The first time I didn’t see the Allman Brothers was also, by the strangest of coincidences, the first time Duane Ailman saved my life, or at least a large portion of it. I was just back from an extended, forced stay outside this country and was finally repatriated one misty morning in San Francisco. This was still in the Sixties and, since I had faithfully read my Time Magazine International. Edition , I knew that San Francisco was awash in flowers and that the Grateful Dead would be tuning up for a love-in just about the time I would be arriving at the corner of Haight & Ashbury. I had a lot of money on me when I landed, so I immediately hired a taxi at day rates. I looked down the row of yellow cabs until I found what I needed a large spade driver wearing a dashiki. He would know where the action was. I wanted a grand tour.

In the country where I had been living, it was commonplace to hire a cab and driver for days at a time. The driver also served as your messenger, bodyguard, guide, and general savant who could protect you from your own ignorance. The big spade at the airport thought I was crazy, but agreed to a day’s hire for a hundred bucks. I leaped into the cab: and yelled to Gerald, the driver, to “take me to the Haight!” His broad shoulders shook with laughter as he shut off the engine and turned to me: “Now, you don’ really want ho Haight. I'm gone have to tell you a few thangs, I see that rat now."

Old Gerald probably saved my life right there. If I had jumped into the first can and rushed to the H-A, me and my European clothes and my bankroll would’ve been a soggy, bloody mess in a New York minute. But he knew that I was ready only for a little mild hippies action and not the: standard Haight speedfreak shakedown, mugging and knifing. Furthermore, he knew that B.B. King was headlining at the Fillmore that night and he sensed, accurately, that no self-respecting honky who aspired to hippiehood could refuse a BB concert. Got to learn about those blues. Exactly.

Gerald gave me the tour: a “boutique” for some California hippie clothes, grocery store for some sippin’ wine, a pound of barbeque ribs in Oakland, a quick marijuana score, and then a high-speed, door-locked run through the Haight.

By the time he dropped me at the Fillmore, Gerald and I were staggeringly wasted but he. had given me a thorough education about “that mess they calls hippahs.” I tipped him a fifty and reeled by Bill Graham’s rent-a-goons into the limo and stopped to cackle hysterically at the spectacle of a barrel of free apples for the hippies. While I did so, the opening act, a young Southern band known as the Allman Brothers finished up what might have been a good set and walked off to desultory applause from the apple-eating hippies. I was trying to find a beer and missed them by a good 30 seconds. Well, what the hell. Probably missed some dizzy hippah band playing recycled Robert Johnson or some damn thing. I was there to see The Man! Yessir, BB. I sagged to the floor near the stage and waited for that Blues Boy. King. He came on, played letterperfect, and I was disappointed enough to leave in fifteen minutes. 1 bounced off every wall and when 1 hit the sidewalk, Gerald’s baggie popped out of my coat pocket and landed with a soft plop on the concrete. I just stared dumbly. Besides the weed, the transparent baggie contained several brightlycolored capsules and triangular shaped pills. A real cop — not just a Graham strong-arm — idly noticed it and started over to inspect that deadly little package. I was frozen — one of those nightmares where your limbs turn to lead — and waited to watch myself being hauled away to the back room to be rubber-hosed. Suddenly, a rawboned hippie with orange hair and a walrus mustache ambled over from a limousine he was about jo enter and he aggressively engaged the cop in conversation.

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A Personal Testament of Road Dues

“Say, my man,” he said, “we got us a lee tie problem ovah heah.” The cop, confused, looked from me to the hippie. He decided to go check out the limo: bigger game there. I scooped up the baggie and ran like hell. Many months later, I would pick up an album cover and recognize a face on it: a Southern hippie with a walrus mustache. Duane Allman.

By then I knew who the Allman Brothers were. I had also moved back to the southern part of the United States, where life’s rhythms and paces and patterns meshed more closely with my own. Duane Allman, meanwhile, was fighting to make it respectable again to be southern and white. The regionalism and elitism he found in certain circles in California and New York sent him back to Georgia, except when he took that monster band on the road. Then, any sequined, protohip poseur who talked through his nose and then looked down it at these southern boys would get popped in a second. Only the fact that Duane was the best guitar player in America and leader of the best rock and roll band in America enabled him to get away with being southern. Even the most flagrant cultural bigots "Couldn’t ignore that, couldn’t ignore that, incred ible sound. Instead, the cultural rednecks fought dirty. Well, they would say, it’s inadequate band but you know they can barely read or write. Titter. Just white trash, you know. No indeed, they could never be like us, our snug little circle with the best dope and our intellectual conversation. O look — there’s Viva! Hel-lo, dear. Is Andy coming tonight? O what a shame. Excuse me, dear. I see Lance. O hello Lance...

I didn’t have any use for any of that cultural redneckism, that automatic curl of the lip or raise of an eyebrow when the slightest trace of a southern accent was heard in cultivated circles on either coast. I imagined that Duane didn’t either. I had fought all my life against rednecks in the South and all they stood for: intolerance, incestuous smugness, inability to see any farther than the tip one’s nose, and baseless egotism.

Duane and Gregg, more than anything else, returned a sense of worth to South. Instead of being automaticconditioned to accept any no-talent band from either coast, kids in the South finally had cultural heroes of own. Phil Walden and Capricorn Records and Wet Willie and Marshall can thank Duane Allman for that. You no longer had to fcWallow the image of yourself as a nose-picking, retarded, illiterate Snopes. Duane moved a whole generation of southern kids uptown. Up from the back of the bus. If the best rock and roll band in the country lived figuratively just down the road from you, why, brutha, you didn’t have to take no shit off nobody. You just might wanta pick up a git-tar yourself and show Jerry Garcia what he’s been missing. It was confident music, full of the South’s rhythms and carrying a sense of freedom, a Wide-open feeling of room to move around in. Unlike much rock music of late, it was not constructed music, not confined in any way.

Certain music, certain songs formed an unconscious soundtrack for my life then, as must happen with everyone’s. Where I used to wake in the morning and put on Bringing It All Back Home, I found myself now waking up with Idlewild South. If I were driving across the country, I carefully assembled cassettes of highway music and discovered that it was all Sir Douglas Quintet or Allman music: I began avoiding certain friends whose personal soundtracks consisted of the Dead or the Airplane. I made new friends who kept the bruthas on their boxes. “Whipping Post,” we knew, was a far preferable excess to “Turn on Your Lovelight.” More fun, too. “Statesboro Blues,” as everybody knew, would get you across town faster than the Jefferson Starship could. What could be more important, after all, than finding music that complemented your life? Music that worked withyou instead of against your personal grain. Just like a new pair of shoes or new rubber for the Chevy. You could move around a lot more easily.

After my money ran out and I had to think about earning a living (something my old starship-dead circle couldn’t understand — redneckism coming at me from every direction), I wandered into the position of traveling around, talking to rock musicians, and writing about them. Ill-paying, although easy enough work that came to be as boring as hanging sheetrock.

Me and my Sony moved around the country with a small but essential collection of cassettes to break the boredom: mid-Sixties Dylan and Stones, all of Sir Douglas, all of the Allmans, and Hank Williams to relieve the tedium of all that. It was certainly a glamorous life: plodding through an endless series of Holiday Inns, interviewing quartets of 18-year-olds who wanted to talk about the cosmos. Occasionally, I would grow irritated and tell them, look, nobody gives a fuck what the Pink Sludge thinks about mankind. Hurry up and take your dope — sniff it, shoot it, swallow it, kiss it, shove it up your ass— and answer these here questions and then you can go back to your comic books. Leave the cosmos alone. It ain’t interested in you. Give it a break.

Sometimes the only way I could purge myself of the ennui was by storming back to the room, turning the bruthas up all the way, throwing down a couple six-packs and cursing Charles Reich for the goddam pissant he is and that went double for all the little green pissants he let loose on the land. Fuck ’em all. Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More.

It wasn’t always that bad but often enough was so dismal that I became very selective as to whom I would write about: I came to prefer someone in whom I had absolutely no interest, who produced such ephemeral music that it just didn’t matter.

For that reason, I had no desire to meet the Allmans, anymore than I had wanted to meet Dylan or the Stones. Hank Williams was safe, being cold in the grave these many years. There could be no point in meeting on artificial terms, someone who really mattered. Nothing could come of it but disappointments, depressing motel-room interviews, shattered illusions, unwanted confidences. Thomas Pynchon was right in hiding himself away. No interviews; therefore, no misquotes, no wise-ass Rex Reeds of the rock generation prying in his cupboards, looking in his refrigerator, documenting the frayed cuffs and unshaven face and stale sandwiches under the couch and beer cans tossed in a heap in the corner. Better to be invisible. Just throw the book or record out to the hungry maws of the masses and let the little son of a bitch live or die of its own strengths and weaknesses. How could you discuss V or Gravity's Rainbow on the Carson Show? Or Idlewild South?

Duane and Gregg, I thought, were people like that: with them, the music was all that mattered and any attempt to go beyond that would result in misfortune.

That’s partly why, when I happened to be in New York in the summer of 1971,1 passed up an invitation to watch the bruthas close Fillmore East.

I halfway wanted to see them but late in the afternoon a friend who worked at Atlantic brought over a bootleg tape of Duane’s solo sessions in Muscle Shoals in 1969. I called my buddy who had the Fillmore tickets and told him I wasn’t going. He came by and told me what a fool I was by passing up the cultural event of the year. I declined: rather listen to Duane’s tapes. All right, stupid, he says. He cracked up his car on the way to the show and was badly injured! Thanks again, Duane. I’ll catch your show yet.

I never did, though. I got busy the rest of the summer and the Allmans took their first vacation. October 29th, Duane took his bike out for the last time. I was sitting in a Texas beer joint when I heard about his death. Well, I thought, that’s that. He done smoked up the road for the last time. What was he thinking, I wondered, when he swerved to miss that truck and thd bike started going over and he knew he was in for a bad one. Did he try to lay it down or was it too late to attempt a slide? Was he maybe realizing it was all over and did he start to sing “I Got the Key to the Highway” as his band would later sing over his broken body at the funeral? Be nice irony, I thought, as I wandered over to the jukebox and looked for a bruthas tune to play. Not even one there. Had to settle for Hank Williams, but that was close enough.

It was no coincidence that Duane’s bassist, Berry Oakley, went out a year later on his bike. Their music was born of the highway and there was no place else to end it. Most rock has been city-bred, feeding on the city’s closeness and raucous patterns and randomness and sudden violence. The Allman’s though, has always belonged to the highway, to the clean open road. It was almost a throwback to the hipster’s road sensibility: a fast car, a loud radio, alcohol or dope, a straight road, and a city to reach. For a time. Before taking off again. They had the Southern rural blues and country feel in their music but it was mostly traveling music: a constant, incessant rhythm of rubber biting asphalt, that ringing whine overlaid with the deep pounding of a piston engine close to red-lining. Always just a few RPM from blowing all to hell, but never doing so. Motoreycles are the closest you can get. The two-wheelers will get you to the edge, close to the dark ribbon of concrete and the rush of the wind and the deafening roar of the engine. Closer to an ecstatic oblivion.

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Since Duane Allman aAd Berry Oakley died, I have even less of a desire to see the surviving band or to meet them. Sometimes I feel almost close to them, when I’m on a deserted West Texas highway late at night and I can push the gas pedal to the floor and turn up the tape and reach for a cold one.

It’s not the same band, though, and I’m not the same person. We’re both older and a little more cautious now. Eyewitness accounts of their stadium shows, convince me that success has smoothed the bruthas’ tough edges, that once they got to the top of the mountain they found no graceful way to either stay on top or descend.

Even so, I find myself thinking of Duane Allman lately — especially when I hear the strong rumors about difficulties with Gregg and trouble within the bruthas’ ranks. The same surge of second generation Southern bands that is strengthening Capricorn is weakening the Allmans’ popular appeal. I know — I sense, rather, that Gregg will be gone one of these days, or that his music’ll leave him, which would be the same. It’s been nearly 18 months since their last album, and this year we’re likely to see only a live jam, if anything. Audiences seem to anticipate an Allmans concert as they would Evel Knievel’s last jump. If Gregg can’t carry the load, then there will be po more bruthas at all, bruh. No more Kennedy brothers of the rock world. No more eatin’ a peach, no more idlewildin’ south. No more ramblin’ music. No more. Every band belongs tt) an era and theirs has all but been taken from them.