Hillcrest Avenue, October Twenty-Ninth
Near Macon, Georgia
At Fillmore East was released in July of nineteen seventy-one. Two evenings of recording at a New York ballroom in March had produced something that music critics immediately recognized as one of the greatest live albums ever made. Duane Allman was twenty-four years old and at the precise moment when a life's work announces itself.
On the afternoon of October twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-one, Duane was riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster near his home in western Macon. At the intersection of Hillcrest Avenue and Bartlett Street, a flatbed boom truck stopped suddenly. Duane swerved to avoid it, struck the vehicle, and was thrown. He died that evening at the Medical Center of Central Georgia. He was twenty-four.
His bassist, Berry Oakley, was twenty-four when he was killed in a motorcycle accident just three blocks from that intersection thirteen months later, on November eleventh, nineteen seventy-two. That proximity was not something anyone who knew the band could easily absorb or explain away.
Both men are buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, within view of each other, on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. The site draws visitors from every direction, people who come to stand at the graves of musicians they never met, leaving guitar picks and whiskey bottles and handwritten notes in the grass. What they are paying is a kind of debt that music incurs when it gets inside you and will not leave.
