Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Ronnie, in fact, was squeamish about taunting Young. He later recalled that “I showed the verse to Ed and asked him what Neil might think. Ed said he’d dig it; he’d be laughing at it.” And so he went on, repaying Young in kind, his lyrics just as stinging, sticking up for southern manhood. There was some soft soap too about the rush of being carried home “to see my kin” and the peerless Swampers up in Muscle Shoals, who’ve “been known to pick a song or two.” But then there were the references that at first listen seemed affectionate about George Corley Wallace—“In Birmingham they love the Gov’nor”—followed by the most cryptic sequence of stray thoughts ever in rock: “Boo! Boo! Boo! We all did what we could do. / Now Watergate does not bother me, / Does your conscience bother you? (Tell the truth!)”

  Just what this all meant was anyone’s guess. Indeed, the references were in some ways outdated or predated. Wallace at the time was not quite the roaring lion. He was recovering from the near-fatal wounds he had suffered while campaigning for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when the drifter Arthur Bremer shot him five times at a Maryland shopping center. After a hospital stay, Wallace returned to the governor’s mansion, no less adamant in his support for, as he once infamously said, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Even in a wheelchair, he was still a hoary segregationist.

  The reference to Birmingham was pointed, but it had been a decade since the city had witnessed the horrendous Ku Klux Klan church bombing that had killed four black girls—way back in 1963. As for Watergate, Ronnie was behind the curve. The scandal had grown and was closing in on Richard Nixon. The lyrics, then, were a weird hash of scattered, unfocused thoughts, something not surprising given that Ed King describes Van Zant’s writing process as less than disciplined. “Basically,” King says, “Ronnie didn’t think real hard about what he was writing. He wrote from his heart; he was a guy who wrote his feelings into songs.”

  Artimus Pyle, after he later joined the group, believed he could play it with more conviction on the drums if he knew what Ronnie had in mind. As Pyle recalled, “Ronnie explained it to me he was telling the Southern Man that the Southern Man is not to be blamed for something that happened two hundred years ago. He was saying, ‘I don’t have anything against African American people,’ and Ronnie didn’t. He’d give the shirt off his back to anybody, black or white. Ronnie was not a racist.”

  Extrapolating all that from the lyrics of this song is impossible, and to be sure, Pyle would have more than one fanciful explanation about Skynyrd matters big and small. For his part, Rossington, believably, says that the picking of a fight with Neil Young was “completely fabricated. We all loved Neil. Ronnie used to wear Neil Young T-shirts all the time because he loved him and was really inspired by him. He just wrote those lines about ‘Southern Man,’ which seemed cute at the time, almost like a play on words.” But the constructions that began to take hold about the overall intent of “Sweet Home Alabama” would not be so easy to dismiss as innocuous folderol.

  While cutting the first vocal take of the tune, Ronnie, having trouble hearing the rhythm track in his headphones, instructed engineer Rodney Mills to “Turn it up!” For Kooper this must have brought back fond memories of playing his impromptu organ line on “Like a Rolling Stone,” one that the record company executives in the studio hated but were overruled on by Bob Dylan barking, “Turn the organ up!” Perhaps feeling sentimental and because it caught Ronnie’s sense of conviction, he left it in, prefacing King’s prickly guitar intro, which repeated through the song—and which would be, ahem, appropriated four years later by Joe Perry on Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” So profound was King’s riff that the Fender Stratocaster he used that day, the same one he’d originally played the riff on at Hell House, is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—despite the fact that King liked it least of all his guitars. “It was a horrible guitar,” he later said. “It was the banjo-like tone that prompted Ronnie to write about Alabama, like ‘I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.’ But I still hated it.”

  Kooper also got into the swing when, after the opening lines about hearing “Mister Young” sing about the South, the producer sang a line from the Young song—“Southern man, better use your head”—in harmony. Ronnie didn’t care for it, but Kooper left his rendition in, though he mixed it so low that it was “nearly subliminal,” he says. The band played at a honky-tonk blues pace, the three guitars pealing high and twangy, so sharply recorded by Kooper that they could tear off one’s eyebrows. Prepared and on target as they were, they nailed it in one take, though Ronnie, who never liked anything the first time he heard it, demanded a second take to make sure. And Kooper wasn’t through with it yet either. When he and the band went out to the coast for the Who tour, he brought the tape of the song so he could continue tweaking it, including adding a horn overlay at an L.A. studio. He also hired a trio of female soul singers, Merry Clayton, Clydie King, and Sherlie Matthews—proof enough to some that the song was hardly a celebration of Old South racism—to juice up the hooks; this was the second song of note Clayton would dress up, having sung a withering harmony with Mick Jagger and the unforgettable solo about “rape and murder” being just a shot away on “Gimme Shelter.”

  Finally calling it done, Kooper had in hand a fisty, smug, funky, hard-rockin’ ode to the New South struggling to get out of the shadow of the Old Confederacy. With its clever and catchy title hook, a listener could get lost in a dreamy milieu where “the skies are so blue” and the words “Lord I’m coming home to you” could make it actually feel like the South was one’s home, anyone’s. But those throwaway lines about the “Gov’nor” and the most stigmatized of all Southern cities were going to be heard too—loud, if not exactly clear. Kooper was sanguine about it. “I think they were proud of where they came from,” he said breezily. “Racism didn’t come into it.” Still, he had to admit that lines like “We all did what we could do” were “ambiguous.” And even Ed King says he didn’t know what Ronnie meant by it, especially in relation to Watergate. Kooper’s interpretation of that line somehow was: “We tried to get Wallace out of there,” although nothing in the maddeningly ambiguous song supported that point of view.

  Feeling so good about the tune, as well he should have, Ronnie did not forget his promise to Jimmy Johnson. That night he called Muscle Shoals. “Hey, man,” he told Johnson, “we put you guys in a song.”

  Johnson was duly flattered but had to wonder: Would anyone ever hear it?

  Ronnie had no doubts about it. “Well, Ed,” he told King when they wrapped up recording, “that’s our ‘Ramblin’ Man.’”

  “Gimme Three Steps” was released in November, backed with “Mr. Banker,” one of the Kooper demo tapes that hadn’t made it onto the album. Although the band was a hit out on the Who tour, the single made little penetration, failing to crack the charts or rouse concert audiences. Clearly, as a light-hearted pastiche of redneck life, it was more suited to be a change of pace after a hoped-for string of hits. Indeed, the buzz about Skynyrd was centered on “Free Bird,” which was igniting audiences, and “Sweet Home Alabama,” which they made sure to perform at every show and which etched their identity. The amazing thing was how tight the guitars were, how spectacularly they meshed, and how close to the Kooper studio versions these live performances were, confirming Kooper’s initial conviction that he had never run across a band as polished and rehearsed to perfection as this one. On “Alabama,” absent background singers, Leon stepped forward from his usual place hanging around the rear of the stage to execute a harmony vocal, something that delighted Ronnie once he learned that Wilkeson actually had a decent singing voice.

  Having sung “Free Bird” hundreds of times already, Ronnie had developed a routine for what could be up to ten minutes of guitar onslaught. Having remained true to his vow never to try any hip-swiveling moves or flounce around like the bare-chested, Spandex-and-fringe-wearing front man of the hugely successful Black Oak Arkansas, Jim “Dand
y” Mangrum—not that he could with all the beer he put in his gut—Ronnie would float between the guitarists or merely hang back by the drum, digging the groove. In his hat, jeans, and bare feet, he was still a riveting, engaging front man, even doing nothing.

  Kooper and the MCA boys were satisfied. They had cautiously set a target sale level for the album of four hundred thousand copies, and with gathering momentum it had cleared one hundred thousand by the end of the year, which was punctuated by a show the band headlined in Atlanta at the Sheraton Biltmore that sold out its five thousand tickets and was a success even though the power went down for a few minutes during the set. They met up with Kooper at the Record Plant in Burbank with a full sheaf of new songs for the second album—though at first glance their visit might have been confused with a getaway at a spa. The studio was one of three with the same name, the others being in New York and Sausalito, California—all owned by Jimi Hendrix’s former recording engineer Gary Kellgren and Revlon cosmetics executive Chris Stone. A radical departure from drab “dentist-officey” studios, as Kooper put it, the L.A. Plant was like the Playboy Mansion with recording gear. With a Jacuzzi room, three plush bedrooms, and hordes of nubile young women everywhere (and clothing purely optional), it was little wonder the Plant was the studio among the big L.A. bands.

  Indeed, when the Skynyrd sessions commenced in one studio, the Eagles were in another cutting their magnum opus Hotel California, and the two bands mingled during breaks that were more like playtime. This was decadence of the highest order and lowest instinct, something the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote and sang of in their new work but which Ronnie would claim was a turnoff to the Dixie boys more accustomed to back porches and fishin’ hole contentment. He too would write of the L.A. mise-en-scène, not as a magnet but a mine field. None of the Skynyrd boys felt much like prowling the back alleys of Sunset; instead they spent almost all their time in the studio or in the Jacuzzi between takes, snorting piles of cocaine.

  The growing success of the debut Skynyrd album gave Kooper more leeway, and his budget for the new album was upped to around $30,000. The band kept faster company now as well, a fact that was underscored when during the sessions John Lennon, during his three-year “lost weekend” separation from Yoko Ono, dropped into the studio and hung out (though in his perpetual drunkenness he may not have known who he was, much less this band from the South). By comparison, Skynyrd was all business. They had come in with seven songs well thought out, arranged, and rehearsed to perfection at Hell House. Kooper, looking for the same formula as that of pronounced, was amazed at the versatility of material before him. In a real tour de force, they gassed up Oklahoman blues troubadour J.J. Cale’s 1972 ballad “Call Me the Breeze” into slick, loud, foot-stomping biker-bar blues, with sizzling solos by Rossington on slide guitar and Powell on piano. Another eye-opener was “The Needle and the Spoon,” a Van Zant-Collins tune confronting the bane of heroin, with Ronnie’s vocal cutting to the bone:

  I’ve been feelin’ so sick inside

  Got to get better, lord before I die

  Seven doctors couldn’t help my head, they said

  You better quit, son before you’re dead.

  They also had written their best pure blues song, the Van Zant-Collins original “Ballad of Curtis Loew,” in which Ronnie spun a fictitious yarn about selling soda bottles as a boy to pay to hear “an old black man with white curly hair” play his “old Dobro.” That man, given the name Curtis Loew, was a composite of the great Delta guitar masters and “the finest picker to ever play the blues.” Kooper kept the arrangement to a minimum, with Ed and Gary alternating on slide and Al playing piano and acoustic guitar and singing backup vocals.

  For the first two weeks, with no gigs to get in the way of recording, they raced through the album. Kooper found a place for the parody riff he liked so much, “Workin’ for MCA.” Besides “Sweet Home Alabama,” a good candidate for release as a single was “I Need You,” a valentine from Ronnie to Judy—and to Paul Rodgers, given that the tune was intended to be the album’s Free soundalike. “What more can I say / Ooh baby, I need you / I miss you more everyday,” he crooned as sinewy multiple guitars rang behind him. Every song seemed to come up a winner. Another, the Van Zant-King “Swamp Music,” was a heartfelt wish to flee “them big ol’ city blues” and spend long days huntin’ ’coons with hound dogs, and it throbbed to the beat of Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.” Al Kooper was pleased to note that no attempt was made to do “Free Bird II.”

  The album, called Second Helping, rounded out the rough edges of pronounced, an objective that could be seen in the cover art. The bone design of the Skynyrd logo was smoothed into more of a Flintstones look than a Black Sabbath one by mod artist Jan Salerno. In a psychedelic, pastel-colored Peter Max-style collage Salerno inserted the band’s rotogravure faces into something resembling a church window or a honeycomb around which were images of birds’ wings and leaves that could have been cannabis. The jacket sleeve had individual black and white, Scavullo-esque shots in various cool poses, and one of the group tossing Kooper into a pool during a birthday party at his house. They did manage to throw in some satirical, frat-boy touches, listing among the album credits a string of pseudonyms—Wicker, Toby, Cockroach, Moochie, Punnel, Wolfman, Kooder, Mr. Feedback, and Gooshie—the band’s pet names for each other, Kooper, the soundman Kevin Elson, and chief roadie Dean Kilpatrick. “Wicker” was Ronnie’s nickname, one that stemmed from, Ed King says, “the name of a gay guy in a movie.” Van Zant liked how it sounded and adopted it, daring anyone to infer he was gay. That would have been dangerous to someone’s health, for sure.

  Images aside, there were deeper issues to be resolved. As Kooper recalls, “I sent them the mix, and they went bonkers. Too much cowbell here, not enough vocal there.” Fighting a deadline for the album’s release, he took the tapes to the Record Plant in Sausalito to mix, aided by Ed King who came up just days before a six-day Skynyrd run at Whisky a Go Go. When Ed arrived, he found Kooper in a house provided by Stone and Kellgren, which was crawling with drugs and bouncy young things. King, who came up with his wife, was disgusted. Once, when Kooper was playing music in his bedroom at ear-splitting levels in the middle of the night, King walked in and tore the arm off the record player. Another time, seeing Al and a friend snapping pictures of a naked woman, King, as Kooper recalled, “just walked outside shaking his head.”

  Despite all this, what they finally came out with was another remarkable piece of vinyl, one that Rolling Stone retroactively observed “served up the band’s feisty hard-rock twang to a broad national audience.” Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic.com regards Van Zant’s work on this album as a tour de force, “at turns plainly poetic, surprisingly clever, and always revealing” and credits him for “developing a truly original voice.” In Crawdaddy!, Bud Scoppa wrote that the album “cannily and positively draw[s] a distinction between Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, a key distinction for them.”

  As big a gift as Kooper had in “Sweet Home Alabama,” he decided to hold it back, not, he insists, out of any risk the band would be stereotyped as too regional but because he wanted it to be a killer follow-up to a first hit. Thus the first single was “Don’t Ask Me No Questions,” written by Van Zant and Rossington on a fishing trip, always a head-clearing interlude, that had Ronnie hating on the pressures of the record industry; integrating that theme into a typically macho dismissal of a suspicious woman’s inquiries about where he’d been, he sang with his best sneering arrogance, “Don’t ask me no questions and I won’t tell you no lies / So don’t ask me about my business and I won’t tell you goodbye.” Kooper put a lot into the song, including a full horn section with longtime Rolling Stones sax man Bobby Keys, and played piano and sang backup. The single went out on the market in April backed with “Take Your Time,” a song that had been left off the album; and amid a heavy ad campaign Skynyrd set sail on another long, long trek called the Second Helping Tour.

 
But while the album began to sell well, the single failed to chart. And the tour itself was becoming something of a bummer as well, the high point being perhaps when they played Nassau Coliseum on February 25, the first time they’d been back on Long Island since the Black Sabbath fiasco. This time, they were the headliner, and the sold-out show went perfectly. Fortuitously, the schedule then took them to their home turf, playing gigs around the South, for the next month and a half. But they needed a jolt, lest they become yet one more band with promise who simply couldn’t cut it in the marketplace. As it happened, they had the jolt they needed in their hip pocket—“Sweet Home Alabama” had become even more of a fan favorite, available on record, and was getting more airplay from the disc jockeys than “No Questions.” Now, Kooper knew, it had to come out as a single, and the future of the band was riding on it.