Where Are They Buried? (61 page)

At the end of October 1971 the band took a break from the road and returned to their hometown of Macon, Georgia. At the time, the band’s base of operations was at “the Big House,” at 2321 Vineville Ave. (now a part-time Allman Brothers museum). On his motorcycle, Duane left the house and, traveling west on Hillcrest Street, laid his bike down on its side to avoid colliding with a truck pulling out of Bartlett Street. Duane instead struck a parked vehicle, suffered extensive internal injuries, and died a few hours later at Middle Georgia Hospital without ever regaining consciousness. He was 24.

At Duane’s funeral, while his guitar leaned on his casket, the remaining Allman Brothers played “The Sky is Crying” and “Stormy Monday” for their fallen brother.

Just about a year later and only a few blocks from where Duane lost his life, the band’s bass player, 24-year-old Berry Oakley, was killed when he drove his motorcycle into the side of a bus.

Today, the band mates rest side by side at Macon’s historic Rose Hill Cemetery.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-16, take Exit 2 and follow Spring Street south. Go over the Ocmulgee River bridge, and at the traffic light turn right onto Riverside Drive. After a third of a mile, turn right and proceed up the hill to the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and proceed straight down the cement drive to its end. Turn right, going parallel to
the train tracks, and at the next paved drive on the right turn and go up the hill. (Don’t take the hardest right—just the 90-degree turn.) Off to the left and halfway up the hill are the twin polished tombs of Duane and Berry.

Oddly enough, Rose Hill Cemetery is also a place where the Allmans sometimes hung out and practiced during their early years. Later, one of their jams was labeled with a name borrowed from a gravestone, and the free-spirited tune, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” is now familiar to classic-rock radio listeners everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, Elizabeth Reed wasn’t a friend of the band or anyone the Allmans knew. Instead, she was a Macon resident who died in 1935 at the age of 89, long before the Allmans’ time. As it happened that her grave was among the Allmans’ old session quarters, a song was dedicated to her memory.

You can see Elizabeth Reed’s grave here, too. About 100 feet after taking the right-hand turn that puts you parallel to the train tracks when you’re on the way to the rockers’ graves, look on the right for a plot with two terraced levels. The grave on the lower level with a concrete urn atop is Elizabeth’s.

APRIL 3, 1943 – MARCH 4, 1986

DECEMBER 9, 1942 – DECEMBER 10, 1999

MAY 26, 1940 – APRIL 19, 2012

Beginning around 1960, four Toronto-area musicians plus one more from America’s Deep South slowly came together as the Hawks to supply the backing sound for American rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Their music wove the old sounds of country blues with the new spirit of rock and roll, and the result was a distinctly new, listenable, and catchy style. By 1965, the Hawks had outgrown the roadhouse circuit and were touring with Bob Dylan
on the infamous, boo-filled world tour that marked the former folkie’s “going electric.”

By the next year they were calling themselves the Band and had holed up near Woodstock, New York, in a crash pad they affectionately dubbed Big Pink. In the basement of Big Pink, guitarist and chief-songwriter Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, organist Garth Hudson, and drummer Levon Helm honed their unique lyrical and pastoral style, mentored by Dylan, who dropped by after crashing his motorcycle. Their harmony-filled debut album,
Music From Big Pink
, was released in 1968 and became the fulcrum for country rock.

A succession of albums and tours followed and the Band became a firm fixture in the rock aristocracy. But less than a decade later they had had enough and the Band officially called it quits with a celebratory final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. The concert featured an unprecedented all-star lineup including the likes of Muddy Waters, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, and Van Morrison, and was documented by Martin Scorsese in his film,
The Last Waltz
. Many consider it the finest concert film of all time.

The rich baritone and lonesome falsetto of pianist Richard Manuel helped the Band’s rise to success, but by the time the band mates regrouped in 1983, an unexplained weariness and despondency had settled over Richard. After a sold-out reunion show in Winter Park, Florida, Richard hanged himself in a motel bathroom while his wife lay sleeping.

At 42, Richard was buried at Avondale Cemetery in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Stratford is about 1½ hours west of Toronto. Once you get into town, turn northwest onto Route 8, which is Huron Street. After Saint Joseph’s Church, turn left onto Avondale Avenue, follow it to its end, and the cemetery will be in front of you.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right, and proceed down this drive to where it bends hard to the left. After the hard left, count three more roadways on your left, then stop. On your left is Range 23A, and Richard is buried in this lawn at plot number 193.

After
The Last Waltz
, bassist and part-time lead singer Rick Danko continued his musical pursuits and was a mainstay of the tour
circuit for the remainder of his life. His talent shone in his 1978 debut solo album,
Rick Danko
, and in the late 1980s he toured as part of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. In 1993 Rick spearheaded the release of a long-awaited new album by the Band, the acclaimed
Jericho
. In 1994 he and the Band were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

At 57, Rick died in his sleep of a heart attack and was buried at Woodstock Cemetery in Woodstock, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-87, take Exit 19 and follow Route 28 west for six miles. Turn right onto Route 375 and turn left at its intersection with Route 212. After a half-mile, turn right onto Rock City Road and the cemetery is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive all the way to the cemetery’s rear and, along the back road, you’ll find a reddish, double heart-shaped stone for the Cooks. Two rows behind this stone, you’ll find Rick’s grave.

In The Band, lead vocals changed from song to song, sometimes even within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But when lyrics turned mystical or to tales of the American South such as in “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the group turned to the weathered voice of their drummer Levon Helm, who managed to sound desperate, ornery, and amused all at the same time.

Growing up on a cotton farm outside of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, Levon’s father often took the family to see traveling music shows at tents in Memphis just across the river where, unbeknownst to him, Levon literally witnessed the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Smitten by musicians of every stripe, nine-year-old Levon
played guitar in a rock duet with his sister called the Jungle Bush Beaters and learned a variety of other instruments as a teen before joining Ronnie Hawkins’ rockabilly band after high school. He hoped music would be a way out of Arkansas, and it was. “I was praying that it was,” Levon said. “Because I was a terrible cotton farmer and didn’t have the heart for it. Sometimes I would look up and see a plane going across and wonder if it was going to New York or something.”

When the Hawks left Hawkins and became The Band, Levon more or less assumed the role as the group’s linchpin, though he never really called attention to himself. After
The Last Waltz,
he continued working at every opportunity, performing with a partly reunited Band, with his own band Levon Helm and the RCO All-Stars, with Ringo Starr’s All Star Band, and even appearing in movies as an actor, most notably playing Loretta Lynn’s father in
Coal Miner’s Daughter
.

But in the late 1990s a pair of personal crises threatened to end his career and his life: a fire destroyed his home and studio, and then he was diagnosed with throat cancer which required dozens of radiation treatments, leaving him hardly able to speak, let alone sing. The cost of these calamities nearly drove him to bankruptcy, so to help pay the bills he reinvented himself as a sort of roots-music patriarch, hosting in his barn eclectic, down-home concerts called Midnight Rambles.

Though the Rambles had been intended as a one-off “rent party,” the interest from fans, and every musician from Elvis Costello to Kris Kristofferson, who dropped in to play with him, was so widespread that the late-night jam sessions became an almost-weekly event leading to tours and Grammy-winning albums. “If I had my way about it, we’d probably do it every night,” Levon said. “I never get tired of it.” The hoedowns took precedence over nearly anything else in his life and in 2008 he even skipped the presentation of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award with The Band to host a Midnight Ramble instead.

In 2012 the cancer came back and Levon lost that battle at 71.

Like his buddy Rick Danko, Levon is buried at Woodstock Cemetery in Woodstock, New York.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and drive to the top of the hill. On the right, notice the section of chain link fence that has wooden boards attached to it, and that’s where you’ll find Levon.

DECEMBER 4, 1944 – DECEMBER 28, 1983

DECEMBER 21, 1946 – FEBRUARY 6, 1998

In 1961 Brian Wilson, with brothers Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love, and friend Alan Jardine, formed the Beach Boys. Though they only knew how to play three songs at their first concert, endless airplay of their feel-good pop tunes—“Surfin’ USA,” “Good Vibrations,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” among dozens of others—later lifted the Beach Boys, and each band member individually, to esteem as the epitome of California’s carefree spirit.

The Beach Boys also elevated surfing itself, and the arcane pastime soon became a preoccupation among teenagers who lived far from any ocean. Their thickly layered wall of sound was best when it stayed within the bounds of that “surfing sound,” but Brian, the group’s visionary, contrived a new direction for his musical vision, and in 1966
Pet Sounds
was released. The album’s complex composition of harmonies and instruments raised the bar for musical artistry and inspired the Beatles to weave their own masterpiece the following year with
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
.

The Beach Boys were later eclipsed by groups with harder sounds and rougher images and, though they pressed on over the next decades in various incarnations (and continue today), they ceased to be a consistent rock music force after the 1960s.

Dennis was the only surfer of the bunch. Always at the beach instead of practicing, his mother had to later advocate for his inclusion in the band, which led to Dennis being the drummer by default. Though regarded as the least talented of the brothers, Dennis was a musician in his own right; he contributed a few songs to the Beach Boys’ albums and in 1977 had an acclaimed solo release,
Pacific Ocean Blue
. Prompted by that success, Dennis returned to the studio and began a follow-up, tentatively entitled
Bamboo
, but substance abuse slowed his creative momentum and the project stalled.

By 1983 Dennis was nearly broke, a victim of excess. A few days after Christmas, while friends watched from the dock, he repeatedly dove into the chilly waters of the empty slip that once held his boat, the
Harmony
, in Marina del Ray, California. Each time Dennis emerged from the depths, he proudly displayed mud-clad treasures that had been tossed or dropped from his boat in the years before: drinking tumblers, a framed photo of him and his wife Karen. Back to the bottom he went again and again, until at last he failed to resurface. After a frenzied search, the 39-year old Dennis was found an hour later, drowned in the depths where he’d spent his last moments happily searching for his own sunken treasures.