Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  “Listen, they should have concentrated on the music and the shows and left the bookings and business to the pro. It amazes me how bands hire a manager and as soon as they get hot want to tell him how to do it. Or fire him because he is too smart for them. They should stick to what they know best. Music! And so I was thinking of their latter days when they would no longer tour…. I had set up profit sharing and pension plans for their older years. I got them life insurance. Things they did not want to keep at that time. They wanted it all in cash.

  “On one of my road trips with them, I discovered $90,000 in a briefcase. I took it home and straight to the bank. I tried to remind them it wasn’t that long before that we all had been broke. The wheel of success had turned, and now I was the miser. In their minds, they just knew the success would never stop. It was all going perfectly. Pronounced was a hit, and with Second Helping moving up the chart, MCA was thrilled and had reps meeting us in every city. Both smash albums were made for under $50,000. No wonder MCA loved us so much. And I was setting them up for the kill. We had not borrowed money, and it was a prime time to renegotiate their recording contract. It would have been a multimillion-dollar deal. We were getting prime concerts now, with the Allman Brothers in Atlanta at Braves Stadium, Clapton in Memphis, ZZ Top in Nashville, and heading to pick off the Eagles at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The band was now the showstopper! They killed and killed. No one could hold up behind ‘Free Bird!’”

  Yet it was right then and there, at the Orange Bowl on March 26, 1975, two days after the release of Nuthin’ Fancy, that the sky fell on Alan Walden.

  What Walden didn’t know was that Ronnie had gone behind his back and contacted Peter Rudge on his own, a line of communication that Rudge intended to keep open. As Artimus Pyle observes, Rudge was “very manipulative.” While he didn’t ask to manage the band, he did make sure to say what he would do with them if he did: big-time things, worldwide things, things that would spurt big money. And the drip-drip-drip of those conversations filled Ronnie’s cup of ambition to the brim. Skynyrd, he became convinced, needed a big-time manager.

  He had a point too. Despite Walden’s protestations about protecting their long-term security, the band was even then paying out of their own pockets to get to some gigs. When Gary Rossington said in 1977, “We weren’t makin’ anything, we were just surviving, and we were still having to pay thirty percent to a manager,” it was obvious that they had come to see Walden not as a Musketeer but as a maggot. “We didn’t think anyone would fuck us over, we just thought that if somebody said something, we’d take their word for it, because that’s the way we were. We didn’t know what kind of rat race this really is. But we started learnin’ real quick.”

  Their thinking was evident: if managers screwed people by nature, they needed one who would screw not them but other people for them. Not by coincidence, Rudge came down to Atlanta just days before to attend a picnic Phil Walden threw at Capricorn. Seeing Ronnie and Gary sitting by a lake behind Phil Walden’s house, Rudge ambled over and sat down next to them. “We just talked the whole afternoon,” Rossington recalls, “and we really wanted to go with him…. He said, ‘If you want to come with me, I’ll be your manager.’”

  A handshake agreement was made. The next step was to deep-six Alan Walden. When it happened, the Musketeer felt like he had walked into a fist.

  “We were at the Orange Bowl with the Eagles, and I was doing an interview with Creem. They had spent two days traveling with me, and this was going to be the big story. Ronnie told me he needed to talk to me right after the show, and he and I went back to the room together. The conversation began with that they wanted me to move to California where I could pursue getting their songs and them into movies and further their career more in that direction. At the time, I was very happy living in a three-room log cabin in Round Oak, Georgia. My reply was, ‘Ronnie, I can’t stand California. When I’m there I’m afraid to go to sleep at night because I am afraid some guy might think I have a gold tooth in my mouth and kill me just to steal it!’ I only trusted Mike Maitland and Bill Graham out there!

  “Then he proceeded to tell me how Lynyrd Skynyrd was a well-oiled machine now and that the brotherhood of the band no longer was a big part of it. I told him that was one of the main reasons I had signed the band, and that maybe I no longer fit in.”

  That was Ronnie’s opening. “At that point, he informed me the band had voted to replace me as the manager of the band. The wind went out of my sails. I was shocked, but more confused than hurt. I had done a superb job for this group. Here we were with the whole world at our feet and now—boom, it was over. I must admit that I also felt like a concrete block had fallen off my shoulders. Now I did not have to worry about their future, which had been a full-time job because of how they lived. But no one was looking after my future, or seemed to care.

  “This had been my whole life for the last four years. No one loved the band any more than me. Ronnie had been best man at my wedding and the only people I invited were the band. I thought of Ronnie as my closest friend. And he felt so bad about it that he said I could beat the hell out of him, that he would just cover up the vitals and let me have a go at him. He was serious, too, but I couldn’t. He also asked me if I wanted to know who voted what. I didn’t want to know.”

  Walden, however, refuses to this day to call it a firing but something more like a reset. “I said if there was a separation that I would like to have a say in the whole matter, that I should help choose the next manager rather than the band and end up in a horrible lawsuit and court battle. Ronnie had told me he had met with [the Eagles’ manager] Irving Azoff and another manager. I told him Irving was not someone I would recommend at all, and that I did not know who the other manager was. I told him I would lean toward Peter Rudge. I figured if he could deal with Mick Jagger’s ego and Keith Moon’s insanity, he could surely manage my little southern band.” As it happened, of course, this decision had already been made.

  Now, with the details to be worked out, Walden had every right to crack nuts with the band over terminating his contract. But he was still in a stage of denial, hoping the whole thing might blow over and things would go on as they had. “They said I was a miser and I do count money well—isn’t that what a manager’s job is?—but I did not want to see some idiot come in and totally ruin everything I had worked on and I wanted him to have to buy my contracts. So I waited a couple of days, prayed over it and then called Ronnie. I offered to meet with them and try to correct any problems and I did go out to see them. Ronnie and I ended up in a room alone and I won’t go into details but I lost it with him. Here was the guy whose back I had been covering for four years even when we were up against very bad odds. And now he’s letting them all stab my back. I knew Ronnie could kick my ass one-handed but I had to hold myself back, and after I had my say I saw a tear coming down his face. Then I lost it and left with tears flowing, too.”

  The soap opera had become so drawn out that Alex Hodges recalls still going on booking Skynyrd for Paragon even after he was told Walden had been sacked. Then a call came from Rudge’s office ordering him to stop doing so. “That was not a good day,” he muses, “but it was a lot worse for Alan. I had been booking a lot of acts for both Phil and Alan, all the big country rock acts, Marshall Tucker, Black Oak Arkansas, Charlie Daniels, everyone. But Skynyrd was the only act Alan had, and now, he had nothing. From that moment on, I was working only for Phil Walden.”

  Yet even with having his magic carpet pulled out from under him, Alan Walden retains all the bravado a man who fools himself can have when he insists on one point, a point he would never give any ground on: “I left Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he says, “but I was never told I was fired—by anyone!”

  Whatever the semantics and emotional delusions, Walden was out, with a severance deal to ease his sadness—a $1 million buy-out and co-ownership with MCA in perpetuity of the publishing rights to all Skynyrd songs to that point. Walden, downplaying the deal, says, “I took t
heir offer of some cash and retained the publishing on the old songs that had already had their big earning days. The cash did not equal what I would have made off the negotiation of the record deal alone. It was a drop in the bucket compared to what I could have made in the next three years. It would equal about one-hundredth of what I would have made.”

  What with all that dough and future profit, word began to get around that it was Walden who had wanted out so he could reap his bonanza. “Rumors spread that I only wanted the money,” says Walden. “I find that ridiculous and totally untrue!”

  And so, in sauntered the elongated Pete Rudge, full of plans and schemes for how to make Lynyrd Skynyrd one of the world’s biggest bands. To the band’s delight, Rudge quickly won from MCA a fifty-fifty split of the publishing rights the music giant had shared with Walden. Starting with the next Skynyrd album, the publisher of the songs they composed would be listed as “Duchess Music Corp./Get Loose Music Inc.,” the latter the perfectly apt name for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s brand-new publishing company. Rudge drew up a touring schedule even more hectic than the one before. New studio sessions were set for early September at the Record Plant in L.A., with an as-yet-undetermined producer, and a new European tour was scheduled for October and November, with a TV appearance booked on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test music series, along with another jaunt to England in February 1976 to share the bill with the Eagles. They’d also play some venues in the United States for the first time, including one show each in ’75 and ’76 at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco and at New York’s Beacon Theatre, where the Allman Brothers seemed to have a key to the front door. A long-awaited, live double album was planned for mid-1976.

  The plans, made by Rudge and the band in numerous meetings at his New York office, got bigger and more ambitious, fueled by mass quantities of substances legal and not. Rudge assistant Chris Charlesworth remembered, “Group meetings in Rudge’s big office were all day and night affairs at which bottle after bottle of Jack Daniel’s was consumed, piles of coke snorted, and carton after carton of cigarettes smoked. Voices were often raised and the language was as bad as you could hear anywhere. Anyone who’d crossed them was dead meat. MCA Records threw a party for the band that summer at a bar near Nathan’s Restaurant which almost got out of hand when someone made a loose remark to one of Skynyrd’s women.”

  Charlesworth encountered Skynyrd’s quirks as a study in American sociology. “Before their shows,” he has said, “Skynyrd liked to psyche themselves up in their dressing room, winding themselves up by breathing deeply together like US football players, passing the Jack Daniel’s around in a ritual drink, willing each other on to perform as if their lives depended on it. Rudge, a sports fanatic, encouraged this.”

  But the purge wasn’t over. With Walden gone, Skynyrd faced a brave new world, richer, famous, and with a need to show that they could rid themselves of anyone they deemed excess baggage. The next in that line of fire was in the band of brothers itself.

  “Saturday Night Special” might have caused a few heads to be scratched in the South, but this was nothing fatal to the record. MCA, as usual getting as tasteless as possible in the ads for the band, ran one that showed a skimpily clad babe in a garter belt holding a .38 between her legs. By the early summer the song had gotten to number nineteen as the new album’s first—and, as it turned out, only—single, that being enough for their purposes. The album, against the grain as it was, received uplifting notices, mainly for revealing Ronnie’s taken-for-granted vocal range, about which Robert Christgau marveled: “Ronnie Van Zant has never deployed his limited, husky baritone with such subtlety. Where Gregg Allman is always straight, shuttling his voice between languor and high emotion, Van Zant feints and dodges, sly one moment and sleepy the next, turning boastful or indignant or admonitory with the barest shifts in timbre. I mean, dumb he ain’t.” The closest thing to a dissenter, Sounds, the Brit weekly, called it “rather disappointing…. Rightly or wrongly, you expect a band like Skynyrd to wipe the floor with you every time.”

  Skynyrd went out on a backbreaking tour, a ninety-day, sixty-one-date ordeal, during which came the Walden firing. But in contrast to the professional highs of the previous two album tours, the “Torture Tour,” as they would privately call it, left a trail of fistfights, wrecked hotel rooms, sloppy performances, and canceled shows when Van Zant’s unfiltered Marlboro-and-booze-punished vocal cords gave out.

  Naturally, the brunt of it was taken by their hotel rooms. Van Zant said, “We get a lot of publicity about busting up places or being really mean … but you just get really tired … really nervous … just about to flip out and go over the deep end, just say the hell with it, I quit. Well, instead of doing that we’re just liable to knock a hole in the wall.”

  Pete Rudge, going over the bills from the road back in New York, loved the “bad boy” ink they got, but had to keep a reserve fund separate from the routine expenses just to pay off property damages, which often were $10,000 per town when it got out of hand, but could go much higher. A hotel where they stayed in Nashville incurred terrible damage when an exercise room was set on fire, for which they held Skynyrd responsible. And Rudge could only write out a check, deducted from their account.

  Charlie Brusco, like Rudge, saw the effects of the damage firsthand. “I remember at the end of one tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd, it was them, the Outlaws, and Golden Earring. The last show was in Cleveland, and we stayed at Swingos Hotel, where all the big rock bands stayed then. And I heard the number batted around that there was $10,000 worth of damage to the hotel, and that was in ’75 or ’76—that was a lot of money then. To their great regret, the hotel put Skynyrd in no less than the Frank Sinatra Suite, which had a big piano in it, and it was opulent—until they got through with it. We had a party to celebrate the end of that tour, and it went on not a few hours but an extra day. I don’t think anybody got out of there to make flights the next day, we were all so hung over. We had done a hundred shows together in a six-to-eight-month period of time and that was the last show.” With a pause and a wan smile, he adds, “Boys will be boys.”

  While all three bands were involved in trashing the suite, it was Skynyrd that got hit with the bill. That was the logical move, to go after the richest band. And Rudge’s rule was “Do the damage, pay the toll.” During the Torture Tour, Ronnie remembered, “Our manager hit me with a bill the other day for $29,000 worth of damages and I tore that up without even thinking about it”—though of course Rudge had to pay it and dun the band the same amount. By rote Ronnie explained the carnage as being somehow necessary to “let off steam…. We’re a bunch of hyperactive people gettin’ with it. If we don’t let it all off at a gig, we’re gonna make a hotel a wreck. We usually wind up gettin’ thrown out owin’ money.”

  It helped that they had the luxury to do that, write a check, and move on. But for Ronnie, it was never even that easy. He was just as ready to use his fists on people as on walls. In June 1975 he used them on an innocent bystander, Brusco. “I thought I’d gotten to know Ronnie pretty well, but you never really got to know him well because he could turn on you no matter how tight you were with him. He turned on Gary all the time. He’d pop him out of nowhere, bang, and both he and Gary would just go on about their business like nothing happened.

  “Gary was used to that. I wasn’t. After the show at the Beacon Theatre in New York, we were out late and Gary and I were a little loud in the hallway and Ronnie decided that he was gonna square off with us—with me. You know how for a fight you have a bell? Well, I got hit before the bell rang. That was Ronnie’s way, he didn’t waste any time. He just came up to me and boom. I went down, lights out. And Gary didn’t even bat an eyelash. He just went to his room, leaving me there on the floor, not out of meanness but because something like that was an everyday occurrence.

  “Nobody really got hurt when Ronnie did shit like that. If he wanted to kill you, he could. He just wanted to clock you, to keep you in line. He was very g
ood at creepin’ you—that’s what they called it, that Ronnie was creepin’ you. I got up in a few minutes, the damage mostly to my pride. I figured maybe Ronnie only did that to people he liked.”

  Of course, that term—“creepin’”—was the creepy way Ronnie had described that ominous black cat in “Saturday Night Special.” He obviously believed it fit him just as well. In truth, he was the black cat. When he crept up on you, he was bad luck. Rossington seemed to be his favorite target. Once, everyone in the band was draining bottles of Schnapps, and “somehow,” Rossington said, “a bottle got broke and I ended up with slashes across my hands and wrists. But the next day, we were the best of friends again. That’s how it was, like a family.”

  As Powell learned, it was a family one might only see in horror movies. His operative phrase for Van Zant was “Jekyll and Hyde.” “I remember arguing with him once, after a few whiskeys, about Allen Collins’ volume and tuning up onstage,” Powell said. “Next thing I know, I got four of my teeth knocked out.” Ed King, not being in the circle of Jacksonville boys, observed Van Zant almost as a dispassionate outsider and came to see him as a threat to anyone around him and to himself.

  “It was always a perplexing thing to me, why they descended to violence and craziness,” says Alex Hodges, “because living the demented rock lifestyle wasn’t what it was about to them. It was more that they had all these weird backgrounds and never had a sense of normalcy, even from a young age on. They had dark impulses, and they just flashed without warning. I didn’t want to get too close to what made them that way because I didn’t understand it, didn’t want to understand it. If you got too close, you might wind up like Charlie Brusco, out cold on the floor and with a busted lip. I was lucky. ’Cause Ronnie never looked at me cross-eyed, so I must have been doin’ something right.”