Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (32 page)

It helped that they had the luxury to do that, write a check, and move on. But for Ronnie, it was never even that easy. He was just as ready to use his fists on people as on walls. In June 1975 he used them on an innocent bystander, Brusco. “I thought I'd gotten to know Ronnie pretty well, but you never really got to know him well because he could turn on you no matter how tight you were with him. He turned on Gary all the time. He'd pop him out of nowhere,
bang
, and both he and Gary would just go on about their business like nothing happened.

“Gary was used to that. I wasn't. After the show at the Beacon Theatre in New York, we were out late and Gary and I were a little loud in the hallway and Ronnie decided that he was gonna square off with us—with
me
. You know how for a fight you have a bell? Well, I got hit before the bell rang. That was Ronnie's way, he didn't waste any time. He just came up to me and
boom
. I went down, lights out. And Gary didn't even bat an eyelash. He just went to his room, leaving me there on the floor, not out of meanness but because something like that was an everyday occurrence.

“Nobody really got hurt when Ronnie did shit like that. If he wanted to kill you, he could. He just wanted to clock you, to keep you in line. He was very good at creepin' you—that's what they called it, that Ronnie was creepin' you. I got up in a few minutes, the damage mostly to my pride. I figured maybe Ronnie only did that to people he liked.”

Of course, that term—“creepin'”—was the creepy way Ronnie had described that ominous black cat in “Saturday Night Special.” He obviously believed it fit him just as well. In truth,
he
was the black cat. When he crept up on you, he was bad luck. Rossington seemed to be his favorite target. Once, everyone in the band was draining bottles of Schnapps, and “somehow,” Rossington said, “a bottle got broke and I ended up with slashes across my hands and wrists. But the next day, we were the best of friends again. That's how it was, like a family.”

As Powell learned, it was a family one might only see in horror movies. His operative phrase for Van Zant was “Jekyll and Hyde.” “I remember arguing with him once, after a few whiskeys, about Allen Collins' volume and tuning up onstage,” Powell said. “Next thing I know, I got four of my teeth knocked out.” Ed King, not being in the circle of Jacksonville boys, observed Van Zant almost as a dispassionate outsider and came to see him as a threat to anyone around him and to himself.

“It was always a perplexing thing to me, why they descended to violence and craziness,” says Alex Hodges, “because living the demented rock lifestyle wasn't what it was about to them. It was more that they had all these weird backgrounds and never had a sense of normalcy, even from a young age on. They had dark impulses, and they just flashed without warning. I didn't want to get too close to what made them that way because I didn't understand it, didn't
want
to understand it. If you got too close, you might wind up like Charlie Brusco, out cold on the floor and with a busted lip. I was lucky. 'Cause Ronnie never looked at me cross-eyed, so I must have been doin' something right.”

The unfortunate ones clearly weren't, at least according to Ronnie's warped value system. Ed King tells of a frightful incident when Ronnie came into the hotel room he was sharing with King, “drag[ging] a young woman and beating her senselessly. He threw her head into a nightstand three or four times—I mean, he really fucked her up.”

“Ronnie!” Ed shouted at him. “What the hell did she do, man?”

“She swallowed my yellow jacket,” he said, meaning a yellow-colored speed pill.

It was as good a reason as any for Ronnie Van Zant, rock-and-roll star, to act like a raging, abusive asshole.

E
d King, like everyone else, was helpless to stop Van Zant from these sorts of psychotic episodes, which to King were symptomatic of two things: One was something inside Ronnie that he suppressed but that came out in a Freudian rush when he was drunk. “Ronnie,” he said, “was one angry guy…. There was something inside him that was eating him up.” But for a nonsoutherner like King, it signified something else as well—for him, Van Zant was a metaphor for the best and worst of the South, a region King loved but could never transfuse into his own blood, where it resided by birth for Ronnie and the others. And this, he believed, they held against him.

“Though I was an outsider, I could see the whole picture. And I don't mean to be too critical of the South—I love its charm and I do still live there—but, oh, the stupidity sometimes. It exceeds all ignorance.” The worst of it was the “Southern gentlemen” of the band's unstintingly callous treatment of women. “It was unbelievable. You wouldn't even think about doing the kinds of things they did. I was appalled, man. I just thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever encountered. And to them, it was like nothing.”

Al Kooper had the same ambivalence about the band and the region, which hastened his egress from the South. The guns, the misogyny, the routine acceptance of violence and racial stereotypes, all of it got to him eventually; even the sick, drugged-out decadence of L.A.—the
place where, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti sagaciously wrote, “the American Dream came too true”—and the rock scene's fatuous acceptance of misogyny on their terms and its embrace of a jive shaman like Carlos Castañeda imparting meaning to essentially meaningless songs seemed harmless by comparison to a wild-eyed badlands with a gun and ammo store on each corner. For Kooper and King, both nonnatives, an impassable cultural chasm always stood between them and the band. The pictures taken of Skynyrd during the time King was in the band almost all contained some sort of underlying if subconscious proof of his alienation. In nearly every one, King is stuck off to the side, seemingly pushed into or situated by choice on the periphery. Still, even if that's how he felt, he suffered the effects of a kind of Stockholm syndrome when it came to Ronnie, feeling a great deal for him on a personal level but unable to tolerate him when he went over the edge of psychopathy. After the debut album came out, Ronnie had told King he hated his bass playing—“Man, you really suck” was how he put it. Indeed, Van Zant had never had much of a relationship with or attachment to the moon-faced Jersey native. Never did King feel he was “one of them” beyond the useful expertise he contributed to the band. Indeed, Ronnie wanted him off the bass and on guitar, creating more “Sweet Home Alabama” riffs. The three-lead-guitar attack that the song had begotten meant King was needed, an invaluable asset on that instrument and a catalyst for the best songs Ronnie ever wrote. Still, King couldn't disregard the nagging, gnawing feeling in his gut that he could take only so much more or risk his own sanity.

The Torture Tour was four months in when he came close. The band was ragged and dog tired, and some nights the shows were awful, such as in Ann Arbor on May 25. This was two days after Ronnie had cold-cocked Gary in Cleveland, and the entire band was out of sorts. King, speaking with a reporter the next day, admitted, “We were terrible. We were just horrible; it didn't happen at all. If I'd have been hit in the head with a tomato and a bottle I would have accepted it. Any other time I'd have been raving mad. The audience was real polite and gave us more applause than we'd deserved.” He went on, “Our band works on pride. If it doesn't turn out, like that, we're ashamed of it. Our live gigs are what we're really proud of; they're what our reputation is built on. When we
go out to promote a record, we can back it up. Tomorrow we're going to spend all day rehearsing. Playing a bad gig like that will bring your spirits up. You're feeling so bad about it, there's no way to go but up.”

That same day, King's spirits were broken. Previously a light drinker, he too had become a prisoner of the bottle. He'd start a half-hour before the show to make sure he was high as a kite on stage. “One night somebody forgot to bring the booze,” he says, “and it just wasn't the same.” After the show the night before, Ronnie and roadie John Butler had gotten into a barroom brawl and spent the night in the local jail for disorderly conduct. Recalls King, “Butler took care of my guitars. It was his job to change my strings every day, and they didn't show up in Pittsburgh for the next show until like five minutes before the show. We didn't know if we'd be able to go on. And that night during ‘Free Bird,' I broke two strings, something I never do.

“On the limousine ride back to the hotel Ronnie was pissed, he told me that I didn't amount to a ‘pimple on Allen Collins' ass,' which I wasn't going to argue with. But then Ronnie started wanting to fight in the limousine and the driver pulled over and got out of the car and said, ‘You guys can drive your own car back.' When I got back to the hotel I said that's it, I just don't need this shit. I mean, if they want to act crazy and fight amongst themselves, that's one thing. But don't steer it my way.”

According to Artimus Pyle, Ronnie told Ed to “hit the road,” in effect, firing him right there; the irony of such a reaction was that Ronnie had thrown it all on Ed to try to get Rudge to cancel a few shows so that the band could rest, something they were badly in need of. Ronnie, shirking his duties as leader, would not ask for it himself, knowing Rudge would never willingly agree to lose money just so the band could chill. When asked about this, King confirms that a few days before the blowup in the limo, “Ronnie came to me and said, ‘Let's cancel some shows.' He said, ‘I haven't got the guts to do it, so you do it.'” King would have; however, after Ronnie either fired or simply humiliated him, he says, “I just walked out the next day.”

If Ronnie had in fact wimped out rather than make a demand of Rudge, that would have marked him as something of a paper tiger. Still, as arrogant as Ronnie was with the other members of the band, he struck King as a real enigma, more in search of respect by default than by deed, given to terrible insults of his own band as if to convince himself of his
own infallibility—a trait that had also become evident by the offense he took when the others indulged heavily in booze and drugs, even as he increased his own capacity to do the same. To Ronnie, his proclivities were no one's business but his—but
theirs
were his business because they threatened the band he'd labored to build. These hypocrisies, mixed with his spontaneous volatility, had become all too much for King, who says, “I had some real problems with Ronnie. I didn't understand why a genius had to act like that.”

The pity for him was that he had joined the band because of Ronnie and had only been comfortable with him. “I didn't care for anything about those other guys. I was always a better guitar player than any of them, anyway. I mean, they wrote some good stuff, but Ronnie was the soul of that band.” Even as he walked away, it was with mixed feelings. “I was real sorry to give it up, but I didn't have any regrets. I had regrets on how I did it … walking out in midtour, but I had to because it was just one of those things that, the longer you stay, the more it has its teeth in you and you can't let it go.”

Not bothering to say good-bye, King caught a cab for the airport and flew back to Jacksonville, where he packed his belongings and headed home with his wife to Greenville. He still hoped that Ronnie would call and ask him back and, better still, admit to his faults. And, he admits, “I would have come back. Yeah, absolutely. But I knew he wouldn't do that. Number one, there was his pride. I walked out on him. And number two, Rudge said, ‘We don't need him.' I mean, [Ronnie] was really mesmerized by Peter Rudge, who was the only person that I'd ever met that mesmerized Ronnie. Because Ronnie had it all over everybody. But he didn't have it over Pete Rudge.”

For King, the portents for the band seemed all bad. “Because it had gotten so violent and it had gotten so mean. I had seen so many mean things. Not necessarily against me but just against people that were close to him, that to me was totally unnecessary. Pretty much every day was traumatic. I just had a bad premonition and felt I should obey the urge to get out when I did. I was from a different mindset from those guys. I was just there to play music. I wasn't in there to get beat up, get spit upon, get dragged around a room, get jagged glass held up to my throat.