If Allman was a prickly bandmate, he was an even tougher romantic partner, marrying six times, most famously to Cher from 1975 to 1979. The unraveling of the band becomes as intriguing as its rise. Allman captures how fame and money - especially money - corrupted relationships and eroded the simple joy of playing together. He has empathy for Oakley, who some say grieved himself to death after Duane’s accident: “I don’t think he wanted to die I just think he didn’t want to live.” Allman candidly admits regretting not doing more to help him.Īllman is less generous to the survivors, portraying founding guitarist Dickey Betts as a petty tyrant and Capricorn Records co-founder Phil Walden as a mediocre businessman who claimed undue credit for the band’s early success. While clearly shattered by Duane’s death, he is frank about their relationship and resists the urge to romanticize the “What if Duane had lived?” alternative. Allman tells this part of the tale in a spare but moving dozen pages. The twin deaths of Duane and Oakley transform the band’s story from interesting to legendary, haunting its glory years. Two girlfriends also commit suicide after Allman breaks up with them. only two weeks after the band’s third album, At Fillmore East, went gold.ĭuane’s death marked Allman as rock’s Ted Kennedy, a guy whose whole life was shadowed by tragedy: Father murdered, brother dies, and eerily, less than 13 months later, the band’s bassist, Berry Oakley, is killed in a motorcycle accident three blocks from the spot where Duane met his fate. 29, 1971, when Duane died in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Ga. Only four photos chart the entire arc of the ’60s: the brothers’ first band, the Beatles-imitating Escorts in 1965, which morphed into the mod Allman Joys in 1966, then the psychedelic Hour Glass in 1967, and finally the long-haired/Southern rock Allman Brothers Band in 1969. The pictures he shares from this period reveal their own story. John (Allman was unimpressed), drink beers with The Marshall Tucker Band, hang out with Jackson Browne and spot Eric Clapton watching them play a free concert in Miami Beach. But as a chronicler of the band’s exuberant rise and tragic dissolution, however, he is fabulous.Īllman beautifully re-creates the rock scene of the mid-’60s as the brothers’ various bands move from regional clubs to national venues like the Fillmore. (The story begins with the murder of his father in 1949, the victim of a carjacking gone wrong, when Gregg was 2 and his brother, Duane, was 3.) And he isn’t especially adept at describing how he and his brother developed their signature musical style (“The more I did, the more I learned”). Tom Hanks' 'The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece': Listen to an Excerpt Featuring Holland Taylor (Exclusive)Īs narrator of his private life, Allman is uneven - honest but not particularly insightful.

My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman