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

by Galadrielle Allman

  All she could do was repeat what he said: “You love me but you can’t do this anymore?”

  “That’s right. I’m leaving.”

  “You’re leaving? You mean you’re leaving me?”

  “That’s right.”

  He walked out of the house full of people primed for a party and drove to Atlanta to be with Dixie, one of the Taft Street Girls.

  Donna went up to their room and lay down, stunned.

  She stayed in a state of shock for days. Kim came into her room and sat on the edge of the bed to check on her. She asked him why Duane would leave her now, but his answer didn’t make it any clearer. “Do you know what they do when a horse breaks its leg? They shoot her,” he said.

  My mother always mentions that she was in the middle of knitting Duane a scarf out of Aunt Lydia’s multicolored rug yarn. She remembers the yarn because it was so heavy it continued to stretch under its own weight until the scarf became overwhelmingly long. She once made Duane a macramé guitar strap that stretched out, too. His guitar was hanging down to his knees before he knew it. He wore it as a belt instead. It was an important detail to her, that she kept knitting for him. She wanted him to see that she wasn’t giving up. It was her quiet way of telling him she knew he would come home.

  He did come back to her bed once in the weeks after their breakup, sick with a fever. She asked him again, “Duane, are you sure?” He didn’t give her an answer.

  He let her take care of him like a nurse, feeding him soup and resting her cool hand against his hot cheek. She was grateful to have him there, but once he was well, he left again. She learned that heartbreak was a real pulsing pain, her chest so sore she thought I might feel it through her skin when she held me. The hurting pinned her down and kept her still. She slept late and stopped helping around the house. Linda came into her darkened bedroom in the mornings, carrying me on her hip, and tried gently to rouse her.

  One day Donna heard the sound of Duane’s car turning into the driveway and walked out to meet him, carrying me in her arms, her lips pressed into my hair. She stopped short when both car doors opened. She couldn’t believe he would bring her here. Donna stepped back through the back door and looked through the glass walls of the sunroom. Duane stood in the backyard with a short woman with short hair: Dixie. This girl wasn’t taller or thinner than she was. She was not gorgeous or stylish or perfect. Donna hadn’t consciously tried to picture her, but she had assumed she must be stunning in every way, and here was a perfectly ordinary girl—not better than her, just different. Donna suddenly felt that she had never really known Duane at all. If he could simply erase her, replace her, and let go of their child just to be with someone new, who was he? Who had he ever been?

  She was spinning in a hellish swirl of feelings. Her home and loving family were a naïve dream. Duane was gone and it felt like he had never really been there at all. The walls around her seemed like paper, the light thin and sickly. Nothing was real there anymore. Then I cried a wet baby scream and the world firmed up under her feet.

  There was laundry to fold, a baby to feed, warm baths to draw, damp diapers to change: a string of benign chores to fill her days and nights. My baby world was her safe home. There was always something more to do, and when she did something small for me, I would smile like she was made of sunshine. It was impossible to cry while looking at my dimpled cheeks and wide-open smile, which revealed tiny teeth poking through pink gums. This is his baby, she thought. We are his family. Someday he will come back.

  How cruel that Layla and Other Love Songs was released just after their breakup. Duane had assured her that this album contained the seed of their future; with it would come all the things they both wanted. The songs were so full of pathos and longing, it seemed Duane was playing her pain. His crying guitar and the beautiful lyrics said all she wished she could find a way to say to him: You’ve got me on my knees.… Why does love got to be so sad?

  Mom tells me that whenever I heard “Layla,” I would dance from the first note until the last. I was two years old, tiny with serious dark eyes and bright orange hair. At the clarion call of my father’s guitar I would begin spinning with my hands raised over my head. I closed my eyes and swayed slowing to the piano coda, my hands fluttering around me. My mother was mesmerized.

  Donna served Duane with divorce papers. Her lawyer said the length of their relationship and the fact that he asked her to use the name Allman qualified them as married under common law. She hired the lawyer when Phil Walden presented her with papers of his own, laying out an arrangement that seemed neither clear nor fair. Walden wanted to move us to an apartment in town so Duane could still see me. Donna went to look at a couple of places, but standing in an empty second-floor duplex, looking out into a silent street with bare winter trees, she broke down. She didn’t want to live alone after living with her closest friends. The Big House was home, and it was too much to lose all at once: the house and friends, her love and her identity. She couldn’t stay close enough to watch it go on without her. How could she start all over again across town by herself? She decided to go back to St. Louis to her parents, as hard as that seemed; at least it was far away from everything she was losing.

  Duane wouldn’t sign the divorce papers. He gave them back covered with handwritten changes. He disputed the amount of money she was asking for—saying it was too much. He refused to get the life insurance her lawyer recommended, saying no one was going to bet that he was going to die before them.

  He said, “I’ll give Galadrielle money for whatever she needs, but I am not gonna give you roller-skating money!”

  Big Linda suggested to Donna that he was stalling because Duane didn’t really want to lose us, and Donna still held on to hope even as she moved forward. The papers went back and forth a half dozen times. Donna finally asked Duane to come to the house and talk it through with her. They sat at the table in the sunroom. She explained that it was important to her to have time with me. She didn’t want to get a job and let a stranger take care of me all day. She just wanted a little support so she could raise me right. He understood, and he finally signed the papers.

  Soon after, Michael Callahan, the band’s soundman and roadie, was diagnosed with hepatitis and everyone had to go down to the clinic and get a shot. Donna and Duane ran into each other in the parking lot behind the doctor’s office. She set me down and they stood together on the grass and watched me toddle around. Donna saw Duane tear up watching me. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “I love you, but I can’t be a husband. I can’t be a father.”

  There was nothing else to say. Duane wasn’t going to change, and it wasn’t because of Dixie. It wasn’t that Donna wasn’t good enough or pretty enough. What kept him away from her was something more difficult to see.

  A white sport coat and a pink carnation

  I’m all alone in romance

  In a drunken radio interview recorded at WABC in New York on December 9, 1970, Duane described Donna as “a white sport coat and a pink carnation,” a line from a Marty Robbins song, an opaque indictment of her innocence and apparent unsuitability for a man like him. His manic monologue is one of only a few recordings of him talking at any length. The velocity of his delivery is wild. Rolling with a thought, his voice drawls out into near nonsense. He sounds so high, you can practically join him on his bender by listening to him shucking and jiving. He puts on a cruel high-pitched voice to mock her, while telling a wholly made-up story of meeting Donna backstage at a concert. He makes it sound like he lost his freedom to a girl who was part savvy man-eater, part naïve child. All of this came spilling out of him when the DJ asked him if he lived in Atlanta:

  “I live in Macon, Georgia, right now. I’ve got a house, man.… Berry and his old lady and kid live there, and me and my old lady and kid live there and Gregg and his chick which is Berry’s sister live there and make it nice and so, anyhow, I got rid of my old lady and my kid. I said, no old ladies and no kids, just guitars, man. She’s a teenage q
ueen.…”

  “Who’s a teenage queen? Your kid?”

  “My old lady. My kid’s a kid, man. She’s mine, man. She’s part of me. You can see me in her. Man, I look at her and say, ‘Hey, me! How you doin’?’ It’s good, man. It’s good. Children are good, man, if you love ’em. If you got time to do it. It’s not good if the old lady ain’t nowhere, man. And my old lady is a white sport coat and a pink carnation. She’s just, ‘Do you love me, son?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t love you, I just seen you, man.’ You come by the gig and ask me if I’d ball ya and I said okay, yeah. And then ten months later, ‘I’m pregnant! What’ll I do? What’ll I do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ So she comes down and she gets a crib see, gets an apartment and says, ‘Duane! Here’s your home! Here’s your home!’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve been lookin’ for a home. This must be it!’ and I’m in the door, man, and right away I start getting pulled at and shoved at. I don’t want none of that, man. I don’t want none of that. So I said, ‘Okay, here’s your bucks. Here’s your car. Here’s your trip. Hit the road.’ So, it’s me and my old guitar, which is a Jimmie Rodgers song, ‘Me and My Old Guitar.’ It’s a beaut. Y’all should play some of him! He’s good!”

  My mom never heard that interview, and it was only recently that I found it on the Internet for the first time. It took me a long time to bring myself to listen to it; friends warned me that it was rough. I didn’t recognize their relationship in anything he said—not how they met or how they parted. It was close to the time of their breakup, and he was raging. Still, I wish I had listened sooner. As mean as he gets, his sweet words for me are tucked in there, too. For the first time I considered that he and I might have had our own bond, separate from theirs. I was always so close to my mother, and felt the impact of the pain he caused her; it had never occurred to me that he might have felt differently about her than he did about me … a horribly disloyal thought. Even before I listened to the interview I felt caught in the loyalty bind created by my love for her and my love for him.

  Mom and I left for St. Louis just before Christmas 1970, on a bitterly cold and damp morning. As she prepared to walk out of the Big House for the last time, Donna was shocked to find Duane sleeping in the living room with the rug from the floor pulled over him for warmth. She stood above him and watched him for a moment, but didn’t wake him to say goodbye.

  Why didn’t he come upstairs? Why did he come so close and not take the final step? What would have happened if she had woken him up? I asked her to picture the moment she saw Duane sleeping there.

  “Did he know we were leaving?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did.”

  “He must have, right? Was he sleeping on the floor? Or a couch? Under a rug? The rug from the floor?”

  “Yes, a rug. He must have gotten very cold. I don’t know if he was on the floor.…”

  “Can you try to picture it?”

  “I pulled it up over him, and that was it.”

  “Was he up on a piece of furniture, or did you have to bend down to the floor?”

  “I don’t know, I was so shocked to see him there.”

  “Mom, try.”

  “Galadrielle. I don’t know. Does your memory work that way? Can you remember details from your first love by trying?”

  “I think I can.”

  “Well, good for you. I can’t.”

  We were sitting in an empty restaurant over a wine-stained tablecloth and empty coffee cups. She had told me this story many times before, but I had never been so merciless about details. We left the restaurant in opposite directions to our waiting cars, barely saying goodbye. It took me a while to realize how cruel I had been. She was telling me about the very last time she saw my father alive.

  Some men seem able to sever ties in ways that women can’t fathom. They can box things up—love, pain, the past—shelving the things that might weigh them down. They know how to get free and keep moving forward. I have seen how completely women’s lives are changed by the decisions that men make. My mother could no more decide to stop loving my father than she could have decided to stop loving me; he was her family. He is her family. The strange twin virtues of freedom and control that everyone so admired in him, did they draw him away?

  “Some people have satellites. They create their own gravity,” my mom said. “When you have that strength, people see it in you and they are drawn in. You develop your talent, and then you can generate anything: money, sex, music. People adore you for it. But that music, it’s like wind through the trees. It’s just going through them. It is not them.” The distance between Duane and his loving presence in songs felt immense after their breakup.

  Forty years later, she is still trying to find answers, still wondering if she could have fought him and made him stay. What if she had yelled, “We are your family! You are not going!” She marvels at her own paralysis and weakness, but I think it was closer to pride. How can you make a man stay when what he has loved best in you is your gentleness, and the likeliness that you would never fight?

  “He was disappointing himself. He was disappointing me. I was tangled up in it, and it was easier to walk away and feel changed by it. I felt like Duane. I was just as bad as he was. I was just as angry and just as broken. I couldn’t feel a separation between him and me. I felt how strong I really was and I decided to push through and live. Duane had lived, and I had witnessed him living, and I carried him within me. That is how real it was. I thought, Now I am him.”

  Saying goodbye to Candy and Linda was incredibly hard. They were so angry and sad, but there was nothing to be done. Candy drove us to the airport in Atlanta, and when she came home, she stood in front of Linda in the kitchen, threw up her hands, and said, “All gone!”

  “Why is Duane doing this?” Linda asked Berry.

  “When he looks at Donna he feels guilty. She’s pure of heart and she really loves him so much. He doesn’t feel guilty when he looks at Dixie. She’ll be his little puppy and follow him around and he can do whatever he wants.” Berry was upset about it, too. Duane was breaking up their family. Brittany and I had never been apart. “Baby, the root is the root of all evil,” he concluded with a sad smile.

  Linda saw this breach in our family as the first and knew it would lead to other cracks in the foundation, and she was right. Before too long, she was contending with a girlfriend of Berry’s, too. “I know what was between Donna and Duane,” Linda told me years later. “I was there. He always treated her so special. If you would have told me what was coming with Dixie, I never would have believed it.”

  In Duane’s case, Linda thought it was more than sex. She thought Duane wanted to protect us from the crazy life he was leading. It must have shocked Duane to feel death standing beside him. I know he felt an acute responsibility for the band and he must have known how frightened everyone was of losing him. Did the overdose shake him? Maybe he imagined it would be easier for us to survive if we were away from him, should something tragic take him.

  I asked Ace, the one person I knew who might have been close enough to know what was in my father’s mind. “Did he ask us to go as a way of protecting us?”

  He answered without a moment’s hesitation. “Absolutely. That is absolutely why.”

  I realized that what I told myself lightly all along was the whole truth: My father fell in love with music. Music woke Duane up in the morning with fragments of songs rescued from his dreams. Melodies coursed through his blood all day. He played every hour he could, stopping to eat, to walk from one place to another, to sleep, only grudgingly setting his guitar aside. Every other moment, he wrapped his hands around his guitar like a ravenous lover, pushing her golden body to cries of ecstasy, never letting her rest. I hadn’t considered what that love meant for us, the ones who loved him most.

  Music sustained my father, and he would follow it wherever it led. He didn’t need us the way we needed him. To be complete, he needed only to play. He was tapped into a higher source,
and we were tapped into him, which wasn’t fair to any of us. I was something that happened to him, not something he craved or created out of a need. He handled my arrival with grace and warmth, and my mother always insists that I was the one thing they always agreed on, but he continued down his path. When the road became dark and dangerous, he told us to go.

  We stayed at my grandparents’ house for several months, in a guest bedroom downstairs from Donna’s teenage bedroom. It was the hardest time for Mom. With a word, Duane had stripped her of everything that had come to her so magically, and she was back where she started.

  By Easter, I was running with abandon. Grandpa took pictures of me in the yard, hunting for eggs with a basket on my arm. I carried a tiny red chair around and sat on it proudly, dressed in a pale green dress with a petticoat. Donna mailed prints to Linda, Candy, and Joanie, and when they arrived, they asked Duane if he’d like to see them.

  He said no. “Has she married a floorwalker at Belk’s yet?” he asked Joanie bitterly.

  But Joanie saw him ease open the drawer of the sideboard in the dining room where she left the pictures of me when he thought he was alone. He kept them all.

  (photo credit 22.1)

  Duane tosses out a little slide riff and says into the mic, “Test one … I hope this comes out pretty good. We’re cutting our third album here tonight!”

  It wasn’t an easy sell, convincing Atlantic Records to give a band with two underperforming albums behind them the chance to record a live album. Live albums were usually released to satisfy eager fans waiting for new studio albums from highly successful artists, but capturing the power of the Allman Brothers Band in front of a crowd had become the band’s ultimate ambition. With Phil Walden’s help, they were able to convince Atlantic Records that it was an important next step. When they were cooking in front of a crowd, no one could deny them. It might be just the thing they needed to really break through commercially.