Remembering Gregg Allman

By Derek Malone

In 1991, I saw a neo-noir film called Rush. It’s the story of two young undercover narcotics detectives, played by Jason Patrick and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who pose as junkies to bring down a drug kingpin played by a laconic, Gregg Allman. It was a period piece set in the world of Southern Rock; mid-1970’s Texas, rowdy honky-tonk bars with Harley Davidsons and muscle cars in the place of horses at the hitching post, all populated with longhaired men in fancy western shirts and cowboy hats.

Allman barely speaks a word in the entire film but he really didn’t have to. He was there mainly as a presence, holding court with the damned, strutting amongst the drunken and drugged-out habitué with an unspoken authority. He was an archetypical figure in pop culture by this point, and the audience knew that this was a world that he, perhaps more than anyone else, had created and personified.

Allman’s real life journey began as a white southern boy steeped in black music. He had a distinctive soulful blues singing voice that was both husky and full of anguish. He began his career in the business with the 60’s pop acts, Allman Joys, and then Hour Glass, bands he co-founded with his older brother, guitarist and session-great, Duane Allman. Though he is best known for the music of the Allman Brothers Band, the prototypical southern rock band which he toured with on and off for 45 years, it seemed that a part of him always longed to be a pop singer with hit songs on the radio, a desire at odds with the dark and mercurial persona he exhibited both on and off stage. To me, he always sounded like he was tied to the whipping post.

Perhaps Gregg Allman’s talent may never have been realized without his being constantly roiled by a life of personal tragedies that began almost from the very beginning when his father was shot to death by a hitchhiker when he was only two years old. As the late Irish writer Frank McCourt once wrote, “The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”

Early on, The Allman Brother’s Band partially embraced the hippy aesthetic, with the “People-can-you-feel-it? Love-is-everywhere” chorus of “Revival” on their second album, Idlewild South, and with the magic mushrooms and swirling psychedelia of their stage back-drops and promotional art. But my feeling was always that they were from a much darker commune of the spirit, one steeped in the blues, as properly understood.

A masterwork of the 1970’s, one that made a definite impression on yours truly was Allman Brothers Band Live At Fillmore East. Even the album cover was great; an iconic black and white photo, which captured the sextet in an unguarded jovial moment perched atop their gang-boxes of gear in a hardscrabble brick alleyway. It’s one of the great images in rock n’ roll.

Live at Filmore East was the Allman’s third release, the one that defined their career as a band, a double-record set containing only seven tracks, a compendium of the best recordings that could be salvaged over two consecutive July nights at promoter Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in Manhattan. Producer, Tom Dowd, described their new and eclectic style as that of “a rock ‘n’ roll band playing blues in the jazz vernacular.” It remains one of the most enduring live albums to this day.

It was the third track that closes out the first side, “Stormy Monday” that initially grabbed me when I first heard this record. Originally it was a T-Bone Walker number that had been revised by Bobby Bland before the Allmans turned in the final draft. It has to be one of the best blues ballads I’ve ever heard, anchored by Gregg’s vocals and organ-vamping. But it’s also just as much a jazz number that turns mellow and relaxing, dreamy and transporting, but with a few cathartic moments in the soloing. I cannot hear it without imagining myself in a dark, smoke-filled room, in a better place, in a better time.

Guitarist, Dickie Betts, would later say of the period, “That was our pinnacle. The Fillmore days are definitely the most cherished memories that I have. If you asked everybody in the band, they would probably say that.”

That fall, Duane Allman would be killed in a motorcycle accident. Bassist, Berry Oakley, was also killed the same way, a year later, three blocks away from the spot in Macon, Georgia where Duane had fallen. Mercifully, celebrity death didn’t strike this band three times.

Gregg and the band would continue on with the 1973 platinum-selling hit record, Brothers and Sisters (their best studio album) which was recorded simultaneously with his solo debut, Laid Back, which featured the classic anthem, “Midnight Rider.”

Allman was married seven times (Seven Brides for One Brother!) fathered five children and even dated porn-superstar Savannah, who shot herself to death in 1994. But it was his 1975 wedding with Cher that made him tabloid fodder for a time. She filed for divorce nine days later, but ended up sticking around long enough to record a duet album, Two The Hard Way, which was billed under the fantastic stage name, Allman and Woman. Music critics seem to be of the opinion that it’s one of the worst pop albums ever, so there’s no better reason imaginable to seek it out for yourself. Here’s them performing “Move Me” on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977.