In a run of shows starting last week, the Allman Brothers are taking the stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre for what may be the last time. Earlier this year, Gregg Allman announced that the band will stop touring in 2014.

Fans experiencing any pre-emptive nostalgia can indulge those feelings by digging into Please Be With Me, Galadrielle Allman’s new book about her father Duane, who founded the band with Gregg in 1969 and died in a motorcycle accident two years later.

Galadrielle was two when her father died, and the book contains her father’s story, her mother’s, and her own. In chasing the myth of a father she never really knew, she has to determine what she’s seeking, knowing that she won’t like everything to be found. Her parents were already broken up by the time Duane died, and she knew that groupies, drugs, booze, and hard living were inevitable components of the story. “I dreaded pursuing this story as a reporter would, by asking uncomfortable questions and following every lead,” she writes. In a way, she feared it would make her feel more distant from her dad: “Wanting to know made me feel like everyone else who wants to know. It put me on the outside looking in."

This relationship between writer and subject informs the book but doesn’t saturate it. Allman the author is far from indulgent, and the book’s best moments come when she dives all the way in, relaying her father’s story, but transforming anecdotes and facts into fully drawn scenes, complete with dialogue she has sketched herself.

Allman’s telling of her grandmother Jerry’s story is strong, and (as Barbara Herman at Newsweek points out), Please Be With Me is the rare rock ‘n roll biography that considers the points of view of the women caught in the whirlwind of fame, touring, and free love available to those at the center. Please Be With Me -- part memoir and part well-researched biography, with chunks of literary reenactment thrown in -- finds cohesion in its hybrid parts, and it provides a clear and compassionate view of the evolution of Duane Allman, his daughter, and his band.