Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  The truth that many never have grasped about Skynyrd is that their oeuvre is chock-full of surprisingly antistereotypical themes that are still quite relevant. Times indeed haven’t changed much, given that Van Zant sang forty years ago about the easy availability of cheap handguns (“Saturday Night Special”), which he warned were good only for “putting a man six feet in a hole.” Laughing about the far-out nature of such a tune for a southern redneck band, Ed King, who with Van Zant wrote that song and other aces such as “Poison Whiskey” and “Swamp Music” while serving as one of the band’s three lead guitarists until 1975, asks the perfectly obvious question: “What kind of redneck writes an anti-gun song?” Not that Van Zant shied from guns—although, contrary to assumption, he did not express gun-love in the follow-up “Gimme Back My Bullets,” the ammo in question here being those figurative bullets appended to songs that ran the quickest up the charts. A rational man—except when he was drunk or high, times in which he was a vile and violent, not endearing, redneck—Van Zant reasonably cared not to be on the wrong end of a gun while facing a redneck with a grudge, a situation he was not unfamiliar with.

  Still, if the staunch southern men of Skynyrd were macho to the core, reckless to the bone, and self-destructive to a fault, songs like the ostensibly innocuous “What’s Your Name” reveal a certain moral conundrum about the too-easy availability of something else out there on the long road, especially for a married man like Van Zant, who loved his wife but also loved many others—well and often. There is, too, not defiance but desperation in “That Smell,” a harrowing vérité piece written after Rossington, tanked on booze and cocaine, nearly killed himself in a car wreck, prompting the immortal opening line about whiskey bottles and brand-new cars and the oak tree that got in the way because there was “too much coke and too much smoke.” Van Zant may have been waving a finger at Rossington when he warned, “Look what’s going on inside you,” but in truth he was also singing into a mirror, metaphorically the same one on which he laid out his own lines of cocaine, to be followed by Quaaludes, which he popped into his mouth like jelly beans. When Van Zant sang that “the smell of death surrounds you,” he knew that no one in Skynyrd could say, “Not me, pal.” Once, it had seemed like great, baroque fun to live the lifestyle of rock-and-roll outlaws, to tear out hotel walls and let the accountants pay for it all. But “That Smell” was hard, cold reality setting in. Its message: something had to give.

  This sort of material was a sharp scalpel cutting into the group’s pathology, allowing the world in on the little secret that a Southern Man can and does admit to weakness. And that kind of departure was a perfect counterweight to comfort food for the masses, the songs about brawling and drinking and fooling around with other men’s women. These also were based on truth—“Gimme Three Steps,” for example, was the result of an interlude in a Jacksonville bar when just such a betrayed man stuck a gun in Ronnie’s face. Another tune, “Don’t Ask Me No Questions,” ripped record-company executives who had avoided signing the band, while “Double Trouble,” Ronnie’s description of himself when drunk and stoned, spelled out the feel-good joys of bad intentions. One of their best blues riffs was a rough-cut B side called “Mr. Banker,” an indictment of a moneylender who refuses funds for a poor man to bury his father—a thinly veiled roman à clef born of Ronnie’s range of emotions about the father he felt he could never please. Just about every Skynyrd song had this sort of magnification of a dream, a failing, or the betrayal of a broken social contract, and even the few covers they did connected to these conditions. Consider, for example, their cover of early country legend Jimmie Rodgers’s “T for Texas,” the lyrics of which perfectly channeled their pugnacious insistence on being taken seriously on their turf or any other. To wit: “I’d rather drink your muddy water, sleep down in a hollow log / Than to be in Atlanta, Georgia, treated like a dirty dog.”

  One suspects that Skynyrd all the while knew they were just that, dirty dogs, albeit ones with enormous skill and singularity. Their range was many miles wide; yet whatever the subject, they never seemed to miss their target, and they struck right to the bone. They funneled to the world the sights, sounds, and even the smells of a not-yet-forsaken, riven but belatedly risen South. Indeed, unwittingly but inexorably, they found a place among the artistic giants of the American South, their thematic content deceptively simple but as soul deep as any Faulkner novel or Tennessee Williams play. Like the best southern writers and musicians, Skynyrd provided a set of new definitions about the region. To the amazement of critics and other students of musical history, vocal and visual echoes of Old Confederacy white-glove society mixed and mingled in a New South assimilation with flower-power fashion, the expansion of booze consumption, and pills and powder going up the nose. All in all, by the mid-1970s, southern fried was the way rock was being served. Damn, no one expected that. Call it redneck chic, in all its honest, shit-faced glory. Or, in the coda of another Skynyrd song title, “Whiskey Rock-a-Roller.”

  Before Skynyrd, the preposterous assertion that country rock was based out of L.A. had somehow been deemed logical. Not that the Byrds, Poco, and the Flying Burrito Brothers didn’t perform in that role with conviction and skill, not to mention credibility, as they went about giving the new idiom an old-fashioned, romanticized face, a fact that can be gleaned from the title of the wonderful Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But Skynyrd had no intention of following the Allman Brothers’ road to the left coast; when Van Zant, proud to be a homegrown boy, sang in “When You Got Good Friends” that L.A. “never cared for me,” the line was a proud declaration of independence from the capital of soft country rock, whose in crowd liked to slag them as hicks. In turn, he and his mates fully intended to dirty up the face of country rock but good. The Southland rose around this payback, and with it came a cool regression of hip culture, back to what rock’s original soiled face had been before it was annexed by corporate overlords. And the cool kids, the smug critics, the Yankee Ivy League college boys, the foreign audiences, who only knew the American South as a swamp-soaked monument to churlishness, jumped aboard the bandwagon. Christ, the band may even have helped elect a peanut-farming Southern Man to the presidency of the United States in 1976—a Democrat, at that—a decade after the last southern president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had passed the Civil Rights Act. Johnson himself predicted that his party would “lose the South for a generation,” and with the exception of 1976, 1992, and 1996, he was right. In the Skynyrd South, however, such easy inductions and punishments were inoperative; in general, nativism trumped politics.

  Skynyrd was a product of many factors, some running deep, including the cultural transitions of the 1950s and 1960s, which splintered Southern notions of patrician morality and brought its underbelly of woe, booze, brawls, and life on the road into the rock-and-roll arc. As such, they fed off the region’s Gothic literature and music, becoming a part of that tradition themselves. The South harbors the most pungent and tragic undercarriage in the American experience; thus it stands to reason that the most pungent and tragic rock band sprung from its fertile and foreboding soil, a group of riders who were perfectly timed and placed for a musical epiphany.

  Alas, like so many other children of the South who created a southern identity in their artistry, Lynyrd Skynyrd was not built for a long run but rather a breathless sprint for the finish line before the tab came due. Suspecting this themselves, none of them took a thing for granted and often dreaded the dawning of another day ahead, though no one was prepared for that cursed flight on October 20, 1977, when the devil claimed his bounty. To be sure, back during the shank of the Skynyrd phenomenon, neither they nor their fans would have shied from the directive they are often credited with coining: “Live fast. Die young. Leave a pretty corpse.” They moved forward, chary but hopeful that success might be the antidote to a cruel fate. But that was not to be, and the pain would never subside. The survivors of the crash were never whole again, most doomed to die young. Indeed, the flames that
engulfed all of them—eerily presaged by the album cover of what would be the original band’s final work—were metaphorically perfect: the rebirth of the Old Confederacy died as had the first, when the skies over the South were not so much blue but burnt orange from the fires below. Margaret Mitchell wrote of those flames in Gone with the Wind, a phrase that had deep meaning for Van Zant, whose paean to movin’ on, “Tuesday’s Gone,” contained the lyric “Tuesday’s gone with the wind.” Neither Mitchell nor Van Zant knew that Southern tradition would for the second time, literally in this case, be gone with the wind, the one that dropped a plane from the sky.

  For purists of the now-fabled era shaped and molded by Lynyrd Skynyrd, there is little to correlate between the band then and the touring attraction by that name today, fronted since 1987 by Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s kid brother, a remarkably talented singer himself and a ghoulishly familiar-looking doppelganger recycling his brother’s songs in a similar gruff and growling country-boy burr. Gary Rossington, one of only two survivors of the crash to make it this far, gets himself up on stage with his guitar, his rumpled presence bearing witness to unimaginable glory and unspeakable tragedy, bearing the scars of his own too-close call with mortality. To be certain, Collins, Wilkeson, and Powell hastened their premature demises by drinking themselves into the grave. Ed King is hanging on, having suffered congestive heart failure in the 1990s and undergoing a heart transplant in 2012. Since two latter-day group members have also caught the last train for the coast during their tenures in the band, one can plausibly believe that the old devil is still looking to claim his bounty. The other survivors lived long enough to take a final bow at the 2006 induction of the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The honor was thin soup, and in itself a reminder that anti-South prejudice still lives on in the industry’s northern, corporate-based elitism so perfectly embodied by the most effete rock power broker of all, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, who with his staff of high-minded nabobs had kept Skynyrd out of the Hall the first six years the band was eligible.

  Not that it mattered much to a southern band that had never needed benedictions from the suits, just some bread and the suits keeping out of the way. Hell, the Hall had stiffed Johnny Cash for years too. And Wenner and his cronies—per the wishes of Van Zant’s widow, Judy, in her muddy power struggle with Gary Rossington in all band matters—also limited to nine the number of Skynyrd members who would receive a statuette. Just those who had played in the band between its debut album and the plane crash got to take a bow. This was an arbitrary slap in the face to the others who had labored to keep the band alive—Rickey Medlocke, for example, who had been an early member and returned to keep its memories animate through several incarnations. To the industry suits, the members of Skynyrd were always tramps, boxcar stowaways on rock’s grand journey. Even so, the majestic, inexplicable, confounding breadth of rock could be gleaned on that night, when the inductees included the Sex Pistols, Blondie, Black Sabbath, Miles Davis, and the prodigal sons of Jacksonville.

  Skynyrd’s only real relevant body of work, the five albums of the Van Zant era, all monster hits in their day, are now among the highest-selling albums in history, pushed into the stratosphere in the era of CDs and mp3s. Three—the debut, titled (pronounced ’lĕh-’nérd ’skin-’nérd); Second Helping; and the finale, Street Survivors—have gone double platinum. Nuthin’ Fancy is platinum and Gimme Back My Bullets is gold. A live album from 1976, One More from the Road, is triple platinum. The post-Van Zant incarnations have released nine studio and five live albums, the last two of which, God & Guns and Last of a Dyin’ Breed, landed in the Top 20. Perhaps the most salient barometer of the enduring popularity of the old brand is that there have been no less than twenty-one compilations of the old stuff, eight of which have gone platinum, one triple platinum, and one—1989’s Skynyrd’s Innyrds—quintuple platinum. What was intended as a one-shot reunion of the surviving band in 1987 has become an enormous commercial concern. Skynyrd tours are chronic sellouts, and the hawking of licensed merchandise is a million-dollar enterprise by itself. Ronnie Van Zant’s widow, Judy Van Zant Jenness, operates a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute website and the successful Freebird Live music club on North First Street on Jacksonville Beach, the strip where the nascent Skynyrd cut their teeth.

  The business of Skynyrd nowadays is business, the conversion of the Skynyrd name into leisure-class gold, a boardwalk attraction. In Choctaw, Mississippi, a marquis card reads: LYNYRD SKYNYRD BRINGS SOUTHERN ROCK TO PEARL RIVER RESORT. In an eon of sapless, soulless music built on marketing plans rather than anyone’s creative suffering, nostalgia can find a new audience of free spenders every generation. Thus, MCA, the corporate behemoth that took a chance and put out those first five albums in real time—though at the start any liability was shouldered by the band’s producer, Al Kooper, not the company—has sold more than 30 million Skynyrd albums, making them the company’s top-selling artist ever, outselling even the Who. According to BMI records, “Free Bird” has been played on the radio more than two million times, which may not be on “Hey Jude” or “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” terrain but is rather astonishing given that it’s usually played at its full, elongated length, meaning only on the niche format of classic rock. Consider this: two million plays is the equivalent of approximately one hundred thousand broadcast hours—or more than eleven years of continuous airplay—and still counting.

  The Atlanta-born author of The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy, said, “My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, ‘All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to sister.’” Southern to the bone as they were, Skynyrd added a few more components to the equation, all without ever once trying to sound like a southern stereotype. That was tricky—and ballsy—but it worked. And in so doing, they did what few great artists can ever claim: they were actually underrated for what they meant to the frames moving all about them. Their legacy was so rich and resonant that it suggests southern tradition in various, evolving stages, darting by turns from imagery that could be found between the covers of works by W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Kinky Friedman. The rebirth of the Old South invoked by Skynyrd had nothing to do with race yet was a secession nonetheless, a willful and wistful flight of fancy, swagger, and defiance—in the end, a flight doomed by its refusal to cooperate with the logical order of the universe. Maybe that’s why the band moved fast, recklessly, at one speed—jacked up.

  When the devil came to collect and they fell from the sky to the muddy woods below, the soul of southern culture crashed to the ground with them. This time, for good, except for the steeped, misty echoes of what once was and what will never be again.

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  LORDS AND MASTERS

  Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I’ve known some that even circumstances couldn’t stop.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER, GO DOWN, MOSES

  During the nascence of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the nuts, bolts, and guts of which were assembled at a typical sort of titular hallmark of the Old South—Robert E. Lee High School, a squat building still standing on McDuff Avenue in southwest Jacksonville, Florida, seven blocks from the Saint Johns River—Ronnie Van Zant was already a compelling fellow, if not always for the right reasons. In 1965 at the age of seventeen and soon to be a dropout, he stood five foot seven and 160 pounds, built like a fireplug, his face round as the moon, his wavy blond hair streaked almost platinum by the hot sun, and his handsome features usually bloated from the steady stream of beer and junk food he shoved into his mouth or from a fat lip he proudly displayed.

  Because of his unrelenting confrontational attitude—his own mother called him the meanest kid in the neighborhood, a good thing to be on the hard-scrabble streets of Shantytown, as it was called—he was in scrapes all the time. He was also a crafty, advanced sort of redneck. For one thing, he was sharp—smart and calculating. When he wasn’t bored
with school, he made the honor roll. But he was bored and could regularly be found in dive bars, hanging with the real rednecks, sneaking beers, and looking for a fight.