Got Eleven Minutes

If you have eleven minutes you can listen to both clips below. Apparently YouTube has a ten minute limit and the song runs about 11. I guess you never know what military school is going to do for you, though he did drop out to stay home and play guitar. Greg graduated, I believe.

Skydog

Duane was born in Nashville, Tennessee. When he was three years old, 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 event occurred in 1959 when the boys were in Nashville visiting family. They attended a rock 'n' roll show in which blues artist B.B. King performed, 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."

Nice image here. This is an article on his first meeting Clapton, who was incredibly impressed with him and wanted him for Derek and the Dominoes after hearing him on Wilson Picket's cover of Hey Jude. Duane did a lot of studio work around that time. Oh, and he wasn't killed by a peach truck - it was a lumber truck that stopped in an intersection in front of him. An autopsy showed no signs of drugs or alcohol.

His first guitar. His last resting place.

In the early evening of October 29, 1971, he was returning via motorcycle to his home in West Macon, Georgia when, at the intersection of Hillcrest and Bartlett, a lumber truck turned and stopped in front of him blocking his path. He veered sharply and struck either the right corner of the truck or the wighted ball from a nearby crane. He later died of the injuires he sustained in the accident. A coroner's inquest into the event ruled his death "an unfortunate accident." No traces of alcohol or drugs were found in Duane Allman's system and no charges were filed against the driver of the truck.

In the summer of 1971, the Allman Brothers began work on their fourth album, Eat A Peach, but tired from constant touring, they took a break mid-way though the sessions. On 29 October, in an effort to avoid a collision with a truck, (Duane) Allman crashed his motor-cycle and died following three hours of intensive surgery. This tragic accident robbed music of one of its exceptional talents whose all-too-brief legacy reveals an individual of rare skill and humility.

Comments

[Guy_in_Georgia]

Thanks very, very much for the post, Dan. It brought back very fond memories, also some sad ones. I am a huge fan of the Allman Brothers, and Derek and the Dominoes.

[Phoenix]

Wow..... this is too fun. The Allman Brothers are my favorite. I've seen them four times each time leaving the hours-long concerts sort of floating on the guitar riffs that blasted us into neverland. Best show I ever saw was in Hampton-Rhodes where they played for four hours non-stop. I am serious. They did not take a break and those of us in the crowd were stoned out of our heads from the music and the pot that wafted throughout the auditorium making such clouds it was like special effects to make you think you really were in the twilight zone of the blues. They didn't play 'Whipping Post' and ended the concert to the howls and chants of 'PLAY WHIPPING POST'. It went on forever with everyone chanting and rocking that stadium to its foundations. All went dark and the audience hushed and we waited wondering when all of a sudden a spotlight shot through the darkness and exploded on the tall, lanky, white-leather-fringed outfit of the black bass player. They had him suspened way out and over the crowd by a crane that couldn't be seen in the dark, so with the first chords of 'Whipping Post' we thought it was coming from an angel of the blues suspended in midair. God, it was so fabulous. Needless to say, the crowd went ape. They played for about twenty minutes. Ow! In one concert, Gregg went nuts on the piano for fifteen minutes while the rest of the band stood around and grinned...... They were the last act to be helicoptered in at August Jam Festival at the Charlotte Motor Speedway - 300,000 of your closest friends gathered for three days determined to do drugs and listen to blues. I had a press pass for that and made a long movie of the whole thing.... Just amazing. Young people have no idea what the world of rock 'n roll was all about.....and I better stop because all I want to do is talk about it...... Thanks for the walk down Amnesia's Rock 'n Roll's Riff Lane. :)