Boz didn’t want to let go of the good feeling he had found in Muscle Shoals.
He went to visit Duane in Macon, and was drawn by the laid-back beauty of the place, and the sense that music was flowing free and easy and friends were there for the asking. Boz and his wife, Carmella, rented a house there for a time, bringing their worldly California style and gypsy ease with them.
Mom swears one day they had a bare apartment, and the next it was painted six different colors and decorated like a magazine. Carmella had a magical touch, and she was such an exotic beauty, with dark hair and eyes, people would stop in the street to watch her as she walked by. When strangers asked her where she was from, she would make up crazy answers like Istanbul or Cairo and they would just stare. She wanted to see everything Donna and Linda could show her, especially the antiques stores and tiny boutiques they’d discovered.
Carmella and Boz were part of the Allman Brothers Band extended family for a time, soaking up the gentle vibes of the Deep South. The concentration of musical energy and experience in Macon, the legend of the local R&B greats, added to the mystique. Boz went fishing and played poker with the guys late into the nights, drinking beer and telling stories. He said, “It was a remarkable slice of life.”
Boz watched the Brothers rehearse; the investment Phil was making was apparent.
“I have a sense that between Phil and Duane, the scope of the project was developed. The model for the band was Duane’s vision, not to be popular but to give him artistic room to grow. I think it was a really important vision because a lot of musicians at that time, of our generation, West Coast guys, all over, were not as experienced as Duane. He’d been at the heart of the contemporary recording scene with Atlantic. He’d had more going for him. He’d been to California and knew the scene. Most of them were still learning their instruments. Duane and the rest had already been through all that. They knew they had to make a statement, and make a career.… Duane was intelligent, and had a focus that most people didn’t have.”
Boz had just bought a car with his first check from Atlantic Records for the album they had recorded together in Muscle Shoals. Duane asked Boz to take him up to Nashville, probably still wary of his brief trip to jail. He wanted to meet a guitar dealer named George Gruhn, who specialized in vintage acoustic guitars. Duane wanted a Dobro, an acoustic guitar with a metal resonator they called a spider bridge in the center of its hollow body. Nothing sounded like a Dobro; it was like a time machine, right back to the Delta, that warm rattle vibrating under your fingertips. Duane was so excited.
It was a three-hour drive and they left in the early morning, down the two-lane country roads and onto the highway to Nashville. On the drive, Duane talked about what his new band could be. He said that besides the process itself, which was powerful, everyone had a real strong and obvious sense that this was an important new venture.
He was inspired by what Santana had done; it was the best guitar-based band around.
Carlos Santana left room for songs to grow and change in the moment, and extend into musical explorations anchored by his guitar. He was also using percussion in innovative ways that rock acts weren’t doing. Duane wanted the Brothers to have room to stretch out like that.
Donna rode quietly in the backseat. She was so quiet, Boz doesn’t remember her being there, but she was. The road trip made a big impression on her. They stayed at Tracy Nelson’s farm on the outskirts of town, and slept in a beautiful brass bed piled with quilts. Tracy was a singer and guitar player in her own right, and a close friend of Boz, but she was out on the road.
They spent a few hours in George Gruhn’s darkened apartment and he was really a character. Duane seemed to know George, at least by reputation, and this guy was an expert. Duane was something of an expert, too, and he played almost every guitar that seemed to have potential, his head bent and patient. Every single guitar came out of the case to be looked at, tuned, and played for a while, so it was hours and hours. There were hundreds of guitars stacked, case upon case and bag after bag of guitars, every surface of the room piled high. Duane had only enough money to buy one, and he was being meticulous, going through all of them until it came down to a choice of several.
It was a very careful process, and he finally did arrive at the one. Boz played a couple himself, but mostly he watched attentively while Duane played. As their eyes began to adjust to the dim room, it seemed there were slow-moving forms around the perimeter. It took a while to make them out. George collected more than guitars; he was also a serious collector of snakes. Glass tanks were stacked among the cases and Boz recalled several giant pythons curling slowly and gently around Duane’s boots while he played, a very vivid scene.
The first thing Gruhn disputed to me was that his snakes were crawling free that day.
“Do you have any idea how many places a snake can hide or be trapped in an apartment? They were all kept in tanks. I was known to carry a guitar case full of vipers to guitar shows. I didn’t have a car alarm or anything like that, but there is no deterrent quite as effective as a case full of poisonous snakes.”
Gruhn is still selling fine guitars in Nashville, and he is a highly educated and published herpetologist. He has even written a book about guitars that borrowed from the taxonomy he was familiar with from studying snakes and reptiles.
I called him one afternoon on a whim and we had a great talk.
I asked him if he remembered what my father was looking for in a Dobro.
“Not specifically, but he knew what he wanted. He played until he heard it. A good player can play any guitar and make it sound good, and your father was certainly that, but a really good guitar makes suggestions.”
I loved the idea that fine guitars have ideas of their own, things they want to try and to which they can lead a player who is tuned in to them.
Maybe there were melodies and feelings held in the hollow body of the Dobro my father finally chose that manifested as songs. Coiled songs were waiting for him in the body of that old instrument, nestled in a roomful of snakes.
I asked Boz about the naked picture of my father that was included as a poster with Boz’s eponymous album. The photo was originally taken during a shoot for Allman Brothers publicity, and when Boz needed a shot of Duane for his album, he couldn’t resist using the naked image as a kind of centerfold. When I was a kid, I was welcomed by the picture of my grinning father, holding a strategically placed leaf, the image framed or pressed under thumbtacks in friends’ bathrooms and hallways, and it would embarrass the hell out of me, and fascinate me, too. Boz wasn’t there when the picture was taken, but he knew the story.
The Brothers went out to Otis Redding’s farm with Stephen Paley, a young photographer who shot for Atlantic Records. Boz said, “They got naked and it was a riot to hear about it. We were looking for pictures of each person on the album, since there were no shots taken during recording. It was part of the spirit of the package. Duane was a unique individual in the scheme of things, and the picture reflected that. He was funny and could be really clever with the jokes. It was a sunshine feeling in that studio. It was a frivolous side you didn’t always see. He was respectable, gentle, highly focused, and completely without pretention. I can’t think of higher things to say about anyone. He was a serious man. He was brave enough to pull it off.”
The Brothers gathered bare-assed and smiling, no head trips or hesitation.
I have seen photocopies of the outtakes from that afternoon, and they are even more remarkable than the iconic color image that became a promotional postcard and ad for their first album. The band stands together, relaxed on the stream bank with nothing to hide. The moment looks like a scene from some sun-kissed utopia where there is trust and ease among the strongest men. It brings home in a single image how close they were, and how much they shared.
My young, pregnant, and midwestern mother was shocked when Duane came home and described the day.
“Du-ane, what will I tell our child?”
> “Tell ’em ‘Your daddy got nekkid in a crick!’ ”
When he brought home a demo of the Boz album, Donna put it on their turntable before she started making supper. Duane always listened to himself play with a critical ear. He rarely said much about the tapes and test pressings he brought home. But when “Loan Me a Dime” came on, his face changed. A little smile perked up his left cheek and took over into a full-blown toothy grin. He was happy with it and he couldn’t hide it.
He put his arms around Donna from behind as she stood at the stove, resting his chin on her shoulder, and said, “I have to admit, that sounds pretty good.”
Duane and Donna’s new home on Bond Street was only a couple of blocks from 309 College Street, but it was a different world. Their place was one of two in a Victorian house that had been divided into apartments. Their door on the second floor was up a wide wooden staircase that turned sharply at a landing, beneath a many-paned, multicolored grid of stained glass that cast psychedelic shadows on the floor when the sun angled in. The ceilings were tall and fireplaces with brick chimneys stood in every room. The glass windowpanes rippled with age like water, and blurred the street views of the other grand homes around them.
When a session check came in, Donna decorated around the furniture that was already there: brown vinyl couches, a bare mattress, and a couple of shabby tables. She and Duane shopped for tapestries, astrological posters, and paper lanterns to cover the bare lightbulbs.
It was a more intimate life for Donna and Duane, and it brought them closer.
They would stay up late in bed reading novels to each other aloud. Donna noticed he always flipped to the ending of a book and read the last few pages before they started.
“What are doing? You’ll spoil the story for yourself if you start at the end.”
“I’ve always read the end before I start. I want know what happens and I don’t want to wait,” he said.
They took long hot showers together and Donna shared her special hair conditioning technique with Duane. It was an elaborate process involving heating a glass bottle of amber-colored oil in a pot of water on the stove, then massaging it into his scalp and hair while he sat on the floor between her knees. She wrapped his oiled-up head in a towel like a turban and he had to keep it that way for half an hour. He was a good sport about it, and was so happy with how silky his hair felt afterward.
At night, Macon was so very quiet, only the singing insects in the trees and an occasional low growl from a passing car would accompany Duane’s acoustic guitar. Donna sat beside him while he played and he looked up at her and asked if she’d like to learn a song.
She went to their room and returned with a Joan Baez songbook and turned to the song “Wildwood Flower.”
“Oh, that’s an old Carter Family tune! I love that song!” Duane said, and started to play it without looking at the lines on the page. She set the book aside and he passed her the guitar, angling his body around her back and resting his left hand around hers. He carefully placed her fingers in a neat pattern, then suddenly grabbed her wrist and shook her hand until her fingers were flapping like a wing. “Relax! That’s the first thing,” he said.
Donna laughed. “Okay! I’ll try. Show me again.”
He was so patient with her, sitting like that, leaning in to smell her hair, and praising her when she strummed the strings just right. When he left for practice the next day, he called out, “I’m leaving my acoustic behind for you! Practice your song!”
Phil Walden had a dock on a lake, a quiet place to wet a line, and Duane loved to go there with his fishing pole and a few free hours at dawn, or in the evening when the air started to cool and insects would settle onto the water’s tense surface and skim, luring the fish out of the depths. He and Butch would go together, and talk would turn to books, their favorite shared pastime. They passed each other well-worn copies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and volumes of philosophy by Thoreau and Rousseau, drawing out themes of free will and brotherhood from each of them, and always coming back to music. Butch quoted Nietzsche saying, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
They felt the true revolutionary potential inside the music they were creating with the Brothers. Music was the only communication pure and strong enough to really be regarded as universal, and so it had a special power to bring people together. It actually articulated a higher state of being everyone struggles to attain.
Sometimes Duane brought Donna to the lake, and their talk tapered down to a sweet murmur while they watched the sun brighten the tops of the trees. Donna knew how to put a worm on a hook from fishing trips she had taken in high school. She never asked Duane questions about the past, or wondered aloud what the coming weeks or months would bring; it was one of his favorite things about her. She stayed in the moment, watching the long muscle in Duane’s arm wave the pole behind him, then cast the line smoothly out over the water, the hook barely disturbing the surface as it dropped in. He was so beautiful to her, his frizzy red hair catching rays like a crown.
He held the slick speckled bodies of the fish they caught firmly in his hands and freed the tiny silver hook from their flexing mouths with expert ease, telling her he’d been doing this all his life. When they got home he showed her how to clean a fish. He dragged the back of his knife against the scales, quickly stripping them all away, then flipped the blade between flesh and bone, peeling them apart into even fillets with a wink. Donna’s try was less fluid and fast, but she figured it out.
They dredged the fish in flour and set the fillets into bubbling butter in a frying pan. Donna made grits and biscuits from a simple mix and Duane danced a little jig around the table saying, “A breakfast fit for a king!”
Some mornings, Gregg would come over and sit with them at the kitchen table in the sweetness of the morning light. Gregg’s mail was delivered at Bond Street and he would go through his letters with great ceremony and share them with Duane. There were notes from friends in Los Angeles and the occasional card from their mama, telling them about high school friends of theirs she had seen on the beach and asking them to come home for a visit as soon as they could manage it. Once a letter from Stacey came, and Gregg groaned loudly as he opened the envelope. Things had not ended well with her. He’d gotten some great song lyrics out of their breakup, though. Gregg read the first line out loud: “ ‘You can tear this up if you want to.’ ” And he tore it up right then and tossed it over his shoulder. The three of them laughed so hard at that one, they shook the table.
They had serious talks, too. Not long after Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones died, Gregg, Duane, and Donna sat around the coffee table on the floor and talked about death.
“You better not die before I do, that’s all I can say. I couldn’t stand it,” Donna said. “Well, you can’t leave me here, either,” Duane answered.
“I guess we all have to jump off a cliff together,” Gregg said.
They lingered on the subject for a while longer. Duane said, “Just throw me in a pine box,” but then he hesitated and said he could not stand the idea of being buried deep in the ground. He made Donna promise she would find another way, and she asked them if they could please talk about something else.
Kim’s first duty as a roadie was to pick up their new white Econoline van and bring it over to Twiggs’s folks’ house to park it—easy enough, and everything was fine, until he was standing inside with Twiggs, giving him the keys, and noticed movement in the steep driveway. He said, “Hey, somebody’s van is … oh shit!” Kim had forgotten to engage the parking brake, and the van rolled down the hilly drive and smacked into a tree.
Kim was not looking forward to telling Duane about his first day on the job, and he could already tell Duane was the one to impress. He was more than a little surprised when Duane stretched an arm around Kim’s shoulders and said, “That’s okay. You’re my hoss even if you don’t ever win no race.”
That white van would become their home for the better part of the n
ext year. It was a bare metal shell with no insulation at all inside. Two mattresses filled the back, curving halfway up the walls to hold six grown men lying head to toe. Red Dog usually drove, and Twiggs took turns riding shotgun with Jaimoe. Kim and Callahan would take turns driving the reclaimed U-Haul truck with all the equipment, riding caravan-style. They had painted it black and named her the Black Hearted Woman after their song. If there was any harder or cheaper way to travel, they didn’t know of it.
In late May 1969, Duane went on ahead of everyone to New York City and played three sessions in three days with two legends: Aretha Franklin and Percy Sledge. Then he met the band in Boston to play their first major gigs outside of the South, at the Boston Tea Party, May 30–31. Boston proved to be a real trial, but it also gave the first indication that the right people were getting behind them.
After driving all day piled in the van like a cord of wood, then humping Gregg’s four-hundred-pound Hammond B-3 organ up two impossible curving staircases, the Allman Brothers opened for the experimental New York band the Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party. The pairing was completely misguided; there have never been two bands with less in common. The Brothers knew the crowd wasn’t with them, and the music never quite got off the ground.
Phil had arranged for an industry-heavy crowd, including Frank Barsalona, the head of Premier Talent, and Jon Landau, an influential rock journalist. Bunky Odom, who helped Phil, said Barsalona was used to working with famous European artists and that he was less than impressed by the Tea Party shows. He thought the Brothers were too bluesy and advised them to dress better and jump around onstage a little, put on a show. Bunky says Duane, in colorful language, told Frank that wasn’t going to happen.
Instead of writing them off, Don Law, the owner of the club, agreed to book them in an opening slot for Dr. John, a like-minded musician. But it meant hanging around Boston for a couple of weeks.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 21
