Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (2 page)

“I saw 'em,” he says. “Saw 'em in '74, in Nashville. Helluva show. My wife here, she saw 'em too.”

The woman next to him, still pretty after all these years, has a smile on her face. “Saw 'em?” she says. “Hey, I'm from Georgia—Doraville,” which happens to be the home of the studio where Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded their most enduring songs. “Those guys were around there all the time. They were like all of us—they sat and talked with you. They were like part of a big family in town. The Atlanta Rhythm Section were there too. I remember one time, I was in this big old car, with the drummer—oh, what was his name … ?”

“Nix. Robert Nix,” the stranger says.

“Yeah, he was driving me all over town. They just liked being with the folks in town. That's how it was then. Skynyrd, Atlanta Rhythm Section, Joe South—they were all southern boys doin' what they loved doin'. Wasn't about fame or money. They had somethin' to say in their songs.”

The husband wears a plaintive look. “Those were the days,” he says. “The boys like that, they meant a lot to guys like me. We were young,
teenagers, early twenties. We looked up to 'em. We
listened
to 'em. Went where they were playin' to see 'em. We'd ride the train, the box cars, just like what they sang about, to get there.”

He has a question. “Where you from?” he wonders.

“New York.”

He shakes his head, laughs easily. “I never thought anyone from the North even knew about Skynyrd,” he says. “But here you are in Florida. You came to the South, and maybe music like that had something to do with it. All I know is, I go around the country, and I hear that music to this day, and I see that it got in their blood, all that southern way of life, and it felt good.”

The man in the Skynyrd shirt, who was in the midst of writing this book when this interlude happened, shook hands with the husband and wife, said he'd meet them right back here at some time in the future to continue the conversation, and left the fast-food place, another lesson learned. He had heard more than once the exclamation of “Skynyrd—'75!” or “‘Free Bird'—
yeahhh!”
while wearing that shirt. It happened everywhere, but with the most feeling in the South, and each time it became more obvious that it was more than a recognition of a band. It was a recognition of themselves, how they once were, how the South once was, when the whole world sat up and took notice.

But it was also a recognition that those days ain't never comin' back.

In the late 1960s, the Old South—the courtly, cotillion-celebrating, civilized South that lived high, large, and mighty in all matters save the degradation and exclusion of an entire race of dark-skinned riders in steerage—had been deconstructed and demythologized, its sacred land paved over for highways, strip malls, and sewage treatment plants. And then, out of the most prosaic of outposts in the Old South, Jacksonville, Florida, came a vehicle of redemption, rebirth, and renaissance—albeit a fleeting, teasing one. It rose high into skies so blue, until one day, a day that the riders on the storm seemed to know was coming, they rose too high and were smacked down, their ill-equipped Convair CV-300 falling to earth, its twisted metal becoming the tomb of a rock-and-roll fable and a pungent era.

In that tragic fall Lynyrd Skynyrd's lead singer Ronnie Van Zant; guitarist Steven Gaines; his sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines; and
assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick died on impact, and everyone else on the flight was left with broken bones, mangled limbs, and punctured organs. That day—October 20, 1977—can be more accurately called the “day the music died” than the occasion of the first of too many such famous crashes, the one that killed one of the first southern-based crossover rock-and-roll stars, Buddy Holly, along with Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson. For rock and the South could ill afford the death of a band that brought a new and much-needed transitional link to a cultural and geographical landscape.

While they soared above the musical and cultural clouds, Lynyrd Skynyrd chartered a journey in time when the South indeed rose again—a matter of great curiosity to those for whom the region was the land of the damned, the butt of jokes about backwoods inbreeding. When Skynyrd arrived, a constantly changing unit fronted by a clear-throated, sallow, blond-maned, blue-eyed, porkpie-hat-wearing, hungry pile of smugness and snark named Ronnie Van Zant, they had no intention of bending over for anyone or anything. Their vital core was always the same: Van Zant's fisty and feisty vocals, fronting three lead guitarists, the constants being original members Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, two spindly cobras, coiled and cocked, locked and loaded. When they went off on extended solos, they didn't compete for the best riffs so much as challenge each other to find some cosmic source of truth and possibility. They had groove. They had meaning. They had a rhythm that darted from pure rock thunder, pouring from the electric guitars and Leon Wilkeson's bass, to jazzy swirls on pianist Billy Powell's keyboard. The almost visually scenic resonance of their work became the brand of a South that had never before existed—an updated South prideful for the right reasons, ones that had little to nothing to do with race and everything to do with the habitat that spawned them, the soul of desperado itchiness and dare, wanderlust, cheap thrills, and the battle within to keep faith with God. It was, without trying to be, the soundtrack of a new southern sensibility, yet in its fealty to in some cases wretched convention one as old as the region itself.

On stage Skynyrd emblazoned the walls with a skull-and-crossbones logo and flew the Confederate flag in a new-wave rebel yell that came directly from the South's long-rooted psyche. Their rallying cry was new wave because the yell wasn't about race—how could it be when so much of it embraced the seminal blues music of the great black Deep South?
It was more of a yelp, actually, a release of long-pent-up emotion, the Southern Man's whoop in finding a way to cherish tradition while facing down the guilts left by the past, all without wiping them away or pretending they weren't there. It was about venerating the land they had a yen to traverse by getting out on the road again and again, on interstate highways and backwoods dirt roads. Skynyrd looked less like music royalty than sharecroppers out on a bender on a Saturday night. There were no sequins and rhinestones, no slicked-back pompadours. They piled almost satiric cowboy Stetsons on their heads but draped themselves in plaid flannel, T-shirts, leather vests, torn jeans, and scuffed boots. They looked the part of contemporary, urban country cowboys, but their sound wasn't country at all. There were no yodels, fiddles, or Buddy Holly-style hiccups. Like the Allman Brothers Band before them, who also dressed down and played not country but the blues, Skynyrd played unapologetic rock and roll, not loud but
loud
, without any of them fiddles or weepy steel guitar licks. The country part came in with their piquant nativist themes, an edgy, don't-fuck-with-me pose and attitude, a gnawing male chauvinism undercut by sentimentality for women, kin, and the Lord.

Only a few years removed from high school in Jacksonville, a group with a name that was a goof on an old gym coach who had ridiculed them for wearing long hair detonated a new
thing
in rock, though it stemmed from pathology built over a century when the kingdom of kingdoms was dashed into dust by the Civil War, forcing Southern Men to approach life as Common Men, driven by pride and conceit. Skynyrd's first major hit, “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974), branded them as soldiers eager to take up arms, figuratively this time, in defense of the homeland; this was despite having no connection to Alabama beyond being at the receiving end of the metaphoric slur to all Dixie dwellers hurled by Neil Young—ironically a strong country music ally—in his twin imprecations, “Alabama” and “Southern Man,” in which he excoriated such men for brandishing Bibles but forgetting to “do what your Good Book says” in matters of racial comity. Ronnie's poison-pen response took aim at a man whose work he admired, letting “ol' Neil” have it between the eyes. Trouble was, in rhapsodizing about a place where “the skies are so blue,” he referenced the segregationist governor George Corley Wallace, seemingly not with reproof but as a man beloved by the neo-Confederate
brigades of Birmingham, a crucible of degenerate racism. That clipped lyric still sparks scholarly (and comically absurd) debate about one of the most misunderstood songs in rock history, in which a fleeting chant of
“Boo! Boo! Boo!”
was Skynyrd's own diss of southern men who
did
sully the region—and it remains a jab at those who, decades later, would embrace the song as a right-wing battle hymn. Conservatives constantly appropriate songs they want to believe mean what they don't, but no one ever went so far into dementia as John J. Miller of the
National Review Online
when he dreamt that “Sweet Home Alabama” is one of “the 50 greatest conservative rock songs” and “a tribute to the region of America that liberals love to loathe,” notwithstanding Van Zant's own long-on-the-record explanation of his intent.

Some never did get, or refused to get, the impish, against-the-grain subtleties of a group seemingly as subtle as a kick in the groin. The acid-penned, ill-fated blade runner of the rock press Lester Bangs, son of a Texas truck driver himself, was so taken aback by what he perceived as dusty, slobbering goobers screeching about southern manhood while waving the Stars and Bars that he filed them away as “crude thunder-stomper hillbillies.” Here, too, the underlying reality—it was Skynyrd's record company, Van Zant once said, that had them use the Confederate flag as a gimmick, contradicting the band's wishes—played second fiddle to first appearance. Still, the dichotomy of Skynyrd seemed clear to some in the rock intelligentsia. The haughty music critic Robert Christgau sniffed that Skynyrd “makes music so unpretentious it tempts me to give up subordinate clauses,” yet he had to admit that he “loved” them, realizing that a Yankee had to put aside regional prejudices to be able to appreciate what the hell they were doing.

Whether a guilty pleasure or not, Skynyrd just could not be ignored, not by the intelligentsia and certainly not by the bourgeois proletariat. Any qualm or quibble about Skynyrd was swallowed up in the overall slam-bang impact they made. A case in point is their most persevering echo, “Free Bird,” the dizzying, eight-minute sorcerer's journey through take-me-or-leave-me defiance—with Van Zant asking, while not really caring about the answer, “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?” While not released as a single, the song immediately began to dominate FM radio, demanding to be performed live in arenas and stadiums, where arms stuck in the air clutching lit cigarette
lighters would languidly sway back and forth to the indelible slide guitar opening, birthing a new rock concert tradition (one that, lamentably, evolved from lighters to backlit cell phones). “Free Bird” was only possible because Skynyrd, by eschewing the power centers of the music industry, believed they could ignore the rules about such things as song length, and held firm that their eight-minute magnum opus was not to be cut by even a second on the album. Rather than the band giving in to the establishment, it gave in to
them
. They played gambles like that—and won. Only after “Free Bird” had won its spurs in long form was it allowed to be truncated in half for AM play, and it hardly fazed the band that it became a hit on the Top 40 stations. Another winning gamble was their refusal to remove the Stars and Bars from their stage shows, always a matter of concern to promoters and critics. To them, it wasn't a symbol of slavery, the whipping post, and the hanging tree, and damn if they were gonna cede it to those who
did
see it as such. If the message seemed mixed to some, to Skynyrd it was a nonissue, a convenient position given the ruckus they stirred up. And still do. In 2008, “Sweet Home Alabama”—a tune that has been downloaded as a cell phone ringtone over two million times—became the official motto in that state, embedded on its license plates, replacing the discarded “Stars Fell on Alabama.” It seemed innocuous enough—but that old line about how up in Birmingham they love “the Gov'nor” is still worn as a badge on the lapels of unreconstructed racists. If you cannot put the Stars and Bars on a license plate in Dixie, might the next best thing be the song with a wink and nod to the Old South of Jeff Davis? If so, this would surely disturb Ronnie Van Zant. As inscrutable as he was, there can be no doubt that his vision of the Old Confederacy was very different than, say, that of Ted Cruz.