Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  The reforming of Skynyrd was a very hard sell, given that their image was so intertwined with their excesses. Indeed, one British reviewer wrote that “tasting Lynyrd Skynyrd live feels like having a bottle of Jack Daniel’s shoved down your throat.” To be sure, the bandmates were threats to themselves and anyone around them, particularly when one of them turned the key in a car. It had become a joke to them that they lost their licenses so much yet kept on driving, openly cackling about the fake licenses they got, and even with police laying in wait, still avoiding prosecution when they cracked up. Once when Al Kooper asked Wilkeson for his address, Leon handed him a license. Kooper asked, “Don’t you need this?”

  “Nah, keep it,” Wilkeson told him. “I got a few of those.”

  Not long after the band had gotten home, Gary, the world’s worst driver, went out in his Ford Torino on Labor Day, drunk and high on Quaaludes, and passed out with his foot on the accelerator. The car careened off Mandarin Road, crashed into a telephone pole, then a tree, and then finally careened into someone’s home. Once more cheating death and the likelihood of injuring or killing others, he bruised some ribs and spent a week in the hospital. Amazingly, this still didn’t seem enough cause for Jacksonville’s finest to charge him with any crime or revoke his license—an absolute crime in itself—instead allowing Pete Rudge to merely pay fines and restitution to the owner of the home that was damaged. Rossington, as usual, could cover the bandages with his frilly jackets and go on playing guitar, for a while in a neck brace. When Ronnie heard of this latest mishap, he was not amused. Visiting Gary in the hospital, he let him have it.

  “I told him he was stupid,” he later told Gene Odom, apparently not appreciating the irony, “’cause what he was doing was only gonna hurt the band and everything we’ve worked for.”

  Van Zant, with the same lack of irony, for years had insisted he wanted to clean up and broaden the image of the band into something more than a bunch of barroom bruisers who could also play music. And now he resolved to prove Skynyrd could give up the booze, the one-night stands, and the crazy-ass driving, and settle down in some quiet little town—even if he knew it really didn’t have a chance in hell of happening. His own habits and deceits aside, for Ronnie, life as a magnum rock star was no more than a dizzying, kaleidoscopic blot, senseless and unrequiting, a life whizzing by through bus and airplane windows, seen through the eyes of men who were almost always eight miles high. In his newly adopted phase, he began dropping hints that he might give up music for a while, dry out, and become a homebody at last.

  This seemed plausible when on September 19 Judy gave birth to a daughter they named Melody. The next five shows were canceled, and Ronnie flew home, seeing visions of redemption for a life lived for varying reasons in confusion, anger, and regret. He moved his family to a new home on a quiet lane in a woody area off Brickyard Road in Orange Park, again just off the Saint Johns River, with a guitar-shaped swimming pool in back. To all who saw him, he took vows of sobriety he knew he wouldn’t keep, as if the vows themselves marked a kind of turning point in his life, to be reserved at that moment and then chased sometime in the future. He could even get philosophical about it. “For the first time I’m really thinking about the future,” he said at the time. “I’m twenty-seven now [he was twenty-eight] and I’ve got a baby girl and I plan to stick around and watch her grow up. I also plan to collect for the last ten years of self-abuse.”

  It sounded convincing. Tom Dowd for one believed he saw in Ronnie “a more serious person.” Pulling rank as the leader he was, in the wake of Gary’s latest misadventure on the road, he began openly turning on the others in the band, regarding them as immature snot-nosed kids who just didn’t get it. “These boys are still boys, and they’re never gonna stop on their own…. If this keeps up, somebody’s gonna get killed,” he said. And he wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie. Rossington wasn’t the only one who’d had a near miss. In recent months Powell had almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident, Collins had fractured his skull driving a jeep over an embankment, and Pyle had broken his leg in a car crash. Dean Kilpatrick, who was always on the periphery of Skynyrd madness, had crashed the band’s van, without them in it, into the back of a Trailways bus on the off-ramp of the interstate, putting him in the hospital with injuries so severe he needed his spleen removed.

  Despite the fact that he saw himself as the sole grown-up of the bunch, Ronnie was obviously the last to lecture anyone else about this sort of thing, least of all the men he had influenced so heavily by his own ongoing erratic, inebriated behavior. Still, he would try hard to play the sanctification and sympathy cards. The problem was, as good as he made it sound, the road called, as it always did, one more time. And that was when he would make a liar and a fool of himself.

  16

  LOOK WHAT’S GOING ON INSIDE YOU

  With two Skynyrd albums climbing the charts on almost concurrent paths, MCA’s ads and band-licensed items such as Skynyrd T-shirts and everything from Skynyrd belts to Skynyrd necklace pendants, Skynyrd photos, and Skynyrd underwear—all of which were now hawked as collectibles under the corporate banner of Broken Arrow Productions, run out of Peter Rudge’s office suite—were now full-frontal everything. The Confederate flag was paired with the old skull motif, now updated with wings spreading on either side of a flying skull, and the Jack Daniel’s logo, which was beneficial to both the band and the booze maker. Ronnie, meanwhile, was strutting hard. After getting home from Knebworth, he began wearing a T-shirt that definitely was not for sale. It read, WHO THE FUCK ARE THE ROLLING STONES ANYWAY?

  That cocky attitude was as salable a quality as any band apparel. As it stood now, the hippies loved Skynyrd. The bikers loved ’em. The drunks loved ’em. The potheads and coke sniffers loved ’em. The metalheads loved ’em. The “Free Bird”-grooving, mellowed-out yuppie crowd loved ’em. The right-wing nuts loved ’em. Only Lester Bangs still seemed to hate ’em. They cut across all cultural and musical fault lines, upscale, low scale, any scale. This was especially timely, as it erected a buffer zone against the malefaction of disco, and the way they transformed their aversion to snobbery into a kind of reverse snobbery portended the breakout of punk. It was all extremely profitable too. Rudge, as crassly commercial as he was, would enclose in the next album a form for the “Lynyrd Skynyrd Survival Kit,” a collection of items with the reminder to “send check or money order” plus a dollar in postage.

  The cash streams were deep and rich, and the Shantytown boys were doing all right, if not ostentatiously so. They were still close to home—no L.A. migration for these boys. Gary had bought a home across the river in the chic Mandarin section of Jacksonville, where some of his best car crashes had occurred. Allen and Kathy had a home built on two acres a few miles to the east on Julington Creek, surrounded by a high fence. Steve, Billy, Leon, and Artimus lived in comfort, if not splendor. They had it all, it seemed, if one didn’t count sobriety or industry power, which they likely believed they would never have.

  With the release of the live album, Skynyrd believed they had fulfilled their commitment to MCA. Pete Rudge had planned to negotiate with Ahmet Ertegun, signing the band to Atlantic Records, the first step of which had been to hire Dowd to produce them. However, complications arose when MCA pointed out that they needed to record one more studio album before they could field offers from other labels. What’s more, MCA was prepared to better any other offer, so tied was the label to its top act, and Rudge advised the band to forget about going elsewhere. They would still be workin’ for MCA, ball and chain and all.

  That being the assumption, the company had a directive for Skynyrd—get out some hit singles. Mike Maitland had been bugging Rudge about this for some time, as none of the singles that had been released had done much, save for “Sweet Home Alabama.” Maitland himself called Ronnie with his ukase. “We’ve got you back in this market,” he said, meaning the sales mainstream. “Now you’re going to go pop. I want three hit singles on the next album.�
�

  “What’s a hit single?” Ronnie wanted to know.

  “A record that’s not more than three minutes long.”

  This was a touchy subject with the group, who had become somewhat defensive about their lack of hit-single material; it seemed irrelevant given their massive album sales. What’s more, it could even be said that Skynyrd had helped render the single 45-rpm record obsolete; in the new age of album rock, if a fan liked a particular song on an album, he’d simply buy the album, which seemed to put each song into a context. Indeed, suggestive of “Free Bird,” the Eagles’ Desperado was so popular that the title track, which was never released as a single, was their most requested song, while the two singles from that double-platinum album tanked. Nor was “Stairway to Heaven”—a song that now vies with “Free Bird” for the top spot on classic radio all-time lists—ever a single. Led Zeppelin, which only had two Top 10 hits in the United States, owns the biggest-selling album in history, the nine-time platinum Led Zeppelin IV, and the third-biggest-selling double album, Physical Graffiti. Pink Floyd, whose album The Wall has still sold the most double LPs in history, 23 million, only notched one Top 10 hit, the title track. Deep Purple also had just one Top 10 song.

  The difference was that, in America, the album-rock gods the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, and Chicago had consistent and big hits, not to mention Grammy awards. And so Skynyrd, reluctantly, accepted the challenge of making hits without compromising their integrity—and certainly not going too pop, a notion that made their skin crawl. They seemed to have the ideal guy to move them into wider mainstream territory. But Skynyrd being Skynyrd, even God—Soundman God—was about to fall out of their favor.

  There was no way Skynyrd could create such new material utilizing the old system of waiting until they got into the studio and hoping for lightning. Now, they would come to arenas early to hash out songs for the next album, sessions for which were scheduled at Dowd’s Criteria Studios in Miami in the early spring of 1977. And there was no dearth of arenas at which to do this. Rudge had not cut back their touring, nor his propensity for booking them on a whim thousands of miles across the sea. They went back again to London twice—each time for one show—first on October 9 at the Capital Theatre in Cardiff, Wales, and then on December 20 at London’s Odeon (bootlegs of both shows would surface years later on the Oh Boy and Flying Horse labels). And as if all that travel wasn’t crazy enough, Rudge booked them on their first trip to the Far East, with five shows in Tokyo in mid-January 1977; from there they’d go right back to England for three weeks.

  While Cameron Crowe, who accompanied them for a Rolling Stone article, saw that trip as “the beginning of a real new way of handling themselves,” once they were in Japan the sake flowed right along with the Kentucky bourbon. A day after they arrived, Ronnie turned twenty-nine, and the promoter threw a birthday party for him and took the entire troupe to a nightclub. Plied with champagne all night, the band was quickly in a fighting mood. Before long, two German tourists accosted a couple of Honkettes and Mary Beth Medley—Peter Rudge’s assistant and Crowe’s girlfriend—outside the ladies’ room and then followed the girls back to their table. Recognizing Ronnie, they began to taunt him, yet another occasion when some nimrod thought it would be fun to pick a fight with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  Ronnie kept his cool initially. But then one of the Germans pinched Mary Beth on the behind, and another knocked Ronnie’s hat off; and before anyone knew it, a brawl had erupted. Champagne bottles were being thrown back and forth, sending people in the club running for cover. The Skynyrd boys were pummeling the jokers when the cops rushed in, requiring the promoter to do a lot of talking, and perhaps grease a few palms, for the group to be let go. The German pair was arrested and, so the story went, deported.

  Ronnie did take some measures to at least limit the booze. He put Gene Odom in charge of keeping the stuff away from the band’s trailers and dressing rooms. The ever-obedient bulldog, Odom had taken some punishment himself as a Skynyrd roadie; one night in Salt Lake City, a nut wielding a knife had attempted to scale the stage before being subdued by Odom, whose arm was slashed perilously close to an artery. But that was child’s play compared to the wrath of Skynyrd when they discovered that Odom had poured the contents of whatever booze was around down the john and intercepted record company leeches before they could leave the guys those telltale envelopes of white powder. The only concession Odom made was allowing a single six-pack of beer in, not for each member of Skynyrd but for all of them. As Odom recalled, “I’m not saying there weren’t serious lapses…. They’d get around the roadblock by [drinking] at the hotel bar before the show [but] they expressed their appreciation.” He recalled Alan telling him, “We never thought we could play in front of fifteen thousand people sober,” and then being ecstatic that they indeed could.

  To be sure, their shows in Japan might have been the first ones in a long while that they played mostly clean and sober, allowing them to actually grasp the satisfaction of being mobbed from the time they stepped off the plane and thousands of Japanese fans welcomed them “just like the Beatles,” as Honkette Leslie Hawkins put it. During shows, their lyrics were sung back at them by people whose only knowledge of English was limited to that in rock-and-roll songs. The trip was by all measures a tremendous success, another Skynyrd triumph, and one that they could see through mainly clear eyes. Even they had to admit that was almost as good as a belt of Irish whiskey.

  When they returned from the mini world tour in April, they picked right back up with shows across the South. Then Ronnie finally got to see Melody, if only for fleeting moments between rehearsals at Riverside Studio, while the band prepared for the new album sessions at Tom Dowd’s Criteria Studios in Miami. However, despite Mike Maitland’s hit-singles directive, Ronnie was having trouble wrapping his mind around the concept. “We’re not experts on 45s,” he told one interviewer. “I don’t know anyone who is except Elton John. We’re not in the business to put out 45s, just to make albums.” Even if album sales flagged, he said, “that’s fine, too.” And since no one at MCA ever thought “Free Bird” would fly because of its length, Rossington’s take was “What do they know?”

  Tom Dowd figured Ronnie would only be able to go so far trying to give MCA what it wanted. “Ronnie wasn’t inclined to make Top Ten records or be a formula writer,” he said. “Ronnie was an observer and a storyteller. He didn’t want to write ‘Leader of the Pack.’” Consequently, when the sessions got underway, each time a track was completed Ronnie asked how long it was, something he had never done. If it was longer than three and a half minutes, Dowd would say he’d speed up the tape or shorten the intro, again, something that never would have been tolerated in the past. Dowd would later recall that “it was like handcuffs. Absolutely limiting and debilitating to him. It was embarrassing.”

  Worse, the songs they cut at Criteria were lacking in their usual gut-kicking impact, something no one was willing to say except, of all people, Steve Gaines and Kevin Elson. As the soundman remembered, “I told them if they released it their career was over, and Steve Gaines was the only one who agreed with me.” If there was a reason for any drop in energy, Ronnie was convinced, it had to be Dowd’s fault; the producer was recording Rod Stewart’s Foot Loose and Fancy Free album in his own studio at the same time, crimping his focus on Skynyrd. Thus, mercurial as always, Ronnie suddenly had a revelation: the fault lay not with the band but with the studio. He told Dowd they were through with sessions there and would head to Doraville—their home, not Dowd’s—to resume work at Studio One.

  This would present a hardship for Dowd since he would need to commute back and forth, but he didn’t begrudge them; it was their album, their call. And so they packed up and left, looking for an environment more conducive to their art. Yet before a single note was recorded in Doraville, the newly “clean and sober” Skynyrd slid backward yet again. The band, Dowd, the roadies, and various Skynyrd leeches were all quartered in a hotel in Atlanta. The
re, four days before the sessions were to begin, Leon dropped some acid in his room and decided he really did want to be a free bird. Dowd, in the room directly below, glanced out his fourth-floor window and was startled to see two skinny legs dangling from the room above. In a panic, he raced upstairs to Wilkeson’s room, where he saw him hanging, each hand being held desperately by a roadie, and screaming, “Let me go! I want to fly!”

  They were able to pull him back into the room, but by then hotel attendants had already called the Georgia state police. Now Dowd had to explain to the troopers that “somebody drugged this man and this is not his normal state of conduct,” though just whom that conduct would be normal for was a mystery. After Dowd promised it would not happen again, the cops let it slide, another bullet dodged by the band, and two roadies were assigned to keep a vigil with Leon. “You sit on top of this son of a bitch and don’t let him loose,” Dowd ordered them.

  It did no good. Shortly after, a still-addled Leon grabbed hold of a television and tossed it out the window. It landed on a car in the parking lot, the crash jolting people awake and sending security guards running upstairs looking for him. Like a chase scene in a movie, Leon bolted past them and through the hallways—waving his gun. Soon the cops were back, joining in the chase. They caught up to him, cuffed him, and called for an ambulance to take him to a hospital, and a possible arraignment. Dowd, having to think quickly, reached an amenable local doctor he knew who rushed over and vouched that Wilkeson was his patient and he would take responsibility for him.