Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (7 page)

“Everybody get in the car,” he ordered, and the whole bunch of them motored to a place where the Mods hung out. He jumped from the car, ambled into the yard where they were, and ripped off his shirt.

“We're here to take Allen—anybody got a problem with that?” he asked.

In Burns's recollection of the possibly slightly overbaked story, “they said, ‘Nope, we've got no problem with that. In fact, we'll help you load all of his equipment—and good luck to y'all!'”

With the first lineup of the band now complete, they turned their attention to finding a name for it. They had no good choices and settled on the Noble Five. Like many American kid bands at the time, they chose the name because it sounded faintly British, something that had worked out pretty well for a Brooklyn band named the Left Banke, which scored a number-one hit, “Walk Away Renée,” causing people to proclaim them the newest British band. If a group from Brooklyn could pull off a con like that, why not a bunch of streetwise guys from Jacksonville?

As the band progressed, however, it was apt to look a bit different from gig to gig, as one or another of them would be unable to make it, either buried by homework or chafing under an early curfew dictated by parents. One observer of their earliest sets, Gene Odom, a pal of Van Zant's, recalls that the first song the group ever sang, from the back of a pickup truck in a church parking lot, was a cover of a cover: the Byrds'
version of a song Jimi Hendrix would also cover, a brutal tale of the consequences of infidelity, “Hey Joe.” The bass player that night was not Junstrom but a local kid named Billy Skaggs; another stand-in, Jimmy Parker, a former cohort of Ronnie's in his defunct band Us and a future solo country star, joined in on guitar.

The amorphous nature of the band that would alter the topology and geography of rock was to continue. Yet that was a trivial issue to Ronnie Van Zant. What really mattered was that he was the nucleus of the band. He expected he would move heaven and earth—all by himself if he had to.

I
n later years, speaking of the germination of Skynyrd, Ronnie Van Zant would navigate around reality, saying, “I handpicked all these boys to play for me.” But then, in his worldview, he
had
handpicked them to be included in his orbit. He may not have played any instrument, never having had the patience to learn how, but as a teen his musical palette was extensive. He had heard classic country songs on the radio since he was a tot. Lacy always had his radio tuned to the music of his roots, and when he sometimes took his son on truck routes, the kid heard nothing but that for days on end. As he matured, he became a fan of Merle Haggard—who wasn't?—the Nashville “outlaws” Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and the prototypical Man in Black, Johnny Cash, who indeed “walked the line” between yearning survival and reckless self-destruction. But Ronnie had become far more influenced by non-southern rock stars of the era, the Beatles and the Stones, as well as the soulful dance grooves of Sam and Dave. Within a few years, his favorite sound would be the guitar-driven blues-rock and breathy vocals of Paul Rodgers of Free, whose Top 5 hit “Alright Now” would become a virtual template for Skynyrd.

“I managed Paul Rodgers at one time, and when I arranged for Ronnie to meet Paul, it was the biggest thrill Ronnie ever had, bar none,” says Charlie Brusco. For Ronnie, people like Mick Jagger and John Lennon paled by comparison to the swarthy, bushy-browed Brit, who may own the only voice in rock more accommodatingly serrating and melodious than Van Zant's.

Even so, as Ed King attests, the road that led to the phenomenon that was Lynyrd Skynyrd ran not through England but straight through the musical and cultural history of the South, dating back half a century to those Delta blues and folk infusions that gave country music its amenability to new forms. By then a new generation of musicians born and nurtured in the south was forming. The first, of course, had been Tupelo, Mississippi-born Elvis Presley, who spent his teenage years in Memphis. A fortuitous coincidence when he auditioned for Sam Phillips' small country label, Sun Record Company, in 1953 landed him in what would soon be a Hall of Fame stable with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. All of them broke away, signed by big labels, into the rock orbit, but with a rockabilly flavor heavily influenced by black R&B. Another, Buddy Holly, whose hiccup cadence and throaty twang were more organically country than Elvis's style, proved he too could fit perfectly into electric guitar-driven rock. His premature death in 1959 in the first plane crash that demoralized rock came as the rock charts were dotted with hits by southern boys like the Everly Brothers, Conway Twitty, and Roy Orbison, all of whom helped define a new Nashville sound with songs of heartache and unrelenting loneliness.

The old-guard music men of the South tried to provide a buffer to the British Invasion that remodeled the sixties. Merle Haggard's proud identity as an “Okie from Muskogee,” where, he crooned, they don't smoke marijuana but get drunk as a skunk, was funny enough to make it plausible that the song was a send-up of the old guard. Indeed, an increasing number of grizzled country veterans were becoming eager to wear the “outlaws” label that was claimed by the older and wiser country rebels, who paved the way for a younger generation of similarly free-thinking, against-the-grain redneck antiheroes. That movement was on the horizon everywhere, nowhere stronger than in north Florida.

Van Zant, Rossington, Collins, Burns, and Junstrom were fortunate to have grown up with a wide variety of influences, not the least of which were southern soul singers who had cut their teeth in the meridians of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Ronnie would tune the radio in his old pickup truck to the stations at the far end of the dial, unleashing the country-blues soul of Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, and “Wicked”
Wilson Pickett. Like Lacy, Ronnie had no demons about race, no imaginary boogeymen to hate on—the boogie men he knew were the ones who could play the hillbilly blues rendition of “Guitar Boogie” made famous in 1945 by Arthur Smith's Rambler Trio or, more likely, Chuck Berry's clanging rock-and-roll version. This broad musical view wasn't so unusual among his generation, but Ronnie's blindness to color could be incongruent in his hometown.

Ronnie could often be seen at Speedway Park, a half-mile-long brickyard a few blocks from his house, at one of the stock car or NASCAR race events that were held there from 1947 to 1963. (Its grounds are a housing complex today.) A number of race car drivers lived in Jacksonville, but LeeRoy Yarbrough was the best. LeeRoy, who won fourteen NASCAR races and earned over $1 million in 1969 alone, lived on the west side near the track and was a favorite of the Shantytown boys—who had no idea how troubled he was until he was committed in 1980 after trying to strangle his mother. But at the November 1963 Grand National race at the oval a black driver, Wendell Scott, beat LeeRoy and everyone else, breezing to his only career win, still the only Grand National event won by a black driver. However, Scott had to endure a charade when local NASCAR officials, apparently loath to the reaction of handing the trophy to a black man in the Deep South—“[They] didn't want me out there kissing any beauty queens,” Scott said—declared the second-place driver the winner, even though he had finished two laps behind.

If most of the crowd was content with this theft, Ronnie, who was there with a buddy, Gene Odom, was not. “LeeRoy don't mind racing with him,” he told Odom, “and if he can beat LeeRoy, he deserves to win.”

While no one would have called Ronnie Van Zant a flaming liberal, neither would anyone ever see a trace of knee-jerk southern prejudice. And matter-of-fact logic, which always cut through bullshit with him, left an impression on Odom, who years later said, “I thought a little differently about black people after that, and I began to realize that Ronnie saw things in a different light than most of the rest of us.”

In Jacksonville—where it took until 2014 to change the name of Nathan B. Forrest High School, so christened in 1959 for a Confederate general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—that was not an easy light to see. NASCAR would eventually award Scott the win
—two
years
later—but it was not until 2010, twenty years after Scott had died, that the association sent his family the winner's trophy for that landmark victory. Those were the kinds of southern traditions that Ronnie Van Zant could do without.

Ronnie's hubris could only get him so far. In fact, with the future looking so uncertain, his overconfidence seemed almost comical. Even he knew he was walking a fine line and that, if he fell off it, he would wind up in a place familiar to some other Shantytown tough guys: a jail cell. He used to say, only half in jest, that only two people from Jacksonville ever became famous: LeeRoy Yarbrough and a career criminal named Eston Bullard Jr. The latter was in and out of jail until he was sentenced to life in the 1980s for murdering a man; he committed suicide in his cell. According to Ronnie, he would be more famous than either LeeRoy or Bullard; he just didn't know which.

(Surprisingly, he omitted two far more pertinent hometown talents who had made some amazing music history—original Oklahoma natives Mae Boren Axton and her son, Hoyt. Mae, an English teacher at Dupont High, had been the one to introduce Elvis Presley to “Colonel” Tom Parker after Elvis performed in Jacksonville in the mid-fifties. After the Colonel signed him to the legendary personal services contract, Mae promoted him to RCA's Nashville office, leading to his long tenure with the label. She then cowrote “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first number-one hit. Later, writing for country singers like Willie Nelson and Mel Tillis, she earned the nickname “the Queen Mother of Nashville.” Hoyt, a 1960 Lee High graduate, became a folk and country singer, actor, and writer of 1960s and 1970s hits such as “Joy to the World,” and others for Elvis as well.)

To be sure, as Ronnie cruised through his teen years, he became familiar with the inside of jailhouses, and by the time he dropped out of school already had a prison record of petty crimes. One of his plethora of brawls, this on Hendricks Avenue, landed him in the pokey at age nineteen, charged with “disorderly conduct, fighting.” Cops took his fingerprints and then called Lacy, who sighed and came down to the station to bail him out for fifty dollars. The court assessed a fine of the same amount and dismissed the case. But there would be others. According to
Gary Rossington, a few years later, Ronnie was busted again, and when Gary was bailing him out, he told Ronnie, “Man, you're double trouble.” The phrase stuck in Ronnie's head until he pulled it out in 1975 to write a song with that title and with lyrics that fell in the truer-words-were-never-spoken category. He sang: “Double Trouble, is what my friends all call me.”