Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  “Sweet Home Alabama,” with the flip side again “Take Your Time,” hit the stores on June 24, 1974, and began to scramble up the chart, stopping at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in late summer. On its way up, it did more than give Lynyrd Skynyrd its first and only Top 10 hit. It unfurled the symbolic pennon, and the accompanying baggage, that they have carried ever since. Even before it was released as a single, it had become their virtual theme song out on the hustings, so it was only logical to develop some sort of stage atmospherics to help frame it as such. Thus came the entrance of the highly contentious monogram that still causes delight and consternation to this day.

  There is no agreement about who exactly made the decision to pin the literal Confederate flag on Skynyrd’s figurative hide. After it began to appear, it drove redneck fans into a frenzy and nonrednecks into a state of revulsion that an American band had adopted this long-shunned symbol of intolerance at a time when de facto segregation was still extant in the South. When the sharp divide became apparent, Ronnie was not prepared to fall on a Confederate sword—not when it might cut to pieces Skynyrd’s carefully crafted mainstream appeal. Finding a convenient fall guy, he put the blame squarely on the bosses. The flag, he said, was “strictly an MCA gimmick … you know, Southern band, drunken fighters and all that. They put out that publicity. Hype, nothin’ but hype.”

  Gary on the other hand maintained that the flag entered the picture as a result of their corporate owners not caring much about contributing any ideas or angles for the band to use. “MCA didn’t promote us,” he said. “We promoted us. We were from the South and our audience always had rebel flags, flying ’em and putting ’em on stage. One night we just said, ‘Hey, let’s just get a big one and put it behind us.’ It was just that simple. We didn’t mean nothing by it. There was no meaning; like the flag means this, or we’re against blacks. We’re just from the South. It wasn’t no big thing to us, it’s not a ‘Hell no, we ain’t forgetting, let’s be rednecks’ kind of thing.”

  Although Alan Walden boasted that he and Mike Maitland had sat down and put together a “brilliant marketing plan” for Skynyrd, neither took ownership of the flag idea. Putting the onus back onto the band, Bob Davis, an executive at MCA Records who in the 1980s became vice president of the label, said, “I don’t [believe] that MCA as a company, from a policy point of view, was in any way involved in decisions as to stage presentation, whether or not Confederate flags or anything were part of the presentation of the live show. That being said, that doesn’t mean there were not people out in the field, whether they were sales or marketing people, promotion people, who weren’t making suggestions … in connection with marketing a record.”

  Those people would have had a great influence on a fairly wide-eyed band in the maw of free-wheeling, free-ranging record company lackeys, either under contract or as loosely affiliated promotional leeches and lemmings—think Artie Fufkin, Paul Shaffer’s bumbling record-company stooge in This Is Spinal Tap. People just like that swarmed around bands on the rise, meeting them backstage or in hotels looking for an in, the pockets of their faux-satin baseball jackets stuffed with envelopes of cocaine. Not only were such supplies liberally dispensed to Skynyrd, fueling their descent into an addiction inferno, but the yes men, amoral as they were, eagerly endorsed the Confederate flag as a marketing tool, on the assumption that racism could be cool.

  Certainly, Skynyrd needed something to enliven a rather static onstage persona. Davis thought they were “very bland” and wanted to add pizzazz. And Al Kooper had perhaps unwittingly opened the door for something more daring than an image of long-haired rednecks when he applied the skull-and-bones motif to their album and subsequent promotional materials; soon T-shirts with that motif were selling quite nicely at arenas. Adding one more promotional tool might put them over the top, and it surely made sense to some at the record company that the Stars and Bars conveyed some sort of nativist pride, if seen in the narrow context of southern “heritage.” When Skynyrd would enter the stage to “Dixie” playing through the hall and a giant Confederate flag covering the entire back wall, there was surely a surge of regional pride in the air—but also a surge of anger.

  This helped them in the South but elsewhere left a decided unease and instant revulsion. For many African Americans and for northern liberals, including the most respected music critics, the flag was tantamount to a swastika, and defending it was a very tricky business, as the band would learn. Ronnie, who would usually act on gut instinct and say the hell with whoever disagreed with him, burned up the phone line with calls to Charlie Daniels, his confidant, concerned the band was asking for big trouble. Daniels told him to keep it in the act, that it would do more harm than good to remove it, and that the issue would recede when critics came to size up Skynyrd as a nonpolitical bunch with a regional angle that cut to the heart of the South’s identity—not as racists but good, decent folks keeping the faith with its traditions sullied by civil war and opprobrium for its mistakes. Skynyrd’s songs were, after all, about just those elemental themes.

  Or most of them. With “Sweet Home Alabama” they would inject a new element, taking them into deeper water. Indeed, the first manifestation of the flag was the jacket art for the single release of the song, featuring an image of a young woman’s beckoning lips, onto which were stuck a color image of the Confederate flag. This put the race angle in blatantly sexualized terms, always the most incendiary of all in matters of race, not long separated from the days of Emmett Till when a black man could be lynched for merely looking at a white woman. As squeamish about it as the band was, when the lights went up on their shows, audiences went absolutely crazy. There would be deafening shouts of yee-haw! and others cries that sounded like they emanated from barnyard animals. On the opening guitar bars, feet stomped, hands clapped, and the building shook. When Ronnie sang, “Big wheels keep on turning,” a mass sing-along would erupt. Emotions would keep rising until the great climax of “Free Bird” left everyone limp.

  The phenomenon was unlike anything they had seen, and it helped manufacture an institutional engraving for the song. As Ed King says, “I’m sure Dickey Betts disagrees, but ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is the Southern anthem.” But, as it happened, part and parcel of this was that most southerners and those who felt like southerners listening to Skynyrd took the lyrics of the song as a cue to release some not-so-courtly feelings. The easiest thing for the band to explain was the fight they had picked with Neil Young, who for his part refused to take the bait and indulge in a cheesy “feud.” He expressed no ill will and said he greatly admired Skynyrd, which he proved in future years when he said the lyrics of his that Ronnie had objected to were “condescending and accusatory” and “not fully thought out.” Indeed, Young had some repenting to do; in 1972 the soundtrack of his pseudodocumentary Journey Through the Past was released with cover art depicting hooded horsemen carrying cruciform staves and an inset photo of Young glaring at a Confederate flag. If Van Zant wasn’t pissed off by that, he may as well have walked away from his birthright.

  Al Kooper helpfully confirmed that Young “loved” the Skynyrd song. And proving that there never was a schism between them, Van Zant and Young began discussing collaborating on future songs. Ronnie pointedly wore T-shirts on stage screened with Young’s face. Neil would wear a Skynyrd/Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. After Ronnie’s death, Neil Young would perform a cover version of the very song that had taken him to task.

  Not so easily dispensed with was the reaction to those confusing lyrics about Wallace and Watergate. With people in his circle beginning to wonder if he had produced a racist band, Al Kooper suddenly was not so sure about what the song said. “Hey, you have to be more careful when you write a song now,” was his revised opinion. Skynyrd might have wanted to say to him, “Hey, Al, nice of you tell us that now.” Pissed off that they even had to address the issue, they acted as if anyone who asked was an idiot. Ronnie, far from what he told Artimus Pyle later, called it a “joke
song” and “a party tune” that he never thought would ever be released as a single, and that when it was, it “hit Top 10 and we’ve been paying for it ever since,” though they also had been paid for it ever since, quite well. “We’re not into politics,” he said. “We don’t have no education, and Wallace don’t know anything about rock n’ roll.”

  Ed King, however, doesn’t toe the company line these days. Contrary to what Van Zant may have told Pyle, King says, “Ronnie was a big fan of George Wallace. He totally supported him. We all did. We respected the way Wallace stood up for the South. Anybody who tells you differently is lying.”

  What Van Zant was trying to do was clear the biggest hurdle for any Southern Man: separating the concept of “standing up for the South” from the chaff of innate racism. It would seem impossible that he could have worked Wallace into these lyrics as he did without realizing that the man was a breathing synonym for intolerance. Wallace himself would need to go to great lengths later in his life to remove the stigma, saying in 1998, “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over.” The need for Van Zant to walk the racial tightrope was unavoidable, especially after his own record company had put him up there on that high wire. If the crackers embraced Skynyrd, it was still incumbent on him—not on the suits at MCA but the band’s leader—to assure the record-buying public that nothing racist was meant by “Sweet Home Alabama.” And, no matter his feelings about “the Gov’nor,” he did so, with great contrition.

  “Of course I don’t agree with everything Wallace says,” he said. “I don’t like what he says about colored people”—yet the fact that he used a pejorative term for African Americans while insisting nothing had been pejorative in the song only underscored the quandary of acting southern without malice carved out of southern conditioning.

  He went on, “We’re southern rebels, but more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong…. My father supports Wallace but that doesn’t mean I have to…. I’ve heard him talk and wanted to ask him about his views on blacks and why he has such poor education and such a low school rate there, such a low housing rate,” meaning for African Americans.

  His best case for proving that the song was actually a sly rebuke of Wallace lay in those three repetitive syllables in the verse that he explained were the key to understanding the entire song. “The lyrics,” he said, “were misunderstood. The general public didn’t notice the words ‘Boo Boo Boo!’ after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor.”

  Not everyone bought it. As was the case with the rest of the lyrics, the “Boo! Boo! Boo!” refrain could be construed any way the imagination wanted. If he had been serious about debunking Wallace, why not say it, in words, something like, say, “In Birmingham they love the Gov’nor / Well, that ain’t something they should do.” Why go with a guttural ballpark response to an umpire’s bad call? Still, it provided plausible deniability, though that was not really needed; in fact, the murky connection with Wallace seemed only to add another whiff of outlaw chic. Skynyrd might have been pissed about the brouhaha, but they could live quite nicely with having a hit. And if anyone needed a period to put on the end of the sentence, Leon Wilkeson offered it. “I support Wallace about as much as your average American supported Hitler,” the inscrutable bassist said.

  Wily bush dog that he was, Van Zant likely was apolitical, it not being worth the aggravation of lecturing people who just wanted to hear him sing, not talk. The only endorsement for a candidate he ever made was still on the horizon, support he would offer when another son of the South ran for president—a Democrat, of all things, a clear case of regional loyalty being political enough for him. He did know that he had a tightrope to walk, playing to type in his writing and stage persona while avoiding any taint of too-literal Confederate status; it was already a heavy enough lift for MCA’s radio liaisons to get Skynyrd played on FM stations in the North. And in fact, Ronnie was a different sort of Confederate soldier, as was Wallace, who despite his segregationist stance never got on board with standard right-wing doggerel about the underclass being, in the contemporary vernacular, “takers”; indeed, by then Wallace had won a certain fealty among Alabama’s black underclass, having raised taxes on the rich to sink money into the ghettos.

  That was the Wallace with whom Van Zant related. “To me,” Ed King says, “Ronnie was a proud, working-class southern man, and George Wallace represented proud, working-class southern people. To Ronnie, Wallace was not just a man who wouldn’t let blacks into a college, he was a man who spoke for poor, uneducated people who didn’t have a voice. It’s right there in [‘Sweet Home Alabama’].” Still, it was never easy to split hairs when it came to Wallace. The “Gov’nor” so loved the song that when Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band played a gig in Tuscaloosa, Wallace appeared on stage to present Skynyrd with plaques making them honorary lieutenant colonels in the Alabama State Militia—another symbol of racial grievance, since the militia had imposed martial law during the civil rights marches. Rather than steering clear of the “honor,” they eagerly jumped at the chance to be deputized. Indeed, agreeing with King, Charlie Daniels recalls that Van Zant “had great respect for George Wallace. Ronnie was a southerner, man [and when] they got plaques from the governor … they were just tickled to death about it.”

  Yet here too Ronnie had to backtrack, calling the interlude a “bullshit gimmick thing,” neglecting to say that the band kept that hardware and their “commissions” in the militia. And decades later, when the song was made into the state motto, no one in the band calling itself Lynyrd Skynyrd threw that fish back either. Al Kooper tells of the time when, during the recording of pronounced, he brought to the studio a guitar that had been given to him by Jimi Hendrix. Someone he identifies only as “one of the Skynyrd boys” began fooling with it, saying, “Hey, Al, this guitar plays nice.” From across the room, Ronnie said, “That guitar used to belong to Jim Hendrix,” whereupon the guy, Kooper says, “let it fall out of his hands onto the couch. ‘OOOO… I just got some nigger on me!’ he screamed irreverently.”

  “You better pick that guitar up,” Ronnie said, “and see if you can get some more of that nigger on ya.”

  Naturally, such palaver was meant in jest, but it did show how easy it was for men of the South to fall into racially offensive dialogue odious to northerners and progressive southerners. One Yankee journalist, Jaan Uhelszki, who was sent to write a piece about Skynyrd for Creem, claimed the experience made her feel like she needed to be deloused. After meeting Rossington, she said she expected him to tell her “some juicy tales of nigger skinnings.” Mark Kemp, then a southern music journalist and later an editor at Rolling Stone and vice president at MTV, wrote in his 2004 book Dixie Lullaby of visiting Ed King and asking if anyone in the band had ever uttered racist thoughts. “When King’s wife, who was sitting at the table with us, chimed in, saying, ‘Oh, please, I remember Gary making a comment just a few years ago,’ King immediately interrupted her.” Choosing his words carefully, King then told Kemp, “I don’t have any personal experience with that. But I can tell you this: unlike the Allman Brothers, we never had any black people hanging around Lynyrd Skynyrd at all. At all. I mean, none at all.”

  Yet, as if King himself had been bitten by the routine, quotidian expression of racism during his time with the band, he too betrayed some rather acrid opinions during the highly charged debate surrounding the Trayvon Martin killing in 2013. King wrote on his Facebook page that young black men were “lazy,” “thugs,” “killers,” and “thieves,” and that blacks in America have “had their reparations.” Kemp, who had believed King was the “enlightened” one in Skynyrd, took that label back.

  “I thought he had more insight than other right-wing rockers. I was wrong…. Who the hell does this ex-southern rocker think he is to moralize so generically and condescendingly about ‘blacks’ he doesn’t even know?” (King later scrubbed the offensive remarks from his page.
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  As much as Ronnie craved black recognition for Skynyrd, a few bluesy numbers did little to ameliorate centuries of cultural and racial conditioning.

  While MCA had gotten down with the flag and was feasting on “redneck chic,” fashioning the band’s name in promotional materials and record jackets out of pieces of the Confederate flag, Ronnie began to feel the heat over it. Asked to explain what the flag meant to the act, he did his damndest to deflect the issue by folding it into his general beef about the “establishment”—the “gimmick”-hungry record company. “It was useful at first,” he allowed, “but by now it’s embarrassing.” Years later, Rolling Stone’s John Swenson bought into this construct that by flying the flag Skynyrd was actually making their own antiestablishment stand, the Old Confederacy being among that establishment. The flag, he wrote, had “some kind of complex relationship to the Confederacy, but it’s not about states’ rights or slavery; it’s something very personal. It’s closer to the whole idea of the Declaration of Independence. This was their version of it, being a rebel.”

  It was a tortuous rationale, assuming a whole lot, but it did make some sense given the Skynyrd inferiority complex that would never end; as high as they got, they always saw themselves as mutts—dirty dogs—never accepted as anything more by the cultured rock Brahmins and thus never under any obligation to act like anything else. It was a self-serving prophesy and shield, giving them license to act like dogs. If the problem areas of the flag and “Sweet Home Alabama” were thorny, Skynyrd might deflect criticism but embrace the notoriety. In fact, rather than merely let the flag be an avatar, they went even further. Soon their sound equipment was painted battleship gray, a “Confederate” hue that blended in with the backdrop of the flag. Ronnie even strode onto the stage one night clad in a Confederate officer’s coat and hat—though he later laughed it off as a “showbiz stunt,” his way of sending up the whole kerfuffle about the flag.