Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (35 page)

Now, though, in no small part because of the band whose political motives were so hard to decipher, that thirst for freedom and flight had been transmuted to Lynyrd Skynyrd's songs of the great redeeming qualities of the American South. This was more reason why more than a few Yankees witnessing this amazing metamorphosis felt like wheezing
The horror! The horror!
—at least until a closer listening to their records revealed something beneath the cartoon surface that made the South actually seem worth saving, worth
caring
for.

With these new parameters being so rewarding, Skynyrd enjoyed an infusion of badly needed cash in their pockets. Ronnie and Judy moved
to larger digs, an apartment on the banks of the Cedar River, on—appropriately—Confederate Point Road. Gary Rossington had floated around the area, not settling into a pad he considered home. His drinking had gotten out of hand, and it was almost a relief to those around him when he did cocaine because it meant he wasn't getting so drunk he couldn't see. With those curls and doe-like eyes, he always could reach out and collect any number of women with little effort, and one, a willowy blonde named Martha, became his girlfriend, or so she thought. One morning he rolled over in bed, squinted at her through bloodshot eyes, and asked, “Who are you?” But she stuck with him, and the reward was that in 1977 he would marry her, if not for long.

The cosmetic side of success never overly affected the band. To their credit, they didn't start living lives of wild financial excess. All lived fairly modestly, close to the old neighborhood. They all had either long cars or shiny pickup trucks in their driveways—which they never drove, since all except Artimus had had their licenses suspended for reckless driving, something that would become a graver problem. They could now appreciate how Alan Walden had put money away for their future. Ronnie and Gary had sprung for a fishing boat they named
Bad Company
—for their jukebox hero Paul Rodgers's band but also a term that could describe what they were by then—on which they spent more time reeling in catfish than at home with their wives. Indeed, for Judy, her marriage to Ronnie felt more like a rumor than fact. “I can't even remember the sound of his voice,” she lamented. “He really wasn't home all that much.”

But he did spend enough time with her to knock her up, another accident he believed might be a blessing. His older daughter, Tammy Michelle, was all but estranged from him, and he wanted to believe that becoming a father again, at the right time, would calm down his primitive instincts and impulses and give him a chance to be a family man for the first time in his life, even if 1976 loomed even more hectic than '75. Then, too, proper fatherhood, as opposed to his experience the first time around, not to mention any little mementos of the road that might have been running around out there, might bring him close to Lacy and Sis, whom he practically brushed past on the way out the door when they would drop in on him and Judy. As it was, his boy's constant run-ins with the law had only made Lacy's hair even grayer, though it didn't prevent him from bragging around town about his son's success or sometimes
coming out on the road with them. But in Ronnie's mind, it was easier to avoid Lacy than to promise he would clean up his act. Thus, he erected yet another barrier to their relationship without even knowing it.

As Artimus Pyle came to recognize, “Ronnie's biggest disappointment was that he couldn't please his father. I found that so bizarre because all his father ever did was sing his praises. Yet he felt that way. I could never figure out why because Lacy adored Ronnie. Maybe he never told Ronnie.”

Even now, as accomplished as Van Zant was, he felt inadequate about dropping out. Counseling a roadie to stay in school, he told him, “You're getting something I never had a chance to get, an education. I'd give anything if I could have that now.” Seen through that prism, writing lyrics to a song didn't mean a damn thing. As if to unburden himself, Ronnie himself would brag on Lacy and admit to his failure to live up to his father's expectations. In 1975 he told an interviewer, “I learned everything I know from him. He always wanted me to be something I could never be—and I'm sorry to disappoint him. He wanted me to be just like him. But I couldn't be.”

B
y age twenty-seven, it was about time Ronnie Van Zant grew up. As it was, with his thinning hair and expanding waistline, he looked around forty, and was also a touch more well appointed. Rudge forbade the leader of the “American Stones” from coming onstage barefoot—something Van Zant had never let on was the result of his old football ankle injury, which made it hard to stand a long time in shoes, instead saying that he just liked to “feel the burn” of the stage boards. Now he would need to grin and bear the pain. Now, too, he could chuck his old sweat-stained hats and don replacements made specially for him by the Texas Hatters company.

His material and paternal yearnings seemed to be taken care of, but his thirst for world conquest was only going to become more demanding, which was a recognition that, while Lynyrd Skynyrd were the last people in the world who would have ever expected such status for themselves, in 1976 they were the new thing in rock. In moving the ball down the field more than any other group of southern rock polecats ever could have, they had broken down too many old barriers to count. Al Kooper put his finger on the pulse of what they were, saying of them years later, “When I found them they were a great heavy metal band. I just tried to give them a recording identity.” Not
rock
or
country
, but
heavy metal
.

Accordingly, the Skynyrd fold of country rock
was
a heavy-metal identity. Soon, the Skynyrd “look”—not really a look at all but rather an
antifashion
statement: denim, sometimes torn, with T-shirts, cutoff vests, and longer than long hair—would become the uniform of
heavy-metal bands, and remains so even to this day. The stark minimalism of the visual part of the equation stood in raging contrast to the growling passion and decibel level of the performance; nothing else—no mincing about, no glittery outfits, no fireworks—was there to distract attention from the music. It was all a product of Shantytown, which had finally found a context. Even any principled wariness about the Confederate flag was now passé. Artimus Pyle, behind whom the flag was draped like a Damoclean sword every night, said years later that he “hated” it and that it was “offensive to some people [who] think we hate black people.”

Pyle nonetheless added some punch to the stage act. He was more animated and played with more finesse than Burns. He and Wilkeson would quickly find a rhythm groove in which the backbeat was tighter and more coordinated. Leon had come a long way on bass. He was so nimble fingered now that he was playing lead notes and rhythm notes in split-second intervals, a technique mastered by only a few elite bass players like Motown's immortal James Jamerson and John Entwistle, whom Leon had of course been able to observe at close range on the Who tour and who could make ungodly sounds come from four strings. Still, Leon was by choice the least noticed member of Skynyrd, usually hanging back near the rear of the stage, to the right of the drums, so he could always hear the beat being banged out and to keep his bone-rattling bass notes in perfect coordination. He still attracted notice by wearing all manner of bargain basement haberdashery, including vintage policemen's suits and hats, his favorites being an oversized porkpie and an English bobby's cap. For this reason, he was sometimes taken to be the token Brit in a group that by then was fully in the hands of a Brit calling the shots.

Peter Rudge, who kept a hand in every pot of the band's affairs, found them a new producer, a tricky matter given their quirks, egos, and methods, not to mention their propensity for fighting like drunks in a barroom. Rudge, who had to have an album in hand for an early February release, could not afford to inject a novice into this mulligan stew. So he went straight to the top, to the A-list of producers, to arguably the most respected of them all—Tom Dowd, who at fifty-two had done studio
work that had been heard by virtually everyone who listened to music, though doing so was actually a step down for him. During World War II, as a physicist, he had been on the Manhattan Project team that had developed the atom bomb. Moving into music, he engineered and produced for Atlantic Records the likes of Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Bobby Darin's “Mack the Knife,” John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. A pioneer of multitrack and stereo recording, he produced hits for the Rascals, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Cream, Eric Clapton, and the Allman Brothers, proving no idiom was beyond him. Not for nothing was he known as “Soundman God.”

There were other, typically connived industry considerations attached to the decision. Dowd's contract with Warner Communications, Atlantic's parent company, forbade him to produce noncompany acts. But Ahmet Ertegun was very interested in signing Skynyrd to Atlantic when their MCA contract would expire with the album that came after this one, and thought Dowd would be the conduit. Dowd had worked at the Stax studio in Memphis, at Muscle Shoals, and established the Criteria Studios in Miami where he produced Clapton's
461 Ocean Boulevard
and
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
, the title track of the latter being a cornucopia of slide guitar madness with Duane Allman stoking Clapton. Dowd knew all about southern rock—hell,
all
rock, all
music
. Most of all, he could work fast, which was necessary since the band had to squeeze the recording into the seams between their perpetual tour dates. After a short layover at home, they were off on another touring jag in mid-August, bouncing from Tampa to Charleston to Jersey City to San Diego.

There would then be nine gigs out west through September before they took a
long
boozy flight to Europe for a fourteen-date tour in October and four more shows in November. Dowd would need to somehow get eight songs done during a week set aside in L.A. for that purpose in September at the Record Plant. There would be no chance to get them back for any overdubs or retakes until Thanksgiving when they would get back home to Jacksonville for a few weeks.

Before agreeing to Dowd, Ronnie had gone around looking for producers, flattering them all. Paul Hornsby, Marshall Tucker's producer, said Ronnie told him he wanted to hire him but that “it's a democracy in the band. Unfortunately, I'm always outvoted.” Said Hornsby, “If he had
his way, we would have worked together.” But that was likely what other producers believed too. In reality Ronnie's word was law—or else; the Skynyrd “democracy” was more like a banana republic. As Pyle says, “It was his show, his dream—we were just renting space.” And Ronnie was smitten with Dowd, whom he called “a master.”

Thus, the ruddy-faced, bearded Dowd—who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, a decade after his death—came with Rudge to Skynyrd's concert in Santa Monica, was introduced to the band, and within days was in the studio with them, facing perhaps the biggest challenge of his career. Dowd actually had a double challenge; he would also produce the long-delayed live album, which would need to be released first, in the fall, for the European tour. Happily for Dowd, while the band still had rough-edged ways about them, they were now on a level of songwriting expertise and studio musicianship that, as it had for Al Kooper, made such shoestring recording possible. Although writing songs was never easy, the simple foundation of their songs had been refined to a science.