The unfortunate ones clearly weren’t, at least according to Ronnie’s warped value system. Ed King tells of a frightful incident when Ronnie came into the hotel room he was sharing with King, “drag[ging] a young woman and beating her senselessly. He threw her head into a nightstand three or four times—I mean, he really fucked her up.”
“Ronnie!” Ed shouted at him. “What the hell did she do, man?”
“She swallowed my yellow jacket,” he said, meaning a yellow-colored speed pill.
It was as good a reason as any for Ronnie Van Zant, rock-and-roll star, to act like a raging, abusive asshole.
11
“WE DONE THINGS ONLY FOOLSD DO”
Ed King, like everyone else, was helpless to stop Van Zant from these sorts of psychotic episodes, which to King were symptomatic of two things: One was something inside Ronnie that he suppressed but that came out in a Freudian rush when he was drunk. “Ronnie,” he said, “was one angry guy…. There was something inside him that was eating him up.” But for a nonsoutherner like King, it signified something else as well—for him, Van Zant was a metaphor for the best and worst of the South, a region King loved but could never transfuse into his own blood, where it resided by birth for Ronnie and the others. And this, he believed, they held against him.
“Though I was an outsider, I could see the whole picture. And I don’t mean to be too critical of the South—I love its charm and I do still live there—but, oh, the stupidity sometimes. It exceeds all ignorance.” The worst of it was the “Southern gentlemen” of the band’s unstintingly callous treatment of women. “It was unbelievable. You wouldn’t even think about doing the kinds of things they did. I was appalled, man. I just thought it was the weirdest thing I’d ever encountered. And to them, it was like nothing.”
Al Kooper had the same ambivalence about the band and the region, which hastened his egress from the South. The guns, the misogyny, the routine acceptance of violence and racial stereotypes, all of it got to him eventually; even the sick, drugged-out decadence of L.A.—the place where, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti sagaciously wrote, “the American Dream came too true”—and the rock scene’s fatuous acceptance of misogyny on their terms and its embrace of a jive shaman like Carlos Castañeda imparting meaning to essentially meaningless songs seemed harmless by comparison to a wild-eyed badlands with a gun and ammo store on each corner. For Kooper and King, both nonnatives, an impassable cultural chasm always stood between them and the band. The pictures taken of Skynyrd during the time King was in the band almost all contained some sort of underlying if subconscious proof of his alienation. In nearly every one, King is stuck off to the side, seemingly pushed into or situated by choice on the periphery. Still, even if that’s how he felt, he suffered the effects of a kind of Stockholm syndrome when it came to Ronnie, feeling a great deal for him on a personal level but unable to tolerate him when he went over the edge of psychopathy. After the debut album came out, Ronnie had told King he hated his bass playing—“Man, you really suck” was how he put it. Indeed, Van Zant had never had much of a relationship with or attachment to the moon-faced Jersey native. Never did King feel he was “one of them” beyond the useful expertise he contributed to the band. Indeed, Ronnie wanted him off the bass and on guitar, creating more “Sweet Home Alabama” riffs. The three-lead-guitar attack that the song had begotten meant King was needed, an invaluable asset on that instrument and a catalyst for the best songs Ronnie ever wrote. Still, King couldn’t disregard the nagging, gnawing feeling in his gut that he could take only so much more or risk his own sanity.
The Torture Tour was four months in when he came close. The band was ragged and dog tired, and some nights the shows were awful, such as in Ann Arbor on May 25. This was two days after Ronnie had cold-cocked Gary in Cleveland, and the entire band was out of sorts. King, speaking with a reporter the next day, admitted, “We were terrible. We were just horrible; it didn’t happen at all. If I’d have been hit in the head with a tomato and a bottle I would have accepted it. Any other time I’d have been raving mad. The audience was real polite and gave us more applause than we’d deserved.” He went on, “Our band works on pride. If it doesn’t turn out, like that, we’re ashamed of it. Our live gigs are what we’re really proud of; they’re what our reputation is built on. When we go out to promote a record, we can back it up. Tomorrow we’re going to spend all day rehearsing. Playing a bad gig like that will bring your spirits up. You’re feeling so bad about it, there’s no way to go but up.”
That same day, King’s spirits were broken. Previously a light drinker, he too had become a prisoner of the bottle. He’d start a half-hour before the show to make sure he was high as a kite on stage. “One night somebody forgot to bring the booze,” he says, “and it just wasn’t the same.” After the show the night before, Ronnie and roadie John Butler had gotten into a barroom brawl and spent the night in the local jail for disorderly conduct. Recalls King, “Butler took care of my guitars. It was his job to change my strings every day, and they didn’t show up in Pittsburgh for the next show until like five minutes before the show. We didn’t know if we’d be able to go on. And that night during ‘Free Bird,’ I broke two strings, something I never do.
“On the limousine ride back to the hotel Ronnie was pissed, he told me that I didn’t amount to a ‘pimple on Allen Collins’ ass,’ which I wasn’t going to argue with. But then Ronnie started wanting to fight in the limousine and the driver pulled over and got out of the car and said, ‘You guys can drive your own car back.’ When I got back to the hotel I said that’s it, I just don’t need this shit. I mean, if they want to act crazy and fight amongst themselves, that’s one thing. But don’t steer it my way.”
According to Artimus Pyle, Ronnie told Ed to “hit the road,” in effect, firing him right there; the irony of such a reaction was that Ronnie had thrown it all on Ed to try to get Rudge to cancel a few shows so that the band could rest, something they were badly in need of. Ronnie, shirking his duties as leader, would not ask for it himself, knowing Rudge would never willingly agree to lose money just so the band could chill. When asked about this, King confirms that a few days before the blowup in the limo, “Ronnie came to me and said, ‘Let’s cancel some shows.’ He said, ‘I haven’t got the guts to do it, so you do it.’” King would have; however, after Ronnie either fired or simply humiliated him, he says, “I just walked out the next day.”
If Ronnie had in fact wimped out rather than make a demand of Rudge, that would have marked him as something of a paper tiger. Still, as arrogant as Ronnie was with the other members of the band, he struck King as a real enigma, more in search of respect by default than by deed, given to terrible insults of his own band as if to convince himself of his own infallibility—a trait that had also become evident by the offense he took when the others indulged heavily in booze and drugs, even as he increased his own capacity to do the same. To Ronnie, his proclivities were no one’s business but his—but theirs were his business because they threatened the band he’d labored to build. These hypocrisies, mixed with his spontaneous volatility, had become all too much for King, who says, “I had some real problems with Ronnie. I didn’t understand why a genius had to act like that.”
The pity for him was that he had joined the band because of Ronnie and had only been comfortable with him. “I didn’t care for anything about those other guys. I was always a better guitar player than any of them, anyway. I mean, they wrote some good stuff, but Ronnie was the soul of that band.” Even as he walked away, it was with mixed feelings. “I was real sorry to give it up, but I didn’t have any regrets. I had regrets on how I did it … walking out in midtour, but I had to because it was just one of those things that, the longer you stay, the more it has its teeth in you and you can’t let it go.”
Not bothering to say good-bye, King caught a cab for the airport and flew back to Jacksonville, where he packed his belongings and headed home with his wife to Greenville. He still hoped that Ronnie would call and
ask him back and, better still, admit to his faults. And, he admits, “I would have come back. Yeah, absolutely. But I knew he wouldn’t do that. Number one, there was his pride. I walked out on him. And number two, Rudge said, ‘We don’t need him.’ I mean, [Ronnie] was really mesmerized by Peter Rudge, who was the only person that I’d ever met that mesmerized Ronnie. Because Ronnie had it all over everybody. But he didn’t have it over Pete Rudge.”
For King, the portents for the band seemed all bad. “Because it had gotten so violent and it had gotten so mean. I had seen so many mean things. Not necessarily against me but just against people that were close to him, that to me was totally unnecessary. Pretty much every day was traumatic. I just had a bad premonition and felt I should obey the urge to get out when I did. I was from a different mindset from those guys. I was just there to play music. I wasn’t in there to get beat up, get spit upon, get dragged around a room, get jagged glass held up to my throat.
“The other guys, they had to put up with all that. It was either that or live the blue-collar life that faced them growing up in Jacksonville. There was no out for anybody, because when you’re born on the west side of Jacksonville and you’ve got this success on your plate right in front of you, what are you going to do, walk away? And I wasn’t from there. So I could.”
The day King split, Artimus Pyle became enraged at Van Zant for precipitating it. “I had a major fight with Ronnie,” he once said. “I was pissed off because I liked Ed and wanted him in the band. So I went to Ronnie’s room and me and Ronnie, we went to it.”
Artimus, who has insisted he was the only one in the band not deathly afraid of confronting Ronnie, didn’t say exactly how they went to it or the toll it might have taken on someone’s teeth. But nothing changed. And while only a few months back they had all been on a high, now, it seemed nobody was happy. John Haury, who played in the John Lee Walker Band, Skynyrd’s opening act on some dates during the tour, hadn’t realized just how much bad blood there was within the band of redneck “brothers.” “There were some nights,” he said, “everybody would arrive at the show separately and none of them were talking to each other.”
For a band in the middle of a long tour, the timing of Ed King’s departure was indeed ominous. Some big dates were coming up, including a few in New York City a week ahead and the fall tour of Europe. Yet Ronnie was hesitant about hiring a permanent replacement; with the way they could overdub in the studio, he believed the two guitarists could create any sort of multiple-instrument sonic effect. And out on the road, Kevin Elson at the board was able to mix the feedback from all those microphones in a way that would sound like three guitars or more. This highly technical proficiency was in stark contrast to the continuing beastly behavior within the band. Other incidents on the tour showed Ronnie indeed had cause to wail, “Lord help me, I can’t change.”
In late June, after a show in Louisville, Ronnie, who had been in a foul mood the whole tour, was awakened at the hotel by a loud argument in the hall between Billy Powell and a road manager. Wrapping a towel around himself, he came out of his room and yelled, “Cool it!” Billy, not appreciating the intrusion, told him, “Fuck you.” Ronnie recalled what happened next: “I just walked over and knocked Billy’s teeth out, hit the road manager and knocked him down. Then my towel fell off in front of the fuckin’ spectators.”
After Ronnie went back to his room with no contrition, Billy—for the second time after being a Van Zant target—picked his teeth off the floor, six of them this time. He marched to Ronnie’s room and banged on the door and, when Ronnie opened it, screamed, as if with marbles in his mouth, “You’re gonna pay for the dentist bill!” Ronnie was so hysterical at the sight and sound of Powell, dripping blood and semitoothless, that he guffawed and got out his checkbook. “I’m sorry, Billy,” he said. “Here’s the check, man.” At least Billy could say he took one for the team by giving Ronnie something to smile at.
The open question was whether Ronnie would alienate everyone in the band before he was through. He was still the fighter, but now he was something a good fighter can never afford to be: out of control. He was quite honest about that fact too, and why. “We were doing bottles of Dom Perignon, fifths of whiskey, wine, and beer,” he would say. “We couldn’t even remember the order of the songs. Some guy crouched behind an amp and shouted them to us. We made the Who look like church boys on Sunday. We done things only fools’d do.”
Near the end of the tour, no amount of wreckage or booze or anything else could blow off enough steam to clear their heads or battered bodies. Four days after Ronnie’s assault on Powell came a frightening moment in Charlotte. Two shows that week had to be canceled because Ronnie felt under the weather. Then, during the show in Charlotte, he felt faint and nearly blacked out. After making it through, he collapsed backstage and was taken to a hospital where they pumped the right kind of fluids into him. Two days later, he was back on his feet on stage in Jackson, Mississippi. Things were near a breaking point. Feeling the strain, Gary would openly start crying for no particular reason. Sometimes one or more of them would be so drunk, they couldn’t play a decent lick; at those times, Elson would turn off their mikes from the sound board, which happened more than anyone ever knew.
But none of the wreckage they caused themselves or their habitats caused any damage to the band’s marketability—quite the contrary. There seemed to be only new high-water marks. They opened for Eric Clapton in Memphis on April 12, and the June 19 issue of Rolling Stone gave them props, if still not fully aware of where they came from, nor how many musicians were onstage: “With three full-time electric guitarists, a piano player and a fireplug of a lead singer who looks like Robert Blake’s Baretta in a hippie disguise, Georgia’s Lynyrd Skynyrd presents an unusually broad front line … [and is] a must see.”
They would not come off the road until July 6, when they played their hometown—for the first time since March 20, 1974—a gig steeped in irony for them since, as Gary would say, “Jacksonville never gave a shit about us until we were famous all over the world.” Yet, almost as a taunting reminder of the town’s recalcitrance, even that homecoming gig turned ugly. At the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Coliseum they were introduced by none other than Leonard Skinner, the man whose name they had made synonymous with rock’s newest wave. Perhaps feeling he was too big to stay a gym coach or realtor, Skinner had opened a couple of bars. One was the Still, which he renamed Leonard Skinner’s on San Juan Avenue, where rock-and-roll bands, with their long hair, played.
After Skinner’s name and phone number appeared on the inner sleeve of Nuthin’ Fancy, his phone, predictably, rang off the hook, yet it said something that he didn’t change the number. Sought out for interviews, he would leap at the chance to tell the story that had made him, as the New York Times said in its obituary of him in 2010, “arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture.” Yet as far as he and they had come, Skinner must have wondered that night if he had been right all along about those Shantytown boys. After the Charlie Daniels Band warmed up the sold-out crowd, Skynyrd assembled under the Stars and Bars, but after only a few songs Ronnie became raspy, then began coughing up blood. He stopped in midsong, made a brief announcement that his throat was bleeding, and left the stage. The rest of the band stood around waiting for him to come back, whereupon impatient fans threw bottles onto the stage, which shattered like fragment bombs.
That drove the band offstage, too, where confusion reigned. No further announcement was made, and angry fans in the crowd of fifteen thousand, who had paid a top-shelf six dollars per ticket, stormed onto the stage, kicking at and destroying some of the equipment and instruments. Fights broke out everywhere in the crowd. With a riot erupting, cops brandishing guns were called to the arena. Backstage, Ronnie had again collapsed and was being taken to the emergency room. And Skynyrd, not fighting this time but cutting and running, left the building and ducked into waiting limousines, dodging more bottles thrown by fa
ns who had gathered at the stage door, as roadies salvaged whatever they could on the stage.
The Jacksonville Journal headline the next day blared, THE MUSIC STOPPED AND THE FIGHT STARTED. There had been $1,400 in damage done to the building, with sixteen people arrested and one cop injured. The promoters tried to dun Rudge for the refunds they had to make, but they were chasing a shadow—he’d wisely put in all of Skynyrd’s booking contracts that any cancellation due to medical reasons, which could conceivably apply to alcohol or any other “medicinal” cause, absolved them of any financial amercement. The easy conclusion to draw from all this was that Skynyrd had gotten what they had wrought: people didn’t only come to see the band of brawlin’ rednecks; they came to mess with ’em, even fight ’em, in a kind of bonding ritual. The mayhem now seemed part and parcel of the Skynyrd experience. During the tour a fan had thrown a package of lit firecrackers onto the stage, sending them scrambling; another time, in Salt Lake City, as Van Zant would recall, “some guy got on stage and had a knife [and] was going for me. One of the security guys got him first, but he cut the security guy all up.”
Only a month and a half after the melee in Jacksonville, Skynyrd gulped hard and took another gig opening for Black Sabbath in Jersey City. Leon again wore his holster, but when a 45-rpm plastic record came skimming from the crowd, he couldn’t prevent it from lodging in his neck, inches from his carotid artery. At other times, as he said later, “I’ve had bottles thrown within inches of my head.” The band certainly was the subject of great wonderment, incredulity—and danger. And the implication regarding any Skynyrd concert was: come and buy a ticket—you might not only see a fight, you might be in one. This being so, some of their critics would sense a very discomfiting retrenchment of Old South norms; as Mark Kemp wrote, “Unfortunately, their image merely reinforced stereotypes of the South—not the aw-shucks sentimentalism of Andy Griffith’s fictional TV character, but the ass-whupping aggression of the real-life Bull Connor.”
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