Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (15 page)

As for the tapes, nine of the tracks, some of them having been embellished with additional guitar parts for potential release after the band exploded in popularity, would eventually appear on the posthumous 1978
Skynyrd's First and … Last
album; a 1998 rerelease, retitled
Skynyrd's First
, carried all seventeen tracks, including “Free Bird” (despite its not being ready for prime time), “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Simple Man.” Amazingly, after the plane crash the thirst for any “lost” Skynyrd product was such that even these tracks were reviewed on the same level as their biggest albums.

The
Village Voice
music critic Robert Christgau's verdict upon the album's release was that “I expect more from Skynyrd than good white funk and second-rate message songs”—never mind that the songs had
not been released for these very reasons. Some latter-day critics would have a fairer perspective. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the website
AllMusic.com
, conceding that their value was mainly as curios, nonetheless believed that “it's possible to hear Ronnie Van Zant coming into his own as a writer” on the early efforts.

The “white funk” of Lynyrd Skynyrd almost never came to the attention of the record-buying public. Though they may have positioned themselves as free birds, they were still strange birds in the overall rock milieu. At times they seemed painfully true to their image; perhaps a little too eager to play the redneck role, Ronnie would come out for gigs in his bare feet or in flip-flops, his eyes increasingly glazed by “poison whiskey.” Still, it is of note that not a single Confederate flag was anywhere in sight—an important detail to keep in mind, as their original instinct was that the most egregious (yet for many the most prideful) symbol of the South seemed way too tasteless. If their native turf and themes of “down south jukin'” and simple men wistfully seeking flights of freedom but coming home to their kin and women weren't enough to pinpoint them as trailer-park friendly, emblazoning their venues with that symbol of human bondage—leaving aside labored alibis insisting it was about
heritage
—would be as subtle as a kick in the nuts, something they only wanted to accomplish through their music, not pedantry.

However, something had to give. With nothing earned by way of royalties or advances, the starving, Bohemian life of nomadic rockers getting nowhere was a dead-end street shared by many acts. For Ronnie, the thought of Lacy telling him “I told you so” was depressing enough, but having to keep working irregularly at menial jobs magnified the indignity. While he still went in every once in a while to the auto parts store, Gary and Allen actually had to take jobs at Clark's meat-rendering plant, their hair tucked under hairnets similar to what the ladies in the Lee High cafeteria wore. Rickey Medlocke grew so frustrated that, with his role becoming less defined, he decided to re-form Blackfoot, which he relocated to Jacksonville and would keep together until the 1990s, when the past would again beckon.

No one needed to remind Skynyrd that they were falling further behind in the southern rock derby. In 1972 Phil Walden signed the Toy
Factory—now renamed the Marshall Tucker Band, after a blind piano tuner the bandmates knew. So popular were their first two albums that their third was a double LP: one record of studio cuts, the other of live shows. All six of their Capricorn albums went gold, even though they wouldn't have a Top 20 hit until “Heard It In a Love Song” on the fifth album. This was certainly proof that the era of single hits as the overriding priority was over, opening a new market that Skynyrd would seek to exploit as well. Another band, Pure Prairie League, formed in Ohio in 1969 by Craig Fuller, had both critical and commercial success with five straight Top 40 albums.

Although the Muscle Shoals tapes did not click with the record companies that heard them, at some point the band may or may not have been offered a contract with Capricorn Records. A story, perhaps apocryphal, has been told that such an offer was in fact proffered but that Ronnie vetoed it because he didn't want to put his band in the shadow of the Allman Brothers. But this is not how Charlie Brusco remembers it. “Alan tried but couldn't convince his brother to sign them. Alan Walden was not Phil Walden. He was the kid brother. And Phil wasn't about to bail him out. It was a very difficult thing to get them signed. They weren't really a country-rock act—they were a three-guitar rock band in the country fold, and there just wasn't anything like that around. Phil never considered signing them, a decision I'm sure Phil came to regret.”

Around the industry, it was taken for granted that Alan had no desire to run up against Phil; most of those who knew them both believed the kid brother was physically afraid of the bigger, elder brother, whose volatility and impetuosity were ironically much like Ronnie Van Zant's and who got himself into the same trouble with drugs, which would later cost him his music empire. In any case, Alan Walden says he never actually
asked
his brother to sign the group, and the point became moot one night when Skynyrd played the Grand Slam club in Macon. Not only were the Allman Brothers there that evening to watch them, but so was Phil. After the set, said Alan Walden, “I walk up to Phil, start talking to him. Well, he's arrogant as hell, acting like he's the shit. He says, ‘Your lead singer's too goddamn cocky, he can't sing, the songs are weak, and they sound too much like the Allman Brothers.'”

In Alan's story, Phil made this critique (which was the same as that of the record companies that had rejected them) loudly so that Ronnie,
lurking nearby, could hear it. But he couldn't quite. When Phil exited, Ronnie sat down next to Alan.

“What'd he say?” Ronnie asked.

“Nothing important,” Alan lied, sparing him. “Let's go have a drink.”

Putting a period on the story, Walden says, “And we went and had a drink—a whole bottle, actually. J&B Scotch.”

Nothing more was ever said about Capricorn Records. But the hurt inside Alan Walden only grew deeper and more scathing.

Alex Hodges, who was the closest person to Walden, says, “Alan was so hurt by Phil that I don't even know if they ever spoke to each other after that. Alan felt that Phil had insulted him and he was pissed off. I remember Phil called me around that time and said, ‘Alan won't speak to me.' And the fact is, it was Phil who had encouraged Alan to sign Skynyrd. Phil told me that if Alan didn't want to manage them, that I should. He said, ‘Go talk to Alan about it.' And I had lunch with Alan to talk about it, and that's when he made the decision he would sign them. But when Phil rejected them, it blew a hole between them. And it became an obsession for Alan to get them a record deal, just to show Phil. Alan has spent half his life trying to get out from under the shadow of the great Phil Walden, and Alan has mishandled that, because he exaggerates so much. It's always ‘I was the guy, I was the guy.' But there were a lot of guys who had a part in Skynyrd. I have never blown my horn, but I was right there every step of the way with them for the first five years.”

Indeed, Alan Walden was no Phil Walden. But even though he was right about Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Phil wrong, he would have scant time to rub it in. And it might not have been Alan Walden but Fate who played the biggest role.

It seems unimaginable today that no record company was interested in Skynyrd. Charlie Brusco, for whom Alan Walden played the shelved Skynyrd tapes, was stunned by how good the band with the funny name sounded. “The guitars were just on fire,” Brusco recalls. “It really was something that grabbed you by the ears and the balls.” Yet it was that very metal overkill that easily explained the industry aloofness. Brusco indeed had the same barrier to scale with the Outlaws, charting new territory in the country-rock genre that was just too over the top as defined by the Allman Brothers' formula of not-too-heavy-duty rock.

Skynyrd, however, was close enough to the Allman Brothers' style and substance to ride on their coattails. It helped that the Brothers' roadhouse boogie blues cover of “One Way Out,” the old Elmore James blues standard originally recorded by Sonny Boy Williamson, featured a transcendent bottleneck slide guitar line by Duane Allman and could provide some cover for their harder electric country-rock emphasis. There simply has never been a better slide guitarist than Duane Allman. Eric Clapton knew it too. He had been dabbling in country-rock sounds, touring with southern singers Delaney and Bonnie, and in 1970 when he came to Florida to record in Miami's Criteria Studios, he hired Allman to play the soaring, searing slide guitar lines of the pomp-rock opus “Layla.”

Duane Allman would become a rock martyr when on October 29, 1971, the Harley-Davidson he was riding through Macon smashed into a flatbed truck. He was thrown from the bike, which then landed on him, pinning him and crushing him to death at age twenty-four. Amplifying the tragedy, just over a year later Allman bassist Berry Oakley crashed
his
motorcycle, only three blocks from where Duane had finished his final ride, and died as well. The Allmans carried on, with Dickey Betts taking Duane's place, providing the electrified blues guitar; two brilliant Betts compositions in 1973, the country/pop/rock monster crossover hit “Ramblin' Man” and the rollicking seven-minute instrumental “Jessica,” among the greatest country-rock grooves ever written and played, created an almost visual sonic field. This assured the band's unbroken dominance—though this enormous success soon sowed the seeds of their destruction. Drummer Butch Trucks later said the band “got away from the music” with “country-fried hit records,” creating egos that “ripped [them] all apart.”

This aspect of fame, with booze and drug excess—one imitated by Skynyrd all too well—wrote an end to the Allmans' heyday, which would essentially be over by 1975, though their reunion tours would become endless. Still, their footprint was so large that FM stations had no compunction playing in full their live-album jams, which stretched as long as twenty-three minutes. Had they not broken radio's time barriers, a song like “Free Bird” never would have been written in the form it was. By that time southern songwriters had become the modern southern
literati, and in their pens lay the definitions of a new reconstruction of the South and southern manhood. The classic stereotypes had taken a beating through the twentieth century, but certain instincts were inbred, such as a courtly kind of regional and sexual chauvinism in which southern women, as one historian notes, were “put firmly on the pedestal of an impossible purity.”

If the songwriters' aim was to “recoup white male power, even as they admit[ted] that their terms of that power [could] never be the same,” as southern historian Caroline Gebhard postulated in an essay in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson's essential 1998 cultural analysis of the region,
Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts
, the new crop of native southern rock and rollers had to walk a fine line between racial rehabilitation and racial reversion, a very risky theme for any band. To Bartow J. Elmore, a noted history professor at University of Alabama, the southern rock idiom was “essentially reactionary,” a bastion of “unquestioning traditionalism.” To yet another, Ted Ownby, author of “Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music,” it was “upholding traditions while they were at the same time, as young rock musicians, rebelling against authority” and thus espousing a sort of closeted liberalism. Still other commentators anointed southern rockers as the first role models of the region who were not evil or buffoons, providing young southerners with a new way of healing from the scars of their ancestry.