Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  In truth, a Skynyrd concert, while a showcase of ass-whupping aggression to be sure, was hardly an homage to Bull Connor. Rather, they were seminally punk, pushing no tangible agenda, spitting in the face of all authority. They were truly scary in one respect—to other, bigger bands for whom they opened. On September 1, the second day of the California swing, they were to open for the Kinks, who decided to cancel at the last minute, not denying rumors that they’d had second thoughts about having to follow Skynyrd—who would want to have to come out and play after “Free Bird”? Skynyrd said they’d go on regardless, sparing the promoters from having to dump the whole show, and few asked for refunds.

  Given who and what they were, any publicity was good publicity. Thus a headline such as one in Circus Raves in September—LYNYRD SKYNYRD IN TURMOIL—was merely free advertising, furthering the theme of bad boys being bad boys. In the grand scheme of things, at least when it came to their bottom line, if not their mental and physical state of being, a much more significant headline was the one in the October 11 issue of Billboard—LYNYRD SKYNYRD: 3 GOLD LPS IN A ROW. Pronounced had reached that milestone in September 1974, with Second Helping following three months later and Nuthin’ Fancy in June 1975. Forty years later, with no headlines or advertising needed, the albums go on selling. And nobody still wants to have to come out and play after “Free Bird.”

  12

  100 PROOF BLUES

  Skynyrd had unearthed something new in popular culture, something distinctly and genuinely southern, something that was rising as an antidote to crudely commercial, corporate country rock. The band seemed to have picked up the torch of southern rock heroes who had come before them only to fall before reaching their apogee. The latest to drop was Gram Parsons, the pure country rocker, gifted with perhaps the most emotionally genuine voice in contemporary music, who had died in a motel room near Joshua Tree National Park in September 1973 from an overdose of drugs and alcohol. And the Allman Brothers, imploding by the day, could never really replace Duane Allman or Berry Oakley.

  In terms of popularity and sales, the country-rock niche by default was owned by the Eagles, a band whose members—in a perfect allegory of the impersonal, corporate industry rock had become—had to be introduced to each other, formed by managers and producers for quick success. The Eagles also used a skull as a marketing tool, but one of a dead animal in the desert. Their sound was geared around a cowboy rather than redneck ethic with songs like “Tequila Sunrise,” “Lyin’ Eyes,” and “Best of My Love.” They sold a massive number of records, and the weepy slide guitars of their brand became a signature of the early Southern California country-rock trend.

  There were now a grab bag of southern country-rock units with a new wrinkle—Black Oak Arkansas, for one, combined psychedelia, fifties rock, Hindu spiritualism, and gospel into “psycho-boogie,” or “raunch ’n’ roll.” (Spiritualism with a country twang had been broached by George Harrison with the Beatles, and on the title track of his 1970 All Things Must Pass album he added a tart pedal-steel guitar line.) Black Oak—a great but highly underrated influence with Jim “Dandy” Mangrum’s sandpaper voice and stage writhing writing the template for heavy metal rock—released their debut album in 1970 and had four through mid-1973, before Skynyrd had even one.

  There was also the Outlaws, a veteran country outfit that had broken up in 1971 but reformed with new personnel a year later. Their wrinkle was front man Hughie Thomasson’s guitar wizardry and studio innovations, such as having a fuzzy guitar lick on one stereo channel and a clear guitar line on the other, or playing Beatles/Hendrix-style licks in reverse. More and more, the Outlaws, managed by the tall, square-jawed Charlie Brusco, built a following. And Ronnie Van Zant, in a rare show of support for a rival band, urged Alan Walden to move in on them, whereupon Walden and Brusco became comanagers. In 1974 when the Outlaws opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd in Columbia, South Carolina, Ronnie, spying Clive Davis, the veteran music panjandrum who had just created Arista Records, spoke directly to Davis from the stage. “If you don’t sign the Outlaws,” he told him, “you’re the dumbest music person I’ve ever met—and I know you’re not.”

  Davis did, making the Outlaws the first act signed to Arista and the second Southern-rock band to be taken in by a major label outside the South. Yet once Skynyrd had opened that door, even though they themselves had made their bed using the Confederate flag as their comforter, they began to chafe when the label of “southern rock” was applied to them—not unlike the Eagles when they too were shoehorned into “country rock.” It was especially irritating to Ronnie, who had made a real effort to expand the Skynyrd mold with the eclectic buffets of Second Helping and Nuthin’ Fancy.

  “Southern Rock’s a dead label,” he said, “a hype thing for the magazines to blow out of proportion. We don’t play like the Allmans did, or like Wet Willie…. When I talk about the South and all that I just mean pretty country. Like Tennessee, Kentucky, which is like upstate New York. Really, I can’t see no difference between North and South, and I’d like to see this shit about ‘southern man’ and ‘southern this’ just thrown away.”

  This was a truly remarkable stance for a man who had so willingly and unalterably taken up the cudgels for the “Southern Man.” Just as remarkably, he said, “We are tired of all this ‘southern scene’ crap that follows us in newspapers; it’s gotten so that a great band from New York has less of a chance now than an average band from the South. People have come in and started to make money, and there are folks now who’ll snap you up because you’re from Dixie.” Of course, it was due to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd that this was the case at all. Yet now, it seemed as if he was ready to go to war for the Northern Man. And some seemed to appreciate it. Music critic Michael Point believed that Skynyrd was “the only Southern band capable of retaining the interest of say, a New Yorker strong on Bad Company.”

  Van Zant wasn’t the only “southern scene” artist who wanted to stretch out—take Barefoot Jerry, for instance, a band composed of Nashville studio musicians who had played on Bob Dylan’s sessions in the city and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” In one song they proclaimed, “Proud to be a redneck … but I’ve changed,” asserting that “the South’s gonna rise again” but “we don’t have to be so doggone mean.” While satisfied to be just “good ole country hicks,” they channeled Marvin Gaye in one song, averring, “Blood is not the answer,” condemning the Vietnam War. The burr under Ronnie’s saddle did have something to do with race—that the image making of Skynyrd had all but precluded non-Caucasians from appreciating them, or caring to. He had read in the rock press numerous times about the white audiences that came to Skynyrd concerts, covered in tattoos and carrying Confederate flags, wearing Skynyrd/Jack Daniel’s T-shirts. Such an audience meant that blues songs like “Curtis Loew” and “Call Me the Breeze” would not be recognized for what they were. For many Skynyrd fans, it was still all about “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird.”

  Skynyrd had certainly courted the “rowdy bunch of drunks” image that Ronnie also decried—which often seemed to be confirmed by their roadies almost ritualistically getting into fights with audience members and even roadies from other bands. It was a rare night when no one in the Skynyrd retinue came away from a gig without a shiner or broken bone. These effects of the Skynyrd experience might have been quite beneficial in selling them, but for Ronnie they did nothing to reveal that he had broad set of talents and musical palette. What he longed for was to be taken seriously by all demographic metrics and to see some black faces in those crowds. Toward that end, he would make an appeal for that, based on northern hypocrisy: “The difference between blacks and whites, that’s changed for sure,” he said in 1975. “We don’t have any trouble with our brothers. If you want to talk about racial stuff, talk to people from Boston.”

  So, needing to keep the base growing, he would grit his teeth and say that Skynyrd was “just a little band from Jacksonville,” while his eyes were on a bigger pri
ze—a larger mainstream—with every expectation that the new guy pulling strings would make it happen.

  But something else was happening too, something neither Pete Rudge nor anyone in the band could brake. Rossington was right that, as the pressures kept mounting for the band to figuratively get higher, they had to literally get higher. It was little wonder that Bob Burns had snapped on the European tour; all of them barely got through all those weeks under the European magnifying glass in one piece. That Artimus Pyle came in half baked from dropping acid was a sign that Skynyrd was now also in the big leagues of rock self-immolation. The boozing, snorting, popping, and everything else they dabbled in were all part of the time bomb.

  “From a manager’s perspective,” says Charlie Brusco, “you see what’s going on with a band—you hate it, you try to tell guys they’re killing themselves—but there’s not a damn thing you can do about grown men who want to get ripped all the time. There’s not a rock band in the history of the world that has ever been able to avoid it, and there never will be. It’s why guys drop like flies, die before their time with their livers being rotted away or their hearts giving out. Look at Gregg Allman. That’s walking death.”

  Ronnie’s health was already an issue. Two dates on the European tour had been canceled and money refunded when his throat became infected. While always sharp eyed and together while prowling the stage, once off it he would get so falling-down drunk he was incoherent and a danger to all around him, including himself. The courtly southern charmer at those times would become insulting, rude, and threatening—the classic nasty drunk. He’d have run-ins all the time, several with cops outside of clubs that ended with him being thrown in the can until he slept it off and first Walden, then Rudge, paid a fine and got him out. That happened at least six times. Yet he and the others had become proficient at self-denial. Ronnie, in one interview, maintained that he was no longer drinking—that is, except when he did. He said he’d made a $4,000 bet with the others in the band that he could stay off the hard stuff. Instead, he was now drinking only wine. Never mind that he had once sung of “sweet wine” that “it makes a fool of you.”

  In a profile of the band in the October 1975 issue of Creem, Rossington also had some bull to sling. Before, he said, they all drank six fifths of Chivas a night, among other things. “It was like water to us. Then we started getting the shakes and playing so bad we quit drinking.” Except of course when they didn’t. “Now,” he added, “we just drink moderate and have a few to calm down.”

  Terms like “moderate” and “a few” to Skynyrd entailed a different kind of metric than they did for most civilians. Their capacity seemed infinite, and to other bands they must have looked the way the Who once had to them. But this wasn’t all bad from Ronnie’s bleary-eyed vantage point. He had wanted to be recognized as a blues singer. And now, as Creem observed in its title, he was singing the 100 PROOF BLUES.

  The wonder is that Skynyrd did indeed keep every shred of their base while moving ever forward into new musical avenues. In fact they were permanently affixed to the loam of Tobacco Road. Once, they had opened for some distinctly midlevel acts; now, only an act on the order of Clapton or the Stones could pull rank on them. Their shows in big venues were major rock events. Skynyrd, which once had exactly one roadie, Dean Kilpatrick, now had a mob of roadies. Kilpatrick, who was now called head of security, managed up to twenty roadies, including Gene Odom, Billy McCartney, John Butler, Joe Barnes, Craig Reed, Chuck Flowers, Joe Osborne, and Scott Parsons.

  Some fading acts who had been riding high just a few years before were now trying to ride their coattails, Ted Nugent and Carlos Santana among them, each of whom took slots as Skynyrd’s opening act during their tour. It was a given that, when Skynyrd played on their home turf, they were the attraction, something that applied also at NASCAR speedway concerts at which the biggest country rockers jammed with each other. Bands that had tasted success far sooner than Skynyrd, like the Marshall Tucker and Charlie Daniels bands and Black Oak Arkansas, were now essentially Skynyrd’s warm-up acts. On a broader scale, merging a hard-core country sensibility with mainstream rock was a major watershed in pop music, and Skynyrd’s pulse-raising impact was more arousing than the superb but medium-cool blues of the now-receding Allman Brothers Band. And with that pulse came a topsy-turvy effect on popular culture. Before, geographical biases had been reflected in literature and art. Even Dennis Hopper’s groundbreaking Easy Rider, the ultimate parable of 1960s idealism gone sour—with Hopper and Peter Fonda’s amoral “free birds” on Harleys descending into the American Hades of the South—ended with a shotgun blast from a redneck in a pickup.

  Nor was James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, immortalized by the squirm-inducing line, delivered in a thick backwoods twang, “Bend over and squeal like a pig, boy,” of help to a South in transition and in search of a makeover but still seemingly stuck in hubris and unfocused angst. While Charlie Daniels’s 1975 anthem “The South’s Gonna Do It Again,” a virtual roll call of southern rock acts—Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, ZZ Top, Wet Willie, Barefoot Jerry, Grinderswitch, Elvin Bishop—was intended to defuse that rusty old rubric of defiance by applying it to a new font of southern music, it was annexed in the spirit of the same nativist flag-planting as was “Sweet Home Alabama,” more easily done since Daniels had left open what the “it” in the song was supposed to be.

  Now, though, in no small part because of the band whose political motives were so hard to decipher, that thirst for freedom and flight had been transmuted to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s songs of the great redeeming qualities of the American South. This was more reason why more than a few Yankees witnessing this amazing metamorphosis felt like wheezing The horror! The horror!—at least until a closer listening to their records revealed something beneath the cartoon surface that made the South actually seem worth saving, worth caring for.

  With these new parameters being so rewarding, Skynyrd enjoyed an infusion of badly needed cash in their pockets. Ronnie and Judy moved to larger digs, an apartment on the banks of the Cedar River, on—appropriately—Confederate Point Road. Gary Rossington had floated around the area, not settling into a pad he considered home. His drinking had gotten out of hand, and it was almost a relief to those around him when he did cocaine because it meant he wasn’t getting so drunk he couldn’t see. With those curls and doe-like eyes, he always could reach out and collect any number of women with little effort, and one, a willowy blonde named Martha, became his girlfriend, or so she thought. One morning he rolled over in bed, squinted at her through bloodshot eyes, and asked, “Who are you?” But she stuck with him, and the reward was that in 1977 he would marry her, if not for long.

  The cosmetic side of success never overly affected the band. To their credit, they didn’t start living lives of wild financial excess. All lived fairly modestly, close to the old neighborhood. They all had either long cars or shiny pickup trucks in their driveways—which they never drove, since all except Artimus had had their licenses suspended for reckless driving, something that would become a graver problem. They could now appreciate how Alan Walden had put money away for their future. Ronnie and Gary had sprung for a fishing boat they named Bad Company—for their jukebox hero Paul Rodgers’s band but also a term that could describe what they were by then—on which they spent more time reeling in catfish than at home with their wives. Indeed, for Judy, her marriage to Ronnie felt more like a rumor than fact. “I can’t even remember the sound of his voice,” she lamented. “He really wasn’t home all that much.”

  But he did spend enough time with her to knock her up, another accident he believed might be a blessing. His older daughter, Tammy Michelle, was all but estranged from him, and he wanted to believe that becoming a father again, at the right time, would calm down his primitive instincts and impulses and give him a chance to be a family man for the first time in his life, even if 1976 loomed even more hectic than ’75. Then, too, proper fatherhood, as opposed to his experience the first t
ime around, not to mention any little mementos of the road that might have been running around out there, might bring him close to Lacy and Sis, whom he practically brushed past on the way out the door when they would drop in on him and Judy. As it was, his boy’s constant run-ins with the law had only made Lacy’s hair even grayer, though it didn’t prevent him from bragging around town about his son’s success or sometimes coming out on the road with them. But in Ronnie’s mind, it was easier to avoid Lacy than to promise he would clean up his act. Thus, he erected yet another barrier to their relationship without even knowing it.

  As Artimus Pyle came to recognize, “Ronnie’s biggest disappointment was that he couldn’t please his father. I found that so bizarre because all his father ever did was sing his praises. Yet he felt that way. I could never figure out why because Lacy adored Ronnie. Maybe he never told Ronnie.”

  Even now, as accomplished as Van Zant was, he felt inadequate about dropping out. Counseling a roadie to stay in school, he told him, “You’re getting something I never had a chance to get, an education. I’d give anything if I could have that now.” Seen through that prism, writing lyrics to a song didn’t mean a damn thing. As if to unburden himself, Ronnie himself would brag on Lacy and admit to his failure to live up to his father’s expectations. In 1975 he told an interviewer, “I learned everything I know from him. He always wanted me to be something I could never be—and I’m sorry to disappoint him. He wanted me to be just like him. But I couldn’t be.”