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Early years
Duane was born in Nashville, Tennessee. At the
age of three, while the family was living near
Norfolk, Virginia, his father, Willis, a United
States Army sergeant, was murdered on December
26 in a robbery by a veteran he had befriended
that day. Geraldine "Mama A" Allman
and the boys moved back to Nashville. In 1957
they moved to Daytona Beach, Florida.
As
a teenager in 1960, Duane was motivated to take
up the guitar by the example of his younger
brother, Gregg, who had obtained a guitar after
hearing a neighbor playing country music standards
on an acoustic guitar. Gregg later said that
after Duane started playing, "he ... passed
me up like I was standing still."
Another
important influence had previously come in 1959
while the boys were back in Nashville visiting
family. They went to see a rock 'n' roll show
which included B.B. King, and both promptly
fell under the spell of the music. Gregg reports
that Duane turned to him in the middle of the
show and said, "We got to get into this."
Allman
Joys and Hour Glass
The Allman boys started playing publicly in
1961, joining or forming a number of small,
local groups. Shortly thereafter Duane quit
high school to stay home days and focus on his
guitar playing. Their band the Escorts eventually
became the Allman Joys. After Gregg graduated
from high school in 1965, the Allman Joys went
on the road, performing throughout the Southeast
and eventually being based in Nashville and
St. Louis.
The
Allman Joys morphed into another not-completely-successful
band, The Hour Glass, which moved to Los Angeles
in early 1967. There the Hour Glass did manage
to produce two albums. At this point Duane added
electric slide guitar to his repertoire, after
hearing Taj Mahal perform the Willie McTell
classic "Statesboro Blues", the group
featuring Jesse Ed Davis on slide; this was
later a signature tune for the Allman Brothers
Band. Duane used an empty glass Coricidin medicine
bottle, which he wore over his ring finger,
as a slide; this was later picked up by other
slide guitarists such as Bonnie Raitt and Gary
Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The
Hour Glass broke up in early 1968, and Duane
and Gregg went back to Florida, where they played
on demo sessions with the 31st of February,
a folk-rock outfit whose drummer was Butch Trucks.
Gregg returned to California to fulfill Hour
Glass obligations, while Duane jammed around
Florida for months but didn't get another band
going.
Session
musician
Duane's playing on the two Hour Glass albums
and an Hour Glass session in early 1968 at FAME
Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
had caught the ear of Rick Hall, owner of FAME.
In November 1968 Hall hired Duane to play on
an album with Wilson Pickett. Duane's work on
that album, Hey Jude (1968), got him hired as
a full-time session musician at Muscle Shoals
and brought him to the attention of a number
of other musicians, such as guitar great Clapton,
who later said, "I remember hearing Wilson
Pickett's 'Hey Jude' and just being astounded
by the lead break at the end. ... I had to know
who that was immediately - right now."
Duane's
performance on "Hey Jude" blew away
Atlantic Records producer and executive Jerry
Wexler when Hall played it over the phone for
him. Wexler immediately bought Duane's recording
contract from Hall and wanted to use him on
sessions with all sorts of Atlantic R&B
artists. While at Muscle Shoals, Duane was featured
on releases by a number of artists, including
Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Aretha Franklin,
Otis Rush, Percy Sledge, and jazz flautist Herbie
Mann. For his first Aretha sessions, Duane traveled
to New York, where in January 1969 he went as
an audience member to the Fillmore East to see
Johnny Winter and prophetically told fellow
Shoals guitarist Jimmy Johnson that in a year
he'd be on that stage; the Allman Brothers Band
indeed played the Fillmore that December.
Formation
of The Allman Brothers Band
The limits of full-time session playing frustrated
Duane. The few months in Muscle Shoals were
by no means a waste, however, because besides
meeting the great artists and other industry
professionals he was working with, Duane had
rented a small, secluded cabin on a lake and
spent many solitary hours there refining his
playing. Perhaps most significantly, at FAME
Duane got together with R&B and jazz drummer
Johnny Lee "Jai Johanny Johannson, Jai,
Jaimoe" Johnson, who came there to meet
Duane at the urging of the late Otis Redding's
manager, Phil Walden, who by now was managing
Duane and wanted to build a three-piece band
around him. Duane and Jaimoe got Chicago-born
and -raised bassist Berry Oakley to come up
from Florida and jam as a trio, but Berry was
committed to his rock band with guitarist Dickey
Betts, the Second Coming, and returned south.
Getting
fed up with Muscle Shoals, in March Duane took
Jaimoe with him back to Jacksonville, Florida,
where they moved in with Butch Trucks. Soon
a jam session of these three plus Betts, Oakley,
and Reese Wynans took place and forged what
all present recognized as a natural, or even
magical, bond. With the addition of brother
Gregg, called back from Los Angeles to sing
and replace Wynans on keyboards, at the end
of March 1969, the Allman Brothers Band was
formed. (Wynans became well known over a decade
later as organist with Stevie Ray Vaughan &
Double Trouble.) After a bit of rehearsing and
gigging, the sextet moved up to Macon, Georgia,
in April to be near Walden and his Capricorn
Sound Studios.
Success,
Layla, and tragedy
The Allman Brothers Band went on to become one
of the best and most influential rock groups
of the 1970s, described by Rolling Stone's George
Kimball in 1971 as "the best ... rock and
roll band this country has produced in the past
five years" [1]. After months of nonstop
rehearsing and gigging, including fondly remembered
free shows in Macon's Central Park and Atlanta's
Piedmont Park, the band was ready to settle
on the band name we know and to record. Their
debut album, The Allman Brothers Band, was recorded
in New York in September 1969 and released a
couple months later. In the midst of intense
touring, work began in Macon and Miami (Atlantic
South - Criteria Studios), and a little bit
in New York, on the ABB's second album, Idlewild
South Produced mostly by Tom Dowd, Idlewild
South was released in August 1970 and broke
ground for the ABB by quickly hitting the Billboard
charts.
A
group date in Miami, also that August, gave
Duane the chance to participate in Layla and
Other Assorted Love Songs. Clapton had long
wanted to meet Duane; when he heard that the
Allman Brothers were due to play in Miami, where
he had just started work on Layla with Dowd,
he insisted on going to see their concert, where
he met Duane. After the show the two bands--the
Allman Brothers Band and Derek and the Dominos--returned
to Criteria, where Duane and Eric quickly formed
a deep rapport during an all-night jam session.[2]
Duane wound up participating on most of the
album's tracks, contributing some of his best-known
slide guitar work as well as brilliant regular
lead.
Duane
never left the Allman Brothers Band, though,
despite being offered a permanent position with
Clapton. The Allman Brothers went on to record
At Fillmore East, one of the classic live albums
of rock and roll, in March 1971. Meanwhile,
Duane continued contributing session work to
other artists' albums whenever he could.
Tragically,
Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident only
a few months after the summer release and great
initial success of At Fillmore East. While in
Macon on October 29, during a band break from
touring and recording, Duane was riding toward
an oncoming truck that was turning well in front
of him but then stopped in midintersection.
Duane lost control of his Harley-Davidson Sportster
motorcycle while trying to swing left, possibly
striking the back of the truck or its crane
ball. Duane flew from his bike, which landed
on and skidded with him, crushing internal organs;
he died a few hours later.
Memorials
After
Duane's funeral and a few weeks of mourning,
the five surviving members of the Allman Brothers
Band carried on with the name, resuming live
performances and finishing the recording work
interrupted by Duane's passing. They called
this next album Eat a Peach for one of Duane's
interview lines, in response to the question
"How are you helping the revolution?":
"I'm hitting a lick for peace, and every
time I'm in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace."
Released in February 1972, this double album
contains a side of live and studio tracks with
Duane; two sides of "Mountain Jam,"
recorded with Duane at the Fillmore during the
same March stand as At Fillmore East; and a
side of tracks by the five-piece band.
A
year later, after Berry Oakley's death in Macon
following another motorcycle accident just a
few blocks from where Duane crashed, Duane's
body was laid to rest beside Berry's in Macon's
Rose Hill Cemetery. The variety of Duane's session
work and ABB bandleading can be heard to good
effect on two posthumous Capricorn releases,
Duane Allman: An Anthology (1972) and Duane
Allman: An Anthology Vol. II (1974). There are
also several archival releases of live Allman
Brothers Band performances from what is called
the band's Duane Era.
Shortly
after Duane's death, Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd
Skynyrd dedicated the song "Free Bird,"
which he initially wrote for a friend's wedding,
to the memory of Duane Allman.
In
1973 some fans carved the very large letters
"REMEMBER DUANE ALLMAN" in a sandstone
embankment along Interstate 20 near Vicksburg,
Mississippi. A photograph was published in Rolling
Stone magazine and in the Rolling Stone Illustrated
History of Rock & Roll; the carving itself
lasted for over ten years. [3]
In
1998 the Georgia state legislature passed a
resolution designating a stretch of State Highway
19 within Macon as "Duane Allman Boulevard"
in memory of him.
In
2003 Rolling Stone named Duane Allman as number
two on their list of the greatest guitarists
of all time, trailing only Jimi Hendrix.
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