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Headline: LIGHTING A SPARK By ALAN SCULLEY Asbury Park Press Devon Allman remembers the exact moment when he became the songwriter and musician fans hear with his band Honeytribe on its debut CD, "Torch." "I woke up Jan. 3 of '05, going, "What am I doing?' " Allman said. "I need to just do it all from the heart, with no thought, no pretense on "I'm not going to sound like that' . . . I'm just going to write a collection of songs. I'm going to put the best (band) lineup that I can put together. Literally, by that evening, I had put Honeytribe together." Until that time, Allman admitted, he had shied away from writing songs that might bring to mind the music made by his father, Gregg Allman, in his group, The Allman Brothers Band. That's exactly what Devon Allman did for the better part of a decade. A native of Corpus Christi, Texas, Allman moved to St. Louis around 1989, and his first band, the Dark Horses, made some noise (and nearly signed a record deal) during the 1990s. "I spent a lot of years in St. Louis really trying to kind of find myself and my sound and my style," said Devon Allman. "I was really proud of the Dark Horses project. But I think at the end of the day, it was still something that didn't encapsulate my most natural abilities. So it just kind of fizzled out." After the Dark Horses breakup, Allman formed his first version of Honeytribe around 2000. That unit lasted only a year or so partly because its horn-spiced eight-person lineup proved unwieldy to hold together and because after the birth of his son, Orion, he wanted to take time away from touring to be a stay-at-home dad. Allman admitted that his dedication to parenting was partly a product of his own childhood, which was spent with his mother, Shelly, after she had divorced Gregg Allman. Allman knew about his father as a young child and actually began to grasp his father's notoriety at a young age as well. "I don't think it hit me to the magnitude of his celebrity until I was about 4 or 5, basically by seeing him on the cover of magazines in the supermarket checkout line when he was with Cher," Allman said. "That was a trip." The relationship between Allman and his famous father wasn't forged until Devon Allman was 15 and he decided to reach out. "I think more than anything else, I wanted to know he was all right," Devon Allman said. "You hear stories. You hear things. I remember I sat down and I wrote him a letter when I was 15. It was very basic. It was a paragraph long. "Hey, I'm your son. I think about you a lot. I hope you're OK. I play guitar. I love music. I like Zeppelin; I like Hendrix. If you feel like talking, here's my number.' Pretty cut and dried." His father called, and right off the bat, the two had a rapport. Several months later, they met in person back stage at the Fox Theater in St. Louis at an Allman Brothers show, and once again, they enjoyed a good visit. By then Allman was a high school junior, and after finishing that school year, he tagged along on tour with the Allman Brothers Band. That tour convinced Devon Allman, who had been torn between pursuing acting and music, that he wanted to follow the career path of his father.