Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Larry laughed. “And you’re tellin’ me Bob is actin’ crazy?”

  The sessions for the album began in early January, but Al Kooper’s participation was uncertain. Months before, with his Sounds of the South deal with MCA due to expire in a year, the parent company wanted to buy him out, thereby giving them ownership of the SOS catalog—though all they really wanted was Skynyrd. MCA had already dissed Kooper by taking his imprint off Skynyrd records since pronounced, and they were prepared to put the new album in jeopardy to force him to sell out. First they threatened to withhold Kooper’s royalties from the first two Skynyrd albums and then keep him from producing anyone else for the duration of the contract until he came around. But Kooper could play some hardball himself. His manager, Stan Polley, was a man whose name made industry people shudder or want to kill themselves—indeed, the latter actually happened when he managed the British band Badfinger in the 1970s, when Kooper had played in the band and been represented by him. When Polley, who was rumored to have mob connections, was unable to account for an escrow account that held Badfinger’s earnings, guitarist Pete Ham committed suicide, leaving a note that read: “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard.”

  Kooper, however, had not severed ties with Polley, and now he sicced him on MCA. Kooper would sell, Polley informed them, but only if MCA shelled out a cool million dollars. And there was another nonnegotiable demand: the royalty rates for Skynyrd and Kooper—the band getting a puny five points, and Kooper, ten—would need to be flipped. This was Kooper’s way of keeping his word to Ronnie that he would take care of them down the road, but MCA stalled, apparently hoping Kooper would eventually fold. MCA went ahead and rented an Atlanta studio, Webb IV, for the Skynyrd album. The studio was owned by Bang Records, which had recently moved to the South, mainly to accommodate Paul Davis, a Mississippian and the label’s top act.

  Kooper would not fold—MCA did. It took almost right up until January, but they made the deal on Kooper’s terms. Suddenly, he was a million dollars heavier, and Skynyrd had a doubled royalty rate. As Kooper giggled, “Things were very good. Everyone was extremely happy—except probably Alan Walden.” MCA people who were there disagree with Kooper’s version of this history. Bob Davis said the decision to buy the producer out wasn’t the company’s but a ploy by the group to land a hefty advance. As Davis tells it, “The Skynyrd people came to MCA and said, ‘We really need you to help us out. What we’d like for you to do is buy out [SOS] so that we could then begin a direct relationship with MCA.”

  The million-dollar buyout of Kooper, the band explained, according to this version of events, would be an advance on future royalties that Skynyrd would make back in half the time—provided their royalty rate was doubled. That rate, they said, “would be more consistent with artists of our stature.” Said Davis: “There was no doubt that the deal was made with MCA by Skynyrd’s representatives.” In any case, figuring he had done enough with, and made enough from, southern rock, Kooper was ready to move on again, now to the happening scene in L.A. Then, with the date of the Skynyrd sessions creeping up, Ronnie made another demand of MCA—the band wanted Al to produce the album. This was quite a concession by Skynyrd, all of whom had grown weary of Kooper’s hectoring in the studio. Working with him, Wilkeson once said, “became such an intricate thing. He was telling us what to do the whole time.” Leon also went as far as to say, “It was Al Kooper who actually started the whole rowdy image for us”—a laughable contention, to be sure. Yet feeling they could not shoulder a failure at this stage and with scant time to look for another producer, they needed the security and familiarity of the egoist with the white-man’s Afro and the goggle glasses.

  Over a barrel, MCA, which had been at war with Kooper, sheepishly called and asked him to take the gig, which Kooper was all too happy to do, as it would earn him royalties on a third Skynyrd album that was sure to go through the roof. He hastened to Webb IV studios, happily anticipating another wealth of Skynyrd material. Instead, he found nothing. With the band having spent so much time on the road, there had been no time for writing and rehearsing, a condition that would be the norm from then on. They had a deadline of one month to record the album, meaning that, starting from scratch, they’d need to compose and cut eight strong songs right there in the studio. Kooper may have pondered whether he should have gone off to Los Angeles after all. Adding to his misery, after meticulously setting up the microphones for the first session, he walked in the next day and found they had all been rearranged by Bang engineer Dave Evans, who had convinced the band to do it his way—a violation of studio protocol, according to which the producer generally rules.

  Kooper was livid and, out of spite, said all such decisions would be made by Evans. As the difficult sessions went on, Kooper said, there was “incredible tension” and little got done. Trying to get things off square one, Kooper, who was also facing jail time on a drug possession conviction at the time, decided the best thing he could do was leave the band alone and go party in New York. He told Ronnie, “I trust you and believe in you, I know you can do it.” When he returned, the band had only two weeks to get it done, but Ronnie, whom Kooper calls “a man among men,” had indeed taken charge, writing all the necessary tracks. As Ed King recalls, “We all worked together and had ideas and wrote songs on the spot. We were tending now to go in a bit more simple direction than we had in the past.”

  With “Saturday Night Special” in the can, the first song to be cut, on January 11, was the Collins-Van Zant track “On the Hunt,” the new album’s tribute to Free, who had recorded a song called “The Hunter.” Kooper found it to contain “Ronnie’s most misogynistic lyric ever”; Van Zant sang, “In these two things you must take pride. That’s a horse and woman … both of them you ride.” A close second in misogyny was the next song in line, the blues ballad “Cheatin’ Woman,” in which he considered gunning down his unfaithful woman, à la “Hey Joe.” “You won’t bother poor me no longer,” he threatened in this tune. Kooper earned a writer’s credit for it with Van Zant and Rossington, as he played organ and electric piano on the song. Then came the Van Zant-Collins original “I’m a Country Boy,” a sweaty, bluesy kiss-off to both coasts with their cars and smoke “chokin’ up my air.” In King and Van Zant’s “Railroad Song,” its chugging beat aided by a frenetic harmonica line by Wet Willie’s Jimmy Hall, Ronnie testified, “I’m goin’ to ride this train, Lord, until I find out / What Jimmie Rodgers and the Hag was all about” (“the Hag” being Merle Haggard).

  With the deadline closing in, sessions were lasting sixteen hours at a stretch, and when Kooper was gassed out, somebody, he said, “slipped some speed into my can of soda.” With all of them speeding, the last three cuts fell in place. There was Van Zant and Rossington’s “Am I Losin’,” which showed off Ronnie’s soft, sentimental side and was sympathetically written to Bob Burns. Kooper thought the ballad, featuring a smooth vocal, acoustic guitar, and banjo, was “the mellowest, most country thing Skynyrd had ever cut”; it included Kooper on background vocal, there being no time to hire any backup singers. Then, appropriating Shorty Medlocke’s old adage, Van Zant and King cowrote “Made in the Shade,” a hillbilly rag with a spoken Van Zant preface—“Well when I was a young-un, they used to teach me to play music like this here”—followed by a jug-band melange of mandolin, dobro, honky-tonk piano, and synthesized tuba.

  The last track was “Whiskey Rock-A-Roller,” which gave Billy Powell a credit with Van Zant and King, its honky-tonk noodling and muscular guitar licks a breath of fresh air. Kooper would overdub a second piano part by the producer David Foster when he mixed the album in L.A. in early February, his last official act as producer for Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  In many ways, the content of the album was antithetical to the band’s desire to break out of old molds; indeed, the work, called Nuthin’ Fancy, can fairly, and ironically, be called Skynyrd’s “country album.” Much of it was mindless and to the gut—exactly what they were going for, given the lack of though
t-inducing time they all had. And as it turned out, it was probably exactly what Skynyrd needed after all the hoopla about “Sweet Home Alabama.” Clearly, though, MCA was thinking of something else; they had worked up a cover that repositioned the band as All-American megastars, neon replacing sawdust. The art no longer used subliminal similarities to the Allman Brothers nor paleontological parallels to Black Sabbath. Their name was printed not in bones but with futuristic letters that looked like florescent bulbs.

  The group’s idea for a cover photo, however, was intriguingly and decidedly unglamorous. They stood perched on a brick wall under, not the blue skies of Alabama, but the thick cloudy skies of Georgia. It was as stark as the back cover was a lighthearted hoot, depicting them striding down a dirt road, Billy Powell’s middle finger upraised. The credits included baubles like “Ronnie Van Zant: Lead Vocals, Lyrics and Lots More J&B,” “Allen Collins: Gibson Firebird and Trout Voice,” and “Artimus Pyle: Drums, Percussion and Determination.” And on the inner front sleeve, within a photo montage of the band, was a sign reading: FOR SALE, LEONARD SKINNER REALTY, 389-1396—a debt of gratitude now repaid. The old gym coach had left coaching to go into real estate in Jacksonville and, good egg that he was, allowed them to use the sign gratis.

  Alan Walden was probably not amused by the jab he got, though; he was left unthanked. Listed among those singled out for “special thanks,” however, was Phil Walden, for Jimmy Hall’s turn on “Railroad Song” and “Made in the Shade.” The album was dedicated to Lacy Van Zant, Shorty Medlocke … and Peter Rudge.

  The album done, and released on March 24, Kooper bowed out, a very wealthy man. Looking back at the kind of punishment he had just come through, he told them when he left, “I would rather remain your friend than your producer…. We damn near killed each other on this one.” They laughed and hugged and then said good-bye, everyone relieved all around. While Skynyrd were tight with Kooper personally and enjoyed being linked with a cool industry icon, they had clearly come to loathe him as a producer. Billy Powell once said, “We fought all the time. He wanted to be the keyboard player, the producer, the director…. We finally got fed up with it after three albums. That’s when we released him.” Ed King agrees but insists that Skynyrd had set up the confrontation, for no better reason than that Kooper was “a northerner. They made it a North versus South issue. They just don’t like Yankees and [wanted to] make Yankees look like idiots.”

  Allen was terse about Kooper. “I’m not saying anything against him,” he said at the time, “but we ain’t gonna use him anymore.”

  Kooper went on to live la dolce vita in L.A., occupying and getting way too high in a playpen he liked to call the Free Bird Mansion. And he would claim that, while he had beaten MCA, the company had gotten even—not with him but with their top-earning act. “Later,” he said, “I found out they charged the million to Skynyrd’s account!” In time he would also have to deal with the same thing Badfinger had when, a few years later, he would have to come after Polley for royalty payments the manager never made.

  Ed King came away from the sessions calling Nuthin’ Fancy “the best we’ve done so far,” after the album he called “probably the worst.” As he explained, “The music has changed, but not too much. We’re aware of whatever basic element we have that makes us what we are and makes people like us.” But Ronnie wasn’t so sure. Having been forced to write songs rather than nurture them along at Hell House and then at clubs, he would lament that the band could not possibly come up with another “Free Bird” on deadline. “We haven’t really progressed that much in the past two or three years because we haven’t been given the time…. Nuthin’ Fancy was probably our poorest showing.” The culprit, in his estimation, was the “record company putting so much pressure on us…. There were some good spots on it, I thought, but …”

  With their tour of the continent a success and another album in the can that was sure to be a hit, they could finally enjoy some income in their pockets, each having received a good-sized royalty check for the quarter and a weekly salary, more like an allowance, of $300, according to King. Even at ten cents a record, big checks were still a ways in the future. Yet “Sweet Home Alabama” had clearly put them on a higher stratum, en route to building their empire—yes, their empire, ruled by only one emperor, the one with no shoes.

  “One time in Birmingham,” recalled King, who had a bit of a cushion from receiving royalties on “Incense and Peppermints” and who had lived the high life before, “we experienced our first limo ride from the gig back to the hotel. Big time stuff. When we got there, Ronnie demanded the night’s take from our road manager, Russ Emerick. Russ told Ronnie he had the money but taxes had to be paid along with other expenses. It still came out to $15,000. Ronnie took the cash and gathered us all in one room. He held the money in his hand peeling off hundreds, saying to each of us, ‘You two played pretty good tonight, you get a thousand bucks each. And you did ok, too … you get a thousand bucks. You did what you were told, that’s worth a thousand. You played some good licks … here’s a grand.’ Then, he said, ‘You’—I won’t say who it was but he wasn’t talking to me—‘you played like shit. You don’t get nothin’.” Ronnie paid himself two grand. Lesson learned.”

  The lesson was that Skynyrd might have landed in the big time but Van Zant still ran the show. And because he was getting itchy about the money being siphoned before it got to the band, he was about to make a change, one that would give Alan Walden the shock of his life.

  10

  TORTURE TOUR

  Pete Rudge, a long-faced, motor-mouthed bloke with a big smile and a terrible chain-smoking habit—usually around sixty cigarettes a day—seemed to fall deeper in love with Skynyrd every time he heard them. Never much of an American country music fan, Rudge was so smitten with the new idiom in rock that he urged one of his top-shelf bands, the Who, to sprinkle some backwoods influences into their repertoire. His other top band, the Rolling Stones, of course, had already heard the call when they came to record at Muscle Shoals. Pete Townsend would subsequently put some redneck into “Squeeze Box,” the Who’s 1975 hit, by adding banjo and accordion parts.

  Rudge approached Lynyrd Skynyrd gradually and cautiously but with some urgency after the Who became disenchanted with him due to all the attention he was giving the Stones, prompting Rudge to turn the Who’s management over to an assistant and to inveigle himself into the affairs of the country rock band he was taken with. His company, Sir Productions, which certainly sounded more classy than Alan Walden’s Hustlers Inc., had an office suite in New York, under the name Premier Talent, on the sixth floor of 130 West Fifty-Seventh Street, right next to Carnegie Hall. Everything about Rudge screamed “big time.” Accordingly, it didn’t take much for Ronnie to move in his direction. Indeed, to some in both camps, there was the assumption that Rudge was already managing Skynyrd; one of his adjutants at Sir, former British music journalist Chris Charlesworth, believes his boss had taken over the band back in 1973, during the tour with the Who. In reality, Rudge dearly wanted them but never made a move, figuring they would come to him. And he was right. He never had to sell himself or bad-mouth Walden, seeing how worked up Ronnie was getting over the paucity of money that was trickling to the band out of the millions they were making MCA.

  For his part Walden was quite content with the way things were—not that 30 percent of the band’s royalties was getting him much, but his cut of the publishing royalties was a growing fortune. He also thought the band should be indebted to him for taking a good portion of their money and investing it, which he believed—correctly—was necessary because, with their backwoods way of divvying up money and spending it indiscriminately, they would lose it all down the line. Whenever anyone in the band asked for some cash, Walden peeled off some bills. But even a doubled royalty rate meant little if the royalties were being siphoned off. None of them could buy a trophy car or move into a spacious crib. They all still lived in apartments in and around Jacksonville, with Ed K
ing and his wife sharing space with Ronnie and Judy at their duplex on Rayford Street, along with Dean Kilpatrick and his girlfriend. Walden hung out there so much it was as if he lived there too, and because he and Skynyrd had come through so much together, never did he think they would ever turn on him.

  Walden boasted of their relationship, “We became the Ten Musketeers! All for one and one for all! Wild, crazy, drinking, fighting rednecks with a capital R and proud of it!” While the band wondered where the money was, Walden says now that none was squandered and that Ronnie simply could not understand that, without prudent money management, they’d be out on the street. “I did very career-minded booking while their manager,” Walden says. “I had the long run in mind constantly. I caught a lot of crap from the band sometimes because they wanted to make a certain amount all the time. Once we played a $10,000 date, and they thought all the dates should be $10,000. Well, we might play Nashville for $35,000 and the next day be booked for $3,500 in a market undeveloped. Then another time they said they wouldn’t play for less than such-and-such, then they complained of working the same cities over and over.