Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Ronnie, steaming as he was, did not want to cut Leon adrift any more than he’d wanted to cut Bob Burns, knowing his value to the band. So he cut Leon slack so the bassist could make up his mind, but insisted he teach the bass lines he had developed for the new songs to another bass player. And it seemed they got a real break when Larry Steele, a real heavy hitter, agreed to play with them until the Wilkeson matter was settled. Steele had played sessions for a staggering range of artists, including Cat Stevens, Al Stewart, jazz organist Jack McDuff, and blues guitarist Stefan Grossman. Recently he had contributed to Elton John’s Honky Chateau and Stephen Stills’s eponymous solo album. He had far more experience than Leon but played good soldier, patiently taking direction from the boozy, barely coherent kid. Both made the trip and roomed in a hotel—ironically, the Headrest—getting drunk and running up excessive room service tabs that Ronnie had to empty his pockets to pay for.

  Now really steaming, Ronnie thought Steele, not Wilkeson, was the bad influence. Plans had been made for Bob Burns to pick up Larry for the trip to Doraville; he waited on the side of the road for Burns, who never came around. That was Skynyrd’s way of firing Steele, who chalked it up to bad judgment on his part, wasting his time with a bunch of two-bit redneck punks. He has hardly suffered for it; he’s been working constantly in the years since, including regular gigs playing bass on and writing songs with both the Johnny Van Zant Band and Donnie Van Zant’s .38 Special. Leon, shaky as he was, got himself together enough to go to Doraville, though Ronnie could not go without a backup ready to step in if—when—Leon got crazy again. That man turned out to be an old ally. A few days before, knowing Steele was a goner, Ronnie had called Ed King at his home in Greenville, North Carolina, and invited him to join Skynyrd, not on guitar but bass. King, who’d wanted to get just such a call from Skynyrd ever since he’d first met up with the band, was surprised nonetheless.

  “I mean, you would think there would have been a bass player in town that they could have called. Larry Junstrom, I know he was the original bass player, and Larry Junstrom is like one of the best bass players. Matter of fact, when they played ‘Need [All] My Friends’ way back at the Comic Book, Junstrom’s bass part was just, it was miraculous. It was just genius. So I don’t know what Ronnie saw in me. There was no logical reason for me to be in that band when you think about it.”

  King drove to Jacksonville, rehearsed on the bass with Wilkeson, and went to Doraville ready to play the four-string but just as likely to be utilized as a third lead guitar, something Ronnie had hoped would give as much kick to the Skynyrd sound as possible. For King, a grand learning experience was beginning. And by now Billy Powell had gotten the promotion that he’d been waiting for. For a time, as he carried out his job as a roadie, it seemed as if the band had forgotten that they had a classically trained pianist in their camp. Then after a Skynyrd concert at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Powell dropped onto a piano stool in the auditorium and began noodling a keyboard embellishment for “Free Bird.” Ronnie, hearing it, was taken aback. “You play? You been workin’ with us for a year and you didn’t tell us you played?” he asked Powell. A few more bars and he was in the band, a move that would have a profound effect on the Skynyrd sound.

  Powell was among the pilgrims who assembled before Al Kooper on March 26. Kooper, though a hands-on producer with great ears, always allowed the artists he was recording the breathing room to record their songs as they wanted them to be. Right from the first downbeat, he realized he wouldn’t need to do much by way of producing Skynyrd. The band, he would later say, “was years ahead of their time. They were twenty year-olds playing like thirty year-olds.” This was, he insisted, just as he wanted it, since “I’m not interested in producing anybody I can’t learn from.” He had told them to come in with all of their songs, literally all of them, including whichever tracks from the Muscle Shoals sessions they were fond of enough to rerecord. They would have fourteen of them, with “not a bad apple in the bunch,” according to Kooper. He found them “incredibly well rehearsed,” their guitar solos arranged beforehand, leading Kooper to call them “the best damn arrangers I have ever worked with” and to acknowledge that “their mental discipline was everything to them. They understood music organically, not by the book.”

  After getting them in the controlled environment of the studio, Kooper’s judgment of Van Zant was much the same as his original one. Although he still thought Ronnie had “a rather pedestrian voice,” he conceded that Van Zant had a “unique sound” and “remarkable leadership skills” that seemed to give that voice a swagger; in his view, the vocals were undeniably commanding. Kooper loves to relate the time when Ronnie amused himself during a break by crooning Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter.” Just as he sang the first line—“Hey porter, hey porter, would you tell me the time”—a janitor sweeping up checked his watch.

  “6:08, son,” he said.

  Light-hearted moments like that were rare. While the sessions ran smoothly enough, the bandmates were as thorny as ever, “always getting in fistfights,” Kooper said. “If they couldn’t find anyone to fight, they’d fight each other.” Having King and Powell surely made things easier. Wilkeson managed to get through the day, freeing King to pick up a guitar and contribute that third lead-guitar part, which to Kooper was gravy, given that Rossington and Collins were already near-perfect complements. Gary, he thought, was a “curious mix” between the great folk-blues guitarist Ry Cooder and Free’s Paul Kossoff, aping the latter’s honkish, vibrato style; while Collins had an “Eric Clapton-like approach,” presumably a reference to Clapton’s self-described “woman tone,” amp cranked to the max, wah-wah pedal creating a thick, distorted sonic blast that poured out of speakers like quivering cake batter.

  In developing and rehearsing songs, there was apt to be a fight over who would play what part. Rather than deciding on some intellectual reasoning about style, Rossington says, “Most of the time we just knew whose rhythm or lead style would fit. On occasion it was more rough and tumble: whoever thought they had a cool approach would jump on it, and if the other guy thought he could whup him, he would just try to take it.”

  For Ed King, the new guy, such a claiming of turf was rare. Usually he would gladly accept a rhythm part, bridging the other two, and then dive into the three-guitar solo breaks when all three would play the exact same notes; yet even then, their distinct styles would lend depth and a “real” feel that could never have been created by Gary or Allen overdubbing their own parts. To Kooper, King was “the icing, [a] James Burton,” referencing the legendary studio guitar man for Elvis. “It’s ridiculous,” said Kooper, “they had every kind of guitar playing covered.” King was just beginning to figure out the quirks and habits of his new bandmates, which extended even to the guitars played by Rossington and Collins—indeed a curious duo. “When I first met them, Gary was playing a white SG and Allen a gold-top Les Paul with mini-humbuckers,” says King, using the vernacular of musicianspeak. “When I joined the band, they’d switched! The Les Paul you hear on the [first] album is that gold-top Paul.” Both of those guitars, he notes, were later stolen out of Collins’s hotel room during a 1974 gig in San Francisco, by which time the band’s supply of guitars was such that they could have freely switched them to match their clothes if they chose to.

  King, the ultimate pro, echoed both of the guitars with his own, broadening the texture of each and the sonic field as a whole, seeming to solder the sound into a cohesive pulp, with not a note out of place or wasted. Billy Powell’s funky, bluesy, honky-tonk piano also added depth. If there was a weak link, it was Bob Burns, but he did what was asked of him, playing drum parts that were written for him by the others with an inherent “Skynyrd” feel, having been there from the start. Being in the Skynyrd “gang,” as Kooper put it, was like having taken a blood oath, one that could only be broken, it seemed, if Ronnie allowed it to be.

  March 26, 1973, was a long and beneficial day, fourteen crisply recorded demo tracks
done. Kooper and the band listened to them, and eight songs were chosen for inclusion on the album. Ignoring that one of them, “Things Goin’ On,” had been in the projected album rejected by numerous labels and that four more—“I Ain’t the One,” “Free Bird,” “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Simple Man”—had been among the outtakes, the band chose these songs to make up the bulk of their first official album. “I Ain’t the One,” Kooper’s favorite, was tabbed as the first cut and “Free Bird” the last. In between, the new songs would be “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Mississippi Kid,” and “Poison Whiskey.” Skynyrd went back home to rehearse the songs, planning to return to Studio One early in April for more polished takes of the tracks. By then, Wilkeson was again coming unglued, adding uncertainty that Ronnie didn’t need. He had Ed King make sure to take a bass along with his six-string Fender Stratocaster. As it happened, Leon would make it through two tracks before getting up and walking out the door, with not a word to anyone. Kooper, seeing this bizarre behavior, believed that Wilkeson “was actually frightened of all the responsibilities that would be forthcoming” and created an exit scenario. In any case, he hitchhiked back to Jacksonville, leaving King to step in, which he did seamlessly, having memorized all of Wilkeson’s bass lines to the chosen songs.

  Kooper was delighted that King not only played the lines but added “little flourishes, slides and grace notes that made the difference between bass playing and art.” As the sessions went on, Kooper would make further use of King, as the third lead guitar. It was little wonder that when people first heard these songs the guitars leapt out of the radio and off turntables. With Kooper doubling the guitar tracks, a massive, coiled font of sound erupted, through which certain notes seemed to climb out of a distant, dewy mist and move from one stereo channel to the other and across the aural spectrum—the nearly visual nature of the Skynyrd sound that would be their signature. The other newcomer, Billy Powell, was another pleasant tool for Kooper, his nimble, bluesy piano accents—“all the textures,” Kooper called them—an effective counterpoint to the deafening din of all those guitars. On “Tuesday’s Gone,” a hazy ballad mourning the things left behind in the course of a man movin’ on—e.g., “My baby’s gone with the wind again”—the guitars gently weeped. It was one of the last songs recorded, and Powell had come up with a solo that Kooper called a “beautiful little sonata.” Kooper got in on the session too, playing the mellotron, the keyboard/synthesizer contraption that creates an orchestral sound from recorded tape segments—the forerunner of modern studio sampling.

  He also played on “Mississippi Kid,” a jug band-style rag with the requisite tale about crossing the state line into Alabama to “fetch” a straying woman, with the ominous vow that “I’m not looking for no trouble, but nobody dogs me ’round.” Kooper hired his old Blues Project/Blood, Sweat and Tears compadre Steve Katz to add a wailing harmonica part. Kooper also heard the need for a mandolin. Obsessive as he was, he called every mandolin player in the musicians directory, in vain, and then scoured music stores in the area until he found a mandolin selling for forty bucks and taught himself the chords of the song. (Pertinent to Skynyrd trivia freaks is that Bob Burns, who took ill, didn’t play on this track; Atlanta Rhythm Section drummer Robert Nix took his place.)

  Knocked out as he was by Powell, whose solos he says were “truly unique,” Kooper did have to temper Billy’s tendency as a classic pianist to overplay with his left hand, which at times drowned out some of the more nuanced guitar notes. Improvising, he had Powell play with his left hand tied to the piano bench. Billy was none too pleased, but when the band would chafe at some Kooper direction, Ronnie would intervene for the producer, if with a little dig.

  “Awright, wait a second,” he said during one session. “I think that idea sucks too but I will listen to everything Al says. Maybe once in twenty times he’ll have a great idea, but I will suffer the other nineteen times because that twentieth one will make us sound better, so go easy on the old guy!” Never mind that, at the time, Van Zant was twenty-five and Kooper all of twenty-nine. Ronnie always did live in his own reality warp. And when he had an objection to a Kooper directive, the “old guy” knew he’d have to back down. That happened most emphatically when Kooper didn’t think “Simple Man,” a rare Ronnie reference to the down-home wisdom of Sis Van Zant—“Take your time. Don’t live too fast / Troubles will come and they will pass”—was strong enough to go on the album.

  “You guys are not gonna cut that song,” Kooper told them.

  Ronnie was not about to argue the point. He took Kooper out to the parking lot and opened the door to Kooper’s Bentley. “Get in,” he said. Too petrified to resist, Al slid into the driver’s seat. Ronnie, standing outside the open window, had just one thing to say.

  “When we’re done cuttin’ it, we’ll call you.”

  Recalls Rossington: “We cut the whole tune without him.”

  This is another of those slices of Skynyrd BS lore that likely didn’t quite happen. Although the band and the producer had numerous runins, and arguments were de rigueur, Kooper need not have been banished that day; rather, he gave in on “Simple Man”—“it did fit, and I was wrong,” he later said, adding, “I’m glad it did go on the album”—and also played organ on the session. Kooper’s role in buffing, tweaking, and polishing Skynyrd’s backwoods rock with technical proficiency, even perfection, without compromising its essence and character is one of the great rock triumphs of all time. Not an ounce of what came out of his studio was either under- or overproduced, nor was any element more or less spacious or more or less biting than was intended when the band composed and played it. Needless to say, he couldn’t have made chickens out of chicken poop. Not just any band could have been buffed into the next big thing in rock—Skynyrd was not just any band. Thus, everything that came out of these sessions constituted the ingredients of what made Skynyrd into Skynyrd.

  Yet Ronnie, being Ronnie, never would see completely eye to eye with Al, one departure being that he thought Ed King’s bass playing was not up to snuff. This was something that King would find out soon enough. But his guitar sorcery would keep him in the fold, feeling not entirely accepted and almost lost in the shuffle among the indigenous rednecks, but quite nearly indispensable, at least for a while.

  The song that Kooper had first heard them play, to a tepid reception, ate up the most studio time, as it would have to, given its length. “Free Bird” had by then become a running soap opera in itself. When Rossington and Collins first erected the melody, Ronnie couldn’t make it work lyrically until Allen simplified the chords. Rather than because of any artistic or rule-breaking consideration, the long instrumental break and fadeout came about because Van Zant, the only singing voice on every song, needed to almost literally take five to keep from losing his voice. Thus he had no objection to standing on stage with little to do but caress the microphone and catch his breath. There would be no forced participation, no banging on a tambourine, no leaping about or swiveling of the hips; like Jim Morrison had done during the extended break of “Light My Fire,” all Van Zant need do was to look cool, something he could manage quite well.

  Kooper let his version run to a stupefying 9:09 when the song was cut on April 3. Until then, the intro through two previous recordings had been Gary’s straightforward lick, joined by Allen’s mournful-sounding slide guitar. But when Ronnie heard Billy Powell’s off-the-cuff piano swirls at Bolles, he had a different idea: to kick the song off with a similar riff. Kooper, however, heard the song as an anthem of redneck royalty and decided that it needed a regal, gospel-like feel, similar to what had been created so effectively by Keith Emerson’s Hammond organ on Emerson, Lake and Palmer songs like “Hoedown,” not to mention the contributions of Booker T. Jones, the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, and good-old Texas boy Doug Sahm in the Sir Douglas Quintet (“She’s About a Mover”).

  Such a feel, played beside Powell’s delicate piano line, Kooper said, could give “Free Bird” an opening like the revere
nt, fugue-style chorale intro of “You Can’t Always Get You Want.” Indeed, Stones fan that Ronnie was, all it took for Kooper to convince him was to mention for the hundredth time that he had played on Stones sessions, as if he could transfer some of that same magic to a hillbilly band. The organ, of course, was an instrument Kooper was rather familiar with, having made a particular Hammond B-3 accompaniment a rock-and-roll staple eight years before in Bob Dylan’s studio. And so he came onto the floor and played as he had back then, on feel and instinct, creating for himself yet another link to rock immortality, joining southern-fried rock and Bob Dylan. Kooper would list himself on the album credits in code as “Roosevelt Gook,” something he had been doing for years whenever he played a session.

  Kooper’s main task was to make the song’s waves of guitars ring in balance, none louder or more commanding than any other, a real challenge given the sheer overload of it all. Both Rossington and Collins doubled their own parts on a separate track, making for a faintly echoing quality to their lines. Yet it was all interwoven, all firing in unison, each seeming to challenge the others during a particular segment, and then each receding in turn to begin another mounting wave. It was so over the top that no one inside the studio that day believed the song would ever be released as a single. When MCA saw that 9:09 in the tape can, executives sent word to Kooper to cut it down to a reasonable length; but he knew better than to ask Ronnie to do that. Besides, he believed it would play right into the maw of the now entrenched long-form FM radio formats.

  “Free Bird,” however, was not considered for the album’s first single. Instead, “I Ain’t the One” was thought to be the best choice. Van Zant and Kooper cut it as the album’s “Free song,” one reserved on each LP for Ronnie to try to sound like Paul Rodgers, though it usually came off more like ZZ Top than Free. Its catchy beat and funky acoustic and electric guitar pickin’, along with Ronnie’s bluesy, throaty vocal and brief spoken rap formed a real platform for the lead man, whose bad-boy image was aided by the provocative, metaphoric line: “I never hurt you sweetheart, oh Lord / Never pulled my gun.” That line, analogizing the penis to a gun, would make the song a concert favorite. The song sounded so good that, even though a guitar part was played slightly out of time, the band ordered Kooper to go with it anyway.