The Allman Brothers Band song that Gregg Allman dedicated to Duane Allman
The Allman Brothers Band only had the actual Allman Brothers in it for roughly two years. Between 1969 and 1971, the Allmans released two studio albums and their classic live LP At Fillmore East, establishing themselves as one of the forefathers of the burgeoning southern rock genre. But only three months after the release of At Fillmore East, guitarist and band leader Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was just 24.
The Allman Brothers decided to continue, even though only Gregg Allman remained from the titular brothers. During the recording of their first album without Duane, 1972’s Eat a Peach, Gregg unearthed a demo that he had written before the band had formally existed. ‘Melissa’ was a song that Duane was positive toward… to an extent.
“[I] played it for my brother and he said, ‘It’s pretty good—for a love song’,” Gregg recalled in the book One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. “‘It ain’t rock and roll that makes me move my ass.’ He could be tough that way.” Still, Gregg would later call it “my brother’s favourite song that I ever wrote” in his memoir My Cross to Bear. The origins of the song date back all the way to Allman’s pre-Allman Brothers life.
“I wrote that song in 1967 in a place called the Evergreen Hotel in Pensacola, Florida,” Allman told the San Luis Obispo Tribune in November of 2006. “By that time I got so sick of playing other people’s material that I just sat down and said, ‘OK, here we go. One, two, three – we’re going to try to write songs.'”
“And about 200 songs later – much garbage to take out – I wrote this song called ‘Melissa.’ And I had everything but the title,” Allman said. “I thought (referring to lyrics): ‘But back home, we always run… to sweet Barbara’ – no. Diane…? We always run… to sweet Bertha.’ No, so I just kind of put it away for a while.”
“So one night I was in the grocery store – it was my turn to go get the tea, the coffee, the sugar and all that other shit… and there was this Spanish lady there and she had this little toddler with her – this little girl,” Allman remembered. “And I’m sitting there, getting a few things and what have you. And this little girl takes off, running down the aisle. And the lady yells, ‘Oh, Melissa! Melissa, come back, Melissa!’ And I went, ‘Oh – that’s it.'”
“I forgot about half the stuff I went for, I went back home and, man, it was finished, only I couldn’t really tell if it was worth a damn or not because I’d written so many bad ones,” he added. “So I didn’t really show it to anybody for about a year. And then I was the last one to get to Jacksonville – I was the last one to join the band that became the Allman Brothers. And my brother sometimes late at night after dinner, he’d say, ‘Man, go get your guitar and play me that song – that song about that girl.’ And I’d play it for him every now and then.”
When he was in dire financial straits, Gregg had actually sold the publishing rights to ‘Melissa’ to producer Steve Alaimo for $250. Allman spent the money on a plane ticket out of Los Angeles, but his lack of ownership over the song kept him from incorporating it into the Allman Brothers’ early repertoire. It was only after Duane’s tragic death that Gregg felt compelled to reclaim the song, buying back the rights and recording it for the album, making it one of three songs on Eat a Peach that didn’t feature Duane.
“After my brother’s accident, we had three vinyl sides done of Peach, so I thought well we’ll do that, and then on the way down there I wrote ‘Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More’. I wrote that for my brother,” Allman said. “We were all in pretty bad shape. I had just gotten back from Jamaica and I was weighing at about 156, 6-foot-1-and-a-half – I was pretty skinny. So we went back down there, got in the studio and finished the record. And the damn thing shipped gold.”
