Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  What made Judy so endearing to Ronnie was that she had little awe for the most popular rockers in town, all of whom she seemed to know by their first names. She certainly didn’t throw herself at him groupie-style—not that Lynyrd Skynyrd, or whatever they were calling themselves on any given day, had risen into the category of groupie “gets.” But in Ronnie she perceived a conflicted man suffering under the weight of torturous moral dilemmas and unresolved issues every way he turned, including issues of the flesh and with Lacy. Unlike most young rockers, he didn’t seem to live for the fringe benefits of his trade and actually had a rather bluenosed opinion abut the parade of young women who would willingly become notches on rockers’ bedposts.

  The conflict here was that not even he could resist a pretty, willing thing for very long. Indeed, few women were ever turned away from a hotel room by the God-fearin’ but self-destructive men of Lynyrd Skynyrd. As if creating a guilt-relieving outlet for themselves, they sang of the Lord, and nearly all would find women they felt compelled to marry in the early years of the band, not that any of these women had any delusions about their monogamy. Such double standards were baked into the loam of rock and roll, not to mention the ethos of Southern Men, etched as it was with misogyny. Judy Seymour certainly understood the rules but could rationalize that Ronnie really did need her to make his life complete. That he had a hard time verbalizing concepts like love seemed to be an indicator of the vulnerable hole in his soul. Thus, when they began dating—and in no time they were inseparable—she accepted that he could himself make the same case that Gregg Allman did in song: “I’m no angel.” Ronnie’s own songs testified to that, and if Judy had to live with that, so be it.

  They soon were shacking up at the Cedar Shores Apartments on Blanding Boulevard near the Ortega Farms section of the west side. The familial nature of the extended, growing Skynyrd brood was such that Dean Kilpatrick now was acting as the band’s roadie, lugging instruments and amps onto rented pickup trucks. Soon Dean and his girlfriend Bonnie moved in too. Implicitly, it was understood that Ronnie and Judy would marry, but his haste with Nadine led him to take the necessary precautions to avoid another accidental child and to put off any nuptials until he had the bread to properly take care of a family, while still providing for his first child. Maybe Lacy could be proud of him after all. Maybe he had learned how to be a man.

  Gene Odom’s recollection that the first time Lynyrd Skynyrd performed “Free Bird” in a public setting was the May 9, 1970, reception following the wedding of Allen Collins and Kathy Johns is incorrect; the wedding was actually on October 10, apparently another shotgun wedding, as Kathy had become pregnant with the first of their two daughters, Amie and Allison. According to Skynyrd lore, much of which is urban myth, Kathy’s parents didn’t like men with long hair, so to placate them the band wore short-haired wigs of the kind they had worn for Leonard Skinner back in high school. If this almost certainly apocryphal story is anywhere near true, it would have meant that Allen Collins’s parents-in-law had never seen him and didn’t know what he did for a living.

  But had Skynyrd actually gotten up after the nuptials and played “Free Bird” for the first of around ten thousand times in comical wigs, the improbable scenario would have made for some sight indeed—though, granted, they were just warped enough to have gotten a kick out of doing something like that. Since the song grew from the now famous question Kathy asked Allen, which became the song’s opening line, it was logical to play the song, and they did so with relish. It was also a marker indented in time: when Ronnie Van Zant sang “Lord help me, I can’t change…. Won’t you fly, free bird” that day, he was putting rock on notice about his defiant determination to shape southern rock in a way no one would be able to change.

  As if on cue, the band got a break shortly thereafter. David Griffin had taken over Skynyrd’s bookings around the Southeast, and he put on a “battle of the bands” show at the Jacksonville Beach Coliseum. This was only a year after Phil Walden had created Capricorn Records as a gold mine for southern rock and hit the mother lode by signing the Allman Brothers. The Allmans, who dressed like cattle rustlers but played the blues like nobody else in rock, had already built a cult following through their sold-out shows at the Fillmore East in Greenwich Village. The cream was their albums, from which came amazing songs like “Whipping Post,” “Dreams,” and “Midnight Rider,” mating Duane Allman’s slide guitar and Gregg Allman’s growling, soulful keyboard blues licks with blaring horns, vibraphone riffs, and a rumbling rhythm bottom.

  Now, the rush was on to get in the door at Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records; in an astonishing turn, Macon, the town that had spawned so many soul legends, was becoming the emerging capital of a new generation of white southern music. In 1971 Walden signed a lucrative distribution deal with Warner Brothers, which became the Allman Brothers’ ticket to ride all around the rock map. When the show in Jacksonville came around, one of the attendees was there at the behest of Alan Walden, who had left Capricorn in 1970 in an attempt to ape his brother’s success, starting a publishing and management firm of his own, unfortunately named Hustlers Inc. Seeking acts outside his brother’s long shadow, he scoured shows like these for redneck rockers, and his liege, a guy named Pat Armstrong, invited three acts—Skynyrd, Black Bear Angel, and Mynd Garden—to audition. Armstrong sent word to Walden that Skynyrd was the real item. He had heard, he said, 187 bands, and they were the first he thought had Allman-like potential. Alan invited them to play for him next and wasted no time in signing on to manage them and book them through Premier.

  “I heard them play ‘Free Bird,’ and I knew from that one song that they were on to something,” Walden said, in retrospect an understatement of prodigious dimensions.

  Believing he had seen and heard the future of rock, Alan Walden signed them to a contract that gave him 30 percent of all earnings they would make if signed by a record company—double the normal manager’s fee (not counting Tom Parker’s notorious 50 percent cut of Elvis’s income). Walden also would own every cent of publishing royalties, under the name of Duchess Music, the same headlock that had applied to the band at Shade Tree. To Skynyrd, it was nothing that seemed very important. A photo of the band signing the contract shows them with Walden; his partners, Armstrong and Gary Donehoo; and the great Stax soul singer Eddie Floyd of “Knock On Wood” renown, who was also managed by Walden. The smiles were broad. To accomplish this, Walden had to convince Tom Markham and Jim Sutton to release them from their contract, which had two years left to run. The two men, who had all but given up on Skynyrd, had no objections to letting them out, though Shade Tree would still own the publishing rights on any royalties that technically belonged to Double “T,” which would one day ring up more than a few shekels for them. Now, clearing their shelves of Skynyrd product, they put out a last two-sided single, “I’ve Been Your Fool”/“Gotta Go,” a combination of titles that seemed a fair summation of both sides’ feelings at that moment.

  Given how much Alan Walden, if not the band, stood to make—and the fact that, on his own, Walden himself was now about broke—his first order of business was to get them recorded, properly. Wasting no time doing so, he used his connections and a fat wad of cash to schedule a session for Skynyrd, not at the renowned FAME studio in the otherwise obscure northwest Alabama town of Muscle Shoals but rather at the newer jewel of Southern studios, Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which had been created in 1969 by the rhythm section of the illustrious house band at FAME that Leon Russell had dubbed the Swampers—guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood, keyboardist Barry Beckett, and drummer Roger Hawkins.

  The new place was not actually in Muscle Shoals but two miles to the north, on Jackson Avenue in Sheffield (and would be relocated a decade later to larger digs on Alabama Avenue), but no one at FAME begrudged the quartet the use of the brand name they had helped establish. The session, scheduled for early 1970, would be produced by Johnson, who was sent a demo tape of Skynyrd songs and was intrigued
by them. It would be his job, he understood, to make the band sound so good that Walden could use the tapes to land a big-time deal from a record company far more important than even his brother’s.

  Ronnie and his men had no regrets. They anticipated that the Muscle Shoals sessions would surely be a windfall. After all, it wasn’t every day, or just any old band, that could walk in the footsteps of the first clients at the new studio: Cher, Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann, and the Rolling Stones, who in December 1969 cut “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” in the space about to be occupied by the boys of Shantytown. To be able to rig this, they figured, Alan Walden was more than a manager; he was a freakin’ titan.

  Alex Hodges, today one of the most powerful men in the entertainment business as CEO of Nederlander Concerts, a massive, worldwide chain of theaters and music venues, and a Georgia Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has a lot less hair—actually, he has not one follicle of it—and a lot more girth than he did back then when, at not yet thirty, he was assisting both Walden brothers at the Paragon Agency. He has rarely been interviewed, by his own choice, but even through the passage of time and out of all the rock royalty that he has managed, such as the Allman Brothers and the Police, two faces haunt him the most.

  “There are people who you just never forget—you see them in your head all the time. Ronnie was one of those. Otis Redding was like that. When I first met Ronnie, he came into the room of our agency, and you were thrown back on your heels. It’s not really a physical presence. Otis was a big, handsome, strapping man. Ronnie was a pudgy little fellow with thinning hair. But your eyes followed him around. He had that gut appeal. Soon as I saw him, I knew his band—and I didn’t care who they were, even—was gonna do some serious damage. I didn’t know how much damage they’d do to themselves, but you knew a band led by that guy was gonna push boundaries, break rules. He was troubled, you could tell, and maybe that was part of it. I mean, he was not a normal human being. You couldn’t figure him out. And you couldn’t wait for him to sing something so you might be able to try. That was the only way, ’cause Ronnie spoke through his music, the only way he felt comfortable doing it.”

  Ronnie had some important business to take care of before the trip to Muscle Shoals. The first was Larry Junstrom, who Ronnie suspected of something less than total commitment to the band—or not being enough of a bad boy—and was canned. Once “Stalin” had made up his mind about such things, there was no further discussion. Larry, who’d come a long way with the band, took it hard. “Can you believe it, man? They fired me. Skynyrd’s fired me,” he told a Lee High classmate. Junstrom was too good a bass player to go hungry for long. (He would later resurface as part of Donnie Van Zant’s band .38 Special, which he still plays in.) And of course he would not be on that doomed plane flight. Junstrom was replaced by Greg T. Walker, who, when the offer came, quit his own band, Blackfoot—so named because all their members had some Native American heritage. But Walker, who is of Muscogee Creek descent, was mainly a placeholder for Leon Wilkeson, always Ronnie’s first choice, who often was sidetracked for some reason or other.

  Indeed, Ronnie had to vie with his brother Donnie for Leon’s services. When Ronnie and Donnie’s sister, Betty Jo Ann, married and moved to another neighborhood on the west side, her neighbors were the Wilkeson family. Leon, just fourteen then, was already an accomplished bass player; and when Betty Jo Ann told him that Donnie was starting a band, the Collegiates, Leon joined up with them first, before being persuaded by Ronnie to hang around as a sometime member of his band. But a problem arose when Leon’s poor grades at Bishop Kenny High School led his parents to yank him from his bass and throw him into his studies. His presence with Skynyrd would be intermittent for the next two years, until he graduated, but even when he was part of the Hell House scene, he was apt to drop from sight, only to resurface drunk and incoherent. This of course put him in the line of fire of Ronnie’s rules, but when Ronnie got in Leon’s face, the latter often stalked out with a slurred “Fuck you.” Rather than tear into him with his fists, Ronnie admired the kid’s spunk and expected he would be back.

  Next came a problem with Bob Burns, who had been a ticking time bomb for some time. When he was fifteen, his parents had moved to Orlando, allowing the tall, swarthy young man to remain in Jacksonville as he wished so he could continue playing drums with his band. Astonishingly, as Burns tells it, his mother and father simply let him fend for himself, apparently not caring enough to see to it that he had a place to live and could feed and clothe himself. Burns had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, living the life of a nomad.

  “I had no place to stay,” he said. “I was crashing in people’s bushes. I was crashing wherever I could. I hung on as long as I possibly could. I was borrowing clothes from the roadies to play shows with. I didn’t even have any shoes, and it just got to me. Everybody was saying, ‘Damn, man, what if [the band] don’t make it, then what are you going to do? Your friends are driving Porches and ’Vettes, they’re in college or making good money.’ The rest of them were living with their parents or their parents were helping them out. I couldn’t stay with any of them. Their parents didn’t want me moving in with them. So I went to live with my folks in Orlando.”

  Ronnie, who had his own family baggage, was sympathetic. Rather than writing Burns off, he kept him on a leash, saying he would be welcomed back if he wanted to return. In the meantime, needing a drummer for the Muscle Shoals sessions, he reached out to another Blackfoot player whom he’d had his eye and ear on for some time, lead singer and guitarist Rickey Medlocke. Sioux by descent and son of blues banjo player Shorty Medlocke, who in the ’50s had a local TV show in town, on which his son appeared, the Jacksonville native had been in New York City with Blackfoot, where the group’s manager was quartered and demanded they make their base. It was the last place Medlocke wanted to be, having cut his teeth in Jacksonville bars. (Blackfoot had once been the house band at Dub’s, a well-attended strip joint.)

  When Ronnie called him, he asked if Medlocke would consider coming back home to play with Walker in Skynyrd—but could he play drums? Rickey hadn’t done so in some time but was a brilliant musician, and homesick as he was, he promised he could step right in. After brushing up on the sticks, he arrived back in Jacksonville and was ready for Muscle Shoals, thus providing another much-needed benefit that Ronnie no doubt also had in mind: Medlocke was an accomplished songwriter, having composed much of Blackfoot’s material. Skynyrd, needing good original songs from any source, could suddenly draw upon a catalog of them, most better than what they had come up with on their own.

  There would be yet one more addition to the band that would pay off—Billy Powell, a wiry, affable guy who had been friends with Wilkeson since grade school. A navy brat born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and reared in Jacksonville, Powell had gone to Bishop Kenny High School then briefly studied music at Jacksonville Community College. He did a brief stint in a band called Alice Marr, in which a teenaged Donnie Van Zant sang. When Wilkeson moved deeper into the Skynyrd circle, he bugged Ronnie about hiring Powell, touting him as a superb boogie-woogie piano player, a rhythm element the band didn’t believe it needed. Ronnie did hire Billy as a roadie for the time being, to help Dean Kilpatrick and another crony of the band, Kevin Elson, carry and set up equipment, and to keep a talented piano man within reach. Powell, who dug the band and wanted in, eagerly took the job, which paid exactly nothing. He too would go to Muscle Shoals and breathe in the ascent of a band he would soon be a major part of.

  Alan Walden was more than a manager to Skynyrd; he was, for all the world, one of them. As if he could vicariously be the redneck he never was, he attached himself to the band by the hip, going to gigs with them, hanging out at Hell House, and calling band meetings that were more like pep talks. When they would break open a bottle of beer, whiskey, rye, whatever, he had his glass ready, even if he wasn’t ever able to keep up with them. “I had drank with some of the best, with [soul singer] Johnnie Taylor, the bes
t. But when I met Skynyrd, whew, I went under the table. Those guys could drink. Straight from the bottle—and they were still teens at the time.”

  He may have believed in Skynyrd, even loved them as manly southern men love each other, but when it came to financing them, he could offer them exactly nothing from his empty pockets. Skynyrd had to pay their own way to Muscle Shoals in the spring of 1971, and when they got there the only lodging they could afford was a fleabag truck stop called Blue’s. So cash poor were they that they had to scrounge up empty soda bottles and cash them in for the five-cent deposits at convenience stores. Then came news that they wouldn’t be recording at Muscle Shoals at all because more important acts had booked the studio. They would have to go down the road a few miles to the Broadway Sound Studio, owned by Quin Ivy, a former disc jockey and songwriter, who had benefited from the constant spillover of sessions from the FAME studio; it was here that Percy Sledge had recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman.”

  Ivy was affiliated with the Walden brothers as well as Atlantic Records. Rather than Jimmy Johnson, Ivy’s in-house producer, David (another Johnson), would oversee the Skynyrd date. To Skynyrd, it was still a blessing, still Muscle Shoals. When the sessions began, David Johnson got them on eight tracks, which covered all the fresh material they had. By then Walden wanted to go further and cut an entire album, so more songs were needed. Jimmy Johnson, meanwhile, heard the rough tapes and wanted in. He and Walden agreed to produce a Skynyrd album at Muscle Shoals and cover the costs. If it bartered the band a record contract, Muscle Shoals would be reimbursed and become part of the Skynyrd arc as their home studio. Walden, of course, would own all the publishing rights to songs the band wrote.