Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (36 page)

Gary Rossington explained the alchemic process years later: “We used a lot of D-C-G progressions. There's only seven chords, so you got to use the same ones over and over. It's all in what you do with them. I could write a dozen different songs with the same three or four chords but they'd all be entirely different.”

Of course, it wasn't
quite
that easy in practice, but in a nutshell, this was the essence of Skynyrd's infectious sound—though Van Zant's lyrics were from a whole other place, a spontaneous combustion that defied formula. And as if any time frame would be enough to accommodate it, they ripped out six tracks in two days. It was a remarkable feat, inasmuch as they were also their usual snarling, arguing selves, agreeing on little until Dowd settled the issues with his expertise. The first to be cut, on September 7, was the Van Zant-Collins track “Cry for the Bad Man,” the title of which suggested perhaps self-pity for the bad men of Skynyrd, but which was aimed squarely between Alan Walden's eyes. Subtle as a two-by-four, Ronnie steamed, “I'd rather quit and go back home / Than to deal with the money miser”—the term Walden sarcastically uses to describe the way Ronnie came to regard him. Nor was Ronnie coy about it, saying it was about “a gentleman we did business with at one time, and he really messed us over, cost us a lot of money … treated us real bad, and finally we got out from under these contracts with him.”

Clearly autobiographical was the next in line, “Double Trouble.” “Eleven times I been busted, eleven times I been to jail,” Ronnie trilled of an arrest record that had grown a long way since Rossington had first stuck that phrase on him. He also recycled his favorite metaphor: the “black cat” that “crosses your trail.” With a smirk, he admitted, “Double Trouble, is what my friends all call me.” Soon, when he would perform it in concert, fans would scream back at him each letter as he spelled out “T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” The third track was another bow to J.J. Cale, a cover of his “(I Got the) Same Old Blues,” a stripped-down, blues-bar piece with a superb slide guitar by Rossington. Then, on the eighth, they cut Van Zant and Collins's “Every Mother's Son,” a crisp, down-home ballad with some sparking Billy Powell piano runs and Ronnie in a higher, Neil Young-like register delivering the very fatalistic line “Well, I've been ridin' a winning horse for a long, long time / Sometimes I wonder is this the end of the line.”

In retrospect one can find apparent or construed references like this to impending death lurking in Ronnie's lyrics, even going back to “Free Bird.” One music chronicler believed that “the man's departure
appears
to be from his lover but ultimately must be from life itself”; in this view, “Lord knows I can't change” really means
Lord knows I can't change it—
not if life is predestined otherwise. It was easy to retroactively dedicate the song to Duane Allman, who lived and died as Ronnie believed he himself was fated to, and according to other Skynyrd members Van Zant frequently struck the theme of not living past his thirtieth birthday. If he had such depressing thoughts in mind, however, he left them in the ellipses of the lyrics. Still, the mood of
Nuthin' Fancy
was contemplative, even regretful, true to the country tradition. The broadening that Van Zant wanted would have to wait until they would get back into the studio in November to complete the album. There would be a lot to do in the meantime, on a journey Jerry Garcia might define in terms that Ronnie could appreciate—trouble ahead, trouble behind.

Tom Dowd, with half the album in the can, pivoted to the live album (which would be released just as the band finished off the studio album in November), the highlight of which would of course be “Free Bird,” the song that made every live concert a group catharsis. The song's evolution had indeed made it into a ritual exercise. Early on, hardcore
Skynyrd fans began screaming “Free Bird!” throughout concerts. This grew into a ritual similar to that of Allman Brothers' concert crowds shouting “Whipping Post!” For years, Ronnie had been coyly asking the crowd before the song's accustomed slot as the second encore, “What song is it you wanna hear?,” which was followed by requisite shouts of “Free Bird!” The track on the live album would capture every ounce of the delirious, dizzying escalation from swaying, cigarette-lighter-clutching mellowness to the pandemonium of sonic madness when the girls, many half dressed and riding atop their boyfriends' shoulders, would especially lose all control. It would also be something it was not when it was written and recorded—an homage to Duane Allman.

Ronnie hadn't known Duane well, but now he believed the man deserved commemoration from the band that was running the Allman Brothers off the field. And Ronnie wasn't above milking it either; in concert, he would offer a brief soliloquy about Duane, leading to the canard that the song was in itself a tribute and had been written as such. Other times he would also include Berry Oakley in these preludes, calling Duane and Berry “free birds.” If only they had known. Yet the truth was that Ronnie had said when they were alive, “They're a part of my crowd, but I don't really know those guys.” No matter. Ronnie, no dummy, knew that epoxying his band to the Allman Brothers was a proven selling point, and this new version of history only made “Free Bird” more contextual and more popular. Even how the title appeared on the jacket of the single release—“Freebird”—caused hard-core Skynyrd fans to take note; that jacket would become a collector's item as a Skynyrd anomaly.

If their signature song was now something on the order of a Ronnie conceit, this was just part of a deepening chasm between actual reality and Ronnie's reality, the best of which could be seen on a stage or on a vinyl record and the worst of which could be seen most everywhere else. If he had learned he had little to fear from the American justice system, being able to “get loose” on foreign soil led him and the others in his trail to think they had even less to worry about. Skynyrd's second European tour would be perhaps the single most concentrated period of havoc they ever created. It was a wonder that Rossington, Van Zant's fishing mate and punching bag, made it back home intact.

It took only eight shows on the tour for all hell to break loose. In
Portsmouth, England, before a show on October 25, again with Black Sabbath, a drunken Ronnie got into an argument with Gary over, of all things, how to pronounce “schnapps”—as much as was ever needed for him to start something. He broke a bottle of whiskey over John Butler's head, just like in a movie, leaving him bleeding profusely, and then grabbed a shard of broken glass and began slashing at Gary's wrists, leaving a deep cut on Gary's hand—his
left
hand, providentially, not the one he played his guitar with. Gary, defending himself, grabbed Ronnie's neck, choking him. But Ronnie, the fighter, broke free and continued his slashing, cutting both of Rossington's hands and breaking his own right hand in the process.

The melee, like a hockey fight, seemed to peter out by mutual consent, just another day in Skynyrdville. Ronnie and Gary made the usual trip to the hospital for their hands to be bandaged, and then were taken back to the arena; the bandages added to the Skynyrd schtick, but Rossington's hands were damaged enough that he had to play guitar with two fingers for a while. While both men had forgotten about the ugly scene, it left Ozzy Osbourne and his own prototypical band of mental cases baffled. Sabbath guitarist Zakk Wylde said, “All I remember was that the guitar player came out with a bandage on his hand and the singer came out with a bandage on his head, and they were hugging each other, saying, ‘I'm sorry, brother—I love you, man.'”

It was too much for Artimus Pyle, who recalls the broken-glass incident as “really scary.” As he had after Ed King's departure, Pyle said, he had “a major confrontation” with Ronnie the next day. “I busted his door down [and] I was ready to whip his ass…. I said, ‘How can you do that to people you love?' And he says, ‘I was drunk, I was drunk.'” Hearing that old dodge again, Artimus told him, “That's bullshit. That's no excuse.” Even so, if any bobbies came looking for Mr. Van Zant, it wasn't with an arrest warrant for attempted homicide but for an autograph. No wonder Leon always donned a bobby hat when he played in London, and the band would write on its next album cover, “Thanks to the people of Europe.” What's more, the incident was played in the rock press as just another story of Skynyrd making mayhem, even as parody; in
New Musical Express
, the writer gleefully called the tussle a “bloodbath” and chortled, “When a band start slashing each other's wrists before gigs you know they're confident.”

The lunacy wasn't done yet. Once again having escaped a criminal situation with impunity, Ronnie decided on the flight from Germany to Belgium that he would throw another roadie, Joe Barnes,
off the plane
, which happened to be thirty thousand feet in the air at the time. This was, he determined, the price Barnes had to pay for failing to bring a cart stocked with booze onto the plane. Apparently quite serious and already too drunk for any more booze to have mattered, he tried to pry open a cabin door so he could heave Barnes out. Unable to, he simply punched Barnes hard in the stomach, doubling him over in intense pain. Barnes, later claiming he had sustained a serious injury, filed a personal injury lawsuit against Van Zant for $250,000, which was settled out of court.

During the band's booze- and drug-saturated heyday, these psychotic episodes seemed no more than a manifestation of the rock lifestyle. Besides, Ronnie could have made the claim, reasonably enough for him, that he had been taken to the woodshed for it in the many fistfights he'd had with his own confreres in the band, though no one could remember getting the best of him in these clashes; usually a split lip or black eye was the toll he had to pay, upon which, as Wylde noted, they were the best of friends again. It was crazy. It was sick. And it was dangerous to everyone's health—but in those times, it could seem normal, even amusing, to behold. Decades of reflection, though, led Pyle to say, “Looking back, it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny at all.”

Still, there was always the filthy lucre to soothe—and gauze over—the ills and consequences of intoxication, even if, once it was common knowledge that they were all rolling in dough, certain perks vanished. At Hell House, for example, they had never paid an electric bill of more than around twelve dollars a month, despite sending hundreds of volts running through a mass of wires to high-powered guitars and amplifiers and keeping the lights on all night. Now, with no warning or explanation, the power company began to bill them for a hundred bucks a month. Also, a sheriff who lived down the road, who had never given them any trouble, came around one day with an “offer” when the music got loud. As Rossington recalled, “He said, ‘We've been known to overlook these things, if you know what I mean.' He looked at us and we said, ‘Yeah, we know what you mean, but forget it.'”

It wasn't the last time such generous offers were made by men in uniform. In Jacksonville, where delinquents from Shantytown were never tolerated easily, cops seemingly were itching to drum up some kudos by busting the glorified hoodlums for something, anything. The easiest and by far most frequent means was to spy one of them behind the wheel of a car, liable as they were they to break some traffic law, get into an accident, or drive without a license—or perhaps the officers might extort some graft out of them. And although they were in a stratum now where they could buy their way out of trouble, which happened all the time, it was a relief that they would only be home for a few weeks at a time before heading back out on the long road. Clearly, they had grown far too big for Jacksonville and too easy to target. Yet something in the blood and the soil kept bringing them back.