Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (10 page)

Still, Markham and Sutton held to their hunch. Early in 1970, they would cut another session with the band, producing two ballads, “No One Can Take Your Place” and “If I'm Wrong,” both cowritten by Van Zant, Collins, and Rossington. As with “Need All My Friends,” there is some real history to these obscure songs. The former is so anti-Skynyrd, so effusively old-school country, that one would never guess it was
them. To the accompaniment of Allen's weeping slide guitar, Ronnie, heartbreak dripping from every syllable about love gone bad, sounds more like Cowboy Copas than Paul Rodgers, his nasal twang almost at parody level—another idiom never again to be heard from him.

“If I'm Wrong” did reflect a rock sensibility, its spare instrumentation pairing a splendid B.B. King-like blues guitar line with a rhythmic acoustic guitar beat. Ronnie, back in his comfy lower register, seemed to rescind the cloying sentiments of “Need All My Friends”:

Don't need no friends, I don't play no games

I need lots of room to roam before I go home….

If I fail no one can ever tell

And if I'm wrong I'll soon be gone.

This theme of breaking free from even those who loved him was clearly much on Ronnie's mind. With time left in the session, the group cut a third song, though without nearly as much attention to detail.

Ronnie and Allen had been honing the composition for a couple of years, expressing a similar worldview in the opening line—“If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”—an actual question that Allen's girlfriend Kathy Johns had once asked him. The lyrics spoke of the flight of a “free bird” that “you cannot change.” Compared with the later, immortal version, the song sounds much like a demo, stripped of its many layers and shadings. An almost identical slide guitar jag by Collins opens the song, and the two guitars fire the same chords but are more clanging and nowhere as nuanced or explosive. Ronnie's vocal is as convincing but a bit thin, leading Markham and Sutton to buff it with a thick echo that nearly swallows it up at times, with an odd “whoa whoa whoa” prelude to the line preceding the long guitar break, which never really takes off, sonically or technically. At seven and a half minutes, it was long, all right, if short by the standard of the later version, but never particularly grabbing.

Shade Tree might have had a tiger by the tail had it released the song, as radical as it was and suited to FM rock play. Instead the record company sat on this tape too. (All three songs would go on
Collectybles.)
But “Free Bird,” in more complete form, would soon have a new life, a life without end.

Even with scant radio play, the band now had a catalog of original songs, something promoters had been waiting for before booking them. According to some sources, “Free Bird” was played for the first time live in May 1970 at a wedding of a friend of the band's. Moreover, along the underground country rock circuit, a surprising number of people in the clubs knew the songs and could even sing along to them. Now out-of-town gigs came their way: one each in Savannah and Macon, Georgia, and two in Saint Louis. Late in 1970, they were invited to open for Eric Burdon and War at a club in downtown Jacksonville. Things were clearly happening now.

Not that Lacy was convinced it was worth it for his son to wear the stigma of a dropout. He was still after Ronnie to return to school and get a diploma, considering the very real prospect that the rock thing would fizzle. Ronnie, in fact, still worked part time at the auto parts store since the money from the band gigs was hardly sufficient to pay child support to Nadine for the daughter he rarely saw. Band doings aside, everything Lacy had predicted would happen otherwise had already materialized—the failed marriage, the child who now needed to be fed and clothed—and through it all Lacy had less hope that his son knew, or would ever know, how to be a man. To a degree, nearly all the members of Skynyrd had daddy issues of some kind, none as serious as Gary losing his early in life, but a matter of gritted teeth nonetheless. Allen, for example, harbored a deep grudge against his father, Larkin Collins, who split from his mother after much acrimony when he was a small child; the guitar thereafter became a sanctuary in a hardscrabble life.

Possibly as a result of being rudderless and having no paternal influence—which to an unruly kid in the South meant the possibility of a big, wide belt being removed and used to lay down the law at home—Collins began careening easily and a little too fast into the rock netherworld of chemical experimentation. Most of the Skynyrd boys were pot smokers, sharing what was a common enough predilection for those of their generation. In fact, when they went on the road early on, they would brandish their emerging “redneck rebel” credentials with absurd tales about getting their stash from some unusual sources. One time they insisted they had just played in Alaska and had brought back with them “Alaskan Thunder Fuck” ganja—which was really just Jacksonville
Gold; then they passed their joints around to watch the psychosomatic overreaction of the guys who tried it.

But Collins's behavior, even before junior high school, had hinted that he was willing to cross more perilous borders. Gene Odom related that Collins had once told him, probably not completely joking, that he had taken wood shop back then “so he could sniff wood glue every day.” One day he blacked out after inhaling toluene, a glue solvent and paint thinner, and fell in a heap against the classroom door. The shop teacher, this apparently not being the first time it had happened, opened the door so that Allen could lie flat until he came to. If these stories are indeed true, then it was just a fact of life that Allen Collins had few limits on self-destructive behavior. Ronnie treated these sorts of incidents somewhat as a joke, not really in a position himself to lecture anyone about the evils of drugs or firewater, having been a hooch drinker since, well, who even knew? Besides, how would a former jailbird even try to play Mr. Clean? For both him and Allen, and for everyone else who would come through the band, the hard lessons about going down the road to addiction and dissipation would only be gleaned after too much time and too much consumption.

As for Ronnie's complicated relationship with his father, all the younger man could do was hope Lacy would one day come around. Lacy would never ridicule his boy about the rock and roll, which he viewed as just a diversion. In fact, always trying to do what he could to get deeper into Ronnie's world, he even helped the band out; after receiving a few thousand dollars in insurance money after a traffic accident, he purchased a drum kit for Bob Burns and a trailer, and then a Chevy station wagon, to help lug their equipment around from gig to gig. But telling his boy he was proud of his excursion into music was a more delicate, complicated affair; that was one thing he felt he could not do. Ronnie took it personally, saying years later that the rift was never healed because Lacy would hold over his head the fact that he had been able to decorate his walls with his son's gold records—“but never a diploma.”

Country rock came through the 1960s with a growing sense of swagger and comfort, perfectly matching the mind-set of a nation that had survived a near meltdown, battered daily by headlines about setbacks
in Vietnam and assassinations of men of vision. With Dante's inferno burning out of control, it was a symbolic exclamation point that the last rock-and-roll convocation of the '60s, held at a raceway in Altamont, California, turned barbaric and deadly, causing America to pine for what the Rolling Stones had sung on stage that dark day—“Gimme Shelter.” So sick and fearful of turmoil and tumult were Americans that they had actually turned to the mortuarial Richard Milhous Nixon, one of politics' biggest demons, who gained election to the White House by running on a “southern strategy.” Nixon, by appealing to their lingering prejudices, won over enough Dixiecrat votes to net five states of the Old Confederacy, while also benefiting from third-party candidate George Wallace's own race-baiting campaign, which grabbed the rest, save Texas.

Down in Jacksonville, with its myriad military installations, and in the home of Army veteran Lacy Van Zant, Nixon carried the vote handily, but as with most national issues, the war and the racial struggle seemed remote. Jacksonville had rarely been the site of any controversy. Martin Luther King had come close in 1964 when he was arrested in Saint Augustine at a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. That was the same year the Florida Supreme Court ordered Jacksonville to desegregate its schools. The mayor, W. Haydon Burns, resisted the order. During Burns's term, racial violence became common. A 1960 protest to integrate downtown lunch counters in the Hemming Park shopping area was ended by segregationists wielding ax handles.

The grisly death toll of Vietnam hit home hard in Jacksonville—202 of its citizens were killed in combat, more than any other Florida city, and it seemed everyone had a friend or relative who didn't make it home. Not incidentally, Ronnie's old football injury had gotten him 4-F status when in accordance of the law he registered for the draft in 1966 at age eighteen. The others drew high numbers in the draft lotteries from 1969 through 1973. The Shantytown boys talked casually about the war, quietly expressing their opposition to it among themselves if not to their parents. Ronnie's attempt at a protest song was painfully inept, and never again would he try his hand at such a theme, ceding that turf to established rockers like the Doors, who were recording masterpieces like “The Unknown Soldier.” Skynyrd would stick to what they knew best, the jagged turf of their homeland, the soil and the state of
mind, and resolved that they would not encroach on political issues in the songs they sung. That was wise, given the terrain. Their purview, they decided, would be universal topics of young men.

As they cut their teeth in the clubs around Jacksonville, Daytona, and Sebring, the band's original songs about love and the road to somewhere peaceful and productive were sprinkled into their swaggering sets of Stones and Free cover tunes—the latter's “Walk in My Shadow” was a constant. Somewhere along this locus of touring they also made another modification to their name, settling now on a version that magnified the sneering tone of the surname and made any speaker of the phrase sound like a good old boy. They heard it being pronounced like that anyway, so, tongue twisting and confusing as it was, they went with the new spelling—“Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

By the end of the decade, their upward progression was still slow but more sure. In late 1970 they won a local “battle of the bands” contest at the Regency Square shopping mall in downtown Jacksonville; appeared on a local TV station dance party show where they fake-played and Ronnie lip-synched “Need All My Friends”; and then played at the opening of the Jacksonville Art Museum. The gigs weren't so small anymore, nor were they confined to smoky clubs. Indeed, all this dues paying allowed Skynyrd to open several shows for the L.A.-based psychedelic rock band the Strawberry Alarm Clock, who were still extant three years after recording one of the most gloriously unlikely hits of all time, “Incense and Peppermints.” This song, one of the first psychedelic rock works, wrote the Magna Carta of alienation for the baby boom era with the line “Who cares what games we choose / Little to win but nothing to lose.” The song went all the way to number one in the summer of 1967, but now, painfully passé and running on fumes, the band was to Ronnie a reminder of how sudden the arrival—and devolution—of fame could be. Seeing them as a soon-to-be corpse, he picked their bones by hastening the departure of their guitarist, Ed King.