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

by Galadrielle Allman

  Friends gathered at the hospital as word spread, and they were taken to a small waiting room. As Duane was wheeled down the corridor, Berry grasped his hand and bent down to kiss his cheek.

  After a couple of hours, a male nurse came in and said Duane had a broken arm and bumped his head, so he might not play guitar for a while, but he would recover.

  Butch went out to get a bottle of wine to celebrate, and Gregg and Chank, one of his closest friends in Macon, went back to his apartment on Orange Terrace to hang.

  In fact, the golden time everyone had shared for the last two and a half years was narrowing down to a single golden hour, the small window of time when it still seemed possible that Duane would live. He was losing his battle in the operating room, and after three hours of attempts to repair the internal damage done, my father died.

  When the surgeon walked into the waiting room, he was visibly shaken to find everyone in a lighthearted mood. He told them Duane hadn’t made it through the surgery, and everything stopped. No one could move or speak for a moment, and then panic set in. Pacing, crying, holding one another. Red Dog stepped outside just as Butch was returning with his wine, and the moment Butch saw the tears in his friend’s eyes, he dropped the bottle and it shattered at their feet.

  Allman Brothers fans pore over photographs of the site of the accident on websites, discussing how fast he might have been going, whether or not his bike caught air on the incline of the hill, whether he hit the back of the truck or merely slipped under it. There are video tours taken from a handheld video camera that circle around the road filming the site and describing the accident. Apocryphal stories circulated about the truck having a huge ball hanging from a crane, or a hook, or a pile of pipes, and all of these things were said to have struck him. Was there a fire hydrant and did he hit it? Was he on drugs or drunk? Did the truck stop before or after he was hit?

  When I was in second grade, a boy taunted me by saying my father was killed by a peach truck, and that was why the band’s next record was called Eat a Peach. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I threw a pinecone at him hard enough to make his forehead bleed.

  Of course it wasn’t true. The whole scene is dissected at great length, to what end?

  My father was killed in an accident, a meaningless, blameless moment that could never be changed. What else is there to know?

  At Gregory’s house, I had been treading lightly for a week or more, easing into the slow pace of life in Savannah, enjoying being with him. His home sits beside a wide river and is surrounded by giant oak trees covered in dusty gray Spanish moss. His little dogs bound through the house barking at every distant sound from the road; otherwise there is sweet silence and peace. My uncle has lived in many houses in many towns, but this place is the first that feels like a real home. I had so little time with him, it felt wrong to me to be there with any kind of agenda, even one as personal as wanting to talk about my father, so I waited for Duane to find his way into our talks naturally, and in time, he did amble through. One night, we watched a brutal action movie about a dirty cop with a drug habit and afterward, while Gregory put on a pot of coffee, he said, “You know, I died the night my brother died.”

  We stood in silence for a long moment before he went on. “I don’t know if I want to tell you about that. I’d hate to hurt the way you think of me.”

  “You won’t,” I said quickly, but he didn’t say any more.

  The thing was, I already knew the story he was hesitating to tell. I read it in a book about the band, and Red Dog had told me, too.

  Gregg and Chank left the hospital together, thinking Duane was in the clear. They went to get high. After he fixed, Gregg slumped to the floor and Chank knew he had taken too much. He tried shooting salt water into Gregg’s arm, and then he tried milk.

  “Milk?” I asked.

  “Yeah, baby. Sometimes that could work,” Red Dog said. Chank held Gregg under his arms and lifted him into his bathtub. He ran icy water over him, but he was out. He slapped his face and talked to him. He tried another shot of salt water.

  “Nothing was working, and Chank knew he had to go,” Red Dog said.

  “He was going to leave him?” I asked.

  “Baby girl, that was the way it had to be. We all knew, if somebody was gone, you had to haul ass. No point in going to jail on top of everything else, dig?”

  Chank propped Gregg up at the edge of the tub and was about to leave him to die when Red Dog knocked on the door. He stood in the doorway with his mouth opening in a silent cry.

  Chank said, “Don’t tell me.”

  Gregg’s small voice called out behind them, “Don’t tell me what?”

  In a single moment, Chank knew that Gregg was alive and Duane was dead; both feelings arrived at once, hot and cold.

  Red Dog made a quick gesture with his thumb, squeezing an invisible syringe into the crook of his bent arm, and said, “We cried and shot and cried some more, and sat up together until dawn.” This new loss was too huge to see all at once from so close-up.

  They hid out in that high for years.

  No one called to tell Twiggs that night, and he heard the news of Duane’s death on the radio in the mental hospital. Twiggs told his mother not to be sad, because Duane had lived more in his twenty-four years than most people ever do. Twiggs was denied a day pass to go to Duane’s funeral.

  Dickey was home with his folks in Florida. His stepfather came to the club where he was playing with a friend’s band to give him the news. Dickey rushed back to Macon in pure shock. Phil Walden was vacationing in Bimini when he got the call. His first thought was that the last time Phil saw him, Duane had wondered aloud if he could ever play any better than he was playing then.

  Joanie walked the hospital halls trying to calm herself enough to call her parents. They had to find her sister and tell her. She called my grandmother and noticed halfway through the awful call that she was in the same wooden booth she had called her parents from when I was born. Grandma tried to track us down, but the night Duane died, Mom and I were camping next to a reservoir in Missouri with her friends Maureen and Frank, and a medical student Mom had just begun to date. The night passed without word from the outside world.

  Donna’s friends had brought along some mushrooms to take, and Donna finally took the hit of LSD that Duane had given her when she left Macon, a parting gift she never understood. She said he never gave her drugs; it was out of character, but he said he thought she might like it.

  Donna wandered down along the water’s edge, wanting to feel herself in the world as her high was blooming. Distant trees waved their arms through a blur of wood smoke and the afternoon sky took on an odd, ghostly sheen. Donna felt the pulse of the breeze that rippled the indigo water rising up through her legs and watched the sky turn gray. Then the wind kicked up all at once, no longer gentle, and the sky and water became one menacing mass. A horrible knowledge suddenly spread through her, carried by the approaching storm. She felt Duane move through her and she knew she had lost his love. Their breakup suddenly seemed permanent and fixed in place, and she knew there was no way back to him. Fear gathered around her, like a heavy woolen cloak that weighed down her slender shoulders, and the sky pulled back into itself and turned away.

  Something was very wrong.

  Donna’s parents found a friend who was willing to drive to the campsite. When he arrived, he was told Donna was tripping and everyone decided to wait. Donna wandered back to the camp and found her friends sitting in a strange silence. Tension was in the air that she didn’t understand, and no one explained. They told her it was time to head home, before the rains moved in. The wind was becoming wild; the fabric walls of the tents flapped so hard it sounded like shrieking. They packed up in the dark and loaded the cars, and reached the closest friend’s house very late. My mom put me down to sleep in an unfamiliar bedroom.

  Her friend Skip came to her and said, “Duane has been in an accident.”

  “Is he all right?”r />
  “He’s dead … I think,” he said, trying to soften the blow.

  “I cried like an animal until I had nothing left inside,” my mother told me. “You slept through it all, I don’t know how. I watched you sleeping and all I could think was, Someday I will have to tell her.”

  Donna told herself I would not suffer because I would not remember him, and it relieved her. How can you lose what you never had?

  The first time I heard my mother tell the story of this night, we were at a fancy restaurant celebrating New Year’s Eve of 2004. She was telling two of my oldest friends simply because one of them had asked. The wind, the water, the feeling coming before the news: My two friends sat in rapt attention while Mom talked, tears shining in her eyes. Donna was wearing a party hat she had made, a pleated tin foil crown topped with an orange ostrich plume. The festive room fell away from us, leaving only black water as she described the weight of my sleeping body being lifted out of our tent.

  I wanted to hear the story, but not like this. I kept eating quietly and didn’t look at her. I felt she was performing for my friends, and a silent rage tightened my chest. I stood up suddenly before she was finished and went to the restroom. When I returned, I asked primly if we could move on to a lighter topic. My mother wiped her wet cheeks with her napkin and said she was sorry, smiling gently at me and at my friends.

  Last year, at Thanksgiving, the day came up again. Mom and I looked through a box of photographs over pie, passing each other snapshots from Jacksonville and St. Louis, my grade school portraits mixed in with her baby pictures, shots of the ocean, pets long since passed, friends with forgotten names. Mom paused over a black-and-white image of our backs huddled together beside a body of water.

  “That’s where we went camping,” she said. I knew exactly what she meant but still I asked.

  “When?” She didn’t answer. I said, “There’s a picture from that day?”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  We looked at the photograph together, a single frame, her head bent down over mine, simple, a throwaway shot that suddenly seemed like the saddest picture I had ever seen.

  The night before Duane’s funeral, there was a private viewing arranged at the chapel inside the funeral home. Donna, her mother, and I had flown from St. Louis. Tommie Jean was being so strong for her daughter, carrying me and keeping me occupied while Donna did what she needed to do. All Donna wanted was to see him. She walked alone down the aisle between rows of chairs to the open coffin, and as soon as she was close enough to see his face, she knew it was not him. He was not in his body anymore. His fire, his beauty, his strength were gone.

  Kim came to her, gently took her by the elbow, and steered her outside. She was crying, and her knees were buckling. Someone came to them, it may have been Chank, and said they were gathering things to place in Duane’s coffin before it was closed, if there was something she wanted to add. She borrowed Kim’s knife and cut a lock of her hair from the nape of her neck, and gave it to him.

  A huge guitar made of hundreds of fluffy flower heads stood in the front yard at the Big House beside a wheel with a broken spoke made of roses, the circle broken. The funeral happened somehow. No one remembers it quite clearly, and for that they are grateful. I have a cassette of the service. I listened to it once when I was about sixteen and never again. Delaney Bramlett and Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) joined the band to play songs Duane loved: “The Sky Is Crying.” “Melissa.” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

  Jerry was very strong and silent. Her heart was shattered, her vision narrowed down to a tunnel that ended only in the sight of her youngest son. She resolved not to let her despair show. She kept a close eye on Gregg, hoping to help him get through the day.

  The Brothers played and sang beside Duane’s coffin, now draped in a blanket of white roses. Jerry Wexler gave a eulogy, as he had for Otis Redding:

  It was at King Curtis’s funeral that I last saw Duane Allman, and Duane with tears in his eyes told me that Curtis’s encouragement and praise was valuable to him in the pursuit of his music and career. They were both gifted natural musicians with an unlimited ability for truly melodic improvisation. They were both born in the South and they both learned their music from great black musicians and blues singers. They were both utterly dedicated to their music, and both intolerant of the false and the meretricious and they would never permit the incorporation of the commercial compromise to their music—not for love or money.

  I remember a magic summer night of music when Duane and Delaney sat on an outdoor patio overlooking the water both playing acoustic guitars as softly as they possibly could and both of them singing—Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, and an unforgettable Jimmy Davis song called “Shackled and Chained.” The music was incredibly pure—completely free of affect—and almost avoided personality as each of them gave himself over to the ineffable beauty of southern gospel, country, and blues music as only southern musicians can.

  Those of us who were privileged to know Duane will remember him from all the studios, backstage dressing rooms, the Downtowners, the Holiday Inns, the Sheratons, the late nights, relaxing after the sessions, the whisky and the music talk, playing back cassettes until night gave way to dawn, the meals and the pool games, and fishing in Miami and Long Island, this young beautiful man who we love so dearly but who is not lost to us, because we have his music, and the music is imperishable.

  Dixie spoke to Donna for the first time. “He was ornery, wasn’t he?” she said.

  Donna thought it was a strangely perfect thing to say.

  Gregg wanted to arrange for a mausoleum to be built for Duane on a plot in Rose Hill.

  Phil took Donna into his office and told her he had paid the considerable amount of $6,600 for Duane’s funeral, and that he would forgive Duane’s debts to Capricorn. Donna realized what he was saying; he wanted her to know no further money would come from him, other than royalties as they were earned.

  Donna told Jerry that I would be eligible to receive a survivor’s benefit from Social Security. She wanted Granny to know that I would be provided for, but her timing felt very wrong. Jerry and Gregg were upset that she had raised the subject of money at all. Within weeks of Duane’s death, rumors circulated that Donna was going to sue the band for money. Nothing could have been less true. She had met with the lawyer who had handled her divorce while she was in Macon, and he had advised her to file an action against the trucking company on my behalf, and she did. He also told her that since I was Duane’s only heir, she had the right to take any of his possessions she thought I should have. The lawyer said that all of Duane’s possessions would be seized and put into storage. They would go through probate and it could take years to sort out. Dixie had left town, and no one else had a key to the house they shared. Donna’s lawyer drove her over and when they could not find another way in, he broke a pane of glass in the back door.

  It was a terrible feeling to be inside the home Duane shared with another woman. It felt wrong to look at their things and try to choose what to take. The only things that seemed familiar to her were his shirts and two guitars, and that is what she left with. Her lawyer suggested she take his car, and she said, “Are you sure?” He said it was fine.

  A week or so after she left, her lawyer called her and said the probate judge needed her to bring back Duane’s car, so she did.

  Donna went to the Big House and left the folded pile of shirts on Berry and Linda’s bed, except for the silk shirt Eric Clapton gave Duane; she took that one to Gregg.

  When she returned to St. Louis, Donna gave his 1959 cherry-burst Les Paul to Joey Marshall, the friend who first introduced her to Duane. She asked him to return it to me when I turned twenty-one, and he agreed. She kept his 1959 Gibson 335 sunburst until several years later, when Tommy Talton mentioned that he did not have a guitar and she loaned it to him. Later, it was stolen from him while he was out on the road, totally breaking his heart.

  The next time
she heard from her lawyer, he reported that Dixie had filed her own claim against the trucking company, as Duane’s common-law wife. She was asking for $2 million. But Joanie overheard Dixie talking to a friend on the telephone, saying she was still married to someone else. Joanie told Donna, and Dixie’s claim was withdrawn. In the end, the company paid $16,000 in damages to Duane’s estate, and the lawyer kept $8,000. Mom put the money in the bank and couldn’t bring herself to use it for years.

  The Brothers were scheduled to play Carnegie Hall on November 25, 1971, less than a month after Duane’s death, and just five days after what would have been his twenty-fifth birthday. It was one of Duane’s dreams to play there with his band, and it was devastating to everyone to contemplate playing without him. The only thing worse would be not playing at all. They knew they had come too far to let their band die with Duane. He would be the first to demand that they continue. In the end, it wasn’t a choice. They had to play to survive the pain.

  They brought Duane’s treasured Les Paul guitar with them and rested it on a stand beside Gregg onstage. They brought friends and family with them to New York for the concert. It was a solemn show at first, the band looking at one another uncertainly. Eventually, they settled into the songs they knew so well, relaxing and opening up as the night went on. The audience was with them, their hearts aching.

  There were other plans in the works that Duane had looked forward to eagerly.

  Claude Nobs, who was then the assistant director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, had extended an invitation to him, via Frank Fenter at Capricorn. His letter read in part: