Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Four days later, they headlined at the Summer Festival in Springfield, Massachusetts, with .38 Special and Foreigner opening for them. As the tour went west, they had top billing at Bill Graham’s Days on the Green on July 3 at the Oakland Coliseum and on the same night were in Tulsa, before flying right back to Oakland a day later for the finale of the three-day Graham event. At times like that, it was helpful that they now had their own charter plane, a Convair CV-300, which Rudge had first leased in April. But these backbreaking tours, combined with years of punishing their internal organs every way they could, clearly had taken a toll. They looked older now. Ronnie’s waistline jiggled from years of being filled with booze and corn pone. Leon and Steve had bushy beards like Artimus, giving them the look of the three wise men. Collins had remained clean-shaven and still had the look of a crazy-eyed teenager; but those eyes had dark circles under them, and he was sometimes unable to speak coherently. Rossington still had his curls and good looks, but his nose was red, bulbous, and frequently bloody from all the cocaine forced through his nostrils. With guitars in their hands, they were even now wiry tarantulas on stage, but Collins’s frenetic leaping around and Pyle’s rabid drumming were about the only thing approaching high-voltage activity that Skynyrd could muster.

  Ronnie Van Zant for his part was still the fighter, albeit tempered by age, weariness, and the wisdom to pick his spots. Pyle saw the difference after Gaines had arrived. At one time or another, he said, “I pulled off [of Ronnie] Billy, Leon, Gary, and Allen. Ronnie didn’t mess with me and Steve because he knew he couldn’t whip my ass and he had a great amount of respect for Steve. He’d leave the stage in front of 200,000 people and let Steve sing a song. That tells you something.”

  Although Pyle later claimed he had threatened to quit the band unless it cleaned itself up, clearly most of them were back on the sauce by then—the weed, the powder, the pills—and cared not who knew it. Ronnie playfully bantered between songs on the tour that “these intermissions are brought to you by the Budweiser king of beer”—a statement that, unlike in today’s commercialized rock orbit, had no connection to any corporate endorsement deal, that crude rock reality still being a few years away. After taking a swig from a can of Bud, he would slyly apply the kicker: “not to mention Acapulco gold.” At a concert in Charleston, Ronnie took out a joint and blew marijuana smoke in the faces of Rossington, Collins, and Gaines, saying to the crowd, “And you don’t think they ain’t fucked up?”

  Pete Rudge apparently was of little use in Skynyrd’s half-hearted reformation. Those cocaine-covered meetings in his New York office went on unabated, and whenever the band came into the general vicinity Rudge would be there with some familiar blandishments. Before the band’s July 13 gig in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Rod Stewart and Ten Years After, Mick and Bianca Jagger happened by the band’s trailer. “We’re talking, and the next thing I knew,” Pyle recalled, “Mick goes into the bathroom. Ronnie’s in the bathroom, too, with Pete Rudge. And guess what they were doing in there.” Awkwardly, Artimus tried to make small talk with Bianca amid loud snorting noises emanating from the john. Also during that swing through the New York area, Dean Kilpatrick was said to have been extremely close with sixteen-year-old Exorcist actress Linda Blair, who developed a wild crush on him after they met. As things now stood, such behavior was horrifyingly normal.

  Street Survivors was released October 17, along with the single “That Smell,” which quickly toppled cultural barriers about what a pop song could say. When the album went out it shipped gold, selling half a million on preorder alone. They were on another endless tour by then, this one scheduled to keep them occupied for four more months with major appearances that included the band’s first gig at Madison Square Garden on November 10 and in virtually every other big market arena until the tour’s end in Honolulu in February 1978. Four days before the album came out, on October 13, they finally headed toward home, landing in Statesboro, Georgia, for a concert at Georgia Southern College, and then went on to the Hollywood Sportatorium in Miami, the Bayfront Center in Saint Petersburg, the Lakeland Civic Center, and Greenville, South Carolina’s Memorial Auditorium on the nineteenth.

  In Greenville, Gene Odom recalled, he saw “an obviously inebriated” Van Zant “ranting and cursing,” another indication, among many, that “Ronnie never should have been around alcohol.” Pyle would have his own takeaway from that concert. After the show, he said, a longtime Skynyrd fan had told him, “I was totally sober and I enjoyed myself more than I had ever enjoyed myself at any concert.” It seemed that some Skynyrd adherents, at least, weren’t getting quite as wrecked anymore, a rite of maturation that Skynyrd could not quite bring themselves to practice.

  The next stop was two days later, October 21, at the LSU Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, 669 miles to the southwest. Once more they wearily hauled their tired bones into their leased Convair. The capacity of the plane was twenty-four, not including two pilots, and every seat was taken, though one that had been reserved for Honkette JoJo Billingsley had been given to someone else because she had gone home feeling ill, and in any case was petrified of getting on the plane. Indeed, she wasn’t the only member of the troupe to believe that; others considered getting to Baton Rouge through other means. The Convair had become a matter of grave concern lately for ample reason.

  The decision to lease a private plane wasn’t only a matter of status or comfort but rather a necessity once the overage delinquents of Skynyrd had caused too many disturbances on their charter flights. Ronnie’s attempt to throw John Butler out of a plane over Europe was not an isolated incident. Tom Dowd had flown with them and couldn’t believe how rowdy they’d get, behavior that often prompted flight crews to threaten them with arrest when they got on the ground. Word had gotten out, and the airlines were loath to book them. Thus Rudge, that April, leased the Convair from a small aviation firm, the L&J Company of Addison.

  The plane was a relic, a converted CV-240, the type of craft John F. Kennedy had used during his 1960 campaign, a two-propeller aircraft dating back to 1947, the third of its kind ever built. Rock being a small world, the plane had recently been used by Aerosmith, who had flown in it to several shows at which they opened for Skynyrd. When Aerosmith was about to tour again that spring, their pilot and assistant chief of flight operations, Zunk Buker, inspected the plane. To his amazement, the two pilots who would be flying it, Captain Walter W. McCreary and First Officer William J. Gray Jr., both of whom were in the early thirties and had limited flight experience, were “smoking and passing around an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the cockpit,” according to Buker, who called the band’s manager David Krebs.

  “No way we are going to fly this airplane,” he said.

  Krebs said, yes, they would, as it would save the band $30,000 on that leg of their tour.

  “The plane isn’t safe,” Buker reiterated. “We’re not doing it.”

  Again rebuffed, Buker gave an ultimatum: “If you’re flying them in this airplane, I’m resigning—effective immediately.”

  Only then did management give in, buying Aerosmith a Cessna 310 for $200,000. The fact that Rudge saved a few dollars of Skynyrd’s money by leasing at bargain basement rates—three payments of $5,000—Aerosmith’s old, discarded bucket of bolts could not have pleased Skynyrd, though it seemed like a typical Rudge business decision; according to Chris Charlesworth, Rudge was always looking for ways to scrimp and save. Paul Welch, a new soundman hired by Skynyrd, who was manning the board with Kevin Elson on the tour, says the band actually had for some time been after Rudge to buy them a spiffy new status-symbol jet too but that, like Aerosmith’s management, Rudge had wanted to squeeze one more tour out of the old tomato can to save money.

  Perhaps tellingly, Rudge himself would not set foot on the plane. Instead, he flew first class to Skynyrd gigs on commercial airline flights while, as Pyle said, “we were flying in a plane that looked like it belonged to the Clampett family.”

  By October the plan
e had over twenty-nine thousand flight hours and seemed rickety. During its first use on Skynyrd tours, McCreary was again the copilot, under a seasoned pilot named Les Long, who had since quit the company that hired the pilots, Falcon Aviation of Lawrenceville, Georgia. For this tour, the pilot would be McCreary himself; his joint-passing partner, Bill Gary, would be the copilot. The plane had not seen any problems until, on the way in from Miami to Greenville, Ken Peden, a sound technician, reported seeing a six-foot flame shooting from one of the engines en route. Though the plane landed safely, the incident scared him to no end and kept everyone in the Skynyrd party on edge about the aircraft.

  The band themselves preferred riding their tour bus, which had snazzy, flashing blue lights and the Skynyrd logo painted onto each side. But it had to be a relief that they would be able to drink or smoke what they wanted and throw punches at whom they wanted in blissful peace. And even Pyle, who has been known to contradict himself, said once that “when we flew into town in that plane it was wonderful because it was just such a cool, old airplane.” Still, just hours before the plane would depart for the next gig, the band was so concerned about a repeat of that flaming engine that they sent Dean Kilpatrick and the tour manager Ron Eckerman, whom Pete Rudge had expressly told to get some answers from the pilots, to find McCreary and Gray. They went to the pair’s hotel room, but the two had already departed, leaving a message at the desk that they had gone to Greenville Downtown Airport early to work on the troublesome engine. Gene Odom, also looking for answers, found them on the tarmac tinkering around with the engine.

  “What’s wrong with the plane?” Odom demanded to know. “That was a helluva trip comin’ up here.”

  Gray said something about the magneto, a magnet-operated generator, and that they’d called ahead to Baton Rouge to have a mechanic ready to repair it when they arrived.

  “Baton Rouge?!” Odom said. “That’s crazy. Why don’t you have him fly here?”

  “No reason to,” Gray said. “It’s just something we need to fix so the engine will run better.” The fire Peden had seen, McCreary added, “wasn’t as bad as it looked. Besides, we can fly the plane on one engine if we had to.”

  These explanations themselves were reason enough for alarm. One word from Ronnie and the whole flight would have been bagged. And, according to Alex Hodges, the plane issue had become the fulcrum of a broader range of discontent by the band as it approached this fateful flight.

  “I spoke with Ronnie a day before, and he had definitely soured on Rudge, for a lot of things, but the plane was one of ’em. It sort of symbolized to the band that Rudge was doing things on the cheap, and here they were one of the biggest bands in the world. They had fired Alan Walden because they wanted to be like the Rolling Stones, but here they were still being treated like dirty rednecks. And Ronnie told me, ‘We’re not happy with Premier Talent.’ He said he wanted me to book their next tour. I don’t know if he wanted to go back to Alan—probably not, that was a dead issue. But he always thought I was much more on his wavelength and had a better understanding of what Skynyrd was, and he wanted me to go back to booking them—which would have been the first step toward firing Rudge.

  “That conversation left me with a very uneasy feeling. They were not a happy bunch, and the plane was like a metaphor for them being trapped in a bad situation. I’m not gonna lie and say I sensed the plane was gonna go down, but I was very uneasy about them gettin’ on it, I’ll tell you that.”

  But if Ronnie ever had a moment of hesitation about getting on, he opted to go ahead, as he always did despite the fact that, as Odom says, “he hated snakes and always hated to fly.”

  Van Zant believed in superstitions—witness his frantic overreaction when the Confederate flag hit the floor. Odom recalled when Ronnie once saw an actual black cat creepin’ in front of his car and then licked his index finger and left three Xs on the window. Now, fears aside, he was either putting up a brave front or was too drunk to care when he boarded. Encountering a worried-looking Odom at the door, he told him, “C’mon, let’s go. If it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

  After JoJo Billingsley had gone home, she called Allen and said she’d had a dream the plane had crashed, and had woken up “screaming and crying.” Allen, typically, was fearless. But Cassie Gaines almost bailed. She made reservations to take a commercial flight to Baton Rouge before she was eventually persuaded to travel with the band. Dean Kilpatrick, for his part, never had a doubt he would go with them. Ever the good soldier, he had grown like the rest of them into his late twenties. To them he was more than a roadie. One time in Paris, after Artimus was detained by the gendarmes for riding a motorcycle without a helmet, Dean passed himself off as Pyle for a photo shoot, with no one in the French press the wiser. Not completely recovered from his own injuries from crashing the band’s van into a Greyhound bus, he was back, boldly leading the roadies onto the plane with not a moment of hesitation.

  And so, despite the grumbling about the plane, they filed on one by one: the band, Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins, the roadies, sound and lighting men including Kevin Elson and their new concert sound engineer Paul Welch, Odom, and cameraman Bill Sykes, who was making a documentary of the tour. Always protective of Ronnie, Pyle would say later that Van Zant was “the healthiest, strongest he’d been in a long time” on the day of that flight, though Ronnie was so hung over he could barely see straight.

  The plane was overloaded, crammed full of luggage and equipment and sundry mementos the band had gotten in Japan. Again, the pilots saw no problem. For two hours the flight was delayed as they attempted to get the dodgy engine to fire up. Then, at 4:02 PM, they took off. As they reached twelve thousand feet, below them panned out the landscape that had bred and sustained them, the South of old and new cultures, big cities and backwoods, old plantations and new superhighways.

  This land had been built by men like Lacy Van Zant, one look at whom brought to mind Pat Conroy’s description, “as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating and a dog with ticks,” people “so relentlessly Southern [they] make me feel that I was born in Minnesota!” Lacy Van Zant’s oldest son was relentlessly a Southern Man, right to the end, but one with some cracks in the veneer of toughness and invincibility. Odom remembers a conversation he’d had with Ronnie a day before, when, letting down his fighter’s stance, he’d admitted he had a fear of being booed off the stage.

  “He said, ‘I don’t know what they see in me, and one day they’re gonna wake up.’”

  Ronnie had taken his accustomed seat in row one, with Dean seated between him and Rossington. Across the aisle, Leon sat between Steve and Cassie. The skies were, just as they had sung, so blue. The soil and kith and kin of the South lay below them, reassuring as always. It was a good day. Any day in the bank was always a good day.

  18

  “PLANE GRASHI”

  Two hours into the flight, with a half hour until the destination, Ronnie was fast asleep, his face buried in a pillow. A little while later, the band felt they had to address the issue of the plane. Without waiting to get to Baton Rouge, they decided that they would junk the Convair and buy a Learjet like the other big rock acts. That decision made, they felt relief they wouldn’t have to go through all this agita again. One more landing and the Convair was gone for good. Feeling better, they began messing around, playing poker and doing some terrible white-boy disco dancing in the aisle. Pyle said there was no booze on board, no pot. “Everybody was basically straight and having a good time”—not that they weren’t still feeling the effects of the drinking they had done at the hotel before the flight.

  Unbeknownst to the passengers, though, the plane was in trouble. Fuel had been leaking for some time, and the engines now began to sputter. Paul Welch maintained later that he saw the engine trailing fire as on the previous flight. At the time, Pyle happened to be in the cockpit with Allen, watching the sun set against a brilliant orange twilight sky. The pi
lots didn’t seem disturbed but, hearing the engine wheeze, Artimus, whose father had died in a plane crash, knew something was wrong. So did Billy Powell, who soon joined them in the cockpit. Billy would say he heard a no-longer-confident Gray mutter, “Oh my God!” as the right engine cut out. Both pilots, Powell said, “were young and they panicked, so they jettisoned the fuel by accident.”

  They may also have pumped too much into the crippled engine, the one with the excess sparking, explaining what Welch saw. In any case, if the pilots were unfazed, they themselves couldn’t determine how much was being wasted because the fuel gauge was broken. The only way to estimate what they had left was the highly unreliable, Stone Age way: dropping a dipstick into the tank. After McCreary had done so, Powell said, the pilot seemed to be “clearly in shock. His eyes were bugged out.”

  The pilots tried siphoning fuel from the left to the right engine, but apparently they accidentally dumped critical fuel from the plane, leading the left engine to quit. Only moments before, Gray had told Odom, “Everything is under control.” Now, at 6:39 PM, the pilots radioed the Houston Air Route Traffic Control Center and were cleared to descend to six thousand feet. Three minutes later, Gray told the controller, “We need to get to a airport, the closest airport you’ve got, sir.” The controller asked the crew if they were in an emergency status.

  “Yes, sir,” Gray said, “we’re low on fuel and we’re just about out of it, we want vectors to McComb, post haste please, sir.”