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

by Galadrielle Allman

  The Allman Brothers! Appearing at the College Discotheque, featuring Duane Allman on guitar! Nicknamed Skyman by Wilson Pickett after his fantastic guitar work on Hey Jude! It’s an experimental blues-rock music feast that your mind won’t believe. Skyman will be playing slide guitar using the neck from a wine bottle! That’s tonight at the College Discotheque on Mulberry Street above Guy White TV and Radio. 8pm until midnight. Don’t miss it! Heads welcome.

  The promo was rolling out on the radio for the Allman Brothers Band’s first advertised show on May 4, 1969, while they were busy recording their first demo at Capricorn Studios. (Phil Walden had renamed Redwall Studios after his and Jerry Wexler’s shared astrological sign, Capricorn. With Jerry’s support, the studio had undergone a major renovation at Atlantic’s expense.) They cut four songs: “Don’t Want You No More,” “It’s Not My Cross to Bear,” “Trouble No More,” and “Dreams.” The demos are tight and clean, composed and fluid. It astounds me how complete they sound, and how quickly the band found its voice.

  A rough tape of the show at the Central City Park in Macon, recorded just a few days later, blazes with life. The funky swagger of the demos is amped up to a nearly frightening pitch. It is instantly clear that playing live was the thing that would set them apart.

  In the roughly six weeks since their first jam session in Jacksonville, the Allman Brothers created the body of work that appeared on their first album as well as other songs that wouldn’t emerge until later, like “Mountain Jam” and “Melissa.” The speed at which they worked and the quality of the music they made seem almost impossible.

  The challenge would be to re-create the fire they found onstage in a soundproof room with a tape rolling when they set out to record their first album at the end of the summer at Atlantic Studios in New York City.

  Duane’s joy was evident; he had finally found four men to join him and Gregg in their lifelong musical conversation. Each player was so seasoned, they could read one another and follow one another anywhere. Duane could ride the groove he built. He could rest his weight on a melody drawn out and explored, and picking up speed, he cruised toward the horizon line with the pedal pressing ever downward. Dickey would fall in beside him and Berry would ground them with a counter-melody, heavy and hard driving. They would move together at the same clip, running hot and swerving wildly into one another’s lanes, passing leads hand to hand while switching positions in the pack. The drummers rumbled fiercely behind them with all the building propulsion of a charging train—get on or get out of the way. Gregg’s voice would break through in a ragged cry, while he played an eerie humming organ that wound its way through the fray. The band tapped into a higher mind, their songs sensate and immersive.

  Now that the band was in place, the wider circle around them started to form: a road crew, a management team, the powerful businessmen at Atlantic Records, and a legendary recording engineer. The power of the music inspired all of them, and Duane’s profound belief in his band made them confident that they would all succeed together.

  Twiggs Lyndon made good on his promise to stay close to the brilliant guitar player he had met at FAME and became the band’s first road manager. He arranged everything the band needed to tour. He wrangled everyone; collected the money, booked hotel rooms, arranged meals, and rented gear. Every logistical consideration fell on him. It was an immense job.

  Duane met Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell at a be-in in Jacksonville behind the Forest Inn. It was such a life-changing moment for Red Dog that he even remembered every detail of what he wore, from the strand of wooden beads a girl had made for him, down to the brown moccasins on his feet. His dense orange curls wandered down his neck, escaping the black hat he wore low over his intense eyes. He sidled up to Jaimoe after the band played and introduced himself. He told him he wanted to meet Duane, and Jaimoe said, “Just go talk to him.” In his gruff drawl, Red Dog told Duane he recognized the sound of his slide playing from a favorite Aretha Franklin song, “Is that you on ‘The Weight’?”

  “Yeah, man! That’s me all right! I loved doing that cut, and I’m so glad you like it. Hey, you know where I could get a joint?” Duane asked.

  Red Dog turned a sly eye on Duane. “You have come to the right place!”

  He strutted off to the side of the crowd with a huge smile.

  Red Dog was enrolled in Florida Junior College, hoping that after a couple of years he could transfer to law school. He was doing pretty well, but he was getting deep into codeine cough syrup and smoking dope. He was a true hustler, selling dime bags on the side from a newsstand where he worked when he wasn’t in class. The newsstand was next to a go-go bar, and he also had a financial arrangement with some of those sweet girls who wanted a little work on the side. He’d arrange a date or two for them to make ends meet, but that’s a whole other story. He was recently back from his second tour of Vietnam, by way of the Panama Canal. He told Duane that if he had never smoked Panama Red, well then, he ain’t never smoked. He also tried to explain how it felt to hear him play. The sound of Duane’s guitar really spoke to him. He felt it coursing through him like an electrical charge. He had never experienced anything like it before. He didn’t even pay that much attention to music most of the time. Duane turned a real smile on him and thanked him for the kind words. They went down to the basement of the inn. They found a couple of crates to perch on and shared two joints.

  “They call you Red Dog? They call me Skydog!”

  “No shit?”

  “I did this session with Wilson Pickett and he started calling me Sky Man, and they called me the Dog before that, so it came together.”

  “What, cuz you was so high?”

  “Nah, man. Cuz I played so high and pretty with my gi-tar!”

  They laughed until their eyes started to water, passing the joint between them.

  Red Dog and Duane got deep real quick. Red Dog wiped his eyes and started to tell Duane he was overcoming some serious shit, walking around with dark memories. He didn’t usually tell anybody about the war, but this guy was the real deal. “You run, you die. I don’t care if you are my brother. You put a hole in my line, and I’m puttin’ a hole in your ass. There is a code.”

  Duane understood. Red Dog was all about loyalty and he had seen real shit.

  “Hey, are you looking for work?” Duane asked. Duane told him his deal was with Phil Walden, the same dude who managed Otis Redding, who owned a recording studio in Macon, Georgia. He was financing Duane’s new band, and they were going to hit the road hard and soon. He was going to need a road crew. If Red Dog was interested in a gig, he could set up the drums and generally do what needed doing. He could also drive and help haul the gear around.

  Red Dog never really went home again. He could feel the beginnings of a brotherhood forming with a pure mission. Together, they would take the music to the people.

  It took a year and a half before Jaimoe would let Red Dog do more than take his drums out of their cases and set them carefully on the ground, but Red Dog made himself indispensable to everyone with his personality alone. He had the biggest heart, a miraculous gift of gab, and amazing dope.

  Donna heard a knock on the door at College Street and opened it on a handsome man with the pale blue eyes of a husky and the wild curls of a cherub. He was completely covered in dust and had dark circles under his eyes, but his smile was very sweet.

  “Hey, I’m Kim. Is Gregg here?”

  Kim Payne and Gregg had hit it off right away when they met in Los Angeles at the end of 1968. They were introduced by the singer of the band Kim roadied for, the Rockin’ Gibraltars. Kim was from Montgomery, Alabama, and had the loose-limbed gait of a man used to straddling a motorcycle. His voice was the sound of home to Gregg, that soothing southern sound girls out west couldn’t resist. They became running mates immediately, and they were never alone for long. Gregg knew lots of girls, and some of them were willing to put up Kim and his friends for weeks at a time. But Kim said, “You can only puke on some
one’s rug so many times before you’re not welcome.”

  Like soaring birds suddenly slicked up with grease from a polluted sea, it wasn’t easy to stay free in that dirty town. In a blink you’d go from riding high to having nothing. They’d run out of money, and Gregg would sell a song for a couple hundred bucks, and they’d keep partying for a month or more, drinking Red Mountain Wine, which had no mention of grapes on its label and cost $1.49 for a gallon. That and a handful of the ’nal sisters—Tuinal and Seconal—and they’d have a nice buzz. Mornings were rough, especially when you weren’t sure where you’d sleep that night.

  They were both getting burned-out and down to no money when Duane called.

  Kim asked Gregg with a little smile, “You ain’t gonna give all this up, are you?” Gregg said he wasn’t sure he was ready to go back to being in a band with his bro, but in the end he couldn’t resist.

  Kim drove Gregg to the airport in a borrowed car dragging its front bumper, and when they said goodbye, Gregg told him that he would send for him as soon as his band was up and running. Kim was sure he’d never see Gregg again, but a couple of weeks later, Gregg called him and told him to head to Macon, Georgia, if he wanted a gig as a roadie. Kim told him he’d need gas money, and Gregg wired him fifty dollars.

  “Well, that was more money than I’d seen, almost ever,” Kim said later, “so I went out and busted up my head and my bike. I had to replace my clutch lever and my brake pedal. I had thirty-seven dollars and eighty cents to make it three thousand miles.”

  Just outside the city, Kim got pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer for riding someone’s bumper. Kim had paid a visit to a gal he knew to get some provisions for the road. She was a nurse and had given him some “diet pills.” He was in a hurry. The cop asked him where he was headed so fast, and Kim told him he was southbound. The cop let him go once Kim promised him he had no plans to return to California.

  The first day, the ride went from eighty degrees and sunshine in Los Angeles to snow in the San Bernardino Mountains. Kim was wearing all the clothes he owned. “I had on three pairs of blue jeans with so many holes I could scratch my ass without touching thread. The warmest thing I had was a denim jacket and that was full of holes, too.” By the time he made it to Odessa, Texas, snow had eased into hours of icy rain. He had been driving for more than fifteen hours and couldn’t feel his hands. He was soaked to the bone. The only place in Odessa that wasn’t closed down was a filling station and a twelve-room motel that backed out into the silent, dark desert. He decided he didn’t care what it cost; he needed to get dry and sleep.

  He told the Mexican man running the place that he wanted to roll his bike into his room for the night, but the man wouldn’t let him. He offered Kim a spot inside the work bay of the gas station, and Kim warily accepted. He took his bedroll, a wool army blanket wrapped around all of his worldly possessions, and headed to his room. He stripped off all his clothes, wet, stiff layers of denim caked with drying splatters of mud, and hung them on the gas wall heater to dry, then hit the bed.

  Kim was asleep in an instant, but it didn’t last more than a couple of hours. He was shocked awake by the blast of his door being kicked in by a huge silhouette of a dude in a cowboy hat. He cocked a shotgun with an evil crack, a sound you don’t want to hear in the dark when you’re naked and alone. His son was behind him, a gangly teen ready to kick some ass. Then, at the same instant, the man and his boy both turned tail and ran. They had seen that there was just Kim in the bed. They had the wrong room. Kim decided to get back on the road, and would skip motel rooms for the rest of the trip. He was grateful to see his bike still parked where he had left it.

  The drive took him four and a half days. By the time he hit Alabama, he had a quarter in his pocket and his bike was held together by baling wire (he’d crashed four or five times). He was also half crazy with the stress of trying to decide which was worse: blowing money on gas by driving without stopping and saving money on food, or blowing money on food and wasting time. He had stopped talking entirely, refusing to answer the same damn questions he was asked at gas stations every seventy-five miles when his tank needed filling.

  “Where you coming from?” He’d point behind him.

  “Where you headed?” He’d point ahead of him.

  When Kim finally made it to Montgomery, he collapsed on his mother’s front lawn. His brother took one look at him and said, “Get a haircut and a job, and you’ll be all right.”

  Kim borrowed five dollars from his mama and headed on to Macon.

  The first person he saw when he pulled up to 309 College Street was Michael Callahan. Mike walked around Kim’s trashed bike a couple of times and said, “You must be Payne. Come on in.… Pretty hammered.”

  Kim never knew whether Mike meant him or his bike.

  He slept on one of the many mattresses for two days straight, and met Dickey, Duane, and Jaimoe, in dreamlike intervals broken by deep sleep. Mike had heard about Kim from Gregg, who had been talking him up like he could move mountains with his bare hands. For some reason, there was a lot of lobbying going on for spots on the Allman Brothers crew. Every band member had a friend or a family member they liked for the gig.

  “Why everyone was clamoring for a job that paid nothing and kept you living on peanut butter and hot dogs for a year and a half, I’ll never know … but it was magical. As Linda says, we didn’t have nowhere to go but up,” Kim said.

  Michael Callahan was the guy Berry wanted to bring on board. He had worked in the road crew for Tommy Roe and the Roemans, the band Berry played bass with out of high school. Callahan grew up in Tarpon Springs, a small Florida fishing town. He was a biker with a huge smile and a quick mind for solving technical problems. He was also a bit of a wild card, with the playful spirit of a kid.

  Callahan became the Brothers’ front-of-house man, running the soundboard.

  Together with Kim, Red Dog, and Twiggs, Callahan completed the original group of crew members who became legends in their own right, known as much for their loyalty and their work ethic as for their unchallenged ability to party harder than anyone else on the scene. They were not hippies. They were veterans and bikers, pure badass survivors looking for a new band of brothers. The crew weathered all the same severe conditions as the band without the glorious payoff of playing, and was satisfied with having a remarkable vantage point from which to watch the show.

  In this lean early time, the crew was crucial to the band’s survival. While Phil Walden had invested a considerable amount of money into new equipment and vehicles for the band, he wasn’t giving them money to live on in Macon and they hadn’t started to earn by gigging. When they were on the road, everyone got a dollar a day, and you had to choose whether you wanted to eat or smoke. Phil was used to working with black artists who had small bands and operated on a shoestring budget. He hadn’t adapted his thinking to supporting ten men and their wives and kids. Everyone felt there was a real disconnect between them and Phil when money was the subject. Red Dog kicked in his disability check from the marines, Twiggs shared his modest salary from Walden, and that’s how everyone ate and stayed high.

  Duane earned the lifelong loyalty of the crew in the earliest days by taking everyone to a business meeting called by Phil Walden. When Phil said he only needed to speak to Duane, Duane made it clear that these ten men were the band, and if Phil needed to talk band business, they would all be present. Duane knew that standing up to Phil and taking an active role right out of the box was crucial. And when money started coming in, Duane made sure that the crew was always paid first, even before the band. He respected how hard they worked and knew how much they’d sacrificed.

  Macon was a quiet college town, mostly filled with clean-cut kids and working families, both black and white, and the eccentric personal styles the band and their friends were rocking caused quite a stir. Their hair was long and their facial hair elaborate. Their tight blue jeans were perfectly faded, thanks to an arrangement Twiggs mad
e with the ladies who ran the laundry downtown. He asked them to throw their denims in with every load they did all day long, and he’d be back around in a couple of weeks to get them. Cowboy hats and big brass belt buckles, windbreakers covered with motorcycle patches, suede fringe jackets, and tough motorcycle boots. Walking shoulder to shoulder, they were a gang. Their old ladies, a term Donna didn’t like at all, were just as eye catching in their tiny miniskirts and long flowing hair. Pulling up to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store with Twiggs in his curvy Depression-era coupe and stepping out into the parking lot in their low-cut blouses and cutoff jeans just blew people’s minds. At one point, there was a petition to have them all removed from the College Street apartment. The Manson Family killings hit the national news in March 1969, and “hippies” suddenly seemed dangerous.

  They didn’t pay much mind to the hostility around town, and it didn’t last forever. Once the band started to get a little recognition, things eased up. They also began to draw more of their friends to Macon, including three members of Hour Glass—Johnny Sandlin, Paul Hornsby, and Pete Carr, who were offered jobs as the rhythm section at Phil Walden’s studio at Duane’s suggestion. Johnny told Phil he wanted to start producing, and Phil agreed to give him a shot. Duane was so happy to have them close by.

  Joe Dan Petty, a lifelong friend and former bandmate of Dickey’s, moved to Macon and came on as part of the road crew as soon as there was money to pay him. Ellen Hopkins, their friend from Jacksonville, moved to Macon, and the feeling of family deepened for everyone. They formed the boundary of one another’s world, and soon needed almost nothing from beyond that perimeter other than a crowd ready to receive the music with open ears and open hearts. As Jaimoe said, “There was no outside world.”