Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (4 page)

Skynyrd's only real relevant body of work, the five albums of the Van Zant era, all monster hits in their day, are now among the highest-selling albums in history, pushed into the stratosphere in the era of CDs and mp3s. Three—the debut, titled
(pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd); Second Helping;
and the finale,
Street Survivors
—have gone double platinum.
Nuthin' Fancy
is platinum and
Gimme Back My Bullets
is gold. A live album from 1976,
One More from the Road
, is
triple
platinum. The post-Van Zant incarnations have released nine studio and five live
albums, the last two of which,
God & Guns
and
Last of a Dyin' Breed
, landed in the Top 20. Perhaps the most salient barometer of the enduring popularity of the old brand is that there have been no less than twenty-one compilations of the old stuff, eight of which have gone platinum, one triple platinum, and one—1989's
Skynyrd's Innyrds
—quintuple platinum. What was intended as a one-shot reunion of the surviving band in 1987 has become an enormous commercial concern. Skynyrd tours are chronic sellouts, and the hawking of licensed merchandise is a million-dollar enterprise by itself. Ronnie Van Zant's widow, Judy Van Zant Jenness, operates a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute website and the successful Freebird Live music club on North First Street on Jacksonville Beach, the strip where the nascent Skynyrd cut their teeth.

The business of Skynyrd nowadays is business, the conversion of the Skynyrd name into leisure-class gold, a boardwalk attraction. In Choctaw, Mississippi, a marquis card reads:
LYNYRD SKYNYRD BRINGS SOUTHERN ROCK TO PEARL RIVER RESORT
. In an eon of sapless, soulless music built on marketing plans rather than anyone's creative suffering, nostalgia can find a new audience of free spenders every generation. Thus, MCA, the corporate behemoth that took a chance and put out those first five albums in real time—though at the start any liability was shouldered by the band's producer, Al Kooper, not the company—has sold more than 30 million Skynyrd albums, making them the company's top-selling artist ever, outselling even the Who. According to BMI records, “Free Bird” has been played on the radio more than two million times, which may not be on “Hey Jude” or “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” terrain but is rather astonishing given that it's usually played at its full, elongated length, meaning only on the niche format of classic rock. Consider this: two million plays is the equivalent of approximately one hundred thousand broadcast hours—or more than eleven years of continuous airplay—and still counting.

The Atlanta-born author of
The Prince of Tides
, Pat Conroy, said, “My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, ‘All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to sister.'” Southern to the bone as they were, Skynyrd added a few more components to the equation,
all without ever once trying to
sound
like a southern stereotype. That was tricky—and ballsy—but it worked. And in so doing, they did what few great artists can ever claim: they were actually
underrated
for what they meant to the frames moving all about them. Their legacy was so rich and resonant that it suggests southern tradition in various, evolving stages, darting by turns from imagery that could be found between the covers of works by W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Kinky Friedman. The rebirth of the Old South invoked by Skynyrd had nothing to do with race yet was a secession nonetheless, a willful and wistful flight of fancy, swagger, and defiance—in the end, a flight doomed by its refusal to cooperate with the logical order of the universe. Maybe that's why the band moved fast, recklessly, at one speed—jacked up.

When the devil came to collect and they fell from the sky to the muddy woods below, the soul of southern culture crashed to the ground with them. This time, for good, except for the steeped, misty echoes of what once was and what will never be again.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I've known some that even circumstances couldn't stop
.

—W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER
,
G
O
D
OWN
, M
OSES

D
uring the nascence of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the nuts, bolts, and guts of which were assembled at a typical sort of titular hallmark of the Old South—Robert E. Lee High School, a squat building still standing on McDuff Avenue in southwest Jacksonville, Florida, seven blocks from the Saint Johns River—Ronnie Van Zant was already a compelling fellow, if not always for the right reasons. In 1965 at the age of seventeen and soon to be a dropout, he stood five foot seven and 160 pounds, built like a fireplug, his face round as the moon, his wavy blond hair streaked almost platinum by the hot sun, and his handsome features usually bloated from the steady stream of beer and junk food he shoved into his mouth or from a fat lip he proudly displayed.

Because of his unrelenting confrontational attitude—his own mother called him the meanest kid in the neighborhood, a good thing to be on the hard-scrabble streets of Shantytown, as it was called—he was in scrapes all the time. He was also a crafty, advanced sort of redneck. For one thing, he was sharp—smart and calculating. When he wasn't bored with school, he made the honor roll. But he was bored and could regularly be found in dive bars, hanging with the real rednecks, sneaking beers, and looking for a fight.

When he got one, picked over some imagined slight or challenge, he would sometimes deck the other guy with his bare knuckles. Other times, having been taught to use his dukes by his father, he'd arrange a bout on some dirt road somewhere. He'd go home, get two pairs of boxing gloves, his and his old man's, and then give his father's gloves to his opponent to use. In these matches, with no referee, Ronnie almost always won, pounding away until the other guy cried uncle. Afterward, they would both return to the bar, the loser buying drinks.

As Van Zant described his home turf, “it was rough … like the ghetto, black and white, and there was a lot of street fighting, a lot of adventure…. Lynyrd Skynyrd are nothin' but street people, right straight off the streets, skid row. It's very easy for us to relate to that. We can relate to that much more than anything else.” The way he said it, he was the “Street Fighting Man” that Mick Jagger had sung about in his famous detour from “palace revolution” to “compromise solution.” For Van Zant, there was no such thing as compromise solution.

To his classmates, Ronnie was a short stack of mercurial impulses and moods, with ambitions that seemed to change by the day. It wasn't that he had a thing for violence or wanted to hurt people; it was just his way of blowing off steam and winning a personal challenge, something he seemed to need to allay his own insecurity and to constantly prove to himself that his father would admire him if he were the toughest kid in town. As a result, even his friends knew they had to be aware that Ronnie might be apt to come up to them willy-nilly and pop them one upside the head.

That was, however, just one side of him—one of many. The last thing he wanted was to end up a thug or be seen as an ignorant redneck with shit for brains. Rough-hewn traits aside, he was a peripatetic figure around Shantytown. He was a marvelous athlete who seriously went after a career as a professional baseball player. He worked at an auto body shop where the foreman recalled that the kid had a photographic memory for the minutiae of car parts.

He was whip smart and cocksure; he could express himself and could sing on key and with feeling, which he did in the mid-sixties with a band he got together at Lee High. He called the group Us, which he
thought sounded hip, similar to the folk-rock group the We Five, who had a hit called “You Were on My Mind.” Us was just one of numerous ragtag bands who used the gym to practice. Another was an instrumental group in the mold of the Ventures called You, Me and Him; it was led by Gary Rossington, a skinny kid with Botticellian curls, who was two years younger than Ronnie and, frankly, scared to death of him, a common reaction around town. “Everyone knew Ronnie in Jacksonville because he was Mr. Badass,” Rossington said. “He would just stand on street corners flipping people off.”

Months later Van Zant's band had trailed away, and he and Rossington crossed paths after a Babe Ruth League game they played in down at the sandlot. Ronnie only knew Gary in passing, but he knew enough: Gary could play a mean electric guitar, and a couple of other guys in his band, called You, Me, and Him, drummer Bob Burns and bass player Larry Junstrom, who also played in that Babe Ruth game, could keep a tight backbeat. With no warning, Van Zant had some startling news for the younger teen. Commencing that day, he informed Gary, “I'm gonna be your singer.”

As was usually the case with Van Zant, there was no discussion. What he said went. He was so adamant about it, in fact, that the four of them went right over to Burns's house and, without changing out of their dirty uniforms, began jamming. Ronnie pronounced quick judgment. “When we started playing,” he would recall years later, “we were just terrible.”

It didn't take long before the band was in his control, reliant solely on his full-throated baritone voice, which seemed to seamlessly shift from mellow to bellow but could tire easily and start to crack. Accordingly, he kept it in a tightly controlled range, never launching into a falsetto flutter or twang. Like Gregg Allman's vocals on the big Allman Brothers hits to come, there was no obvious connection of voice to region beyond that flat northern Florida drawl. He wasn't Elvis or Conway Twitty. This wasn't Nashville; it was Jacksonville.

Ronnie knew exactly what direction he wanted for the band, which would go through a half dozen names before finding the right one. That direction was rock and roll, not country—and no one would argue the point with him. Clearly the future of the group, which added one more guitar player, Allen Collins, was going to be determined by one factor: Ronnie Van Zant. He had the attitude and presence of a good lead
singer. Knowing he had two left feet, he didn't try to prance around like Mick Jagger. He would stand there, erect, foursquare, under his Stetson, pouring out the words he composed. His aura projected an animal magnetism, his guise as a prowling lion enhanced by the sincerity of his voice, the cock of his head, the wink of his eye. He bit off the words of a song in earnest and sometimes in anger. He was, well,
different
.