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galadrielle allman - please be with me (atl pop excerpt) lyrics

rock festivals were a growing venture in the summer of 1970, and the brothers played two back-to-back in july: the second annual atlanta pop festival and the love valley festival in north carolina. the events felt like natural extensions of the free park concerts, and they were often so overwhelmed with crowds, they became free by default when the gates were crashed

the second atlanta pop festival took place july 3–5 in a soybean field beside the middle georgia raceway in a little town called byron, about ninety miles from atlanta. the promoter, alex cooley, was hoping for a crowd of 100,000, about the size of the first festival he had promoted the year before, but estimates of the crowd went as high as 400,000 people, making the festival one of the largest gatherings in georgia history. for fourteen dollars you could spend two days seeing b. b. king, jimi hendrix, ravi shankar, procol harum, and a dozen other bands, including the hampton grease band. but soon the plywood fence that had been constructed to contain the festival was trampled as the crowd grew. from the stage, the crowd looked like a roiling, colorful sea. the summer sun was blazing, over one hundred degrees by late morning, and people wandered naked and jumped in the stream by the road to cool off. tents were pitched under cover of a pecan grove beside the field

by friday morning the highway looked like a parking lot all the way back to atlanta, and duane was somewhere stranded in the middle of it an hour before he was supposed to be onstage. willie perkins was about to lose his mind when he saw duane strut through the back gate and strap on his guitar moments before the music started. he had abandoned his dogsled and convinced a guy on a motorcycle to ride the shoulder all the way to the gig. he barely had time to grin in willie’s direction before taking the stage. there was only one problem. he didn’t have his coricidin bottle. he must have left it in the car

the announcer had a question for the crowd: “does anyone got like a little finger-sized prescription bottle? a gl-ss bottle? like a pill bottle? like a coricidin bottle or something like that? a gl-ss bottle we can slip on a guitarist’s finger? or a wine bottle with a long neck?” ellen hopkins remembers carefully dragging the broken neck of a wine bottle against concrete, trying to smooth the jagged edge. in the footage you can see the rough dark green cylinder on duane’s ring finger pressing against the strings of his goldtop les paul

the allman brothers played two sets, one to open the festival on the afternoon of the third and one to close it on the night of the fifth, and while there may have been more famous musicians on the bill, they were the hometown heroes. their performance was captured by a film crew, which was a very rare occurrence. although legal wrangling has kept the footage under wraps for more than forty years, i have seen a small portion of the film and it is the most vivid doc-mentation of the band at that time. it is electrifying. there is even a brief panning shot down a dusty path that shows linda and berry walking together hand in hand, smiling and waving to the camera. linda saw it for the first time only recently and cried in shock and grat-tude

then the announcer launches into a bizarre riff of his own to introduce them:

“ou know in life magazine they had some pictures of the human egg being fertilized and when i was in school they used to give us this shuck that it’s a big race, you know, and the sperm go out and as they race to the egg and the first one to get there goes into the egg. that isn’t the way it happens. life magazine . . . this swedish nurse or norwegian photographer took pictures of what happens and what really happens is the sperms surround the egg, the female ovum, and they twirl it with their tails at a rate of eight times per minute in this primordial dance, and this actually happens you know, eight times and, eight is the sign of infinity, right, it goes like this, you know, and that’s where we all come from is this dance, so life isn’t a race, it’s not competing with anyone, it’s playing together like all men play together, and these are the allman brothers and they play together, allman brothers . . . all men!”

duane kicks into “statesboro blues,” his knees bouncing, while berry shifts his weight in a s-xy shuffle, smiling like a kid. d-ckey’s head and shoulders dip, his cowboy hat shielding his face from the sun. the three of them dance with their axes, loose and limber, as comfortable in the flow as swimmers carried by a tide. jaimoe holds his drumstick at an angle in the jazz style and bites his lower lip in concentration, while butch looks straight out into the crowd, the smallest hint of anxiety in his eyes as he drives the band forward. you can see how they amazed one another when their faces bloom into smiles of wonder and encouragement

gregg sips from a can of pabst blue ribbon and sings without lifting his eyes from his fingers. he looks so young it is startling. deep into “dreams,” the crowd below dances in undulating patterns

donna was completely overwhelmed by the playing. duane was on fire; she had never seen him play so freely. when he walked off-stage toward her, she tried to find a way to express how the music made her feel but could only say, “you were so amazing.”

duane bent his head down to her and said quietly, “i’m glad you liked it.”

he retreated to the comfort of a nearby camper and fell heavily asleep. when donna tried to wake him to watch jimi hendrix play, he was too exhausted to move. as she walked back to her spot on the side of the stage, jimi p-ssed her in the dark with his guitar in his hand and said h-llo. duane missed seeing hendrix play “the star-spangled banner” at midnight under a sky full of fireworks. just a couple of months later, jimi was gone

two months before, on may 4, a protest at ohio’s kent state university against u.s. military operations in cambodia ended in violence when members of the national guard opened fire on student protesters, k!lling four and wounding nine. kim payne told me that the only time he ever saw my father completely unhinged with rage was after he read about the k!llings in the morning paper. to him it was the ultimate breach of trust. he paced and growled and told everyone they had to fight back, to arm themselves and go after them. a fundamental line had been crossed and now it was war. he was breathing fire, and everyone was a little stunned by his p-ssion and menace. he wanted to round up whatever weapons they could find, get in the van, and drive to washington, d.c. no one knew what to say to calm him back down. he paced and ranted until he wore himself out

even if the purpose was peaceful, any large crowd had a quiet undercurrent of tension after kent state. the news from vietnam loomed over these gatherings, too. music was a galvanizing force against violence, and the south was changing because of it. bands and their multiracial audiences were directly challenging the social conservatism of previous generations. it felt like a major accomplishment to pull off a concert of this size without incident. when richie havens played “here comes the sun” to greet the dawn on the final morning, he seemed to be summoning hopefulness for everyone

- galadrielle allman lyrics

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