Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (13 page)

“I heard them play ‘Free Bird,' and I knew from that one song that they were on to something,” Walden said, in retrospect an understatement of prodigious dimensions.

Believing he had seen and heard the future of rock, Alan Walden signed them to a contract that gave him 30 percent of all earnings they would make if signed by a record company—double the normal manager's fee (not counting Tom Parker's notorious 50 percent cut of Elvis's income). Walden also would own every cent of publishing royalties, under the name of Duchess Music, the same headlock that had applied to the band at Shade Tree. To Skynyrd, it was nothing that seemed very important. A photo of the band signing the contract shows them with Walden; his partners, Armstrong and Gary Donehoo; and the great Stax soul singer Eddie Floyd of “Knock On Wood” renown, who was also managed by Walden. The smiles were broad. To accomplish this, Walden had to convince Tom Markham and Jim Sutton to release them from their contract, which had two years left to run. The two men, who had all but given up on Skynyrd, had no objections to letting them out, though Shade Tree would still own the publishing rights on any royalties that technically belonged to Double “T,” which would one day ring up more than a few shekels for them. Now, clearing their shelves of Skynyrd product, they put out a last two-sided single, “I've Been Your Fool”/“Gotta Go,” a combination of titles that seemed a fair summation of both sides' feelings at that moment.

Given how much Alan Walden, if not the band, stood to make—and the fact that, on his own, Walden himself was now about broke—his first order of business was to get them recorded, properly. Wasting no time doing so, he used his connections and a fat wad of cash to schedule a session for Skynyrd, not at the renowned FAME studio in the otherwise obscure northwest Alabama town of Muscle Shoals but rather at the newer jewel of Southern studios, Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which had been created in 1969 by the rhythm section of the illustrious house band at FAME that Leon Russell had dubbed the Swampers—guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood, keyboardist Barry Beckett, and drummer Roger Hawkins.

The new place was not actually in Muscle Shoals but two miles to the north, on Jackson Avenue in Sheffield (and would be relocated a decade
later to larger digs on Alabama Avenue), but no one at FAME begrudged the quartet the use of the brand name they had helped establish. The session, scheduled for early 1970, would be produced by Johnson, who was sent a demo tape of Skynyrd songs and was intrigued by them. It would be his job, he understood, to make the band sound so good that Walden could use the tapes to land a big-time deal from a record company far more important than even his brother's.

Ronnie and his men had no regrets. They anticipated that the Muscle Shoals sessions would surely be a windfall. After all, it wasn't every day, or just any old band, that could walk in the footsteps of the first clients at the new studio: Cher, Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann, and the Rolling Stones, who in December 1969 cut “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” in the space about to be occupied by the boys of Shantytown. To be able to rig this, they figured, Alan Walden was more than a manager; he was a freakin' titan.

Alex Hodges, today one of the most powerful men in the entertainment business as CEO of Nederlander Concerts, a massive, worldwide chain of theaters and music venues, and a Georgia Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has a lot less hair—actually, he has not one follicle of it—and a lot more girth than he did back then when, at not yet thirty, he was assisting both Walden brothers at the Paragon Agency. He has rarely been interviewed, by his own choice, but even through the passage of time and out of all the rock royalty that he has managed, such as the Allman Brothers and the Police, two faces haunt him the most.

“There are people who you just never forget—you see them in your head all the time. Ronnie was one of those. Otis Redding was like that. When I first met Ronnie, he came into the room of our agency, and you were thrown back on your heels. It's not really a physical presence. Otis was a big, handsome, strapping man. Ronnie was a pudgy little fellow with thinning hair. But your eyes followed him around. He had that gut appeal. Soon as I saw him, I knew his band—and I didn't care who they were, even—was gonna do some serious damage. I didn't know how much damage they'd do to themselves, but you knew a band led by that guy was gonna push boundaries, break rules. He was troubled, you could tell, and maybe that was part of it. I mean, he was not a normal
human being. You couldn't figure him out. And you couldn't wait for him to sing something so you might be able to try. That was the only way, 'cause Ronnie spoke through his music, the only way he felt comfortable doing it.”

Ronnie had some important business to take care of before the trip to Muscle Shoals. The first was Larry Junstrom, who Ronnie suspected of something less than total commitment to the band—or not being enough of a bad boy—and was canned. Once “Stalin” had made up his mind about such things, there was no further discussion. Larry, who'd come a long way with the band, took it hard. “Can you believe it, man? They fired me. Skynyrd's fired me,” he told a Lee High classmate. Junstrom was too good a bass player to go hungry for long. (He would later resurface as part of Donnie Van Zant's band .38 Special, which he still plays in.) And of course he would not be on that doomed plane flight. Junstrom was replaced by Greg T. Walker, who, when the offer came, quit his own band, Blackfoot—so named because all their members had some Native American heritage. But Walker, who is of Muscogee Creek descent, was mainly a placeholder for Leon Wilkeson, always Ronnie's first choice, who often was sidetracked for some reason or other.

Indeed, Ronnie had to vie with his brother Donnie for Leon's services. When Ronnie and Donnie's sister, Betty Jo Ann, married and moved to another neighborhood on the west side, her neighbors were the Wilkeson family. Leon, just fourteen then, was already an accomplished bass player; and when Betty Jo Ann told him that Donnie was starting a band, the Collegiates, Leon joined up with them first, before being persuaded by Ronnie to hang around as a sometime member of
his
band. But a problem arose when Leon's poor grades at Bishop Kenny High School led his parents to yank him from his bass and throw him into his studies. His presence with Skynyrd would be intermittent for the next two years, until he graduated, but even when he was part of the Hell House scene, he was apt to drop from sight, only to resurface drunk and incoherent. This of course put him in the line of fire of Ronnie's rules, but when Ronnie got in Leon's face, the latter often stalked out with a slurred “Fuck you.” Rather than tear into him with his fists, Ronnie admired the kid's spunk and expected he would be back.

Next came a problem with Bob Burns, who had been a ticking time bomb for some time. When he was fifteen, his parents had moved to Orlando, allowing the tall, swarthy young man to remain in Jacksonville as he wished so he could continue playing drums with his band. Astonishingly, as Burns tells it, his mother and father simply let him fend for himself, apparently not caring enough to see to it that he had a place to live and could feed and clothe himself. Burns had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, living the life of a nomad.

“I had no place to stay,” he said. “I was crashing in people's bushes. I was crashing wherever I could. I hung on as long as I possibly could. I was borrowing clothes from the roadies to play shows with. I didn't even have any shoes, and it just got to me. Everybody was saying, ‘Damn, man, what if [the band] don't make it, then what are you going to do? Your friends are driving Porches and 'Vettes, they're in college or making good money.' The rest of them were living with their parents or their parents were helping them out. I couldn't stay with any of them. Their parents didn't want me moving in with them. So I went to live with my folks in Orlando.”

Ronnie, who had his own family baggage, was sympathetic. Rather than writing Burns off, he kept him on a leash, saying he would be welcomed back if he wanted to return. In the meantime, needing a drummer for the Muscle Shoals sessions, he reached out to another Blackfoot player whom he'd had his eye and ear on for some time, lead singer and guitarist Rickey Medlocke. Sioux by descent and son of blues banjo player Shorty Medlocke, who in the '50s had a local TV show in town, on which his son appeared, the Jacksonville native had been in New York City with Blackfoot, where the group's manager was quartered and demanded they make their base. It was the last place Medlocke wanted to be, having cut his teeth in Jacksonville bars. (Blackfoot had once been the house band at Dub's, a well-attended strip joint.)

When Ronnie called him, he asked if Medlocke would consider coming back home to play with Walker in Skynyrd—but could he play drums? Rickey hadn't done so in some time but was a brilliant musician, and homesick as he was, he promised he could step right in. After brushing up on the sticks, he arrived back in Jacksonville and was ready for Muscle Shoals, thus providing another much-needed benefit that Ronnie no doubt also had in mind: Medlocke was an accomplished
songwriter, having composed much of Blackfoot's material. Skynyrd, needing good original songs from any source, could suddenly draw upon a catalog of them, most better than what they had come up with on their own.

There would be yet one more addition to the band that would pay off—Billy Powell, a wiry, affable guy who had been friends with Wilkeson since grade school. A navy brat born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and reared in Jacksonville, Powell had gone to Bishop Kenny High School then briefly studied music at Jacksonville Community College. He did a brief stint in a band called Alice Marr, in which a teenaged Donnie Van Zant sang. When Wilkeson moved deeper into the Skynyrd circle, he bugged Ronnie about hiring Powell, touting him as a superb boogie-woogie piano player, a rhythm element the band didn't believe it needed. Ronnie did hire Billy as a roadie for the time being, to help Dean Kilpatrick and another crony of the band, Kevin Elson, carry and set up equipment, and to keep a talented piano man within reach. Powell, who dug the band and wanted in, eagerly took the job, which paid exactly nothing. He too would go to Muscle Shoals and breathe in the ascent of a band he would soon be a major part of.

Alan Walden was more than a manager to Skynyrd; he was, for all the world, one of them. As if he could vicariously be the redneck he never was, he attached himself to the band by the hip, going to gigs with them, hanging out at Hell House, and calling band meetings that were more like pep talks. When they would break open a bottle of beer, whiskey, rye, whatever, he had his glass ready, even if he wasn't ever able to keep up with them. “I had drank with some of the best, with [soul singer] Johnnie Taylor, the best. But when I met Skynyrd, whew, I went under the table. Those guys could drink. Straight from the bottle—and they were still teens at the time.”

He may have believed in Skynyrd, even loved them as manly southern men love each other, but when it came to financing them, he could offer them exactly nothing from his empty pockets. Skynyrd had to pay their own way to Muscle Shoals in the spring of 1971, and when they got there the only lodging they could afford was a fleabag truck stop called Blue's. So cash poor were they that they had to scrounge up empty soda
bottles and cash them in for the five-cent deposits at convenience stores. Then came news that they wouldn't be recording at Muscle Shoals at all because more important acts had booked the studio. They would have to go down the road a few miles to the Broadway Sound Studio, owned by Quin Ivy, a former disc jockey and songwriter, who had benefited from the constant spillover of sessions from the FAME studio; it was here that Percy Sledge had recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman.”