The idea is to have an evening devoted entirely to blues, bringing together such bluesmen as Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Freddy Below, the Myers Brothers, Hubert Sumlin, Memphis Slim and singer Koko Taylor, together with English musicians like Peter Green, John Paul Jones and Mick Taylor.
I know you can help a lot. This project would, in addition, give the name of Allman a lot of publicity before the group itself comes to Europe this summer.
The world was on the cusp of opening up for the band on a huge scale. There was still the matter of completing their third album, and they returned to Criteria. They rose to the occasion in a remarkable way. Dickey wrote a beautiful new instrumental piece called “Les Brers in A Minor” and Gregg wrote “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More.” Both songs were rallying cries and tributes, representing their commitment to walking forward together. They also revisited “Melissa,” the lovely song Duane and Gregg had brought to Butch’s previous band, the 31st of February, and the lyrics and melancholy tone of the song seemed to take on new meaning now.
Crossroads, will you ever let him go?
Will you hide the dead man’s ghost,
Or will he lie, beneath the clay,
Or will his spirit roll away?
The album was rounded out by the best remaining tracks from their concerts at the Fillmore East and dedicated to Brother Duane. Butch suggested it be titled Eat a Peach when he saw the artwork Phil had found of a peach truck taken from an old postcard. It was based on a brilliant, smart-ass quip Duane made to a reporter who asked him how he did his part for the revolution. He answered, “There is no revolution, it’s evolution … but whenever I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace … the two-legged Georgia variety.”
Twiggs was finally released from the mental hospital in December 1971. He immediately joined the Brothers down in Miami while they finished Eat a Peach. He became the keyboard roadie and ran the roost. There were problems to help solve; that’s what he lived for. He slipped right back into it, in a less pressured role.
The last time I saw Twiggs, I was maybe five years old, visiting Macon with my mother. I have a clear memory of being held on my mother’s hip, eye to eye with Twiggs. His eyes were very blue and happy. I loved him right away. He very quietly pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt to reveal a tattoo on his shoulder.
“That’s my daddy,” I said.
“That’s right! I love him very much, and he loved you,” he said, and kissed my head.
Twiggs died in 1979 parachuting out of a plane over a New York State town called Duanesburg. Twiggs was a skillful and experienced skydiver, and it isn’t known whether his chute malfunctioned or if he had decided to end his life doing something he loved. While it is almost impossible to imagine the meticulous Twiggs making a mistake with his gear, it is also hard to imagine him wanting to die at that point in his life. He was in a good place, and he was thirty-seven years old.
In the aftermath of Duane’s death, Atlantic Records dropped the Allman Brothers Band. It felt like a coldhearted decision; the company clearly had no faith in the band without Duane. The Brothers had the ultimate satisfaction when Eat a Peach became a huge success for their new label, Warner Bros. Records.
Just before the first anniversary of Duane’s death, my mother got a call from a reporter at Newsweek magazine asking why Duane had not been buried. His body was still in the common mausoleum at Rose Hill, and it was becoming clear that something needed to happen. Gregg had wanted to have a special crypt built of Italian marble and stained glass, but it was a hard thing to face doing. Donna thought she should probably go to Macon and talk to Gregg about it. Within the week, Joanie gave birth to her daughter, Rachael Zeff Callahan, so we went to visit. Michael and Joanie were just starting their relationship when Duane’s accident happened, and they grew closer, grieving together. Michael was the smartest man Joanie had ever met, and strong enough to lean on through the most tragic of events. She was only nineteen.
For me and Rachael, it was love at first sight. She was my first real baby, a living doll. Brittany and I begged to give her a bath, push her stroller, and carry her outside—Joanie said no, no, and no, but she let me hold her on my lap if I sat very still on the sofa and was gentle. Rachael gripped my finger with her tiny hand.
On that visit, Brittany and I had a big reunion. We were chasing each other around in the front yard of the Big House when Berry came home in a stranger’s car. Donna watched the driver walking up the steps, a conservatively dressed woman who looked very upset. Berry came up behind her, pale and disoriented, and went straight to bed. The woman had witnessed Berry crash his motorcycle into the side of a city bus. Kim was riding with him but couldn’t convince him to go to the hospital; Berry insisted he was fine.
Linda tried to ask him what had happened, but Berry told her not to harsh his mellow. He just wanted to sleep. When Kim arrived at the Big House several minutes later, he said they should try to get Berry to the hospital.
Berry was in a dark place after Duane’s death. Loss showed on him more than anyone. He said there were only three things he wanted: “I want to get high, I want to be high, and I want to stay high.” Heroin and alcohol had a tight grip on him.
By the time Candy and Linda finally convinced him to go to the hospital, Berry was incoherent and in terrible pain. His helmet had struck the base of his skull and although it didn’t show, he was bleeding internally. Berry died at the hospital shortly after he arrived.
The doctor assured them that they could not have saved him even if he had come in right away. His internal injuries were too grave. Still, those three wasted hours haunted everyone, especially Kim. The trauma of the accident effectively ended his love affair with Candy, loss piled upon loss. She didn’t have to say she blamed Kim for not keeping her brother safe; it was clear. All of the Brothers had been charged with protecting BO from himself, and they had failed.
When Linda came home from the hospital, she knelt down beside Brittany on the porch and wrapped her arms around her. Donna held me and watched them quietly. She knew that Linda and Beebop were on the first steps of a long, dark road, the same one we had been lost on for a year.
Linda looked over her shoulder into Donna’s eyes, and more than they could have expressed passed wordlessly between them.
The wide covered porch was the first thing that made them fall in love with this house. Living together with their lovers and their daughters was a perfect dream. Now, just three years later, it had all slipped away. They were about to relive everything they had been through: the guitar made of hundreds of carnations, the friends in shock, drugged to numb their pain, and the impossible task of facing Berry’s parents. The Oakleys were a beautiful family, close and affectionate, whip-smart and funny. Candy and Berry were best friends. Their parents adored them.
There is a strange and undeniable symmetry in the deaths of Duane and Berry. Their accidents were so similar, only three blocks and one year apart. The uncanny similarities fed superstition and legend. The southern gothic idea that the devil was at work took root in the popular imagination. Our family was living under some kind of curse and paying a price for a deal made in the dark, where the Southern crossed the Yella Dog, as the old blues songs described the crossroads.
No one who knew Berry and Duane could stand that kind of talk, and yet their fates were undeniably entwined. “When Duane died, they should have made the box they buried him in twice as wide, because Berry was gone, too,” Tuffy said.
I found a tape in Granny’s garage, a radio interview with Gregory from 1974. He told a local Daytona DJ that it wasn’t until Berry died that he realized that Duane was really gone. It was easier to imagine his brother out “sailing the seven seas,” living an adventure. When Berry was gone, there was no way to deny that they were living in a terrible and devouring darkness, and each of the Brothers wondered if death might come for them next.
Berry Oakley deserves to be honored and mourned in his own right, separate from his lost bandmate. Like
the elaborate and powerful melodies he conjured on bass, layered beneath the wild twin guitars, he is too often obscured. He was a unique and remarkable man with his own journey, his own family, and his own life. Duane’s loss hurt Berry in terrible ways, and he hurt himself while mourning his brother. He felt pressure to step into the void, to be a leader and be strong. Everyone hoped time would heal him.
Within a few short weeks of Berry’s death, the band began discussing who they could find to play bass with them. They had just asked a talented young piano player named Chuck Leavell to join the Brothers, rather than filling Duane’s spot with another guitar player, but they needed a bass player to anchor them. They never discussed quitting. Jaimoe suggested Lamar Williams, one of his closest friends from Mississippi, who was recently home from Vietnam. Lamar started right away, a calm and anchoring presence.
“Ramblin’ Man,” the song that would bring the band its most wide-reaching fame, was recorded just before Berry passed.
Another startling event was entangled with the sadness of Berry’s loss: He was leaving behind another child. His secret girlfriend from California was pregnant. His son, Berry Duane Oakley, was born in March 1973.
Linda, Candy, and Donna sat together in the music room at the Big House and talked about what kind of graves Berry and Duane should have. While they shared ideas, Linda sketched. It was a strangely familiar feeling, being together in the house and being creative, a dark mirroring of their carefree afternoons making art. When they were happy with the plans, they went to Gregg’s apartment to show him. Donna was nervous to broach the subject with him, but he was very cool about it, relaxed and easy. Duane’s headstone would be engraved with a small phoenix, his name and dates wrapped in the musical notations of “Little Martha.” His Les Paul would be carved across the length of the crypt, with his diary entry from New Year’s Day, 1969, inscribed beneath it:
This year I will be more thoughtful of my fellow man, exert more effort in each of my endeavors professionally as well as personally, take love wherever I find it, and offer it to everyone who will take it. In this coming year I will seek knowledge from those wiser than me and try to teach those who wish to learn from me. I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can—
For Berry, Linda and Candy chose a scarab and a Hindu proverb, “Help thy brother’s boat across, and Lo! Thine own has reached the shore,” and a carving of his bass. Duane and Berry share a beautiful spot in beloved Rose Hill, under tall trees overlooking the train tracks and the Ocmulgee River. It became a place that fans visited by the thousands over the years, a blessing and a curse, as the graves were vandalized and laid upon. Candy took up the fight to restrict the site for private family use, and spent many years on patrol, cleaning chalk and ink from the stones, gathering guitar picks and glass slides left beside them, along with empty beer cans and partially smoked joints. It made her so unhappy, we all finally agreed to fence them in.
Back in St. Louis, after our long stay in Macon, Donna sat on the edge of the tub and ran a soapy washcloth over my back. We were finally settled back into our quiet life. Cat Stevens’s “Moon-shadow” was playing in the next room, and she was smoking a joint. As she held the roach up to her lips, the glowing cherry tip fell onto the cold tile floor.
I looked at her and said, “Maybe it won’t ever go out.” Donna thought I had learned that everything dies and I was trying to find an exception to the rule. We had all lost our innocence; even those of us too young to understand could feel the weight of the pain all around us, narrowing our own futures and making them finite. Death was inevitable and no one can choose when or how it comes. I swear I can tell on sight who has learned this lesson and who hasn’t; the knowledge shows in our eyes.
When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hangs over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long.
In 1974, Donna was twenty-three years old, a mother and a widow. She didn’t take time to mourn, she just kept moving. Her lawyer in Macon had tried to inspire her with all the possibilities life could offer: greener pastures, a broader horizon, a larger world waiting for her. None of it came into focus until he mentioned traveling to Europe. The seed of the idea had stayed with her and taken root.
The day we left St. Louis, Donna wore an outfit she had carefully chosen for the occasion. It seemed important to look like the woman she wanted to be. She wore a forest-green felt hat with a wide floppy brim, snakeskin pumps, and a vintage dress from the 1940s. She was so thin you could see her hip bones clearly through the fabric. She carried a sweater with a plush fox fur collar that had belonged to her grandmother, Zeff. Tommie Jean gave her an art deco ring with a tiny emerald set in the center of two silver waves speckled with diamonds. She presented the ring to Donna in a quiet moment over dinner the night before we left, and told her daughter she was living the kind of adventurous life she herself had always dreamed of. Donna was surprised by how supportive her mother was of her plan, which wasn’t much of a plan at all, just a place: Paris.
In the airport, I was trailing slightly behind my mom, tugging on my droopy purple tights and occasionally dropping my bulky princess coat with the fur collar and cuffs. Before long I was whining loudly, begging to be carried. I was five, and far too tall to be toted, but my mom hiked me up on her hip and gave a little groan every time my feet in their dirty white Buster Browns hit her in the thigh as she walked.
Once in Paris, we stayed in a pension de famille, or boarding house, on the rue d’Alsace, across the street from the Jardin du Luxembourg, where my mom took me to puppet shows and carousel rides. She wrote letters to Linda Oakley about taking French classes and walking through museums. Linda wanted to come and join us.
It rained almost every day that autumn. At first it was very beautiful and romantic, the darkened cobblestones, the rippling surface of the Seine, but Donna was starving for sunshine on her skin. We hit the road with a touring band called Gong, in hopes of seeing a little of the countryside. Giorgio Gomelsky, the esteemed rock promoter, was one of Donna’s contacts in Paris, and he had arranged for her to travel with the band, thinking it would be fun for us to be out with people. When the grim weather did not subside, Donna told Linda plans were changing. “Meet me in Casablanca!” she wrote, and Linda and Brittany did just that.
We traveled all over Morocco together in the White Elephant, a Volkswagen van. We stayed in North Africa for ten months, until Brittany and I had to start first grade. Our mothers were fearless, driving through the desert, listening to Om Kalsoum on a tape deck, smoking hash, taking pictures, and shopping in the Medinas. They found they only needed one crucial phrase to explain their situation, to answer the only question everyone asked, “Where is your husband?” They learned to say, “Mon mari est mort.”
· · ·
I am back in Daytona now, driving Granny’s bright red Cadillac over the Silver Beach drawbridge. The V-8 engine has a badass growl that I will miss when I return to my silent Volvo. I’m headed toward the ocean.
Small wooden houses sit half eaten by the wet salty air and it feels like home to me, like Jacksonville in the seventies. The air and the light here are gentle and infused with the sea. I imagine my father as a teen looking at the blue-green water, the Intracoastal Waterway flowing below the curving concrete bridge; he’s riding his first motorcycle, buzzing up over the water until he can see the ocean ahead of him.
I park the car in Granny’s garage and notice the cool, dusty smell of it. In the corner is the Radio Flyer wagon Granny had painted a sparkly blue at my whim. I walk through into the kitchen and watch Granny quietly crocheting in her chair before she notices me standi
ng there. She is very methodical and careful with herself now. She neatly folds and stacks her newspaper while she reads it, then recycles it as soon as she’s done. She works through two crossword puzzles a day and says she feels no need to succeed at them, just enjoys the attempt. She radiates a relaxed wisdom, telling stories punctuated by her own laughter. When I am settled in across from her on the couch, she recounts a conversation she once had with a young woman at a rock concert. Jerry was sitting alone in the crowd, waiting for Gregg to play. A girl in the row ahead of her kept turning around to stare. She finally leaned over the back of her seat and shouted in Granny’s face, “I know you’re somebody! I can tell. Who are you?”
“Of course I’m somebody,” Jerry replied. “Aren’t you?” She has told me this quip many times and it always makes both of us laugh.
She says she doesn’t worry about anything now. Sure, she has her concerns, but she knows how destructive it is to “chew on a thing.” She makes it seem like a simple choice, and what else would it be? She says she can’t change “a feather of it.” I never want to forget the way she talks. I try to pay close attention to her rhythms and her sayings, and I take notes before I go to bed. We fall into easy silence. I mimic her stillness until it becomes my own. I link my breaths to hers, steadily in and out, and I am calmed. I find a spaciousness within myself, a peaceful kingdom to dwell within, like meditating. So many things she casually expresses to me feel like life lessons, sought by all, taught by Buddhists and therapists. She naturally knows how to live in the moment. She appreciates sitting and breathing and being. The loud blast of air from the air conditioner mutes her high voice. She looks good, fit and strong. I can’t believe she is ninety-five years old. She is so sweet to me. Holding her, saying good night, I feel connected to her. I always have been. I am so glad we have a week to spend together.
A little bronze statue that Ellen Hopkins, Duane’s friend from Jacksonville, made of my father stands under a glass bell on the top of Granny’s bookshelf. In the shape of him, the curve of his back, his hands in his pocket, the slight tilt of his head, you can see that Ellen loved him and memorized him. The statue looks like a smaller version of the Three Musketeers sculptures hanging just above him, the figures I have been looking at all my life and he looked at all of his. I don’t know if Duane ever found this kind of simple peace. I don’t know if he was ever satisfied or knew what he was worth to us, and to everyone who ever listened to him play. I will always wonder what age and experience would have brought him, and what the songs played into his old age would have sounded like. Most of all, I wonder what kind of a father he would have been.
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 35
