Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  13

  SOUNDMAN GOD

  By age twenty-seven, it was about time Ronnie Van Zant grew up. As it was, with his thinning hair and expanding waistline, he looked around forty, and was also a touch more well appointed. Rudge forbade the leader of the “American Stones” from coming onstage barefoot—something Van Zant had never let on was the result of his old football ankle injury, which made it hard to stand a long time in shoes, instead saying that he just liked to “feel the burn” of the stage boards. Now he would need to grin and bear the pain. Now, too, he could chuck his old sweat-stained hats and don replacements made specially for him by the Texas Hatters company.

  His material and paternal yearnings seemed to be taken care of, but his thirst for world conquest was only going to become more demanding, which was a recognition that, while Lynyrd Skynyrd were the last people in the world who would have ever expected such status for themselves, in 1976 they were the new thing in rock. In moving the ball down the field more than any other group of southern rock polecats ever could have, they had broken down too many old barriers to count. Al Kooper put his finger on the pulse of what they were, saying of them years later, “When I found them they were a great heavy metal band. I just tried to give them a recording identity.” Not rock or country, but heavy metal.

  Accordingly, the Skynyrd fold of country rock was a heavy-metal identity. Soon, the Skynyrd “look”—not really a look at all but rather an antifashion statement: denim, sometimes torn, with T-shirts, cutoff vests, and longer than long hair—would become the uniform of heavy-metal bands, and remains so even to this day. The stark minimalism of the visual part of the equation stood in raging contrast to the growling passion and decibel level of the performance; nothing else—no mincing about, no glittery outfits, no fireworks—was there to distract attention from the music. It was all a product of Shantytown, which had finally found a context. Even any principled wariness about the Confederate flag was now passé. Artimus Pyle, behind whom the flag was draped like a Damoclean sword every night, said years later that he “hated” it and that it was “offensive to some people [who] think we hate black people.”

  Pyle nonetheless added some punch to the stage act. He was more animated and played with more finesse than Burns. He and Wilkeson would quickly find a rhythm groove in which the backbeat was tighter and more coordinated. Leon had come a long way on bass. He was so nimble fingered now that he was playing lead notes and rhythm notes in split-second intervals, a technique mastered by only a few elite bass players like Motown’s immortal James Jamerson and John Entwistle, whom Leon had of course been able to observe at close range on the Who tour and who could make ungodly sounds come from four strings. Still, Leon was by choice the least noticed member of Skynyrd, usually hanging back near the rear of the stage, to the right of the drums, so he could always hear the beat being banged out and to keep his bone-rattling bass notes in perfect coordination. He still attracted notice by wearing all manner of bargain basement haberdashery, including vintage policemen’s suits and hats, his favorites being an oversized porkpie and an English bobby’s cap. For this reason, he was sometimes taken to be the token Brit in a group that by then was fully in the hands of a Brit calling the shots.

  Peter Rudge, who kept a hand in every pot of the band’s affairs, found them a new producer, a tricky matter given their quirks, egos, and methods, not to mention their propensity for fighting like drunks in a barroom. Rudge, who had to have an album in hand for an early February release, could not afford to inject a novice into this mulligan stew. So he went straight to the top, to the A-list of producers, to arguably the most respected of them all—Tom Dowd, who at fifty-two had done studio work that had been heard by virtually everyone who listened to music, though doing so was actually a step down for him. During World War II, as a physicist, he had been on the Manhattan Project team that had developed the atom bomb. Moving into music, he engineered and produced for Atlantic Records the likes of Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. A pioneer of multitrack and stereo recording, he produced hits for the Rascals, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Cream, Eric Clapton, and the Allman Brothers, proving no idiom was beyond him. Not for nothing was he known as “Soundman God.”

  There were other, typically connived industry considerations attached to the decision. Dowd’s contract with Warner Communications, Atlantic’s parent company, forbade him to produce noncompany acts. But Ahmet Ertegun was very interested in signing Skynyrd to Atlantic when their MCA contract would expire with the album that came after this one, and thought Dowd would be the conduit. Dowd had worked at the Stax studio in Memphis, at Muscle Shoals, and established the Criteria Studios in Miami where he produced Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the title track of the latter being a cornucopia of slide guitar madness with Duane Allman stoking Clapton. Dowd knew all about southern rock—hell, all rock, all music. Most of all, he could work fast, which was necessary since the band had to squeeze the recording into the seams between their perpetual tour dates. After a short layover at home, they were off on another touring jag in mid-August, bouncing from Tampa to Charleston to Jersey City to San Diego.

  There would then be nine gigs out west through September before they took a long boozy flight to Europe for a fourteen-date tour in October and four more shows in November. Dowd would need to somehow get eight songs done during a week set aside in L.A. for that purpose in September at the Record Plant. There would be no chance to get them back for any overdubs or retakes until Thanksgiving when they would get back home to Jacksonville for a few weeks.

  Before agreeing to Dowd, Ronnie had gone around looking for producers, flattering them all. Paul Hornsby, Marshall Tucker’s producer, said Ronnie told him he wanted to hire him but that “it’s a democracy in the band. Unfortunately, I’m always outvoted.” Said Hornsby, “If he had his way, we would have worked together.” But that was likely what other producers believed too. In reality Ronnie’s word was law—or else; the Skynyrd “democracy” was more like a banana republic. As Pyle says, “It was his show, his dream—we were just renting space.” And Ronnie was smitten with Dowd, whom he called “a master.”

  Thus, the ruddy-faced, bearded Dowd—who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, a decade after his death—came with Rudge to Skynyrd’s concert in Santa Monica, was introduced to the band, and within days was in the studio with them, facing perhaps the biggest challenge of his career. Dowd actually had a double challenge; he would also produce the long-delayed live album, which would need to be released first, in the fall, for the European tour. Happily for Dowd, while the band still had rough-edged ways about them, they were now on a level of songwriting expertise and studio musicianship that, as it had for Al Kooper, made such shoestring recording possible. Although writing songs was never easy, the simple foundation of their songs had been refined to a science.

  Gary Rossington explained the alchemic process years later: “We used a lot of D-C-G progressions. There’s only seven chords, so you got to use the same ones over and over. It’s all in what you do with them. I could write a dozen different songs with the same three or four chords but they’d all be entirely different.”

  Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy in practice, but in a nutshell, this was the essence of Skynyrd’s infectious sound—though Van Zant’s lyrics were from a whole other place, a spontaneous combustion that defied formula. And as if any time frame would be enough to accommodate it, they ripped out six tracks in two days. It was a remarkable feat, inasmuch as they were also their usual snarling, arguing selves, agreeing on little until Dowd settled the issues with his expertise. The first to be cut, on September 7, was the Van Zant-Collins track “Cry for the Bad Man,” the title of which suggested perhaps self-pity for the bad men of Skynyrd, but which was aimed squarely between Alan Walden’s eyes. Subtle as a two-by-four, Ronnie steamed, “I’d rather quit and go ba
ck home / Than to deal with the money miser”—the term Walden sarcastically uses to describe the way Ronnie came to regard him. Nor was Ronnie coy about it, saying it was about “a gentleman we did business with at one time, and he really messed us over, cost us a lot of money … treated us real bad, and finally we got out from under these contracts with him.”

  Clearly autobiographical was the next in line, “Double Trouble.” “Eleven times I been busted, eleven times I been to jail,” Ronnie trilled of an arrest record that had grown a long way since Rossington had first stuck that phrase on him. He also recycled his favorite metaphor: the “black cat” that “crosses your trail.” With a smirk, he admitted, “Double Trouble, is what my friends all call me.” Soon, when he would perform it in concert, fans would scream back at him each letter as he spelled out “T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” The third track was another bow to J.J. Cale, a cover of his “(I Got the) Same Old Blues,” a stripped-down, blues-bar piece with a superb slide guitar by Rossington. Then, on the eighth, they cut Van Zant and Collins’s “Every Mother’s Son,” a crisp, down-home ballad with some sparking Billy Powell piano runs and Ronnie in a higher, Neil Young-like register delivering the very fatalistic line “Well, I’ve been ridin’ a winning horse for a long, long time / Sometimes I wonder is this the end of the line.”

  In retrospect one can find apparent or construed references like this to impending death lurking in Ronnie’s lyrics, even going back to “Free Bird.” One music chronicler believed that “the man’s departure appears to be from his lover but ultimately must be from life itself”; in this view, “Lord knows I can’t change” really means Lord knows I can’t change it— not if life is predestined otherwise. It was easy to retroactively dedicate the song to Duane Allman, who lived and died as Ronnie believed he himself was fated to, and according to other Skynyrd members Van Zant frequently struck the theme of not living past his thirtieth birthday. If he had such depressing thoughts in mind, however, he left them in the ellipses of the lyrics. Still, the mood of Nuthin’ Fancy was contemplative, even regretful, true to the country tradition. The broadening that Van Zant wanted would have to wait until they would get back into the studio in November to complete the album. There would be a lot to do in the meantime, on a journey Jerry Garcia might define in terms that Ronnie could appreciate—trouble ahead, trouble behind.

  Tom Dowd, with half the album in the can, pivoted to the live album (which would be released just as the band finished off the studio album in November), the highlight of which would of course be “Free Bird,” the song that made every live concert a group catharsis. The song’s evolution had indeed made it into a ritual exercise. Early on, hardcore Skynyrd fans began screaming “Free Bird!” throughout concerts. This grew into a ritual similar to that of Allman Brothers’ concert crowds shouting “Whipping Post!” For years, Ronnie had been coyly asking the crowd before the song’s accustomed slot as the second encore, “What song is it you wanna hear?,” which was followed by requisite shouts of “Free Bird!” The track on the live album would capture every ounce of the delirious, dizzying escalation from swaying, cigarette-lighter-clutching mellowness to the pandemonium of sonic madness when the girls, many half dressed and riding atop their boyfriends’ shoulders, would especially lose all control. It would also be something it was not when it was written and recorded—an homage to Duane Allman.

  Ronnie hadn’t known Duane well, but now he believed the man deserved commemoration from the band that was running the Allman Brothers off the field. And Ronnie wasn’t above milking it either; in concert, he would offer a brief soliloquy about Duane, leading to the canard that the song was in itself a tribute and had been written as such. Other times he would also include Berry Oakley in these preludes, calling Duane and Berry “free birds.” If only they had known. Yet the truth was that Ronnie had said when they were alive, “They’re a part of my crowd, but I don’t really know those guys.” No matter. Ronnie, no dummy, knew that epoxying his band to the Allman Brothers was a proven selling point, and this new version of history only made “Free Bird” more contextual and more popular. Even how the title appeared on the jacket of the single release—“Freebird”—caused hard-core Skynyrd fans to take note; that jacket would become a collector’s item as a Skynyrd anomaly.

  If their signature song was now something on the order of a Ronnie conceit, this was just part of a deepening chasm between actual reality and Ronnie’s reality, the best of which could be seen on a stage or on a vinyl record and the worst of which could be seen most everywhere else. If he had learned he had little to fear from the American justice system, being able to “get loose” on foreign soil led him and the others in his trail to think they had even less to worry about. Skynyrd’s second European tour would be perhaps the single most concentrated period of havoc they ever created. It was a wonder that Rossington, Van Zant’s fishing mate and punching bag, made it back home intact.

  It took only eight shows on the tour for all hell to break loose. In Portsmouth, England, before a show on October 25, again with Black Sabbath, a drunken Ronnie got into an argument with Gary over, of all things, how to pronounce “schnapps”—as much as was ever needed for him to start something. He broke a bottle of whiskey over John Butler’s head, just like in a movie, leaving him bleeding profusely, and then grabbed a shard of broken glass and began slashing at Gary’s wrists, leaving a deep cut on Gary’s hand—his left hand, providentially, not the one he played his guitar with. Gary, defending himself, grabbed Ronnie’s neck, choking him. But Ronnie, the fighter, broke free and continued his slashing, cutting both of Rossington’s hands and breaking his own right hand in the process.

  The melee, like a hockey fight, seemed to peter out by mutual consent, just another day in Skynyrdville. Ronnie and Gary made the usual trip to the hospital for their hands to be bandaged, and then were taken back to the arena; the bandages added to the Skynyrd schtick, but Rossington’s hands were damaged enough that he had to play guitar with two fingers for a while. While both men had forgotten about the ugly scene, it left Ozzy Osbourne and his own prototypical band of mental cases baffled. Sabbath guitarist Zakk Wylde said, “All I remember was that the guitar player came out with a bandage on his hand and the singer came out with a bandage on his head, and they were hugging each other, saying, ‘I’m sorry, brother—I love you, man.’”

  It was too much for Artimus Pyle, who recalls the broken-glass incident as “really scary.” As he had after Ed King’s departure, Pyle said, he had “a major confrontation” with Ronnie the next day. “I busted his door down [and] I was ready to whip his ass…. I said, ‘How can you do that to people you love?’ And he says, ‘I was drunk, I was drunk.’” Hearing that old dodge again, Artimus told him, “That’s bullshit. That’s no excuse.” Even so, if any bobbies came looking for Mr. Van Zant, it wasn’t with an arrest warrant for attempted homicide but for an autograph. No wonder Leon always donned a bobby hat when he played in London, and the band would write on its next album cover, “Thanks to the people of Europe.” What’s more, the incident was played in the rock press as just another story of Skynyrd making mayhem, even as parody; in New Musical Express, the writer gleefully called the tussle a “bloodbath” and chortled, “When a band start slashing each other’s wrists before gigs you know they’re confident.”

  The lunacy wasn’t done yet. Once again having escaped a criminal situation with impunity, Ronnie decided on the flight from Germany to Belgium that he would throw another roadie, Joe Barnes, off the plane, which happened to be thirty thousand feet in the air at the time. This was, he determined, the price Barnes had to pay for failing to bring a cart stocked with booze onto the plane. Apparently quite serious and already too drunk for any more booze to have mattered, he tried to pry open a cabin door so he could heave Barnes out. Unable to, he simply punched Barnes hard in the stomach, doubling him over in intense pain. Barnes, later claiming he had sustained a serious injury, filed a personal injury lawsuit against Van Zant for $250,000, which
was settled out of court.

  During the band’s booze- and drug-saturated heyday, these psychotic episodes seemed no more than a manifestation of the rock lifestyle. Besides, Ronnie could have made the claim, reasonably enough for him, that he had been taken to the woodshed for it in the many fistfights he’d had with his own confreres in the band, though no one could remember getting the best of him in these clashes; usually a split lip or black eye was the toll he had to pay, upon which, as Wylde noted, they were the best of friends again. It was crazy. It was sick. And it was dangerous to everyone’s health—but in those times, it could seem normal, even amusing, to behold. Decades of reflection, though, led Pyle to say, “Looking back, it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.”

  Still, there was always the filthy lucre to soothe—and gauze over—the ills and consequences of intoxication, even if, once it was common knowledge that they were all rolling in dough, certain perks vanished. At Hell House, for example, they had never paid an electric bill of more than around twelve dollars a month, despite sending hundreds of volts running through a mass of wires to high-powered guitars and amplifiers and keeping the lights on all night. Now, with no warning or explanation, the power company began to bill them for a hundred bucks a month. Also, a sheriff who lived down the road, who had never given them any trouble, came around one day with an “offer” when the music got loud. As Rossington recalled, “He said, ‘We’ve been known to overlook these things, if you know what I mean.’ He looked at us and we said, ‘Yeah, we know what you mean, but forget it.’”