My cousin Rachael and I took a trip to Macon in 1987, when she was still in high school and I was in my first year of college. Neither of us had visited the town where we were born for years, and we’d never been there alone. It was storming as Rachael drove us from her home in Jacksonville to Macon in her Jeep. The sky was full of ominous clouds when we arrived, and small rain showers would start and stop with the wind.
We drove by every destination we could think of: the Central City Park band shell, the houses on College Street, Bond Street, and Orange Terrace, the scrap of grass where the band played cork ball, the H&H Restaurant (now with a mushroom logo on its sign). We took white roses to the cemetery.
I felt like an exile returning home to find everything unfamiliar. I experienced a kind of night blindness in Macon, an emotional narrowing of my vision. I was so busy searching for any remnant of 1969 that I could barely see the dense greenery and beautiful homes lining the streets. I was disappointed by how few signs of my father remained. The abandoned Capricorn Studios, a small bit of graffiti on a wall, “Remember Duane,” a record store stocked almost entirely with bootlegged Allman paraphernalia, and a couple of boxes filled with photos and newspaper clippings marked “Allman Brothers Band Archive” at the public library downtown. I’m not sure what I expected—scorched earth, crying fans, “Elizabeth Reed” streaming out of car windows?
Macon felt so small and somehow unknowable, like it was withholding something from us, like there was something more to see that we didn’t know how to find. I realized we were not yearning for this place at all; we wanted a portal back in time. Although my father wasn’t anywhere, it seemed that he was most particularly not here, where I had most hoped to find him.
Rachael and I finished our pilgrimage at the grand home our parents and their friends called the Big House. Number 2321 Vineville Avenue is a massive house of brick and stucco, laced up with wood half-timbering in the Tudor style with twin peaked roofs and a deep porch. It was empty then, with a small FOR SALE sign in the dirty front window.
“Should we buy it?” I asked.
“Let’s do it,” Rachael said, climbing up onto the porch and peering into the windows. The walls of the entry were covered with busy floral wallpaper and dust powdered the worn floor. The staircase seemed familiar to me, probably from photographs. As a child, I would stare into the backgrounds of snapshots, trying to get a feeling for this house that was like a lost member of our family. I loved a shot of my mother stretched out on the bed she shared with my father, wearing his striped pants and smiling. Another photo shows me standing in my crib, goofy-faced under a psychedelic poster of my star sign, Virgo. I noted the small details: the deep crown moldings, high ceilings, and casement windows pouring sunlight over the wooden kitchen table, a fireplace almost big enough to stand in.
It felt right that the Big House was empty. It seemed to be protesting our absence and waiting for our return. The yard was thick with weeds, and through a tangle of wild lilies I could barely make out the edge of what was once a fountain. As I stepped over to it, a thin grass snake wriggled over my boot and I yelped.
Rachael and I had been talking about the band all day.
“I just want my small piece of the story. Not a big piece, just a piece of my own,” Rachael said, her eyes searching the tall trees behind the house.
“You do have a piece. Your father was one of the first—” I started to say.
“I know, but no one knows about my father, or what he gave to the band.”
“I do. I know,” I said. “Everyone who matters knows. Did your father ever tell you about the night “Midnight Rider” was written? He walked up to Gregg and Kim while they were writing lyrics and said he had one dollar left and was going to get a bottle of wine. Your dad’s dollar became “one more silver dollar.”
“I never knew that,” Rachael said. She deserved to feel connected and acknowledged. Most of all by her father, Michael Callahan, the Allman Brothers soundman who was still alive but had little contact with her. Like me, Rachael favors her father so much, it’s startling. She has his sweet smile, deep brown eyes, and tanned skin, inherited from his Cherokee ancestors. Her parents split up when she was a baby, and her dad was still living a crazy life then. There was no place in it for a child, and somehow, that never really changed. Eventually, Michael attended her wedding and met her kids, but Rachael never got to know him as well as she wanted to.
When she was about six years old and I was nine, Rachael said something to me that I will never forget. We were sitting on the carpeted steps of our grandparents’ house in St. Louis. “You’re lucky your daddy is dead. At least you can think he’d be with you if he could. My daddy is out there somewhere; he just doesn’t want me.”
I thought of the dozen apartments Rachael and I had shared with our mothers, the funky little rentals we shed like snakeskin every year or two to start again somewhere new.
It seemed impossible that this palace had ever been ours. What would we be like now if we had all stayed? The question was hanging in the air between us. What if we had stayed together in this big house?
In March 1970, as the first blush of a new spring was pinkening up the town’s cheeks, Linda and Candy started looking for a new home for the Oakleys. They had checked out a few other places that left them cold when Linda noticed the ad for 2321 Vineville Avenue.
Candy drove Donna and Linda over to the house in the car she called Mehitable. (Candy had a knack for naming everything. She called her leather purse Wasted Moo.) They walked up the front steps onto the wide porch and unlocked the front door with the key they got from the rental office. The entryway opened to two large rooms, one on each side: a large parlor and a larger living room with a tall fireplace. The dining room at the back had hand-painted wallpaper with vines and birds, and a crystal chandelier. The kitchen opened onto a glassed-in sunroom with a view of the immense trees outside.
They climbed the curved staircase that led from the entry up to a small landing decorated with stained-glass panels of pink tulips with bright green stems. The second floor had a little central hallway lined with doors, like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.
They opened each door and wandered together from room to room. Interior doors connected every room on the floor. There were two bedrooms with fireplaces, and each bedroom had separate dressing rooms and bathrooms beside them, perfect for baby rooms.
“This could be Brittany’s room, and that could be Galadrielle’s!” Linda said.
A small balcony looked out onto the backyard.
“Romeo, wherefore art thou?” Donna called into the trees.
One bathroom had an enormous tiled shower, a small room with seven or eight showerheads mounted on the walls pointing in every direction.
The last door they opened led to the third floor, an attic with vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, and small windows on two sides that illuminated the golden wood floors with sunshine.
“An attic? It’s a ballroom!” Donna and Linda waltzed across the floor of the enormous open space. This house would bring everyone together, Brothers and Sisters. It was a real home.
The rent was a steep $225 a month, but if they shared the expense, it would be all right. They didn’t know what the owner would make of them and their extended family, but they could try.
Candy, Linda, and Donna stood together in a tight circle and hugged one another.
“Let’s do it!”
They moved in with very little: mattresses, baby beds, and their record player. Berry’s grandmother gave them an antique sofa. Word was out that they needed furnishings. Someone found a few cable spools that could be used as tables, pretty when covered with India prints.
The small room between Linda and Berry’s bedroom and Candy’s room became known as “the Kasbah.” They arranged pillows on the floor, draped tapestries on the walls, and set up their stereo. Many nights were spent there listening to records and smoking reefer, joints rolled and passed hand to hand until all eyes were glassy and they dreamed, together and apart. A pay phone was installed on the wall in the kitchen, Phil Walden’s ingenious method of avoiding phone bills. A stack of dimes stayed piled on top. It was a big relief to no longer have to run over to Butch and Little Linda’s apartment down the road to make a call.
They rented a refrigerator and cruised thrift stores and antiques shops, eventually scoring Oriental carpets and elaborately carved oak beds, a couple of rocking chairs and hurricane lamps that they fueled with scented oils from the five-and-dime. They draped lace curtains in the windows and filled jars with cut flowers pilfered from neighborhood gardens.
The upstairs rooms took on the auras of their inhabitants. Candy’s room was where the girls often gathered in the morning to plan their days when the band was on the road. Over her fireplace mantel hung a large art deco print. Her high-backed bed sat on a richly colored carpet. A large-leafed potted plant stretched out in the front window atop a heavy old steamer trunk. Colored beads were everywhere, in bottles and boxes and lidded jars. They lined the windowsills, where they sparkled like candy, tempting Brittany and me to eat them. Linda and Berry chose the sunroom, which was completely lined with windows and felt like a tree house nested in green. Duane and Donna’s room was decorated with the huge valentine she made for him and a black velvet tapestry of two white swans; Duane had brought it home from New York.
One afternoon, the girls returned to the house to find an old upright piano in the parlor, which had become the music room. It was painted baby blue and most of the keys worked. Donna sat down and pretended to play, singing, “My old man, he’s a singer in the park,” doing her best Joni Mitchell.
Brittany was a year old, and I was four months behind her. Our mothers spent their days watching us play together like kittens, rolling and tumbling on the floor. We loved scooting up the carpeted staircase, then thumping down one stair at a time on our diapered butts. We both learned to walk and talk in the Big House. One night, we came back from Idlewild, and while our moms were bathing us, they noticed a change in Brittany.
“Leenda, look!” my mom said, running a washcloth down her tiny back. “Beebop has a neck!” Britt turned her big blue eyes to her mom with a huge cartoon smile and we all laughed together. After baths every evening, Donna stood in front of the mirror in the hall with a towel flopped over my head and let me look at myself. She would lay me down in my crib, and I would cry until I fell asleep, but I always woke up happy. You had to bounce Beebop to get her to sleep, so Linda would sit on the edge of her bed, plant her feet, and bounce with Brittany in her arms.
Every time Duane came home, it seemed, I would get a scratch or a bump right before he arrived. He would check out every little new thing about me, and he’d get to the scratch or bump and lower his chin and give Donna a questioning look. Duane sang “Dimples” to me, touching the four tiny dimples in my cheeks one by one. “You got dimples on your jaw! You my babe, I got my eyes on you!” Mom thought he made up the song for me, and was surprised when she heard Berry playing it in the music room one day.
Candy had a job at a boutique called Steven’s selling clothes and fashion accessories. She was an independent woman with a car and money of her own. Donna and Linda spent afternoons on blankets in the garden, with babies and snacks, writing letters home or working together on craft projects. They made batiks with melted crayon, and knitted and embroidered blue jeans. My grandma Tommie came to visit the Big House. Mom was sitting on the floor rocking me in her arms, loving me so much, she didn’t notice her mother standing there. Tommie quietly said, “And it never stops.”
Ladies of the Canyon drifted out from the record player in the Kasbah, Joni Mitchell playing chords only her fingers could find on her acoustic guitar, her high, smooth voice floating down the stairs, full of longing and wisdom, warm and knowing. Duane and Berry came home from practice, stomping boots through the back door, shouting, “Turn that moaning bitch down!” Motorcycles roared down the road outside, up the side street into the dirt driveway at the back of the house. Red Dog and Kim would enter in midsentence, jiving about giving the cops the slip by ducking into the garages and closing the doors as they passed by, gunning their motors in frustration. The men moved through the cool, shady rooms like a blast of heat from the summer sun, laughing loud, trailing smoke from their cigarettes, leaving sweating beer cans on every surface, poking through the fridge, and drawling out their sweet southern accents in high parodies of the police.
They had a connection that was deepening by the day, built by the hour in their rehearsal space. Every free day they had was spent rehearsing. Their list of songs was growing, melodies strengthening with repetition. Bridges were lifted between parts that at first seemed unconnected, verse and chorus falling into place.
They were already beginning to tighten up material for their second album.
All Donna ever wanted was time alone with Duane; that was her happiness. Duane had a gift for slowing down time when he was by her side, and minutes moved like cold honey. The curving vowels in his voice were a warm current, and she wanted to be everywhere he had been, and asked him to tell her. His hands were gentle, but he was always hungry. To be able to give him anything he wanted was her joy. But their life was full of people, always coming and going. She would wake up in the pale light that filtered through their high bedroom window, the street’s dim glow bouncing off the sky-blue walls. Heat rose off of Duane’s body, his breathing deep and steady, and Donna could dip down into the deepest part of sleep, a different level of rest than she could ever find alone. She tried to stay up and consider his sleeping face, only hers to see. She adored his face, framed by his fine hair and thick, strong muttonchops, scratchy against her cheek. His cheekbones were sharp enough to cast shadows of their own. The tips of his teeth rested on his chapped lower lip, and his eyelids moved in strange dreamy circles, searching for something in a dream. She could make him jump by touching his bony knees with her cold feet. She inhaled his smell, part tobacco and sweet sweat, and tried to memorize the feeling of being tucked tightly against him, his spoon, and make it last forever.
Duane woke up from another dream of a new song. He picked up his acoustic guitar and played the riff, and was so excited he couldn’t wait to record it. He made Jim Hawkins, one of Capricorn’s engineers, get out of bed and meet him at the studio so he could record the tune before it got away. Twiggs met him there, too, and sat in the control room watching with Jim as Duane intently tore into a complex pattern, almost sounding like an elaborate madrigal from the Renaissance. Twiggs broke into a huge grin, turned to Jim, and said, “Which one of us is going to tell him that’s ‘Classical Gas’?”
Duane was unknowingly playing the song Donna had asked him if he knew when they first met.
When the band was home, the wives would gather and cook large meals and everyone would come. The men would play in the music room until the meal was served, then Berry would raise his glass of wine and stand up. Having everyone in his band and everyone they loved around a dining table felt like a significant accomplishment, and he acknowledged it with a toast.
The Big House and its many pleasures were difficult to leave, but the moment the big Winnebago merged onto the highway and picked up speed, it felt like something heavy lifted off everyone, and excitement would build. Duane called these days their study of the three R’s: reds, Ripple, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk—downers, cheap wine, and experimental jazz, the crucial components of surviving the rough road. They had an eight-track player and a pile of Twiggs’s tapes, a little taste of everything from the Carter Family to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, which they kept on heavy rotation, fascinated by the interplay between Davis, Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley. They strummed their acoustic guitars when they were lucid enough. They stoned themselves into a state of grace, the road pulsing beneath them.
Dates stacked up like money, and playing one gig after another, they fell into a deep groove. Everyone went through moods, manic ups and low downs, and whole days were blotted out with drugs to sleep on the drive. They paused in tiny towns for food at roadside diners and truck stops, telling jokes and smoking in parking lots, finally pulling up to venues in the late afternoons. They’d set up the gear and run through a sound check, then nap on the floor before playing all night. It was a grind and a gift. Nineteen seventy was dedicated to the road, and it took everything from them.
Touring was a relentless endurance test: the shitty food they could hardly eat, the desperate lack of sleep, the cycles of highs and hangovers. They lived in places stripped of any personal objects: dusty, depressing hotel rooms. The music was the only solace left, but it was total. Playing to crowds changed their chemistry with a flood of pure energy to the bloodstream. It was almost instantaneous; within the first moments of the first song they’d laugh at the joy of it, after the misery of the day. No one would believe what they went through, and how bad they’d felt just hours before.
The band often opened with “Statesboro Blues” taking off at a clip, and the audience would get to their feet. “Trouble No More” was a swaying hip shaker, Duane chasing Gregg, sounding every bit the big brother, following his Baybro’s words with his own sassy back talk. Then Dickey’s clean tone cut through like a blade. “Dreams” was a gentle groove building to Duane’s lead, rolling out like an elaborate story in a voice as complex and full of yearning as his brother’s. They knew how to build their set brick by brick, drawing people in and leading them through changes from emotional intensity to rocking fun. The songs created their own dimension. A song was started, became vast, and they wandered inside it. Time collapsed; the show felt endless one moment and was over the next.
The silence that followed a show felt shocking. Their ears would ring, blown out and buzzing. Their clothes would be soaked through with sweat; even their shoes were damp with effort. It took a while for verbal thoughts to return. To walk offstage and be approached wasn’t always easy, hands to shake, questions to answer when they were still stripped down, illuminated and floating, under the spell of the music. Whatever they had drunk, smoked, or ingested earlier had burnt off and left them, but the music was its own high, strong enough to blow through anything, a feeling far past any other. After gigs, they got together with new friends and went to their hotel rooms to play some more. They forgot how to wind down.
They lived in an extreme state where time flowed differently. Long hours of waiting and traveling were eclipsed by brief bursts of playing, those few hours that were deep and seemed limitless, but were then fleeting. Night stood in for day, the most energized time, when the highs were waxing, waning only with the light of the rising sun. At dawn, they had to choose to keep going, try a new substance to maintain, or give in to a little sleep.
I gathered together a list of all the known concerts the Allman Brothers Band played from 1969 to 1971, consolidated from fan sites, tape traders’ lists, and the notes in their road manager’s date book, all in an effort to get my arms around the scope of my father’s touring life. The list is absolutely staggering in its breadth and there are many other shows that cannot be accounted for because they left no paper trail or were free shows they played in parks all across the country. Duane spent many nights sitting in with other bands and recording in studios. He spent very few, if any, days without his guitar in hand.
Loading their gear in and out, the massive amps and road cases, the hours spent waiting to play and finally the playing—giving everything for hours, sweat dripping, ferocious amounts of energy burned—the thought of it exhausted me utterly. I felt each entry on my list as an effort, and I marveled at the days without rest, the distance between destinations, the Christmas away from home, the thousands and thousands of miles under their wheels. Then I think of my father, and I can feel his hand on my shoulder, smiling, bemused, shaking his head: Little girl, don’t you see? This long list of shows is a string of pearls, each glowing stage a treasure savored. Every gig was a few precious hours of pleasure and danger, focus without struggle, and painless above all. The person you were when you stepped offstage hardly mattered. Your buzzing body, your dazzled and restless mind only wanted to get back there, a guitar in your hands and a crowd before you. Life was just waiting until you could play again, and there was never any question: Music is worth anything and everything it takes, and what it gives can never be measured. My father plants a phantom kiss on my forehead and I understand.