But another problem developed when Artimus Pyle, during a stopover in South Carolina, decided to do some hang-gliding off a cliff and promptly broke his leg. The rest of the band was in New York for the Beacon shows, but for three days no one heard from him. When he finally showed up, he was on crutches. That might have sufficed, but by then Gary had somehow slammed a door on his left hand, breaking his ring finger. Though the live album was shelved, the Beacon shows limped on, with rabid audiences close to seeing a Skynyrd crack-up. During the final show, Allen and Leon blew fuses on their guitars and then their own fuses; in a fit of pique, aping the Who, they smashed their instruments to bits on the stage floor and threw broken pieces into the audience—one piece caused a bloody cut on a girl’s face, another expense Pete Rudge had to pay for. Then, during the wrap party, Ronnie punctuated the freak show engagement by “creepin’” Charlie Brusco, right in the jaw.
Dowd and the band hopefully rescheduled the live album recording for July 7–9 during a three-night run at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. It was during this interval that Gaines came aboard, and in a real break he would have a place on the very important live double LP. For Gaines, who followed Cassie and their father Bud in moving to Jacksonville with his wife Teresa and their young daughter Corrina, it was a relief to be out of the club grind and playing in an A-list band; and his sense of boyish optimism was a rare departure in a cesspool of fatalism and dark obsessions. “This is the beginning,” he bubbled after his hiring. “I hope to be playing for the rest of my life in some way. My head’s cleared out and I can just think about music more.” In many ways, Steve Gaines, who was not a heavy drinker or drug user, seemed like a metaphor for renewal, even rebirth. Ronnie would begin to elucidate some of these same thoughts, seeing in the fresh-faced Gaines something he himself would like to be, if only he could allow himself to give it a try.
15
T-R-O-U-B-L-E
In 1976 Lynyrd Skynyrd was in full throttle, and so was southern rock. In an ever-lengthening chain, along came analogs like Foghat, Wet Willie, White Witch, Jonathan Edwards, Grinderswitch, Itchy Brother, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and Molly Hatchet. The last, a direct descendant of Skynyrd, had formed in Jacksonville (its name taken from a prostitute who had murdered her clients) and was being managed by Alan Walden’s former partner Pat Armstrong, their recordings made in Skynyrd’s newly built Riverside Studios, which Donnie Van Zant’s .38 Special also used and helped finance. The parallel arc of L.A.-based country rock was evolving, too, its chain made longer by highly talented acts such as the post-Richie Furay incarnation of Poco, Rick Nelson in his post-Stone Canyon Band phase, Little Feat, Firefall, Elvin Bishop, and the bluegrass-rooted New Riders of the Purple Sage. But the kings of the hill were the Eagles and that prickly band of rednecks from Jacksonville whose name had once been unpronounceable but by now had elevated even former gym teacher Leonard Skinner into a lowercase, incidental icon.
Phil Walden, on the other hand, was not enjoying himself as much as Leonard Skinner was thanks in part to the success of the band named after him. With Capricorn Records’ meal ticket, the Allman Brothers Band, in decline, Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts began solo careers while Allman’s checkered life became a gossip-page favorite during his short-lived marriage to Cher, the chanteuse of cheesy pop. Allman’s drug abuse escalated, as did that of the rest of the Allman band, and their 1975 album Win, Lose or Draw was a critical and commercial bomb, a prime example of how fickle success can be. A year later, Allman, busted on federal drug charges, turned state’s evidence against the band’s tour manager Scooter Herring, prompting four Allman bandmates to vow never to work with Allman again—a vow that was easily discarded, given the perpetual touring proceeds brought in by the epochal group long after their prime and even to this day.
There would be no new Allman Brothers product for two years, a period during which it was assumed they had broken up. In the meantime, the hard upward thrust of the band the elder Walden brother had turned down, which his little brother had ushered to success, was the death knell of Capricorn Records. Once, Walden’s operational battle cry was that no southern band could possibly burgeon outside of his arc. Now they had to. Riding the idiom Phil Walden had foreseen, southern rock was making a fortune for bands scattered on labels mainly outside the South. Foghat, for example, was on the Bearsville label founded by Bob Dylan’s former manager Albert Grossman and based near Woodstock, New York. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils were on A&M. The Outlaws, still comanaged by Charlie Brusco and Alan Walden, were going strong at Arista. The way to the promised land for southern rockers was to follow not Phil Walden but the money, the kind handed to them in advances from the big national record houses that dwarfed Capricorn.
Walden was still a highly respected music apparatchik, however. When the South laid on hands for Jimmy Carter during the ’76 presidential campaign, country music—country rock, not the Nashville brand, which was staunchly Republican—followed Walden’s lead and united behind the smiling Georgia peanut farmer. Walden even brought the Allmans together for fund-raising concerts and enlisted the redneck band that had bragged about not being bothered by matters such as Watergate. For Skynyrd, joining this crusade was a half-hearted endeavor at best. What tipped it was their sense of southern pride. While Carter was a former naval officer, engineer, and thriving businessman, his less intellectually gifted, beer-guzzling brother and his silver-haired matriarch with the honeyed drawl were being parodied as typical of a Deep South gooberocracy. And so southern rockers far and wide came to play at a gigantic fund-raiser for Carter on May 1 at Jacksonville’s cavernous Gator Bowl, calling the event the Southern Jam. One by one they laid on hands for this far more enlightened “Gov’nor,” first the Allmans, followed by Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, the Outlaws, and .38 Special.
And Skynyrd? As hopeless as their addictions were and as uninterested as they were in political huckstering, their leader didn’t make it onto the stage. After snorting cocaine in his trailer, Ronnie again began coughing up blood and begged off. When Skynyrd came on, Charlie Daniels announced that he was going to stand in for Van Zant, who was “indisposed.” That was one way of putting it. When Carter narrowly defeated placeholder president Gerald Ford, Walden was accorded a place of honor at the inauguration, and the Daniels and Tucker bands played at the ball and were invited to the White House for periodic events. But the invitations for Skynyrd, who might have been a tad too red in the neck for the born-again Christian president, must have gotten lost in the mail.
By then nothing seemed to go smoothly for Skynyrd. On April 30 Ronnie had become angry at the usually mild-mannered Leon Wilkeson during a set in Lakeland, Florida, and the two had a brief pushing and grabbing match. As the live album again drew near, the bandmates again weren’t talking to each other, not a good thing with the pressure on to finally get the live album done. After arriving in Atlanta, they made it through three days of tense rehearsals. Then it was show time at the Fox Theater, a venue they had chosen for an engagement as part of a fund-raising drive to keep the old theater from being razed. For their efforts, Skynyrd would be honored by Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, whom they presented with a gold record of the work. At the opening show on July 7, Tom Dowd monitored the sound in a mobile sound studio outside the hall and was delighted to hear Skynyrd playing with tremendous energy before a stoked-up audience, such that the Atlanta Constitution called the show “hypnotic.” Ronnie indeed would give it all he had, bloody discharges notwithstanding. He would be so drained and his voice so ragged after the third show that an ensuing gig on the tenth would have to be scrubbed.
From these three shows would be taken fourteen songs for the double LP (reduced to twelve on the first CD reissue in 1986, then bumped back up to twelve with three bonus tracks on the second CD reissue a decade later, and then finally expanded to twenty-four tracks on the extensively remixed 2001 CD reissue, on which the tracks were presented in their original order on the set list). The “Free Bird” enc
ore ran thirteen and a half minutes (nearly fifteen minutes on the second reissue). The song list included “Workin’ for MCA,” “I Ain’t the One,” “Searching,” “Tuesday’s Gone”—which they hadn’t performed in two years—“Saturday Night Special,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Call Me the Breeze,” “The Needle and the Spoon,” and “Cross-roads”—the last a remarkable cover of the Robert Johnson blues classic with Ronnie’s gritty vocal as convincing as Clapton’s cover with Cream.
One new original, “Travellin’ Man,” from a rare collaboration with Leon, was Ronnie’s psalm for Lacy—“My father was a trucker for the years of 23 / And on the day that I was born his truck was left to me,” and ever since, “I am just a mover, movin’ fast as sound / Always free, sometimes lonely, always movin’ around.” The last song to get a place was “T for Texas,” with those Jimmie Rodgers lyrics about being treated like “dirty dogs” and having “had more pretty women than a passenger train could haul” a Skynyrd epitaph of sorts. It also was an introduction to the skills of Steve Gaines, whom fans would learn was a new member of the band when the album came out.
The set, One More from the Road, was an extraordinary work, the single best and purest example—at least until the 2001 remaster with Dowd’s liberal overdubbing scrubbed—of how Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded before a live audience. Of particular note were the extended arrangements of some songs, which Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes were “as long as those of the Allmans, but always much rawer, nearly dangerous.” Dowd’s praise for the album was effusive, even if he said so himself. “The energy’s really there. Like Otis and Booker T Live in Europe!” he said, apparently meaning the 1967 Stax album Otis Redding: Live in Europe, on which the soul legend was backed by Booker T. and the MG’s, high praise indeed as this was the only live album by Redding released during his lifetime. “That record represented every record they had made but they played it better and it was recorded better than the ones that were hits.”
Clearly, it was a barometer of its time. Released on September 13, 1976, with an initial run of four hundred thousand copies, within weeks that was kicked up to six hundred thousand. Just as excited as Dowd were the critics, with Rolling Stone’s John Milward hailing the band’s “Southern blues-rock diced with the sharp blade of British hard rock” as “a prime cut of guitar rock” and Ronnie’s “world-weary” vocals “barroom-tough on rockers, properly vulnerable on … ‘Searching’ and ‘The Needle and the Spoon.’” By year’s end, it had reached number nineteen, and within a year it would go gold, then platinum by the end of ’76, and triple platinum in 1987, the biggest seller of any Skynyrd album, with over three million units sold to date. If “Sweet Home Alabama” was their “Ramblin’ Man,” One More from the Road was their Eat a Peach, the Allmans’ 1972 million-selling double album. Meanwhile, caught in the jet stream, Gimme Back My Bullets picked up more sales, as did the older albums. Skynyrd, it seemed, had become quite nearly a turnkey operation.
One More from the Road was an appropriate rallying cry for the band. With no delay, they were back out on it, one more time. Through July, they played gigs in their home state, one at Miami’s baseball stadium, and then in Nashville and Chicago. On August 1 at a sold-out Macon Coliseum, they broke the Allman Brothers’ attendance record there. The long road was so winding now that it took Skynyrd off to England again for exactly two shows, a trip made necessary because Pete Rudge had the leverage to put them onto the same stage as the Rolling Stones, whom he had booked as the headliner at the Knebworth Festival in Hertfordshire county, north of London. This open-air site had hosted the big summer music event in England since 1974, when sixty thousand people attended a show that included the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, and Van Morrison. The next edition drew one hundred thousand for Pink Floyd, the Steve Miller Band, and Captain Beefheart. In ’76, ticket sales zoomed for the August 21 concert there when some idle musings by the Stones about performing for the “last time” were taken to mean they were about to disband. Actually, all they had said was that it would be their first and last time playing Knebworth. Rudge, seeing the numbers build, gave Skynyrd marching orders to get on a plane.
Ronnie, who was awaiting the birth of his second child, gritted his teeth and went. But since he was homesick away from the States, he took Lacy with him. The two of them had come a ways since Ronnie had dropped out of school, and were constantly trying to mend old wounds; Ronnie hoped the trip would help Lacy see the respect his boy was getting all over the world. The old dog, for his part, needed little convincing; he had long accepted the role of the “Father of Southern Rock,” words he had embroidered on his stationery and handkerchiefs. Making the rounds of Skynyrd concerts close to home, he was instantly recognizable because of his long white Santa Claus beard and sometimes full Confederate Army uniform and hat, entertaining whomever he saw with yarns told through a mouth with progressively fewer teeth.
Skynyrd’s appearance at Knebworth was eagerly awaited. Posters for the event, at Rudge’s directive, featured their image above that of the Stones, with the headline KNEBWORTH FESTIVAL ’76 WELCOMES AMERICA’S CONFEDERATE ROCKERS LYNYRD SKYNYRD. They warmed up the day before with a show in nearby Hemel Hempstead. On a stifling hot, brilliant day the next afternoon, the massive crowd at Knebworth grew by the hour. The official attendance that day was 120,000, but there were probably twice that on the grounds under a blistering sun. Not that big crowds were a big deal for Skynyrd; in Chicago they’d recently played before one hundred thousand in Soldier Field. And back in ’74 at the Ozark Music Festival at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, around 350,000 had crammed into the quaint venue. Ronnie liked saying that beyond the first few rows everything seemed a blur anyway. And Artimus added that a crowd like that created a feeling of such enormous power that he could, with one word, incite either a riot or a mass cleanup of the grounds.
They were on the undercard that day with 10cc, Todd Rundgren, the Don Harrison Band led by former Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, and the Jefferson Airplane spinoff Hot Tuna. They were scheduled to appear at 3:15 PM as an early act leading up to the Stones’ evening set. However, with all the Confederate flags in the massive crowd, it was clear that interest in the band was higher than previously believed, so promoter Freddy Bannister shifted them into the spot immediately before the Stones. This was also a fallback since there was doubt the Stones were in any condition to play, having come in so wrecked that they barely knew where they were. With so many watching—including the Royal Family and Paul and Linda McCartney—a bad gig by the Stones might leave a stain on the event; in this scenario, Bannister would bank on the rednecks from the colonies to save the day.
This reality hardly fazed Skynyrd. Before the show, as Pyle recalled, Ronnie and Gary sat under a tent behind the stage calmly smoking hash with Mick Jagger. “They were tapping a pipe … passing this thing around,” laughed Pyle, who had his own celebrity smoke-in. When he walked into the band’s trailer before the show, he saw Leon and Billy passing joints around with a familiar-looking fellow wearing wraparound sunglasses.
“Hey, you’d never guess who’s here smoking a joint with us,” Leon said through the fog. Artimus squinted through the smoke and instantly recognized the guest toker as Jack Nicholson, who had come from L.A. to view the Stones.
For the next hour, they all got stoned. Then at around five o’clock, as twilight crept in, Skynyrd entered the long, canopied, orange-colored stage to their usual play-on music, “Dixie.” Clad in a black T-shirt reading MUSCLE SHOALS SOUND, Ronnie checked out the mass of humanity in front of him. With little fanfare, he called out, “Hello, how are you?” Skynyrd then kicked into “Workin’ for MCA.” The normal Skynyrd set was around an hour. Now, wanting badly to upstage the Stones, they went on for ninety minutes, holding that gigantic crowd in their palms. Observers had only seen them play as well and with as much sting just once, when they were recording the live album.
As people
waved the Stars and Bars and American flags along with the Union Jack, the band blasted through a dozen songs, ending with a mesmerizing fourteen-minute rendition of “Free Bird.” Freely trespassing on the tongue-shaped ramp at the foot of the stage built for Mick Jagger to preen and strut on, Skynyrd stomped the floorboards as the guitar solos escalated in intensity, with Alan, clad all in red and looking like a big stick of licorice sprouting unruly hair, manically leaping up and down, and a bare-chested Artimus hammering out wild drum fills and cymbal crashes. The electrifying set indeed turned out to be the high point of the festival, in contrast to the Stones’ sloppy, heavy-lidded performance, which came after midnight and a four-hour delay. The Brit rock press vilified their poor showing, some calling it a “fiasco” and “a shambling parody.”
During the day, when there were air shows and clowns to entertain the crowd, the vibe had been felicitous; Pyle felt he had to note that “there were no drug overdoses.” And Skynyrd basked in the afterglow of this victorious stage of their ascendance. Artimus would habitually speak of having “blown away” the Stones, who Billy Powell said were strung out on Quaaludes—“I know this for a fact.” Skynyrd felt the timing was right to strike a new theme: that of maturing, sobering up, and reaching a real crossroads of personal reformation. “It’s the first time we’ve seen our audience in eight years,” Ronnie told the press. It sounded good, anyway—no matter that he had been seen downing shots of straight bourbon before and even during the show, when he periodically grabbed a bottle of whiskey and took a swig; nor that after the show, Gene Odom saw him go shot-for-shot after being challenged to a drinking contest by J. Paul Getty III, the billionaire’s playboy son. Several years before the young man had been infamously kidnapped and held for ransom, an episode during which the kidnappers had cut off his ear and sent it to his grandfather with a ransom note—to Skynyrd that made the young Getty about the coolest guy they’d ever met.
Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Page 24