Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (14 page)

Ivy was affiliated with the Walden brothers as well as Atlantic Records. Rather than Jimmy Johnson, Ivy's in-house producer, David (another Johnson), would oversee the Skynyrd date. To Skynyrd, it was still a blessing, still Muscle Shoals. When the sessions began, David Johnson got them on eight tracks, which covered all the fresh material they had. By then Walden wanted to go further and cut an entire album, so more songs were needed. Jimmy Johnson, meanwhile, heard the rough tapes and wanted in. He and Walden agreed to produce a Skynyrd album at Muscle Shoals and cover the costs. If it bartered the band a record contract, Muscle Shoals would be reimbursed and become part of the Skynyrd arc as their home studio. Walden, of course, would own all the publishing rights to songs the band wrote.

Thus the possibility loomed that Muscle Shoals might be aligned with Alan Walden, and FAME with Phil Walden. Before accomplishing much of anything, it seemed Lynyrd Skynyrd was already at the center of a sibling rivalry—for now, only in Alan Walden's imagination—between two southern industry heavyweights. That of course only upped the pressure on the band to come up with some good material and blow the doors off the studio. The whole world was seemingly riding on these sessions when Skynyrd returned to Muscle Shoals early in 1972 after six months of intensive writing and rehearsing at Hell House. Looking back, Jimmy Johnson said that, after hearing their lead man sing live in the studio, “I totally fell in love with Ronnie Van Zant's fantastic voice,” and that the now instinctively intermeshed guitar licks of Rossington and Collins were almost revelatory. “Gary and Allen,” he said, “were doing solos that were twinned”—as if they were on separate tracks and mixed as perfect complements. Not that the other guys in the band didn't have their own vital roles, but to Johnson the sum and substance of Lynyrd Skynyrd was the skill and chemical interaction of its core; on the first day, he said, “I fell in love with those three guys.”

Given this skew, it was almost insignificant that the band once again changed faces. During the follow-up sessions, Bob Burns came back for the time being. “I decided after I left that I would rather have nothing, no shoes or nothing, rather than not be in the band. I knew I had given up my dreams, my hopes, my everything. The first prayer I ever had in my entire life, I looked up at the sky, and I said, ‘If there's a God there, I'm sorry if I've done wrong, but I want back in that band, it's just not working for me out here.' The next night, Gary called me up and said, ‘Man, you want to play in this band or not?' I said, ‘Yeah,' and he said, ‘Be here about as fast as you can get here.' I left that night, hopped into my Corvair and went back to Jacksonville fast as I could get there.”

Still having no place to stay, Burns made Hell House his home, sleeping there in a place so hot that, he says, “you could fry an egg there.” As for food, “if I didn't catch fish,” he says, “I didn't eat.”

Leon Wilkeson, his schoolwork done, was also in tow, having been allowed by his parents to accept the long-standing invitation he had to be the permanent Skynyrd bass player. This meant that Greg T. Walker was excused, but Rickey Medlocke was too important to let go, having provided the bulk of the new stuff the band took to Muscle Shoals. He went back with them as a third guitarist, but more centrally, to take the lead vocals on his songs, which only he knew well enough to sing.

As Gary remembered it, from the band's standpoint, especially among those who suffered indignity at home, the experience was something like gaining an instant family. “They adopted us, took us in,” he said. Although Rossington likely gilded the lily a tad later, saying that the tutorial they received from the Muscle Shoals producers was so revelatory to them that it was the first time they realized the bass and drum had to play in complementary tandem; when Johnson or his coproducer Tim Smith called out the downbeat—the “one, two, one-two-three” cue to start playing—as the tempo of the song, only then did they understand that was how it was done. Studio drummer Roger Hawkins worked with Bob Burns for
twelve
hours tuning his drum correctly. Johnson and Smith also imparted a critical method for accentuating Ronnie's vocals—having the band play in a lower key than the one in which he sang so that his voice would sound higher and harsher, something like his idol Paul Rodgers.

Like Peck's bad boys, they clambered in and proceeded to act like, well, themselves. David Hood recalls that “they'd have fistfights, actual fistfights. Someone was supposed to [play] a G-chord instead of an A-chord and boom, a fist would fly. That's how they settled their disagreements, they just fought.” Those spats continued as if they
needed
such contretemps to clear the air and get themselves into the Skynyrd frame of mind. Cigarette butts littered the studio floor. But when Johnson called a take, mouths quieted, and heads snapped to attention. The singing and playing were sharp. There were limited retakes. Some wonderful counterpoint acoustic lines emerged among the electric guitar madness, with just the right echo and reverb. The sessions went smoothly and rapidly, and a few Muscle Shoals sidemen came in to play with the band, buffing and adding nuance to the scorched-earth quality of the Skynyrd sound. With the previous eight songs in the can from Quinvy (the Broadway studio), the band cut nine more, almost as if in a blur, by Johnson's reckoning; years later he seemed to think almost all of them went on for around nine minutes, including the second studio version of “Free Bird” and that “one thing I would not do was edit them.” Here his memory is clouded a bit; the still-evolving “Free Bird” on these tapes ran seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, still long but still far shorter than the later versions, a couple of which went over
eleven
minutes. Eight of the seventeen tracks did run longer than five minutes—“One More Time,” “Was I Right Or Wrong,” “Simple Man,” “Comin' Home,” “Things Goin' On,” “You Run Around,” “Ain't Too Proud to Pray,” and “Free Bird.” As with “Free Bird,” the tracks for “Simple Man” and “Things Goin' On,” and an early version of “Gimme Three Steps,” are historical curiosities, all instantly recognizable but obviously works in progress at the time, destined to see better days ahead.

The songs that all agreed were the best and that would go on a possible album of the sessions, were three Van Zant-Rossington songs—“Down South Jukin',” “Was I Right or Wrong,” and “Things Goin' On”—as well as the Van Zant-Collins composition “Comin' Home” and the Van Zant-Rossington-Collins original “Lend a Helpin' Hand.” Three Medlocke songs made the cut—“White Dove” and “The Seasons,” essentially poems turned into redneck rock, and “Wino,” cowritten with Ronnie and Allen. For these, Ronnie willingly stood aside and allowed Rickey to handle the leads in his high falsetto, the only time any Skynyrd songs would be fronted by anyone other than its regular lead singer for
the next five years. And Medlocke added an even dreamier tone to “Free Bird” with a soprano backing vocal, a role almost never again taken by a band member.

Amazingly, “Free Bird,” which nearly everyone who has ever heard it says knocked them out, was
not
deemed worthy of the final cut. If there was one song judged to be a potential single, it seemed to be “Was I Right or Wrong,” a tale of deep-seated angst producing high art—the narrative told of a young rocker living out his dreams and then returning home to find his parents dead, no doubt a nightmare that had jarred Ronnie awake more than once. Little wonder that the song, with Ronnie yearning to be a “restless leaf in the autumn breeze” and a “tumblin' weed,” caused the rock critic Dave Marsh to opine years later that it was “hard to believe the song is only a fantasy.”

But with Skynyrd, such breezes always led back home. As “Comin' Home” made clear, the long road just might be too long and full of “broken dreams and dirty deals.” There were also the night-trolling comforts of “Down South Jukin',” the objective of which was to head to town trying to “pick up any woman hanging around,” which would have to suffice as peace of mind. There was, too, a cautionary note in “Wino,” which warned: “Wino, you wasn't born to lose. Sweet wine is making you a fool.” Not content with presenting a catalog of redneck ups and downs, Ronnie took another stab at a message song. “Things Goin' On,” with its honky-tonk vibe, took aim at an easy target, big government, for “too many lives” spent “across the ocean” and too many dollars spent “upon the moon.” “They're gonna ruin the air we breathe,” he seethes, ending on a massively ironic note, coming from a rock band: “I don't think they really care / I think they just sit up there and just get high.”

Johnson was quite sure the songs chosen were valuable record label bait. Alan Walden, further leaning on the reputation of the highly respected Swampers, taking the approach that a hard sell wasn't necessary, went to L.A. with the mild-mannered Johnson and made the rounds of the big record company headquarters. Wincing still, Walden tells it this way: “Nine record companies had turned us down! I don't mean, ‘We like you but you need better material.' I mean ‘Not interested! No need to contact us again.' Atlantic, Columbia, Warners, A&M,
RCA, Epic, Elektra, Polydor … they all passed after hearing ‘Free Bird,' ‘Gimme Three Steps,' ‘Simple Man,' ‘I Ain't the One,' and about twelve other originals. Their comments were: ‘They sound too much like the Allman Brothers!'

“Now, I ask you—put them on back to back and tell me they sound alike? We all came from the South, played hard, had long hair, drank and chased women. But we did not sound alike! The Allmans had their jazz influences, and we were a straight-ahead juking band! I remember one executive telling me to turn that noise off while I was playing him ‘Free Bird.'” Says Johnson: “It hurt because the stuff was fantastic.” When word got back to the band, recalls Rossington, “We were all angry, freaked out, thinking we didn't know what we were doing. Because those were the best songs we could write.”

Out of frustration, they even took to blaming Muscle Shoals. As the house bass man David Hood recalls, during the trip out west, “somehow the tapes had gotten twisted up on the reel so when they'd play it, they'd be playing the wrong side of the tape, and it would be all muffled. So Skynyrd thought that Jimmy had done something to sabotage them. They were a little mad at us—at Jimmy, really—and we all felt real bad about it. Later on, they found out about the technical glitch, and they made up with Jimmy.” To make good, Ronnie swore he'd make those Swampers famous by getting their name into a song. Hood laughed. Yeah, like
that
would ever happen.

I
n truth, beneath the anger was a hard reality: the Muscle Shoals tapes were definitively
not
the best songs the band could write, nor even the best they could record them, as would be made clear down the road when a chosen few, recorded more competently, would become hit fodder. It wasn't Johnson's fault. His role was not really to alter anything they did, just to get them on tape in a technically professional manner. The band simply wasn't yet good enough to get by on raw talent alone. They needed time to hone their sound and understand
how
to present this hybrid creature—rock with a country smirk and attitude but not necessarily a belch. To get to that point, they needed clever arranging and production under a sort of guru whose word was law, even for Ronnie.