Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  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.”

  To keep his first-born son on the right track, or try to, Lacy worked hard to indulge him by reaching into his own pocket. As soon as Ronnie obtained his driver’s license in 1964, Lacy bought him a used Chevy Corvair, the compact car that, according to Ralph Nader, was a deathtrap, its steering wheel apt to impale the driver in a collision. Ronnie, for whom collisions were a regular occurrence, didn’t have the car long enough to test its safety. Lacy, seeing how his boy salivated when the Ford Mustang hit the market in ’65, sprung for one in fire-engine red, which Ronnie spent his nights drag racing up and down the wide lanes of Plymouth Street and Lenox Avenue. A human crash-test dummy, he wound up in the hospital once with injured ribs and then in a ditch in ’66, totaling the car. Either a miracle or the hand of fate spared him.

  Lacy would vow never again to waste his paychecks on a car for a boy with so little sense or caution. The boy, he would tell Sis, was never going to live long enough to see his thirtieth birthday. Yet Lacy would eventually give in and buy him another car. Ronnie was working at the auto parts store at that time and more than once bought himself some piece of crap—as he did when he came home with a one-seat dirt-racing car that looked like it could be blown over by a good wind. If, as it seemed, Lacy was trying to buy the kid’s love, he expected something in return. His son would try to win his love through empty symbolism—such as the tattoo of his father’s name he got at seventeen. But neither cars nor tribute tattoos were ever satisfactory substitutes for expressions of mutual love.

  Their relationship was palpably, hopelessly conflicted. On the one hand, as Charlie Brusco recalls: “It was a typical southern family, a great family, a very close family. Ronnie loved Lacy, Sister, all his kid brothers. In fact, Ronnie, even though he was twelve years older than Johnny, would always tell people that Johnny had the best voice in the family.” One might indeed make that case based on Johnny Van Zant’s vocal range, which can be heard in his work in the late 1970s with the Johnny Van Zant Band, which was more blues and pop than country, far from his later attempt to channel Ronnie. Then there’s Donnie, still the lead singer of .38 Special, whose country-pop 1980s hits “Hold on Loosely” and “Caught Up in You” proved he had one smooth set of pipes too. Each brother, but primarily Johnny, is in every way an eerie doppelganger.

  To be sure the Van Zants were an amazingly talented family. But for all their closeness—Ronnie loved taking his little brothers down to the river for a day of fishing and, most likely, a few beers slipped to them if they promised not to tell Lacy—it wasn’t the kind of love that was either verbally expressed or shown in the form of hugs and kisses. This was a reflection of Lacy, a haughty sort of patriarch. If Ronnie seemed to need positive reinforcement more than his siblings, Lacy could only offer it in his way, without any mushiness and usually in a stream of consciousness that wandered far off the original point.

  “Let me tell you about Lacy Van Zant,” Ed King begins. “He was the kind of man who would tell you these long, rambling stories that would go on and on—he’d start at one place and go off on these wild tangents, then maybe two hours later he’d wind up right back where he started. He would take you on these fascinating, fantastic journeys. He was the quintessential southern man. And that’s what Ronnie’s songs were like. Ronnie was the spitting image of his dad.”

  This obvious reality was something that both pleased and bedeviled father and son, the dividing line being when Ronnie, like any other teenager in the 1960s, needed ballast in a storm of alienation. One suspects a few words of heartfelt love from his father might have prevented a good many of the scraps he got into when he just felt like lashing out for no good reason—a character trait handed down by Lacy. What he needed most, he figured, was to strike out on his own, and that put him into further conflict with Lacy, flaring up the archetypical love-hate thing between them. Lacy would hear about the drugs, the drinking, the recreational sex—and the rock and roll.

  Lacy worked hard, believing a man’s first responsibility was to support his family, not to go off and sing. “I don’t know if they ever sat down and aired it out, you know, Lacy saying he understood what Ronnie wanted and that he was proud of him,” Brusco says. And as much as Lacy would later get on board the strange trip his son was on—and even take to calling himself the “Father of Southern Rock” and writing liner notes on a Skynyrd album—Ronnie still courted that stamp of approval. He would die without ever believing he had gotten it.

  Going off on his own two weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Ronnie made a major decision, or so he thought, when he popped the question to Nadine Incoe. Doing the “right thing” after impregnating her, the old-world side of Ronnie’s sensibility led him to figure he had no choice but to drop out of Lee High so he could go to work to support his wife and child. As Bob Burns recalls, this was hard to figure—at least to anyone but Van Zant, who, when he made his mind up about something, could not be deterred.

  “Ronnie,” he says, “had one half of an English course to graduate, and he was a straight-A student at every subject—gym, geometry, history … straight As.”

  Even so, his mind made up, he went to work. Nadine’s brother owned that auto parts store, and he commenced living with his nose to the grindstone. They moved into a cramped trailer park, and when their daughter Tammy Michelle was born on July 30, 1967, he was eking out an existence as a young newlywed dad, hating it more every minute. Still—indicative of his morbid fascination with death—Ronnie had a gravestone erected for her at the Riverside Memorial Park cemetery, where relatives in the Van Zant family were buried. The stone had her name and birth date and read: THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD. It still sits there today, waiting, almost forebodingly.

  Marriage an
d fatherhood were pivotal moments in the relationship between Lacy and Ronnie. Lacy firmly believed his boy erred in both decisions—leaving school and marrying Nadine; he was ready for neither life without a diploma nor marriage and fatherhood at his age. Indeed, as time went on, Ronnie himself came to regret his impetuous, reckless actions. He would call dropping out of school the biggest mistake he ever made—which, considering the millionaire status he later achieved, could only have been because of the corrosive effect it had on his relationship with Lacy—though knocking up a girl and finding himself the father of a child he loved but felt strangely unattached to was far worse. And the tension all these bad decisions caused between Lacy and him only worsened Ronnie’s feeling that he had let his old man down.

  Unable to pull off the charade of a young American married couple, Ronnie and Nadine quickly began bickering, and Ronnie took it out on her with verbal abuse, telling her that he had put what he really wanted to do—sing in a rock band—in moth balls. The union lasted only a few months before Ronnie came back home. He was forced to deal with Lacy’s smug, I-told-you-so attitude, but at least he now had the freedom to pursue his teenage dreams. He continued working at the auto shop, giving most of his paycheck to Nadine, who without disputation from Ronnie was given sole custody of Tammy and moved back in with her parents. Through the coming years, Ronnie would all but forget about his daughter as anything but a financial responsibility, which for him was something of a self-serving salve for the blunder he had made; by putting her out of his mind, he apparently hoped to reset the clock and start over again.

  Getting back to the rock-and-roll dream was a key part of that aim. While Lacy reckoned that the rock-and-roll thing was an affront to him, Ronnie sincerely believed it offered the best shot to make a real success of himself rather than fall into the dead-end street that was life in Shantytown. Singing might have been the only unbroken thread in his life since his infancy, possibly the only thing that could tame the savage beast in him. While he never took a singing lesson or had a stated desire to sing for a living, he did have talent and an ego—that was for sure.

  Ronnie believed the Noble Five, which he never quit, were jelling. Moreover, Allen Collins was honing himself into perhaps the best guitarist on the west side, so advanced that his mother, for whom guitars served the same purpose as cars did for Lacy, sprung for another one for her son, a Les Paul model that cost her $500. In a couple of years, when Allen watched the British blues-rock band Cream perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, he was smitten with Eric Clapton’s guitar, which he immediately identified as a Gibson Firebird. And so Eva Collins again put her pennies together and bought one for him. With their long hair and gleaming guitars, at least the Noble Five had the look of a real band—several bands, actually, as Ronnie decreed they change their name to the Wildcats, the Sons of Satan, Conqueror Worm, the Pretty Ones, My Backyard, and then, in a nod to the oft-seen Hell’s Angels’ tattoo that references the percentage of the population bikers estimate themselves to be, the One Percent. With this last moniker, the band hoped to immunize themselves from being harassed by motorcycle gangs when they played gigs on the back of a flatbed truck in church parking lots. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. Says Rossington, “When we started out, people would mess with us ’cause we had long hair. And we’d just say, ‘Fuck you’ and fight.”

  On a regular basis shiners and bloody, swollen lips marked their faces, giving them the tough-guy redneck look they didn’t mind a bit. Image, after all, was important, even at gigs at church socials and school gyms. And in 1968, they were really starting to rock out, with tight, interwoven guitar licks. Collins and Rossington had come to the decision that there would be no lead guitar and no rhythm guitar; the two of them would either alternate leads or double them, an uncommon approach. Burns’s drumming and Junstrom’s bass were tight—“in the pocket,” in musicianspeak—never allowing the beat to stray or become muddled.

  The gigs they played were varied. “We used to play one joint until midnight for kids,” Van Zant once said, “then they turned it into a bottle club, and we’d go until 6 a.m.” Given the many dive bars and hippie hangouts around town where a different band would play every night, there was no paucity of gigs. As if on a carousel, they went round and round, from one joint to another and back again, stopping at the Forest Inn, Comic Book Club, Sugar Bowl, the Still, Skateland, West Tavern, and Little Brown Jug. Though alcohol was prohibited at some of them, the cops would look the other way when a bottle, or case, of Jack or Johnnie was smuggled in. The owners often also owned strip clubs, offering up side benefits for the bands that were worth more than the few bucks they cleared from a set, most of it from passing the hat.

  But the chance to compete with other bands was also worth a lot more. With the competition so fierce, some thievery was inevitable, and the boys of the One Percent were hardly above it. One example marks what is apparently the first-known intersection of the early incarnations of Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band. In 1967 at the Comic Book the One Percent opened for Hour Glass, a unit formed in L.A. by Duane and Gregg Allman from the remnants of their first group, the Allman Joys, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Hour Glass was short-lived, the last false step before the formation of the Allman Brothers Band, but they did cut two albums for Liberty Records at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the first of which (Hour Glass) had been released by the time they came through Jacksonville on tour.

  Looking for any clues that might get them the same success, the One Percent went beyond mere study; while Van Zant’s band was on stage, they thought nothing of performing all the songs on Hour Glass. What was more shocking than the bald theft was that, according to the Hour Glass’s keyboard player Paul Hornsby—who later was in Grinderswitch and produced top-selling albums by the Charlie Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Wet Willie—“They played it as good or better than we played it.” What’s more, with his typical honey-coated bullshit, Van Zant smoothed it over with sweet talk.

  “Man, I gotta tell you,” he said to Hornsby, “we worship you guys!”

  Nor did the Allman boys press the point, possibly because they too knew of Ronnie’s reputation. As Hornsby remembers it, Duane and Gregg told Van Zant his band was too good to do cover tunes; they had to get crackin’ writing their own stuff. Indeed, rival bands would probably not have hesitated to pilfer songs from the One Percent, if only they had some. At the time, they had none that they felt confident enough to play live yet. Jim Daniel, a local booker, had been loosely representing the band for a few years and pleaded with them for original material. One of the earliest attempts, “Chair with a Broken Leg,” apparently was the first song ever recorded by the band soon to be known as Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were still the Noble Five at the time, around mid-1967.

  “Chair,” copies of which do not exist, was some sort of pseudofolk protest rock that few could make sense of. Daniel got it on a reel-to-reel tape, not in a studio but in Ronnie’s aunt’s house, intending to use it as a demo, but he thought better of it and never did. As the band were reluctant to play any new songs on stage, “Chair with a Broken Leg” went into the dust bin of history. Mainly, they went with covers of distinctly nonsouthern bands—the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, Cream. Allen Collins in particular loved to do riffs on Pete Townsend’s guitar-playing moves, such as the famous windmilling of his arm. They began to carve out a niche for themselves—rock and roll, hard and intense, stir-fried with a Merle Haggard-type haughtiness, a tang, and an implied twang, with Allen injecting some bottleneck-blues effects by sliding his palm up and down the neck of his guitar and making redneck banter with the audiences, mainly invitations to hecklers to step outside when the songs were over.

  There was no distinctive sound to it yet, but the seeds for a mutual accommodation of backwoods southern blues and contemporary British rock were there. They began looking ever more grizzled, the vestiges of county-fair-appropriate dress, with no jeans and high school haircut codes giving way to m
usty, faded jeans, sweat-stained T-shirts, dangling locks, and bristly whiskers. The search to find the right alchemy, an emblem that was workable and believable in both tonality and look, was in its infant stages in other dive bars within smelling distance of the One Percent’s gigs, undertaken by similar bands also on the make. And in the end, it was more the attitude, the smug, put-up-your-dukes component of Ronnie’s vocals, not to mention his sinister Elvis-like sneer—and the quick, ingratiating grin signaling that much (but not all) of his tough-guy posing was a put-on—that seemed to stick in minds and ears, propelling the band forward.

  Sensing they were in need of original material that would fortify and ideally define them, Ronnie began to collaborate with Gary and Allen, taking the lyricist role he felt comfortable with and leaving the melody to be knitted onto his words by the two guitarists. Naturally, he was a tough taskmaster, a perfectionist even then, sparking prickly arguments about song topics and direction, which would always be the case. However, they reached a critical watermark late in 1968 when yet another name for the band came into being, one that would last into eternity.

  3

  NEED ALL MY FRIENDS

  In 1969, Forby Leonard Skinner, a gruff, crew cut-sporting, thirty-five-year-old Army veteran, was the gym teacher at his alma mater, Robert E. Lee High. Nothing about him would have ever portended fame or even a minute of notoriety had he not been placed in history as a foil for two students, members of a still obscure band. Having taken on the sartorial and tonsorial identities of rock-and-roll musicians put Gary Rossington on a collision course with Skinner, who like any other high school gym coach was the enforcer of the lingering dress codes that existed in every high school in America.