Galadrielle Allman Talks Of Father Duane’s Legacy (INTERVIEW)

Galadrielle Allman still holds her father Duane close and near.. Listening to her speak regarding the late Duane Allman and the family by blood and kinship that means so much to her, she displays a deceptive pragmatism. It’s tempting to mistake her down-to-earth approach to writing as simply an exhibit of an honest work ethic when, over and above that, her devotion to her vocation is ultimately a means to a greater and truly profound understanding of herself and her place in the world.

Please Be With Me: A Song for My Father Duane Allman may in fact be the best book written to date on The Allman Brothers Band. In addition to being a true insider’s account of the seminal southern band’s story up to the death of the great guitarist, it comes from the unusual perspective of a daughter who, just two years old when he passed, did the research to recreate the life and times of a genuine icon in such a way the work transcends cliché.

The generosity of spirit the founder of ABB often (but, as Galadrielle so honestly renders, not always) exhibited in his sweet short life lives on in his daughter. It’s on display in this conversation, but even more so in her book, where this woman’s relationships with family and friends led to the composition of a story with a continuity reflecting life itself.

I have to tell you how much I enjoyed reaching your book. I got it last week, started reading it and I could not put it down: that doesn’t happen to me that often as voracious a reader as I am. You really did a good job building suspense during the course of the book.

Thank you! That’s high praise! Actually I hoped for that. It took me almost five years to write it. I started with a much more straightforward interview structure and it felt like an extended article and I really wanted to start using the tools of fiction. I too am an avid reader and I wanted it to feel like a world in which he (Duane) was walking around. At one point in the very beginning, my literary agent said to me: “Get us in the room!” and that was such a perfect thing to say and it became my watchwords for the whole thing. That was the goal.

I would definitely say you achieved the goal and kudos to your agent for giving you that gateway. As I finished the book, I had also just finished reading Alan Paul’s recently published book One Way Out. I was thinking back to other books I’ve read on The Allmans, including Willie Perkins’ book No Saints, No Saviors, Randy Poe’s Skydog, and Scott Freeman’s Midnight Riders, plus Gregg’s autobiography My Cross to Bear, and yours is definitely the most vivid history of the band.  You really give a sense of the people involved at any given time no matter what’s going on, whether it’s how profoundly sad people were at the death of your dad, but also how happy and expectant everyone was as they all moved to Macon and congregated there to form a community the likes of which the little town had never seen.

There’s really no exaggeration to say that what happened in those first months is still inspiring the band now. For that reason alone it was really important to me to capture what made that time special and how many ways it was new and different from the lives they’d lived before. I wanted it to feel that by the time you got into the Allman Brothers Band, you already had a feel and a sense of Duane, where he was coming from and what was driving him. The fact that he had had disappointments and the fact that he had had personal losses: music that emotional doesn’t come out of nothing. And it’s not just a capacity to play. It’s an emotional life lived and a level of dedication because you need it. I wanted it to build to that so that you, the reader, never questioned that he’d be able to do it or that you never questioned why.

I think a lot of times when we tell the story of artists, we allude to the fact it’s natural to them and I actually don’t think that tells the whole story. I think it’s an epic amount of work and a gigantic commitment when you’re very young.

You’re right, it’s true of your late father and it’s true of all truly artists, but specifically great musicians, when they get the calling and they respond to it, they have no choice. They have to do it and once they start doing it, they really can’t stop along the way, except perhaps temporarily, because there’s an echo throughout your life of what moves them to do it.

And things get sacrificed to it. There are choices that have to be made for the sake of that life. And that was an important story for me to tell too.

You depict quite clearly the sacrifices he and the other members of the band and even their families and friends and the crew had to make to get them where they were, particularly at the point where it seemed Duane had turned a corner, perhaps matured a little bit at the time he decided to get cleaned up, everyone else in the band cleaned up, just before he died. Especially at the very end, I was brought back to the moment I heard he had died in 1971 when I wondered “Why him”…Why now?”

Yes, it was really cruel timing and it struck everybody really hard because it was such a hopeful moment. Everyone was in town at the time so it was a feeling of rebirth and recommitment. The new album (At Fillmore East) was going really well and was going to be really strong. It was a time they all should’ve been on the high road. I really had a hard time writing the end. I had a struggle to face it, thought I knew what was coming all along. Linda Oakley (bassist Berry’s sister) really helped me: she wrote me that letter and I was so struck by how beautiful it was that I had to reproduce it. More than anything I’ve ever read about his death, it communicates how sudden it was: one minute they’re talking and he’s there getting ready for a birthday party and the next minute he’s gone. It’s really an insider’s view of what that feels like; especially when you’re young, things like that don’t even seem possible.

I could sense the effort you expended toward the end of the book as you were trying to end it with some measure of grace and you put it all in clear objective terms as the story came to its conclusion. Linda must’ve had an unusual perspective on those events in retrospect, considering Berry’s death just a year later—including those letters was a great call.

The letters are really treasures and I’m really grateful to Linda and my mom that they were willing because it’s all so private. But there’s really no other document that can capture from the inside what that all felt like: the humor and the intimate way of expression. Berry’s death was like the final blow that brought home the fact Duane had died. As they all realized both of them were gone, they realized the world was a different place for all of them. And I think that remains true because it was a real loss of innocence and toughening up at that point.

Though I knew of the struggles Berry had the year after Duane died, the finality of his death brought home the fact the group et. al. was not what they were when they first set out. Though they do carry on: no matter the tumultuous events that have ensued, the Allman Brothers carry on forty five years after they started.

And that’s remarkable especially because the group integrates those men while on stage—and they can still soar—by showing pictures of them and by mixing in their songs with new things like Jimi Hendrix “(1983) A Merman I Should Turn to Be” (in “Mountain Jam”). They’re still inspired and that’s the key element. The earliest days of the band are a part of that inspiration.

It definitely is and that’s the realization when I saw them at the Beacon Theater for the very first time in 2003. I had seem them before but the first of the two nights I couldn’t escape the feeling Warren (Haynes) and Derek (Trucks) had developed a chemistry between them-that permeated the rest of the group-comparable to the original group.  They are definitely communicating and they’ve developed that over time and it’s deepened and grown over time: they are really in a conversation into which you’re being drawn as you listen. And that’s the highest praise of an improvisational musician: they’re listening as much as they’re playing and you can feel it because it’s truly exciting.

You anticipated a question of mine a moment ago: did you anticipate writing a book when you started this research or did it come to you along the way?

No, I always wanted to be a writer and I thought I would write fiction when I studied writing in college, but when I was a junior at Sarah Lawrence. I wrote about my family for the first time as an assignment and it really had an emotional impact on my class and I realized this story is really moving even for me on the inside of it. Not to disparage the other books that have been written. because they really serve a purpose for fans who really want the details, when I would read books about the band, I would never get any clear sense of their relationships or their personality which I knew from talking to my family how strong that was and what an impression that made. Truly I knew I only had one shot to tell this story, so I waited until I felt I was a strong enough writer to do it well. Around the time of my fortieth birthday I made the commitment to try and find a deal and it happened very quickly, so I was very lucky. But it was borne as much out of wanting to write as much as wanting to tell the story and it’s beautiful how the two things became connected for me. I think I might’ve done some personal research at that point of my life anyway: it was a labor of love I would’ve done in some way anyway, but I made an effort to absorb it with the deal in hand, visiting the Muscle Shoals studios, spending time with my grandmother-who still lives in the house they (Duane & Gregg) grew up in-and at Gregg’s home as well.

It almost sounds like you outlined, then followed step by step your plan, not that you took that methodical an approach.

No, I’ve always had such curiosity about my father. About ten years a go a friend of mine and I were coming to New York, so we stayed in the Chelsea Hotel because I wanted to see what it looked like and I’ve always done things like that… visiting the former site of the Fillmore East. (laughs) It’s almost like I became a homing pigeon for my family’s story. So it was great to have a purpose for it.

I’m sure that carried you along from step to step, not to mention opened up the possibilities as well as provided focus as you moved along with that kind of purpose. You demonstrated a lot of patience putting the book together over the course of time.

It’s a lot of focus thinking about the same subject for years. It’s a discipline. At the end, I really did have a six or seven hour writing day six or seven days a week. It just was second nature and that’s what it takes-that kind of daily grind to get in there and keep it at the level you really want it to be. There’s no easy way to do that kind of project. I’ve never done anything of that length so that was pretty new.

As much as it’s a grind, the process of finding the right words and putting them in the right order is creative, so that the more you do it the more you want to do it…

It’s true because you find your voice. And you do find that incredible loss of self-consciousness as you dive into your work and you’re doing it well—it’s wonderful feeling! And I also learned about my father from that: in some way I was becoming an artist as well and having that feeling of committing –which he absolutely had– and I never really had that in my life before. That brought home to me a lot of things about the way he lived and that kind of concentration and focus.

Writing about music is really challenging: in some ways it’s kind of any impossible thing, but it’s so inspiring you want to share what you feel about it.  And it’s the same thing about playing guitar: we can’t all be Duane Allman, but anyone can experience that in some way that helps them get through their day. It’ really important people have creative outlets something to tap into to expand how they see themselves and make something worth sharing: that’s part of what life is for.

Writing is such a great diversion for me as it allows me to leave my occupation for means to make a living and have something to leave work for. I feel blessed in that regard, but also that I can put it away sometimes for a while and I’m not sure the real artist can do that.  It’s a balance that’s for sure. It’s fine lines to do all the things they want to do. And bands are like marriages if you commit on a life-long level.

 I must compliment you too on the choice of Scott Boyer ‘s song (“Please Be With Me”) as the title proper for your book. It’s so evocative of the personal connection you generated throughout the book but every rendition of that tune I’ve ever heard (Cowboy, Eric Clapton) has that same haunting sensation. It’s a remarkable piece of music.

It is and I was surprised to learn the story of it from Scott because it was so spontaneous. He didn’t really know what he had. He’d written the lyrics the night before and I just love that how they were so tapped into themselves that magical things like that could happen any day. It’s like a once-in-lifetime song and its title kind of chose me. I didn’t really have a title and I really had a hard time coming up with one: it was a going to be a job to put a name on it. I started keeping lists of song lyrics and anything that would jump out as poetic from the band’s catalog and then somehow I put it aside thinking I would come up with a title when it’s right. Then when I was in the process of doing the box set (Skydog) and putting together all the tracks for that, I realized it was the last studio session Duane had done with other musicians apart from the Allman Brothers. It had stayed with me so strongly all my life, I go there just to look for him. And it struck me “What more would I say to him?” That’s really it.