They were too broke to stay in a hotel for that length of time, so Twiggs did a little investigating. He found out the J. Geils Band was staying in an old abandoned apartment building. It was pretty rough, with filthy spaces and not a stick of furniture. They’d be sleeping on the floors, without power or water, but it was free. Otherwise they’d have to spend the gas money to drive to Macon and back again, and that didn’t seem wise. They took a vote, and everyone was game to squat at the building. They explored the empty flats and found dead rats big enough to saddle up and ride, but not much else.
Twiggs had a suitcase filled with a collection of 45-rpm records, organized with labeled cardboard dividers, and he had real treasures. Red Dog went begging electricity for their record player from a girl next door. She agreed to thread their extension cord through the window, but her old man wasn’t happy about it. Maybe Red Dog offered his thanks in a way he couldn’t abide, and the guy threw a cherry bomb in behind the cord, the acrid smoke driving everybody out yelling on the sidewalk. It was a rough couple of weeks. The next time they passed through Boston, Don Law let them crash at his apartment. They slept on every available surface, although mostly they didn’t sleep at all. They stayed up listening to Law’s records and talking. It was a great time, and a big improvement in circumstances.
Berry sent letters home to Linda from that trip in the sweet and silly language they shared. She read them out loud to Donna and Candy. Phone calls were a luxury none of them could afford, and letters were treasures beyond compare.
June 12, 1969
Beeg Leenda,
What you doin? Nuthin probably, you so lazee. How is the little Peeglet doin? Is she bein good? I sure do miss her. You take good care of her but don’t spoil her too bad so she be a brat like you. OH B.O., what you say? You steenk.
As you might be able to tell B.O. ees flipping out up here. We are ending up paying more dues than we figured on before getting off the ground and we still don’t have a definite date set for the album. We were supposed to have a job in New York this weekend & next week but that fell through and the thought of just hanging till next week’s gig is a drag but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it or anything else and that is fucking my mind up too. Fuck!
I am writing by candlelight so I can’t see very good but I’m trying. You know what a fine writer I am. Boston is really a cookoo place, it’s different, really different, everybody here is a freak and nobody gives a shit, it’s nuts. And boy do they talk funny. Kind of like New Yawkas. It is also very funky, at least most of the places we’ve been. The place we’ve been staying in for the last week is as hammered as the Pick Wick without furniture. Yeach.
We’ve been practicing every day but not getting much done. The lethargy rate is too high.
Tomorrow Johnny Winter is playing here for the whole weekend. I guess we’ll be around the club getting drunk watching him. The guy that owns the club has about four cases of beer and some wine in the big old band room each night when there’s a gig so we go there and drink it all up ha ha. There was a neat band there last weekend. Delaney & Bonnie & Friends and the Serfs. So we sat around and got drunk with them and rapped.
Tell everybody I said Hi. Sure wish we could play down there. I miss it.
I thought of a new lick today for a song so I’m going to go get the guitar and see if I can remember it.
Be good and take care of the little one.
Love
B.O.
Duane took one look at the tiny blonde sitting on the couch backstage and said, “Hey, I know you!” Bonnie answered, “Is that my Duane?” He picked her up off the floor with the strength of his hug.
Bonnie Bramlett had been singing behind legends since she was a teenager in East St. Louis. She sang with Albert King when she was only fifteen years old, and that was like a college education in how to handle yourself. You dressed up, even for band practice, as a sign of respect, none of this rock-and-roll blue-jeans stuff. But King also taught her that if she really wanted to belt, she had to let herself look ugly, no worrying about the expressions on your face or whether or not you were sweating. When Bonnie met Duane, he was hanging out in St. Louis with the Allman Joys, doing a week or so of gigs at the Peppermint Twist, and she was singing with the Billy Peek Band across the street at the Living Room. Duane would never forget hearing that great big, bluesy voice rising up out of that tiny little white girl. Duane started running over after the Allman Joys’ set with his cord dangling from his guitar to plug in and jam with her group, and she’d come sit in with him.
Bonnie went in for a jam once and said, “Just a blues.”
Duane asked, “What key?” and she said, “Huh?”
He said, “This is what you gotta say: twelve-bar blues shuffle in A. That’s your key. If you’re gonna go up to a band to sit in, ya gotta know what key, or they’re gonna think you’re a nitwit.”
One weekend night, he went to see Albert King and Bonnie was singing backup, and he was blown away. She never mentioned that she had a history with him, and they sounded so great together. Bonnie and Duane were part of the same tribe, following the same path deep into the blues. They talked about it. He asked her if singing came to her as easy and free as it sounded.
“Oh yeah, it’s mine,” she said.
“Yup, I know what you’ve got. I’ve got it, too. It’s just in me. I see people struggling to play, and I don’t have to. Not anymore. When I want it, it’s right there,” Duane said.
“Yeah, but you can find a note with your fingers and it’s always right there, right where you left it. I don’t always know if I can get where I need to go, and I have to know another way in, just in case,” Bonnie said.
Bonnie had been through Los Angeles just like Duane had, but they didn’t cross paths there. She had heard about a white guitar player who was shaking up the Shoals, and she wondered if it was the same Duane, and now she knew.
She introduced Duane to Delaney, her husband and partner, and they fit like hand in glove. Once Duane heard their band, he made it a priority to keep in touch with them.
During that first spring in Macon, the band impressed the legendary producer Tom Dowd without even knowing it. Tom stopped in his tracks outside their rehearsal room as he walked down the sidewalk leaving Capricorn Studios. The band was playing only for themselves, and Tom loved what he heard. They had all the swing of jazz, the fire of rock, and the grit of the blues; he had never heard the likes of it. Tom turned around and told Phil to send them down to him in Miami, and do it now. He didn’t want to lose the immediacy and power of the sound as it was. They were ready. But, a month or so later, when the time came to record their first album, Tom was already booked.
Phil Walden reached out to another producer he felt would work well with the Brothers, and he aimed high. He wrote to Glyn Johns, the British producer who had worked with every serious English band you could name: the Stones, the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Clapton. Johns wrote Phil that he would be free in October 1969, and he even came to see the Brothers play when they crossed paths in California, but Wexler didn’t want to pay to send the band to England and shut the idea down. Instead, they worked with another Atlantic producer, Adrian Barber. They recorded and mixed the album during the first week of August with Barber at Atlantic Studios in New York City.
The band arrived on a Saturday morning, after driving in the van from Macon, and by that evening they were running down some tunes. Sunday morning started with “Trouble No More” and “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” and finished with “Dreams.” They had worked everything out so thoroughly in the demos and in practice, they needed very little guidance once they got going. They just went through the songs a time or two and ran tape. Monday was spent on “Black Hearted Woman,” but they struggled with the arrangement and didn’t finish it.
Still, they hoped to be done tracking and mixing by Wednesday.
They stayed in a run-down hotel called the Wellington, where Atlantic put up lots
of bands, but they had to leave because another group left without paying, and the management had had it with rock bands. They moved on to the Holiday Inn on Fifty-Seventh Street, which was a little less depressing.
Linda got a letter from Berry that read, “Leaving our great little apartment and checking into a funky hotel just spaces me out too bad, you know. It’s like being in an old movie.”
Hey Beeg,
What you doin’ huh? How is leetle peeg? I sure do miss you both. By the time I mail this I don’t know if it will get to late so I’m sending it to Gregg House. Okay.
We’ve got the album cover pretty well done and it’s going to be nice. Nothing far out or anything, just simple and nice. They’re all in color slides and they’re all good. Really nice colors. They are going to start work on it right away and we are going to have it mixed before we leave we hope. We are going to cut Outskirts of Town as soon as we go over this afternoon and then we’re done. Cutting and start mixing it so it sounds intense when it goes on the record.
Twiggs and Gregg are out talking to some folks about ways for Gregg to get out of the Army and I’ve just been laying around all day. I can just barely get this letter together. I’ve got spaced out lethargy so bad. This place has got the best of me today. Oh well. I can’t wait to get home.
Twiggs is getting some dates booked for when we get home so we will be playing for everybody and having fun. Yeah. Tell everybody I say hi. Specially Beeba.
Love ya, B.O.
They finished the entire album in roughly five days, and it was as exciting a first album as any band had ever recorded. It was original and powerful and they knew it was only the very beginning. What they could do with those songs in front of a crowd was where it was at, and that’s what they hoped the record would win them: more people to play for. All they wanted to do was play.
Around June, the whole band signed a management contract with Phil.
When Duane told Donna about it, he asked her if she thought he could get out of it by changing his name.
“If I recorded under a pseudonym, what do you think they would do? Would that get me out of my contract?”
“Why would you want out of it?”
“I don’t like the idea of being tied down,” he said.
(photo credit 16.1)
August 6, 1969
New York City
Dear Donna,
I love you and good morning, too! Things are going so good here it’s amazing. I’m so proud of the stuff we’ve done I could bust. All the time and bread we’ve spent is really sounding like it’s worth it.
Yesterday, a few dudes from Three Dog Night came by the session. They really went nuts when they heard the stuff. I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Tell the old Duck that I’m bringing a winner for him to dig when I get back.
The food here is so shitty that I can’t even hardly eat. The tea tastes like hell, too, but we are getting what we came here to do done. Man, I’m digging it so much it’s about all I can think about at once, except that I miss you and home and Rosie. I’ll write more when I can. We moved! We’re in the Holiday Inn on 440 West 57th Street. Write soon. (I’ve got a surprise for you when I get home. Tee hee)
All My Love Always,
D.
“Joanie, I think I just started my period!”
“Very funny!” Joanie said. Donna’s little sister was visiting Macon during her summer vacation, and they were cleaning the Bond Street apartment because Duane was due home from New York.
While leaning down to scrub the bathtub, Donna’s water broke.
“Well something is happening.…”
Donna called her doctor, who told her it might be her water breaking and she needed to get off her feet. The baby wasn’t due for another nine weeks.
When Duane arrived, he found Donna in bed. He pulled rolls of bills out of his pockets and tossed the money in the air, a cascade over her pink satin coverlet. He had gotten paid for several sessions, and it was a huge windfall for them. He climbed into bed beside her and presented her with an elaborate silver bracelet from Mexico. They spent the afternoon making love (not the best idea, she concedes now, considering her fragile condition).
Later that night, Duane decided to go by Phil Walden’s and pick up a bottle of wine.
He came home with a police officer.
Duane had come from Phil’s full throttle, raced through a stop sign, and got pulled over right away. He told the cop his wife was going into labor at home. The officer threatened to impound the car. Duane told him to come home with him and see for himself, and so the cop followed Duane home and walked right into their bedroom to find my mom resting serenely in a yellow baby-doll negligee, certainly pregnant but barely showing. She was stunned to see a uniformed officer standing by her bed, looking at her body.
The cop impounded their car.
At dawn, the sharp pressure of cramps in her back and sides pulled Donna out of sleep. She woke Duane and asked him to go to Jackie and Ella Avery’s house to borrow their telephone. He called her doctor, who said to call an ambulance. Mom was carried down the zigzagging steps from their apartment on a stretcher, with Duane following behind. She grabbed for his hand and asked him to pray for her, and watched with chagrin as he stayed on the sidewalk while she was loaded in. He said he would follow in a taxi, but she didn’t see him again until after she had delivered. When they lifted her out of the ambulance, she looked up at the very blue sky and thought, It’s a beautiful day to have a baby. She was still a child herself.
Dr. Grossman explained that giving birth nine weeks prematurely was dangerous, but since her water had broken the risk of infection was also very high. He said the baby would only have a 50 percent chance of surviving.
After she was given medication to induce labor, Donna was put in a room divided by curtains, where other patients also waited. There was a large clock on the wall, and time seemed to crawl. A woman behind the curtain next to her started chanting, “Oh Mama! Oh Jesus! Oh Mama! Oh Jesus!”
Donna knew she would be in that kind of acute pain soon, but she told herself she wouldn’t scream and yell like that.
When Dr. Grossman finally came to check on her, Donna’s pain was mounting. She asked him if she could have a cesarean. He laughed and assured her that recovery would be much harder from that procedure. He wouldn’t give her anything for pain because he didn’t want to slow down the contractions. She asked for Duane but got no answer.
She was left alone for what seemed like hours. Then she was moved to another room, given a drug through an IV, and wheeled into the delivery room, still confused by what was happening. Her last thought was that she had just cut up the waistbands of her good blue jeans and stitched in elastic panels for her growing belly, expecting another two months of pregnancy. The drug in the IV drip knocked her out, but she still heard voices. She was told to push but she wasn’t sure how. She felt like she wasn’t entirely in her body.
When a nurse set me on my mother’s chest, I was covered in afterbirth and I looked so dark, she wondered if I belonged to the black woman who gave birth behind the partition beside her. She was very confused. When she opened her eyes again, she was alone in a small, dim room filled with supplies. She thought they had left her in a storage room by mistake. Another nurse gave her pills to dry up her milk, since she wouldn’t be able to take me home and nurse me, but she didn’t explain that to my mother. Donna took the pills without question and fell back into a deep sleep. When she woke up, my father came to her side.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“What is?” she asked.
“The baby!”
“I had it already?”
“It’s a girl!” he shouted.
“Is that all right?” she asked.
“Yes! I named her Galadrielle.”
“You named her what?”
The nurse handed my mother a small piece of paper with the letters of my name carefully spelled out: G-A-L-A-D-R-I-E-L-L-E.
Donna couldn’t make sense of it.
“Galadrielle,” Duane said. “I added the L-E on the end. That’s French feminine.” He sounded so proud.
“I told him you can’t name a baby that!” the nurse said. “How will she ever learn how to spell it … or even say it?”
My name was taken from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, my dad’s favorite books. Galadriel is the Princess of the Elves.
“Well, I would have named her Les Paul Allman if she was a boy,” he said.
It was August 25, 1969, my birthday, ready or not. I weighed three pounds, two ounces, and I didn’t look ready for the world. I was kept in an incubator for five and a half weeks, until I weighed five pounds and could be safely taken home. Until then, I stayed in the hospital, too fragile to touch.
When Donna came home from the hospital, Tommie Jean came to look after her. My grandma walked across town every day to visit me in my glass box at Macon General Hospital. It took Duane longer to let Jerry know I had arrived, and she came to visit once I was home. I looked fetal, pale and thin. The smallest available diaper was still much too large. My plastic ID bracelet looked huge on my wrist.
My mom says I made faces and moved my mouth in wild expressions that looked exactly like my father when he played guitar—my eyes closed and my mouth a quivering O, my arms suddenly thrust over my head. Duane looked at my open hands through the glass and said, “Look at those long fingers. She’s going to play guitar someday.”
Jerry Wexler sent flowers with a card: “Congratulations on the little picker!”
The Brothers were back on the road for a few shows in September, and while passing through Florida, Duane visited Penny, his childhood girlfriend, and together they wrote to Jo Jane. Duane sent Jo Jane a picture of himself smiling with his arms crossed, marked “the proud papa.”
September, 1969
Dear Jo Jane, my tight partner and incidentally also distant (700 miles) relative,
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 22
