Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  The consensus pick, however, became “Gimme Three Steps,” the first song recorded on March 29. It sprung from a once scary but now humorous incident at a Jacksonville club—usually assumed to be the Little Brown Jug on Highway 17 (thus “the Jug” in the song)—that had occurred early in their existence. (Rossington seems to think it was the West Tavern on Lenox Avenue.) Ronnie, self-deprecatingly described in the song as the “fat fellow with the hair colored yellow,” took a woman, “Linda Lou”—a nod to Allen Collins’s aunt, a onetime country singer who had sung under that name—onto the dance floor, only to have her boyfriend break in. Suddenly the fat fellow was “staring straight down a forty-four” and making one request: “Mister, gimme three steps toward the door.”

  The band liked to have fun with the tune on stage. Ronnie’s line that night in the bar was actually, “If you’re going to shoot me, it’s going to be in the ass or the elbows. Just gimme a few steps, and I’ll be gone.” The classic rock structure of that tune—simple three-chord repetition, intro, chorus, break, and fade, sung and played with brio and pickle brine—would be the song template for the life of the band; the rejected Muscle Shoals song “Was I Right Or Wrong,” for instance, is a virtual note-for-note copy. The only sound not played by the band on “Three Steps” was a faint bongo part by former Motown percussionist Bobbye Hall.

  With the album in the can and the first single chosen, the last order of business for Kooper was one that no amount of personal cache or begging would make the band budge on. His intention was to get them to change their name, which he loathed. “Lynyrd Skynyrd” struck him as unpronounceable and abstruse, and left him concerned that it might be impossible to market. Kooper says he “hated” it and that it “didn’t make any sense” and “certainly didn’t conjure up what their music was about.” But left no choice, he set out to make it work. With the self-effacing cheekiness that would become their sine qua non, the album was named (pronounced ’lĕh-’nérd ’skin-’nérd), thus addressing the dual need to clarify the name and provoke curiosity about what it meant. The “nerd” part was a hoot, the mark of a band with a sense of humor, though if one were to judge by the album jacket, they could be taken for Allman Brothers wannabes. On the cover shot they struck the same pose the Brothers had on College Street in Macon for their ’69 debut album, unsmiling and looking a trifle pissed off. The shot, taken on Main Street in Jonesboro before Wilkeson split, was nonetheless the one they went with, keeping faith with Leon, who as it happened gave the photo its only panache, wearing aviator shades, a constable hat with badge, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a lightning bolt decal.

  The back cover featured a photograph of a cigarette pack reading LYNYRD SKYNYRD’S SMOKES next to the eight-song listing. (The 2001 rerelease added five demos from Muscle Shoals as bonus tracks.) The band’s name was lettered in bones on the cigarette pack, above and below a skull and bones and surrounded by a ghoulish blood-red umbra, thus merging the imagery of rising heavy-metal bands like Black Sabbath with the nicotine stains of Tobacco Road. One could hardly have imagined how, in a corridor of America where southern Christian conservatives marched in lockstep behind Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Oral Roberts, folks could also get behind leather-clad merchants of devil worship. But then again, Skynyrd’s was not the South of their grandfathers.

  As contrived as such imagery was, Kooper knew the industry and the imperative of getting attention in a swarm of similar acts. He also knew the target audience of restless youth with a thirst for restless rock. Most of all, knowing Skynyrd as he did, as a bunch “always getting into fist-fights,” he would say, “I decided to paint a rough-house image for them.” As a $100,000 ad campaign approved by MCA rolled out, promotional albums sent to radio stations were bundled in packages engraved enigmatically with the question WHO IS LYNYRD SKYNYRD? Full- and half-page ads were bought to run in the hippest of counterculture newspapers like the Village Voice in New York and the Free Press in L.A. Snobbish big-city music critics who might otherwise have ignored a backwoods band of pigpen rednecks took notice; maybe this band was actually made up of southern apostates, a hint of a new wave happening in Dixie, with rock and roll the elixir of liberal notions bubbling down there in the trailer parks and swamps. Stoking such suppositions would be critical to their breakout, and whether it was jive or not, the men of Skynyrd were ready for some altered realities as the price of inordinate fame.

  7

  “CHICKEN-SKIN MUSIC IN THE RAW”

  Al Kooper was so demanding about making (pronounced ’lĕh-’nérd ’skin-’nérd) a reference point in a new order of rock and roll that he took the master tapes to New York three separate times to mix the album to his satisfaction at state-of-the-art mixing facilities. During the process, he threw a kickoff party for himself and his label on July 29, 1973, at Richard’s, a posh nightclub on Monroe Drive that billed itself “Atlanta’s finest rock club,” with “full theatrical lighting and 360-degree sound.” Kooper invited executives at MCA Records to hear the band they were paying for, and to position Lynyrd Skynyrd as a welcome addition to the label’s enormous parent company, Music Corporation of America Inc. For Skynyrd to be associated with this gigantic megacorp seemed a fable in itself. MCA’s entertainment conglomerate had grown into a dominant role across the show business terrain under the storied leadership of the prototypical Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman. MCA Inc. had already gobbled up movie studios like Paramount and Universal and publishing houses like G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and its music division had annexed labels like Decca and Kapp. The company even purchased the Danelectro guitar company.

  In 1972 MCA Records had, after consolidating all its sublabels, gone worldwide with its first release, Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock.” Seeking all manner of acts, its executives were quite receptive to Kooper’s southern rock designs, and for the coming-out party of Sounds of the South, plunked down $10,000 without blinking to arrange and cater the night’s festivities. One of the company’s most valuable artists, Marc Bolan of the English glam-rock band T. Rex, was a guest. Even though the event was on a Sunday night, the company’s éclat was such that the Atlanta police waived the blue law against serving booze on Sundays, just this once, or until they wanted to do it again. Gary Rossington surmises that Kooper wanted Skynyrd to perform at the party so that the suits could validate his ardor for a band of freaky redneck hippies and he wouldn’t be left out on a limb if they flopped. “He invited all the MCA reps and everybody down to hear these three Southern groups that he had found,” Rossington explains. “And so the other two went out and played, and we were last.”

  Throughout the spring and summer of ’73, Skynyrd had returned to the clubs and dive bars, the album garnering them nothing more ornate than dates backing up the bands Traktor and Mose Jones (Kooper’s “Beatles”) at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta and taking them back to Funochio’s where they backed up Mason and Traktor. Knowing the stakes for them at the Richard’s party, they had a good gimmick ready, a song called “Workin’ for MCA,” cowritten by Van Zant and King, about their rise coinciding with that of a certain “Yankee Slicker”: “Worked in every joint you can name, yessuh, every honkytonk / Along come Mister Yankee Slicker, sayin’ maybe you what I want.” Kooper loved every word, especially the lyric that went, “Nine thousand dollars, that’s all we could win / But we smiled at the Yankee Slicker with a big ol’ Southern grin.” It wasn’t merely a gimmick either; it was a damn good song, those frontal guitars on fire. The MCA boys loved it as well, rising from their seats, loosening their ties, and stomping around to the band’s molten, ear-splitting, three-guitar assault and Van Zant’s riveting voice. Kooper knew right then that he had it right about Skynyrd: they had a cheeky impudence and cleverness and could play with the fire and play loud.

  Kooper was beaming that night. Skynyrd, he said, “stole the show. They mustered up all of their inherent discipline and put together a show that floored these people.” Suddenly, his “Beatles,” Mose Jones, were on t
he back burner. Everything was about Skynyrd now. So triumphant was the evening that Gary Rossington recalls it as the very moment Kooper asked to sign them, saying that he “brushed the other two groups off and said, ‘Hey, you’re signed.’” Of course, as with many Rossington recollections, this is way off target, but the gig was certainly productive; having passed this audition of sorts, they were booked to play six more shows at Richard’s and then again in September opening for Bonnie Bramlett.

  Prepared to bank everything on Skynyrd, Kooper had already convinced MCA to throw all of its promotional clout behind them, including $100,000 for those skull-and-bones-dotted promotional and ad campaigns. MCA’s creative directors could hardly imagine how the image fit a bunch of dusty rednecks and a lead singer who just sang. But they trusted Kooper and went full steam ahead. By the time the album was released on August 13, 1973, the L.A.-based public relations agency Norman Winter Associates was hired to ensure the name was actually pronounced correctly, preferably when record buyers walked into music stores and asked for the album. That week, a very expensive two-page ad ran in the music trade papers, Variety and Billboard.

  By then, too, Ronnie had made it his business to talk Leon Wilkeson back. Toward that end, he had insisted that Leon be in the group shot on the cover of pronounced, allowing him to enjoy a rank he hadn’t really earned by playing on just two tracks. His name was also on the back cover’s album credits. Indeed, as with the prodigal Bob Burns, Wilkeson was never written out of the band, and he would be given a one-seventh share of the royalties from sales of the album—a hell of a better payday than he’d earn stuffing ice cream cones for sniveling kids, as he was doing at the Best Dairy in Jacksonville. In Ronnie’s value system, a bandmate he judged to be worthy of the Skynyrd brand—as opposed to, say, Larry Junstrom—was a bandmate forever. Skynyrd was more than a band to him now; it was an all-for-one, well, confederacy, born of a blood bond that went beyond even family and had less to do with music than it did with honor. Thus he had no trouble bringing Leon back into the ring in time to play on the next album, never again to stray from the fold.

  For the Skynyrd rollout, nothing was left to chance and every advantage was sought. In planning their first tour to sell the album, Kooper’s connections stretched a long way. Putting the word out across the rock meridians that Skynyrd would be available to open for a big act that might be concurrently touring, he received an invitation from Alice Cooper née Vincent Furnier, the leather-covered, face paint-streaked rocker who was more shlock than shock. It seemed to be the best they could possibly do—but only until Kooper was in L.A. on business and happened to be in the MCA offices. There he ran into Pete Townsend and fellow Brit Peter Rudge, whose management firm, Sir Productions, managed the Who’s world tours, as well as those of the Rolling Stones.

  MCA had just subsumed the group’s longtime label, Decca, and their first release on MCA Records in the States would be the Townsend-composed rock-opera double album Quadrophenia, to be released in late October when their new world tour would begin, a humongous event, to be sure. Kooper, who had done session work in London and had even planned to move there before catching the Dixie bug, struck up a conversation with Townsend and Rudge about his new southern band. As Kooper recalled, “Miraculously, the timing was perfect. The Who were looking for a young buzz act that they felt could sell whatever seat deficit was left over from their own fans.” This was important since such an act would reduce the Who’s red ink, which would be plentiful given the enormous budget they would foot for their battleship-sized stages and elaborate light show.

  Rossington, with his usual abbreviation of the facts, recalled that Townsend listened to their album “and he said, ‘Hey, I like this group here, get them to open for us.’” Rudge listened too and agreed. Kooper then ran the idea by the band, who knew there was no way they could let the opportunity slide yet were still abashed. “Up until then,” said Rossington, “we had been playing clubs, like three hundred people, one hundred people, and the next day [Rudge] said, ‘You wanna do this tour?’” Adds Ed King, “Everyone else was scared shitless for us. [MCA] was a little leery. I mean, they took us to a Who gig with Mylon LeFevre, the opening act, and he was just booed off the stage. He got eaten up.” LeFevre was also a southern act, albeit a gospel-blues singer, and the reaction could not have helped his state of mind; a few months later, he died of a heroin overdose.

  Recalls Alex Hodges, “It wasn’t a slam dunk, I’ll tell you that. Alan [Walden] likes to boast that he made the tour, but, you know, that’s Alan, thinking of Alan. There was a lot of dissent about it; it wasn’t only that it was a daunting thing to go out there with The Who. I remember I had booked about fifteen dates for Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas, and those were for a lot more money. Skynyrd was already making $2,000 a night, and the Who tour paid us $750 a night. But I told Alan, ‘You gotta do it.’ We’d get them into bigger arenas, move up into a bigger league. It was a career decision. And Alan ultimately made the decision to go. He said, ‘OK, but if it goes wrong I’m blamin’ you.’ He was jokin’, of course, but that’s how concerned he was that we weren’t ready for that kind of heat yet.”

  And so, leery as they were, Skynyrd pulled out of the Alice Cooper deal and became the latest victim, er, opening act for the Who. The first thing they did was get drunk—not for the first time and definitely not the last.

  The Who tour, which would hit the United States on November 20 in San Francisco, would propel the Skynyrd rollout onto a higher level, putting them into the biggest arenas and stadiums. Getting their feet wet, they worked toward that, playing another week at Richard’s and then taking it on the road: headlining at the Cellar in Charlotte, North Carolina; backing up the New York Dolls at the Lion’s Den in Saint Louis; headlining at the Paramount Theatre in Palm Beach, the Peabody Auditorium in Daytona Beach, the Fine Arts Theater in Augusta, and the Mill Hall in Athens; then up to the northeast, to the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, dates in Rochester, New York, and Portland, Maine; on Halloween night, their first big venue—Avery Fisher Hall in New York City—for two shows, opening for Kooper’s Blues Project; heading back south, to Birmingham, Alabama, and Charleston; and finally up to Jersey again to play at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre.

  The Atlanta gig, at the recently opened Omni Coliseum, was as much a show of their mettle as their metal. This was the first of a number of concerts at which they, as the opening act, had to salvage a pay date. As Hodges remembers, “Blue Oyster Cult was the main act that night. But the place was new—it wasn’t even fully built. And the sound system for the building hadn’t gotten there yet—there was no amplifiers. So Blue Oyster Cult said, ‘Fuck it, we ain’t goin’ on.’ The promoter didn’t know what to do. He was thinkin’ he was gonna have to give back sixteen thousand refunds. So he called me and put Ronnie on the phone. And Ronnie says, ‘The fans are all here, and we’re all set up to play—but there’s no sound system, the rig didn’t come, the other guys went home. What do we do?’

  “I’m thinking, ‘Thanks for puttin’ all this on me, pal.’ I just winged it. I said, ‘Ronnie, is there a PA system in that building? You can hook microphones into it and sing and play through the PA. It won’t be great, but you can do it.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s gonna be your call, but I will tell you exactly what’ll happen. You’ll go up on stage, grab a microphone, and tell those people, ‘I want to talk to you for a second,’ you’ll tell ’em the headliners aren’t there but that Skynyrd’s gonna play without amps. You’re gonna ask them, ‘Do you want us to play?’ Because I knew they’d scream, ‘Yeaaaahhhh!’ I said, ‘You’re already big in Atlanta. This will be something the fans will never forget. They’ll love it. You’ll walk off that sage, and you will own Atlanta forever.’ And they played, and that’s what happened. I had to feel pretty good about it. I didn’t really know it would work—I was just pullin’ somethin’ out of my butt to get ’em to play.”

  They had been scheduled for a six-show run at Kenny’s Cas
taways in New York City, which would have been a huge step, but with the Who tour about to commence, the run was canceled. Gearing up, they flew cross-country to meet up with the superstar band at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on November 18, with a buzz about them. That month, Cashbox, another trade paper, was one of the first to take note of them, its reviewer writing, “Watch for this band. Tight, mean and rough, they’re one of the few rock acts in the business that really get it on.” The bisection of the bad-boy Brit whitenecks and the bad-boy Deep South rednecks was a devil’s bargain in itself. By being brought into the circle of one of the world’s biggest acts, the country rockers were turned up all right, and turned on. They were able to observe and hang with all-time great rockers and self-abusers, drinking in—literally—the lifestyle of rock icons, as well as invaluable tips on showmanship, musicianship, and the mandatory misbehavior methods of the contemporary rock culture.

  At that very first show at the Cow Palace, Keith Moon, a sprite with an endless capacity for self-destruction, consumed massive quantities of brandy and tranquilizer pills meant for zoo animals. He passed out on his drum stool during “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and, after a break backstage, did it again during “Magic Bus.” When Moon was carted off again, Townshend, looking more resigned than angered or concerned, having had to do this before, asked the audience, “Can anyone play the drums?—I mean somebody good?” A nineteen-year-old audience member, Scott Halpin, did so, legendarily, and the show went on. By contrast, Skynyrd, nervous as they were, having graduated from two hundred-seat clubs to a hall with twenty-two thousand screaming people, had preceded them and given their usual overheated performance, with no forced theatrics, no one falling off a stool, and no one stumbling about the stage in a drunken shamble. Their “light show” was the passion they had for the music, carried across in Van Zant’s anchoring voice and those three guitars that didn’t need to be set ablaze to sound like they were on fire. That first night, playing a set limited to thirty minutes, they nonetheless caused such a stir that the audience begged for an encore.