Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (29 page)

Burns for many reasons can feel he saved his life when he quit the band, and on some level Ronnie and the others probably envied him
and wished they could have dropped out for a while, something that was impossible by then. Skynyrd in fact had already found a new drummer before Burns split. Back at the time of the session for “Saturday Night Special,” Burns had begged off, saying he was too exhausted from touring to do justice to the song. Seeking a fill-in, Ronnie asked Charlie Daniels if he knew of a drummer, and Daniels touted a guy with the lyrical name of Thomas Delmer Pyle. Born in Louisville, he served in the marines during the Vietnam War and then studied music at Tennessee Technical College. There, some classmates oddly dubbed him “Artemis,” after the ancient Greek
goddess
of the wildland, the hunt, and wild animals, apparently because of the long, wavy tresses that fell halfway down his back and his tendency to behave, well, wildly. He adopted it willingly, and then legally, though he changed the spelling to the more Americanized “Artimus.”

Threading his way through the country-rock scene, Pyle had played gigs with Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band, and unlike most drummers was not content with going unnoticed. Instead, he was indeed a wild man. Looking like Jesus with his long beard and endless hair parted in the middle, he threw his elastic arms around like pick-up sticks, his legs churning as he beat on the bass drum, yet for all that, he kept a steady beat and was able to downshift from loud banging to delicate pawing at the snare and cymbals. Ronnie was impressed and had Pyle play at a gig at Jacksonville's Sergeant Pepper's Club and then took him to Doraville to play on “Saturday Night Special,” which opens with a splendid Pyle shuffle beat. Now, he was called in for more on-the-job training, as the new Skynyrd drummer on their third album. And given Ronnie's precise specifications, he had very little slack. When Allen told bassist Larry Steele of the Burns breakdown and the importation of Pyle, he raved to the great bass man, “You gotta hear this guy! He kicks that sound like machine guns—and he takes
acid
before he goes on stage!”

Larry laughed. “And you're tellin' me
Bob
is actin' crazy?”

The sessions for the album began in early January, but Al Kooper's participation was uncertain. Months before, with his Sounds of the South deal with MCA due to expire in a year, the parent company wanted to buy him out, thereby giving them ownership of the SOS catalog—though
all they really wanted was Skynyrd. MCA had already dissed Kooper by taking his imprint off Skynyrd records since
pronounced
, and they were prepared to put the new album in jeopardy to force him to sell out. First they threatened to withhold Kooper's royalties from the first two Skynyrd albums and then keep him from producing anyone else for the duration of the contract until he came around. But Kooper could play some hardball himself. His manager, Stan Polley, was a man whose name made industry people shudder or want to kill themselves—indeed, the latter actually happened when he managed the British band Badfinger in the 1970s, when Kooper had played in the band and been represented by him. When Polley, who was rumored to have mob connections, was unable to account for an escrow account that held Badfinger's earnings, guitarist Pete Ham committed suicide, leaving a note that read: “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard.”

Kooper, however, had not severed ties with Polley, and now he sicced him on MCA. Kooper would sell, Polley informed them, but only if MCA shelled out a cool million dollars. And there was another nonnegotiable demand: the royalty rates for Skynyrd and Kooper—the band getting a puny five points, and Kooper, ten—would need to be flipped. This was Kooper's way of keeping his word to Ronnie that he would take care of them down the road, but MCA stalled, apparently hoping Kooper would eventually fold. MCA went ahead and rented an Atlanta studio, Webb IV, for the Skynyrd album. The studio was owned by Bang Records, which had recently moved to the South, mainly to accommodate Paul Davis, a Mississippian and the label's top act.

Kooper would not fold—MCA did. It took almost right up until January, but they made the deal on Kooper's terms. Suddenly, he was a million dollars heavier, and Skynyrd had a doubled royalty rate. As Kooper giggled, “Things were
very
good. Everyone was
extremely
happy—except probably Alan Walden.” MCA people who were there disagree with Kooper's version of this history. Bob Davis said the decision to buy the producer out wasn't the company's but a ploy by the group to land a hefty advance. As Davis tells it, “The Skynyrd people came to MCA and said, ‘We really need you to help us out. What we'd like for you to do is buy out [SOS] so that we could then begin a direct relationship with MCA.”

The million-dollar buyout of Kooper, the band explained, according to this version of events, would be an advance on future royalties
that Skynyrd would make back in half the time—provided their royalty rate was doubled. That rate, they said, “would be more consistent with artists of our stature.” Said Davis: “There was no doubt that the deal was made with MCA by Skynyrd's representatives.” In any case, figuring he had done enough with, and made enough from, southern rock, Kooper was ready to move on again, now to the happening scene in L.A. Then, with the date of the Skynyrd sessions creeping up, Ronnie made another demand of MCA—the band wanted Al to produce the album. This was quite a concession by Skynyrd, all of whom had grown weary of Kooper's hectoring in the studio. Working with him, Wilkeson once said, “became such an intricate thing. He was telling us what to do the whole time.” Leon also went as far as to say, “It was Al Kooper who actually started the whole rowdy image for us”—a laughable contention, to be sure. Yet feeling they could not shoulder a failure at this stage and with scant time to look for another producer, they needed the security and familiarity of the egoist with the white-man's Afro and the goggle glasses.

Over a barrel, MCA, which had been at war with Kooper, sheepishly called and asked him to take the gig, which Kooper was all too happy to do, as it would earn him royalties on a third Skynyrd album that was sure to go through the roof. He hastened to Webb IV studios, happily anticipating another wealth of Skynyrd material. Instead, he found nothing. With the band having spent so much time on the road, there had been no time for writing and rehearsing, a condition that would be the norm from then on. They had a deadline of one month to record the album, meaning that, starting from scratch, they'd need to compose and cut eight strong songs right there in the studio. Kooper may have pondered whether he should have gone off to Los Angeles after all. Adding to his misery, after meticulously setting up the microphones for the first session, he walked in the next day and found they had all been rearranged by Bang engineer Dave Evans, who had convinced the band to do it his way—a violation of studio protocol, according to which the producer generally rules.

Kooper was livid and, out of spite, said
all
such decisions would be made by Evans. As the difficult sessions went on, Kooper said, there was “incredible tension” and little got done. Trying to get things off square one, Kooper, who was also facing jail time on a drug possession
conviction at the time, decided the best thing he could do was leave the band alone and go party in New York. He told Ronnie, “I trust you and believe in you, I know you can do it.” When he returned, the band had only two weeks to get it done, but Ronnie, whom Kooper calls “a man among men,” had indeed taken charge, writing all the necessary tracks. As Ed King recalls, “We all worked together and had ideas and wrote songs on the spot. We were tending now to go in a bit more simple direction than we had in the past.”

With “Saturday Night Special” in the can, the first song to be cut, on January 11, was the Collins-Van Zant track “On the Hunt,” the new album's tribute to Free, who had recorded a song called “The Hunter.” Kooper found it to contain “Ronnie's most misogynistic lyric ever”; Van Zant sang, “In these two things you must take pride. That's a horse and woman … both of them you ride.” A close second in misogyny was the next song in line, the blues ballad “Cheatin' Woman,” in which he considered gunning down his unfaithful woman, à la “Hey Joe.” “You won't bother poor me no longer,” he threatened in this tune. Kooper earned a writer's credit for it with Van Zant and Rossington, as he played organ and electric piano on the song. Then came the Van Zant-Collins original “I'm a Country Boy,” a sweaty, bluesy kiss-off to both coasts with their cars and smoke “chokin' up my air.” In King and Van Zant's “Railroad Song,” its chugging beat aided by a frenetic harmonica line by Wet Willie's Jimmy Hall, Ronnie testified, “I'm goin' to ride this train, Lord, until I find out / What Jimmie Rodgers and the Hag was all about” (“the Hag” being Merle Haggard).

With the deadline closing in, sessions were lasting sixteen hours at a stretch, and when Kooper was gassed out, somebody, he said, “slipped some speed into my can of soda.” With all of them speeding, the last three cuts fell in place. There was Van Zant and Rossington's “Am I Losin',” which showed off Ronnie's soft, sentimental side and was sympathetically written to Bob Burns. Kooper thought the ballad, featuring a smooth vocal, acoustic guitar, and banjo, was “the mellowest, most country thing Skynyrd had ever cut”; it included Kooper on background vocal, there being no time to hire any backup singers. Then, appropriating Shorty Medlocke's old adage, Van Zant and King cowrote “Made in the Shade,” a hillbilly rag with a spoken Van Zant preface—“Well when I was a young-un, they used to teach me to play music like this
here”—followed by a jug-band melange of mandolin, dobro, honky-tonk piano, and synthesized tuba.

The last track was “Whiskey Rock-A-Roller,” which gave Billy Powell a credit with Van Zant and King, its honky-tonk noodling and muscular guitar licks a breath of fresh air. Kooper would overdub a second piano part by the producer David Foster when he mixed the album in L.A. in early February, his last official act as producer for Lynyrd Skynyrd.

In many ways, the content of the album was antithetical to the band's desire to break out of old molds; indeed, the work, called
Nuthin' Fancy
, can fairly, and ironically, be called Skynyrd's “country album.” Much of it was mindless and to the gut—exactly what they were going for, given the lack of thought-inducing time they all had. And as it turned out, it was probably exactly what Skynyrd needed after all the hoopla about “Sweet Home Alabama.” Clearly, though, MCA was thinking of something else; they had worked up a cover that repositioned the band as All-American megastars, neon replacing sawdust. The art no longer used subliminal similarities to the Allman Brothers nor paleontological parallels to Black Sabbath. Their name was printed not in bones but with futuristic letters that looked like florescent bulbs.

The group's idea for a cover photo, however, was intriguingly and decidedly unglamorous. They stood perched on a brick wall under, not the blue skies of Alabama, but the thick cloudy skies of Georgia. It was as stark as the back cover was a lighthearted hoot, depicting them striding down a dirt road, Billy Powell's middle finger upraised. The credits included baubles like “Ronnie Van Zant: Lead Vocals, Lyrics and Lots More J&B,” “Allen Collins: Gibson Firebird and Trout Voice,” and “Artimus Pyle: Drums, Percussion and Determination.” And on the inner front sleeve, within a photo montage of the band, was a sign reading:
FOR SALE, LEONARD SKINNER REALTY
, 389-1396—a debt of gratitude now repaid. The old gym coach had left coaching to go into real estate in Jacksonville and, good egg that he was, allowed them to use the sign gratis.