Brow Beat

Gregg Allman of the Allman Brothers Band, Dead at 69

548598931AK00113_2015_Stage
Gregg Allman performing at Stagecoach, California’s Country Music Festival in 2015.

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Stagecoach

Gregg Allman, one of the founding members of rock legends the Allman Brothers Band, has died at home in Savannah, Georgia, at the age of 69, the New York Times reports. Allman wrote many of the band’s early hits, played keyboards, and sang in the group, which in its early years also featured his brother Duane.

Gregg Allman was born in Nashville in 1947, moving to Daytona Beach, Florida, at the age of 11. In high school, he and Duane played club gigs as “the Allman Joys,” before heading to Los Angeles to record two unsuccessful psychedelic albums in 1967 and 1968 as part of a group called Hour Glass. Gregg remained in Los Angeles pursuing a solo career while Duane ended up working as a session guitarist at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When Duane moved to Jacksonville and started assembling a new group, Gregg joined him, and the Allman Brothers Band was born.

Despite entreaties from record company executives to relocate to Los Angeles or New York City, the Allman Brothers established a home base in Macon, Georgia, and embarked on a punishing touring schedule, developing a reputation as one of the all-time great live acts. Their eponymous debut album didn’t do very well, and neither did follow-up Idlewild South, but their constant touring paid off in 1971 when they broke through with live album At Fillmore East, widely considered one of the greatest rock albums in history. That same year, however, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident; bassist Berry Oakley died the same way in 1972. Under a variety of lineups—Wikipedia’s “List of the Allman Brothers Band Members” article is 20 names deep—the Allman Brothers Band continued recording and touring, with Gregg and drummer Butch Trucks as the only constants. Their music, an improvisation-heavy blend of blues, jazz, and country, was hugely influential in the birth of Southern rock, though the band hated the label—Gregg Allman once said that given the Southern roots of blues and rock ’n’ roll, the genre might just as well have been called “Rock Rock.” Jam bands, from Phish to Widespread Panic, also took their cues from the Allman Brothers Band’s extended live performances of songs like the Gregg Allman–written “Whipping Post,” which, in the version that takes up the entire last side of double album At Fillmore East, is 23 minutes long.

Gregg Allman struggled with drug and alcohol addiction before getting clean in the 1990s; in 2010, he received a liver transplant. His cause of death has not been released, but the statement on the band’s website says he “struggled with many health issues over the past several years.” He had five children and was married six times, including to Cher, with whom he recorded the long out-of-print album Two the Hard Way, credited to “Allman and Woman.” Gregg Allman also pursued a solo career, releasing six solo albums between 1973 and 2011. His seventh solo album, Southern Blood, will be released this year. Here he is covering Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” from his first solo album, 1973’s Laid Back: