Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (17 page)

The cops just wanted to get Ronnie out before he could level the joint. “We got him outside,” Walden says, “only to find out I had to go back and collect the money for the week.” Seeing how crazed Van Zant could get, the manager paid up. What's more, Skynyrd had been so good that night, they kept on getting asked back. Kooper, an archetypal New York industry big shot, who had a list of music industry credits as long as his arm, frequented many such clubs. After visiting Funochio's for the first time, he regarded it as a “bucket o' blood,” where “shootings and stabbings regularly took place, and bodies were routinely carried out”—in other words, the very sort of place where one might find some fairly cool music being played. Not since Haight-Ashbury in the late '60s, he says now, had he seen such a “fertile breeding ground” of music.

Kooper was in Atlanta at the time with a two-act band he had formed called Frankie and Johnny, whom he wanted to tune up for a recording
session in the city by having them play some clubs. During his stay, someone suggested he hang at Funochio's, where he was given a private box with flowing booze and easy women to trifle with while listening to the music. Kooper had earned that kind of sway. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he was a prodigy at fourteen, playing guitar on “Short Shorts,” the Royal Teens' twelve-bar blues riff that became a seminal rock-and-roll hit in 1958. Plying his skill as a songwriter, he composed the Gary Lewis and the Playboys smash “This Diamond Ring.” A peripatetic presence, he was in Bob Dylan's backup band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the same year, when Dylan cut his breakthrough folk-rock album
Highway 61 Revisited
, Kooper played the immortal, spindly Hammond organ line on arguably the most existential long-form rock song ever, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

He had also played on Dylan's landmark
Blonde on Blonde
sessions in Nashville and would become involved with just about everyone in the rock sacrarium, either producing, writing for, or playing sessions with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Blues Project, B.B. King, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. He was a cofounder of the Blues Project, teamed up with super guitarist Mike Bloomfield and singer-guitarist Stephen Stills in several legendary live albums in the late '60s and somehow found time to found and produce the horn-driven jazz-rock unit Blood, Sweat and Tears. By 1973 the curly-haired Queens Jew with the thick “Noo Yawk” accent had seen enough of the percolating native southern rock scene and was so taken by the sanctuary the region seemed to offer from the industry jungle he despised that he considered moving to Dixie and creating a label similar to Capricorn. Kooper rhapsodized about a new South, saying that Atlanta had changed drastically in the three years he'd been away from it.

“It was looser,” he said. “It wasn't so …
Southern
. There was a sociological gentrification in attitude…. The
rednecks
had long hair now. They were no longer the enemy. People got along better. I liked this. The women were beautiful and willing.”

This was, of course, the South that bred a new music. Phil Walden's success with the Allman Brothers proved to Kooper that the timing was right for a rock retrenchment. Everyone, it seemed, was into rock forms that had strayed far from their original charter, and a heavy corporate canopy hung over all of it. The sterile nature of L.A. rock had seeped
across the industry, in the formation of contrived, profit-geared “intellectual” supergroups like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. A polar opposite but equally contrived animal had also emerged—the glam rock of T. Rex (“Bang a Gong”) and Gary Glitter (“Rock and Roll Part 2”), a tide that took the Rolling Stones into their mascara-caked “It's Only Rock and Roll” phase. Kooper envisioned an antidote to all the pretension and cerebral marketing strategies, something stripped down and from the gut and loins—“basic rock and roll,” as Kooper put it, recalling the predominant music of the time as “schmutz,” Yiddish vernacular for, well, garbage. Kooper had it exactly right when he said, looking back, that if a southern band didn't rate with Capricorn, “they were pretty much doomed, because no other label understood this phenomenon.”

As a real mover and shaker in the industry, Kooper had the influence to get such a label up and running, as well as backing by the music label MCA. But he would need to have a strong act as his selling point. As fate would have it, Skynyrd would enter his purview with perfect timing, even if they were still rounding into shape—during a six-show run at Funochio's from January 15 to 20, club posters billed them as L
YNYRD
S
KYNNYRD
, an opening act for a band called Boot, along with another called Smokestack Lightnin'. But Kooper's first impression of them was ambivalent. Skynyrd might have sung about the pride of being a “simple man” of southern stock, but Kooper's snap judgment of them was much like that of most nonsouthern music people.

Seeing the front man on stage at Funochio's—“blond and barefoot, and sw[inging] the mikestand around like a majorette's baton”—Kooper admitted, “I hated Ronnie Van Zant upon first look at him…. He was so unusual. I never saw anybody like that—he was a very weird front man.” The word
weird
, in fact, was Kooper's operative word for them. Rossington and Collins, he said, were “like two Cousin Its on stilts”—referring to the Smurf-like, mop-topped
Addams Family
character—“you literally couldn't see their faces when they played.” The sound that emanated, he thought, was—again—“a weird amalgam of blues with second-generation British band influences.” He wasn't alone in first-impression coldness. Even among those who paid to see them, there were sometimes
crossed signals. While the band was determined to play “Free Bird” at every gig, the venue could make that dicey. Ronnie once recalled that at dance clubs, “they wanted to hear ‘Knock on Wood' and ‘Midnight Hour.' They said [‘Free Bird'] wasn't a good dance song, and we'd get a lot of boos and things thrown at us.”

As it happened, the first time Kooper walked into Funochio's, they were playing “Free Bird,” and, he recalled, “nobody was paying attention.”
That
would have been an off night, for sure, since it was the charge they put into audiences—in lieu of a record deal and hit songs—that kept them employed. But, like most audiences a tad baffled by Skynyrd, Kooper quickly warmed to them over three straight nights in his box, the “weird amalgam” suddenly making sense, such as when they played the song Kooper was taken with, “I Ain't the One.” By night three, he thought “they had the sound I was looking for—that return to basic rock.” Having been introduced to the band by the club owner before the show, Kooper asked if he could play guitar with them on stage. As aware as they were of major studio musicians, the band knew Kooper had played with Michael Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix and made room for him, with no idea that Kooper saw them as a possible linchpin in his future plans.

For his part, Kooper says he was “flattered” that they had heard of him and would open their clique to the “Yankee slicker,” as they called him with affectionate sarcasm. What he learned off the bat was that the redneck facade might have been their shtick, but they had a level of musicianship that impressed even him. He recounted his informal jam with the backwoods boys this way: “I strapped on a guitar and said,
‘Let's go!'
[Van Zant] called out ‘Mean Woman Blues' in C# [C-sharp] and counted it off…. In all my years of jamming, nobody ever called C#. It's a weird key between two relatively easy keys that would just as easily have sufficed.”

Later, Kooper said, “I found out it was an intimidation process they dreamed up to keep jammers offstage.” Realizing they were smarter than he had anticipated, Kooper didn't know if they were testing
his
renowned mastery or whether perhaps they were not as eager as they seemed to have an outsider on stage with them, no matter who it was. In any case, Kooper would proudly boast, “I could play fine in C#,” and he continued sitting in with the band for three more nights, more than enough time
for him to make them an offer to get them to commit to his incipient label. Following the last of those shows, Kooper was talking big.

“We talked and he said he'd make us an offer and he was interested,” Rossington said, “but, actually, he didn't.” Indeed, for all the attention he lavished on them, Kooper had also seen other acts to whom he had paid the same sort of attention and made the same promises—big talk being the most abundant and cheapest commodity a music nabob has. And there remains a fuzziness about how and when Skynyrd was in fact signed. Kooper, who has taken bows for having “discovered” them, liked to say that the opportunity was like “walking into a real funky bar someplace where you could get shot and hearing the Rolling Stones [and] finding out they weren't signed to anybody.” Kooper says he offered to sign and produce them. “They said they would mull it over and discuss it with their manager. We said our goodbyes, and that was it. I hoped [their] manager would call me back.” Soon Alan Walden—whom Kooper knew only as “Phil Walden's younger brother”—did.

But even now Kooper didn't push it, possibly because he wasn't particularly fond of Walden and vice versa. Kooper didn't mind who overheard him belittling the junior Walden for not being able to convince his own brother to sign his redneck rock act. Walden on the other hand saw Kooper as a northern sharpie stereotyping “dumbass Southern[ers].” And so nothing happened for three months. Kooper would later say this was merely because “they had to get to know me really well before they would sign,” but if so, Walden never heard a price from Kooper that seemed satisfactory; the most he could offer, based on the ceiling given him by MCA for signing talent, was $9,000.

During the interim, Kooper didn't stand still. He moved from New York to the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs and opened his label—Sounds of the South (SOS), the logo of which was a two-hundred-year-old log cabin on the grounds. He went ahead and signed a number of other acts, his new favorite the Mose Jones band, who also played at Funochio's and sometimes jammed with Skynyrd there. Once signed, Mose Jones—who, as Kooper likely appreciated, had named themselves after Bob Dylan's Mister Jones—kept pitching Kooper to sign Skynyrd, says the band's drummer Bryan Cole. “We were close to them for a while,” Cole said. “Ronnie actually asked me to join [Skynyrd] at one point but I think he was just pissed off at his drummer at the time. [Bandmate]
Jimmy O'Neill and I both told Al that he should check this group out. Even then they were tight and powerful and looked like stars.”

Charlie Brusco, who kept tabs on Skynyrd's progress, sure that they were on the edge of a breakout, says that Kooper “was unsure about them. He had two or three bands that he was seriously interested in over Skynyrd. It wasn't a slam dunk. They were just so different. Again, no one in southern rock had that kind of hard-rock sound. It was a real gamble, and nobody was eager to take it.”

Kooper indeed had his eye on many acts. He wanted to sign a hard-rock country group, Hydra, but they spurned him for Capricorn Records, as did country rock singer Eric Quincy Tate. And in a very odd choice, he did sign Elijah, the Latino horn-funk band hailing from East L.A., whom Kooper had seen playing at the Whisky a Go Go. Fudging the sequence of the Skynyrd signing, Kooper has said simply that he “also” signed Mose Jones, whose tight three-part harmonies and nearly pop hooks appealed to him. “Stylistically speaking,” he said, “Mose Jones were my Beatles, and Skynyrd were my Stones.”

Yet when he took Mose Jones into the studio early in 1973 to cut the first product on the SOS label, he didn't have his “Stones” under contract. All that changed when, at 2
AM
one night in February, Kooper was awakened by the ring of his phone. On the other end, he heard a familiar husky voice—not cocky for once but despondent—with a request he felt he couldn't make of anyone else.