Macon is beautiful in the spring, white magnolia blossoms hanging heavily in the trees, fallen pink cherry petals swirling on the cobblestone streets, and new grass growing in so green it hurts to look right at it. The Ocmulgee River and the train tracks run side by side, the twin means for carrying King Cotton to market back in the day. Together they mark the far edge of Rose Hill Cemetery, a magnificent rambling city of the dead where marble stones rest in the shade of grand old trees.
Duane and Dickey walked to Rose Hill together with their acoustic guitars and sat in the shade of a tall elm within sight of the river. They smoked a joint and started to play, rambling country blues that wandered between them like a trail. Once their high and their song had faded a little, they lit cigarettes and started to talk. Duane knew that he and Dickey had to support each other, actively. They would have to protect each other. He’d say, “When I listen to you play, I have to try hard to keep the jealousy thing at bay and not try to outdo you when I play my solo. But I still want to play my best!”
“That’s a thin line,” Dickey said in agreement.
They were equals, both powerful lead guitar players in their own right, and the music would come off only if they both blazed as brightly as they could. Competition was inevitable and it wasn’t a bad thing, it would help them both get stronger, but resentments could never grow. Duane loved the way Dickey got sounds out of his guitar that Duane could never replicate, and he told him so. Dickey said he felt the same way about Duane’s playing. They raised the bar for each other. They vowed to keep talking as things arose, if either of them felt the need to.
Duane was bound to get the lion’s share of the press attention. His session work was being steadily released and would continue. Some songs were even charting. He was becoming known, and while he was at ease representing the band in interviews if need be, he would not allow them to be divided. If the focus stayed on making one another better and pushing forward as one, they could really grow.
When Duane came back home from Rose Hill, he told Donna that they all had to protect one another, no backbiting or gossip. They were a family and that was a serious and profound responsibility. No one could be left out or left behind. If she saw anyone struggling, she was to help them out. He was such a beautiful man, she thought. She promised she would be the best friend she could be to everyone.
The Allman Brothers! Appearing at the College Discotheque, featuring Duane Allman on guitar! Nicknamed Skyman by Wilson Pickett after his fantastic guitar work on Hey Jude! It’s an experimental blues-rock music feast that your mind won’t believe. Skyman will be playing slide guitar using the neck from a wine bottle! That’s tonight at the College Discotheque on Mulberry Street above Guy White TV and Radio. 8pm until midnight. Don’t miss it! Heads welcome.
The promo was rolling out on the radio for the Allman Brothers Band’s first advertised show on May 4, 1969, while they were busy recording their first demo at Capricorn Studios. (Phil Walden had renamed Redwall Studios after his and Jerry Wexler’s shared astrological sign, Capricorn. With Jerry’s support, the studio had undergone a major renovation at Atlantic’s expense.) They cut four songs: “Don’t Want You No More,” “It’s Not My Cross to Bear,” “Trouble No More,” and “Dreams.” The demos are tight and clean, composed and fluid. It astounds me how complete they sound, and how quickly the band found its voice.
A rough tape of the show at the Central City Park in Macon, recorded just a few days later, blazes with life. The funky swagger of the demos is amped up to a nearly frightening pitch. It is instantly clear that playing live was the thing that would set them apart.
In the roughly six weeks since their first jam session in Jacksonville, the Allman Brothers created the body of work that appeared on their first album as well as other songs that wouldn’t emerge until later, like “Mountain Jam” and “Melissa.” The speed at which they worked and the quality of the music they made seem almost impossible.
The challenge would be to re-create the fire they found onstage in a soundproof room with a tape rolling when they set out to record their first album at the end of the summer at Atlantic Studios in New York City.
Duane’s joy was evident; he had finally found four men to join him and Gregg in their lifelong musical conversation. Each player was so seasoned, they could read one another and follow one another anywhere. Duane could ride the groove he built. He could rest his weight on a melody drawn out and explored, and picking up speed, he cruised toward the horizon line with the pedal pressing ever downward. Dickey would fall in beside him and Berry would ground them with a counter-melody, heavy and hard driving. They would move together at the same clip, running hot and swerving wildly into one another’s lanes, passing leads hand to hand while switching positions in the pack. The drummers rumbled fiercely behind them with all the building propulsion of a charging train—get on or get out of the way. Gregg’s voice would break through in a ragged cry, while he played an eerie humming organ that wound its way through the fray. The band tapped into a higher mind, their songs sensate and immersive.
Now that the band was in place, the wider circle around them started to form: a road crew, a management team, the powerful businessmen at Atlantic Records, and a legendary recording engineer. The power of the music inspired all of them, and Duane’s profound belief in his band made them confident that they would all succeed together.
Twiggs Lyndon made good on his promise to stay close to the brilliant guitar player he had met at FAME and became the band’s first road manager. He arranged everything the band needed to tour. He wrangled everyone; collected the money, booked hotel rooms, arranged meals, and rented gear. Every logistical consideration fell on him. It was an immense job.
Duane met Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell at a be-in in Jacksonville behind the Forest Inn. It was such a life-changing moment for Red Dog that he even remembered every detail of what he wore, from the strand of wooden beads a girl had made for him, down to the brown moccasins on his feet. His dense orange curls wandered down his neck, escaping the black hat he wore low over his intense eyes. He sidled up to Jaimoe after the band played and introduced himself. He told him he wanted to meet Duane, and Jaimoe said, “Just go talk to him.” In his gruff drawl, Red Dog told Duane he recognized the sound of his slide playing from a favorite Aretha Franklin song, “Is that you on ‘The Weight’?”
“Yeah, man! That’s me all right! I loved doing that cut, and I’m so glad you like it. Hey, you know where I could get a joint?” Duane asked.
Red Dog turned a sly eye on Duane. “You have come to the right place!”
He strutted off to the side of the crowd with a huge smile.
Red Dog was enrolled in Florida Junior College, hoping that after a couple of years he could transfer to law school. He was doing pretty well, but he was getting deep into codeine cough syrup and smoking dope. He was a true hustler, selling dime bags on the side from a newsstand where he worked when he wasn’t in class. The newsstand was next to a go-go bar, and he also had a financial arrangement with some of those sweet girls who wanted a little work on the side. He’d arrange a date or two for them to make ends meet, but that’s a whole other story. He was recently back from his second tour of Vietnam, by way of the Panama Canal. He told Duane that if he had never smoked Panama Red, well then, he ain’t never smoked. He also tried to explain how it felt to hear him play. The sound of Duane’s guitar really spoke to him. He felt it coursing through him like an electrical charge. He had never experienced anything like it before. He didn’t even pay that much attention to music most of the time. Duane turned a real smile on him and thanked him for the kind words. They went down to the basement of the inn. They found a couple of crates to perch on and shared two joints.
“They call you Red Dog? They call me Skydog!”
“No shit?”
“I did this session with Wilson Pickett and he started calling me Sky Man, and they called me the Dog before that, so it came together.”
“What, cuz you was so high?”
“Nah, man. Cuz I played so high and pretty with my gi-tar!”
They laughed until their eyes started to water, passing the joint between them.
Red Dog and Duane got deep real quick. Red Dog wiped his eyes and started to tell Duane he was overcoming some serious shit, walking around with dark memories. He didn’t usually tell anybody about the war, but this guy was the real deal. “You run, you die. I don’t care if you are my brother. You put a hole in my line, and I’m puttin’ a hole in your ass. There is a code.”
Duane understood. Red Dog was all about loyalty and he had seen real shit.
“Hey, are you looking for work?” Duane asked. Duane told him his deal was with Phil Walden, the same dude who managed Otis Redding, who owned a recording studio in Macon, Georgia. He was financing Duane’s new band, and they were going to hit the road hard and soon. He was going to need a road crew. If Red Dog was interested in a gig, he could set up the drums and generally do what needed doing. He could also drive and help haul the gear around.
Red Dog never really went home again. He could feel the beginnings of a brotherhood forming with a pure mission. Together, they would take the music to the people.
It took a year and a half before Jaimoe would let Red Dog do more than take his drums out of their cases and set them carefully on the ground, but Red Dog made himself indispensable to everyone with his personality alone. He had the biggest heart, a miraculous gift of gab, and amazing dope.
Donna heard a knock on the door at College Street and opened it on a handsome man with the pale blue eyes of a husky and the wild curls of a cherub. He was completely covered in dust and had dark circles under his eyes, but his smile was very sweet.
“Hey, I’m Kim. Is Gregg here?”
Kim Payne and Gregg had hit it off right away when they met in Los Angeles at the end of 1968. They were introduced by the singer of the band Kim roadied for, the Rockin’ Gibraltars. Kim was from Montgomery, Alabama, and had the loose-limbed gait of a man used to straddling a motorcycle. His voice was the sound of home to Gregg, that soothing southern sound girls out west couldn’t resist. They became running mates immediately, and they were never alone for long. Gregg knew lots of girls, and some of them were willing to put up Kim and his friends for weeks at a time. But Kim said, “You can only puke on someone’s rug so many times before you’re not welcome.”
Like soaring birds suddenly slicked up with grease from a polluted sea, it wasn’t easy to stay free in that dirty town. In a blink you’d go from riding high to having nothing. They’d run out of money, and Gregg would sell a song for a couple hundred bucks, and they’d keep partying for a month or more, drinking Red Mountain Wine, which had no mention of grapes on its label and cost $1.49 for a gallon. That and a handful of the ’nal sisters—Tuinal and Seconal—and they’d have a nice buzz. Mornings were rough, especially when you weren’t sure where you’d sleep that night.
They were both getting burned-out and down to no money when Duane called.
Kim asked Gregg with a little smile, “You ain’t gonna give all this up, are you?” Gregg said he wasn’t sure he was ready to go back to being in a band with his bro, but in the end he couldn’t resist.
Kim drove Gregg to the airport in a borrowed car dragging its front bumper, and when they said goodbye, Gregg told him that he would send for him as soon as his band was up and running. Kim was sure he’d never see Gregg again, but a couple of weeks later, Gregg called him and told him to head to Macon, Georgia, if he wanted a gig as a roadie. Kim told him he’d need gas money, and Gregg wired him fifty dollars.
“Well, that was more money than I’d seen, almost ever,” Kim said later, “so I went out and busted up my head and my bike. I had to replace my clutch lever and my brake pedal. I had thirty-seven dollars and eighty cents to make it three thousand miles.”
Just outside the city, Kim got pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer for riding someone’s bumper. Kim had paid a visit to a gal he knew to get some provisions for the road. She was a nurse and had given him some “diet pills.” He was in a hurry. The cop asked him where he was headed so fast, and Kim told him he was southbound. The cop let him go once Kim promised him he had no plans to return to California.
The first day, the ride went from eighty degrees and sunshine in Los Angeles to snow in the San Bernardino Mountains. Kim was wearing all the clothes he owned. “I had on three pairs of blue jeans with so many holes I could scratch my ass without touching thread. The warmest thing I had was a denim jacket and that was full of holes, too.” By the time he made it to Odessa, Texas, snow had eased into hours of icy rain. He had been driving for more than fifteen hours and couldn’t feel his hands. He was soaked to the bone. The only place in Odessa that wasn’t closed down was a filling station and a twelve-room motel that backed out into the silent, dark desert. He decided he didn’t care what it cost; he needed to get dry and sleep.
He told the Mexican man running the place that he wanted to roll his bike into his room for the night, but the man wouldn’t let him. He offered Kim a spot inside the work bay of the gas station, and Kim warily accepted. He took his bedroll, a wool army blanket wrapped around all of his worldly possessions, and headed to his room. He stripped off all his clothes, wet, stiff layers of denim caked with drying splatters of mud, and hung them on the gas wall heater to dry, then hit the bed.
Kim was asleep in an instant, but it didn’t last more than a couple of hours. He was shocked awake by the blast of his door being kicked in by a huge silhouette of a dude in a cowboy hat. He cocked a shotgun with an evil crack, a sound you don’t want to hear in the dark when you’re naked and alone. His son was behind him, a gangly teen ready to kick some ass. Then, at the same instant, the man and his boy both turned tail and ran. They had seen that there was just Kim in the bed. They had the wrong room. Kim decided to get back on the road, and would skip motel rooms for the rest of the trip. He was grateful to see his bike still parked where he had left it.
The drive took him four and a half days. By the time he hit Alabama, he had a quarter in his pocket and his bike was held together by baling wire (he’d crashed four or five times). He was also half crazy with the stress of trying to decide which was worse: blowing money on gas by driving without stopping and saving money on food, or blowing money on food and wasting time. He had stopped talking entirely, refusing to answer the same damn questions he was asked at gas stations every seventy-five miles when his tank needed filling.
“Where you coming from?” He’d point behind him.
“Where you headed?” He’d point ahead of him.
When Kim finally made it to Montgomery, he collapsed on his mother’s front lawn. His brother took one look at him and said, “Get a haircut and a job, and you’ll be all right.”
Kim borrowed five dollars from his mama and headed on to Macon.
The first person he saw when he pulled up to 309 College Street was Michael Callahan. Mike walked around Kim’s trashed bike a couple of times and said, “You must be Payne. Come on in.… Pretty hammered.”
Kim never knew whether Mike meant him or his bike.
He slept on one of the many mattresses for two days straight, and met Dickey, Duane, and Jaimoe, in dreamlike intervals broken by deep sleep. Mike had heard about Kim from Gregg, who had been talking him up like he could move mountains with his bare hands. For some reason, there was a lot of lobbying going on for spots on the Allman Brothers crew. Every band member had a friend or a family member they liked for the gig.
“Why everyone was clamoring for a job that paid nothing and kept you living on peanut butter and hot dogs for a year and a half, I’ll never know … but it was magical. As Linda says, we didn’t have nowhere to go but up,” Kim said.
Michael Callahan was the guy Berry wanted to bring on board. He had worked in the road crew for Tommy Roe and the Roemans, the band Berry played bass with out of high school. Callahan grew up in Tarpon Springs, a small Florida fishing town. He was a biker with a huge smile and a quick mind for solving technical problems. He was also a bit of a wild card, with the playful spirit of a kid.
Callahan became the Brothers’ front-of-house man, running the soundboard.
Together with Kim, Red Dog, and Twiggs, Callahan completed the original group of crew members who became legends in their own right, known as much for their loyalty and their work ethic as for their unchallenged ability to party harder than anyone else on the scene. They were not hippies. They were veterans and bikers, pure badass survivors looking for a new band of brothers. The crew weathered all the same severe conditions as the band without the glorious payoff of playing, and was satisfied with having a remarkable vantage point from which to watch the show.
In this lean early time, the crew was crucial to the band’s survival. While Phil Walden had invested a considerable amount of money into new equipment and vehicles for the band, he wasn’t giving them money to live on in Macon and they hadn’t started to earn by gigging. When they were on the road, everyone got a dollar a day, and you had to choose whether you wanted to eat or smoke. Phil was used to working with black artists who had small bands and operated on a shoestring budget. He hadn’t adapted his thinking to supporting ten men and their wives and kids. Everyone felt there was a real disconnect between them and Phil when money was the subject. Red Dog kicked in his disability check from the marines, Twiggs shared his modest salary from Walden, and that’s how everyone ate and stayed high.
Duane earned the lifelong loyalty of the crew in the earliest days by taking everyone to a business meeting called by Phil Walden. When Phil said he only needed to speak to Duane, Duane made it clear that these ten men were the band, and if Phil needed to talk band business, they would all be present. Duane knew that standing up to Phil and taking an active role right out of the box was crucial. And when money started coming in, Duane made sure that the crew was always paid first, even before the band. He respected how hard they worked and knew how much they’d sacrificed.
Macon was a quiet college town, mostly filled with clean-cut kids and working families, both black and white, and the eccentric personal styles the band and their friends were rocking caused quite a stir. Their hair was long and their facial hair elaborate. Their tight blue jeans were perfectly faded, thanks to an arrangement Twiggs made with the ladies who ran the laundry downtown. He asked them to throw their denims in with every load they did all day long, and he’d be back around in a couple of weeks to get them. Cowboy hats and big brass belt buckles, windbreakers covered with motorcycle patches, suede fringe jackets, and tough motorcycle boots. Walking shoulder to shoulder, they were a gang. Their old ladies, a term Donna didn’t like at all, were just as eye catching in their tiny miniskirts and long flowing hair. Pulling up to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store with Twiggs in his curvy Depression-era coupe and stepping out into the parking lot in their low-cut blouses and cutoff jeans just blew people’s minds. At one point, there was a petition to have them all removed from the College Street apartment. The Manson Family killings hit the national news in March 1969, and “hippies” suddenly seemed dangerous.
They didn’t pay much mind to the hostility around town, and it didn’t last forever. Once the band started to get a little recognition, things eased up. They also began to draw more of their friends to Macon, including three members of Hour Glass—Johnny Sandlin, Paul Hornsby, and Pete Carr, who were offered jobs as the rhythm section at Phil Walden’s studio at Duane’s suggestion. Johnny told Phil he wanted to start producing, and Phil agreed to give him a shot. Duane was so happy to have them close by.
Joe Dan Petty, a lifelong friend and former bandmate of Dickey’s, moved to Macon and came on as part of the road crew as soon as there was money to pay him. Ellen Hopkins, their friend from Jacksonville, moved to Macon, and the feeling of family deepened for everyone. They formed the boundary of one another’s world, and soon needed almost nothing from beyond that perimeter other than a crowd ready to receive the music with open ears and open hearts. As Jaimoe said, “There was no outside world.”
The Brothers were taking a lot of people on their journey: Women and children, friends and fellow musicians all had a stake in what they were doing, and that pressure rested squarely on Duane’s shoulders. He was their driving wheel, and their connection to Phil Walden. Duane wanted to push through every impediment, and if you didn’t have something positive to add, if you couldn’t see the big picture and get on board, he wanted nothing to do with you.
Sometimes, they found support in unexpected places, like at Twiggs’s favorite restaurant in Macon. The H&H was housed in a former filling station, just a few tables and a window you could walk up to from the street side, named for the proprietors, Mama Louise Hudson and Mama Inez Hill. Mama Louise passed them plates heaping with fried chicken, collards and rice with gravy, corn bread, biscuits, and black-eyed peas. One plate could hold two grown men all day. As money dwindled, the Brothers tested that theory, bringing everyone in the band to gather around the two or three plates they could afford, and when it tightened further and they stopped coming, Mama Louise noticed those skinny little white boys had gone missing and told them never to stay away for lack of money. They were so polite and warm, she had taken a real interest in their welfare. She kept a running tab for them, and they made good on it eventually.
Gregg was more productive as a songwriter than ever before. Words and melodies came to him, easy and often, as if the seeds of songs were carried on the Georgia breeze. He’d bring his lyrics to rehearsal, and throw down the tune, and soon it rose from the glowing glass tubes in their amplifiers to fill the room. First one player then all would find their way in and meet you there in the flow. Something was tried—Duane breaking off in a spree of joy, a melody that loops around Gregg’s like an embrace, followed by a countering wave from Dickey, another voice weaving in, yes, you all could see at the same time where he was going, and you go in together, six abreast, shoulders squared, strutting fine. Gregg had a different sensibility than the rest of them, preferring the tight arrangements of traditional songs to the free-form jams that the guitar players were driving, and it wasn’t always easy for him to accept the changes they wanted to make to his tunes. Songs he imagined as ballads became driving rock epics and three-verse blues became twenty-minute-long journeys. It wasn’t comfortable for Gregg to push back too hard, and Duane was more than confident in the direction the songs were taking.
In the middle of a jam, Duane heard Butch holding back. When things became unfocused and started to bog down, he looked over and saw Butch hesitating and saw his brow knitting and Duane glared at him, a look as strong as a slap upside his head. Butch was indignant and kept on. Duane tore into a little lead, an aggressive pitch to the center of Butchie’s chest, and then he did it again, until Butch could feel the heat rising through him; he was getting pissed-off. Duane was trying to call him out in front of everyone. What an asshole, he thought, and Butch started hitting like he was hitting Duane back. And in the instant that he was really giving it to him, Duane’s face bloomed into a huge smile. He nodded and pointed at Butch, and cried out, “There you go!”
With Jaimoe, it was about totally valuing and trusting whatever he was doing. Dickey needed respect and praise sometimes, but Duane could get after him a little, too. He was about the only one who could. Dickey was changeable, with weather of all kinds, and when he was winding down Duane could say, “Hey, Hoss Fly. Something eating you?”
Berry was usually in a deep groove of his own and he played happy, all the time, a wiggle in his hips, one toe patting, a wild knee rising and a smile as big as the world. Sometimes Gregg just needed to be chewed out like a kid, and Duane didn’t hold back. But Duane also listened to Gregg seriously and believed in him completely; he just wanted him to stay focused and give everything. Everyone wanted to keep pace with Duane. They were doing the best work they had ever done, and in some way, it was for him.
Duane believed as he always had that if they pleased themselves, they were on the right track. If they played as if every show could be their last, nothing and no one could stop them. He could articulate his confidence, not just in words but also in the ferocity of his playing, and when he played strong, no one could deny him, and all of their excitement built.
In addition to the songs Gregg was bringing in, they were riffing on several old blues tunes. In the blues, the strongest man would lay himself bare; the kind of man who would never let you see him hurting was welcoming you in. Duane wanted to be that naked and honest. He sought his tone in jazz horns and in the rawest blues singers who would tear themselves up for you, unafraid to look ugly or sound desperate. He wanted it: the heart torn out and still beating in his hand to offer up.
The hard heel of Duane’s boot knocked out rhythms on the floorboard, calling on the many players before him, thumping and strumming, moaning out their words in an endless incantation of longing and betrayal. The Brothers knew the debt of inspiration they owed the bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, black players whose influence could easily be erased by white musicians covering their songs. When it came time to play songs like “Stormy Monday” or “You Don’t Love Me,” Duane would announce the artists’ names out loud into his microphone before they played their songs at every show: Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Blind Willie McTell, Muddy Waters. It was the very least he could do, giving credit where it was due. As Gregory said to me, “Music is all fathers and sons,” songs passed hand to hand, bridging divides in time, place, and race.
Duane’s slide playing was a kind of haunting ventriloquism; he made his guitars speak in a human voice. When he moved glass against steel strings, it felt like conjuring, like a magic trick. Jo Jane said the first time she saw Duane make that ghostly sound, he was pressing a water glass against the neck of the guitar in a hotel room while they sat and talked. She thought he had invented this brilliant technique, and he didn’t disabuse her of that notion. Duane played to pull people in close, and he had hooked her with those moaning melodies unlike any she had ever heard.
The earliest slide players wanted to do something their fingers wouldn’t do, so they found an ingenious way to use a tool to carry them over the frets of their guitars.
Craftiness was born of their need to express pain, and it made use of objects that could have been weapons in a bar fight—a knife, a broken bottle, a bone.
Duane was a curious and hungry young man who tapped into an aspect of the culture in which he was raised. White culture seemed to offer only escapism and denial in the form of pop music. Duane’s quest led him to the other side of town, to black culture, where a deeper communication was happening. White artists like Duane have been relying on black artists to lead the way forward, always. Creativity isn’t born out of comfort and ease; at its best and most moving, music is a means of survival. Blues artists understand that best. Duane needed to play. He played to live, and you can hear him living in every note he ever played.
On breaks from long hours of practice at their warehouse space, the guys drank wine and took mushrooms, listened to records while mesmerized by the flashing trip light in the College Street apartment. They were living in each other’s pockets, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, riding motorcycles down country roads, swimming at the quarry. They were never apart, and they easily built a shared vocabulary they could rely on, while they told tall tales and made each other fall down laughing.
They invented a game of cork ball. It started as a game they played in the crash pad when they were too high to venture out, and eventually they moved to the patch of grass in front of the yellow house on Orange Terrace where the Oakleys and the Truckses lived. They would take a cork from the hardware store and rest a penny on its narrow end. You had to keep the coin still while you bound it down with tape, making a small tight ball that felt solid and unbalanced in your hand. Then you’d get yourself a pool cue, cut it down to the length of a bat, and hit that ball with the business end. Gregg described the game in great detail, miming the shape of the cork and turning it invisibly in his fingers before pitching it away. “It was a precision game, a musicians’ game … you know, with no running! No way! We stuck wire signs in the ground and they were set spaced at a good distance, labeled one, two, three, and ‘H’ for home run, and you scored by distance hit. Duane was a great hitter, and I must say, I had a great pitch.”
While Linda was still in Jacksonville recovering from the birth of her daughter, Brittany Anne Oakley, and getting ready to move, Berry rehearsed in Macon and he wasn’t always alone. A young Mercer College student knocked on the apartment door at College Street, and stood shyly in the hall in front of Donna.
“Is Berry here?” she asked. Donna let her in and watched Berry’s face light up. Duane coaxed Donna back into the bedroom, saying, “Let’s give them some space.”
Just as he was closing the bedroom door, Donna saw Berry kissing the girl. She was so shocked, her face flushed hot and her eyes welled up.
“Duane, how can he do that? He has a new baby! Linda is so beautiful!”
“Well, he’s a man, honey. He’s up here alone now and he’s lonely. A man needs company sometimes. Let’s mind our own business.” Donna made up her mind to tell Linda as soon as they were together again. She had a right to know.
Phil Walden soon rented a furnished apartment on Bond Street for Duane and Donna so they could have a little privacy, and so could everybody else.
Duane wrote a letter at this time to Holly Barr, who was married to Ralph Barr of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. For some reason Duane nicknamed her Polly. The letter is a perfect snapshot of this time in Macon.
Dearest Polly,
I hugged your letter for about ten minutes when I got it. I was just laying on my old bed and somebody came into my crib and says “Mail call Mail call” and I got it!
I LOVE YOU
I’m really happy here in old Macon, Georgia. The country is beautiful and the air is clean and the old magnolias are a-bloomin’ and I got a Les Paul of my very own and my old lady whom I love more than anybody is gonna have a baby this coming November and Gregg’s here gigging with me and I got about the greatest band I ever did hear together and a Marshall amp and two drummers and I quit taking speed and I been going swimming nekkid in the creek.
I quit my session job to get into this group thing again and we’ll probably be moseying on out to California in a month or so. I even bought a car and a box guitar a Gibson Heritage and it sounds real pretty but I can’t do the things ya’ll do with it. The name of the band is the Allman Bros. and we mostly play music to fuck by and it’s too loud but it’s sure fun. My old eyeballs are drooping down so I’m gonna go to bed, but write to me real soon and God bless you and yours. My address is
309B College St.
Macon, GA
Oh yeah! I got to take Zelma Redding (Otis’s widow) motorcycle riding last weekend. She’s really great.
Love Always,
Duane
I had a picture of me I was going to send you but I can’t find it. I’ll send it next time. My best to lucky old Ralph Barr.