Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (47 page)

Money in fact seemed to be heavy on people's minds. Rudge had included in his leasing agreement with L&J a $2 million insurance policy with a liability of $100,000 per seat. If Pyle is correct that the flight was a sober one, there was good reason for it: the last clause of the lease agreement read, “Lessee shall hold Lessor harmless in any event that drugs or narcotics of any kind should be brought aboard this aircraft for any purpose.” Regardless, L&J claimed it was not liable since the lease had given the band responsibility for the flight. This was so outrageous a claim that the Federal Aviation Administration sued L&J for having used such vague contract language. It took months for the families to recover a cent, and some survivors sued Rudge and the Lynyrd Skynyrd corporation for placing them in mortal danger. Those suits would drag on for years, without success but draining much of the band's coffers and Rudge's blood.

Remembering the day the music died in the South, the Charlie Daniels Band's 1978 song “Reflections” referred to “Ronnie, my buddy, above all the rest,” telling him, “I miss you the most.” Other bands who had soldiered with Skynyrd composed their own elegies. Atlanta Rhythm Section's “Large Time” is dedicated “to the survivors: Allen, Gary, Leon, Billy, Artimus … In loving memory of Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines & Dean Kilpatrick.” Journey, on its
Infinity
album, commemorated Van Zant with the line “Fly on Freebird.” Molly Hatchet's tribute was, “Here's to you Ronnie, you're gone, but your song remains.” The Outlaws'
Bring It Back Alive
album read, “The Lynyrd Skynyrd Band
and Crew—You're with us every night.” The Henry Paul Band's 1979 song “Grey Ghost” lamented, “A free bird falling from the sky brings a bitter end to another Southern man.” The Allman Brothers Band's 1981
Brothers of the Road
was a tribute to those who “fell along the way.”

That Van Zant died falling from the sky—during what was called the Tour of the Survivors—was one of those eerily sardonic rock-and-roll ironies, in hindsight a portent of something truly dreadful, in the manner of Marvin Gaye's vain plea, “Father, father, we don't need to escalate.” For Skynyrd, it was particularly cruel and mocking. Yet if Ronnie could have possibly written a lyric about that mordancy he surely would have testified it was better to have flown high and crashed than never to have flown at all. Robert Christgau wrote in his
Street Survivor
review that “some rock deaths are irrelevant, while others make a kind of sense because the artists involved so obviously long to transcend (or escape) their own mortality. But for Ronnie Van Zant, life and mortality were the same thing—there was no way to embrace one without at least keeping company with the other. So it makes sense that ‘That Smell' is the smell of death, or that in ‘You Got That Right' Van Zant boasts that he'll never be found in an old folks' home.”

The pity was that long before he would have reached old age, he surely would have prospered further. Adds Christgau: “I'm not just being sentimental…. I know Van Zant had his limits. But I mourn him not least because I suspect that he had more good music left in him than Bing and Elvis put together.”

Of the crash victims, Rossington and Collins had the hardest time becoming whole again. Once the wounds healed, Allen became even more reckless, self-medicating with an endless chain of booze and Quaaludes, and Rossington's cocaine intake escalated. Neither was able to sleep, and nightmares often jolted them out of their slumbers in a cold sweat. The biggest psychological block was trying to live with the fact that they had made it out of the plane alive but Ronnie, Steve, Cassie, and Dean hadn't. And one need not have even been on that plane to be consumed by the same guilt. Chuck Flowers, the longtime roadie who had once roomed with Ronnie, had been fired only days before the last flight over some hotel bill expenses. After the crash, Flowers, unable to accept his good fortune, reached for a rifle that Ronnie had once given him as a gift and fatally shot himself in the head.

The redneck-blues/hard-rock formula that had swept the country in the mid-1970s burned on without them for a while, with the movie
Urban Cowboy
codifying the coolness of New South norms. Yet the film's soundtrack included the Eagles, Bob Seger, and Linda Ronstadt—but not Lynyrd Skynyrd. Three years in death, their stamp on the culture was already dimming, part of an overall recession of a South that had been so ascendant in their wake.

There were other victims too. Phil Walden didn't survive long as an industry titan. At its peak his Capricorn roster owned Southern rock. But when record companies across the country caught up to Capricorn in signing country-rock acts, Walden's kingdom atrophied. After Dickey Betts sued Capricorn for back royalties and won an $870,000 judgment, Walden folded Capricorn in 1979 and filed for bankruptcy. Walden, who had drug and alcohol issues himself and went into seclusion for most of the 1980s, resurfaced as a talent manager, and in 1992 briefly reformed Capricorn, basing it in Nashville. But by 2000 he had to sell off most of his priceless record catalog and shortly after closed Capricorn for good. Six years later, he died of cancer at age sixty-six.

Meanwhile, Alan Walden's career pretty much evaporated, leaving him to be his own cheerleader about his nurturing of Skynyrd. “I got the Who tour when all others failed!” he likes to claim, speciously. “I got the best dates for the band and built a foundation the current band lives on! Take away ‘Free Bird,' ‘Gimme Three Steps,' ‘Sweet Home Alabama,' ‘Simple Man,' ‘I Ain't the One' and what do you have left? If these songs were dropped from the set, would you pay to see them?” As much as he would profit from his old copyrights—such as selling “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” to movies like
Forrest Gump
and TV commercials—the “other” Walden was just a pale ghost of rock-and-roll past.

The endless return on “Sweet Home Alabama” benefited Ed King as well. “It's been paying the rent” ever since it was released, he says now. King, who lives in Nashville, has inevitably wondered if he's still alive to collect his writing royalties only because of the unpleasantness that led him to quit the band. Rather being relieved, he has struggled with the same inner guilt that led Chuck Flowers to put a bullet in his head.

The all-but-forgotten Bob Burns didn't make out so well. Unlike King, when Burns left the band he had no writing royalties, and his one-sixth share of sales of the three albums he'd played on slowed and then stopped. Burns hired a lawyer who went to see Pete Rudge and was told Bob was owed a mere $10,000. Burns, who was living in southern Florida and struggling, knew he was being lied to but would have taken it. Instead, when he dropped in on Rossington and Collins a few years after the crash, they said they'd pay him but only if he relinquished all future royalties on albums that would go on to sell in the millions. Offended, he filed a lawsuit against the band and MCA and wound up with a $500,000 settlement.

Meanwhile it seemed Pete Rudge just couldn't win. He filed suit against MCA for a greater share of back royalties, and when he didn't prevail, the band sued
him
. Although Rudge had signed to manage other acts, including .38 Special, he had banked almost everything on Skynyrd, and his obsessive focus on them had led the Who to hire a new management company in 1976. The Stones left soon after. “Nothing was ever the same again at Sir Productions,” recalls Chris Charlesworth. “All the plans we'd had for Skynyrd were dashed. They were bringing in plenty of money and without them the funds dried up, so it was obvious Sir wouldn't last. Later, the grief turned to anger, and there were terrible recriminations: lawsuits, bad vibes, fights with Rudge, deep shit. At least one surviving roadie committed suicide and another went mad and was institutionalized.”

Rudge himself went into a tailspin, almost killing himself with booze and coke. “When I walked out of Sir Productions I didn't see him again for 22 years,” Charlesworth said of the years Rudge hit bottom and battled cancer. He survived, but Skynyrd's demise was his own. Once, he'd had under his wing the Stones, the Who, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. When he resurfaced years later, it was as a producer of low-budget films in England, a long, long way down.

Skynyrd as a living, breathing entity seemed by mutual consent to be over. All of them had pledged never to reunite under the Lynyrd Skynyrd name, there being no point, without Ronnie, other than cheap
commercial manipulation. “We wanted to be America's Rolling Stones,” Rossington said by way of a valediction, “to be the biggest band over here. And I believe we were on our way.” All one needed to add was “amen.” They made it an official denouement while they were, as Billy Powell said, “doing a bunch of drugs one night. They got this piece of paper saying they'd never use the name Lynyrd Skynyrd again.” Whatever royalties would still accrue would be divvied among Rossington, Collins, Judy Van Zant, and Teresa Gaines, each of whom had a one-quarter split.

However, the survivors would informally unite, alone or a few at a time, at gigs such as a January 1979 Charlie Daniels's Volunteer Jam in Nashville and in February 1980 at Orlando's Great Southern Music Hall. By then, with big money on the table from MCA, Rossington and Collins had taken steps to form a Skynyrd spinoff band, enlisting Powell and Wilkeson as well. The group, the Rossington-Collins Band (RCB), made a conscious effort
not
to invite comparisons with Skynyrd, and employed a female lead singer, Dale Krantz, a tough, pretty blonde who had sung backup with .38 Special. Rossington defined the band's sound as “not Skynyrd but good-as-shit music.” Wilkeson, who said he'd had “haunting premonitions” about the crash, admitted, “I wouldn't care if we were called Sammy Hamburger and the Buns. Just to be working is a blessing.”

Krantz and Rossington cowrote much of the material, with Collins and guitarist Barry Harwood pairing off for other songs. They recorded two albums,
Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere
and
This Is the Way
, both of which were reviewed and sold fairly well, the former reaching number fifteen and going gold, the latter number fifty-five. However, Collins was sinking. Irrationally, he began to resent Krantz, perhaps because, as Pyle says, both men had fallen head over heels for her, it being merely incidental to Collins that he had a pregnant wife back home, and Gary had won her.

At an RCB gig in Lubbock, the two old friends argued beforehand, nothing unusual for them, but then on stage Allen lost it, kicking Dale's microphone over and walking off, leaving the band to play without him. Backstage, he and Dale got in each other's faces, and she made plans to go home. The next night's show was canceled; but the problem was smoothed over, and the tour continued, though with constant tension.
Then came the nadir of Collins's life. In Jacksonville, Kathy Collins was in a movie theater with their two young daughters when she collapsed and died of a massive brain hemorrhage. Not only had the two girls seen their mother die, the child inside her had also died. Billy Powell said it “destroyed Allen. He dove into a bottle and never came out.”