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”). Maureen Ryan's Hollywood Takedown Book Storms to Top of the ChartsĪs narrator of his private life, Allman is uneven - honest but not particularly insightful.

My cross to bear book review