Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Kooper, who had been watching from the wings, recalled Townsend and Rudge as “incredulous,” quoting Rudge as saying, “I have never seen this happen with any Who opening band.”

  Kooper had little time to observe. He had taken an active, hands-on role on the tour, dropping himself behind the sound mixing board during their time on stage, a chore he would not trust to Kevin Elson, their usual soundman. Such were the stakes on this tour that the aural shadings of the songs had to be perfect. This was a rather amazing sight, a record company executive mixing the sound—as Kooper would say, “Let’s see Clive Davis do this!” What’s more, he had to do it in unorthodox fashion, with the board not out in the audience so as to hear if the band was being amplified loud enough, but in the wings. This was per Townsend’s orders; if he thought his soundman, Bob Pridden, messed up, he could walk over and attack him, verbally or even physically, something he did regularly during the tour. To ease the task, Kooper hired people to filter through the crowds and report to him on the sound levels via a walkie-talkie telemetry system. Again, nothing was left to chance.

  Billy Powell nearly didn’t survive that first night. After Skynyrd was done with their thirty-minute set, Billy meandered to the foot of the stage so he could watch the Who, just as the security staff was trying to clear the area. Massive bouncers were bodily picking up stragglers without backstage passes and throwing them over a barrier behind the stage. Powell, whose pass was in his coat pocket, was next. When a bouncer grabbed him by the hair, Billy told the guy, “Hold it. I’m in the Skynyrd band.” He tried squatting down so he could reach into his pocket for the pass; but the guy wouldn’t let go, and Billy threw a punch at him.

  Standing nearby was the promoter Bill Graham, a man who watched over his shows like a hawk. Graham, née Wolfgang Wolodia Grajonca, was as famous as many big rock acts. The acts he promoted in the late ’60s included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin. His shows at the Winterland Ballroom and the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York all but created the era of arena rock, and he promoted the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American tour, which set the standard for road-show depravity, as well as the outdoor Watkins Glen festival headlined by the Dead and the Allman Brothers. Seeing the commotion, the swarthy, scowling Graham, as Powell remembered later, “came running down the ramp and punched me in the mouth. I mean with full momentum. Knocked me about ten feet. He knocked me silly. I was bleeding everywhere, and I was about to pass out.”

  As if in a scene from Animal House, Leon, also in the area, leapt into action. “I go running to Billy’s aid,” he once said, “and here comes Ronnie, Gary, and we’re all up there,” mixing it up with bouncers, fans, whoever. Somehow in this melee Powell was able to get the pass from his pocket, upon which Graham turned contrite. “He apologized, swear to God, ten times,” Powell said. Still feeling badly two months later, Graham would send a five-foot floral wreath and bottles of Jack Daniels to the Whisky a Go Go when Skynyrd was booked to play there. If they could draw an apology from Bill Graham, it must have felt like the world really was in their hip pocket.

  Ronnie was also busy that night working the press. The young Cameron Crowe, covering the Who on tour for Rolling Stone, was backstage after the concert when a thick-chested guy with stringy blond hair sidled up next to him. “I can really relate to you,” he said, “because you’re a young guy starting out and I’m a young guy starting out.” Crowe recalls Van Zant as “the first musician that crossed the line and talked to me like I was an artist or a writer. It blew me away. [He was] a straight-ahead, sensitive guy. No agenda. He didn’t ask me to write about him.” But Crowe did write about him, went on the road with the band, contributed liner notes to one of their albums, and in 2000 wrote his first movie Almost Famous about coming of age and then some with them (in the guise of the fictitious band Stillwater, an amalgam of Skynyrd, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin). Smart as the leader of the band was, gaining exposure in the Yankee-dominated rock media was a piece of cake, done with a dollop of charm and a load of bull.

  The most obvious Who “thing” was their dance of nihilism, smashing their instruments at the conclusion of a concert, an exhibition of senseless mayhem that would send crowds, who by then expected it as part of the show, into a sometimes frightening frenzy. Jimi Hendrix had been so impressed with that dynamic of postmodern beatitude by anarchy that he started setting his own precious guitars on fire at the epochal 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, as if to outdo Townsend’s earlier destruction of his own guitar by smashing it to bits, a routine he had begun in 1964. Not that Skynyrd would ever, could ever, have done this, even when they were rich enough to, not those gorgeous instruments of their craft that meant so much to them.

  Still, there were plenty of other lessons they eagerly sucked up—including their introduction to drugs in addition to the usual booze, booze, and more booze. It was on the Quadrophenia tour that Skynyrd encountered cocaine, heroin, pills of many sizes and colors, and God knows what else, all readily available backstage and at the hotels where both bands stayed. As Leon Wilkeson said, getting shit faced had nothing to do with acting the part of rock rebels; it was because “we were terrified to go up on the stage and perform before The Who.” But the problem with the drinking, he said, was that “we never stopped.” Seeing them at close range, Rudge’s assistant, Chris Charlesworth, formed an immediate image in his mind of the country boys. They all, he recalls, “drank like fishes, took all known illegal drugs, fucked anything female on two legs, and liked nothing better than to fight with their fists, either against others or amongst themselves.” Ronnie, he added, “was the toughest of the lot and he could more or less silence any of the others with the threat of a beating.”

  Another infamous part of the Who playbook offered additional comfort: satisfying the primal urge to blow off steam by trashing hotel rooms and having the record company pay for it among the overall travel “expenses.” Billy Powell remembered how, as a kind of rite of passage into rock stardom, starting on that tour they would throw half-filled cans at the back of the TV until the alcohol soaked the tubes and set them on fire. “We’d watch it blow up,” Powell said, still amused by such a simple pleasure. Another one was heaving beer cans out the windows and into the swimming pool below. Back in L.A., MCA would find bills, often running into the thousands, from promoters and hotels seeking recompense for the damage done by the label’s new investment. Kooper could only shrug and point out that it all went with the territory of rock. Somehow, both bands were able to get it together at show time. What else mattered?

  However, at times during the tour they seemed to be progressively coming apart at the seams. There were so many complicated components in trying to recreate the densely layered studio effects on the Who’s Quadrophenia that something was apt to go wrong and often did. They brought with them a score of tapes that had to be played on the sound system at precisely the right time, and if one wasn’t, the timing and texture would be thrown off. Soon, Townsend slapping Pridden wasn’t good enough. The Who actually stopped playing songs from the album in favor of the simpler songs from the past, which required no technological appurtenances; but those who had bought the album in droves, not to mention the critics, were baffled. Right from the start, the enormous pressure that Townsend put on himself to make the tape sequencing and light shows work—and the emotional outbursts that followed when something screwed up—provided the Who with one of many excuses to unwind by wrecking themselves and, famously, whatever hotel harbored them. Such wreckage had become their signature, an all but obligatory part of their persona.

  And they didn’t disappoint on that count. Once, after a show in Montreal, they were so out of control and caused so much destruction to their hotel room that the Canadian Mounted Police were called. They were arrested and bailed out, and as usual let their managers and accountants pay for the damage. Because of the negative publicity, promoters in Denver canceled the six shows the Who was to headline there. Stepping in
to all this madness and chaos, Skynyrd, Billy Powell would say, “blew The Who away.” Ronnie, however, didn’t con himself into believing that. By tour’s end, he would recall, “We were playing good and still getting our asses kicked by The Who.” He said of the tour, however, “I really dug it. It was like a challenge…. And we didn’t have to change our show any. We’re still doing what we did in the clubs.”

  If the Who were grateful for Skynyrd getting audiences jacked up and perhaps a little less apt to find fault with the main attraction, they apparently were not thrilled about being upstaged. Yet those were the times when the boys from Britain would rebound and put on some of their best performances, as if to keep pace with the rubes from Florida. All in all, the bizarre juxtaposition worked to benefit both bands—even if in order to keep the tour rumbling on night after night, the Brits and the good old boys needed constant numbing. “The drinking was crazy,” agrees Rossington, “but we’d just wake up the next morning and go for it.” It was so crazy that it openly became part of the act. Wilkeson once noted that “we decided to take the bar atmosphere on stage. We had a little portable bar up there and everybody was drinking.”

  Still, they won grudging admiration from the Who, and on Rossington’s twenty-second birthday, December 1, Townshend came into his room with booze and a cake and, Rossington recalls, “mashed the cake in my face,” apparently a ritual of acceptance. Skynyrd got even when Roger Daltrey happened into the Skynyrd dressing room just as a bottle of beer was thrown across the room for someone, sending a sudsy spray all over him and ruining his expensive, tailored vest. The increasingly besotted tour stumbled from the Forum in L.A. to the Dallas Memorial Auditorium to the Omni in Atlanta to the Saint Louis Arena to the International Amphitheatre in Chicago to Cobo Hall in Detroit to the Montreal Forum to the Boston Garden to the Spectrum in Philadelphia to the finale at the Capital Centre outside DC on December 6. Then Skynyrd, on their own again, jumped back to their originally planned tour, headlining with Black Oak Arkansas, Canned Heat, and Brownsville Station at the Palladium in Hollywood, opening for Blue Oyster Cult at the Long Beach Arena, and finally, headlining a sold-out New Year’s Eve show back in Atlanta at the Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel.

  Keeping the iron hot, instead of going back home to Jacksonville to chill, they immediately headed back to the studio with Kooper for their second album. According to their contract, they would need a new one every nine months. This time they recorded not in Doraville but across the continent at the Record Plant in L.A., a logical choice since a California tour, with them as headliners, was to begin in San Diego on January 12, allowing for recording on off days and performing at night. The backbreaking schedule would test their endurance and whether they had the right stuff. To Skynyrd, though, it was business as usual, as long as they had gigs and bottles of hooch to comfort them, not to mention vials and little paper envelopes filled with a certain white powder to keep them from collapsing.

  They had picked up something else from the Who as well—a future manager. Pete Rudge had seen enough of them on the tour to decide he wanted to run their affairs and bring them even further into the rock elite. But there was a minor complication: Skynyrd already had a manager who went everywhere with them. Down the road something was going to have to give—something named Alan Walden.

  Despite the band’s to-kill-for gig with the Who, the rock media fairly ignored pronounced. If Skynyrd’s presence on the tour provided a crucial lift for them—and their performances indeed killed—they were still a long way down the rock roster, more a novelty for the young, northern college-bred editors at the increasingly upscale Rolling Stone and even for the more fanzine-style rags such as the C trinity—Circus, Crawdaddy!, and Creem, the last of which had the brass to call itself AMERICA’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL MAGAZINE. In fact Creem was the first of the crowd to give the band any media attention, a July 28, 1973, note about Kooper’s bash at Richard’s. Oddly, it was the teeming British rock press that found more space for them. The October 31 issue of Sounds magazine smartly perceived the LP as “a raw blend of hillbilly, country, and British boogie packed with typically Southern flavor; moaning slide guitar, country-pickin’ mandolin, aggressive guitars, driving rhythm section … and dry, thirst-parched vocals…. Van Zant’s lyrics completed the geographical picture with tales of disapproving daddies, guns, trains, rides, ghettos, the Lord, and getting high on dope and booze.”

  It was hard to get a handle on them. Rossington, when asked what they were, could only reply, “We were kinda rebels.” Indeed, they were kinda a lot of things: nonhippie hippies, but far more prone to crush flowers under their boots than wear them in their hair, more Harley hog than Magic Bus, kinda hard, kinda soft—and both in one song, their own “Stairway to Heaven,” a compost of nice ’n’ easy and nice ’n’ rough. Decades later, Rolling Stone’s album guide decided that pronounced “boiled down its potent regional influences—blues, country, soul—into a heady, potentially crippling homebrew. They liked to play; those three lead guitars weren’t just for show.” Robert Christgau’s review in the Village Voice read, “Lacking both hippie roots and virtuosos, post-Allmanites like ZZ Top, Marshall Tucker, and Wet Willie become transcendently boring except when they get off a good song. But in this staunchly un-transcendent band, lack of virtuosos is a virtue, because it inspires good songs, songs that often debunk good-old-boy shibboleths.”

  Critics have noted the tie between redneck and metal rock in songs like “Tuesday’s Gone” and “Poison Whiskey,” which, as a 2012 review on the Ace Black Blog said, “exude animated danger festering at rock’s far reaches…. Solid examples of the best elements of southern rock reaching for the solidity of metal, the vocals of Ronnie Van Zant perfectly suitable for stretching into metal, and the guitars of Gary Rossington and Allen Collins more than willing to follow…. The good material succeeds in outweighing the bad, and the greatness on the album is pronounced ‘Free-Bird.’”

  Others look back at Skynyrd’s flowering through a cultural lens. Historian Barbara Ching points to the album, which Van Zant always said was Skynyrd’s best, as something startlingly new for its time, “the mock-didactic title … suggest[ing] that the band came from a South so deep that even the language was incomprehensible”—which in this case only worked in their favor. Indeed, all future cover art and publicity photos of the band would reflect the tableau of that Deep South, which as Ching put it, “displayed sullen and grungy members in kudzu-choked landscapes.” Uncut calls the LP “all spring-tight riffage, jukin’ country and delinquent boogie … chicken-skin music in the raw. On ‘Simple Man’ and ‘Things Goin’ On,’ Van Zant emerged as a lyricist with a common touch, making monuments of everyman while decrying the political hypocrisy that kept them poor.”

  But all this was a taste of still-cooking stew. On the way was the song that would make them the only thing anyone would need to know—Skynyrd.

  8

  WE ALL DID WHAT WE COULD DO

  Al Kooper had assembled the band at Studio One back in June 1973, a month after the pronounced album sessions had concluded but before Kooper’s party at Richard’s, to record a song that Ronnie swore to all that was holy just had to be a hit. It had come about a few weeks before at Hell House from a riff Ed King liked to say came to him in a dream but that, he says now, really began with him joining in on an idle Rossington riff. The way Ronnie incubated a song, King had come to learn, was most unusual. When such a riff was played for him on a guitar or piano, his brain would go into overdrive, but the others in the band wouldn’t know until he had a microphone before him what he would sing.

  “I never saw him write a lyric down,” says King. “It was all in his head, based on the groove. If you ever showed up at rehearsal the next day and couldn’t recapture the groove—you might have the chords right, but if you’d lost the groove—the lyrics were gone forever. One time he said, ‘I can’t remember it.’ We go, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘You guys lost it, man.’ So you know, that song was
gone. But that didn’t happen anymore. We’d stay there till dark, playing stuff over and over until we were playing it in our sleep. No wonder that solo came to me in a dream, because we just played and played and played.

  “Listen, Ronnie Van Zant really wasn’t a redneck. He was a very sophisticated guy. I mean, people think he was just this rowdy, whiskey drinking, going out, gathering other women, but Ronnie had a level of sophistication that even early on just grew so fast. Every day you’d see a change. So I wouldn’t, didn’t even classify him as a redneck. But the thing about him that appealed to everybody is you could tell by listening to him sing that that’s exactly what he was like in real life. I mean it’s exactly him. All you had to listen to was six Skynyrd songs, and then you’d have the whole gist of what that man was about.”

  “Sweet Home Alabama,” as this one was called, coalesced when King locked into Ronnie’s lyrical progression, which from somewhere deep in Ronnie’s thought process developed as an answer to Neil Young’s scalding couplet of Dixie ragging, the 1970 “Southern Man” and 1972 “Alabama,” eviscerating all southern men who didn’t explicitly condemn the vestige of their “heritage” that had caused black men to hang from trees on nooses. “I saw cotton and I saw black,” Young had sung on the former, a huge hit, “tall white mansions and little shacks. Southern Man, when will you pay them back?” In the latter song he further mocked the hypocrisy of men not compelled to “do what your good book says”: “You got the rest of the union to help you along / What’s going wrong?” Ronnie, who thought such generalizations ignored the obvious debt being paid to black music by country rock bands like his, decided to pay back the man he greatly admired. Indeed, he came to regard Young’s 1972 smash “Heart of Gold” as a template, with its mourning slide guitar and thumping beat. He had a drawer full of Young T-shirts, which he often wore on stage and would continue to.