James Keach, director of Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, which opens June 17 in theaters, on why he didn't shy away from the singer's flaws
When filmmaker James Keach signed on to direct Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, a new documentary about the Allman Brothers Band’s co-founder, he admits he knew the group’s music but wasn’t fully versed in the history. Then he had a conversation with his wife.
“‘You have to do this movie,’” Keach recalls her saying. “‘They got me through school.’”
It was a good decision by the director, who previously documented the life of Glen Campbell in I’ll Be Me (2014), and co-produced 2005’s Walk the Line, the Johnny and June Carter Cash biopic, and the 2019 Linda Ronstadt doc, The Sound of My Voice.
Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, produced by Subtext and Rolling Stone, opens Wednesday, June 17, in more than 200 theaters nationwide for a special one-night-only event. It’s based around a rarely seen 2014 interview that Allman gave just three years before his death. Keach — whose older brother is the actor Stacy Keach — says that Allman’s manager Michael Lehman reached out to him about directing the film. “I was interested because of two things,” Keach says. “One, his relationship with his brother [Duane Allman, who died in 1971]. The idea of something happening to my brother Stacy really got to me. And then on top of it, we grew up in a little town in Texas called Taft, and it was very segregated.”
Keach, 77, saw parallels to his own life. Born in Nashville, Allman brothers Gregg and Duane were raised in the 1950s before the landmark Civil Rights legislation of the Sixties was passed. The same went for the Keach boys.
“One side of Taft was the African-Americans and the Mexican folks, and the white people lived on the other side,” Keach says. “It always bugged the shit out of me. It reinforced my mind that somebody had created an artificial separation. I discovered Gregg and the Allman Brothers were very much against that.”
The Allman Brothers Band’s makeup illustrated the group’s sense of inclusivity. Drummer Jaimoe, the last living original member of the Allman Brothers, was Black, as was Chank Middleton, Gregg’s best friend and a regular presence on the road. If Jaimoe and Middleton weren’t allowed into a venue, restaurant, or hotel with the rest of the band, Allman says in one moment of the doc, the entire troupe would leave.
“I found that very moving,” Keach says. “It’s important in these times to have that kind of attitude.”
The Allman Brothers were mostly white guys with long hair and hippie clothes who played the blues. Their setlists were filled with covers of songs written and performed by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and other Black blues luminaries. Duane Allman, a legendary guitarist, had also crossed over into R&B, playing sessions with Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
After a stint as “Hour Glass,” Duane and Gregg put together the Allman Brothers Band, a group that soon became known for their legendary Southern-rock jams. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul hails 1971’s At Fillmore East double album as the greatest live record of all time. (I can attest: I attended the famous June 23, 1971, Allman Brothers late show at Fillmore East that let out at 7 a.m.)
But Duane’s life was cut short just four months later when he died in a motorcycle accident. He was 24. That same night, according to the film, Gregg overdosed on heroin. That could’ve been it for the Allman Brothers, but Gregg recovered and the bruised band soldiered on through a series of further tragedies, including the death of bassist Berry Oakley, also in a motorcycle crash, in 1972.
The deaths, however, helped fuel Allman’s growing addictions to heroin, cocaine, and alcohol.
“Addiction is numbing,” Keach says. “The addiction is a symptom of something else. The addiction to the drugs, or whether it’s sex, rock and whatever it is, you’re trying to numb something and put something on top of a feeling that you are having a problem dealing with. As Lenny Bruce said, ‘I take a hit and I feel like a new man. And then the new man wants a hit.’ That’s a vicious cycle. I think it worked for a while for Gregg, and then the new man wants a hit, and then the new man gets really fucked up and, well, we know what happens after that.”
The documentary dives into many of Allman’s flaws and failures, with Keach even probing his multiple marriages (seven in total, including a brief union with Cher). Allman’s last wife, Shannon, 37, is interviewed in the film. “I think he loved falling in love,” Keach says. “He liked that feeling of that emotion and that it was very satisfying to him. And then if they tried to control him and they tried to change him in some way or another, he rebelled.”
The film also touches on Allman’s decision to testify against the group’s road manager John “Scooter” Herring, who provided Alllman and other band members with coke and was arrested in 1976, charged with five federal counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Herring, who died in 2007, received a 75-year sentence and served 30 months in prison. Allman’s testimony caused a rupture in the band and resulted in the first of several band breakups.
Keach contends that Herring “had to take the fall.”
“The band wouldn’t be able to continue,” he says. “The loyalty among the guys was you don’t squeal on the other guy, and Gregg was forced to do it… His intentions weren’t to save himself. It was to save the band. At least that’s the way I was told.”
As for Allman’s own addictions, which he failed to rein in despite multiple trips to rehab, he finally went cold turkey in 1995, eliminating drugs, alcohol, and even cigarettes. He became a staunch anti-drug advocate for the rest of his life. Allman died from complications of liver cancer in 2017.
“I learned from Gregg about how to deal with addiction and about how to deal with trauma,” Keach says.
At the film’s New York premiere earlier this month, Keach zeroed in on the addiction and redemption narrative of the documentary.
“To see this man after 15 rehabs hit his bottom and then come back, for me it was a 12-step call that I wanted to make for the world. It’s really great when he finally got sober and there’s applause in the audience,” Keach told the crowd. “I thought, ‘Ah, we connected. And Gregg connected.’ His music is phenomenal, but his story is phenomenal too.”
Steve Bloom is co-author with Shirley Halperin of Reefer Movie Madness: The Ultimate Stoner Film Guide.
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