One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band Page 15

  PERKINS: He was self-taught in business, as in everything else, and he learned quickly. I remember him coming back from the Layla sessions, walking into Phil’s office and spreading fifteen hundred-dollar bills across the desk and saying, “Look what I got.” I believe they had paid him union day rates and given him the fifteen hundred as a bonus. He was very proud of that, but Phil said, “That’s great, but you should have gotten a lot more than that,” and he worked it out for him to get royalties.

  HAMMOND: We were both excited to work together again soon, but he had to get home, and I had a gig in Newfoundland, so I left and he left and we said we’d talk about this project soon.

  PODELL: I was on a call when my secretary buzzed in and said, “Jonny, it’s Duane Allman on line one.” I ignored it, because Duane never called me like Gregg, Dickey, and Butch would. Five minutes later she called back, saying, “It’s Duane Allman again, Jonny,” and I ignored it again, thinking it’s one of my friends, who used to call and say he was Elvis. She buzzed me again five minutes later and said, “Please pick up. It’s Duane Allman again.”

  So I pick up, annoyed, and go, “Who is this?”

  And there’s that unmistakable voice: “It’s Duane Allman, motherfucker! I pay your rent.”

  My voice went up about ten notches in nervousness: “Duane, when did you get out?”

  And he goes, “You know that friend of yours—does she have any downs?” He meant barbiturates, and I said, “No, she doesn’t do that.”

  He had literally gotten out of rehab that day! I heard desperation in his voice, a desperation I would come to know all too well in future years. I was so sad and disappointed by that call, and my heart beats fast even talking about it forty-some years later.

  PERKINS: I thought he was clear as a bell. He was clean from the heroin. He was doing lots of coke, like everyone else in the music business. But that really wasn’t considered a problem at the time. My last recollection of talking to Duane is he was upbeat, positive, and ready to go. Things were just getting rolling.

  MCEUEN: I thought Duane had really cleaned up. I ran into him at the Atlanta airport that fall, and he said, “John McEuen, it’s sure good to see you.” He was just Mr. Nice Guy and seemed very upbeat and positive; it was like running into someone you knew from high school. He said, “I see you have your banjo there. Take it out and play a tune.” I said, “Duane, we’re in the airport,” and he said, “Anyone in Georgia who doesn’t want to hear a banjo doesn’t belong in Georgia. Come on—take it out.” So I sat there and played it for him for about ten minutes and he gave me an Allman Brothers T-shirt and we said good-bye.

  After one day in New York, Allman joined the rest of the band in Macon, returning on the evening of October 28.

  RED DOG: Duane visited me the night he got back to town, partly because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right. He sat on my couch in my apartment, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, “You haven’t done any, have you?” and I said, “No, man.”

  And I fired right back on him: “Hey, have you?”

  And he said, “Me neither. I ain’t looking back. Ain’t no more beans for us. We’re on our way now.” He looked me right in the eye and said, “This is a religion.” He was aware of the spirit, though I don’t recall ever directly talking about religion with him.

  LINDA OAKLEY: Duane was so happy and full of positive energy. He was always like that unless he was just totally wasted. He was the leader, the great soul, and he kept saying, “We are on a mission and it’s time for this thing to happen.” He was moving forward, and that energized everyone else. Everyone fed off of that.

  RED DOG: Everyone in the band felt it. It was coming after all those years of grinding. The band might have had instant stardom, but I wouldn’t have traded nothing for the grinding it out, because we built something together.

  On October 29, 1971, the day after returning to Macon, Duane called Doucette at his Florida home to check in on his old friend.

  DOUCETTE: He sounded great. He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice that shouted, “It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!”

  He goes, “You doing all right?” and I said, “Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.” He said, “I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing and then we’re going back to work.” I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.

  LINDA OAKLEY: It was my birthday. Berry and Brittany and I were outside carving jack-o’-lanterns when Duane and Dixie brought me this huge bouquet of flowers, and we were all so happy. All of our dreams seemed to be coming true. Fillmore was going to be their opus and they were about to become stars and all of our struggles would be done.

  After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle. He had also cut the helmet strap so the protective headgear could not be secured. Dixie Meadows and Candace Oakley trailed him in a car.

  Duane Allman, 1946–1971.

  Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Allman saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. Duane pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him. Duane was alive and initially seemed OK, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. He died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.” It was two days shy of a year since Oakley prayed for Duane to recover from his OD in a Nashville hospital, begging God for one more year.

  He was twenty-four.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

  AS WORD OF Duane’s accident began to circulate around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the Medical Center.

  SANDLIN: I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital. I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.

  I got there and everyone was standing around in the area where the emergency ambulances came in and I could sense the gravity of the situation. Then someone came out and told us he was dead. I went numb and don’t remember anything else that day.

  PAYNE: Earlier that day, I was heading up to Atlanta to pick up my bike at a custom shop and I stopped by Duane’s new little house where he was living with Dixie to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything for his bike. He yelled at us for waking him up and we took off. When we got back, everyone was at the hospital. When I found out he had died, I got pissed off, just angry at the world, at God. I was exploding with rage and I jumped on my bike, gunned it, and went straight up in the air and flipped over.

  PODELL: I always felt he was a tough Southern motherfucker who wasn’t scared of nothing and he had met his match. He wanted to stop but couldn’t. He had met the devil and he knew the devil was stronger. It was a process of coming to grips: “I can’t live with something being bigger than me.” He had met his match and it was called heroin.

  PERKINS: They had sent me off on a band-paid vacation to the Bahamas. I checked in and before I even went to dinner I got a phone call from Bunky Odom that Duane had an accident and then another call that he was dead and I started making plans to get back.

  HAMMOND: I got a call in the middle of the night saying Duane had died and it was just unbelievable … literally something that could not be believed or grasped.

  TRUCKS: It was just unacceptable that he was gone. Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.

  ODOM: It was a complete shock. Phil was in Bimini and Willie was in the Bahamas. Carolyn Brown, Phil’s as
sistant, got ahold of Phil and I called Willie Perkins and Geraldine [Allman, Gregg and Duane’s mother] just to let them know that Duane had been in an accident and things did not look good and that I would get back to them as soon as I knew something. And then I had to make the next calls—the horrible ones—to Willie and Geraldine. I made those calls from the emergency room pay telephone, not from the office. I had to rise to the occasion. I had no choice.

  DR. JOHN: When a guy like that is suddenly gone it’s impossible to comprehend. I played at Duane’s funeral and it was gut-wrenching.

  LANDAU: Rolling Stone sent me down to cover the funeral and I flew on a private plane with Jerry Wexler, who delivered the eulogy, and Dr. John. It was all very somber.

  SANDLIN: It’s like everyone in the music business was there in this relatively small funeral home. The Brothers were set up and Duane’s guitar was there on a stand with an empty seat. They played some songs with very serious faces but … man, it was tough. I just had my head in my hands.

  RED DOG: I put a joint in Duane’s pocket and Gregg put a silver dollar in there with him. I think someone put a Coricidian bottle in as well.

  DR. JOHN: Years later, when I met Stevie [Ray Vaughan], one of the first things I thought was that he reminded me of Duane. They were both eccentric as hell and had the same kind of musical concepts—rooted in the past but totally open to the future. And they both came out of the old school, and took it deep, but were totally open to whatever came by. Today, guys are specialists, like doctors, but these guys weren’t in that mode. They were totally into all music and it always came first—in a serious way—no matter what kind of drugging and drinking they were into.

  WYNANS: Stevie and Duane were both incredible and I feel blessed to have been able to play with either, let alone both. They were both very dedicated to the music, deeply rooted but looking forward, not back. Stevie was probably more well-rounded in the blues but Duane would take more chances. You never knew where he was going to go and he just loved to jam. He was such a force and presence.

  MAMA LOUISE: Duane was so nice. Everyone came in here at twelve or one to eat and he’d come back at three or four almost every day just to talk about life. He was so serious, just very serious about life. You’d forget how young he was when you talked to that guy. It really hurted me when he passed. It left a big hole in me.

  ALLMAN: We didn’t enjoy [our breakthrough with] Fillmore for long. A lot of the initial impact of the joy was absent because of the heavy tragedy that happened to my brother. We worked so hard, so long to get there, then, bam, he was gone. Right in the middle of a hell of a tragedy, the record went big, big, big.

  The band was reeling, even as At Fillmore East climbed into the top 20 of the album charts.

  LINDA OAKLEY: We were all in shock. It was like our guts had been torn out. When you grieve, you come together. There was so much love and support from so many people as we all grappled with and tried to overcome the loss of Duane. The guys needed to be together.

  BETTS: We thought about breaking up and all forming our own bands. But the thought of just ending it and being alone was too depressing.

  SANDLIN: You knew they would continue. They didn’t know how to do anything else—none of us did. There’s no stopping.

  HAMPTON: They couldn’t stop. The train was moving. No one was going to try and jump off.

  LINDA OAKLEY: Duane was gone, but his spirit was so very much there. We all loved him so much.

  TRUCKS: One of the last things Duane recorded, just before the Eat a Peach sessions, was Cowboy’s “Please Be with Me” with Scott Boyer and Tommy Talton. A few weeks after he died, when I still hadn’t really let loose or accepted it, I put on “Please Be with Me” and the dam burst and I started crying and crying, just racked with grief. I was sitting there listening to the song over and over and crying. To this day I can’t hear it without getting choked up.

  PAYNE: Me and B.O. would sit up in the music room at the Big House listening to Duane playing on Layla and cry like little girls. We played that album over and over, until the vinyl was almost see-through. And we just cried.

  BOYER: Every musician in Macon was pretty down, just stunned. We couldn’t believe Duane was gone. The guy was always friendly and he was such an incredible presence. He had so much energy that he just made things happen. He was always kicking everyone in the butt. It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead. He was a central figure for all of us, and, of course, he was the central figure for Gregg, who depended on Duane for a lot of things.

  PAYNE: Duane was more of a father figure to Gregg. He was the only male in the house that Gregg had to look to for guidance and, given the strength of Duane’s personality, that worked fine.

  ALLMAN: He only and always called me “baby brah.” Had we lived ’til he was ninety-one and I was ninety, I still would have been “baby brah.”

  PERKINS: It was big brother/little brother, but also father/son, and that was pretty clear to everyone who spent any real time with them. I never saw any conflict between Gregg and Duane last long.

  BOYER: Duane was only a little more than a year older than Gregg but he was almost like a father. They were extremely close. Gregg was extremely tore up, which is only natural.

  RED DOG: Gregg couldn’t have loved Duane any more than I did—and that’s not saying anything bad about Gregg or his feelings about his brother at all. It’s just that we all loved him that much, and the whole band was like a family. Anyone’s death would have been devastating.

  LINDA OAKLEY: Berry’s heart was so broken. There was just an empty spot, a chasm.

  DOUCETTE: I was in complete shock, just dead. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to play again.

  HAMMOND: Duane was the force of that band. It was his philosophy, his concept that formed it and allowed it to progress. He set a standard for them that they lived up to.

  PAYNE: The band had a meeting about continuing and it was clear they wanted to do so, but everyone was concerned about how. It was kind of a leaderless operation there for quite some time. The natural progression of things should have been that Gregg would take over as a leader, but that’s not who he is. Dickey’s personality and ego were pretty powerful, so he sort of took over, but in a different way.

  DOUCETTE: I walked into the first rehearsal after Duane died and Berry and I shared a look of understanding: What was is over. It’s gone. It very easily could have ended right there, but Betts pulled it out of the fire. A lot of people do not understand how really smart and connected Dickey is, because of his demons, which can take over.

  The whole situation was just too weird. The reason I was there was Duane. I was his guy and he was mine. I loved everyone in the band like brothers, but there was some sorting out to be done and I didn’t want to get in the middle of the Gregg/Dickey thing, which I saw developing.

  Duane was not buried, remaining in cold storage at the mortuary. Duane had no will and was separated from Donna Allman, the mother of his heir, his daughter, Galadrielle, then just two years old. Duane was living with his girlfriend, Dixie Meadows, who signed his death certificate as “Mrs. D. Allman.” The papers authorizing the release of Allman’s body from the hospital morgue listed his final resting place as Riverside Cemetery. Gregg struggled to deal with the situation and make a decision.

  PERKINS: The concept of common-law wife in Georgia was a bit legally vague and complicated and there were legal questions about who had the authority to make decisions for Duane’s estate. In the meantime, his body remained at the funeral home. It got pretty embarrassing and there was a lot of discussion within the band, wondering what was going on. Nobody outside really seemed to notice.

  LINDA OAKLEY: There was a lot of confusion initially about who Duane’s wife was, but it was up to Gregg to decide about the burial. As I recall, his mother left it up to him and he told her he would take care of it, but he just couldn’t deal with it. It was simply too much for him.

  JAIMOE: If you’re with a wo
man and she’s living with you, then it is considered common-law wife and husband, whether you ever married or not. You don’t have to go before God and ask for permission. The fact is, the only time I knew Duane to be married was with his first and only wife, whom I never met.

  When Duane and I were living in that cabin in Alabama, one morning at seven some guy knocked on the door. I was sitting up writing letters to my grandfather or something and Duane came to the door in a pair of jeans, no shoes or shirt, and answers: “Can I help you?” And here’s this guy in a suit saying he’s selling insurance and Duane said, “Motherfucker, do you know what time it is?” He told him to get the fuck out of there and the guy left. Duane was all worked up and couldn’t go back to sleep so he sat down with me and said, “You know what? You see that guy? I used to be like that. When I was seventeen I used to wear a suit with a skinny Beatles tie and go around selling stuff and I had a wife. I had a wife and a job and I tried that.”

  He never was divorced from that woman in terms of how society sees things. Then he was with Donna and fathered Galadrielle right in that cabin we were sitting in, and then he took it up with Dixie and she became his girlfriend, but I never heard him call either of them his wife.

  Duane’s legal wife, whom he married in Jacksonville, was named Patty Chandlee. They had a daughter together, who is deaf, and who has a child, Duane’s grandson.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Ain’t Wasting Time No More

  THE BAND TOOK a short hiatus before regrouping, gravitating back to one another and immersion in their work. They committed to fulfilling previously scheduled dates in New York. Their first appearance without their leader was at C. W. Post College in Long Island on November 22, 1971; it was exactly three weeks after Duane’s funeral.

  PERKINS: Everybody was ready to go back on the road, because we couldn’t bear to sit around anymore. We got back out there so fast because I think everyone worried that if we didn’t, we might never get back.