The announcer had a question for the crowd: “Does anyone got like a little finger-sized prescription bottle? A glass bottle? Like a pill bottle? Like a Coricidin bottle or something like that? A glass bottle we can slip on a guitarist’s finger? Or a wine bottle with a long neck?” Ellen Hopkins remembers carefully dragging the broken neck of a wine bottle against concrete, trying to smooth the jagged edge. In the footage you can see the rough dark green cylinder on Duane’s ring finger pressing against the strings of his goldtop Les Paul.
The Allman Brothers played two sets, one to open the festival on the afternoon of the third and one to close it on the night of the fifth, and while there may have been more famous musicians on the bill, they were the hometown heroes. Their performance was captured by a film crew, which was a very rare occurrence. Although legal wrangling has kept the footage under wraps for more than forty years, I have seen a small portion of the film and it is the most vivid documentation of the band at that time. It is electrifying. There is even a brief panning shot down a dusty path that shows Linda and Berry walking together hand in hand, smiling and waving to the camera. Linda saw it for the first time only recently and cried in shock and gratitude.
Then the announcer launches into a bizarre riff of his own to introduce them:
You know in Life magazine they had some pictures of the human egg being fertilized and when I was in school they used to give us this shuck that it’s a big race, you know, and the sperm go out and as they race to the egg and the first one to get there goes into the egg. That isn’t the way it happens. Life magazine … this Swedish nurse or Norwegian photographer took pictures of what happens and what really happens is the sperms surround the egg, the female ovum, and they twirl it with their tails at a rate of eight times per minute in this primordial dance, and this actually happens you know, eight times and, eight is the sign of infinity, right, it goes like this, you know, and that’s where we all come from is this dance, so life isn’t a race, it’s not competing with anyone, it’s playing together like all men play together, and these are the Allman Brothers and they play together, Allman Brothers … All Men!
Duane kicks into “Statesboro Blues,” his knees bouncing, while Berry shifts his weight in a sexy shuffle, smiling like a kid. Dickey’s head and shoulders dip, his cowboy hat shielding his face from the sun. The three of them dance with their axes, loose and limber, as comfortable in the flow as swimmers carried by a tide. Jaimoe holds his drumstick at an angle in the jazz style and bites his lower lip in concentration, while Butch looks straight out into the crowd, the smallest hint of anxiety in his eyes as he drives the band forward. You can see how they amazed one another when their faces bloom into smiles of wonder and encouragement.
Gregg sips from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and sings without lifting his eyes from his fingers. He looks so young it is startling. Deep into “Dreams,” the crowd below dances in undulating patterns.
Donna was completely overwhelmed by the playing. Duane was on fire; she had never seen him play so freely. When he walked offstage toward her, she tried to find a way to express how the music made her feel but could only say, “You were so amazing.”
Duane bent his head down to her and said quietly, “I’m glad you liked it.”
He retreated to the comfort of a nearby camper and fell heavily asleep. When Donna tried to wake him to watch Jimi Hendrix play, he was too exhausted to move. As she walked back to her spot on the side of the stage, Jimi passed her in the dark with his guitar in his hand and said hello. Duane missed seeing Hendrix play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at midnight under a sky full of fireworks. Just a couple of months later, Jimi was gone.
Two months before, on May 4, a protest at Ohio’s Kent State University against U.S. military operations in Cambodia ended in violence when members of the National Guard opened fire on student protesters, killing four and wounding nine. Kim Payne told me that the only time he ever saw my father completely unhinged with rage was after he read about the killings in the morning paper. To him it was the ultimate breach of trust. He paced and growled and told everyone they had to fight back, to arm themselves and go after them. A fundamental line had been crossed and now it was war. He was breathing fire, and everyone was a little stunned by his passion and menace. He wanted to round up whatever weapons they could find, get in the van, and drive to Washington, D.C. No one knew what to say to calm him back down. He paced and ranted until he wore himself out.
Even if the purpose was peaceful, any large crowd had a quiet undercurrent of tension after Kent State. The news from Vietnam loomed over these gatherings, too. Music was a galvanizing force against violence, and the South was changing because of it. Bands and their multiracial audiences were directly challenging the social conservatism of previous generations. It felt like a major accomplishment to pull off a concert of this size without incident. When Richie Havens played “Here Comes the Sun” to greet the dawn on the final morning, he seemed to be summoning hopefulness for everyone.
Less than two weeks after Atlanta Pop, the Brothers played the Love Valley Rock Festival in Statesville, North Carolina, a western-themed community of fewer than one hundred people in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains. The town was a single block of rustic wooden buildings linked by a wooden walkway and lined with hitching posts; it looked like a movie set, complete with a church and post office, a general store, and an arena where the festival was held. It was the dream of a young man named Andy Barker, who moved his wife and daughter from Charlotte to a country shack and slowly built the town of which he had always dreamed. The music festival attracted an estimated crowd of one hundred thousand people. The counterculture was spreading through the rural South, alarming many locals, and the events were getting national press.
The footage of that day begins with a hazy, sun-bleached moment. Duane leans into the camera for a kiss, and builds to a passionate and expansive rendition of “Mountain Jam.” The camera stays with him, panning between his hands and his ecstatic face. Duane presses the base of his glass bottle high on the neck and the bright shock of birdsong rings out. He switches seamlessly between playing slide back to straight leads, and as the fever begins to break, the melody of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” flows from his fingertips, all gentle sweetness. There are moments when you can see Gregg, Berry, and Butch all watching him as they play. They shift as he shifts and then, just as you think the song is ending, the band takes the melody into a fiery vamp, a country church service turned rocking roadhouse party. The thread never breaks, only weaves in countermelodies until somehow you are back in the psychedelic expanse of Donovan’s pop song “There Is a Mountain.” By the time they touch back down and the end approaches, Butch pounds a powerful pattern on timpani while Duane bows and rocks his guitar again and again, jumping and landing on the final note.
Linda and Donna traveled to North Carolina to join the band as a surprise, and Duane greeted Donna by asking her what she was doing there. The strain of traveling and playing full-out was showing on him and he was drinking heavily, culminating with him peeing in his sleep on their hotel room radiator in the middle of the night.
When things went dark with him, Donna thought Duane could just stop coming home altogether, or he could come home so changed she wouldn’t want him there. She wasn’t sure which would feel worse. This life she had built with him was so fragile.
From the beginning, Duane wanted to know what went on inside her. He wanted to see if he could open her up, and make her yield to him. She always did, but she also had a temper that could flare up in frustration. Duane didn’t seem to understand how close to the bone they were living while the band was on the road. She and Linda would sometimes take the baby carriages and walk all the way across town to ask for money at the Capricorn office. When she tried to tell this to Duane, he cradled her face in his palms and said, “Oh darlin’, the Ladies Auxiliary has gotten hold of you.”
One night that summer, Duane came home from practice after midnight. Donna pre
pared him a late meal. He was leaving in the morning, just hours away, and she felt an urgency to connect with him. At the very least, she had to be sure she’d have money to buy what she needed while he was away. She asked for twenty dollars, and he scoffed at her. She would never talk back to Duane, or even raise her voice, but she slowly eased his plate across the table and let it fall into his lap. The hot, wet spaghetti dinner soaked his blue jeans, and she didn’t wait to see how he would react. Her chair scraped the kitchen floor, and she quickly stalked upstairs. She positioned herself on the far edge of their bed so the mattress would be between them if he came into the room. She used to wait in the same position for her father to come pounding upstairs when she had done something wrong. She wasn’t sure what Duane would do. He walked very slowly up the steps and stood in the doorway. “I want you out of here in the morning,” he said, then left. Yeah, right, she thought as she listened to his car pull away. He was the one leaving, not her. His absence was just a different kind of slap.
Part of Donna was always waiting for the end to come. Every hard thing that happened seemed an unwelcome portent of his leaving. When she heard what Twiggs had done, her first thought was This will do it. Duane will leave me. It wasn’t a logical thought, but it felt true. The more stress and pressure he was under, the further apart they grew.
The esteemed British producer Glyn Johns had written to Phil Walden to express his disappointment when Jerry Wexler vetoed the idea of the Allman Brothers recording their first album with him in England. “I am sure all will go well with Adrian Barber. In the same token, I still really want to do the second album. By then things should be a lot more straight on my end.” Duane was still interested in working with him, but when the time came to record their next album, the band locked in Tom Dowd and headed for Criteria Studios in Miami in late August 1970.
Gregg wanted to know why they couldn’t work at home. Capricorn was a state-of-the-art studio, right there in Macon. Duane said, “Dig it. This is Tommy Dowd’s sandbox and his toys. Let’s go give it a try.”
The Allman Brothers recorded together in Studio B, the smaller of Criteria’s two studios. They were arranged as they were onstage, Gregg stage right, Duane and Dickey beside him, and Berry stage left. Jaimoe’s kit was behind Duane and Butch’s was behind Berry. The only overdubs that were done separately were Gregg’s vocals and the occasional corrected lead. Their year of heavy touring between albums was evident. They were able to work through songs quickly because they had aired them out live. This made for comparatively short work at Criteria Studios. Their touring schedule continued on. They divided their time working on the album into several sessions whenever they could find a few free days. They had worked up a portion of the new songs on the road, picking melodies on acoustic guitars in hotel rooms, but some things were still to be determined in the studio.
While they were down in Miami recording, they picked up as many Florida gigs as they could. Jo Jane still spent summers in Daytona with her aunt Jerry, and when the band came within a few hundred miles of Daytona Beach, they would spend hours in Jerry’s tiny red Triumph convertible, just to give her the chance to hug the boys and spend a little time with them. The band and crew called Jerry “Mama A” and treated her like a queen.
Jerry and Jo Jane drove to Pensacola in the summer of 1970 for a couple of nights. The band started very late; they had been delayed by their equipment truck breaking down.
They had played only a few songs by the time the midnight curfew struck, and the promoter cut the power. Jo Jane felt an immediate tingle shoot up her spine, thinking, You do not cut off Duane Allman while he’s playing guitar!
The sudden silence created a vacuum in the room, and people gasped, but Jaimoe and Butch kept playing. No longer tethered to the structure of song, they tapped into the oldest, deepest music used to move bodies and send signals, their drums rumbling in the darkness. The crowd stomped and howled while the rumbling drums built, driving tribal rhythm that moved through the room like a wave. It went on and on, as the rest of the band stood by clapping and stomping their feet, until the promoter had no choice but to turn on the juice and let them finish; the kids were going to tear the walls down if he didn’t. The guitars flew back in like birds crying overhead, swooping in to reclaim their stage. Jo Jane and Jerry were amazed by it. The Allman Brothers were literally unstoppable.
(Years later, I asked Butchie if he remembered that night. “Oh, that used to happen all the time,” he said.)
Kim’s main job was maintaining what they called the Wall, the stack of amplifiers that loomed behind the drummers. For the most part, Duane and Dickey maintained their guitars on their own, without help from anyone on the crew, but occasionally something would go wrong and Kim would jump in. He once replaced one of Duane’s broken strings without taking the guitar from him.
“Seriously, Kim? He kept playing while you changed his string?” I asked.
“Yeah, he kept right on playing. I just stayed away from his fingers best I could.”
One night at the Warehouse in New Orleans, they were opening for Pink Floyd, and when they finished their set, the audience went completely nuts. The band played three encores, and still the crowd was cheering and calling for more. The crew cleared the stage, and Pink Floyd’s crew set up their gear, but the crowd was still shouting for the Brothers to come back. Pink Floyd played a song or two, but the crowd would not let go, chanting for the band, so Pink Floyd walked off the stage to wait them out. Kim walked back to the dressing room and asked Duane what he wanted to do. Duane said, “Set it back up.”
The roadies started to roll out the Brothers’ gear, but the Pink Floyd crew asked them what in the hell they thought they were doing. Kim told them the crowd had spoken and the Brothers were going to play another set, but the other crew wouldn’t back down. “Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya?” Red Dog said, and punches started to fly. In the end, the Brothers took back the stage and played an entire second set, including a version of “Mountain Jam” that lasted more than two hours, until the drummers all but collapsed on their kits.
“We would like to keep playing, but we don’t have any drummers,” Duane said. “We’re gonna go drink a beer, and if there’s anybody still here, we’ll play some more.”
The band moved through towns like a storm system, gathering strength as their cool smacked against the heat of the crowd. Callahan sat at the mixing board in the crowd and received the flood of sound from the many mics onstage. He used his ears to bring them into perfect balance. He taped the shows at the soundboard most nights, for the band to listen to later and mark their progress. When the band fully opened up, he would crank up the volume so the music would be felt down to the bone. The players wouldn’t know the difference from the stage, but for the crowd, it was total sensory immersion.
The year on the road had given the band a patina, a dusty, golden sheen. Nothing could shake their laid-back calm. Sometimes they’d sit on the edge of the stage and talk to people in the audience, shake hands, and make jokes; they remained accessible, engaging, charismatic. The Brothers now had a following they could depend on in a growing number of clubs across the country: at the Warehouse in New Orleans, the Boston Tea Party, Ludlow’s Garage in Cincinnati, Fillmore East and West, and on many college campuses. They lived at the pace set by the road. They felt entitled to their fun, as hard as they worked. They fed girls on songs of love, so what did you expect? They were wanted.
The relationships between the women in the Big House were every bit as significant and satisfying as the Brothers’ relationship to one another. Candy, Linda, and Donna worked hard to make a peaceful and lovely home. They cleaned and baked banana bread, and chased the baby girls around. The wonder of being mothers deeply bonded Linda and Donna. Candy was a working woman, out in the town at the boutique all day. Her thing with Gregg was long over; he had lived with her at the house for a time, but he didn’t stay for long. She found a bundle of love letters from other girls tucked
in with his clothes in her wardrobe, and that was it. She started seeing Kim. The women would pass a joint in the evening and confide in one another, describing the men’s bodies and comparing their moves, the little things they liked, and they’d lie stretched out on the floor with the stereo turned up, playing the beautiful music the band sent home. The women felt like muses, hearing the love they shared reflected in the songs.
The Winnebago would roar up behind the house and men would pour out, dirty and tired, talking loud in the alley. Donna would hear them filling up the kitchen, and no one would come upstairs to her. Duane would still be out there somewhere, working. He’d have jumped in on a session or stayed in Atlanta. When he finally came home days later, there were no apologies or explanations. Sometimes he would sleep for days and then leave again. Donna knew what Duane expected of her; he wanted silence and stability. He told her to be “quiet as a mouse.” He wanted to come home and find her waiting. When news came through friends that the band was close, she would dress up, clean the house, and cook. Her anticipation was stronger than any other feeling. When he didn’t come home to her, the strain broke something inside her.
If Duane saw anyone in his band losing their way inside of sadness or stress, he would find words of encouragement to pull them out of it. Everyone had to move forward together. He was so adamant about taking care of everyone, in word and deed, that when the stress of his responsibilities showed on him, it was frightening. Even as the band promoted the importance of their families, the two halves of their lives were fitting together less easily all the time.
Duane’s charm and intelligence were being pulled under a wave of arrogance, and dark moods. He would drink to drunkenness and smoke until he could barely keep his eyes open, repeating himself over and over, saying paranoid things that made no sense. Donna was scared. Listening to Robert Johnson in the music room, he said, “Never poison me,” alluding to the story of the Delta blues master dying at the hand of a jealous man who poisoned his whisky after Johnson flirted with his wife. Duane cut his eyes at Donna over the neck of his wobbling guitar, as if she were the menacing one, picking and slurring out lyrics about no-good women and the evil they make men do.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 27
