Thursday, April 30, 2020

Gregg Allman: The Wild Times, Lost Years and Rebirth of a Southern-Rock Legend

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The Allman Brothers singer survived nearly 50 years of epic shows and unimaginable disaster – but there was one death he could never get over.

When I met Gregg Allman, he seemed like a ghost on guard. It was 1990, in Miami. The Allman Brothers Band had recently reunited for a second time. In the early Seventies, they single-handedly invented Southern rock, but their hallmark was live shows that mixed bedrock aggression and high-flown invention in ways no other group did. Their first breakup, in 1976, had been ugly; a reunion a few years later hadn’t taken. But here they were, nearly a decade later, improbably kicking off a new phase of a career that time and tragedy had not been able to kill off. 

That day in Miami, the band was easygoing and talkative when we met at producer Tom Dowd’s studio – but not Gregg. He wasn’t unfriendly; he just seemed dazed, wary. He had rarely been an eager interview subject since the band first became popular in 1971, and the death that same year of his older brother, Duane – one of the most brilliant guitarists in history – had left him stunned and heartsick. For years Gregg narcotized himself, then entered daily into drunken stupors.

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