`Sky Man' played last tune 25 years ago for Allmans

Web posted November 17, 1996

Associated Press

MACON - They called him ``Sky Man.''

In the late 1960s, he first began hanging around the celebrated studios of Muscle Shoals, Ala., where he would record with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and King Curtis.

Duane Allman must have seemed equal parts enigma, boy wonder and secret weapon.

Like a precious few Mississippi Delta and Chicago legends, Mr. Allman's mercurial guitar playing channeled a soaring new vision of the blues.

This skinny, longhaired Southern boy was uncannily gifted beyond his years: a musician like no other.

Yet he wasn't destined to enjoy a long career. Twenty-five years ago last month, in Macon, the city he helped put on the musical map, Mr. Allman was killed in a traffic accident. He was riding his motorcycle through the fading light of early evening when a truck cut in front of him. Trying to avoid a collision, he skidded and crashed. He died a few hours later; he was 24.

The Allman Brothers Band is the group the guitarist founded with brother Gregg on vocals and Hammond B-3 organ, guitarist Dickey Betts, bassist Berry Oakley and drummers Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson.

The band was on the cusp of real stardom.

The group's third album, At Fillmore East, had recently gone gold. It was, and is, the pinnacle of the band's achievement. Some say it quite possibly is the greatest live rock album ever. At Fillmore East is considered a galvanic and galvanizing testimony to the glories of improvisation and communication on a bandstand. It is as indebted to the astral cries of saxophonist John Coltrane as to the earthy imperatives of urban blues. The album is at once an apotheosis of clean, melodic country picking and open-ended jams that possesses the intensity of Afro-Caribbean rhythms - amplified to the rafters.

Mr. Allman's death would be tragically echoed one year later when Mr. Oakley, also 24, fatally crashed into a city bus. His demise came at a time when the ranks of rock 'n' soul heroes were being thinned prematurely: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding and Mr. Coltrane had all preceded Mr. Allman in the obituaries, casting a shadow that reached between decades.

Two years of hard touring and nightly gigs that sometimes stretched toward daylight had made the Allman Brothers a sensation. This band from the American South didn't have to embrace the blues, jazz, gospel, country and rhythm-and-blues sounds it so passionately synthesized. It already was steeped in this music; the musicians grew up alongside it.

``They weren't trendy,'' said Phil Walden, who built his Capricorn Records empire around the band's success, and whose fortunes have since sunk and risen in tandem with the group.

Like the Allmans, revitalized in the '90s by new blood and the enthusiasm of a young audience, Mr. Walden weathered dark seasons of dysfunction and substance abuse. He once again heads his record company, which has developed a niche for alternative rock groups such as 311 and Cake.

``You had all these British groups dressed up in Edwardian finery,'' Mr. Walden continued. ``But there was never any attempt by the Allmans to be a show band. They played music. On occasions, when they were allowed to, for hours.''

Even Eric Clapton, whom fans knew as ``god,'' is diminished in Mr. Allman's presence on Layla, Mr. Clapton's greatest recording. The song's introductory signature notes were Mr. Allman's idea, Butch Trucks recalled in a 1990 Rolling Stone interview. It makes you wonder what the two bluesmen might have concocted together in later life.

Instead, the song - Mr. Clapton's agonized, searing lament for the love of his best friend's wife - can also be heard as a kind of memorial for Duane.

``The funny thing is,'' Mr. Trucks said, flashing back to the months before Mr. Allman's death, ``when Duane came back from (rhythm-and-blues saxophonist) King Curtis' funeral (in August 1971), he was thinking a lot about death, and he said many times, `If anything ever happens to me, you guys better keep it going. Put me in a pine box, throw me in the river and jam for two or three days.'°''

We tried taking six months off after his death, but we were all just getting too crazy from it. There wasn't any way to deal with it but to play again.''

Without Duane, however, it wasn't the same band. The one-page entry on the Allman Brothers in the 1976 first edition of ``The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll'' is unsparing in its view of the group before and after Duane's death: ``The sad thing about the Allman Brothers Band is that, by the time they became really popular, they were no longer very good.''

Recent years have seen an encouraging return to old-fashioned form by the band, which has persevered despite the sometimes difficult behavior of its enduring principals, Betts and Gregg Allman. The energy of new guitarist Warren Haynes and bassist Allan Woody has sparked a renaissance.

Listeners can appreciate Duane Allman's legacy in several ways. The manner in which he and his bandmates established themselves as Georgia rock 'n' roll stars created a precedent for the emergence of R.E.M., a band that was in many ways the antithesis of the Allman Brothers, in Athens during the 1980s.

And, as the founder of the ``length-equalsstrength'' school of guitar solos, Allman has inspired generations of far lesser mortals to emulate him and fail miserably - if often earning piles of money in the process.

To hear the Allmans' twin lead guitar style adapted with thought and precision is a thing of beauty; as a performance tactic, it's rescued Bob Dylan's concerts from the mushmouthed doldrums.

The last time Walden saw Duane Allman, Walden praised his musicianship. ``That's the scary part,'' he recalled Duane saying. ``I don't know if I can get any better.''