On one of their last nights at home together before Duane returned to the road, Donna decided she needed to tell him how hard it was to be separated for such long stretches of time. When he didn’t come home with everyone else and jumped into a session or sat in with another band, it was so deeply disappointing. He sat close to her and looked into her eyes.
“Duane, you must go through a hundred changes while you’re away, traveling and meeting people and having adventures. I go through maybe one or two changes.”
“I guess this is what you’d call getting to know each other,” he said quietly.
Still, the tour schedule only got more intense. In the second week of January, the band headed to Philadelphia for a few shows, and then drove straight on to California for their first gigs at the Fillmore West. Playing on the same bill as B. B. King, the first guitar player who had set Duane and Gregg on fire at the first real show they ever saw in Nashville, was a major milestone. He was incredibly gracious, and Duane actually felt a little starstruck. After their set, as he was walking offstage, Bunky Odom told Duane how well he had played, saying, “Man, you were great! You cut B. B. King!”
“No way!” Duane said. “B.B. cut me—he opened his mouth and sang!”
February at the Fillmore East with the Grateful Dead was the trip you would expect and hope for. Their soundman, Owsley Stanley, was also the preeminent LSD chemist who had made it his merry mission to dose everyone he met. He poured liquid acid into the trash can full of ice and beer in the band’s dressing room. It was so strong that holding a wet can was a ticket to a crazy trip. Kim didn’t notice what had happened until he had to go looking for a cord in Gar, their nickname for Gargantuan, their enormous custom road case, and found it crawling with black snakes. Even Bill Graham got dosed, and stood behind a stack of Marshall amps playing along with a cowbell during the Dead’s set. The two bands were coming from the same place, wanting to lift people up with their music, and they formed an immediate bond. (The next time they played with them, at the Atlanta Sports Arena in May, Duane took me out of my mother’s arms and carried me off. “Duane! Where are you taking her?” my mother asked. “I want her to get blessed by Jerry!” He took me into the Dead’s dressing room, and Jerry Garcia rested his big palm on my tiny head.)
The band was on the road for the rest of February. They came home for just a few days, but spent most of it recording demos of a new song or two for their second album at Capricorn.
Donna’s sister Joanie had decided to move to Macon after her visit when I was born. She graduated from high school a semester early, and in February 1970, just before her seventeenth birthday, she left home. When she arrived in Macon, no one was there to meet her.
“I sat at the little Macon airport all alone, completely freaked-out. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I didn’t know what to do, so I just waited.”
The night before Joanie’s arrival, Big Linda, Donna, and Candy got together at the Oakleys’ little flat in the yellow house on Orange Terrace. Linda, Donna, and Candy spent a night making elaborate valentines for Berry, Duane, and Gregg. They cut pictures and phrases out of magazines and made collages on poster board, lacquered shiny with layers of glue. Donna pasted down the handbill from the Jefferson Airplane concert where she and Duane had met, a little picture of a VW Bug like hers back home, and pictures of a starry sky. She added a small picture of Duane over the words “For the man with a lot of living to do,” and a picture of herself in a leather skirt and big round sunglasses. Cherubs and roses danced at the perimeter of her psychedelic love letter. A Dr. Seuss dog strutted with a guitar above the caption “Dog of Distinction.” Naked ladies lounged on a beach, chubby babies sat in swirls of color, and a picture of a bride stood under the heading “Why I was an unwed wife.” (Duane’s divorce from Patti had not been finalized yet, but Duane had asked Donna to take his name and always introduced her as his wife.) The valentine told the story of their love.
The girls had taken LSD and the paper images danced and winked under their sticky fingertips. They felt like they were floating above themselves, and when they looked down together from the ceiling at their little bodies working with scissors at the table far below, it made them laugh. They played music and smoked cigarettes and watched the colors in their pictures rise up and float between them. It was a memorable night and they felt so close, but after long hours of tripping, they started to tire of it and decided they needed help to come down. They took Thorazine and crashed.
From her flat downstairs, Little Linda heard Brittany crying.
Finally, Little Linda went upstairs. She saw no one so she called out, “Candy! Linda!” Suddenly she saw them sprawled out on the floor. I was in my pumpkin seat and Britt was in her crib, and both of us were screaming. By the time Linda, Donna, and Candy woke up, the whole day had gone by without anyone remembering to pick up Joanie from the airport.
Joanie was so pretty, with dark eyes, light brown hair, and a little curvy body. She was openhearted and gregarious, too, much less shy than Donna. Trouble, in a word, thought Duane. Joanie says Duane felt he had to keep an eye out for her, and asked everyone else to do the same. Once he saw her walking down the sidewalk smoking a cigarette.
He leaned out of his car window. “Ladies don’t smoke in public!” he shouted.
Joanie became friends with Kim and Mike. She rode on the backs of their motorcycles and went with them to the Carousel Lounge, where the proprietor made chicken wings steeped to tenderness in fiery red-pepper sauce. She was seeing a side of Macon her sister didn’t even know existed and she was having a great time.
My cousin Rachael and I took a trip to Macon in 1987, when she was still in high school and I was in my first year of college. Neither of us had visited the town where we were born for years, and we’d never been there alone. It was storming as Rachael drove us from her home in Jacksonville to Macon in her Jeep. The sky was full of ominous clouds when we arrived, and small rain showers would start and stop with the wind.
We drove by every destination we could think of: the Central City Park band shell, the houses on College Street, Bond Street, and Orange Terrace, the scrap of grass where the band played cork ball, the H&H Restaurant (now with a mushroom logo on its sign). We took white roses to the cemetery.
I felt like an exile returning home to find everything unfamiliar. I experienced a kind of night blindness in Macon, an emotional narrowing of my vision. I was so busy searching for any remnant of 1969 that I could barely see the dense greenery and beautiful homes lining the streets. I was disappointed by how few signs of my father remained. The abandoned Capricorn Studios, a small bit of graffiti on a wall, “Remember Duane,” a record store stocked almost entirely with bootlegged Allman paraphernalia, and a couple of boxes filled with photos and newspaper clippings marked “Allman Brothers Band Archive” at the public library downtown. I’m not sure what I expected—scorched earth, crying fans, “Elizabeth Reed” streaming out of car windows?
Macon felt so small and somehow unknowable, like it was withholding something from us, like there was something more to see that we didn’t know how to find. I realized we were not yearning for this place at all; we wanted a portal back in time. Although my father wasn’t anywhere, it seemed that he was most particularly not here, where I had most hoped to find him.
Rachael and I finished our pilgrimage at the grand home our parents and their friends called the Big House. Number 2321 Vineville Avenue is a massive house of brick and stucco, laced up with wood half-timbering in the Tudor style with twin peaked roofs and a deep porch. It was empty then, with a small FOR SALE sign in the dirty front window.
“Should we buy it?” I asked.
“Let’s do it,” Rachael said, climbing up onto the porch and peering into the windows. The walls of the entry were covered with busy floral wallpaper and dust powdered the worn floor. The staircase seemed familiar to me, probably from photographs. As a child, I would stare into the backgrounds of snapshots, tryi
ng to get a feeling for this house that was like a lost member of our family. I loved a shot of my mother stretched out on the bed she shared with my father, wearing his striped pants and smiling. Another photo shows me standing in my crib, goofy-faced under a psychedelic poster of my star sign, Virgo. I noted the small details: the deep crown moldings, high ceilings, and casement windows pouring sunlight over the wooden kitchen table, a fireplace almost big enough to stand in.
It felt right that the Big House was empty. It seemed to be protesting our absence and waiting for our return. The yard was thick with weeds, and through a tangle of wild lilies I could barely make out the edge of what was once a fountain. As I stepped over to it, a thin grass snake wriggled over my boot and I yelped.
Rachael and I had been talking about the band all day.
“I just want my small piece of the story. Not a big piece, just a piece of my own,” Rachael said, her eyes searching the tall trees behind the house.
“You do have a piece. Your father was one of the first—” I started to say.
“I know, but no one knows about my father, or what he gave to the band.”
“I do. I know,” I said. “Everyone who matters knows. Did your father ever tell you about the night “Midnight Rider” was written? He walked up to Gregg and Kim while they were writing lyrics and said he had one dollar left and was going to get a bottle of wine. Your dad’s dollar became “one more silver dollar.”
“I never knew that,” Rachael said. She deserved to feel connected and acknowledged. Most of all by her father, Michael Callahan, the Allman Brothers soundman who was still alive but had little contact with her. Like me, Rachael favors her father so much, it’s startling. She has his sweet smile, deep brown eyes, and tanned skin, inherited from his Cherokee ancestors. Her parents split up when she was a baby, and her dad was still living a crazy life then. There was no place in it for a child, and somehow, that never really changed. Eventually, Michael attended her wedding and met her kids, but Rachael never got to know him as well as she wanted to.
When she was about six years old and I was nine, Rachael said something to me that I will never forget. We were sitting on the carpeted steps of our grandparents’ house in St. Louis. “You’re lucky your daddy is dead. At least you can think he’d be with you if he could. My daddy is out there somewhere; he just doesn’t want me.”
I thought of the dozen apartments Rachael and I had shared with our mothers, the funky little rentals we shed like snakeskin every year or two to start again somewhere new.
It seemed impossible that this palace had ever been ours. What would we be like now if we had all stayed? The question was hanging in the air between us. What if we had stayed together in this big house?
In March 1970, as the first blush of a new spring was pinkening up the town’s cheeks, Linda and Candy started looking for a new home for the Oakleys. They had checked out a few other places that left them cold when Linda noticed the ad for 2321 Vineville Avenue.
Candy drove Donna and Linda over to the house in the car she called Mehitable. (Candy had a knack for naming everything. She called her leather purse Wasted Moo.) They walked up the front steps onto the wide porch and unlocked the front door with the key they got from the rental office. The entryway opened to two large rooms, one on each side: a large parlor and a larger living room with a tall fireplace. The dining room at the back had hand-painted wallpaper with vines and birds, and a crystal chandelier. The kitchen opened onto a glassed-in sunroom with a view of the immense trees outside.
They climbed the curved staircase that led from the entry up to a small landing decorated with stained-glass panels of pink tulips with bright green stems. The second floor had a little central hallway lined with doors, like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.
They opened each door and wandered together from room to room. Interior doors connected every room on the floor. There were two bedrooms with fireplaces, and each bedroom had separate dressing rooms and bathrooms beside them, perfect for baby rooms.
“This could be Brittany’s room, and that could be Galadrielle’s!” Linda said.
A small balcony looked out onto the backyard.
“Romeo, wherefore art thou?” Donna called into the trees.
One bathroom had an enormous tiled shower, a small room with seven or eight showerheads mounted on the walls pointing in every direction.
“Oooooo!” they cried.
The last door they opened led to the third floor, an attic with vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, and small windows on two sides that illuminated the golden wood floors with sunshine.
“An attic? It’s a ballroom!” Donna and Linda waltzed across the floor of the enormous open space. This house would bring everyone together, Brothers and Sisters. It was a real home.
The rent was a steep $225 a month, but if they shared the expense, it would be all right. They didn’t know what the owner would make of them and their extended family, but they could try.
Candy, Linda, and Donna stood together in a tight circle and hugged one another.
“Let’s do it!”
They moved in with very little: mattresses, baby beds, and their record player. Berry’s grandmother gave them an antique sofa. Word was out that they needed furnishings. Someone found a few cable spools that could be used as tables, pretty when covered with India prints.
The small room between Linda and Berry’s bedroom and Candy’s room became known as “the Kasbah.” They arranged pillows on the floor, draped tapestries on the walls, and set up their stereo. Many nights were spent there listening to records and smoking reefer, joints rolled and passed hand to hand until all eyes were glassy and they dreamed, together and apart. A pay phone was installed on the wall in the kitchen, Phil Walden’s ingenious method of avoiding phone bills. A stack of dimes stayed piled on top. It was a big relief to no longer have to run over to Butch and Little Linda’s apartment down the road to make a call.
They rented a refrigerator and cruised thrift stores and antiques shops, eventually scoring Oriental carpets and elaborately carved oak beds, a couple of rocking chairs and hurricane lamps that they fueled with scented oils from the five-and-dime. They draped lace curtains in the windows and filled jars with cut flowers pilfered from neighborhood gardens.
The upstairs rooms took on the auras of their inhabitants. Candy’s room was where the girls often gathered in the morning to plan their days when the band was on the road. Over her fireplace mantel hung a large art deco print. Her high-backed bed sat on a richly colored carpet. A large-leafed potted plant stretched out in the front window atop a heavy old steamer trunk. Colored beads were everywhere, in bottles and boxes and lidded jars. They lined the windowsills, where they sparkled like candy, tempting Brittany and me to eat them. Linda and Berry chose the sunroom, which was completely lined with windows and felt like a tree house nested in green. Duane and Donna’s room was decorated with the huge valentine she made for him and a black velvet tapestry of two white swans; Duane had brought it home from New York.
One afternoon, the girls returned to the house to find an old upright piano in the parlor, which had become the music room. It was painted baby blue and most of the keys worked. Donna sat down and pretended to play, singing, “My old man, he’s a singer in the park,” doing her best Joni Mitchell.
Brittany was a year old, and I was four months behind her. Our mothers spent their days watching us play together like kittens, rolling and tumbling on the floor. We loved scooting up the carpeted staircase, then thumping down one stair at a time on our diapered butts. We both learned to walk and talk in the Big House. One night, we came back from Idlewild, and while our moms were bathing us, they noticed a change in Brittany.
“Leenda, look!” my mom said, running a washcloth down her tiny back. “Beebop has a neck!” Britt turned her big blue eyes to her mom with a huge cartoon smile and we all laughed together. After baths every evening, Donna stood in front of the mirror in the hall with a towel flopped over my head and
let me look at myself. She would lay me down in my crib, and I would cry until I fell asleep, but I always woke up happy. You had to bounce Beebop to get her to sleep, so Linda would sit on the edge of her bed, plant her feet, and bounce with Brittany in her arms.
Every time Duane came home, it seemed, I would get a scratch or a bump right before he arrived. He would check out every little new thing about me, and he’d get to the scratch or bump and lower his chin and give Donna a questioning look. Duane sang “Dimples” to me, touching the four tiny dimples in my cheeks one by one. “You got dimples on your jaw! You my babe, I got my eyes on you!” Mom thought he made up the song for me, and was surprised when she heard Berry playing it in the music room one day.
Candy had a job at a boutique called Steven’s selling clothes and fashion accessories. She was an independent woman with a car and money of her own. Donna and Linda spent afternoons on blankets in the garden, with babies and snacks, writing letters home or working together on craft projects. They made batiks with melted crayon, and knitted and embroidered blue jeans. My grandma Tommie came to visit the Big House. Mom was sitting on the floor rocking me in her arms, loving me so much, she didn’t notice her mother standing there. Tommie quietly said, “And it never stops.”
Ladies of the Canyon drifted out from the record player in the Kasbah, Joni Mitchell playing chords only her fingers could find on her acoustic guitar, her high, smooth voice floating down the stairs, full of longing and wisdom, warm and knowing. Duane and Berry came home from practice, stomping boots through the back door, shouting, “Turn that moaning bitch down!” Motorcycles roared down the road outside, up the side street into the dirt driveway at the back of the house. Red Dog and Kim would enter in midsentence, jiving about giving the cops the slip by ducking into the garages and closing the doors as they passed by, gunning their motors in frustration. The men moved through the cool, shady rooms like a blast of heat from the summer sun, laughing loud, trailing smoke from their cigarettes, leaving sweating beer cans on every surface, poking through the fridge, and drawling out their sweet southern accents in high parodies of the police.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 24
