Duane Allman Quotes

I will take love wherever I find it and offer it to everyone who will take it.., seek knowledge from those wiser than me and try to teach those who wish to learn from me.

Do what you love and own who you are. Time is precious ad death is real. So is Art: It defies them both

This year I will be more thoughful of my fellow man, expect more effort in each of my endeavors professionally as well as personally, take love wherever I find it, and offer it to everyone who will take it. In this coming year I will seek knowledge from those wiser than me and try to teach those who wish to learn from me. I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can - Duane Allman

Duane was crazy --- which helps... he was always nine steps ahead of himself and everybody else. He was just a real hyper guy. He was the kind of guy that you felt had something to say. He was always on the cutting edge of everything --- from the clothes he wore to the music he played to the books he read. When he said something, everybody listened. If you ever saw him sitting down, he had a guitar across his lap and a book in his hand. So he was either reading or playing guitar --- always.

You have to utilize what's inside you to create what you want to create. If it doesn't come out pure, it's no good.

The Allman Brothers were from my hometown of Macon, Georgia, so requesting this song was a small lapse into provincialism. In 1972, the group’s guitarist, Duane Allman, had died when his motorcycle had crashed into the back of a peach truck. They subsequently named the album they had been working on, Eat A Peach. Its memorable lyrics, which came pouring out of Wisconsin’s machine at 9,000 feet in the California mountains, go as follows: Well, I’ve got to run to keep from hiding And I’m bound to keep on riding And I’ve got one more silver dollar But I’m not gonna’ let ‘em catch me, no Not gonna’ let ‘em catch the midnight rider. The song is a paen to freedom and independence, which, come to think about it, is kinda’ what the PCT is. And the God’s-honest-truth is that for the next two days this song carried me a total of fifty miles in an elevated state of morale.

It seemed impossible that someone who lived so fiercely, and with such hunger for all that life could offer, could be taken so suddenly.

Do what you love and own who you are. Time is precious and death is real. So is Art: It defies them both

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long.

Late in 1967, still struggling to write a keeper song, Allman found himself sitting in a room in Pensacola’s Evergreen Motel, holding Duane’s guitar, which was tuned to open E. “I picked up the guitar and didn’t know it was natural-tuned,” Allman recalls. “I just started strumming it and hit these beautiful chords. It was just open strings, then an E shape first fret, then moved to the second fret. This is a great example of the way different tunings can open up different roads to you as a songwriter.

Jim Dickinson: They started running down “Brown Sugar” the first night, but they didn’t get a take. I watched Mick write the lyrics. It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing! If you listen to the lyrics, he says, “Skydog slaver” (though it’s always written “scarred old slaver”). What does that mean? Skydog is what they called Duane Allman in Muscle Shoals, because he was high all the time. And Jagger heard somebody say it and he thought it was a cool word so he used it. He was writing about literally being in the South. It was amazing to watch him do it. The same thing happened with “Wild Horses.” Keith had “Wild Horses” written as a lullaby. It was about Marlon, about not wanting to leave home because he’d just had a son.

When I write something that I’m proud of, like ‘Elizabeth Reed,’ where does that melody come from? That melody is given to me because I’ve dedicated myself so much to that guitar.

Duane’s story can only end one way. It ends with goodbye. But you can live forever inside a goodbye. I have, all my life so far. What better way to live in longing than with a song, repeated endlessly? How many daughters can lift the needle of a record player and trace backward to the first groove in an album and hear their fathers, young, strong, and alive?

There ain’t no revolution, it’s evolution, but every time I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace.

I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can. I will take love wherever I find it and offer it to everyone who will take it. . . seek knowledge from those wiser and teach those who wish to learn from me.