Linda Oakley, at my request, wrote me an account of October 29, 1971.
They had just returned from Buffalo, N.Y. and the craziness of “getting clean” … getting together … and, at last turning over a new leaf. We’d been through a baptism of fire, reborn and renewed. The path before us was clear. We were headed for higher ground.
It was so so good to be back home … “all in our places with sunshiny faces.” … We had gotten a big orange pumpkin to celebrate the season. Berry and I took the Beebop out to the garden. In the warm afternoon we spread ourselves next to the fishpond and set to work scooping out the squishy pulp. Brittany clutched her Crayola pens, ready to draw a face for Daddy to carve.
We heard a car and a motorcycle pull into the back driveway. Visitors! Peering over the hedges, I saw a huge bouquet of flowers held aloft by brother Duane. He graciously presented them with a big hug and a “Happy Birthday!” He and Dixie had just returned from a stopover in The Big Apple to see John Hammond. I was so touched and thrilled that they’d taken the time to come over and wish me well.
“Ah, a Jack-o-lantern I see! Can I cut out the eye, nose, and mouth?” That was typical Duane. We later wandered into the house as he rhapsodized about the great time they had with John Hammond.
“… up all night with our acoustics, just riffin’. Such a righteous cat, man!” He was glowing.
Berry wanted me to show off my new patchwork knee high boots. He’d had them custom made for me at “Granny Takes a Trip” in New York and they’d just arrived via the post.
“You look so good in them boots it’s enough to make my old pecker hard!” Again typical Duane: bold as brass! I took it as a great compliment. So did BO of course. “I hear you’re takin’ your old lady out jukin’ tonight!” We were supposed to go to dinner while Aunt Candy entertained the Beebop.
Duane and Dixie headed home to recover from their travels and Candy left to run some errands. We started getting ready for our big date; just waiting for Candy to get back. That’s when the phone rang.
They were all headed to Duane’s place; him on his bike, Dixie behind him in the car, Candy following in Mehitable. The bike spun out and slid after glancing off the back of a truck. Dixie screeched to a halt and ran over to where he lay. Yes, Candy was right there. I can only imagine how surreal it was for them. She told us he’d been taken to the ER … they were there waiting to hear.… Berry and I just looked at each other.… He was just here.… How could this happen? NOT DUANE!
Promising to call as soon as he knew anything, Berry raced to join the gathering of brothers and sisters keeping vigil at Middle Georgia Hospital.
I went through the motions of fixing dinner for Brittany, music playing, I think it was Cowboy, as I sent out my prayers. Time slows down when you are waiting, waiting and wondering, worrying and wishing and hoping. At last I heard the back doors opening and closing. I ran to the stairs. As I stood on the landing, Berry was dragging up the stairs. The look on his face just pierced my heart. Candy came in right behind him and said,
“He’s gone!”
Heartbreak. Broken. Devastation. Disbelief. We were the walking wounded, sometimes not even able to walk. Joanie and I talked about this yesterday. That night, she and Callahan and Berry and countless others filled Grant’s Lounge to celebrate Duane … many toasts of tequila. I think they were expecting him to show up and tell them it was all a bad dream. When the bar shut down, Joan and Michael managed to walk to their apartment. Berry had driven his Z car. He almost made it safely home but he missed the turn into the driveway and hit the wall instead. The car was totaled but Berry was able to extricate himself. Luckily Willie was there and got him into the house by the time the police came. The rest of the night is a blur … thankfully.
I don’t recall who spilled the beans about the surprise birthday party they had planned. Berry? Candy? That’s what they were up to. Showing me the love again. More than that it was a time to get us all together again, celebrating the mission of the music. Drawing the family in … the circle. Well the circle had been broken.
Strangely it came together because we all loved Duane so much. You and Donna came back to Macon. Sisters had been apart too long. We had shared a lifetime in the blink of an eye. That was the most amazing funeral I have even been to. It was Glory Gospel Hour, a real revival. The roster of musicians and dignitaries alone would have made you think the King had died. “Long Live the King!”
We put on our finest frocks and danced and sang and clapped and cried our eyes out. The band and guests played for all they were worth, enough to wake the dead? I think Duane would have been pleased that it was a celebration of his life. Oh but the sight of that guitar, like a quiet sentinel on its stand …
My beautiful birthday bouquet was joined by a multitude of floral displays. Most impressive were the ones arranged in the image of his Les Paul. There were flowers all over the front porch of the Big House, spilling out into the front yard for all to see. Do you know, when those blossoms began to fade and dry, we made candles. We pinned the flowers around the surface of each one, then dipped them in the hot wax until they were firmly attached. We gave them as Christmas gifts. Tuffy’s sister still has one.
Those Cowboys sang us through our grief with their angel harmonies … and lending his voice as only he could, there was Duane with us still.
I love you,
Linda
A flatbed truck began to make a wide turn in the middle of the intersection ahead. For a moment, it seemed that Duane could easily make it around the back end of the truck, but when it stopped short, he was forced under the hot, spinning body of his Harley and knocked unconscious. Candy and Dixie leaped from their cars and ran to him, calling out for help. Candy banged on the doors of several houses on the street, pleading for someone to call an ambulance. She pulled the covers off the seats of her car to cover him while they waited for help to come. He had a scratch on his face, but the worst of his injuries did not show. It took forever for the ambulance to come, its siren blaring.
Friends gathered at the hospital as word spread, and they were taken to a small waiting room. As Duane was wheeled down the corridor, Berry grasped his hand and bent down to kiss his cheek.
After a couple of hours, a male nurse came in and said Duane had a broken arm and bumped his head, so he might not play guitar for a while, but he would recover.
Butch went out to get a bottle of wine to celebrate, and Gregg and Chank, one of his closest friends in Macon, went back to his apartment on Orange Terrace to hang.
In fact, the golden time everyone had shared for the last two and a half years was narrowing down to a single golden hour, the small window of time when it still seemed possible that Duane would live. He was losing his battle in the operating room, and after three hours of attempts to repair the internal damage done, my father died.
When the surgeon walked into the waiting room, he was visibly shaken to find everyone in a lighthearted mood. He told them Duane hadn’t made it through the surgery, and everything stopped. No one could move or speak for a moment, and then panic set in. Pacing, crying, holding one another. Red Dog stepped outside just as Butch was returning with his wine, and the moment Butch saw the tears in his friend’s eyes, he dropped the bottle and it shattered at their feet.
Allman Brothers fans pore over photographs of the site of the accident on websites, discussing how fast he might have been going, whether or not his bike caught air on the incline of the hill, whether he hit the back of the truck or merely slipped under it. There are video tours taken from a handheld video camera that circle around the road filming the site and describing the accident. Apocryphal stories circulated about the truck having a huge ball hanging from a crane, or a hook, or a pile of pipes, and all of these things were said to have struck him. Was there a fire hydrant and did he hit it? Was he on drugs or drunk? Did the truck stop before or after he was hit?
When I was in second grade, a boy taunted me by saying my father was killed by a peach truck, and that was why the band’s next record was called Eat a Peach. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I threw a pinecone at him hard enough to make his forehead bleed.
Of course it wasn’t true. The whole scene is dissected at great length, to what end?
My father was killed in an accident, a meaningless, blameless moment that could never be changed. What else is there to know?
At Gregory’s house, I had been treading lightly for a week or more, easing into the slow pace of life in Savannah, enjoying being with him. His home sits beside a wide river and is surrounded by giant oak trees covered in dusty gray Spanish moss. His little dogs bound through the house barking at every distant sound from the road; otherwise there is sweet silence and peace. My uncle has lived in many houses in many towns, but this place is the first that feels like a real home. I had so little time with him, it felt wrong to me to be there with any kind of agenda, even one as personal as wanting to talk about my father, so I waited for Duane to find his way into our talks naturally, and in time, he did amble through. One night, we watched a brutal action movie about a dirty cop with a drug habit and afterward, while Gregory put on a pot of coffee, he said, “You know, I died the night my brother died.”
We stood in silence for a long moment before he went on. “I don’t know if I want to tell you about that. I’d hate to hurt the way you think of me.”
“You won’t,” I said quickly, but he didn’t say any more.
The thing was, I already knew the story he was hesitating to tell. I read it in a book about the band, and Red Dog had told me, too.
Gregg and Chank left the hospital together, thinking Duane was in the clear. They went to get high. After he fixed, Gregg slumped to the floor and Chank knew he had taken too much. He tried shooting salt water into Gregg’s arm, and then he tried milk.
“Milk?” I asked.
“Yeah, baby. Sometimes that could work,” Red Dog said. Chank held Gregg under his arms and lifted him into his bathtub. He ran icy water over him, but he was out. He slapped his face and talked to him. He tried another shot of salt water.
“Nothing was working, and Chank knew he had to go,” Red Dog said.
“He was going to leave him?” I asked.
“Baby girl, that was the way it had to be. We all knew, if somebody was gone, you had to haul ass. No point in going to jail on top of everything else, dig?”
Chank propped Gregg up at the edge of the tub and was about to leave him to die when Red Dog knocked on the door. He stood in the doorway with his mouth opening in a silent cry.
Chank said, “Don’t tell me.”
Gregg’s small voice called out behind them, “Don’t tell me what?”
In a single moment, Chank knew that Gregg was alive and Duane was dead; both feelings arrived at once, hot and cold.
Red Dog made a quick gesture with his thumb, squeezing an invisible syringe into the crook of his bent arm, and said, “We cried and shot and cried some more, and sat up together until dawn.” This new loss was too huge to see all at once from so close-up.
They hid out in that high for years.
No one called to tell Twiggs that night, and he heard the news of Duane’s death on the radio in the mental hospital. Twiggs told his mother not to be sad, because Duane had lived more in his twenty-four years than most people ever do. Twiggs was denied a day pass to go to Duane’s funeral.
Dickey was home with his folks in Florida. His stepfather came to the club where he was playing with a friend’s band to give him the news. Dickey rushed back to Macon in pure shock. Phil Walden was vacationing in Bimini when he got the call. His first thought was that the last time Phil saw him, Duane had wondered aloud if he could ever play any better than he was playing then.
Joanie walked the hospital halls trying to calm herself enough to call her parents. They had to find her sister and tell her. She called my grandmother and noticed halfway through the awful call that she was in the same wooden booth she had called her parents from when I was born. Grandma tried to track us down, but the night Duane died, Mom and I were camping next to a reservoir in Missouri with her friends Maureen and Frank, and a medical student Mom had just begun to date. The night passed without word from the outside world.
Donna’s friends had brought along some mushrooms to take, and Donna finally took the hit of LSD that Duane had given her when she left Macon, a parting gift she never understood. She said he never gave her drugs; it was out of character, but he said he thought she might like it.
Donna wandered down along the water’s edge, wanting to feel herself in the world as her high was blooming. Distant trees waved their arms through a blur of wood smoke and the afternoon sky took on an odd, ghostly sheen. Donna felt the pulse of the breeze that rippled the indigo water rising up through her legs and watched the sky turn gray. Then the wind kicked up all at once, no longer gentle, and the sky and water became one menacing mass. A horrible knowledge suddenly spread through her, carried by the approaching storm. She felt Duane move through her and she knew she had lost his love. Their breakup suddenly seemed permanent and fixed in place, and she knew there was no way back to him. Fear gathered around her, like a heavy woolen cloak that weighed down her slender shoulders, and the sky pulled back into itself and turned away.
Something was very wrong.
Donna’s parents found a friend who was willing to drive to the campsite. When he arrived, he was told Donna was tripping and everyone decided to wait. Donna wandered back to the camp and found her friends sitting in a strange silence. Tension was in the air that she didn’t understand, and no one explained. They told her it was time to head home, before the rains moved in. The wind was becoming wild; the fabric walls of the tents flapped so hard it sounded like shrieking. They packed up in the dark and loaded the cars, and reached the closest friend’s house very late. My mom put me down to sleep in an unfamiliar bedroom.
Her friend Skip came to her and said, “Duane has been in an accident.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s dead … I think,” he said, trying to soften the blow.
“I cried like an animal until I had nothing left inside,” my mother told me. “You slept through it all, I don’t know how. I watched you sleeping and all I could think was, Someday I will have to tell her.”
Donna told herself I would not suffer because I would not remember him, and it relieved her. How can you lose what you never had?
The first time I heard my mother tell the story of this night, we were at a fancy restaurant celebrating New Year’s Eve of 2004. She was telling two of my oldest friends simply because one of them had asked. The wind, the water, the feeling coming before the news: My two friends sat in rapt attention while Mom talked, tears shining in her eyes. Donna was wearing a party hat she had made, a pleated tin foil crown topped with an orange ostrich plume. The festive room fell away from us, leaving only black water as she described the weight of my sleeping body being lifted out of our tent.
I wanted to hear the story, but not like this. I kept eating quietly and didn’t look at her. I felt she was performing for my friends, and a silent rage tightened my chest. I stood up suddenly before she was finished and went to the restroom. When I returned, I asked primly if we could move on to a lighter topic. My mother wiped her wet cheeks with her napkin and said she was sorry, smiling gently at me and at my friends.
Last year, at Thanksgiving, the day came up again. Mom and I looked through a box of photographs over pie, passing each other snapshots from Jacksonville and St. Louis, my grade school portraits mixed in with her baby pictures, shots of the ocean, pets long since passed, friends with forgotten names. Mom paused over a black-and-white image of our backs huddled together beside a body of water.
“That’s where we went camping,” she said. I knew exactly what she meant but still I asked.
“When?” She didn’t answer. I said, “There’s a picture from that day?”
“I guess so,” she said.
We looked at the photograph together, a single frame, her head bent down over mine, simple, a throwaway shot that suddenly seemed like the saddest picture I had ever seen.
The night before Duane’s funeral, there was a private viewing arranged at the chapel inside the funeral home. Donna, her mother, and I had flown from St. Louis. Tommie Jean was being so strong for her daughter, carrying me and keeping me occupied while Donna did what she needed to do. All Donna wanted was to see him. She walked alone down the aisle between rows of chairs to the open coffin, and as soon as she was close enough to see his face, she knew it was not him. He was not in his body anymore. His fire, his beauty, his strength were gone.
Kim came to her, gently took her by the elbow, and steered her outside. She was crying, and her knees were buckling. Someone came to them, it may have been Chank, and said they were gathering things to place in Duane’s coffin before it was closed, if there was something she wanted to add. She borrowed Kim’s knife and cut a lock of her hair from the nape of her neck, and gave it to him.
A huge guitar made of hundreds of fluffy flower heads stood in the front yard at the Big House beside a wheel with a broken spoke made of roses, the circle broken. The funeral happened somehow. No one remembers it quite clearly, and for that they are grateful. I have a cassette of the service. I listened to it once when I was about sixteen and never again. Delaney Bramlett and Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) joined the band to play songs Duane loved: “The Sky Is Crying.” “Melissa.” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
Jerry was very strong and silent. Her heart was shattered, her vision narrowed down to a tunnel that ended only in the sight of her youngest son. She resolved not to let her despair show. She kept a close eye on Gregg, hoping to help him get through the day.
The Brothers played and sang beside Duane’s coffin, now draped in a blanket of white roses. Jerry Wexler gave a eulogy, as he had for Otis Redding:
It was at King Curtis’s funeral that I last saw Duane Allman, and Duane with tears in his eyes told me that Curtis’s encouragement and praise was valuable to him in the pursuit of his music and career. They were both gifted natural musicians with an unlimited ability for truly melodic improvisation. They were both born in the South and they both learned their music from great black musicians and blues singers. They were both utterly dedicated to their music, and both intolerant of the false and the meretricious and they would never permit the incorporation of the commercial compromise to their music—not for love or money.
I remember a magic summer night of music when Duane and Delaney sat on an outdoor patio overlooking the water both playing acoustic guitars as softly as they possibly could and both of them singing—Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, and an unforgettable Jimmy Davis song called “Shackled and Chained.” The music was incredibly pure—completely free of affect—and almost avoided personality as each of them gave himself over to the ineffable beauty of southern gospel, country, and blues music as only southern musicians can.
Those of us who were privileged to know Duane will remember him from all the studios, backstage dressing rooms, the Downtowners, the Holiday Inns, the Sheratons, the late nights, relaxing after the sessions, the whisky and the music talk, playing back cassettes until night gave way to dawn, the meals and the pool games, and fishing in Miami and Long Island, this young beautiful man who we love so dearly but who is not lost to us, because we have his music, and the music is imperishable.
Dixie spoke to Donna for the first time. “He was ornery, wasn’t he?” she said.
Donna thought it was a strangely perfect thing to say.
Gregg wanted to arrange for a mausoleum to be built for Duane on a plot in Rose Hill.
Phil took Donna into his office and told her he had paid the considerable amount of $6,600 for Duane’s funeral, and that he would forgive Duane’s debts to Capricorn. Donna realized what he was saying; he wanted her to know no further money would come from him, other than royalties as they were earned.
Donna told Jerry that I would be eligible to receive a survivor’s benefit from Social Security. She wanted Granny to know that I would be provided for, but her timing felt very wrong. Jerry and Gregg were upset that she had raised the subject of money at all. Within weeks of Duane’s death, rumors circulated that Donna was going to sue the band for money. Nothing could have been less true. She had met with the lawyer who had handled her divorce while she was in Macon, and he had advised her to file an action against the trucking company on my behalf, and she did. He also told her that since I was Duane’s only heir, she had the right to take any of his possessions she thought I should have. The lawyer said that all of Duane’s possessions would be seized and put into storage. They would go through probate and it could take years to sort out. Dixie had left town, and no one else had a key to the house they shared. Donna’s lawyer drove her over and when they could not find another way in, he broke a pane of glass in the back door.
It was a terrible feeling to be inside the home Duane shared with another woman. It felt wrong to look at their things and try to choose what to take. The only things that seemed familiar to her were his shirts and two guitars, and that is what she left with. Her lawyer suggested she take his car, and she said, “Are you sure?” He said it was fine.
A week or so after she left, her lawyer called her and said the probate judge needed her to bring back Duane’s car, so she did.
Donna went to the Big House and left the folded pile of shirts on Berry and Linda’s bed, except for the silk shirt Eric Clapton gave Duane; she took that one to Gregg.
When she returned to St. Louis, Donna gave his 1959 cherry-burst Les Paul to Joey Marshall, the friend who first introduced her to Duane. She asked him to return it to me when I turned twenty-one, and he agreed. She kept his 1959 Gibson 335 sunburst until several years later, when Tommy Talton mentioned that he did not have a guitar and she loaned it to him. Later, it was stolen from him while he was out on the road, totally breaking his heart.
The next time she heard from her lawyer, he reported that Dixie had filed her own claim against the trucking company, as Duane’s common-law wife. She was asking for $2 million. But Joanie overheard Dixie talking to a friend on the telephone, saying she was still married to someone else. Joanie told Donna, and Dixie’s claim was withdrawn. In the end, the company paid $16,000 in damages to Duane’s estate, and the lawyer kept $8,000. Mom put the money in the bank and couldn’t bring herself to use it for years.
The Brothers were scheduled to play Carnegie Hall on November 25, 1971, less than a month after Duane’s death, and just five days after what would have been his twenty-fifth birthday. It was one of Duane’s dreams to play there with his band, and it was devastating to everyone to contemplate playing without him. The only thing worse would be not playing at all. They knew they had come too far to let their band die with Duane. He would be the first to demand that they continue. In the end, it wasn’t a choice. They had to play to survive the pain.
They brought Duane’s treasured Les Paul guitar with them and rested it on a stand beside Gregg onstage. They brought friends and family with them to New York for the concert. It was a solemn show at first, the band looking at one another uncertainly. Eventually, they settled into the songs they knew so well, relaxing and opening up as the night went on. The audience was with them, their hearts aching.
There were other plans in the works that Duane had looked forward to eagerly.
Claude Nobs, who was then the assistant director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, had extended an invitation to him, via Frank Fenter at Capricorn. His letter read in part:
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.