Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  By the end of the decade, their upward progression was still slow but more sure. In late 1970 they won a local “battle of the bands” contest at the Regency Square shopping mall in downtown Jacksonville; appeared on a local TV station dance party show where they fake-played and Ronnie lip-synched “Need All My Friends”; and then played at the opening of the Jacksonville Art Museum. The gigs weren’t so small anymore, nor were they confined to smoky clubs. Indeed, all this dues paying allowed Skynyrd to open several shows for the L.A.-based psychedelic rock band the Strawberry Alarm Clock, who were still extant three years after recording one of the most gloriously unlikely hits of all time, “Incense and Peppermints.” This song, one of the first psychedelic rock works, wrote the Magna Carta of alienation for the baby boom era with the line “Who cares what games we choose / Little to win but nothing to lose.” The song went all the way to number one in the summer of 1967, but now, painfully passé and running on fumes, the band was to Ronnie a reminder of how sudden the arrival—and devolution—of fame could be. Seeing them as a soon-to-be corpse, he picked their bones by hastening the departure of their guitarist, Ed King.

  The New Jersey-born King, who had composed the sapid guitar solo in “Incense and Peppermints”—a sound that became the stamp of psychedelic rock songs—had been steaming since ’67 that the band’s producer had deprived him of a writing credit for the song. He also had a desire to relocate to the South. Working him, Ronnie would hang out with the burly, round-faced guitarist between shows, coyly planting in his mind the seed that he would be welcome in another band poised for major stardom, or so Ronnie promised. King might have laughed at such an entreaty from a relative unknown, but he was taken with the young redneck, both as a tintype of the South and as a singer. A few years earlier, the Hour Glass had opened for the Strawberry Alarm Clock for a show in L.A., and King had been blown away by Gregg Allman’s soulful blues voice. Now, he was hearing a similarly impressive voice in Ronnie. As a whole, he recalled, Skynyrd “were just borderline. They only had a few original tunes, one of which was ‘Free Bird.’ But Ronnie was already amazing. I’d never seen anybody with so much charisma. I made up my mind right then that I’d do anything to play music with this guy.”

  King and his Clock returned to Los Angeles, with a special sort of road map of the back roads from Ronnie, which told them where the cops lurked in the shadows eager to bust guys with long hair. Those cops, Ronnie said, “will pull you over and they will throw you in jail and you’ll be there for a while.” And of course he knew what he was talking about. King got himself an education about the South during that tour. At one gig in Alabama, when the club owner ordered the Clock to sweep the floor and they refused, “he ran us out at gunpoint.” After the group hired a black driver for their van, they felt especially ostracized, to the point of fear. But the driver had an instinctive way of avoiding trouble, another sign of life in the new South. “It was so bizarre,” King said. “But it was very interesting.” King did subsequently quit and move to the South, to Greenville, North Carolina. He played in a bar band for a couple of years, biding time before he got the call from Skynyrd, something he would learn fell under the category of “be careful what you wish for.”

  As Skynyrd gained maturity, record-company bird dogs began coming to see them perform. But clearly they were in the same beaker as other groups of Southern rockers. There was the Toy Factory, a South Carolina quintet with four Vietnam veterans, so named because of front man Toy Caldwell, who had been wounded in ’Nam. Like the Allman Brothers, the band had two brothers, Toy and his brother Tommy, the latter of whom would die in 1980 in a manner eerily similar to the way Duane Allman would, on a motorcycle. Their easygoing southern-fried style seemed to have gotten the jump on the rest of the talent pool and signaled that competition in the top tier of southern rock was going to be stiff.

  A good number of country-rock veterans look back fondly on those early days of the genre, recalling a kind of collegial, even familial, bonding between bands. Charlie Daniels, who was older than the young rednecks but also looking for a big break for his eponymous, fiddle-fueled rockabilly band, attributes this bond to most of them sharing similar Tobacco Road socioeconomic deprivations in their youth. In solidarity, he says, bands would go out of their way to help other bands, offering suggestions, lending out players, getting drunk and stoned with them, and touting them to industry bird dogs.

  However, at the very top even friendly rivals were regarded as the enemy. Gregg Allman, for one, seemed to have little use for friendships along the circuit that he and his brother fully intended to own, thus they avoided bending elbows with the competition. Having already seen the lengths to which one particular band would go to steal a good song, the Allmans respected the hell out of Ronnie Van Zant and did indeed bend elbows with him after shows on which they and Skynyrd played. But less and less would Gregg and Duane carry any water for them. That being the case, Lynyrd Skynyrd having a born fighter as a front man, a guy who seemed to know everyone in his orbit but wanted to kick all of their asses, was surely going to be an advantage.

  Indeed, Ronnie was not going to let Skynyrd bask in small-time success. Rehearsing in their living rooms and basements would not cut it anymore, and when complaints by neighbors chased them from house to house, Ronnie and Gary went out scouting locations where they could make their noise in splendid isolation. Splendid or not, what they decided on was a dilapidated wooden cabin with an overhanging tin roof located deep in a wooded field on a farm out in Green Cove Springs in the town of Russell near Black Creek. They rented it for sixty-five bucks a month and made it their center of operations. Soon they had their own phrase for the godforsaken shack with no air conditioning where they sweltered in sauna-like conditions while writing their first two albums—Hell House, they called it. The house became another salient marker of the band’s legacy, and it would be preserved as such for years before eventually being torn down to make way for the inevitable interstate highway.

  Not surprisingly, Ronnie’s rules applied. There would be a band rehearsal and a writing session almost every morning at 10 AM. The atmosphere inside Hell House was brutal. Because there was no insulation in the walls, an air conditioner could not be made to work, rendering the name of the place all too literal on humid summer days. They would stock a fridge with beer and sandwiches and get at the music. At the beginning they’d turn out the lights after a session and go home, barely bothering to lock the door. But that changed when some guitars left in the shack were stolen. Now, by rotation, one of them would stay behind and sleep there, with one eye open, and armed with a shotgun. In an early photo taken of the band at Hell House, a pistol is tucked into Ronnie’s waistband. He and Lacy were accomplished marksmen, often spending time at a shooting range or hours in a duck blind. But never had Ronnie thought he might have to use a piece on a human until those expensive instruments became an inviting target for thieves. Fortunately, with the lights on all night, no one tried to pilfer anything; if they had, whoever that night’s sentry was would have shot to kill.

  But defending their fortress and their instruments was worth the time, trouble, sweat, stench of backed-up toilets, and lack of creature comforts. Indeed, in their Bohemian visions, living in these conditions and extracting down-home music from their collective soul was not unlike what the great old Delta blues men had done. They might have finished the day drunk to the gills or strung out on reefer, but their only true comfort was the music. Their alchemy produced a gusher of song ideas, fragments, and riffs and lent a sweaty, gritty genuineness to whatever they played.

  Leon Wilkeson was another piece of the puzzle, though so far his presence in the band had been on-again, off-again; he filled in for Larry Junstrom when the latter had better things to do than play a gig. Nothing was being left to chance, and the work ethic bred inside the log walls of Hell House left the sprite-like Wilkeson, who weighed maybe 120 pounds, bathed in sweat and wrung out like a drained sponge. Wilkeson once said, “Ronnie d
ropped me and Bob Burns off there one day and told us that we were going to stay there till we could make the bass and drums blend into one sound, so we wouldn’t detract from the guitars. He said, ‘If you can’t do it, you’re fired.’” Still, Leon felt swept up in the swelling sense of confidence and swagger. A man of few words, he would later say that Ronnie Van Zant ran Skynyrd like Stalin did Russia, “but without his cracking whip, it would have all been for naught.” At Hell House, Wilkeson said, “We worked our asses off … and it paid off.”

  4

  “THEY SOUND TOO MUCH LIKE THE ALLMAN BROTHERS”

  The formula that had eventually adopted the evolving Lynyrd Skynyrd was an almost perfect flip of Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children,” which captured the smooth grooves of L.A.-based country rock as it gained traction in the early 1970s. The kick-ass authenticity of the down-home Skynyrd model conjured up visions not of languid days in the canyons of the San Fernando Valley but long days pumping gas at the filling station. But all forms of country rock were joined in a real sense by the history of the form itself and its long trail of bleeding across musical borders. An important transition had come back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when L.A. producer Snuff Garrett, a good old boy from Dallas, applied a country flavor to white pop singers such as Bobby Vee on songs like “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Garrett also cut rockabilly pioneer Johnny Burnette on crossover country tunes like “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” continuing the trend of native southern singers migrating westward. And country merged with surf-rock guitars in the Fendermen’s 1962 cover of the country classic “Mule Skinner Blues.”

  Later in the ’60s came a belated appreciation for the roots of rock and roll. Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited paid homage in its very title to the highway Dylan fled on from Minnesota to the picket fences of southern cities en route to the Mississippi Delta. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the first American double album, was backed on most tracks by Nashville’s elite studio musicians and was derivative in part of New Orleans R&B (such as on the 1966 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”); and his stripped-down, outright country/folk-rock offering John Wesley Harding further soldered the south to the broadening schema of pop music.

  The genesis of what can be branded West Coast or L.A. country rock filtered through the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the eventual conglomeration of the remnants of those two bands into the supergroup of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young). Of all the players in these groups, only one, Stephen Stills, hailed from the south, from the same northern Florida incubator as Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. Tellingly, it was Nash, the Brit expatriate, who wrote “Teach Your Children,” a song driven by a ringing pedal steel guitar line—turned in by the pride of Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. A similar country-by-proxy example was the Band, in which Levon Helm was conjoined with four Canadians; recording in Woodstock, New York, of all places, they indelibly stamped the country-rock idiom, first by backing up rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, then Bob Dylan, before making their own mark by fusing bluegrass into rock with parables of Jesus in Nazareth and a tableau of “the night they drove old Dixie down.”

  The first avowedly country-rock work—in the spangled, Nashville sense of the term—occurred when Gram Parsons, who was born in the backwoods of Florida, grew up in Waycross, Georgia, and went to Harvard, recorded Safe at Home with his International Submarine Band. A few months later, when the album came out, he was already with the Byrds recording their brilliant 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, though most of his lead vocals were later scrubbed. That album landed them a gig at the Grand Ole Opry, a first for a rock band. Parsons then led the first self-identified country-rock group, the Flying Burrito Brothers, who clad themselves in spangled, Nashville-style Nudie suits. But for all their genuineness, these Brothers were an L.A. band. Meanwhile, the soul and rock songs recorded at the Muscle Shoals studios (FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound) by artists ranging from Wilson Pickett to Donny Osmond and the Rolling Stones brought the music back to its roots in the Deep South.

  Those roots had already opened the way for an ambitious, lantern-jawed parvenu, Phil Walden, who had actualized the most unlikely of cockeyed dreams. Starting out as a student at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, having been proselytized by the rhythm and blues of the first-generation rock-and-roll incarnation, and living in a town that seeded Little Richard, James Brown, and Otis Redding, he began booking soul singers—Redding was one of his first clients—into frat houses and dive bars. When Redding was given a contract by Memphis’s fledgling Stax Records label in 1962, giving it bite and soul-deep emotion, mighty joy, and quivering vulnerability, the South had its answer to the question of how to compete with Berry Gordy’s rising kingdom of distilled black music sifted and aimed at a white market. Whereas Motown called itself Hitsville, Stax was Soulsville, a critical difference—with the added irony that the company was owned by white siblings, Jim Stewart and Estelle Stewart Axton. Walden was practically the conduit of talent for Stax, his client list long and noble—besides Redding, he had under contract Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Al Green, and some forty others, all of whom he was the personal manager for.

  Walden became a millionaire through his eye for talent and his keen intuition. And he was not caught flat-footed when two events changed the future rock landscape. The first was when Redding, at twenty-six, died in one of the many rock-and-roll death rides in the sky, his private plane crashing into a Wisconsin lake in December 1967, three days after he recorded “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” The other was when Atlantic Records, the New York-based titan of soul music labels that had cannily distributed Stax Records’ products, creating inroads into the South similar to when RCA Records had signed Elvis Presley, broke with Stax and, having maneuvered to control that priceless music catalog, looted Jim Stewart of nearly all the songs that dominated soul in the mid to late 1960s. Soulsville never recovered, and neither did the idiom of southern soul, with the exception of those God-blessed studios in the backwoods of Alabama, FAME and Muscle Shoals Sounds, where Atlantic sent Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to record after Stewart refused to allow any non-Stax artists to use his Memphis digs.

  By then Phil Walden had a thriving agency, Phil Walden and Associates, and a separate booking firm called the Paragon Agency and had groomed as an associate his three-years-younger brother, Alan, who had little of Phil’s savvy but was an energetic, aggressive, and sometimes abrasive presence in the business. Phil had trusted Alan enough to allow him and Redding to form a music publishing company, Redwal Music, which owned not only Redding’s songs but other standards like “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Soul Man.” Alan also had a hand in Premier Talent, which operated independently from Phil Walden and Associates, affording Alan a chance to scout and sign talent and then book it, solely on his own. True to the southern way of keeping things in a tight family circle, Paragon’s officers were the Walden brothers; their father C. B. Walden, an ex-newspaperman; and their mother, Carolyn. The only outsider was something like a brother, Alex Hodges, a fast-talking former Mercer classmate of Phil’s whom he had hired in the early ’70s only because no one else knew how to type and Phil’s business relied on a constant churn of press releases. Back then, the business was run out of Phil’s garage apartment beside his parents’ house; now it was quartered in a fancy office in the Robert E. Lee Building in downtown Macon.

  Phil had bigger things in mind than merely managing talent. Sick with grief, the fulcrum of his soul empire gone, he entered into a deal with Atlantic Records in 1969 to fund a new label, Capricorn Records, located in Macon. He aimed to harvest southern country-rock acts, a species yet to be fully formed or discovered. Capricorn’s first score would earn back every penny and more. He signed the then-green Allman Brothers, who had won some notice as a curio, a Deep South band that had little use for country music other than the blues aspects of it, a kind of Yardbirds grilled in smokehouse sauce. While it would take a few years for the
Allmans to break out, the formation of native southern industry norms and stars would be of immense help to the still-forming genre of music they played.

  Phil cut Alan in on Capricorn, but the label was really his baby, and he would run it as a monarch, with no use for the advice or help of others. Nor did he see any kind of conflict of interest in managing the talent he would, by rock-and-roll rote, be seeking to pay only as much as he had to. In this he was not alone: Berry Gordy had the same system in Motown, and as much as groups like the Temptations groused about being underpaid, they had no recourse and no outside manager to take up their case; indeed, they didn’t even see the tax returns that were prepared for them by Motown’s accountants. Walden, to his credit, paid his talent more than the usual three and a half cents per record sold but made no apologies for hoarding a fortune for himself.

  As Capricorn laid down roots, mainstream rock and even soul continued to dip into country—John Fogerty with “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and “Born on the Bayou”; Canned Heat’s jug-band boogie; Bobbie Gentry’s enigmatic “Ode to Billie Joe”; and soul genius Ray Charles’s warbling of “Born to Lose” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” But an open question for music honchos in the South was whether there really were homegrown acts that could break just as big across the mainstream. Fortuitously, one, a band of brothers (at least two of them), was rolling down Highway 41. And another was tuning up, approaching the on ramp.

  In 1969, Ronnie Van Zant, a man who clearly could not handle the notion of abandonment and being alone, found the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. While the band played a gig at the Comic Book Club, Gary introduced him to a pretty, shy, and very hip regular patron of the club, twenty-one-year-old Judy Seymour, who with her friends Mary Hayworth and Dean Kilpatrick—the latter a lanky, shag-haired starving artist who wore long capes and seemed the paragon of cool—shared a house in the Riverside section down the block from the Green House, where several members of the Allman Brothers Band lived. As a goof, the trio called theirs the Gray House.