Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (5 page)

He was, wrote one chronicler of southern culture, Mark Kemp, “at once honest and wily, good-hearted and mean as a rattlesnake, sometimes innately progressive, other times as reactionary as George Wallace.” Undeniably, there was
something
about him, something that pulled people into his world without giving them the feeling that they'd been dragged in. And, by instinct, he was prepared to go to the mat, down and dirty, to make this project a success. He would fight with his voice and, if necessary, with his fists to convince people. To be sure, one could call Ronnie Van Zant many things; but “harmless” would not be one of them. Thank God, too, because all that was dangerous and excessively redneck about him was the propulsion that sent Skynyrd skyward and kept them flying higher and higher for as long as the devil allowed.

At seventeen, Ronnie Van Zant was a young man on the make, with a battle plan in his head. He also was a young man with a range of feelings and loads to say. For more reasons than he understood, he had a hard side and a soft one, the latter rising up when a girl he was sweet on, Nadine Incoe, a classmate at Lee High, entered his life. Actually, no one girl at a time was enough for him. Always on the prowl, he also took up with another girl at the school, a redhead named Marie Darsey. How he was able to pull
that
off no one knows, but each of the girls believed she was the only one. Both saw the charmer in him, probably because they received the same love letters, with only the names changed. One that Darsey has kept to this day reads, “I would really love to have a date with you. I think you are very, very cute. I really crave red hair.” Perhaps leaving himself some wiggle room, he added that, most of the time, “I just want to be alone.”

When Ronnie and one of the girls were together, it was usually in the front of his '65 Mustang or in the dark of the neighborhood movie theater. It mattered little what film was playing; tough guy that he was,
Ronnie didn't mind if it was Doris Day up on the screen being virginal. Darsey laughs, “He even took me to see
Mary Poppins
.” All that mattered was that he could let his hands roam without interference. For the record, Darsey reports, he was “a good kisser” and “a sweet, caring person.”

Coincidentally, most every girl or woman he made time for gave the same kind of verdict. He was that good at playing the game, though it bit him when he knocked up Nadine and, in the noble tradition of courtly southern manhood, married her—at least until they inevitably divorced soon after. But his talent for heartfelt poetry and not a little bullshit became transmuted from love letters to song lyrics, much of which would be inscrutable but irresistible.

As he moved forward, the fighter moved with him. Charlie Brusco, who managed the first Skynyrd reunion band in 1987 and ensuing editions until 1999, was absolutely riveted and sometimes repelled by him. “There was a lot to Ronnie, which was the reason he could write so many songs with different emotions and topics,” says Brusco. “He was both the sweetest guy in the world and the biggest prick in the world. He would tell you how much he loved you, then take a swing at you for no apparent reason other than he just had to. But he kept that band focused all the time, man. And he was absolutely magnetic, a fascinating guy. A very odd character and a very complicated person, sometimes a very confused and angry person, and I don't think anyone ever figured him out, and I don't know if he ever figured himself out. But this was something that doesn't come around often, a meteor, an unexplainable force field that needed to be around longer than he was. A lot longer.”

No richer trough of Gothic culture, whether in the written or sung word, has ever existed than the American South. Indeed, though many have tried to alter its fundamental genetic underpinnings, no one ever has. The cultural ingredients of the continental shelf that sits below the Mason-Dixon Line down through the sleepy, dusty Delta, the contours of the Gulf, the jagged Florida panhandle and peninsula, and the massive sweep of high plains and low swamps that is Texas have not only been ingrained in the region but have seeped, in the blood of the spoken and sung word, into every other region across the continent. Not
by accident did a man like Levon Helm, the heart, soul, and comforting beat of the Band, a man from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, a man for whom every minute of his seventy-nine years on earth was a revelation and a life lesson, make his mark in music in Woodstock, New York, collaborating with men bred in the Great White North of Canada.

In the Great White South of America, such expatriate reverse flow was common. Many artistically bent southern men took to the road, dating back to the Delta bluesmen who migrated to Chicago in the 1920s, and their work bled from border to border, enriching the cultural stock that congealed in ensuing decades, giving identity to genres not homegrown. In fact the exile of nativist southern music is almost alarming in retrospect, seeming to foretell of a southern civilization shorn of its glory and its honor. Even with the shield of Jim Crow to deflect the sting of Reconstruction, the Confederacy was dead, and rather than a grand society and an American Rome, there were white hoods, colored-only fountains, and bumper stickers crowing that T
HE
S
OUTH
S
HALL
R
ISE
A
GAIN!
—none of which could alter the basic geometry, the fatalism that declared that the glory of the South was never to be again.

In the absence of revival and with the gradual eroding of the topology and psychology of the South came imagination and longing. Through this looking glass, like the lost souls of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, southern men were no longer plantation swells but weary, guilt-scarred, middle-class survivors dealing with morals and conundrums. This was the South from which the new generation of artists and musicians would come in the 1960s. Through heredity, they would carry the glory of the Old South within them, as well as the innate fear that stoked almost parodic hubris. As weathered and withered as they were, Southern Men—that is, southern
white
men—were, as regional historians Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson write, “still ‘lords and masters' at home in the South, regardless of class,” even if only in their minds.

One heady example of the cultural clash and angst-ridden pride within the New South was a rock band from the prosaic streets of Jacksonville, who would flourish as the vanguard of southern pride and rebirth by recasting the ethos of the Southern Man in all his glory and anguish. It was quite a ride they got themselves on. But, inevitably, it was an illusion, a devil's bargain, for them and the new Confederacy.

Far from Jacksonville's booming downtown corridor of corporate skyscrapers, waterfront hotels, the University of Florida campus, and the NFL Jaguars' home turf at EverBank Field, the old Van Zant homestead still stands today as it did half a century ago, buried deep “across the tracks” on the city's west side. They don't call the neighborhood Shantytown these days; it just doesn't sound appropriate anymore—though, given this conscience qualm, it is ironic that one
can
find the name Shantytown, as if given éclat by the band that hailed from these streets, far from its original latitude, on a bar in the chichi Springfield downtown section. Fans of the contemporary music culture of the city also know Shantytown as one of the scene's clique of native rock bands.

Back where time has stood still, however, in an area no one would ever call an American Rome, the Van Zant place is, as it was back then, a one-story white, wood-frame house set back behind shrubbery at 1285 Mull Street near the junction of Woodcrest Road. The place has been remodeled a few times, but one can easily imagine the Van Zants' quotidian activities here. In the backyard, wash hangs on a line. Bikes and toys are strewn on uncut grass. Old mattresses are stacked high outside a shed in the corner of the yard. A pickup truck is parked in the driveway. A R
OOM FOR
R
ENT
sign sticks out of the ground. Dogs bark. The sky is bright blue; the sun shines. Faint music streams from a radio somewhere inside the house.

In the rootstock of mid-twentieth-century civilization, this milieu and not anything close to a manor house
was
the South and, thus, the only life that Ronnie Van Zant knew and could write songs about living in and getting away from. As Ed King, an early, vital member of Lynyrd Skynyrd who added the signature third lead guitar to their congealing sound, recalls the band's sine qua non: “When you get right down to it, Ronnie was a country singer fronting a rock band. He was writing country songs, because that's what he knew. His musical roots were very southern.”

This was something Ronnie had no compunction about owning up to. His music may not have been in the mold of George Jones or Lefty Frizzell, but his blood ran with the same genetic code. When he sang
openly of this in the self-explanatory “I'm a Country Boy” on
Nuthin' Fancy
, he did so with a defiant chauvinism:

I don't like smoke chokin' up my air

And some of those city folks well they don't care

I don't like cars buzzing around

I don't even want a piece of concrete in my town.

Van Zant's world was one in which he didn't feel concrete under his feet when he trod his streets, headed somewhere through abandoned properties and weed-strewn lots or, later, down the roads in his red Mustang, usually way too fast. The west side of Jacksonville, which can't really be called poverty stricken, is typical of much of the bowels of Florida: hard-working, lower-middle-class men and women happy to be given a mortgage and to have enough to put on the table for their families. For them, as for Ronnie's father, who spent twenty years providing for his wife and six children by driving a truck through the snakelike interstate highways of the South, having an old pickup on a dirt driveway is the definition of contentment.

Lacy Van Zant certainly was content right where he was—even when his boy was a millionaire, living in splendor several miles away, with a pool in the shape of a guitar, Lacy would refuse to budge the family from the house he considered his homestead. But that was not the life that Ronnie dreamed of, and he was determined that it would not claim him as it had Lacy.