Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  “It was looser,” he said. “It wasn’t so … Southern. There was a sociological gentrification in attitude…. The rednecks had long hair now. They were no longer the enemy. People got along better. I liked this. The women were beautiful and willing.”

  This was, of course, the South that bred a new music. Phil Walden’s success with the Allman Brothers proved to Kooper that the timing was right for a rock retrenchment. Everyone, it seemed, was into rock forms that had strayed far from their original charter, and a heavy corporate canopy hung over all of it. The sterile nature of L.A. rock had seeped across the industry, in the formation of contrived, profit-geared “intellectual” supergroups like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. A polar opposite but equally contrived animal had also emerged—the glam rock of T. Rex (“Bang a Gong”) and Gary Glitter (“Rock and Roll Part 2”), a tide that took the Rolling Stones into their mascara-caked “It’s Only Rock and Roll” phase. Kooper envisioned an antidote to all the pretension and cerebral marketing strategies, something stripped down and from the gut and loins—“basic rock and roll,” as Kooper put it, recalling the predominant music of the time as “schmutz,” Yiddish vernacular for, well, garbage. Kooper had it exactly right when he said, looking back, that if a southern band didn’t rate with Capricorn, “they were pretty much doomed, because no other label understood this phenomenon.”

  As a real mover and shaker in the industry, Kooper had the influence to get such a label up and running, as well as backing by the music label MCA. But he would need to have a strong act as his selling point. As fate would have it, Skynyrd would enter his purview with perfect timing, even if they were still rounding into shape—during a six-show run at Funochio’s from January 15 to 20, club posters billed them as LYNYRD SKYNNYRD, an opening act for a band called Boot, along with another called Smokestack Lightnin’. But Kooper’s first impression of them was ambivalent. Skynyrd might have sung about the pride of being a “simple man” of southern stock, but Kooper’s snap judgment of them was much like that of most nonsouthern music people.

  Seeing the front man on stage at Funochio’s—“blond and barefoot, and sw[inging] the mikestand around like a majorette’s baton”—Kooper admitted, “I hated Ronnie Van Zant upon first look at him…. He was so unusual. I never saw anybody like that—he was a very weird front man.” The word weird, in fact, was Kooper’s operative word for them. Rossington and Collins, he said, were “like two Cousin Its on stilts”—referring to the Smurf-like, mop-topped Addams Family character—“you literally couldn’t see their faces when they played.” The sound that emanated, he thought, was—again—“a weird amalgam of blues with second-generation British band influences.” He wasn’t alone in first-impression coldness. Even among those who paid to see them, there were sometimes crossed signals. While the band was determined to play “Free Bird” at every gig, the venue could make that dicey. Ronnie once recalled that at dance clubs, “they wanted to hear ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘Midnight Hour.’ They said [‘Free Bird’] wasn’t a good dance song, and we’d get a lot of boos and things thrown at us.”

  As it happened, the first time Kooper walked into Funochio’s, they were playing “Free Bird,” and, he recalled, “nobody was paying attention.” That would have been an off night, for sure, since it was the charge they put into audiences—in lieu of a record deal and hit songs—that kept them employed. But, like most audiences a tad baffled by Skynyrd, Kooper quickly warmed to them over three straight nights in his box, the “weird amalgam” suddenly making sense, such as when they played the song Kooper was taken with, “I Ain’t the One.” By night three, he thought “they had the sound I was looking for—that return to basic rock.” Having been introduced to the band by the club owner before the show, Kooper asked if he could play guitar with them on stage. As aware as they were of major studio musicians, the band knew Kooper had played with Michael Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix and made room for him, with no idea that Kooper saw them as a possible linchpin in his future plans.

  For his part, Kooper says he was “flattered” that they had heard of him and would open their clique to the “Yankee slicker,” as they called him with affectionate sarcasm. What he learned off the bat was that the redneck facade might have been their shtick, but they had a level of musicianship that impressed even him. He recounted his informal jam with the backwoods boys this way: “I strapped on a guitar and said, ‘Let’s go!’ [Van Zant] called out ‘Mean Woman Blues’ in C# [C-sharp] and counted it off…. In all my years of jamming, nobody ever called C#. It’s a weird key between two relatively easy keys that would just as easily have sufficed.”

  Later, Kooper said, “I found out it was an intimidation process they dreamed up to keep jammers offstage.” Realizing they were smarter than he had anticipated, Kooper didn’t know if they were testing his renowned mastery or whether perhaps they were not as eager as they seemed to have an outsider on stage with them, no matter who it was. In any case, Kooper would proudly boast, “I could play fine in C#,” and he continued sitting in with the band for three more nights, more than enough time for him to make them an offer to get them to commit to his incipient label. Following the last of those shows, Kooper was talking big.

  “We talked and he said he’d make us an offer and he was interested,” Rossington said, “but, actually, he didn’t.” Indeed, for all the attention he lavished on them, Kooper had also seen other acts to whom he had paid the same sort of attention and made the same promises—big talk being the most abundant and cheapest commodity a music nabob has. And there remains a fuzziness about how and when Skynyrd was in fact signed. Kooper, who has taken bows for having “discovered” them, liked to say that the opportunity was like “walking into a real funky bar someplace where you could get shot and hearing the Rolling Stones [and] finding out they weren’t signed to anybody.” Kooper says he offered to sign and produce them. “They said they would mull it over and discuss it with their manager. We said our goodbyes, and that was it. I hoped [their] manager would call me back.” Soon Alan Walden—whom Kooper knew only as “Phil Walden’s younger brother”—did.

  But even now Kooper didn’t push it, possibly because he wasn’t particularly fond of Walden and vice versa. Kooper didn’t mind who overheard him belittling the junior Walden for not being able to convince his own brother to sign his redneck rock act. Walden on the other hand saw Kooper as a northern sharpie stereotyping “dumbass Southern[ers].” And so nothing happened for three months. Kooper would later say this was merely because “they had to get to know me really well before they would sign,” but if so, Walden never heard a price from Kooper that seemed satisfactory; the most he could offer, based on the ceiling given him by MCA for signing talent, was $9,000.

  During the interim, Kooper didn’t stand still. He moved from New York to the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs and opened his label—Sounds of the South (SOS), the logo of which was a two-hundred-year-old log cabin on the grounds. He went ahead and signed a number of other acts, his new favorite the Mose Jones band, who also played at Funochio’s and sometimes jammed with Skynyrd there. Once signed, Mose Jones—who, as Kooper likely appreciated, had named themselves after Bob Dylan’s Mister Jones—kept pitching Kooper to sign Skynyrd, says the band’s drummer Bryan Cole. “We were close to them for a while,” Cole said. “Ronnie actually asked me to join [Skynyrd] at one point but I think he was just pissed off at his drummer at the time. [Bandmate] Jimmy O’Neill and I both told Al that he should check this group out. Even then they were tight and powerful and looked like stars.”

  Charlie Brusco, who kept tabs on Skynyrd’s progress, sure that they were on the edge of a breakout, says that Kooper “was unsure about them. He had two or three bands that he was seriously interested in over Skynyrd. It wasn’t a slam dunk. They were just so different. Again, no one in southern rock had that kind of hard-rock sound. It was a real gamble, and nobody was eager to take it.”

  Kooper indeed had his eye on many acts. He wanted to sign
a hard-rock country group, Hydra, but they spurned him for Capricorn Records, as did country rock singer Eric Quincy Tate. And in a very odd choice, he did sign Elijah, the Latino horn-funk band hailing from East L.A., whom Kooper had seen playing at the Whisky a Go Go. Fudging the sequence of the Skynyrd signing, Kooper has said simply that he “also” signed Mose Jones, whose tight three-part harmonies and nearly pop hooks appealed to him. “Stylistically speaking,” he said, “Mose Jones were my Beatles, and Skynyrd were my Stones.”

  Yet when he took Mose Jones into the studio early in 1973 to cut the first product on the SOS label, he didn’t have his “Stones” under contract. All that changed when, at 2 AM one night in February, Kooper was awakened by the ring of his phone. On the other end, he heard a familiar husky voice—not cocky for once but despondent—with a request he felt he couldn’t make of anyone else.

  “Al,” said Ronnie Van Zant, “our equipment van got broken into last night … We have engagements to fulfill immediately, and unless you can send us five thousand dollars by tomorrow morning, we’re fucked!”

  As Kooper remembered, there was no need to think it over. Whether or not Ronnie would ever be able to pay it back, five grand was a stiff but reasonable price to pay if it would break the negotiation logjam with Walden. “Where do I send it, buddy?” he said.

  Grateful, a relieved Van Zant stunned him. “Let me tell you somethin’,” he told Kooper. “You just bought yourself a band for five thousand dollars.”

  Walden, when he heard about this oral agreement, nearly fell down. He knew that Ronnie’s word was good as gold, and he would never go back on it. That meant that any leverage Walden might have had was gone with the wind. Walden had known the band would wind up with Sounds of the South—there just was no place else for them to go—and as he says, “the band would not have survived” any longer without a deal. But he nevertheless believed he had turned over a fortune for peanuts—the same bargain-basement $9,000 advance that Kooper had dangled all along. What’s more, Ronnie had vowed to pay back the money, southern men not being prone to charity.

  So Skynyrd finally got their contract. It was drawn up by the MCA lawyers, dated February 5, 1973, and signed shortly thereafter. Kooper was quite pleased about having committed highway robbery—though in his purview it was the reasonable advantage he reaped as an industry veteran. The contract broke down the split of every dollar in sales royalties thusly: Kooper ten points, Skynyrd five. But five was better than 0 percent of zero, and Kooper still cackles about how happy the rednecks were “that they got a major-label deal, and they were braggin’ about it.” In truth, they were no fools. They knew how lousy the deal was, because Walden told them. The manager, justifiably uneasy about how much power Kooper might grab from him, was in the parking lot outside the Macon Coliseum, contract in hand, waiting in his pickup truck for the band to finish a show. When they came out, Ronnie came over and hopped into Walden’s pickup truck. He asked Alan what he thought of the deal.

  “It’s the worst piece of shit I ever seen,” Walden told him.

  Ronnie, who had no intention of taking back his handshake agreement, also understood there was no other option, “What else we got?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Nothin’,” Walden said.

  “Gimme the goddamn pen,” Ronnie told him.

  Walden looks back on that moment with not much glee or pride. Lynyrd Skynyrd, he says, “signed away two million dollars that day.”

  But they’d make up for it. Lord knows, they would make up for it.

  6

  ENTER ROOSEVELT GOOK

  The men—no longer boys—of Lynyrd Skynyrd saw the money for a fleeting, giddy moment. As Ed King recalled, having been told of it by the band when he joined, “Ronnie cashed the check from Kooper and literally brought all the money to Hell House. Once we were all there, he threw the money up in the air and [they] just sat there for a while looking at it laying everywhere while drinking some beer.” However, after rolling around in the green, cold reality set in, and every dollar of it, King noted, “was poured back into the band for equipment and for those that needed money to get by,” which was actually everyone. For the time being and until the advance was earned back, there would be no additional bread; when—if—they earned out, they were told they would be put on a weekly salary. Thus, little changed for them materially. They were still starving artists, living hand to mouth, still selling auto parts and packing meat in their nonband hours. King could be glad he was in Greenville, North Carolina, earning his own money.

  “If I had been in the band twelve months prior to Kooper signing the band,” he says, “it would’ve been very frustrating. You have to recognize how much Collins, Rossington, and Van Zant believed in and supported each other in those early days.”

  Of course, Al Kooper, too, had no way of knowing if there would ever be any sort of return on his investment or whether he and MCA would in the end take a $9,000 bath. To test the waters of his newly signed act, Kooper, with his New York connections, landed them a one-shot gig as the opening act for Black Sabbath on February 25 at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Sabbath, fronted by the not-quite-all-there Ozzy Osbourne, was touring the United States in support of its Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album, a brilliant, widely praised milestone in metal, and would play in April at the California Jam before two hundred thousand people on a bill with the Eagles, Deep Purple, Black Oak Arkansas, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Yet Sabbath fans were a loony lot, and so was Osbourne, who in the ’80s would legendarily bite the head off a bat at one concert. To the fruitcakes in the Long Island audience, there was no accommodation to be made with Skynyrd.

  First they threw bottles at the stage. That was not new for Skynyrd, but then, recalled Kooper, “the audience came at them.” Guards had to intercept several fans before they reached the stage. Not knowing what they might do, Leon Wilkeson had worn a holster with a gun, loaded with blanks. As Skynyrd played their set, their ears stinging from catcalls like “You guys suck!” and “Get the fuck off the stage!” and “Ozzy rules!” Wilkeson, Kooper said, “pulled out his gun and fired off a blank but convincing round right at them that caused a few wet pants in the crowd and an immediate cessation of catcalls.”

  Score one for the Thumper. He was let alone by the cops when it was learned the gun had fired blanks, but the band, shaken by the experience, surely had to wonder, flying home after the show, what the hell they had gotten themselves into.

  As it happened, however, the deal Skynyrd had signed with MCA was so weighted in the company’s favor that it was highly unlikely that Kooper or anyone else beside the band would suffer. As Alan Walden recalled, “I knew from the beginning we needed MCA on our side. I made sure we gave them a deal that would give them a chance to make millions. We recorded [the debut album] for $22,500. Can you believe it? We did not try to borrow a lot of money. We did not call [MCA] every day. We were a working machine fully tuned and oiled. Independent!” Indeed, the MCA honchos wondered why the band and Walden were so detached from the pomp of signing a deal with a big company. “When I met [MCA Inc. president] Mike Maitland, he was shocked,” Walden goes on. “I was all business and not into hanging out in the Hollywood scene like most.” Nor did Skynyrd particularly care about going out west and shuffling their feet down Sunset. Right after the Nassau Coliseum debacle, Kooper got the group into the studio, in this case Studio One in Doraville, just outside of Atlanta, where the owner of the studio, Buddy Buie of the soft country rock band the Atlanta Rhythm Section, gave him the run of the place. The session, at which Kooper would produce tracks for a debut album, was scheduled for March 26, 1973. Skynyrd tuned up for it by playing a seven-date engagement back at Funochio’s—the first three still as a backup act, to the headliners Blackfoot and Hooker, before getting top billing as “Lynyrd Skynyrd” for three shows and then returning to backup for Orpheum Circuit and Kudzu.

  By then Kooper had filled their heads with garru
lous promises of what he could deliver them, no less than superstardom. One night, Kooper, as always looking to sample the charms of southern women, found himself invited home by a girl he’d met in a club. When he got there, he had to rub his eyes when he saw Allen Collins, who had also been invited, possibly for some sort of rock-and-roll ménage à trois. For Collins, the encounter was a tad awkward, what with his recent marriage. Kooper, meanwhile, jumped not on the girl but on the opportunity to butter up Collins, telling him that Skynyrd was “the missing link” in rock’s evolution. Kooper remembered that “we forgot about the girl and talked all night.”

  This rendezvous with Kooper wore down the group’s initial wariness of him as a sharpie and user. Ronnie—still grateful about the loan, ripoff or no—had grown to respect Kooper as he did no other industry figure. He was impressed to no end with the MCA signing, boasting a year later that “we were the first southern group to go with a label that wasn’t in the South.” It’s not at all clear, however, whether Kooper ever really liked the band members or just tolerated them for his own purposes. But then, who knew how long he, as an industry bumblebee, would even sojourn in the South before taking off on another conquest somewhere?

  Just as with Skynyrd’s trip to Muscle Shoals, personnel adjustments had to be made before the Doraville sessions. Leon Wilkeson, who, if he didn’t bitch and moan about something during any given day, caused Ronnie to give thanks, began acting crazy during the three-month writing and rehearsing period at Hell House. He frequently came in piss-faced drunk, muttering about Jesus, the devil, and rock and roll stealing his soul. Little got done, and with the band about to take a road tip to Saint Augustine for a gig, Leon said he might not be a-goin’.