Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  “Like Alan Walden, I had worked for two giants of music who both died the same way, Otis Redding and Ronnie Van Zant. And I had spoken with Otis, too, a day before that doomed flight. I was supposed to go with him, but I had other business. The last thing he said to me was, ‘See you Monday,’ when he was going to come home to Macon, Georgia. Those words stay with you, they haunt you, and when Ronnie told me they were gonna junk that plane I should have said, ‘Don’t push your luck any further. Take a commercial flight.’ If I had, I would still have Ronnie Van Zant as my friend.”

  Charlie Brusco was in New York on business, staying at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. “Someone told me there’d been a crash, that Lynyrd Skynyrd was on the plane. The extent of it wasn’t yet known, but as soon as I heard it, I knew, I just knew, that Ronnie was dead. I always saw Ronnie in a longer lens, as a tragic figure running on borrowed time. When you look back, it seems foreordained that he’d die when he did.”

  Aerosmith could have fainted when they heard the news. David Krebs, the accountant who had insisted they keep flying in that plane, immediately called Zunk Bunker and said, “I owe you an apology.”

  All across the rock meridians they laid hands on, but in the South the reaction was so grieved, and the sense of loss so great that everyone who mourned sounded as if a family member had been lost. Charlie Daniels heard when he was in Saint Louis on tour. He about fell to the floor but decided he’d perform the show. “If it were us,” he said, “I wouldn’t want them to blow off a show. So we went onstage that night and we played a lot and we played hard.” Weeks later, it hit him hard. “It was just … depressing,” he said. “It was like a weight mashing down on my head.”

  Steve and Cassie Gaines were laid to rest first, on October 23, at Jacksonville Memory Gardens in Orange Park. Dean Kilpatrick was buried at Arlington Park Cemetery in Jacksonville. On October 25 a private ceremony was held for Ronnie at the Memory Gardens. With the public outside the gate straining to get a look, the 150 guests arrived at the chapel. Ed King and Bob Burns were there, but of the crash survivors only Billy Powell was able to leave his hospital bed and attend. Charlie Daniels of course was there, as was Dickey Betts. Al Kooper came in from L.A., Tom Dowd from Miami. Merle Haggard’s “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” and David Allan Coe’s “Another Pretty Country Song” were played through loudspeakers. The service was hosted by David Evans, the engineer on Nuthin’ Fancy, who was a part-time pastor and had grown close to Ronnie. Giving the eulogy, Daniels read a poem that had been inscribed on a cement bench near the headstone, about “a brief candle, both ends burning, an endless mile, a bus wheel turning,” ending with the line “Fly on proud bird, you’re free at last.”

  As Donnie Van Zant sang “Amazing Grace,” Ronnie was lowered into his grave, just to the left of Steve Gaines and in front of Cassie Gaines, his black Texas Hatters gambler’s hat and his fishing pole placed beside him in the casket. Lacy and Sis Van Zant were so distraught they needed to be steadied as they walked to their seats. Lacy seemed as if he had been kicked in the solar plexus, and his moods swung between grief and anger. As JoJo Billingsley remembered, “he came up to me, scooped down and got a handful of sandy dirt and wiped it across my mouth and said, ‘Girl, kiss this ground you’re walking on’ and left me standing there.” She had felt awful enough without being reminded that she had made the decision Ronnie hadn’t, but Lacy was feeling no sympathy for the living and couldn’t soothe himself with incantations of faith. Years later, he recalled of his son, “He said to me many times, ‘Daddy, I’ll never be 30 years old.’ I said, ‘Why are you talking this gunk?’ and he said, ‘Daddy, that’s my limit.’” But when the end did come, Lacy had his fall guy.

  “God,” he seethed, “was a jealous God, taking him for reasons I don’t know.”

  The Skynyrd men shared some of that biliousness, with more destructive consequences. Billy Powell once said the remaining members of the group came away “bitter” and “blaming God for everything.” That, he said, soon led to “probably the heaviest drug use of our lives. We were just all getting drunk all the time, doing downers and stuff, just being real bitter.”

  On a purely commercial level, the tragedy, as it normally does in rock, meant there would be a short-term spike in sales. Street Survivors, no doubt a Top 10 album in any case, peaked at number five. “What’s Your Name” was hurriedly released in November as a more pleasant, upbeat alternative to the now-too-prophetic “That Smell” and rose to number thirteen. However, only days after the crash, the album had a new look. Out of deference to the Van Zant and Gaines families, MCA called back George Osaki to redesign the cover. Now, with a prosaic shot of the band in the same outfits as the original on the cover, hundreds of thousands of “flame” albums were recalled, though just in the United States, quickly providing another reason for the original to become a collector’s item. In Baton Rouge, when promoters offered ticket holders refunds for the concert that never happened, only a handful of people turned their tickets in.

  Money in fact seemed to be heavy on people’s minds. Rudge had included in his leasing agreement with L&J a $2 million insurance policy with a liability of $100,000 per seat. If Pyle is correct that the flight was a sober one, there was good reason for it: the last clause of the lease agreement read, “Lessee shall hold Lessor harmless in any event that drugs or narcotics of any kind should be brought aboard this aircraft for any purpose.” Regardless, L&J claimed it was not liable since the lease had given the band responsibility for the flight. This was so outrageous a claim that the Federal Aviation Administration sued L&J for having used such vague contract language. It took months for the families to recover a cent, and some survivors sued Rudge and the Lynyrd Skynyrd corporation for placing them in mortal danger. Those suits would drag on for years, without success but draining much of the band’s coffers and Rudge’s blood.

  Remembering the day the music died in the South, the Charlie Daniels Band’s 1978 song “Reflections” referred to “Ronnie, my buddy, above all the rest,” telling him, “I miss you the most.” Other bands who had soldiered with Skynyrd composed their own elegies. Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “Large Time” is dedicated “to the survivors: Allen, Gary, Leon, Billy, Artimus … In loving memory of Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines & Dean Kilpatrick.” Journey, on its Infinity album, commemorated Van Zant with the line “Fly on Freebird.” Molly Hatchet’s tribute was, “Here’s to you Ronnie, you’re gone, but your song remains.” The Outlaws’ Bring It Back Alive album read, “The Lynyrd Skynyrd Band and Crew—You’re with us every night.” The Henry Paul Band’s 1979 song “Grey Ghost” lamented, “A free bird falling from the sky brings a bitter end to another Southern man.” The Allman Brothers Band’s 1981 Brothers of the Road was a tribute to those who “fell along the way.”

  That Van Zant died falling from the sky—during what was called the Tour of the Survivors—was one of those eerily sardonic rock-and-roll ironies, in hindsight a portent of something truly dreadful, in the manner of Marvin Gaye’s vain plea, “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate.” For Skynyrd, it was particularly cruel and mocking. Yet if Ronnie could have possibly written a lyric about that mordancy he surely would have testified it was better to have flown high and crashed than never to have flown at all. Robert Christgau wrote in his Street Survivor review that “some rock deaths are irrelevant, while others make a kind of sense because the artists involved so obviously long to transcend (or escape) their own mortality. But for Ronnie Van Zant, life and mortality were the same thing—there was no way to embrace one without at least keeping company with the other. So it makes sense that ‘That Smell’ is the smell of death, or that in ‘You Got That Right’ Van Zant boasts that he’ll never be found in an old folks’ home.”

  The pity was that long before he would have reached old age, he surely would have prospered further. Adds Christgau: “I’m not just being sentimental…. I know Van Zant had his limits. But I mourn him not least because I susp
ect that he had more good music left in him than Bing and Elvis put together.”

  Of the crash victims, Rossington and Collins had the hardest time becoming whole again. Once the wounds healed, Allen became even more reckless, self-medicating with an endless chain of booze and Quaaludes, and Rossington’s cocaine intake escalated. Neither was able to sleep, and nightmares often jolted them out of their slumbers in a cold sweat. The biggest psychological block was trying to live with the fact that they had made it out of the plane alive but Ronnie, Steve, Cassie, and Dean hadn’t. And one need not have even been on that plane to be consumed by the same guilt. Chuck Flowers, the longtime roadie who had once roomed with Ronnie, had been fired only days before the last flight over some hotel bill expenses. After the crash, Flowers, unable to accept his good fortune, reached for a rifle that Ronnie had once given him as a gift and fatally shot himself in the head.

  The redneck-blues/hard-rock formula that had swept the country in the mid-1970s burned on without them for a while, with the movie Urban Cowboy codifying the coolness of New South norms. Yet the film’s soundtrack included the Eagles, Bob Seger, and Linda Ronstadt—but not Lynyrd Skynyrd. Three years in death, their stamp on the culture was already dimming, part of an overall recession of a South that had been so ascendant in their wake.

  There were other victims too. Phil Walden didn’t survive long as an industry titan. At its peak his Capricorn roster owned Southern rock. But when record companies across the country caught up to Capricorn in signing country-rock acts, Walden’s kingdom atrophied. After Dickey Betts sued Capricorn for back royalties and won an $870,000 judgment, Walden folded Capricorn in 1979 and filed for bankruptcy. Walden, who had drug and alcohol issues himself and went into seclusion for most of the 1980s, resurfaced as a talent manager, and in 1992 briefly reformed Capricorn, basing it in Nashville. But by 2000 he had to sell off most of his priceless record catalog and shortly after closed Capricorn for good. Six years later, he died of cancer at age sixty-six.

  Meanwhile, Alan Walden’s career pretty much evaporated, leaving him to be his own cheerleader about his nurturing of Skynyrd. “I got the Who tour when all others failed!” he likes to claim, speciously. “I got the best dates for the band and built a foundation the current band lives on! Take away ‘Free Bird,’ ‘Gimme Three Steps,’ ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ ‘Simple Man,’ ‘I Ain’t the One’ and what do you have left? If these songs were dropped from the set, would you pay to see them?” As much as he would profit from his old copyrights—such as selling “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” to movies like Forrest Gump and TV commercials—the “other” Walden was just a pale ghost of rock-and-roll past.

  The endless return on “Sweet Home Alabama” benefited Ed King as well. “It’s been paying the rent” ever since it was released, he says now. King, who lives in Nashville, has inevitably wondered if he’s still alive to collect his writing royalties only because of the unpleasantness that led him to quit the band. Rather being relieved, he has struggled with the same inner guilt that led Chuck Flowers to put a bullet in his head.

  The all-but-forgotten Bob Burns didn’t make out so well. Unlike King, when Burns left the band he had no writing royalties, and his one-sixth share of sales of the three albums he’d played on slowed and then stopped. Burns hired a lawyer who went to see Pete Rudge and was told Bob was owed a mere $10,000. Burns, who was living in southern Florida and struggling, knew he was being lied to but would have taken it. Instead, when he dropped in on Rossington and Collins a few years after the crash, they said they’d pay him but only if he relinquished all future royalties on albums that would go on to sell in the millions. Offended, he filed a lawsuit against the band and MCA and wound up with a $500,000 settlement.

  Meanwhile it seemed Pete Rudge just couldn’t win. He filed suit against MCA for a greater share of back royalties, and when he didn’t prevail, the band sued him. Although Rudge had signed to manage other acts, including .38 Special, he had banked almost everything on Skynyrd, and his obsessive focus on them had led the Who to hire a new management company in 1976. The Stones left soon after. “Nothing was ever the same again at Sir Productions,” recalls Chris Charlesworth. “All the plans we’d had for Skynyrd were dashed. They were bringing in plenty of money and without them the funds dried up, so it was obvious Sir wouldn’t last. Later, the grief turned to anger, and there were terrible recriminations: lawsuits, bad vibes, fights with Rudge, deep shit. At least one surviving roadie committed suicide and another went mad and was institutionalized.”

  Rudge himself went into a tailspin, almost killing himself with booze and coke. “When I walked out of Sir Productions I didn’t see him again for 22 years,” Charlesworth said of the years Rudge hit bottom and battled cancer. He survived, but Skynyrd’s demise was his own. Once, he’d had under his wing the Stones, the Who, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. When he resurfaced years later, it was as a producer of low-budget films in England, a long, long way down.

  Skynyrd as a living, breathing entity seemed by mutual consent to be over. All of them had pledged never to reunite under the Lynyrd Skynyrd name, there being no point, without Ronnie, other than cheap commercial manipulation. “We wanted to be America’s Rolling Stones,” Rossington said by way of a valediction, “to be the biggest band over here. And I believe we were on our way.” All one needed to add was “amen.” They made it an official denouement while they were, as Billy Powell said, “doing a bunch of drugs one night. They got this piece of paper saying they’d never use the name Lynyrd Skynyrd again.” Whatever royalties would still accrue would be divvied among Rossington, Collins, Judy Van Zant, and Teresa Gaines, each of whom had a one-quarter split.

  However, the survivors would informally unite, alone or a few at a time, at gigs such as a January 1979 Charlie Daniels’s Volunteer Jam in Nashville and in February 1980 at Orlando’s Great Southern Music Hall. By then, with big money on the table from MCA, Rossington and Collins had taken steps to form a Skynyrd spinoff band, enlisting Powell and Wilkeson as well. The group, the Rossington-Collins Band (RCB), made a conscious effort not to invite comparisons with Skynyrd, and employed a female lead singer, Dale Krantz, a tough, pretty blonde who had sung backup with .38 Special. Rossington defined the band’s sound as “not Skynyrd but good-as-shit music.” Wilkeson, who said he’d had “haunting premonitions” about the crash, admitted, “I wouldn’t care if we were called Sammy Hamburger and the Buns. Just to be working is a blessing.”

  Krantz and Rossington cowrote much of the material, with Collins and guitarist Barry Harwood pairing off for other songs. They recorded two albums, Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere and This Is the Way, both of which were reviewed and sold fairly well, the former reaching number fifteen and going gold, the latter number fifty-five. However, Collins was sinking. Irrationally, he began to resent Krantz, perhaps because, as Pyle says, both men had fallen head over heels for her, it being merely incidental to Collins that he had a pregnant wife back home, and Gary had won her.

  At an RCB gig in Lubbock, the two old friends argued beforehand, nothing unusual for them, but then on stage Allen lost it, kicking Dale’s microphone over and walking off, leaving the band to play without him. Backstage, he and Dale got in each other’s faces, and she made plans to go home. The next night’s show was canceled; but the problem was smoothed over, and the tour continued, though with constant tension. Then came the nadir of Collins’s life. In Jacksonville, Kathy Collins was in a movie theater with their two young daughters when she collapsed and died of a massive brain hemorrhage. Not only had the two girls seen their mother die, the child inside her had also died. Billy Powell said it “destroyed Allen. He dove into a bottle and never came out.”

  Collins tried going on. But the old deliriously leaping beanpole was now a sullen, depressing figure. “He became real bitter, even with me,” Rossington said. One reason was that both men were still after Dale Krantz. As this love triangle escalated, the tour became unbearable, the two either avoiding or bickerin
g with each other. They managed to cut the second RCB album in 1982; but during the tour for it Gary broke his leg in an accident, and the tour ended. By year’s end, Gary had a victory, however, convincing Krantz to marry him. But when sales of the album lagged, MCA dropped RCB, and the band folded.

  Collins subsequently formed the Allen Collins Band with Leon, Billy, Harwood, and guitarist Randall Hall. MCA took a shot on them, and they cut a 1983 album, Here, There and Back. It sold fairly well, but not only was the Skynyrd spinoff thing—which also included two albums by the Artimus Pyle Band—played out, so was Collins. He was arrested no less than eighteen times for drunk driving, but only after a DUI conviction in 1983 did he do any hard time, two months in a Duval County jail. Then, in January 1986, he was out in his new jet-black Thunderbird with his girlfriend Debra Jean Watts and lost control. The car flipped over on Plummer Grant Road and, not belted in, both were thrown from the car. Debra died of head injuries en route to the hospital. Allen lived, but his neck was broken, just centimeters from where it had been broken in the plane crash. He had gotten lucky then, but now he was left paralyzed from the chest down. After another long hospital stay, he was charged with DUI manslaughter, pleaded no contest, and served no time—a result that was, no doubt, out of pity, as he was confined to a wheelchair and barely able to speak.

  His daughters had been living with Eva Collins, and now his home was sold. He moved in with Larkin, who played the role he never had when Allen was young, feeding and cleaning him; incidentally, Larkin also was given power of attorney for his son, and made executor of his estate. Allen was a pathetic and heartbreaking sight, the irony of which was that, in this condition, relieved of having to live the high life, he actually seemed more at ease with himself. When people visited him, they could not help but be overcome with emotion, yet there he would be in his wheelchair, the least upset of everyone. The pressure was finally off, though there had indeed been one hell of a price to pay for peace.