The accent comes up out of Nashville, by way of Georgia, makes a dash across the States and ends up vaguely California. He sounds a bit like Kris Kristofferson; looks uncannily like his late brother, Duane. The hotel television is on; the sound is off. It is late, and the black and white movie — something surely about horror and death at this small hour — glows up on Gregg Allman's tired face like a moonscape in Macon's Rose Hill Cemetery.

Rose Hill is where the band — the Allman Brothers Band — went in the lean scuffling days, back when they all lived in a two-room, $50-a-month apartment. Sometimes they'd eat psilocybin for inspiration. Sometimes a lonely, bluesy wail would rise out of that old graveyard: a song like Dicky Betts' "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed." It was a grassy, quiet place to be alone together and to talk about music, and love, and finite thoughts. In later years, Duane Allman would be buried there and the band would play a deeply felt set at the funeral in his memory. Bassist Berry Oakley, too, would die, ominously almost a year to the day after Duane. Eerily, the circumstances of the accident would — even the place where it happened — recapitulate the tragedy of Duane Allman. And Berry Oakley would be buried at Rose Hill.

Gregg Allman stares moodily at the silent television. The writer is asking him about the band's latest successes: about the rave reviews of their two-week long West Coast tour, about the new album, Brothers And Sisters, topping the charts. All six of their albums have now made over a million dollars; most have sold over a million units. In the past six months the Brothers have grossed between $50,000 and $100,000 on an average night. They headlined before 600,000 at Watkins Glen, and though an agreement with the promoter prevents an official statement on the Allmans' gross, a spokesman for Capricorn Records, the Brothers' company, states flatly that it was "astronomical." They have played to sell-out crowds in America's largest arenas and stadiums.

But Gregg Allman's mind, this quiet night after a tour de force marathon set at San Francisco's Winterland, is back in Macon, at Rose Hill. "The real question," he says, "is not why we're so popular. I try not to think about that too much. The question is what made the Allman Brothers keep on going. I've had guys come up to me and say, 'Man, it just doesn't seem like losing those two fine cats affected you people at all.'