Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (50 page)

Judy was the first to speak. “No one deserves to be here tonight any more than Ronnie Van Zant,” she said, setting an emotional tone. When the band performed “Sweet Home Alabama”—with Kid Rock inexplicably doing a duet with Johnny—and “Free Bird,” Bob Burns and Ed King took their places, no doubt with a flood of mixed feelings.

But while King enjoyed the evening and the recognition he had never gotten before, this was yet another tease. He had finally gotten word that a heart donor had been found and that he would have the transplant soon after. The surgery went well, and before long King was up and about, playing his guitar with a new energy. Remembering that Rossington had told him he'd be taken back when he was healthy, Ed tried to punch that ticket. But he was told there was no room for him and that he should enjoy his retirement. Crushed, he sued the band for going back on a vow that had never been put in writing, something Gary Rossington was too smart, or cunning, to have done.

The bright side of the Skynyrd legacy has lived on in the music, but the dark side pops up in unfortunate ways. When a drug smuggler was arrested in Miami 2002, the warrant said that among his physical characteristics were a tattoo on his left arm (“face Ronnie van Zant”) and one on his right arm (“flag confederate w/dead soldier”). In 2008 a fifty-year-old man with a familiar surname and a job as leader of a rock band in Jacksonville was busted on cocaine possession charges. The local paper reported, with no real proof,
VAN ZANT ARRESTED ON DRUG CHARGES
.
HE IS RELATED TO FORMER LYNYRD SKYNYRD LEADER
,
RONNIE VAN ZANT
.

To be certain, Skynyrd wears its many-edged legacy fitfully—and tenuously. After they were dropped by BMG, their 2009 album
God & Guns
was released on a sublabel of Roadrunner Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, with a specialty label for them, Loud & Proud Records. The album, recorded in Nashville, was produced by Bob Marlette, a curious choice given that his past work included albums by David Lee Roth, Marilyn Manson, and grunge-metal bands like Saliva and Seether. If the aim was to give Skynyrd an outlaw edge again, the band—now composed of Rossington, Powell, Johnny Van Zant, Rickey Medlocke, bassist Ean Evans, and drummer Michael Cartellone, with Dale Rossington née Krantz moving in as a Honkette with singer Carol Bristow—was defiant only in its dive into half-witted redneck parody. The songs, mainly written years before by Hughie Thomasson, who had returned to the Outlaws before his untimely death in 2007, were odes to vapid right-wing paranoia blended with now tiresome grudges about
the industry, even if it kept bending over backward to accommodate them. Sniffed Robert Christgau upon hearing it, “Really, [Johnny] ought to have some inkling that nobody worthy of his trepidation wants to ban hunting, burn the Bible, or slam old Uncle Sam.”

Billy Powell had already laid down tracks for the album when, on January 28, 2009, he awakened in his Orange Park condo just after midnight, having trouble breathing. Powell, who lived with his wife Ellen Vera and their four children, had heart problems but had passed up a doctor's appointment the day before. He called 911, but by the time a rescue crew arrived, phone still in his hand, the fifty-six-year-old had lapsed into unconsciousness and was pronounced dead. No autopsy was done because his cardiologist signed the death certificate identifying the cause as a heart attack. The band and a horde of industry VIPs came to his funeral, but no Skynyrd music was played, only the religious rock he had recorded with the band Vision, sung by Kid Rock.

Only three months later, Ean Evans died of cancer at forty-eight. Braving what was now being called the “Skynyrd death curse,” the band kept moving ahead, battered but unbowed. They hired Peter Keys of the 420 Funk Mob to play keyboards and Robert Kearns of the Bottle Rockets to play bass. Crowds were still generally big and full of verve, their fervor, as Faulkner wrote in “A Rose for Emily,” “a sort of hereditary obligation”—not that Skynyrd had any obligation to political correctness. In 2010 they appeared at a thinly veiled political front billed as the Freedom Concert series, hosted by Sean Hannity, the right-wing radio and TV host who used their song “That Ain't My America” as a propaganda tool.

However, being an American “treasure,” the band had been feted two years earlier by the US Congress and visited the White House, to be greeted by the president—a black president. It was quite a tightrope to walk, and they did. Though obviously pandering to a more hard-core Dixie crowd now, they were also something no one had believed Lynyrd Skynyrd could ever be—safe.

The sad rhetorical question Ronnie Van Zant had asked so long ago was answered: He certainly
was
remembered after he left here, sometimes
in weird and mysterious ways. In the 1997 movie
Con Air
, “Free Bird” plays as escaped prisoners are partying on an airplane, prompting Steve Buscemi's character to muse, “Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.” Like the mysterious Poe Toaster, who visits Edgar Allen Poe's grave on his birthdays, leaving a partially filled bottle of cognac and three roses, Skynyrd fans habitually visit Van Zant's grave with Jack Daniel's and old Skynyrd albums and raise a bottle to him. In 1981 a stone-carved bench beside his grave was stolen. In 2000, committed “fans,” who should be committed, actually tried to dig up his body, necessitating that his remains be moved, to a fenced-in family plot at Riverside Memorial Park, where his firstborn daughter Tammy's plot still awaits beside his. Just to be sure, a cement slab was implanted under the surface of the grave, to prevent other ghoulish body-snatching attempts.

Judy Jenness, who turned sixty-five in 2013, retained the stringy-haired, hippie look of the twenty-one-year-old who fell for Ronnie Van Zant. Being remarried certainly did not crimp her commitment to preserving his memory and good name. After opening Made in the Shade Studios, she began a charity, the Freebird Foundation, though it soon suffered the same fate as the studio when it ran out of money and closed up in 2000. She also financed a Ronnie Van Zant Memorial Park down the road from the old Hell House grounds. The book and movie she envisioned never happened; Larkin Collins died in 2013 at age ninety-one, not having to fight anymore about it.

Judy still oversees the licensing empire. Ronnie's daughter Melody lives in the house on Brickyard Road where her parents lived at the time of the crash. In 2012 she married a man like her old man, guitarist Jasin Todd of the Jacksonville hard-rock band Shinedown, which has sold six million albums. The “Father of Southern Rock,” Lacy Van Zant, toothless, with a white beard down to his belt buckle, died on August 3, 2004, four years after Sis Van Zant's heart gave out. Both of them had known the end was near—Sis had bought a new dress days before she died, giving instructions to bury her in it. Their home was opened to Skynyrd fans so they could see the couple's massive collection of the band's gold and platinum records.

Leonard Skinner, who was able to cash in on his name and enjoy a few minutes of being almost famous, had for many years posed for pictures with the ever-changing band and appeared in Skynyrd
documentaries. Just how oversized that name had become was proven after the crash when a law firm for the band's corporation sent a letter to Skinner threatening legal action if he did not stop using
his own name
, a threat that was soon rescinded. In 2009, with Skinner near the end and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a “Tribute to Coach Leonard Skinner & Southern Rock” was held at the old National Guard Armory on the west side, a satisfying moment a year before he died at age seventy-seven. Artimus Pyle, alone among the Skynyrd clan, made it a point to attend his funeral.

Pyle's constant verbal ragging of the band did not serve him well. His claim that the reborn Skynyrd had been doomed by “drugs, cocaine, alcohol, lying, cheating, thieving” that was “more important than the music” was something Rossington could neither forget or forgive. Gary blasted back, saying Pyle had been so drunk and high that he couldn't play drums anymore and that “everyone wanted to fire, get rid of him, so we did.” More offensive to him was the role Pyle had taken as storyteller-in-chief of the plane-crash saga, especially the notion perpetuated by Pyle that he had saved lives after the accident.

“He didn't save our lives,” Gary insisted. “He was so freaked out lookin' at us all sittin' there sufferin' and dyin' and burnin', and he ran away. People were comin' to get us, they saw us go down. He didn't run off and get the people to save us, that's
his
story.”

After Wilkeson's death, Pyle believed the band should take him back at long last, as one of only two “originals” left, the final hurdle having been cleared when in 2009 he was acquitted on charges of failing to register as a sex offender when he renewed his Florida driver's license. Although his name and photograph are on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sexual offender database website, the daughters he had been accused of molesting both came to court in his support, saying he had never in fact acted inappropriately. With his image thus rehabilitated, or so he thought, he offered his services to Skynyrd. “I would help them out if they needed me,” he said, “and I think they need me.”

However, Rossington said Pyle had never been anything but a replacement. Pyle then lashed out at Gary and Judy “for being so damn greedy…. All these lawyers and managers, fuck it, man. Judy wants all
the money and Gary wants all the power. They fight with each other and everybody else loses. Dammit! … Why should they have a problem with me? They've got all the money, they've got the name. I'm just a little old drummer.” He reiterated, “I left Skynyrd in '91 because of their massive, gluttonous consumption of cocaine and alcohol. I was a part of the real Skynyrd. I didn't want to be a part of something less.” For rants like that, Pyle's 2012 album entitled
Artimus Venomous
could not have been more apt for
him
.