Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (21 page)

Kooper was beaming that night. Skynyrd, he said, “stole the show. They mustered up all of their inherent discipline and put together a show that
floored
these people.” Suddenly, his “Beatles,” Mose Jones, were on the back burner. Everything was about Skynyrd now. So triumphant was the evening that Gary Rossington recalls it as the very moment Kooper asked to sign them, saying that he “brushed the other two groups off and
said, ‘Hey, you're signed.'” Of course, as with many Rossington recollections, this is way off target, but the gig was certainly productive; having passed this audition of sorts, they were booked to play six more shows at Richard's and then again in September opening for Bonnie Bramlett.

Prepared to bank everything on Skynyrd, Kooper had already convinced MCA to throw all of its promotional clout behind them, including $100,000 for those skull-and-bones-dotted promotional and ad campaigns. MCA's creative directors could hardly imagine how the image fit a bunch of dusty rednecks and a lead singer who just sang. But they trusted Kooper and went full steam ahead. By the time the album was released on August 13, 1973, the L.A.-based public relations agency Norman Winter Associates was hired to ensure the name was actually pronounced correctly, preferably when record buyers walked into music stores and asked for the album. That week, a very expensive two-page ad ran in the music trade papers,
Variety
and
Billboard
.

By then, too, Ronnie had made it his business to talk Leon Wilkeson back. Toward that end, he had insisted that Leon be in the group shot on the cover of
pronounced
, allowing him to enjoy a rank he hadn't really earned by playing on just two tracks. His name was also on the back cover's album credits. Indeed, as with the prodigal Bob Burns, Wilkeson was never written out of the band, and he would be given a one-seventh share of the royalties from sales of the album—a hell of a better payday than he'd earn stuffing ice cream cones for sniveling kids, as he was doing at the Best Dairy in Jacksonville. In Ronnie's value system, a bandmate he judged to be worthy of the Skynyrd brand—as opposed to, say, Larry Junstrom—was a bandmate forever. Skynyrd was more than a band to him now; it was an all-for-one, well,
confederacy
, born of a blood bond that went beyond even family and had less to do with music than it did with honor. Thus he had no trouble bringing Leon back into the ring in time to play on the next album, never again to stray from the fold.

For the Skynyrd rollout, nothing was left to chance and every advantage was sought. In planning their first tour to sell the album, Kooper's connections stretched a long way. Putting the word out across the rock meridians that Skynyrd would be available to open for a big act that might be concurrently touring, he received an invitation from Alice
Cooper née Vincent Furnier, the leather-covered, face paint-streaked rocker who was more shlock than shock. It seemed to be the best they could possibly do—but only until Kooper was in L.A. on business and happened to be in the MCA offices. There he ran into Pete Townsend and fellow Brit Peter Rudge, whose management firm, Sir Productions, managed the Who's world tours, as well as those of the Rolling Stones.

MCA had just subsumed the group's longtime label, Decca, and their first release on MCA Records in the States would be the Townsend-composed rock-opera double album
Quadrophenia
, to be released in late October when their new world tour would begin, a humongous event, to be sure. Kooper, who had done session work in London and had even planned to move there before catching the Dixie bug, struck up a conversation with Townsend and Rudge about his new southern band. As Kooper recalled, “Miraculously, the timing was perfect. The Who were looking for a young buzz act that they felt could sell whatever seat deficit was left over from their own fans.” This was important since such an act would reduce the Who's red ink, which would be plentiful given the enormous budget they would foot for their battleship-sized stages and elaborate light show.

Rossington, with his usual abbreviation of the facts, recalled that Townsend listened to their album “and he said, ‘Hey, I like this group here, get them to open for us.'” Rudge listened too and agreed. Kooper then ran the idea by the band, who knew there was no way they could let the opportunity slide yet were still abashed. “Up until then,” said Rossington, “we had been playing clubs, like three hundred people, one hundred people, and the next day [Rudge] said, ‘You wanna do this tour?'” Adds Ed King, “Everyone else was scared shitless for us. [MCA] was a little leery. I mean, they took us to a Who gig with Mylon LeFevre, the opening act, and he was just booed off the stage. He got eaten up.” LeFevre was also a southern act, albeit a gospel-blues singer, and the reaction could not have helped his state of mind; a few months later, he died of a heroin overdose.

Recalls Alex Hodges, “It wasn't a slam dunk, I'll tell you that. Alan [Walden] likes to boast that he made the tour, but, you know, that's Alan, thinking of Alan. There was a lot of dissent about it; it wasn't only that it was a daunting thing to go out there with The Who. I remember I had booked about fifteen dates for Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas, and
those were for a lot more money. Skynyrd was already making $2,000 a night, and the Who tour paid us $750 a night. But I told Alan, ‘You gotta do it.' We'd get them into bigger arenas, move up into a bigger league. It was a career decision. And Alan ultimately made the decision to go. He said, ‘OK, but if it goes wrong I'm blamin' you.' He was jokin', of course, but that's how concerned he was that we weren't ready for that kind of heat yet.”

And so, leery as they were, Skynyrd pulled out of the Alice Cooper deal and became the latest victim, er, opening act for the Who. The first thing they did was get drunk—not for the first time and definitely not the last.

The Who tour, which would hit the United States on November 20 in San Francisco, would propel the Skynyrd rollout onto a higher level, putting them into the biggest arenas and stadiums. Getting their feet wet, they worked toward that, playing another week at Richard's and then taking it on the road: headlining at the Cellar in Charlotte, North Carolina; backing up the New York Dolls at the Lion's Den in Saint Louis; headlining at the Paramount Theatre in Palm Beach, the Peabody Auditorium in Daytona Beach, the Fine Arts Theater in Augusta, and the Mill Hall in Athens; then up to the northeast, to the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, dates in Rochester, New York, and Portland, Maine; on Halloween night, their first
big
venue—Avery Fisher Hall in New York City—for two shows, opening for Kooper's Blues Project; heading back south, to Birmingham, Alabama, and Charleston; and finally up to Jersey again to play at Princeton's McCarter Theatre.

The Atlanta gig, at the recently opened Omni Coliseum, was as much a show of their mettle as their metal. This was the first of a number of concerts at which they, as the opening act, had to salvage a pay date. As Hodges remembers, “Blue Oyster Cult was the main act that night. But the place was new—it wasn't even fully built. And the sound system for the building hadn't gotten there yet—there was no amplifiers. So Blue Oyster Cult said, ‘Fuck it, we ain't goin' on.' The promoter didn't know what to do. He was thinkin' he was gonna have to give back sixteen thousand refunds. So he called me and put Ronnie on the phone. And Ronnie says, ‘The fans are all here, and we're all set up to play—but
there's no sound system, the rig didn't come, the other guys went home. What do we do?'

“I'm thinking, ‘Thanks for puttin' all this on me, pal.' I just winged it. I said, ‘Ronnie, is there a PA system in that building? You can hook microphones into it and sing and play through the PA. It won't be great, but you can do it.' I said, ‘Look, it's gonna be your call, but I will tell you exactly what'll happen. You'll go up on stage, grab a microphone, and tell those people, ‘I want to talk to you for a second,' you'll tell 'em the headliners aren't there but that Skynyrd's gonna play without amps. You're gonna ask them, ‘Do you want us to play?' Because I knew they'd scream,
‘Yeaaaahhhh!'
I said, ‘You're already big in Atlanta. This will be something the fans will never forget. They'll love it. You'll walk off that sage, and you will own Atlanta forever.' And they played, and that's what happened. I had to feel pretty good about it. I didn't really know it would work—I was just pullin' somethin' out of my butt to get 'em to play.”

They had been scheduled for a six-show run at Kenny's Castaways in New York City, which would have been a huge step, but with the Who tour about to commence, the run was canceled. Gearing up, they flew cross-country to meet up with the superstar band at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on November 18, with a buzz about them. That month,
Cashbox
, another trade paper, was one of the first to take note of them, its reviewer writing, “Watch for this band. Tight, mean and rough, they're one of the few rock acts in the business that really get it on.” The bisection of the bad-boy Brit whitenecks and the bad-boy Deep South rednecks was a devil's bargain in itself. By being brought into the circle of one of the world's biggest acts, the country rockers were turned up all right, and turned on. They were able to observe and hang with all-time great rockers and self-abusers, drinking in—literally—the lifestyle of rock icons, as well as invaluable tips on showmanship, musicianship, and the mandatory misbehavior methods of the contemporary rock culture.

At that very first show at the Cow Palace, Keith Moon, a sprite with an endless capacity for self-destruction, consumed massive quantities of brandy and tranquilizer pills meant for zoo animals. He passed out on his drum stool during “Won't Get Fooled Again” and, after a break backstage, did it again during “Magic Bus.” When Moon was carted off again, Townshend, looking more resigned than angered or concerned,
having had to do this before, asked the audience, “Can anyone play the drums?—I mean somebody good?” A nineteen-year-old audience member, Scott Halpin, did so, legendarily, and the show went on. By contrast, Skynyrd, nervous as they were, having graduated from two hundred-seat clubs to a hall with twenty-two thousand screaming people, had preceded them and given their usual overheated performance, with no forced theatrics, no one falling off a stool, and no one stumbling about the stage in a drunken shamble. Their “light show” was the passion they had for the music, carried across in Van Zant's anchoring voice and those three guitars that didn't need to be set ablaze to sound like they were on fire. That first night, playing a set limited to thirty minutes, they nonetheless caused such a stir that the audience begged for an encore.

Kooper, who had been watching from the wings, recalled Townsend and Rudge as “incredulous,” quoting Rudge as saying, “I have
never
seen this happen with any Who opening band.”

Kooper had little time to observe. He had taken an active, hands-on role on the tour, dropping himself behind the sound mixing board during their time on stage, a chore he would not trust to Kevin Elson, their usual soundman. Such were the stakes on this tour that the aural shadings of the songs had to be perfect. This was a rather amazing sight, a record company executive mixing the sound—as Kooper would say, “Let's see Clive Davis do this!” What's more, he had to do it in unorthodox fashion, with the board not out in the audience so as to hear if the band was being amplified loud enough, but in the wings. This was per Townsend's orders; if he thought
his
soundman, Bob Pridden, messed up, he could walk over and attack him, verbally or even physically, something he did regularly during the tour. To ease the task, Kooper hired people to filter through the crowds and report to him on the sound levels via a walkie-talkie telemetry system. Again, nothing was left to chance.