The Allman Brothers Band had been flying excessive in 1971, as they adopted two studio releases with the defining At Fillmore East reside album that was on its technique to changing into their first platinum document. The live performance set stood at No.46 in its fifteenth week on the Billboard 200 when the dreadful information arrived, on October 29, that Duane Allman had been killed in a motorbike accident.
Duane was a mere 24 years outdated when the accident occurred close to Macon, Georgia, throughout a interval when the band had been between touring and recording commitments. The Allmans had not too long ago accomplished a tour of the West Coast and had been making ready for a brand new East Coast run.
“According to police reports,” ran the Billboard story, “he apparently lost control of his motorcycle to avoid crashing into a tractor-trailor. He died on the operating table at Middle Georgia Medical Center, three hours after the accident.” Mockingly, the identical difficulty of Billboard reported that the Fillmore East album had gone gold.
Tragic information arrives
In 2014, Duane’s daughter Galadrielle had her e book about her father, Please Be With Me, printed by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random Home. The e book movingly describes the scene within the hospital, when the household had been initially informed that he would survive, solely to be crushed by the information that Allman had not survived the surgical procedure.
Stoically, after mourning Allman’s loss of life, the band carried on, releasing the mixed studio and reside landmark Eat A Peach little greater than three months later. As their hordes of devotees know, tragedy would go to the Allmans once more on the finish of 1972, when Berry Oakley died in an analogous crash, eerily solely three blocks from the positioning of Duane’s accident. However the reminiscence of the departed members of the group was, and continues to be, celebrated by way of the Allman Brothers Band’s unquestioned place within the pantheon of American music.
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