Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (39 page)

And Skynyrd? As hopeless as their addictions were and as uninterested as they were in political huckstering, their leader didn't make it onto the stage. After snorting cocaine in his trailer, Ronnie again began coughing up blood and begged off. When Skynyrd came on, Charlie Daniels announced that he was going to stand in for Van Zant, who was “indisposed.” That was one way of putting it. When Carter narrowly defeated placeholder president Gerald Ford, Walden was accorded a place of honor at the inauguration, and the Daniels and Tucker bands played at the ball and were invited to the White House for periodic events. But the invitations for Skynyrd, who might have been a tad too red in the neck for the born-again Christian president, must have gotten lost in the mail.

By then nothing seemed to go smoothly for Skynyrd. On April 30 Ronnie had become angry at the usually mild-mannered Leon Wilkeson during a set in Lakeland, Florida, and the two had a brief pushing and grabbing match. As the live album again drew near, the bandmates again weren't talking to each other, not a good thing with the pressure on to finally get the live album done. After arriving in Atlanta, they made it through three days of tense rehearsals. Then it was show time at the Fox Theater, a venue they had chosen for an engagement as part of a fund-raising drive to keep the old theater from being razed. For their efforts, Skynyrd would be honored by Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, whom they presented with a gold record of the work. At the opening show on July 7, Tom Dowd monitored the sound in a mobile sound studio outside the hall and was delighted to hear Skynyrd playing with tremendous energy before a stoked-up audience, such that the
Atlanta Constitution
called the show “hypnotic.” Ronnie indeed would give it all he had, bloody discharges notwithstanding. He would be so drained and his voice so ragged after the third show that an ensuing gig on the tenth would have to be scrubbed.

From these three shows would be taken fourteen songs for the double LP (reduced to twelve on the first CD reissue in 1986, then bumped
back up to twelve with three bonus tracks on the second CD reissue a decade later, and then finally expanded to twenty-four tracks on the extensively remixed 2001 CD reissue, on which the tracks were presented in their original order on the set list). The “Free Bird” encore ran thirteen and a half minutes (nearly fifteen minutes on the second reissue). The song list included “Workin' for MCA,” “I Ain't the One,” “Searching,” “Tuesday's Gone”—which they hadn't performed in two years—“Saturday Night Special,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Call Me the Breeze,” “The Needle and the Spoon,” and “Cross-roads”—the last a remarkable cover of the Robert Johnson blues classic with Ronnie's gritty vocal as convincing as Clapton's cover with Cream.

One new original, “Travellin' Man,” from a rare collaboration with Leon, was Ronnie's psalm for Lacy—“My father was a trucker for the years of 23 / And on the day that I was born his truck was left to me,” and ever since, “I am just a mover, movin' fast as sound / Always free, sometimes lonely, always movin' around.” The last song to get a place was “T for Texas,” with those Jimmie Rodgers lyrics about being treated like “dirty dogs” and having “had more pretty women than a passenger train could haul” a Skynyrd epitaph of sorts. It also was an introduction to the skills of Steve Gaines, whom fans would learn was a new member of the band when the album came out.

The set,
One More from the Road
, was an extraordinary work, the single best and purest example—at least until the 2001 remaster with Dowd's liberal overdubbing scrubbed—of how Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded before a live audience. Of particular note were the extended arrangements of some songs, which Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes were “as long as those of the Allmans, but always much rawer, nearly dangerous.” Dowd's praise for the album was effusive, even if he said so himself. “The energy's really there. Like
Otis and Booker T Live in Europe!”
he said, apparently meaning the 1967 Stax album
Otis Redding: Live in Europe
, on which the soul legend was backed by Booker T. and the MG's, high praise indeed as this was the only live album by Redding released during his lifetime. “That record represented every record they had made but they played it better and it was recorded better than the ones that were hits.”

Clearly, it was a barometer of its time. Released on September 13, 1976, with an initial run of four hundred thousand copies, within weeks that was kicked up to six hundred thousand. Just as excited as Dowd were
the critics, with
Rolling Stone's
John Milward hailing the band's “Southern blues-rock diced with the sharp blade of British hard rock” as “a prime cut of guitar rock” and Ronnie's “world-weary” vocals “barroom-tough on rockers, properly vulnerable on … ‘Searching' and ‘The Needle and the Spoon.'” By year's end, it had reached number nineteen, and within a year it would go gold, then platinum by the end of '76, and triple platinum in 1987, the biggest seller of any Skynyrd album, with over three million units sold to date. If “Sweet Home Alabama” was their “Ramblin' Man,”
One More from the Road
was their
Eat a Peach
, the Allmans' 1972 million-selling double album. Meanwhile, caught in the jet stream,
Gimme Back My Bullets
picked up more sales, as did the older albums. Skynyrd, it seemed, had become quite nearly a turnkey operation.

One More from the Road
was an appropriate rallying cry for the band. With no delay, they were back out on it, one more time. Through July, they played gigs in their home state, one at Miami's baseball stadium, and then in Nashville and Chicago. On August 1 at a sold-out Macon Coliseum, they broke the Allman Brothers' attendance record there. The long road was so winding now that it took Skynyrd off to England again for exactly two shows, a trip made necessary because Pete Rudge had the leverage to put them onto the same stage as the Rolling Stones, whom he had booked as the headliner at the Knebworth Festival in Hertfordshire county, north of London. This open-air site had hosted the big summer music event in England since 1974, when sixty thousand people attended a show that included the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, and Van Morrison. The next edition drew one hundred thousand for Pink Floyd, the Steve Miller Band, and Captain Beefheart. In '76, ticket sales zoomed for the August 21 concert there when some idle musings by the Stones about performing for the “last time” were taken to mean they were about to disband. Actually, all they had said was that it would be their first and last time playing Knebworth. Rudge, seeing the numbers build, gave Skynyrd marching orders to get on a plane.

Ronnie, who was awaiting the birth of his second child, gritted his teeth and went. But since he was homesick away from the States, he took Lacy with him. The two of them had come a ways since Ronnie had dropped out of school, and were constantly trying to mend old
wounds; Ronnie hoped the trip would help Lacy see the respect his boy was getting all over the world. The old dog, for his part, needed little convincing; he had long accepted the role of the “Father of Southern Rock,” words he had embroidered on his stationery and handkerchiefs. Making the rounds of Skynyrd concerts close to home, he was instantly recognizable because of his long white Santa Claus beard and sometimes full Confederate Army uniform and hat, entertaining whomever he saw with yarns told through a mouth with progressively fewer teeth.

Skynyrd's appearance at Knebworth was eagerly awaited. Posters for the event, at Rudge's directive, featured their image above that of the Stones, with the headline
KNEBWORTH FESTIVAL
'76
WELCOMES AMERICA
'
S CONFEDERATE ROCKERS LYNYRD SKYNYRD
. They warmed up the day before with a show in nearby Hemel Hempstead. On a stifling hot, brilliant day the next afternoon, the massive crowd at Knebworth grew by the hour. The official attendance that day was 120,000, but there were probably twice that on the grounds under a blistering sun. Not that big crowds were a big deal for Skynyrd; in Chicago they'd recently played before one hundred thousand in Soldier Field. And back in '74 at the Ozark Music Festival at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, around 350,000 had crammed into the quaint venue. Ronnie liked saying that beyond the first few rows everything seemed a blur anyway. And Artimus added that a crowd like that created a feeling of such enormous power that he could, with one word, incite either a riot or a mass cleanup of the grounds.

They were on the undercard that day with 10cc, Todd Rundgren, the Don Harrison Band led by former Creedence Clearwater Revival's Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, and the Jefferson Airplane spinoff Hot Tuna. They were scheduled to appear at 3:15
PM
as an early act leading up to the Stones' evening set. However, with all the Confederate flags in the massive crowd, it was clear that interest in the band was higher than previously believed, so promoter Freddy Bannister shifted them into the spot immediately before the Stones. This was also a fallback since there was doubt the Stones were in any condition to play, having come in so wrecked that they barely knew where they were. With so many watching—including the Royal Family and Paul and Linda McCartney—a bad gig by the Stones might leave a stain on the event; in this scenario, Bannister would bank on the rednecks from the colonies to save the day.

This reality hardly fazed Skynyrd. Before the show, as Pyle recalled, Ronnie and Gary sat under a tent behind the stage calmly smoking hash with Mick Jagger. “They were tapping a pipe … passing this thing around,” laughed Pyle, who had his own celebrity smoke-in. When he walked into the band's trailer before the show, he saw Leon and Billy passing joints around with a familiar-looking fellow wearing wraparound sunglasses.

“Hey, you'd never guess who's here smoking a joint with us,” Leon said through the fog. Artimus squinted through the smoke and instantly recognized the guest toker as Jack Nicholson, who had come from L.A. to view the Stones.

For the next hour, they all got stoned. Then at around five o'clock, as twilight crept in, Skynyrd entered the long, canopied, orange-colored stage to their usual play-on music, “Dixie.” Clad in a black T-shirt reading
MUSCLE SHOALS SOUND
, Ronnie checked out the mass of humanity in front of him. With little fanfare, he called out, “Hello, how are you?” Skynyrd then kicked into “Workin' for MCA.” The normal Skynyrd set was around an hour. Now, wanting badly to upstage the Stones, they went on for ninety minutes, holding that gigantic crowd in their palms. Observers had only seen them play as well and with as much sting just once, when they were recording the live album.

As people waved the Stars and Bars and American flags along with the Union Jack, the band blasted through a dozen songs, ending with a mesmerizing fourteen-minute rendition of “Free Bird.” Freely trespassing on the tongue-shaped ramp at the foot of the stage built for Mick Jagger to preen and strut on, Skynyrd stomped the floorboards as the guitar solos escalated in intensity, with Alan, clad all in red and looking like a big stick of licorice sprouting unruly hair, manically leaping up and down, and a bare-chested Artimus hammering out wild drum fills and cymbal crashes. The electrifying set indeed turned out to be the high point of the festival, in contrast to the Stones' sloppy, heavy-lidded performance, which came after midnight and a four-hour delay. The Brit rock press vilified their poor showing, some calling it a “fiasco” and “a shambling parody.”

During the day, when there were air shows and clowns to entertain the crowd, the vibe had been felicitous; Pyle felt he had to note that “there were no drug overdoses.” And Skynyrd basked in the afterglow of this
victorious stage of their ascendance. Artimus would habitually speak of having “blown away” the Stones, who Billy Powell said were strung out on Quaaludes—“I know this for a fact.” Skynyrd felt the timing was right to strike a new theme: that of maturing, sobering up, and reaching a real crossroads of personal reformation. “It's the first time we've seen our audience in eight years,” Ronnie told the press. It sounded good, anyway—no matter that he had been seen downing shots of straight bourbon before and even during the show, when he periodically grabbed a bottle of whiskey and took a swig; nor that after the show, Gene Odom saw him go shot-for-shot after being challenged to a drinking contest by J. Paul Getty III, the billionaire's playboy son. Several years before the young man had been infamously kidnapped and held for ransom, an episode during which the kidnappers had cut off his ear and sent it to his grandfather with a ransom note—to Skynyrd that made the young Getty about the coolest guy they'd ever met.