Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (46 page)

“I tried to call Rudge at home,” he said. “Peter had just heard too. He was on his way to the office. I grabbed a cab and went straight there. I was the first to arrive, and the phones were all ringing at once. Then Rudge arrived. He'd been to pick up a carton of cigarettes because he knew it would be a long night. He looked distraught and opened a bottle of red wine but he somehow maintained his composure until, eventually, around 1
AM
, we heard that Ronnie was dead. Then he went alone into the office kitchen and wept. The girls who worked at Sir manned the phones all night, crying as they did. The various wives and girlfriends of the guys in the band and the road crew were on the lines wanting to know the latest. Eventually they all gathered at Ronnie and Judy's house and what dreadful scenes of hysteria and grief that house must have witnessed that night I can barely imagine. The job of telling Judy that Ronnie was dead fell to Rudge.”

For Rudge, it was a day of excruciating drama and trauma. Not only had he lost the guts of his top American act, but it had been his decision to use the Convair. Some within the Skynyrd extended family would hold him to account for that; and some survivors would sue him and the band for having put them in a flying death trap. But for now, Rudge could only try to make things easier for the families. He sent private planes that
industry people put at his disposal to pick up the wives and take them to McComb. When Rudge himself got there he went straight to the hospital. Clay Johnson, one of the roadies, says he asked him “why he put a million-dollar band in a dollar-ninety-eight airplane.” Says Johnson: “He didn't have much to say … but, you know, he was in shock.”

Judy arrived early the next morning to claim Ronnie's body at the morgue, and then take his remains home. Meanwhile at the crash site, some strange things were happening. The gawkers had increased in number, and security was lax. It would be learned that the victims' belongings, when cleared from the woods, had been looted, and items such as cameras, wallets, and jewelry were stolen. A briefcase with the band's proceeds from the tour, which was carried by Ron Eckerman, was found, forced open, with $1,100 in cash missing. “Souvenir” hunters had to be chased away by the cops. Eventually, around $6,900 in cash and almost $88,000 in checks were somehow recovered.

Months after the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its investigation and determined that the probable cause of the crash was fuel exhaustion and “total loss of power from both engines due to crew inattention to fuel supply.” The board blamed “inadequate flight planning and engine malfunction of undetermined nature” in the right engine, which had resulted in “higher than normal fuel consumption.” Although Odom raised the possibility that Gray had been using cocaine before the flight, pharmacological tests indicated no traces of drugs or alcohol in either pilot's blood. McCreary's flight bag did contain a prescription drug, Librax, an anxiety reliever, but it was said not to be a factor. The bottom line was that McCreary and Gray were “either negligent or ignorant” of the available fuel supply.

Ronnie Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, and Dean Kilpatrick had lost their lives due to the worst possible and least acceptable reason: incompetence. It was, as Ronnie had sung about the way he thought he might actually die, “one hell of a price” to pay for putting a million-dollar band in a dollar-ninety-eight airplane. That price was quantified by a headline two days later in the
Dallas Morning News:
LYNYRD SKYNYRD IS DECEASED
.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are
.

—W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER
,
T
HE SOUND AND THE FURY

A
lthough even the NTSB report called it a miracle that more had not perished in the swamps of Gillsburg, the death of Lynyrd Skynyrd's beating heart and three others who were perhaps the most innocent and well-liked among the inner circle made the tragedy almost unspeakably sad. Ed King once recalled, “I was making dinner [and] my mother called me…. She had heard the news first. And I flipped on the TV, saw a little bit, then got in the car and went straight to Mississippi. I went to visit everybody in the hospital. And then I went to Ronnie's funeral after that, then I just drove home, all in a daze.” He says now: “When those guys told me about what happened on the plane, I couldn't imagine going through that. You can survive something like that, but you'll never be the same. I knew, and they knew, that they'd live with it every day of their lives.”

Alex Hodges, who had booked every Skynyrd tour except that last, fatal one, heard about the crash on the radio and thought of the conversation he'd had with Ronnie about the plane. “I was devastated of course, but I couldn't help but wonder why he had gotten on that flight.
I was angry at him for doing it. Then I blamed myself for not telling him, ‘Don't do it!,' because Ronnie listened to me. He respected me. He relied on me to be straight with him. And in that case, I failed him. I did.

“Like Alan Walden, I had worked for two giants of music who both died the same way, Otis Redding and Ronnie Van Zant. And I had spoken with Otis, too, a day before that doomed flight. I was supposed to go with him, but I had other business. The last thing he said to me was, ‘See you Monday,' when he was going to come home to Macon, Georgia. Those words stay with you, they haunt you, and when Ronnie told me they were gonna junk that plane I should have said, ‘Don't push your luck any further. Take a commercial flight.' If I had, I would still have Ronnie Van Zant as my friend.”

Charlie Brusco was in New York on business, staying at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. “Someone told me there'd been a crash, that Lynyrd Skynyrd was on the plane. The extent of it wasn't yet known, but as soon as I heard it, I knew, I just knew, that Ronnie was dead. I always saw Ronnie in a longer lens, as a tragic figure running on borrowed time. When you look back, it seems foreordained that he'd die when he did.”

Aerosmith could have fainted when they heard the news. David Krebs, the accountant who had insisted they keep flying in that plane, immediately called Zunk Bunker and said, “I owe you an apology.”

All across the rock meridians they laid hands on, but in the South the reaction was so grieved, and the sense of loss so great that everyone who mourned sounded as if a family member had been lost. Charlie Daniels heard when he was in Saint Louis on tour. He about fell to the floor but decided he'd perform the show. “If it were us,” he said, “I wouldn't want them to blow off a show. So we went onstage that night and we played a lot and we played hard.” Weeks later, it hit him hard. “It was just … depressing,” he said. “It was like a weight mashing down on my head.”

Steve and Cassie Gaines were laid to rest first, on October 23, at Jacksonville Memory Gardens in Orange Park. Dean Kilpatrick was buried at Arlington Park Cemetery in Jacksonville. On October 25 a private ceremony was held for Ronnie at the Memory Gardens. With the public outside the gate straining to get a look, the 150 guests arrived at the chapel. Ed King and Bob Burns were there, but of the crash survivors only Billy Powell was able to leave his hospital bed and attend. Charlie
Daniels of course was there, as was Dickey Betts. Al Kooper came in from L.A., Tom Dowd from Miami. Merle Haggard's “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” and David Allan Coe's “Another Pretty Country Song” were played through loudspeakers. The service was hosted by David Evans, the engineer on
Nuthin' Fancy
, who was a part-time pastor and had grown close to Ronnie. Giving the eulogy, Daniels read a poem that had been inscribed on a cement bench near the headstone, about “a brief candle, both ends burning, an endless mile, a bus wheel turning,” ending with the line “Fly on proud bird, you're free at last.”

As Donnie Van Zant sang “Amazing Grace,” Ronnie was lowered into his grave, just to the left of Steve Gaines and in front of Cassie Gaines, his black Texas Hatters gambler's hat and his fishing pole placed beside him in the casket. Lacy and Sis Van Zant were so distraught they needed to be steadied as they walked to their seats. Lacy seemed as if he had been kicked in the solar plexus, and his moods swung between grief and anger. As JoJo Billingsley remembered, “he came up to me, scooped down and got a handful of sandy dirt and wiped it across my mouth and said, ‘Girl, kiss this ground you're walking on' and left me standing there.” She had felt awful enough without being reminded that she had made the decision Ronnie hadn't, but Lacy was feeling no sympathy for the living and couldn't soothe himself with incantations of faith. Years later, he recalled of his son, “He said to me many times, ‘Daddy, I'll never be 30 years old.' I said, ‘Why are you talking this gunk?' and he said, ‘Daddy, that's my limit.'” But when the end did come, Lacy had his fall guy.

“God,” he seethed, “was a jealous God, taking him for reasons I don't know.”

The Skynyrd men shared some of that biliousness, with more destructive consequences. Billy Powell once said the remaining members of the group came away “bitter” and “blaming God for everything.” That, he said, soon led to “probably the heaviest drug use of our lives. We were just all getting drunk all the time, doing downers and stuff, just being real bitter.”

On a purely commercial level, the tragedy, as it normally does in rock, meant there would be a short-term spike in sales.
Street Survivors
, no doubt a Top 10 album in any case, peaked at number five. “What's Your
Name” was hurriedly released in November as a more pleasant, upbeat alternative to the now-too-prophetic “That Smell” and rose to number thirteen. However, only days after the crash, the album had a new look. Out of deference to the Van Zant and Gaines families, MCA called back George Osaki to redesign the cover. Now, with a prosaic shot of the band in the same outfits as the original on the cover, hundreds of thousands of “flame” albums were recalled, though just in the United States, quickly providing another reason for the original to become a collector's item. In Baton Rouge, when promoters offered ticket holders refunds for the concert that never happened, only a handful of people turned their tickets in.