Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (19 page)

“I mean, you would think there would have been a bass player in town that they could have called. Larry Junstrom, I know he was the
original bass player, and Larry Junstrom is like one of the best bass players. Matter of fact, when they played ‘Need [All] My Friends' way back at the Comic Book, Junstrom's bass part was just, it was miraculous. It was just genius. So I don't know what Ronnie saw in me. There was no logical reason for me to be in that band when you think about it.”

King drove to Jacksonville, rehearsed on the bass with Wilkeson, and went to Doraville ready to play the four-string but just as likely to be utilized as a third lead guitar, something Ronnie had hoped would give as much kick to the Skynyrd sound as possible. For King, a grand learning experience was beginning. And by now Billy Powell had gotten the promotion that
he'd
been waiting for. For a time, as he carried out his job as a roadie, it seemed as if the band had forgotten that they had a classically trained pianist in their camp. Then after a Skynyrd concert at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Powell dropped onto a piano stool in the auditorium and began noodling a keyboard embellishment for “Free Bird.” Ronnie, hearing it, was taken aback. “You
play?
You been workin' with us for a year and you didn't tell us you played?” he asked Powell. A few more bars and he was in the band, a move that would have a profound effect on the Skynyrd sound.

Powell was among the pilgrims who assembled before Al Kooper on March 26. Kooper, though a hands-on producer with great ears, always allowed the artists he was recording the breathing room to record their songs as they wanted them to be. Right from the first downbeat, he realized he wouldn't need to do much by way of producing Skynyrd. The band, he would later say, “was years ahead of their time. They were twenty year-olds playing like thirty year-olds.” This was, he insisted, just as he wanted it, since “I'm not interested in producing anybody I can't learn from.” He had told them to come in with all of their songs, literally
all
of them, including whichever tracks from the Muscle Shoals sessions they were fond of enough to rerecord. They would have fourteen of them, with “not a bad apple in the bunch,” according to Kooper. He found them “incredibly well rehearsed,” their guitar solos arranged beforehand, leading Kooper to call them “the best damn arrangers I have
ever
worked with” and to acknowledge that “their mental discipline was
everything
to them. They understood music organically, not by the book.”

After getting them in the controlled environment of the studio, Kooper's judgment of Van Zant was much the same as his original one. Although he still thought Ronnie had “a rather pedestrian voice,” he conceded that Van Zant had a “unique sound” and “remarkable leadership skills” that seemed to give that voice a swagger; in his view, the vocals were undeniably commanding. Kooper loves to relate the time when Ronnie amused himself during a break by crooning Johnny Cash's “Hey Porter.” Just as he sang the first line—“Hey porter, hey porter, would you tell me the time”—a janitor sweeping up checked his watch.

“6:08, son,” he said.

Light-hearted moments like that were rare. While the sessions ran smoothly enough, the bandmates were as thorny as ever, “always getting in fistfights,” Kooper said. “If they couldn't find anyone to fight, they'd fight each other.” Having King and Powell surely made things easier. Wilkeson managed to get through the day, freeing King to pick up a guitar and contribute that third lead-guitar part, which to Kooper was gravy, given that Rossington and Collins were already near-perfect complements. Gary, he thought, was a “curious mix” between the great folk-blues guitarist Ry Cooder and Free's Paul Kossoff, aping the latter's honkish, vibrato style; while Collins had an “Eric Clapton-like approach,” presumably a reference to Clapton's self-described “woman tone,” amp cranked to the max, wah-wah pedal creating a thick, distorted sonic blast that poured out of speakers like quivering cake batter.

In developing and rehearsing songs, there was apt to be a fight over who would play what part. Rather than deciding on some intellectual reasoning about style, Rossington says, “Most of the time we just knew whose rhythm or lead style would fit. On occasion it was more rough and tumble: whoever thought they had a cool approach would jump on it, and if the other guy thought he could whup him, he would just try to take it.”

For Ed King, the new guy, such a claiming of turf was rare. Usually he would gladly accept a rhythm part, bridging the other two, and then dive into the three-guitar solo breaks when all three would play the exact same notes; yet even then, their distinct styles would lend depth and a “real” feel that could never have been created by Gary or Allen overdubbing their own parts. To Kooper, King was “the icing, [a] James Burton,” referencing the legendary studio guitar man for Elvis. “It's ridiculous,”
said Kooper, “they had every kind of guitar playing covered.” King was just beginning to figure out the quirks and habits of his new bandmates, which extended even to the guitars played by Rossington and Collins—indeed a curious duo. “When I first met them, Gary was playing a white SG and Allen a gold-top Les Paul with mini-humbuckers,” says King, using the vernacular of musicianspeak. “When I joined the band, they'd switched! The Les Paul you hear on the [first] album is that gold-top Paul.” Both of those guitars, he notes, were later stolen out of Collins's hotel room during a 1974 gig in San Francisco, by which time the band's supply of guitars was such that they could have freely switched them to match their clothes if they chose to.

King, the ultimate pro, echoed both of the guitars with his own, broadening the texture of each and the sonic field as a whole, seeming to solder the sound into a cohesive pulp, with not a note out of place or wasted. Billy Powell's funky, bluesy, honky-tonk piano also added depth. If there was a weak link, it was Bob Burns, but he did what was asked of him, playing drum parts that were written for him by the others with an inherent “Skynyrd” feel, having been there from the start. Being in the Skynyrd “gang,” as Kooper put it, was like having taken a blood oath, one that could only be broken, it seemed, if Ronnie allowed it to be.

March 26, 1973, was a long and beneficial day, fourteen crisply recorded demo tracks done. Kooper and the band listened to them, and eight songs were chosen for inclusion on the album. Ignoring that one of them, “Things Goin' On,” had been in the projected album rejected by numerous labels and that four more—“I Ain't the One,” “Free Bird,” “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Simple Man”—had been among the outtakes, the band chose these songs to make up the bulk of their first official album. “I Ain't the One,” Kooper's favorite, was tabbed as the first cut and “Free Bird” the last. In between, the new songs would be “Tuesday's Gone,” “Mississippi Kid,” and “Poison Whiskey.” Skynyrd went back home to rehearse the songs, planning to return to Studio One early in April for more polished takes of the tracks. By then, Wilkeson was again coming unglued, adding uncertainty that Ronnie didn't need. He had Ed King make sure to take a bass along with his six-string Fender Stratocaster. As it happened, Leon would make it through two tracks before getting
up and walking out the door, with not a word to anyone. Kooper, seeing this bizarre behavior, believed that Wilkeson “was actually frightened of all the responsibilities that would be forthcoming” and created an exit scenario. In any case, he hitchhiked back to Jacksonville, leaving King to step in, which he did seamlessly, having memorized all of Wilkeson's bass lines to the chosen songs.

Kooper was delighted that King not only played the lines but added “little flourishes, slides and grace notes that made the difference between bass playing and art.” As the sessions went on, Kooper would make further use of King, as the third lead guitar. It was little wonder that when people first heard these songs the guitars leapt out of the radio and off turntables. With Kooper doubling the guitar tracks, a massive, coiled font of sound erupted, through which certain notes seemed to climb out of a distant, dewy mist and move from one stereo channel to the other and across the aural spectrum—the nearly
visual
nature of the Skynyrd sound that would be their signature. The other newcomer, Billy Powell, was another pleasant tool for Kooper, his nimble, bluesy piano accents—“all the textures,” Kooper called them—an effective counterpoint to the deafening din of all those guitars. On “Tuesday's Gone,” a hazy ballad mourning the things left behind in the course of a man movin' on—e.g., “My baby's gone with the wind again”—the guitars gently weeped. It was one of the last songs recorded, and Powell had come up with a solo that Kooper called a “beautiful little sonata.” Kooper got in on the session too, playing the mellotron, the keyboard/synthesizer contraption that creates an orchestral sound from recorded tape segments—the forerunner of modern studio sampling.

He also played on “Mississippi Kid,” a jug band-style rag with the requisite tale about crossing the state line into Alabama to “fetch” a straying woman, with the ominous vow that “I'm not looking for no trouble, but nobody dogs me 'round.” Kooper hired his old Blues Project/Blood, Sweat and Tears compadre Steve Katz to add a wailing harmonica part. Kooper also heard the need for a mandolin. Obsessive as he was, he called every mandolin player in the musicians directory, in vain, and then scoured music stores in the area until he found a mandolin selling for forty bucks and taught himself the chords of the song. (Pertinent to Skynyrd trivia freaks is that Bob Burns, who took ill, didn't play on this track; Atlanta Rhythm Section drummer Robert Nix took his place.)

Knocked out as he was by Powell, whose solos he says were “truly unique,” Kooper did have to temper Billy's tendency as a classic pianist to overplay with his left hand, which at times drowned out some of the more nuanced guitar notes. Improvising, he had Powell play with his left hand
tied to the piano bench
. Billy was none too pleased, but when the band would chafe at some Kooper direction, Ronnie would intervene for the producer, if with a little dig.

“Awright, wait a second,” he said during one session. “I think that idea sucks too but I will listen to everything Al says. Maybe once in twenty times he'll have a great idea, but I will suffer the other nineteen times because that twentieth one will make us sound better, so go easy on the old guy!” Never mind that, at the time, Van Zant was twenty-five and Kooper all of twenty-nine. Ronnie always did live in his own reality warp. And when
he
had an objection to a Kooper directive, the “old guy” knew he'd have to back down. That happened most emphatically when Kooper didn't think “Simple Man,” a rare Ronnie reference to the down-home wisdom of Sis Van Zant—“Take your time. Don't live too fast / Troubles will come and they will pass”—was strong enough to go on the album.

“You guys are not gonna cut that song,” Kooper told them.

Ronnie was not about to argue the point. He took Kooper out to the parking lot and opened the door to Kooper's Bentley. “Get in,” he said. Too petrified to resist, Al slid into the driver's seat. Ronnie, standing outside the open window, had just one thing to say.

“When we're done cuttin' it, we'll call you.”

Recalls Rossington: “We cut the whole tune without him.”

This is another of those slices of Skynyrd BS lore that likely didn't quite happen. Although the band and the producer had numerous runins, and arguments were de rigueur, Kooper need not have been banished that day; rather, he gave in on “Simple Man”—“it did fit, and I was wrong,” he later said, adding, “I'm glad it did go on the album”—and also played organ on the session. Kooper's role in buffing, tweaking, and polishing Skynyrd's backwoods rock with technical proficiency, even perfection, without compromising its essence and character is one of the great rock triumphs of all time. Not an ounce of what came out of his studio was either under- or overproduced, nor was any element more or less spacious or more or less biting than was intended when the band
composed and played it. Needless to say, he couldn't have made chickens out of chicken poop. Not just any band could have been buffed into the next big thing in rock—Skynyrd was not just any band. Thus, everything that came out of these sessions constituted the ingredients of what made Skynyrd into
Skynyrd
.