With the success of Fire on the Mountain, we were in demand as an opening act. For a while we bounced back and forth across the country between a Joe Walsh tour and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tour. We did that all the way to California. Then we joined Skynyrd full-time for what they were calling The Torture Tour. We worked our way back to their hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where the tour would end.
It was a grueling schedule, but we were performing in front of a lot of people and that’s what we needed.
I hit it off with Ronnie Van Zant from the first time I met him in 1974. We spent a lot of hours together in hotel rooms and buses and became good friends in the process. Ronnie used to call me the King of Dixie, a title I certainly didn’t deserve, but I was honored that he would think about me in that way.
In 1974 I got my birthday pie, or actually pies, in the face in Utica, New York. I was sitting in the Holiday Inn lounge when someone from the hotel came in and told me I had an overseas call at the front desk. I couldn’t imagine who’d be calling me and was pleasantly surprised to hear Ronnie’s voice calling from the United Kingdom, where the band was touring.
I thought he had called to wish me a happy birthday, but that wasn’t the reason at all. He said, “Charlie, I’ve got a question for you. You know that big Rebel flag we have onstage behind us? Well, last night it fell on the floor, and we took it out in the alley and burned it. Now, you’re the King of Dixie, and I just want to know, do you think we should go onstage without that flag?”
I think Ronnie was just homesick and wanted to hear a friendly voice from back home.
The last two nights of the tour were in Atlanta and Jacksonville. Atlanta was a huge Skynyrd market, and the Omni was completely sold out. After the show in Atlanta, Ronnie wanted me to go with him to a club called Hotlanta, where his brother Donnie was playing with a new band. You could see the pride on Ronnie’s face as he watched his little brother light the place up with a band that was soon to go on to bigger and better things when they became known as 38 Special.
The next night in Jacksonville was the final date of The Torture Tour and the much-anticipated homecoming of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Jacksonville Coliseum was packed to the rafters with diehard hometown fans. Family and longtime friends were in attendance, and they gave Ronnie the key to the city. It was shaping up to be a total triumph for the Skynyrd boys.
Just before we went out to do our set, Ronnie walked into our dressing room and presented me with a highly polished, vintage National steel-p guitar. It’s one of my most treasured possessions to this day.
We did our set and the crowd really got into it, but we were just the appetizer; the main course was coming up next, and they had one thing on their minds. They came to see their hometown heroes, and the place was pulsing with energy. We finished our show, the stage was set, and the crowd was supercharged with excitement. The evening was ready to go pedal to the metal when the problems started.
We waited and waited. The crowd started getting restless, and it was apparent that something was wrong. I went to Skynyrd’s dressing room to check it out and found Ronnie bent over a garbage can with a violent case of dry heaves. What a horrible time to get sick, with a sold-out hometown crowd out front, waiting for the band to take the stage.
Sidney Drashin, the promoter, asked me to go onstage and do a couple of tunes with the rest of the band in hopes that Ronnie would soon feel well enough to go on. Of course I was glad to help out and went onstage with Gary and Allen and the rest of the guys. We jammed a few songs, but the crowd had come to see Skynyrd. It was not Skynyrd without Ronnie Van Zant. They were getting impatient, and a rock and roll crowd with an attitude is a dangerous thing.
I’ve got to hand it to Ronnie, as sick as he was, he managed to come onstage and join the band for “Free Bird.” He tried to explain the situation, telling the crowd that the band would redo the show even if he personally had to foot the bill. But by that time, the crowd had reached the point of rowdiness, with the few troublemakers that are always in every crowd egging the situation on. They started throwing things and tearing up the venue, and there was a near riot.
I felt so sorry for my friends. What should have been one of the greatest nights of their career had, through no fault of their own, turned into a nightmare. It was a sad way to end a highly successful tour. Ronnie Van Zant would never again have the chance to take the stage of the Jacksonville Coliseum.
The years of 1974 and 1975 were to be some of the most intense periods of touring we would ever experience. We were constantly on the road. Even at Christmastime we would come home for a few days and leave Christmas night to go back on tour.
It takes a good woman to keep the home fires burning while the man of the house is gone two hundred and fifty days a year. Hazel was a rock, and she still is. Without her and Little Charlie’s constant love and understanding, I would never have made it. They were the only two people in the world I would have given my career up for. But they never asked. Instead, they encouraged me, taking as much pleasure in every increment of success as I did. They have been such a blessing and still are.
I remember the day the Uneasy Rider finally breathed her last. We were touring in the Southeast. We played Monroe, Louisiana, and were headed for Ruston, Louisiana. I was behind the wheel when it stopped again. I got my stuff and got off the bus. I told Robert Stewart to find a phone and call Joe Sullivan and tell him I had just gotten off the Uneasy Rider for the last time. I would never get back on it again. We leased a bus until we got our new ones.
Soon it was time to make another album. We headed back to Macon and Capricorn Studios with Paul Hornsby, a batch of new songs, and three new band members. This one was to be called Nightrider. It didn’t enjoy the immediate success of Fire on the Mountain, which went on to sell more than four million records over the years. But it still had some good songs, sold well, and was another step in the right direction.
At Volunteer Jam 2, Art Kass and Wade Conklin from our record label presented us with our very first gold album for Fire on the Mountain. The guest list in 1975 was Buckeye, Chuck Leavell, Roni Stoneman, Mylon LeFevre, and Alvin Lee, and it was the first and only appearance of the entire original Marshall Tucker Band. We had the cameras rolling that night, and Volunteer Jam 2 would turn into a full-length documentary movie.
In addition, there have been several television documentaries and live albums. The Jam was broadcast around the world on the Voice of America. That was back in the Cold War days. It was an awesome experience to be standing on a stage in Nashville and know that you’re talking to people imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, not to mention most of the rest of the planet.
I don’t know why the phrase came into my mind, but one night onstage at one of the early Jams I said, “Ain’t it good to be alive and be in Tennessee.” I had no idea that it would become part of the Lexicon of the Volunteer State I love so much, even quoted from the pulpit on at least one instance.
In 1976 it seemed that we had gone about as far as we could go with Kama Sutra records. Neil Bogart had left the company to form the Casablanca label, taking some of the personnel and a lot of the energy with him. With the success of Fire on the Mountain, we had attracted the attention of some of the major players and felt it was time to take advantage of the situation while we had the chance. We let it be known through our music business attorney Eric Kronfeld that we were available and would entertain any and all offers from any major record companies who saw fit to bid for our services.
We were to find out that there were several.
CHAPTER 29
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
We had bites from two major labels right off the bat: CBS and MCA. They were both serious about signing the band and were anxious to see us in concert.
We were playing a concert in Houston one night and Dallas the next. It was arranged for the CBS folks to see us in Houston and the MCA folks in Dallas. I had gone to Stelzig’s Western Store in Houston to get some new shirts and things when I g
ot a call. “Charlie, there’s a whole bunch of CBS people here waiting to see you.” I hurried back to the hotel to indeed find a room full of CBS folks waiting to see me. They came out in full strength, including Walter Yetnikoff the president, Jim Jefferies the national promotion man, and a slew of functionaries and executives and VIPs. But the one who really impressed me was a vibrant ball of fire named Ron Alexenburg, who was the head of Epic records.
They emphasized the availability of the executives to the artists and promotion and distribution advantages. Ron Alexenburg was excited and really anxious to sign the band, and his excitement only increased when he saw us live at the Sam Houston Coliseum that night.
The next night in Dallas, Mike Maitland and Mike Cook from MCA came to see the band. They, too, were impressed and eager to offer us a deal. MCA had done a great job with Lynyrd Skynyrd and was a solid company that understood promoting our kind of music. We talked to Jimmy Bowen at MGM in Los Angeles and the folks at Atlantic Records in New York. After comparing notes, we felt it would be either CBS or MCA. We had identical offers from both labels, and it was now down to the process of splitting hairs.
Joe Sullivan, David Corlew, and me flew to New York to meet with CBS and then to Los Angeles to meet with MCA. We spent a day with each, observing their operations firsthand before getting down to the tough decision of which one of the two we wanted to sign with. Since they had made us identical offers, it came down to which one would do the best job promoting and selling our records.
CBS corporate headquarters in New York is in an impressive skyscraper called Black Rock. When I showed up on the thirteenth floor among all the suits that morning in a Western hat and cowboy boots, I’m sure a lot of folks didn’t quite know what to make of us. But we were warmly treated and soon getting educated on the internal workings of Epic Records.
It was so different from what we’d been used to at Kama Sutra, actually a David and Goliath situation. Kama Sutra was a small, independent label with a small promotion staff. It was distributed by independent distributors and had little international clout. CBS was the biggest record company in the world, with their own distributors, massive coast-to-coast promotion staffs, and offices in cities around the world. It seemed they had a department for everything.
One of the highlights of my visit to Black Rock was running into music business legend John Hammond, the man who discovered Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others. I treasure the few minutes I was able to spend with him.
MCA also had its own building in Los Angeles, and its operation was also impressive. Each company had its own particular perks and advantages. Both really wanted to sign the CDB. The money both were guaranteeing was the same. The number of albums we would record for both was the same. Both were mammoth record companies with international operations. Now it was time for me to make a decision about who I wanted to sign with. Others could advise, make recommendations, and express opinions. But when it came right down to it, I was the only one who could make the decision.
Us and our lawyer, Eric Kronfeld, were in Los Angeles. We had seen both operations, and now it was time to make a choice. We met at Eric’s hotel, and everybody was waiting for me to state my preference. This was the biggest business decision I had ever made in my life. If the CDB was to go onward and upward, we needed to have successful records. Who was more capable of delivering them? CBS or MCA? I walked outside by myself to make the decision.
No matter what else I considered about the two record companies, I could not get away from the energy and excitement of Ron Alexenburg. I walked back into Eric’s hotel room and told everybody that it would be CBS, or more specifically, Epic Records and Ron Alexenburg.
Remembering what had been said about the accessibility of CBS executives to the artists, I had Eric call the president of CBS, Walter Yetnikoff, in New York, where it was about 2:00 a.m. We got him out of bed so I could personally tell him that he’d just signed himself an artist.
We were super excited about making our first album for Epic Records, and they were super excited about getting it. We went back to Macon to get together with Paul Hornsby. We recorded the songs we had written and rehearsed for an album that would eventually be called Saddle Tramp.
The title song “Saddle Tramp” started out as an instrumental. We had planned to leave it that way until one night I had an idea for a lyric. We put the two together, and it turned out to be one of the most durable and favorite jam tunes in our repertoire. We still play it onstage to this day.
The record started with a snappy fiddle tune called “Dixie on My Mind.” There was a ballad called “It’s My Life,” Tommy Crain’s “Cumberland Mountain Number Nine,” and a few others. We were ready to deliver our very first Epic album.
We knew nothing about the protocol of working with a major record company. We approached Saddle Tramp the same way we had approached every other album we had ever recorded. We wrote the songs, recorded them, got somebody to design an album cover, wrote the liner notes, and turned the whole thing in. We bypassed the A&R department, the art department, the artist development department, and all the rest that make up the bureaucracy of a big record company. We stepped on toes we didn’t know even existed.
As time passed, we learned to operate within the system a little better by working, to our advantage I might add, with the different entities that made up the Epic apparatus. But one thing was strictly off-limits: nobody told me what music to record. At that time, nobody at the label wanted to. That would come much later.
Saddle Tramp was released on March 29, 1976. From that point on, I didn’t have time to do anything except play concerts and do record promotions. Where we had had a handful of promotion men at Kama Sutra, Epic had a staff from coast to coast. Sometimes they would be waiting for me when our bus got to town in the morning. We’d spend the day visiting radio stations, and they’d get me back to the hotel in time to get ready for the show that night.
We were opening shows for The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Marshall Tucker Band. We did a coast-to-coast tour with Eric Clapton and were doing one-offs, opening shows for all kinds of acts.
It was an exciting time in my career, but it was also a demanding period. Between the concerts and promotion schedule, I was constantly on the move. But this was what I wanted, and I threw myself into it. It was paying off.
Our whole family had gotten into horseback riding and spent a lot of my limited time at home riding horses. We had to board them because we didn’t have a place to keep them. We started looking around for a place in the country to build a home and a barn and some acreage to ride our horses on.
Hazel looked hard but to no avail. She had one more place to look at, so when I came home for a few days, we went to check it out. When we came through the front gate, the first thing we saw was a big pond between two hills. We knew if the back hill was flat enough to build a house on, we had found our dream spot. We walked to the top of the hill and found it to be ideal. A short while later, we closed the deal for just more than fifty acres of land and started to build a small horse barn right away.
We named the front hill Sugar Hill and the back hill High Lonesome. There were two pine trees side by side on Sugar Hill, and we called the place Twin Pines. Over the years, it has evolved into a two-story log home and a big barn where we raise quarter horses and cattle. It’s where I want to spend the rest of my life. In fact, when I leave Tennessee, I want to go to heaven. It’s the only other place I’d rather live than Twin Pines.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Don Murray, one of our drummers, decided he’d had enough of the road. We replaced him with a fine player from California named Jim Marshall without missing a lick.
It’s amazing, but every move I’ve made with having musicians leave and choosing another one to take his place has turned out to be a good one, and Jim Marshall was no exception. He was a fine player and was to go on to play on some of our most s
uccessful records.
Saddle Tramp was well received on the radio and would eventually go on to be a gold album for us.
We went back to Macon and Paul Hornsby to make an album titled High Lonesome. It was released on November 5, 1976, and sold well, but it didn’t immediately reach the coveted gold status of five hundred thousand. We were doing well, making a good living even if we weren’t exactly a household name, touring hard and turning on the concert crowds we played for.
We went back into the studio to do another album we would call Midnight Wind. The recording itself went well, but this was to be my first run in with the bureaucratic side of Epic Records. When I turned in our concept for an album cover, the art department balked. I asked them to come up with something better, and they basically came up with a pile of junk. I approved what was probably the worst cover we’ve ever had so we could get the record out on time.
It went against the grain, but we needed to get the record out. We had a tour planned.
CHAPTER 30
IT WAS OCTOBER IN ST. LOUIS TOWN WHEN WE HEARD THAT THE FREE BIRD HAD FELL TO THE GROUND
Midnight Wind was released on October 7, 1977. Our tour would open at Kiel Theater in St. Louis on October 20. We had added Ben Smathers and The Stoney Mountain Cloggers square dancers from the Grand Ole Opry to spice up the fiddle tunes at the end of the set. We were locked and loaded and ready for a great fall tour.
The St. Louis show was sold out in advance, and we were in a fine old mood as we sat in the dressing room warming up and getting ready to go on. Just a few minutes before time to head for the stage, someone, I don’t remember who, came in the dressing room and said that he had heard a rumor that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane had crashed and there had been fatalities.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 13
