On the Movie Set, Allman Wasn’t a Rock Star : Movies: He makes his screen debut in ‘Rush’ as a drug kingpin. ‘I wanted somebody with Gregg’s kind of history in his face,’ says director Lili Zanuck.

Gregg Allman’s paid a lot of dues, but this may have been asking too much.

There he was one morning, tied to the video equivalent of a whipping post--”Live With Regis and Kathie Lee”--and invited, with five minutes left to the show, to sing the Allman Brothers’ chestnut “Melissa” for probably the 10-millionth time. And then cut off before the second verse by credits and a voice-over.

And let’s add insult to injury: Back at his hotel, snide comments were running as thick as the free coffee. The various junketeers--guests of MGM, host of a press conclave attended by Allman and other stars of the new film “Rush”--were sitting around a TV speculating just how Allman had screwed up. Old Gregg must have been late, they chuckled. Maybe he hadn’t showed up at all! “You have to wonder,” spoke a haircut in a sweater, “whether it’s better or worse publicity for the movie if he doesn’t show.”

He did show, though. In fact, he’d been there since an 8:15 sound check for the 9 a.m. show. The producer was apologetic. Chagrined, even. Revealing this, of course, could do irreparable damage to Allman’s established image as an erratic, irresponsible rock star. And image, after all, has a lot to do with Allman’s latest career turn.

“Rush,” director Lili Fini Zanuck’s screen version of Kim Wozencraft’s novel about drug cops gone bad, features Allman as Will Gaines, a reputed drug kingpin and target of narcotics detectives Jim Raynor (Jason Patric) and Kristen Cates (Jennifer Jason Leigh). A sullen, brooding presence, Gaines invades the movie’s mood from the outset, haunting the pair as they’re sucked under by the very drugs they’ve set out to stop.

It’s no secret that Allman’s had his own abuse problems. And his testimony against his personal manager at a mid-’70s drug trial effectively undid the original Allman Brothers Band. So: A drug movie set in the ‘70s? Didn’t it bother him? Not just the subject matter, but the inevitable questions?

“No, because my problems like that ended a long time ago,” Allman said curtly. Then he laughed. “And yes, I do get that question a lot, a whole day of them yesterday. I guess if you went through the ‘70s and went through the ‘60s--well, I remember bits and pieces of it. It’s like Graham Nash told me: ‘Anybody who says they remember the ‘60s wasn’t there.’ ”

Allman’s laugh, like his speaking voice, is a throaty, croaky thing; you wonder how he manages to produce what is perhaps the best white blues voice around, and certainly one of the most recognizable in rock. It’s not a voice you hear on the film’s soundtrack, though. His speaking role, in fact, is only about half a dozen lines long.

“That’s another thing that was so great about the part,” Allman said, to more laughter. “It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do that, it’s not like doing a song, where you have the music and there’s landmarks, y’know? I mean, how many songs have I got up here in the computer? But you can study lines all day long--all night long--and look at the script one more time, walk on the set and just draw a blank. And feel like a total jackass.”

It happened like that a couple of times, he said. Other times, he did the scene in one take.

“The hardest thing was the waiting,” Allman said of filming. “But there wasn’t much about it that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. I loved the whole family, all those people doing all those hours and hours and hours of work and still getting along wonderfully, and not treating me like a rock ‘n’ roll star. Or a rookie. They treated me like they treated everybody. I never felt at any time that I was there ‘cause I’m an Allman Brother.”

Allman credits the effectiveness of his screen debut to the coaching he received from co-stars Patric and Sam Elliott, and especially to Zanuck, who with husband Richard produced “Driving Miss Daisy.” She is making her directing debut with “Rush.”

“Lili’s so great,” Allman said. “She’s got so much energy and so much patience. It was never, ‘Cut! It’s wrong! It’s wrong!’ It would just be ‘Take 34. . . .”

Zanuck, who called Allman and herself “two babes in the woods,” knew what she wanted for the Will Gaines character: somebody like Gregg Allman.

“I wanted somebody with Gregg’s kind of history in his face,” she said. “You know he’s seen something. He has a kind of confidence about him, the way he carries himself. Everything about him was what I thought Gaines should be.”

As a result, Zanuck said, when “Rush” got under way, casting kept sending her big guys with blond hair. “But a guy with blond hair isn’t Gregg Allman,” Zanuck said. “He’s been a big deal in his field for so long, so a lot of that strut, that confidence--it’s not arrogance, but something like that--comes from the fact that he is Gregg Allman. So finally I said, ‘Maybe we ought to get Gregg Allman in here.’ ”

The singer had only one acting performance under his belt: a cameo on the syndicated “Superboy” TV program. But as director and actor, they apparently clicked. Although the role is small as far as lines go, Zanuck said she added a scene after watching the dailies.

“What ended up being so rewarding,” Zanuck said, “is I think he’s a good actor. It’s not as if he has a lot of dialogue, or even a lot of close-ups, but what he does he does very effectively. He leaves a real impression.”

Allman feels good enough about his performance to pursue other roles. “I’ve had some scripts come in,” he said. “At this point I can be a little more picky about it. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I hope to work with the Zanuck people again.”

His hulking presence makes him a threatening figure in the film, but constant touring with the re-formed Allman Brothers--he was in the midst of recording the band’s “Shades of Two Worlds” album while the film was in production--has thinned him down. Except for the face, which has a lot of that history Zanuck spoke about, he looks much as he did when he was singing and playing organ with his guitarist brother Duane in the Allman Brothers Band.

It’s been a year of history for Gregg Allman: It was just 20 years ago last March that the band recorded its monster “Allman Brothers at Fillmore East” album, which established them as a national act. Back in 1971, they’d been the virtual house band at New York’s Fillmore East, working for Bill Graham, the rock impresario featured in “Bugsy” who was recently killed in a helicopter crash.

“God bless him,” Allman said. “He was the sultan of rock ‘n’ roll, as Keith Richards named him. We did a lot of gigs together after the band got back together, and we got real close with him. That’s one of the reasons I moved out to San Francisco, to be around people like him.”

But 1971 also saw the Allman Brothers Band suffer the first of a series of tragedies: the death of Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash that October. (Oddly enough, the soundtrack to “Rush” includes Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a tribute to Duane Allman. Zanuck said she was unaware of the link, and Allman, who hadn’t seen the finished film yet, didn’t know the song had been included.)

“He probably was the best slide guitar player who ever lived,” Allman said of his late brother. “He still has a lot of effect on a lot of guitarists.”

Allman said he didn’t want his own music in the film. “No, Lili asked me about it, but I said it wouldn’t feel right, that people’d think I sang my way into the part,” he said, smiling. “I got ethics.”

Duane’s death was followed a year later by the death of bassist Berry Oakley in a similar accident; the band released its hugely successful “Eat a Peach” and “Brothers and Sisters” albums in ’72 and ‘73, but drug problems, managerial fraud and internal strife served to undo what remained of the group. The band reunited for three albums between ’78 and ‘81, but it was a lackluster effort. Not until the release of the boxed set “Dreams” in 1989 were the surviving original members--Allman, guitarist Dickey Betts and drummers Butch Trucks and Jaimoe --prompted to reunite. A new record, “Seven Turns,” resulted.

Harmony continues to reign, Allman said, although it hadn’t always. “It’s that way with any band,” he said. “You live eat, sleep, drink, sweat and play in each other’s face for a long time. In 1970, we worked 306 nights. We were on tour all year. We don’t tour that extensively anymore, but that was in the beginning, when we were trying to get established.”

On the last four days of this year, the Allman Brothers will record their first live album in 20 years, back in their one-time home of Macon, Ga. “The tickets sold out in a couple of days,” Allman said. “I heard they were trading Super Bowl tickets for ‘em.”