Going to the grocery store may have given the Allman Brothers their greatest track in ‘Melissa’
Waves of inspiration come from the strangest of places, and for Gregg Allman, The Allman Brothers Band wouldn’t have had one of their finest moments had it not been for a trip to the supermarket.
Now, getting away from the studio and clearing your head might be the sort of thing you’re imagining Allman to have partaken in here, but it happened to be that the supermarket had another customer in it who would change the course of a song that was on the verge of being discarded.
We’re not talking about Allman laying eyes on someone who he was completely entranced by, whose allure was hard to draw his eyes away from, but we’re talking about a misbehaving little girl, who happened to have a name that fit perfectly with the song that he was ready to give up on.
In 1967, when he was recording alongside the rest of the band in Florida, he began working on a song that had everything fall into place pretty quickly, with the exception of a name for the character of his desire. Allman wrote in his memoir, My Cross to Bear, that “there was a woman that I had really wished was there to bring me some happiness”, but rather than use her actual name, he was searching for the right name with three syllables that fit at the end of the line: “But back home you’ll always run with sweet…”
It must have been frustrating to be so close to finishing a track off, but for a simple name, and in an effort to distract himself from the annoyance of having almost finished the track, he found himself heading to get coffee and juice at a virtually empty shop. However, also shopping there was an elderly woman and her excitable granddaughter, and when the youngster ran down the aisle that Allman was minding his own business on, he heard her grandmother call after her: “Don’t run away, Melissa!”
“I could’ve gone over there and kissed that woman,” Allman later wrote in his memoir, coming to the realisation that ‘Melissa’ was the perfect three-syllable name for him to put in the empty space he was trying to fill. However, as inspirational as this small moment may have proven to be, that didn’t mean that Allman thought he was looking at his next hit.
In fact, he was eager to have the song off his hands initially and decided to sell the publishing rights for ‘Melissa’, looking to make a quick buck in a time of dire need. It took until 1971, when Gregg’s brother and bandmate, Duane, died in a traffic accident, for him to realise the error of his ways. And knowing that it was one of his favourite songs that Gregg had written, an effort had to be made by The Allman Brothers Band’s manager, Phil Walden, to reacquire the publishing rights.
The track would eventually find its way onto their fourth album, Eat A Peach, and went on to become one of their biggest hits, but had it not been for a trip to the shop and a sudden realisation of the song’s brilliance four years after it was written, we may never have been fortunate enough to hear it at all.
