Galadrielle Allman is the producer of Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective (Rounder Records). She lives in Berkeley, California. This is her first book.
“Duane Allman was my big brother, my partner, my best friend. I
thought I knew everything there was to know about him, but
Galadrielle’s deep and insightful book came as a revelation to me,
as it will to everyone who reads it.”—Gregg Allman
“Poignant and illuminating . . . brings Duane Allman to life
in a way that no other biography will ever be able to
do.”—BookPage
“Galadrielle Allman offers a moving and poetic portrait of her late
father.”—Rolling Stone
“[Allman’s] descriptions and scenes are vivid, even cinematic. . .
. The pleasure of reading Please Be With Me lies as much in its
lyrical prose as in its insider anecdotes.”—Newsweek
“An elegantly written, heartfelt account.”—The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
“Evokes a wistful, elegiac atmosphere; fans of the ’70s music scene
may find it indispensable.”—San Jose Mercury News
“A compelling and intimate portrait of Duane.”—The Hollywood
Reporter
“Illuminating.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Frequently touching . . . Readers will come away feeling more
connected to the man and his music.”—Publishers Weekly
“If you have ever been part of a family that has no photograph left
behind to record its wholeness, you know what the absence of that
picture does to you: Its nonexistence is itself a portrait of an
incomplete heart that doesn’t contain you. Galadrielle Allman grew
up in the territory of that loss, trying to understand a father who
held her but who she never got to hold in return. Her account of
the life of Duane Allman—rock and roll’s most lyrical guitarist—is
the most moving music biography I’ve ever read. Better than that,
Galadrielle has uncovered the heart and motivations, the desolation
and saving graces, of the man, and lays it plain in a born-to-write
southern voice. She has looked into absence, and from it she has
salvaged two hearts: her father’s and her own.”—Mikal Gilmore,
author of Shot in the Heart
“ ‘You can live forever inside a goodbye,’ Galadrielle Allman
knows. But then you embrace it, explore it, and call forth its
witnesses. In lyrical prose, and with love and wisdom, the
now-mature daughter of guitar legend Duane Allman, who died at
twenty-four when she was two, meditates on his outsized grip on her
life, and retraces that life, and her mother’s, sending us to the
South at the end of the sixties, when girls were hapless hippie
goddesses, music was male and muscular, and even redneck culture
was being transformed. But beyond that vibrant portrait is a
comfort. We all idealize someone who left us long ago; we all
romanticize some memory. This story invites us to savor our own
secret intersection of nostalgia and emotional mercy, and it feels
very, very good to have soulful, elegant company as we do.”—Sheila
Weller, author of the New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us:
Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a
Generation
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