Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (33 page)

“The other guys, they had to put up with all that. It was either that or live the blue-collar life that faced them growing up in Jacksonville. There
was no out for anybody, because when you're born on the west side of Jacksonville and you've got this success on your plate right in front of you, what are you going to do, walk away? And I wasn't from there. So I could.”

The day King split, Artimus Pyle became enraged at Van Zant for precipitating it. “I had a major fight with Ronnie,” he once said. “I was pissed off because I liked Ed and wanted him in the band. So I went to Ronnie's room and me and Ronnie, we went
to it.”

Artimus, who has insisted he was the only one in the band not deathly afraid of confronting Ronnie, didn't say exactly
how
they went to it or the toll it might have taken on someone's teeth. But nothing changed. And while only a few months back they had all been on a high, now, it seemed
nobody
was happy. John Haury, who played in the John Lee Walker Band, Skynyrd's opening act on some dates during the tour, hadn't realized just how much bad blood there was within the band of redneck “brothers.” “There were some nights,” he said, “everybody would arrive at the show separately and none of them were talking to each other.”

For a band in the middle of a long tour, the timing of Ed King's departure was indeed ominous. Some big dates were coming up, including a few in New York City a week ahead and the fall tour of Europe. Yet Ronnie was hesitant about hiring a permanent replacement; with the way they could overdub in the studio, he believed the two guitarists could create any sort of multiple-instrument sonic effect. And out on the road, Kevin Elson at the board was able to mix the feedback from all those microphones in a way that would
sound
like three guitars or more. This highly technical proficiency was in stark contrast to the continuing beastly behavior within the band. Other incidents on the tour showed Ronnie indeed had cause to wail, “Lord help me, I can't change.”

In late June, after a show in Louisville, Ronnie, who had been in a foul mood the whole tour, was awakened at the hotel by a loud argument in the hall between Billy Powell and a road manager. Wrapping a towel around himself, he came out of his room and yelled, “Cool it!” Billy, not appreciating the intrusion, told him, “Fuck you.” Ronnie recalled what happened next: “I just walked over and knocked Billy's teeth out, hit the
road manager and knocked him down. Then my towel fell off in front of the fuckin' spectators.”

After Ronnie went back to his room with no contrition, Billy—for the second time after being a Van Zant target—picked his teeth off the floor, six of them this time. He marched to Ronnie's room and banged on the door and, when Ronnie opened it, screamed, as if with marbles in his mouth, “You're gonna pay for the dentist bill!” Ronnie was so hysterical at the sight and sound of Powell, dripping blood and semitoothless, that he guffawed and got out his checkbook. “I'm sorry, Billy,” he said. “Here's the check, man.” At least Billy could say he took one for the team by giving Ronnie something to smile at.

The open question was whether Ronnie would alienate
everyone
in the band before he was through. He was still the fighter, but now he was something a good fighter can never afford to be: out of control. He was quite honest about that fact too, and why. “We were doing bottles of Dom Perignon, fifths of whiskey, wine, and beer,” he would say. “We couldn't even remember the order of the songs. Some guy crouched behind an amp and shouted them to us. We made the Who look like church boys on Sunday. We done things only fools'd do.”

Near the end of the tour, no amount of wreckage or booze or anything else could blow off enough steam to clear their heads or battered bodies. Four days after Ronnie's assault on Powell came a frightening moment in Charlotte. Two shows that week had to be canceled because Ronnie felt under the weather. Then, during the show in Charlotte, he felt faint and nearly blacked out. After making it through, he collapsed backstage and was taken to a hospital where they pumped the
right
kind of fluids into him. Two days later, he was back on his feet on stage in Jackson, Mississippi. Things were near a breaking point. Feeling the strain, Gary would openly start crying for no particular reason. Sometimes one or more of them would be so drunk, they couldn't play a decent lick; at those times, Elson would turn off their mikes from the sound board, which happened more than anyone ever knew.

But none of the wreckage they caused themselves or their habitats caused any damage to the band's marketability—quite the contrary. There seemed to be only new high-water marks. They opened for Eric Clapton in Memphis on April 12, and the June 19 issue of
Rolling Stone
gave them props, if still not fully aware of where they came from, nor
how many musicians were onstage: “With three full-time electric guitarists, a piano player and a fireplug of a lead singer who looks like Robert Blake's Baretta in a hippie disguise, Georgia's Lynyrd Skynyrd presents an unusually broad front line … [and is] a must see.”

They would not come off the road until July 6, when they played their hometown—for the first time since March 20, 1974—a gig steeped in irony for them since, as Gary would say, “Jacksonville never gave a shit about us until we were famous all over the world.” Yet, almost as a taunting reminder of the town's recalcitrance, even that homecoming gig turned ugly. At the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Coliseum they were introduced by none other than Leonard Skinner, the man whose name they had made synonymous with rock's newest wave. Perhaps feeling he was too big to stay a gym coach or realtor, Skinner had opened a couple of bars. One was the Still, which he renamed Leonard Skinner's on San Juan Avenue, where rock-and-roll bands, with their long hair, played.

After Skinner's name and phone number appeared on the inner sleeve of
Nuthin' Fancy
, his phone, predictably, rang off the hook, yet it said something that he didn't change the number. Sought out for interviews, he would leap at the chance to tell the story that had made him, as the
New York Times
said in its obituary of him in 2010, “arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture.” Yet as far as he and they had come, Skinner must have wondered that night if he had been right all along about those Shantytown boys. After the Charlie Daniels Band warmed up the sold-out crowd, Skynyrd assembled under the Stars and Bars, but after only a few songs Ronnie became raspy, then began coughing up blood. He stopped in midsong, made a brief announcement that his throat was bleeding, and left the stage. The rest of the band stood around waiting for him to come back, whereupon impatient fans threw bottles onto the stage, which shattered like fragment bombs.

That drove the band offstage, too, where confusion reigned. No further announcement was made, and angry fans in the crowd of fifteen thousand, who had paid a top-shelf six dollars per ticket, stormed onto the stage, kicking at and destroying some of the equipment and instruments. Fights broke out everywhere in the crowd. With a riot erupting,
cops brandishing guns were called to the arena. Backstage, Ronnie had again collapsed and was being taken to the emergency room. And Skynyrd, not fighting this time but cutting and running, left the building and ducked into waiting limousines, dodging more bottles thrown by fans who had gathered at the stage door, as roadies salvaged whatever they could on the stage.

The
Jacksonville Journal
headline the next day blared,
THE MUSIC STOPPED AND THE FIGHT STARTED
. There had been $1,400 in damage done to the building, with sixteen people arrested and one cop injured. The promoters tried to dun Rudge for the refunds they had to make, but they were chasing a shadow—he'd wisely put in all of Skynyrd's booking contracts that any cancellation due to medical reasons, which could conceivably apply to alcohol or any other “medicinal” cause, absolved them of any financial amercement. The easy conclusion to draw from all this was that Skynyrd had gotten what they had wrought: people didn't only come to see the band of brawlin' rednecks; they came to mess with 'em, even
fight
'em, in a kind of bonding ritual. The mayhem now seemed part and parcel of the Skynyrd experience. During the tour a fan had thrown a package of lit firecrackers onto the stage, sending them scrambling; another time, in Salt Lake City, as Van Zant would recall, “some guy got on stage and had a knife [and] was going for me. One of the security guys got him first, but he cut the security guy all up.”

Only a month and a half after the melee in Jacksonville, Skynyrd gulped hard and took another gig opening for Black Sabbath in Jersey City. Leon again wore his holster, but when a 45-rpm plastic record came skimming from the crowd, he couldn't prevent it from lodging in his neck, inches from his carotid artery. At other times, as he said later, “I've had bottles thrown within inches of my head.” The band certainly was the subject of great wonderment, incredulity—and danger. And the implication regarding any Skynyrd concert was: come and buy a ticket—you might not only
see
a fight, you might be
in
one. This being so, some of their critics would sense a very discomfiting retrenchment of Old South norms; as Mark Kemp wrote, “Unfortunately, their image merely reinforced stereotypes of the South—not the aw-shucks sentimentalism of Andy Griffith's fictional TV character, but the ass-whupping aggression of the real-life Bull Connor.”

In truth, a Skynyrd concert, while a showcase of ass-whupping aggression to be sure, was hardly an homage to Bull Connor. Rather, they were seminally punk, pushing no tangible agenda, spitting in the face of all authority. They were truly scary in one respect—to other, bigger bands for whom they opened. On September 1, the second day of the California swing, they were to open for the Kinks, who decided to cancel at the last minute, not denying rumors that they'd had second thoughts about having to follow Skynyrd—who would want to have to come out and play after “Free Bird”? Skynyrd said they'd go on regardless, sparing the promoters from having to dump the whole show, and few asked for refunds.

Given who and what they were, any publicity was good publicity. Thus a headline such as one in
Circus Raves
in September—
LYNYRD SKYNYRD IN TURMOIL
—was merely free advertising, furthering the theme of bad boys being bad boys. In the grand scheme of things, at least when it came to their bottom line, if not their mental and physical state of being, a much more significant headline was the one in the October 11 issue of
Billboard
—
LYNYRD SKYNYRD:
3
GOLD LPS IN A ROW
.
Pronounced
had reached that milestone in September 1974, with
Second Helping
following three months later and
Nuthin' Fancy
in June 1975. Forty years later, with no headlines or advertising needed, the albums go on selling. And nobody still wants to have to come out and play after “Free Bird.”