With so much at stake, all they could do was follow along with it and hope that lame clarifications about the “gimmicks” would keep the fallout off their backs. However, as time went on they almost became prisoner to that flag, even consumed at times by it. The first time Skynyrd took their show across the pond to Europe—a two-month trek beginning in mid-November 1974 with dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh, two weeks in England, three days in Germany, one day each in Belgium and France, and the finale at the Rainbow Theatre in London on December 12—the flag came too, though Europeans had not the slightest notion of the mortal insult it was to African Americans. As Ronnie reported, patrons such as those the band played for at venues like Britain’s Saint George’s Hall, Theatre Royal, the Kursaal, Theater An Der Brienne Strasse, Jahrhunderthalle, and Ancienne Belgique “really like all that [Confederate] stuff because they think it’s macho American”—which of course it was in a good part of America as well.
On one night during the well-attended and well-received tour, Ronnie happened to drop the flag onto the floor; he freaked out, as if he had committed a great sin against the motherland. Reaching for the phone, he called Charlie Daniels back home. The rotund fiddler, who himself had taken to wearing jumpsuits at his concerts covered with the Stars and Bars, recalled that the band had gone as far as to take the flag out to an alley and burn it, in accordance with antebellum protocol for flag desecration.
“Do you think it would be all right if we went on without the flag?” Ronnie asked him. “Certainly,” Daniels replied.
Ronnie sighed in relief. The symbol he insisted was a gimmick and an embarrassment had not been sullied on foreign soil after all. The honor of the South lived on.
The one-story wood-frame house that Lacy Van Zant built for his brood at 1285 Mull Street in “Shantytown,” the hardscrabble neighborhood on the west side of Jacksonville, stands pretty much as it did when Ronnie Van Zant was young. CAMERON SPIRITAS
Here, at Robert E. Lee High School, which still stands stately on South McDuff Avenue, the Shantytown boys ran afoul of crusty gym coach Leonard Skinner for wearing their hair too long, which earned them suspensions and inspired a ready-made name for their band. CAMERON SPIRITAS
In perhaps the first-known photo of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the bandmates play onstage at Atlanta’s dingy Funochio’s club on July 21, 1972, with bass man Leon Wilkeson singing lead, while Ronnie Van Zant looks on. Gary Rossington strikes a chord while Allen Collins, his face hidden by hair, focuses on his own guitar. CARTER TOMASSI
Few would know that a slice of rock history was made in this drab warehouse at 2517 Edison Avenue, which in the early 1970s housed the Little Brown Jug, where Ronnie was inspired to write “Gimme Three Steps,” the semitrue tale of a flirtation gone very wrong. CAMERON SPIRITAS
Copping an Allman Brothers’ pose, Skynyrd lines up on a Macon, Georgia, street and shows some attitude for the cover of (pronounced ’lĕh-’nérd ’skin-’nérd), which would eventually go double platinum. From left to right are Leon Wilkeson, Billy Powell, Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington, Bob Burns, Allen Collins, and Ed King. GETTY IMAGES
In this shot from May 6, 1973, taken during sessions for Skynyrd’s debut album at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia, Al Kooper, in the glasses, works the control board as Ronnie and Gary try to lend a hand and engineer “Tub” Langford stands by. GETTY IMAGES
During Skynyrd’s 1973 tour with the Who, trying to keep up with the manic-eyed Keith Moon (left) Ronnie hoists a J&B in front of Allen’s face while Gary appears to look for something to ingest from a candle bowl. GETTY IMAGES
Lacy Van Zant, who dubbed himself the “father of Southern rock,” poses here with son Ronnie in 1975. DAVID M. HABBEN
If Ronnie was apt to take a swing at all the others in the band at any given moment, he had nothing but admiration and even some envy for the clean and sober guitar virtuoso Steve Gaines, who became Skynyrd’s newest member in 1976. AP
The essence of Skynyrd in a single image: Ronnie Van Zant, front and center, flanked by the guitar firepower of Allen Collins and Gary Rossington, the thunder of Leon Wilkeson’s bass rolling in from stage right and Billy Powell’s funky piano swirls from stage left—and a giant Confederate flag hanging over Artimus Pyle’s booming drums. GETTY IMAGES
Ronnie and Gary rock out under blue skies that are so blue, not only in Alabama, but in Oakland, California, where this concert occurred. RALPH HULETT
October 20, 1977: Southern rock died in a swamp in Gillsburg, Mississippi, with the twisted wreckage of Skynyrd’s rickety Convair CV-300 strewn between the trees that tore it apart, killing Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, Dean Kilpatrick, and its two inept pilots. Miraculously, the other nineteen passengers on board survived. AP
A simple headstone in Jacksonville’s Riverside Memorial Park marks the grave of Skynyrd’s front man and of the southern rock movement. The original grave site was vandalized in 2000, necessitating that Ronnie’s remains be moved to a concrete vault deep under the stone. DAVID M. HABBEN
The “Father of Southern Rock,” as truck driver Lacy Van Zant dubbed himself, was laid to rest in 2004 alongside his wife, Marion Hicks “Sis” Van Zant, in Riverside Memorial Park, the same grounds where Ronnie Van Zant is buried. DAVID M. HABBEN
March 13, 2006: Oft-denied, Skynyrd was finally elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, giving the band a chance to bask in pride—though the body language of everyone but Billy Powell betrays the hurt feelings that still existed for Gary Rossington, Artimus Pyle, Ed King, and Bob Burns. AP
The Freebird Live Cafe on Jacksonville Beach—owned by Judy Jenness, Ronnie’s widow and the executor of his estate—is the sort of place where the fledgling Lynyrd Skynyrd might once have honed their sound. CAMERON SPIRITAS
One of the many tributes to Jacksonville’s most famous native son is Ronnie Van Zant Memorial Park, an eighty-five-acre stretch of greenery and crystal blue lakes in the Penney Farms area—the sort of spot where Ronnie might get away to fish, though he likely would have disobeyed the NO CURSING signs. CAMERON SPIRITAS
9
YOU DON’T GET NOTHIN’
“Sweet Home Alabama,” the big bang of an already explosive act, didn’t quite cause a seismic sonic boom nationally, but it did give Skynyrd the only Top 10 hit they would ever have, which at the time was a must, as even an FM-oriented band needed at least a decent-sized hit single regularly to keep album sales at a peak. Despite rising no higher, it seemed to be heard endlessly wherever one went, and also went to number six in Canada and made the charts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The next single wouldn’t need to be released until late November, when the band allowed a four-minute version of “Free Bird” to go out, which would be further edited down to three and a half minutes on some AM stations. Though hardly reflective of the glory of “Free Bird,” it still got to number nineteen in the United States and to thirty-one in Britain. Meanwhile, the two albums sold apace—Second Helping hitting number twelve, pronounced reaching number twenty-one, both soon to go gold. This cascade seemed to revolve around “Sweet Home Alabama,” the success of which unsealed Skynyrd to the masses and further honed their professionalism and raised the bar for them.
Gradually, they occupied more and more space in the music press, with the Brits genuinely fascinated by them, even if not quite getting some details right. Playfully echoing the marketing campaign, the headline WHO THE HELL ARE LYRNRD SKYNYRD? ran in the February 1974 Disc and Music Echo, a UK version of the teenage-geared fanzine Tiger Beat, tracing the roots of the band back to “a used-car salesman somewhere in Florida,” meaning Leonard Skinner, who was never a car salesman. Another English rag, Melody Maker, told of Al Kooper’s triumph with the band in a profile titled SWEETHEART OF THE SOUTH. Perhaps the earliest American music magazine to start spreading the news was the short-lived, Florida-based Zoo World, which in April wrote of them as “an alcohol band … steeped in southern blooze [who] create that perfect sleazy barroom atmosphere both in concert
and on record.” However, once “Sweet Home Alabama” hit, the big rags fell in line. Rolling Stone reviewed Second Helping by, mandatorily, comparing them to the Allman Brothers, saying that while Skynyrd lacked the Brothers’ “sophistication” the work had a “certain mellowing out that indicates they may eventually acquire a level of savoir faire to realize their many capabilities.” And Robert Christgau called it the work of a “substantial, tasteful band” that “will expose you to their infectious putdowns of rock businessmen, rock journalists, and heroin.”
The album has lost none of its sheen over the years. The Rolling Stone album guide calls it “the consummate Skynyrd platter; the guitars sigh and sting like a stiff breeze as Ronnie Van Zant draws a line in the dirt.”
After completing their second exhausting US tour, opening for acts like ZZ Top and Savoy Brown and capping it off with a boisterous headline gig in Memphis’s cavernous Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium on July 28, they could barely take a breath before they were back in the studio with Al Kooper. In early August they cut at Studio One a song they’d been asked to write for the Burt Reynolds movie The Longest Yard, director Robert Aldrich’s black comedy about a prison-yard football game between prisoners and guards; with a song needed for a scene involving cops with guns drawn, Ronnie and Ed King worked out something much more significant, which took form when Ronnie had King play a riff over and over until, from somewhere in his soul, Van Zant came up with the line “Two feets they come a creepin’ like a black cat do.” Says King: “I was just amazed by that—it was brilliant. That was Ronnie at his best as a songwriter.”
The verse continued, referencing three grim tales of people reaching for no good reason for a “Saturday Night Special,” the cheap, poorly constructed .38 caliber Smith and Wesson handgun, the kind that flows so freely in the United States, no less now than they did then. Ronnie likely was unaware that the pejorative nature of the term derived from “niggertown Saturday night special,” a term coined by fearful whites about blacks who armed themselves in fear of whites, though by the 1970s it pretty much applied exactly as he used it in the lyrics, as a way to end a drunken Saturday-night argument. Thus did he define the most salient argument for avoiding guns altogether, that far more likely than preventing a tragedy, a gun will cause one—though this was not an induction he bought entirely. In fact, he had a few of those .38s himself and had bought one for Judy to protect herself with when he was on the road. Rather, Ronnie, who’d had his share of run-ins when he was looking down a barrel, and often worried what he might do with his own pistol if he was provoked and drunk enough, simply regarded a .38, unlike a hunting rifle, as completely useless for anything but killing people.
It was a radical position for a redneck band to take in a song—indeed, when Donnie Van Zant formed his band in 1974, they took their name from the weapon—but Ronnie had something to say, and as always he said it. His chorus hook, grim and sung as if with clenched teeth, could make one shiver: “It’s a Saturday night special, got a barrel that’s blue and cold / Ain’t no good for nothin’ but put a man six feet in a hole.”
Just so the point wasn’t being missed, he had another killer line—“Hand guns are made for killin’, ain’t no good for nothin’ else / And if you like to drink your whiskey, you might even shoot yourself.” It was a seething, riveting alter-ego argument, coated with balls-to-the-wall rock and an ominous undercurrent that was so convincing, when Kooper noodled a dark-sounding passage on the synthesizer, Ronnie remarked that it sounded “like an airplane crashing.” He was satisfied that he had done something against the grain, even if its unambiguous meaning would be lost for some who heard its stew of overwrought guitars and bone-jarring bass and drums—“heavy-metal-under-funk,” Christgau called it—as a seal of approval for keeping a gun concealed in one’s pants. The Longest Yard, which made $43 million and was one of 1974’s most successful films, whetted the appetite for Skynyrd, enough that the song would be released as a single nine months later in May 1975 and become so entrenched in pop culture that it would also be used on the soundtrack for the 1978 Richard Pryor film Blue Collar; when The Longest Yard was remade in 2005, the song was there too. Some songs and some causes never get old. “Special” was immediately earmarked for the third Skynyrd album, sessions for which were set for January 1975—but this album proved so difficult to make that it would send Al Kooper fleeing from the South.
First, though, there would be Skynyrd’s landmark first trip to Europe, an obligatory act since there now was the exigency to expand their sales profits in the important European market—and a chance to play for American soldiers on the German dates. England in particular was a natural for any American band with a new sound carved by either soul or country music, which Britons were continually fascinated by. Indeed, the Eagles’ first two albums, their most country-flavored work, were recorded in London, produced by erstwhile Beatles engineer Glyn Johns, a country-music buff. English rock audiences, notorious for showing displeasure by means of catcalls, streams of spit, and sundry objects thrown at performers, mainly had a jolly old time with the strange new American band, even if few knew just what they were supposed to do when they were cued onto the stage by “Dixie” and that unfamiliar flag was lit up on the wall behind them.
Skynyrd couldn’t have sold out the tour alone and were booked as an opening act for most dates. In Glasgow they opened for the veteran Dutch band Golden Earring, who’d had their first US and UK hit, “Radar Love,” in 1973, but a review in Sounds said that Skynyrd ate Earring’s lunch. That pattern continued when they stole shows from Humble Pie—then two years into its post-Peter Frampton era and heard often on the FM album rock stations—in Belgium and Paris, and even from Queen in Hamburg, though this may have been the last time Freddie Mercury would ever be upstaged, his band still a year from its international breakout with their A Night at the Opera album, which included “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Indeed, at the first show at London’s Rainbow Theatre, when they were to open again for Golden Earring, the promoter flipped the acts, making Skynyrd the headliner.
However, while they came back home triumphant, they were also short a drummer. In Paris, Bob Burns had become a casualty of the pressures and his own mounting troubles. Never having resolved being abandoned in childhood, Burns had been slipping downhill for some time. Months before, driving on Jacksonville’s Buckman Bridge, he had collided with another car, killing the driver. It was ruled an accident but Burns came away shaken and with no time to get his head together before having to go right back on the road. After a gig at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall he polished off a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in one shot, went berserk in his room, and ripped a sink off the bathroom wall.
The last thing he needed was the long, hectic trip to Europe. Once there, he behaved more bizarrely, his behavior apparently worsened by mixing up his drink of choice, whiskey, and codeine. Having just seen The Exorcist in a theater at one stop, he began screaming that he saw the devil in the eyes of a cat and threw it from a hotel roof to its death below. Then, in Paris, he saw the devil again, this time in soundman Kevin Elson, whom he began to chase down a street with an axe he had somehow found before someone restrained him. With only one date left, at the Rainbow in London, Ronnie told the band they’d need to find another drummer when they got back home, and told Bob he was out, at least until he got himself some help. While all of them would have benefited from that advice, Burns was undeniably the worst off. When he did seek help, he says, “My parents put me in a hospital in Jacksonville, and they found the problem. They found that I was bipolar. They gave me medication, antidepressants, lithium—the stuff people who went crazy used to be given—lithium, whatever.” Not until after Prozac was approved for prescription in 1987 did he begin to finally recover, saying, “I’ve been a free man ever since.”
As he fought to gain his sanity and equilibrium, Burns never asked to come back to the band. For one thing, he cringed at the very thought of getting caught up again in the meat grinder of pressu
re, drugs, and drinking. “Everybody was doing it in the band and they were going in one direction with it and I was kinda headed off in another, because my bipolar was pulling me in a different way,” he says now. “But nobody understood what in the world was going on. We were like best of friends since we were like four or five years old yet we didn’t see what was happening to us until it became something that literally threatened to kill us all.”
Burns for many reasons can feel he saved his life when he quit the band, and on some level Ronnie and the others probably envied him and wished they could have dropped out for a while, something that was impossible by then. Skynyrd in fact had already found a new drummer before Burns split. Back at the time of the session for “Saturday Night Special,” Burns had begged off, saying he was too exhausted from touring to do justice to the song. Seeking a fill-in, Ronnie asked Charlie Daniels if he knew of a drummer, and Daniels touted a guy with the lyrical name of Thomas Delmer Pyle. Born in Louisville, he served in the marines during the Vietnam War and then studied music at Tennessee Technical College. There, some classmates oddly dubbed him “Artemis,” after the ancient Greek goddess of the wildland, the hunt, and wild animals, apparently because of the long, wavy tresses that fell halfway down his back and his tendency to behave, well, wildly. He adopted it willingly, and then legally, though he changed the spelling to the more Americanized “Artimus.”
Threading his way through the country-rock scene, Pyle had played gigs with Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band, and unlike most drummers was not content with going unnoticed. Instead, he was indeed a wild man. Looking like Jesus with his long beard and endless hair parted in the middle, he threw his elastic arms around like pick-up sticks, his legs churning as he beat on the bass drum, yet for all that, he kept a steady beat and was able to downshift from loud banging to delicate pawing at the snare and cymbals. Ronnie was impressed and had Pyle play at a gig at Jacksonville’s Sergeant Pepper’s Club and then took him to Doraville to play on “Saturday Night Special,” which opens with a splendid Pyle shuffle beat. Now, he was called in for more on-the-job training, as the new Skynyrd drummer on their third album. And given Ronnie’s precise specifications, he had very little slack. When Allen told bassist Larry Steele of the Burns breakdown and the importation of Pyle, he raved to the great bass man, “You gotta hear this guy! He kicks that sound like machine guns—and he takes acid before he goes on stage!”
Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Page 17