Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (41 page)

While Cameron Crowe, who accompanied them for a
Rolling
Stone
article, saw that trip as “the beginning of a real new way of handling themselves,” once they were in Japan the sake flowed right along with the Kentucky bourbon. A day after they arrived, Ronnie turned twenty-nine, and the promoter threw a birthday party for him and took the entire troupe to a nightclub. Plied with champagne all night, the band was quickly in a fighting mood. Before long, two German tourists accosted a couple of Honkettes and Mary Beth Medley—Peter Rudge's assistant and Crowe's girlfriend—outside the ladies' room and then followed the girls back to their table. Recognizing Ronnie, they began to taunt him, yet another occasion when some nimrod thought it would be fun to pick a fight with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Ronnie kept his cool initially. But then one of the Germans pinched Mary Beth on the behind, and another knocked Ronnie's hat off; and before anyone knew it, a brawl had erupted. Champagne bottles were being thrown back and forth, sending people in the club running for cover. The Skynyrd boys were pummeling the jokers when the cops rushed in, requiring the promoter to do a lot of talking, and perhaps grease a few palms, for the group to be let go. The German pair was arrested and, so the story went, deported.

Ronnie did take some measures to at least limit the booze. He put Gene Odom in charge of keeping the stuff away from the band's trailers and dressing rooms. The ever-obedient bulldog, Odom had taken some punishment himself as a Skynyrd roadie; one night in Salt Lake City, a nut wielding a knife had attempted to scale the stage before being subdued by Odom, whose arm was slashed perilously close to an artery. But that was child's play compared to the wrath of Skynyrd when they discovered that Odom had poured the contents of whatever booze was around down the john and intercepted record company leeches before they could leave the guys those telltale envelopes of white powder. The only concession Odom made was allowing a single six-pack of beer in, not for each member of Skynyrd but for
all
of them. As Odom recalled, “I'm not saying there weren't serious lapses…. They'd get around the roadblock by [drinking] at the hotel bar before the show [but] they expressed their appreciation.” He recalled Alan telling him, “We never thought we could play in front of fifteen thousand people sober,” and then being ecstatic that they indeed could.

To be sure, their shows in Japan might have been the first ones in
a long while that they played mostly clean and sober, allowing them to actually grasp the satisfaction of being mobbed from the time they stepped off the plane and thousands of Japanese fans welcomed them “just like the Beatles,” as Honkette Leslie Hawkins put it. During shows, their lyrics were sung back at them by people whose only knowledge of English was limited to that in rock-and-roll songs. The trip was by all measures a tremendous success, another Skynyrd triumph, and one that they could see through mainly clear eyes. Even they had to admit that was almost as good as a belt of Irish whiskey.

When they returned from the mini world tour in April, they picked right back up with shows across the South. Then Ronnie finally got to see Melody, if only for fleeting moments between rehearsals at Riverside Studio, while the band prepared for the new album sessions at Tom Dowd's Criteria Studios in Miami. However, despite Mike Maitland's hit-singles directive, Ronnie was having trouble wrapping his mind around the concept. “We're not experts on 45s,” he told one interviewer. “I don't know anyone who is except Elton John. We're not in the business to put out 45s, just to make albums.” Even if album sales flagged, he said, “that's fine, too.” And since no one at MCA ever thought “Free Bird” would fly because of its length, Rossington's take was “What do they know?”

Tom Dowd figured Ronnie would only be able to go so far trying to give MCA what it wanted. “Ronnie wasn't inclined to make Top Ten records or be a formula writer,” he said. “Ronnie was an observer and a storyteller. He didn't want to write ‘Leader of the Pack.'” Consequently, when the sessions got underway, each time a track was completed Ronnie asked how long it was, something he had never done. If it was longer than three and a half minutes, Dowd would say he'd speed up the tape or shorten the intro, again, something that never would have been tolerated in the past. Dowd would later recall that “it was like handcuffs. Absolutely limiting and debilitating to him. It was embarrassing.”

Worse, the songs they cut at Criteria were lacking in their usual gut-kicking impact, something no one was willing to say except, of all people, Steve Gaines and Kevin Elson. As the soundman remembered, “I told them if they released it their career was over, and Steve Gaines
was the only one who agreed with me.” If there was a reason for any drop in energy, Ronnie was convinced, it had to be Dowd's fault; the producer was recording Rod Stewart's
Foot Loose and Fancy Free
album in his own studio at the same time, crimping his focus on Skynyrd. Thus, mercurial as always, Ronnie suddenly had a revelation: the fault lay not with the band but with the studio. He told Dowd they were through with sessions there and would head to Doraville
—their
home, not Dowd's—to resume work at Studio One.

This would present a hardship for Dowd since he would need to commute back and forth, but he didn't begrudge them; it was their album, their call. And so they packed up and left, looking for an environment more conducive to their art. Yet before a single note was recorded in Doraville, the newly “clean and sober” Skynyrd slid backward yet again. The band, Dowd, the roadies, and various Skynyrd leeches were all quartered in a hotel in Atlanta. There, four days before the sessions were to begin, Leon dropped some acid in his room and decided he really
did
want to be a free bird. Dowd, in the room directly below, glanced out his fourth-floor window and was startled to see two skinny legs dangling from the room above. In a panic, he raced upstairs to Wilkeson's room, where he saw him hanging, each hand being held desperately by a roadie, and screaming, “Let me go! I want to fly!”

They were able to pull him back into the room, but by then hotel attendants had already called the Georgia state police. Now Dowd had to explain to the troopers that “somebody drugged this man and this is not his normal state of conduct,” though just whom that conduct
would
be normal for was a mystery. After Dowd promised it would not happen again, the cops let it slide, another bullet dodged by the band, and two roadies were assigned to keep a vigil with Leon. “You sit on top of this son of a bitch and don't let him loose,” Dowd ordered them.

It did no good. Shortly after, a still-addled Leon grabbed hold of a television and tossed it out the window. It landed on a car in the parking lot, the crash jolting people awake and sending security guards running upstairs looking for him. Like a chase scene in a movie, Leon bolted past them and through the hallways—waving his gun. Soon the cops were back, joining in the chase. They caught up to him, cuffed him, and called for an ambulance to take him to a hospital, and a possible arraignment. Dowd, having to think quickly, reached an amenable local doctor he
knew who rushed over and vouched that Wilkeson was his patient and he would take responsibility for him.

Farcical as it was, it kept Leon free. And Ronnie, who had impulsively told Artimus during the craziness that Leon was out of the band, quickly relented. Life went on for Skynyrd. But Dowd, who hadn't signed on to save psychos from themselves and jail, was a nervous wreck. He insisted later that he'd had enough of the band: “I checked out the next morning and that's where I broke off with them.”

Actually, he didn't do that, not then, maybe not ever. After a few days' delay for Leon to get his addled head together, Dowd conducted a few sessions at Studio One, which were mainly devoted to rerecording all but one of the tracks cut at Criteria. Ronnie then told him that it might help the project if another producer was called in to collaborate. That had to really hurt Dowd. He hadn't been fired but, highly offended, he
now
broke off. The next day when the session was supposed to begin, people milled about the studio asking, “Where's Tom?” The answer was, back in Miami, not having said a word to anyone that he was going.

Now, needing just one producer, Ronnie called Rodney Mills, the Doraville engineer who had crowded Al Kooper out on
Nuthin' Fancy
. Mills had an easygoing manner that the band preferred over the autocratic styles of Kooper and Dowd. And Mills, who had been working as road manager for the Atlanta Rhythm Section, jumped at the chance, quitting his work on tour with the Section to take the job, which had him working hand in hand with Kevin Elson, who now knew how to reproduce the Skynyrd sound in concert better than anyone.

Dowd did eventually send an emissary to Doraville, engineer Barry Rudolph, a studio veteran who had just helped produce a Waylon Jennings album. When he got there, Rudolph was stunned to find that the entire album had been unofficially completed. “I didn't know exactly what I was doing there,” he says. Rudolph, who considered Mills and Elson to be no more than engineers, thought some of the songs needed a lot of work and wanted to rerecord them, for a
third
time, fourth in all. These included “That Smell” and “What's Your Name.” But getting anything done was a strain. Although the sessions did run clean and sober, Rudolph says, “a couple of their buddies would come in and get 'em
going, like Robert Nix, he'd do things like hold up a joint in the middle of the control room. They would be in the middle of the best take and would stop playing and go ahead and smoke it. They nearly killed me. We would work 'til about two or three in the morning, and then they would want to go out and party. Being local heroes, it was pretty much carte blanche everywhere they went: anything they wanted, as much as they wanted…. We'd get back to the hotel at ten in the morning. By the end of the week I was fried.”

Whether Dowd fully intended to work with them again was unclear. But Skynyrd couldn't worry about that now. With Dowd physically gone, and believing he was holding them back anyway, they went to work with Rudolph, the priority being the most commercially oriented song, “What's Your Name,” which was Ronnie's most overt attempt at a three-minute hit. Recycling the beat of “Gimme Three Steps,” the Van Zant-Rossington composition—which Dowd and Steve Cropper, the fabled Stax/Volt guitarist, helped develop during the Criteria sessions, though they were stiffed of writing credits—told a semifable of a night “in Boise, Idaho,” when Ronnie had picked up a “little queen” in a bar before the band was evicted from the room for making “a mess,” and then not quite being able to remember her name during and after a strenuous night with her. As with many Van Zant songs, though, in the underbrush lay a trace of guilt about living such an amoral life and betraying his wife for the carnal conquests of the rock ethos. True to form, this Van Zant lyric was more than met the ear and more than he probably realized.

Those clues to the man's humanity, so often buried within a hard crust of conceit and redneck smugness, were even harder to decipher in the song's delirious blues-bar, horn-heavy arrangement and hip, redneck chic—“What's your name, little girl? What's your name? / Shootin' you straight, little girl? Won't you do the same?”—that made the song irresistible from the first note. The best to come from the album, however, was a song Ronnie never expected would be a single, given his determination that, if other tracks were to be compromised, he would compensate with a song that would push the boundaries of pop music. He had been wanting to get off his chest what he thought of Gary's self-induced brushes with death, and the other guys' misadventures with drugs and booze; and he didn't plan to spare himself from the warning none of
them would obey. The result, “That Smell,” moved the earth in a way no Skynyrd song ever did.