Skynyrd, however, was close enough to the Allman Brothers’ style and substance to ride on their coattails. It helped that the Brothers’ roadhouse boogie blues cover of “One Way Out,” the old Elmore James blues standard originally recorded by Sonny Boy Williamson, featured a transcendent bottleneck slide guitar line by Duane Allman and could provide some cover for their harder electric country-rock emphasis. There simply has never been a better slide guitarist than Duane Allman. Eric Clapton knew it too. He had been dabbling in country-rock sounds, touring with southern singers Delaney and Bonnie, and in 1970 when he came to Florida to record in Miami’s Criteria Studios, he hired Allman to play the soaring, searing slide guitar lines of the pomp-rock opus “Layla.”
Duane Allman would become a rock martyr when on October 29, 1971, the Harley-Davidson he was riding through Macon smashed into a flatbed truck. He was thrown from the bike, which then landed on him, pinning him and crushing him to death at age twenty-four. Amplifying the tragedy, just over a year later Allman bassist Berry Oakley crashed his motorcycle, only three blocks from where Duane had finished his final ride, and died as well. The Allmans carried on, with Dickey Betts taking Duane’s place, providing the electrified blues guitar; two brilliant Betts compositions in 1973, the country/pop/rock monster crossover hit “Ramblin’ Man” and the rollicking seven-minute instrumental “Jessica,” among the greatest country-rock grooves ever written and played, created an almost visual sonic field. This assured the band’s unbroken dominance—though this enormous success soon sowed the seeds of their destruction. Drummer Butch Trucks later said the band “got away from the music” with “country-fried hit records,” creating egos that “ripped [them] all apart.”
This aspect of fame, with booze and drug excess—one imitated by Skynyrd all too well—wrote an end to the Allmans’ heyday, which would essentially be over by 1975, though their reunion tours would become endless. Still, their footprint was so large that FM stations had no compunction playing in full their live-album jams, which stretched as long as twenty-three minutes. Had they not broken radio’s time barriers, a song like “Free Bird” never would have been written in the form it was. By that time southern songwriters had become the modern southern literati, and in their pens lay the definitions of a new reconstruction of the South and southern manhood. The classic stereotypes had taken a beating through the twentieth century, but certain instincts were inbred, such as a courtly kind of regional and sexual chauvinism in which southern women, as one historian notes, were “put firmly on the pedestal of an impossible purity.”
If the songwriters’ aim was to “recoup white male power, even as they admit[ted] that their terms of that power [could] never be the same,” as southern historian Caroline Gebhard postulated in an essay in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson’s essential 1998 cultural analysis of the region, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, the new crop of native southern rock and rollers had to walk a fine line between racial rehabilitation and racial reversion, a very risky theme for any band. To Bartow J. Elmore, a noted history professor at University of Alabama, the southern rock idiom was “essentially reactionary,” a bastion of “unquestioning traditionalism.” To yet another, Ted Ownby, author of “Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music,” it was “upholding traditions while they were at the same time, as young rock musicians, rebelling against authority” and thus espousing a sort of closeted liberalism. Still other commentators anointed southern rockers as the first role models of the region who were not evil or buffoons, providing young southerners with a new way of healing from the scars of their ancestry.
For Lynyrd Skynyrd and their cohorts, such arguments were nearly irrelevant. To them, they merely sang of bonding, extreme loyalty to God and family, and the land, and of being men who admitted to needing “all my friends” one day and nobody the next. The bad boys of Skynyrd had good cause to cast their own image in an Allman-like molding. Even so, major deviations in style and substance distinguished the two bands. Van Zant’s writing was far more personally rooted in real-life yearning, pride, fear, and insecurity, and would grow even more so, a clear sign that none of his alienation ever eased. If he was after solace, all he could find was in his writing and singing about what he saw through the windows of his life, but he never really flew free like the bird he longed to be.
Needing to seem like a smart-ass whiskey-bar singer more than a blues singer, he wanted to sound as if he had just picked up the microphone after a stiff belt of liquid courage and a drag on an unfiltered cigarette. Mission accomplished, he decided that background vocals would not be sung by any band members, not just because they weren’t polished singers or because as front man he wanted the spotlight all to himself—though that certainly was the case—but because the intricate guitar lines played by Gary and Allen might be disrupted if they had to remember lyrics and sing them into microphones. Thus most of their songs would be written without harmony parts—another departure from most every band of the day and, specifically, the Allman Brothers—and on those that benefited from a backup vocal, Leon would handle that well enough.
The anomaly of “Free Bird” aside—and the irony, given its influence on FM radio—Skynyrd was more attuned to cutting discrete hard-rock songs that were bar blues based and country themed and lasted three to four minutes, making their point and getting on to the next song, rather than letting a set flow into one big, interwoven jam session. Ronnie’s thinking was that the Allman Brothers had done that, and only a band of fools would try to beat them on their own turf. His credo would be: Let’s don’t overstay our welcome. To Ronnie, it was all from the heart, the gut. The rules mattered only in how far they bent. After all, this whole thing was, as Paul Rodgers sang, a “rock ’n’ roll fantasy.”
“Ronnie Van Zant and those guys, they were totally independent from all the bullshit record-industry nonsense,” recalls Alan Walden. “Ronnie was a leader—he wasn’t no follower. Other bands I’d auditioned had misconceptions about how to act. They’d follow the magazine stories to try to figure out what to say and do to be successful. Not Ronnie. He was totally down to earth.”
By the time the Allman Brothers Band self-obliterated, the band from Shantytown would be there to pick up the fallen torch of the New South.
The problem for Skynyrd was remaining on the upward path before they burned out. As it was, they were building a following in the Deep South, the absence of a record-label contract notwithstanding. With the next big break ostensibly waiting around each new corner, the grind went on through three years of, as Gary Rossington puts it, “just starvin’ and payin’ dues and stuff.” It could be rough out there in the sticks. Rossington tells of the time at a nightclub when, from the stage, he witnessed “a guy getting his head blown off” in a typical sort of altercation, the reason unknown but probably a woman. It all went with the ambience of their existence, that of seamlessly stitched wasted days and wasted nights.
Walden, who kept reassuring them they would get their break sometime, could only pray he was right. As he recalled, “I had one hundred dollars in my pocket” at the time, and “I had encountered problems with some of the other partners and was looking at starting all over again. I got about thirty miles out of Muscle Shoals one day when the old Cadillac broke down with a bad fuel pump. The wrecker service left me out there waiting until after 5 PM so he could charge more. There went all but ten dollars. Add $90,000 that I was in debt back home, and you might understand how bad it was. I walked out into a cotton patch, shaking my fist at the sky, shouting, ‘I am going to make Lynyrd Skynyrd happen even if it kills me!’ It was my solemn oath.”
Ronnie, who in the past wouldn’t have given a hang about borrowing money, felt guilty as hell that he had to keep asking Judy to loan him enough to get to a gig. She had to take a job as a waitress, which was another thing he felt guilty about and probably one reason why he decided that, even if he had nothing in his pockets, it was time to marry Judy, lest he
lose her. They took their vows on November 18, 1972, in Waycross, Georgia, her hometown, during another tour of the Atlanta clubs in which Skynyrd opened for Bob Seger’s band on a few nights at the Head Rest club. When they got home, the newlyweds moved into an upstairs apartment in the Boone Park section of Riverside, at least symbolically far from Shantytown and metaphorically a million miles from Lacy Van Zant.
For some time, Ronnie’s catchphrase had been to tell people that he had no doubt the band would make it—one day soon, they’d have it “made in the shade,” he’d say, to the point where people rolled their eyes. He even wrote a song with that as the title. But where was the shade?
One little sliver of success came late in 1972 when they landed a critical gig opening for the Allman Brothers on some shows in Macon, the first time that the similarities and differences between the two bands could be gauged. Not that the Allmans had any particular reason to separate Skynyrd from the buffet of southern rock bands Phil Walden hired as his meal ticket’s opening acts—most of whom Walden managed and had given contracts with Capricorn Records, thereby goosing sales for them and profits for himself. Skynyrd of course was not on his roster, but the link with his brother gave the band a few advantages. And when they were allowed to play in front of the Allmans, they continued making their bones. Van Zant’s gritty vocals and the stampede of guitars made for a very difficult act to follow, especially for a blues-rock band that didn’t punch listeners in the face but instead wove trance-like spells with long, free-form jams. Skynyrd even had their own soundman traveling with them, mixing their sound to specification on the board. Record deal or no, they were making perfectionism a rule of what seemed like a no-rules, anything-goes act.
Seeing the fuss Skynyrd was causing, the Allmans started keeping their distance, perhaps afraid that the much more aggressive southern band might eclipse them someday on their home turf. Indeed, Gregg Allman rarely had anything nice to say about them and, even decades later, still seemed to be looking down his nose at them. In his 2012 memoir, he mentioned Skynyrd exactly once, in an oh-by-the-way fashion, with ambivalence and perhaps arrogance. “In 1972,” he wrote, “we had a lot of Capricorn bands that Phil had brought to Macon opening for us—Eric Quincy Tate, Wet Willie, Dr. John, Alex Taylor, Captain Beyond, and Cowboy—and it was a very good thing for everybody. There ain’t but one Allman Brothers, and there ain’t but one Marshall Tucker. There ain’t but one of any of those bands, so we weren’t worried about them stealing our thunder or whatever.” Interestingly, giving them credit for success they hadn’t had at that point, he added, “I would imagine that Lynyrd Skynyrd had more hits than anybody else, but they sure ended up appealing to a real redneck bunch of folks.”
Ronnie felt the sting of this condescension. Cameron Crowe—now a movie director, but then a wunderkind reporter for Rolling Stone—was privy to some of Van Zant’s unguarded thoughts on the band’s bus rides during long tours. Ronnie, he says, “didn’t feel like Gregg was giving him too much back in terms of respect or acknowledgment. It wasn’t a rift or anything, but I know Ronnie sort of wanted his props from Gregg, more than he was getting…. [He’d ask], ‘Did you talk to Gregg? Did Gregg say anything?’” The irony was that by dissing the “redneck” audience they may have made Skynyrd more appealing to that crowd, establishing a building block to the latter’s growing momentum. Gregg Allman’s arrogance was duly noted by Ronnie and his band, generating a good deal of motivation for wanting to surpass the great godhead of the Allman Brothers.
Gregg, who still tours with the Brothers (or, like Skynyrd, a reasonable facsimile), can take pride in his unlikely longevity—after a lifetime of drugs and booze and having contracted hepatitis, apparently from dirty needles, he required a liver transplant in 2010 at age sixty-three. Yet even four decades later, he is no more generous to those southern rockers who followed in his path. “[T]here was some competition between bands—there has to be,” he wrote. “But we weren’t out there to sell southern rock, we were out there because we had the best goddamn band in the land. The Allman Brothers has had its bad nights, but we are some Super Bowl motherfuckers compared to all them other bands.”
Allman may be a victim of his own hubris, but he did have a point when he noted that the term “southern rock” was so amorphous as to be meaningless, given how different the bands all were in terms of musical style and sound. Unlike most rock-and-roll idioms, country rock was splintered before it hit its apogee. And that left a door wide open to any band with a fresh approach to get through it. Skynyrd made the most of its opportunity. Their concert appearances were like Fourth of July parties, with half-naked crowds baking in the southern heat and getting off on the sonic fireworks on stage as Ronnie, affixed in place and never breaking character with any awkward dance steps or patter for the audience, stood nonetheless as a transfixing presence, spilling southern populist soul into the microphone amid the concretion of screaming guitars and pounding drums melting the air. The Allmans were no match for them in sizzle factor, no doubt a factor in the Brothers deeming that it would be better if Skynyrd didn’t open for them anymore.
Skynyrd’s time was nearing, even if the industry—even if they— didn’t know it.
Fate was a stronger force than all of Alan Walden’s designs and connections. For no reason other than pure chance, the man who would help bring Lynyrd Skynyrd to fruition crossed their path in mid-January 1973, during the same swing through southern Georgia on which Ronnie married Judy. That man, born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt but better known as Al Kooper, was in Atlanta at the same time that Skynyrd was playing in a club on Peachtree Street called Funochio’s, a dim, suffocating cavern with a sign on it reading ATLANTA’S ORIGINAL HOUSE OF ROCK. There was almost no room between performers and audience, some of whom would sit on the foot of the stage during sets. As bands played, the crowds would dance as if on top of one another, and if there was a capacity limit or fire code, the owners seemed not to care.
Alan Walden, knowing pretty much all the dive bars in southern Georgia, calls Funochio’s a “hell hole, a real fruit and nut bar. The booze was good, the women were wild and we stayed until I thought I would die there.” On one Skynyrd date there, Ronnie’s grandmother died, and he didn’t want to sing. He and Walden went to see the manager of the bar, who was unmoved by their request to cancel the show. “The old bitch is dead, and you go on!” was his answer. It took all the self-control Ronnie had not to separate the guy from his spleen. He went onto the stage, burning hot under the collar. Then after the band played its finale—“Free Bird,” as always—he snapped. Says Walden: “Ronnie started throwing amps onto the dance floor, smashing chairs, and breaking bottles. He totally wrecked the joint! People were screaming and running, cops rushing in. I reached him just as the cop was about to bust him with a billy club. I screamed, ‘His grandmother died! Don’t hurt him!’”
The cops just wanted to get Ronnie out before he could level the joint. “We got him outside,” Walden says, “only to find out I had to go back and collect the money for the week.” Seeing how crazed Van Zant could get, the manager paid up. What’s more, Skynyrd had been so good that night, they kept on getting asked back. Kooper, an archetypal New York industry big shot, who had a list of music industry credits as long as his arm, frequented many such clubs. After visiting Funochio’s for the first time, he regarded it as a “bucket o’ blood,” where “shootings and stabbings regularly took place, and bodies were routinely carried out”—in other words, the very sort of place where one might find some fairly cool music being played. Not since Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s, he says now, had he seen such a “fertile breeding ground” of music.
Kooper was in Atlanta at the time with a two-act band he had formed called Frankie and Johnny, whom he wanted to tune up for a recording session in the city by having them play some clubs. During his stay, someone suggested he hang at Funochio’s, where he was given a private box with flowing booze and easy women to trifle with while listening to the music.
Kooper had earned that kind of sway. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he was a prodigy at fourteen, playing guitar on “Short Shorts,” the Royal Teens’ twelve-bar blues riff that became a seminal rock-and-roll hit in 1958. Plying his skill as a songwriter, he composed the Gary Lewis and the Playboys smash “This Diamond Ring.” A peripatetic presence, he was in Bob Dylan’s backup band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the same year, when Dylan cut his breakthrough folk-rock album Highway 61 Revisited, Kooper played the immortal, spindly Hammond organ line on arguably the most existential long-form rock song ever, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
He had also played on Dylan’s landmark Blonde on Blonde sessions in Nashville and would become involved with just about everyone in the rock sacrarium, either producing, writing for, or playing sessions with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Blues Project, B.B. King, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. He was a cofounder of the Blues Project, teamed up with super guitarist Mike Bloomfield and singer-guitarist Stephen Stills in several legendary live albums in the late ’60s and somehow found time to found and produce the horn-driven jazz-rock unit Blood, Sweat and Tears. By 1973 the curly-haired Queens Jew with the thick “Noo Yawk” accent had seen enough of the percolating native southern rock scene and was so taken by the sanctuary the region seemed to offer from the industry jungle he despised that he considered moving to Dixie and creating a label similar to Capricorn. Kooper rhapsodized about a new South, saying that Atlanta had changed drastically in the three years he’d been away from it.
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