jane, her first birthday cake on her motorcycle, strapped behind her in a box. She drove it all the way to Fort Bragg, where Janie’s husband, Joe Pitt, was stationed. The Harley was practical and it was a pleasure to be able to go wherever she liked.

  Bill wouldn’t have liked it if he had known how she learned to ride. Jerry saw an ad in the newspaper for the Harley, and decided to go and get it; then she had to walk it home. It was heavy to push, but she had no idea how to ride it. While she was rolling that metal beast beside her, a man drove by in a truck, slowly circled around the block, and passed her again. On the third pass he finally called out to her, “Hey! You know how to ride that thing? You want me to carry you home with it?” She ignored him. “Miss, I ride a motorcycle, too, and if you’d like to learn, a bunch of us meet on Saturdays and we’d be happy to show you how.” She climbed into his truck and they became friends. Now she spent her free days learning to ride with a new group, and she wasn’t the only woman there. She didn’t see anything wrong with it. With a little help, she learned to trust her instincts, steering with her body before her mind could get in the way. She leaned into turns, powering the engine with a twist of her wrist on the throttle, braking with her feet and hands; it all became second nature.

  But Bill got his way in the end. She decided the motorcycle wasn’t worth the fight it would have taken to keep it. When Bill came home from the war, all that was left of the bike was a great photo of Jerry riding it. That picture came in handy later, when she was raising their two sons. The sight of her on that motorcycle was instant cool to Duane and Gregg. They teased her that she was one ho
t mama, and later they asked her if they could put the picture on an album cover, but she said no.

  The first rebel on a Harley the brothers ever knew was their mother. Now that picture sits on my desk.

  My grandparents, Willis Allman and Geraldine Robbins, called Bill and Jerry by their friends, met in a local tavern in Jerry’s hometown of Rocky Mount. Bill and a fellow serviceman joined Jerry and her girlfriends, sliding in beside them in a circular booth. Bill joked easily and looked smart in his khaki uniform; his eyes kept meeting hers. It wasn’t love at first sight, but she had to admit they had chemistry. Soon he was challenging her to have another drink, then one more, and when he swore she couldn’t have another, she drank it in a single gulp. She outdrank him with her head held high. The taste of whisky burning down her throat, the low, glowing light of the bar, and Bill’s smile, none of it could bowl her over. Later, he told her that was the moment he decided she was the girl for him. With her blond Betty Grable curls piled neatly on her head and high-heeled shoes with straps around her ankles, Jerry was a beauty with a sparkle in her blue eyes. More than all that, she had a quick mind. She had an answer for everything and she was funny—Good Lord she could make him laugh. Within a week, walking home from the movies, passing through pools of light under streetlamps into darkness, Bill said, “Geraldine, I’m going to marry you.” She told him he was crazy and quipped, “I hope you don’t ask every girl you meet. One of them might say yes.”

  Jerry had been married before. Memories of her first love got in the way of giving Bill an answer for a time. She didn’t let herself think of Roy very often. She didn’t much like to form her first husband’s name in her mind; it still hurt that much. They were sweethearts and jitterbug partners, and married right out of high school in 1935, when they were both eighteen. Her first two years with Roy were wonderful. They set up house and took romantic trips to Daytona Beach, Florida, where they stayed in a motel with little separate cottages by the sea. He was sweet and daring, and she was completely in love. He also liked to drink, just like her daddy.