Please Call Home
The eternal youth of the Allman Brothers.
So there was this one morning in Georgia when I was sitting on the back porch of the house I was staying at. In the week I spent as artist-in-residence at Slow Exposures, I would get up and make coffee, and then sit down and write about where all I had gone the day before, what all I had seen. I heard a rustling in the brush, back by the muscadine vines, and looked up to see a young deer just staring at me, before galloping away.
Pike County, Georgia, Polaroid 600 (all photos 2017)
They gave us a week to make art and a homebase a few miles from downtown Zebulon. My pitch for the residency was that I wanted to immortalize the town—document it as it existed right then in time, a scale model in Polaroids. But what I really wanted to do was roam around Georgia while blaring the Allman Brothers.
Barnesville, Ga, Polaroid SX-70
About an hour east of the keyhole of Zebulon, down through Barnesville and Forsyth, you get to Macon. I had never been but wanted to pay tribute to the troubadour Gregg Allman, who had passed just a few weeks before my residency. Before heading to where he was buried, I swung by the Big House where various configurations of the Allmans and their families had lived from ‘70 to ‘73.
The Big House, Macon, Georgia, SX-70
It was a dang riot, filled with some of the best things I’ve ever seen—a real museum, not a tourist trap, and I would have been happy with that. But here there were handwritten lyrics to “Please Call Home,” show posters with the boys and Moby Grape, a letter from then-Governor Jimmy Carter to Jaimoe thanking him for helping him campaign for President, and a poster of the man from Plains wearing a Win, Lose or Draw t-shirt with the caption “I don’t intend to lose.”
The Big House, SX-70
Afterwards I headed on down the road to where the band used to hang out near the traintracks. It’s not like I haven’t been hot before—I live in Mississippi—but y’all, on that July day it was so up there in terms of temperature I had to find some shade and actually sit down.
Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, Georgia, SX-70
Unlike Liz Reed, there wasn’t a marker up yet for Gregg. It was just lumped up red Georgia dirt covered with a carnival of tributes—flowers real and fake, teddy bears, an Almond Joy bar, drumsticks, pennies, and a heavy AA chip embossed with “XXIX.” It didn’t look sad at all. It looked like a party.
Macon, Georgia, the last frame of film I ever shot with a Polaroid Land Camera, Fuji FP-100c1
There was a steady stream of visitors. I wanted to let people be able to pay their respects at the grave without getting in the way, so I would make a few photos, then ease back to let others come in and take a moment. Like two teenagers who had drove up from Florida, spending all their money on gasoline. And a man about my age, dressed all in black, alongside his silent momma; he knelt and nestled a bullet from a .45 into the red dirt at the base of the grave. “In case the Midnight Rider needs protection,” he told me, with a voice as steady as Gary Cooper walking down the middle of a dusty street.
The grave of Gregg Allman, Polaroid SX-70. I love the way the SX-70 will turn little drops of water or glitter into stars.
Just a few steps away was the gated grave of two other legends from the band, Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. They both died at age 24, both in Macon, both on motorcycles, both before I was born.
Shadow of the graves of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, Macon, Georgia, Polaroid 600
At least once a month I find myself listening to the music these people made. Sometimes if I don’t watch out I’m not even really listening—it’s just birdsong, or an engine hum, just the noises you hear as you move through life. Even though it’s beautiful, it can become commonplace, especially over the course of forty years.
When I find myself taking their music for granted, I’ll put on the “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” from At Fillmore East, and absorb the gently chiming notes of the first few minutes, its gradually building intensity, the synchronicity of creation. I try to think of those six boys sitting in that graveyard, now fifty years ago, playing their guitars and making up songs together. I think of how hot it was that summer day in Georgia when I visited, and I try to hear these songs again like it was the first time.
That big splash of rainbow light at the grave and the light leak streaks startled me when I peeled the film. I am not above believing in ghosts, especially not in this business. It was the perfect farewell to the film and my time shooting with those beautiful cameras.
Sidebar, I was carrying an SX-70, a 600, a Land Camera, and a Spectra. I was going to make dang sure I made something worth carrying back to Jackson. I hope that you agree that I did.