Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (37 page)

N
ot only had Skynyrd now caught up to and passed the Allman Brothers, but they had become, to much of the rock intelligentsia—if not to the Yankee holdouts who refused to believe they were more subtle than the “Sweet Home Alabama” lyrics and Confederate flag—the certified
equal
of the biggest-selling American band of the 1970s, the Eagles. This thesis would only grow stronger in retrospect; to one pop culture and country music historian, Barbara Ching, “the Eagles were country rock, and their country was America; Skynyrd was country rock in a country ruled by the Eagles.” The difference, she wrote, could be boiled down to the reality that the southern rockers engaged in a “struggle over the role and meaning of white southern manhood,” their music something like a numbing agent for the “defeat and anger” felt by the “marginalized southern male” and giving license to rebellious Southern youth to break the stereotype of “unsophisticated dullards and backward bigots.” Most of the newer country-rock acts, pretenders or otherwise, had to choose between the two models. L.A.'s version was the peaceful, easy kind—Poco, Linda Ronstadt, the second incarnation of Neil Young's Crazy Horse, the transplanted Texans England Dan and John Ford Coley—while Dixie had the sweatier, boozier blasts of Foghat and Texas blues rockers Edgar and Johnny Winter.

As the leader of that rat pack, Lynyrd Skynyrd turned to completing their fourth studio album, booking Phil Walden's Capricorn Studio in Macon for a week commencing November 25. Weeks before then, Tom Dowd flew to Jacksonville to spend some time with the band and go
over the songs they had. He stayed at Ronnie's house, where he could study the band in their element. On Dowd's first day there, Ronnie, who, like the others at some time or other, had had his license revoked for repeated infractions, asked the producer to drive him to a rehearsal. Dowd got behind the wheel of the vintage canary-yellow Mercedes-Benz convertible. Even though Dowd was driving slowly, a cop almost immediately pulled the car over.

“The cop looks in the car,” Dowd once recalled, “and Ronnie leans across and says, ‘Hi, officer!' and he waves to him.” A few minutes later, another cop pulled them over. Seeing Ronnie smirking, Tom knew what the ride was all about. “They all figured they were busting him for driving. He wanted me to drive his car into town so he could make fun of all these police officers.”

The band had by then gone to great lengths to keep the cops at bay, one way being to play, as Ronnie noted to Dowd, “six to ten free concerts [in Jacksonville] because nobody wants to go to jail.” Laughing because this was one of the periods in which he had no license, he said, “Now I don't have to do them no concerts no more,” which Dowd thought was “his sweet revenge,” such victories being taken in small doses. Other times, Ronnie would take Dowd fishing, bringing along his two Chihuahuas and a sawed-off billy club—“for gators,” he explained. In Van Zant's backyard was a shed with a broken door engraved with
HOLIDAY INN
. Dowd asked what that was about. “All the hotels we trash they keep on charging us for the goddamn stuff we trash,” Ronnie said, “so I make them send it to me.” Other such mementos were all over the house, too, not as material possessions but punching bags of a sort. “If he was mad,” Dowd learned, “he'd go down and he'd start throwing broken TV sets out the window. [He'd say] ‘I paid for it once, I can do anything I want with it.' This was his way of working off some of his animosity and some of his frustration.”

After the sessions got underway, Gary got into
his
car and, with yawning predictability, had an accident—one can only imagine what these Skynyrd boys were paying for repairs and insurance. His injuries were minor but delayed the sessions, just one more hurdle for Dowd in finishing the project. Trying to stitch together a tone and texture from songs
with no connection, he thought the tired band lacked some zip; so as Kooper had, he brought in a trio of female backup singers—Leslie Hawkins, JoJo Billingsley, and Cassie Gaines—who were billed on the album as the “Honnicutts,” and would henceforth be Skynyrd's permanent trio of “Honkettes.” But he also ran into many of the same obstacles that had plagued Kooper and would later call the sessions “laborious.” Dowd's manner was more rigid than Kooper's, and the band would chafe when he'd break in and yell through his microphone, “You're playing like dog-meat today!” or a brusque “Cut!” when they would change chords and parts on the fly, their normal way since they almost never came in with a complete arrangement for a song.

For Dowd, Van Zant was impossible. Ronnie would sing a few notes, take off his headphones, say, “I ain't singing for shit today,” and walk out the door for the day. As Dowd would recall, “The man
knew
when he could sing. I couldn't say, ‘Come on, Ronnie, you can finish this song.' I couldn't coax him to do diddly-squat.” With the limited time they had, patience wore thin on both sides. But Dowd did lay down a helpful law—no drinking before or during sessions. He also forbid the usual coterie of groupies, dope dealers, and other leeches to hang out in the studio and get in the way.

Somehow the tracks fell in line. The first was the Van Zant-Collins-Rossington song “Roll Gypsy Roll,” another of their chugging “road” songs, with a Collins twelve-string guitar that sounded like a banjo, a lilting Powell organ line, and some “Whipping Post”-style lyrics—“Ridin' on a greyhound, countin' those white lines / Destination I don't know and I'm feelin' like I'm dyin'.” Next was Van Zant and Collins's mournful “All I Can Do Is Write About It,” the “it” being the destruction of the South's natural resources, its land and its air, by corporate commercialization. One of the few acoustic pieces in the Skynyrd catalog, with a piano solo by Billy and mandolin and dobro parts by Muscle Shoals' Barry Harwood, Ronnie's heartfelt lament cries, “I can see the concrete slowly creepin' / Lord take me and mine before that comes.”

Now, with one day left before they would have to prepare for their next tour, to begin in Sudbury, Canada, on December 10, and needing some rock-out material, they had to go back to an old cut from their Muscle Shoals tapes, “Trust,” with Ronnie wailing another sexist creed: “Don't tell your woman that you love her / Because that's when your
trouble begins.” The last track would give the work its identity. “Gimme Back My Bullets” was a song that, like “Saturday Night Special,” was not what the title suggested, a make-good sequel to “Special” and a recommitment to the gun culture they had never really renounced. Rather, it was a bit of industryspeak that Ronnie and Gary had made into a song after “Sweet Home Alabama” peaked, equating “hard times” and “pressures” with the loss of those precious “bullets” that accompany hits up the chart at the whim of record critics—“pencil pushers,” as he sang, who had “better get outta my way,” because “I'm leavin' this game one step ahead of you / And you will not hear me cry 'cause I do not sing the blues.” The problem with these protestations was that they were now tiresome and tendentious, not to mention hardly credible, considering how well they'd done, even without any singles coming near the Top 10 since. But Van Zant would flog the theme until his dying day.

With nine tracks in all (three future CD reissues would also include live tracks of the songs), the hard blues-rock tone, sneering vocal, and sure-to-be misconstrued meaning of “Gimme Back My Bullets” made for a trenchant theme and title for the album, even if only a couple of songs were in that vein. (The band had given some thought to calling the album
Ain't No Dowd About It
, though it was agreed no one would get what that meant.) An appropriately dark cover was created by their art designer George Osaki, half in black and white, half in sepia tone, with each of the dour-faced Skynyrd members looking bleary eyed or drunk or stoned, and posing in a photo by Moshe Brakha like they were taking a group mug shot. Only Billy, at the far right, smiled. Ronnie, Leon, and Billy each cradled a can of beer.

The back cover, also shot by Brakha, was unnerving, showing the band in dim light on a dark street in front of a honky-tonk bar, whiskey bottles and beer cans in hand, sizing up a mysterious stranger seen from the rear, with something like the handle of a gun on his hip. The logo chosen for the LP—a baseball with an eerie, skeletal hand gripping a gun, bony finger on the trigger, tongue sticking out of the barrel—left no doubt that the band and MCA had no intention of clarifying the bullet theme. Acknowledgments were strewn all over the back cover, which called Pete Rudge “a gentleman” and credited Tom Dowd
twice
, once in recognition for “putting up with us”—something Al Kooper could surely relate to, though he might also have wondered why they'd never credited
him
for that.

When the album was released on February 2, Kooper, after hearing it, was in no mood to be magnanimous, and pronounced it “flat as a pancake,” mainly, he said, because “I knew how to record them—that vision I had [and] to make that salable.” Self-serving or not, this slam—and his feeling that Ed King's loss hurt badly—was actually an accurate analysis. Much of the incoming flak would sound similar and burst mainly around the producer Skynyrd had lavished all that praise on. For all Dowd's efforts, he had failed to gun the Skynyrd engine. And apparently the band secretly agreed, with consequences that would soon land Dowd into the same perdition as Kooper.

Although Skynyrd went into hype mode—“This was the most pleasant album we ever did,” Ronnie said, with Allen calling it “material-wise, our best album”—their market sensed a disconnect. While much of what they heard on the mixes kicked ass in the usual fashion, the album would stumble out of the gate, and the dangers inherent in pushing a metal/redneck agenda would be evident when the band broke into “Gimme Back My Bullets,” Ronnie's recital of the title phrase prompting fans already familiar with the tune to do just that—throw
real
bullets onto the stage. Tom Dowd was astonished. “Here'd come .22s, .22 longs, .38s, .45s, coming up on stage like an arsenal.” Fearing that some of those cartridges might explode if they hit a hot light or a wall with too much force, the band decided to stop playing it live, even if it was the title track of the album. Of course, that only created another urban legend attached to Skynyrd and made an industry song a
pro-gun
song.

However, although most reviews were favorable, even a rave such as one in
Hit Parader
was apt to opine that, although Van Zant sang with “a rich measure of personal conviction … about contemporary southern livin'” and “more maturity,” overall “the fire and anger is somewhat channeled.” And the
Rolling Stone
notice was brutal, scolding them for “inertia” and “poor material, fully half of which I couldn't have imagined Lynyrd Skynyrd recording two years ago.” Skynyrd, it said, “is a good band in limbo,” a verdict shared by Robert Christgau's real-time review in the
Village Voice
, which read: “Unfortunately, the music could use some Yankee calculation—from Al Kooper of Forest Hills, who I figure was good for two hooks per album, and Ed King of New Jersey … whose guitar fills carried a lot more zing than three doodooing
Honnicutts.” While such tut-tutting from the Yankee literati might have made Ronnie react by saying
See what I mean?
, lagging sales had a more tangible effect. This would be Skynyrd's worst-selling album, going no higher than number twenty on the chart and needing twenty years to be certified gold; the only singles that would come from it, “Double Trouble” and “Roll Gypsy Roll,” stiffed, only the former making the chart at all, at number eighty—proving Ronnie's lament that it sucked to lose those magic bullets. Rossington's explanation was almost helpless. “We were kind of lost,” he said.