Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  In Jacksonville, a port city located on the eastern coast, there were fewer ties to southern traditionalism than the more obvious southern culture of other Florida cities to the south. A curious anomaly is that, despite being just over the border from Georgia and within tobacco-spitting distance of Alabama, the twangy accent is largely absent, largely due to the constant coming and going of transient populations.

  Lacy wanted to live in a certain style, but the postwar flood of returning soldiers looking for work created an instant middle class, all competing for jobs and living space. With limited resources, Shantytown was his only option for a home, and driving a truck his only choice for a job. Lacy, a descendant of that wave of Dutch immigration—his surname a derivative of Van Zandt, Old World Dutch for “from the sand” or “from Zante,” an island in the Mediterranean—never complained about the hand dealt him. He was a proud man with rock-ribbed, conservative southern values, who would work like a maniac to provide for his family. He may not have kept all his teeth by the 1960s, but he kept his wife and would continue to do so for just short of half a century, until her death in 2000, preceding his by four years.

  Sis Van Zant, like most wives of the era, stood respectfully in the shadow of her husband, but in the privacy of the home, she had the dominant hand, a necessity with her husband on the road so often. Because Lacy wanted a big family, she obliged him, giving birth to a parade of children—six in all, including Betty Jo, with a rhythmic progression of names: Ronnie, Donnie, Marlene, Darlene, and Johnny. Yet Sis somehow found the time to work nights in a doughnut shop to add extra cash to the family pot. When Ronnie was two, she had to be the one to go down to the bank and persuade a loan officer to give the Van Zants a loan to mortgage the house on Woodcrest where Lacy would live, happily if not always easily, until the day he died in 2004.

  Lacy could never quite understand his boy, in particular the unfocused sense of boiling anger inside him. Ronnie, he once said, “had a temper and a ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude, which he would need growing up.” With pride and a little bit of a wince, he recalled that when his boy was all of two, “he had miniature gloves that I bought for him and he gave me a black eye.” He paused for a beat and then added, “He’s been giving me black eyes ever since,” though he meant this only in the figurative sense. His conclusion was that Ronnie “was well thought of, very popular—because he fought for his rights.”

  Lacy indeed could be proud that the boy, for all his rough-and-tumble traits, had a good side. He was quick-witted and completely charming; he could sing and express himself, and he excelled on the football and baseball fields. The football dream ended only when he broke his ankle during a game, leaving him with a faint limp, but the individualism of baseball was more his thing anyway. As a fleet center-fielder with a big, lusty cut at the plate and a Ty Cobb-like zeal to slide into bases with his spikes up (aimed right at someone’s head), he led his American Legion team one year with a simple batting philosophy: “I just swung for the fences,” he once said. “That was my whole philosophy in life.”

  As it happened, of course, he and Gary Rossington had met on a ball field, the Hyde Park Elementary School field on Park Street, where all the sandlot teams played. In 1965, Ronnie, a junior at Robert E. Lee, was playing for the Green Pigs, sponsored by a restaurant of that name. Rossington, not yet fifteen, was on the Lakeshore Rebels, his junior high team. That gap in age and experience should have made him a blip on Ronnie’s screen, except for the fact that Ronnie always seemed to know who the talented kids were, as if he had filed away such data for future reference. Besides, Us, the band Ronnie had formed when he was attending Lakeshore, had become an afterthought; no one in it could play a guitar as well as Gary.

  Ronnie also had a good deal of sympathy for the younger teen, who had lost his father when he was ten; for Ronnie this harsh fact redefined the itchy relationship he had with Lacy, giving him a cold chill at the thought that his old man might not always be around to give him hell. Death indeed was a matter that unsettled Ronnie and gave him much food for introspection. His later work would occasionally feature death as a theme, most prominently on “Free Bird,” a song he kept in his head for years before setting it down on vinyl, with its metaphoric yearning for eternally open skies, a sadly ironic consequence.

  This might seem to conflict with his tough-guy ways, but anyone who knew him understood that Van Zant was not out to hurt a guy he egged on to fight him; rather, the fine distinction was that he was laying down who was boss of Shantytown. Indeed, when the prospect that he might in fact have done serious damage to someone arose, which happened at least twice, the kid who was always in control of his emotions nearly came unglued. One time he and a buddy drove to the woods to hunt squirrels. Wielding a .22-caliber shotgun, he fired at one but missed; a woman standing nearby, whom he hadn’t seen, collapsed to the ground. As it turned out, she was an elderly woman who lived in the woods and drank heavily; coincidentally, she had passed out just as the shot was fired.

  Ronnie came running over, almost in tears. “You all right?” he kept asking the fallen woman, who finally stirred, looked up, and made a request.

  “Give me my bottle,” she said.

  Per Skynyrd legend, a remarkably similar incident supposedly occurred out on the ball field. During one at bat, Ronnie hit a blistering foul line drive down the third-base line. At the time, Rossington was standing in foul ground with Bob Burns, the friend from Forrest High School who also played drums in You, Me and Him. They ducked, but the ball glanced off Burns’s head. More stunned than hurt, he went down to the ground. Aghast that he might have killed the kid, Ronnie dropped his bat and tore down the third-base line.

  “You killed him, you bastard!” Rossington growled at him—taking his own life in his hands.

  Burns, who lives in Seminole, Florida, and still plays in local bands, remembers it differently. “It looked like an aspirin comin’ at me, and I turned around to run, and it caught me right between the shoulder blades. It hit me hard, knocked the breath out of me. And I’m layin’ on the ground, and the coaches are pullin’ my belt up, saying, ‘Breathe, son, breathe.’ I finally came around, and I looked up, and Ronnie was staring down at me. He went, ‘Sorry, kid,’ and he walked off.”

  After a few minutes Burns rose, and all was well. Greatly relieved, Ronnie went back to bat. Then, after the final out, he sought out the two younger kids and pulled some beers out of his duffle bag, and they got to talking about music in one of the dugouts. It was during that colloquy that Ronnie decided he was going to annex their band and become the singer they didn’t have, whereupon they repaired to Burns’s basement and, still wearing their sweaty uniforms, informally jammed—badly.

  The problem was that Gary had the right equipment but couldn’t play it to maximum effect. He owned a Silvertone electric guitar, an inexpensive in-house brand sold at Sears, which for years had a record label by that name. Those Silvertone models would be discontinued in the early 1970s, later making them rare and enormously popular among musicians such as Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Jerry Garcia, and Chet Atkins. A Canadian band that began in the 1960s as the Silvertones, in homage to the guitar, became the Guess Who.

  But Gary was not getting out of his Silvertone the commonly played rock riffs of the day, not yet having mastered bar chords, which are played with multiple fingers or even a whole hand pressing down strings on the fingerboard. Indeed, country music had made liberal use of bar chords, with guitar players sliding their entire hands up and down the fingerboard, yielding a twangy, wailing sound. Not incidentally, Ronnie had been to a Rolling Stones concert at the Jacksonville Coliseum in May 1965, observing at close range Keith Richards’s work on the fingerboard of his guitar. While it said something about the town that the arena was only half filled that night, the show no doubt produced for Ronnie more than one epiphany.

  Agreeing with Ronnie’s assessment that a second guitarist was needed, Gary brought up the name of a classmate, Allen Collins, who
could play those pleasing bar chords on his own Silvertone, bought for him by his mother Eva, after whom he named the instrument, etching it in the body just like the LUCILLE inscribed on B.B. King’s guitar. Collins, originally taught to play by his grandmother, Leila Collins, a low-level country singer, was a serious music student, and he had a band called the Mods. That was all Ronnie needed to hear. He decided, before even meeting him, that Collins, a frizzy-haired string bean of a kid with jack-o-lantern facial features, was going to be the second guitar player in the still-unnamed band.

  Ronnie, Gary, and Bob jumped into Ronnie’s Mustang and drove over to Collins’s house in Cedar Hills, to the east across I-295. When they got there, Allen was riding his bike in the street in front of his house. Seeing Van Zant eyeing him, he became uncomfortable, a not-uncommon reaction when Van Zant stared at someone. Collins pedaled hard, tearing down the street, the Mustang on his tail. In a panic, he jumped off the bike and ran through some woods. The trio in the car got out and followed him on foot, with Gary shouting, “Allen, man, we ain’t gonna hurt you—we just wanna play!”

  Collins finally stopped running, and listened, at a distance. Then he said, “Gee, guys, I’d like to play with y’all, but I’m afraid the Mods would beat me up.” Those, of course, were fightin’ words for Ronnie. The target: not Collins but his band.

  “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.

  2

  A DIFFERENT LIGHT

  In 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.