Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  MCA first broached a Skynyrd nostalgia wave only a year after the crash, releasing Skynyrd’s First and … Last out of the old unreleased Muscle Shoals tapes. The label and the band enjoyed a huge profit when the LP climbed to number fifteen and went platinum. They did even better in 1979 with the double album Gold & Platinum, which hit number twelve and went triple platinum. Marking a decade since the crash, MCA released Legend, drawn from unreleased demos, which nonetheless rose to number forty-one and went gold. Now seemed the right time for the surviving band members to amend the injunction against ever playing as Lynyrd Skynyrd anymore. With enormous moneymaking potential staring at them, most readily agreed to reunite the band.

  The holdout was Rossington. After his marriage to Dale, they settled down and had two daughters. In ’86 they had formed the Rossington Band, and Gary hired Charlie Brusco as his manager. An album for MCA was put out entitled Returned to the Scene of the Crime. He wanted to believe he was well beyond Skynyrd. What’s more, Dale saw a Skynyrd reunion as a threat to her. “Dale just really bitched me out,” Powell recalled. “She told me, ‘Why are you trying to take my career away from me and take my husband away from me?’ Of course to this day she thanks me for it all the time.’”

  Brusco, who favored the reunion, says, “It was very, very difficult for Gary. He knew how great the appeal of Skynyrd was, but at the same time he could barely think of Skynyrd. Gary knew the weight of Lynyrd Skynyrd would be all on him. So he needed all the assurances he could get.”

  After being promised that his own band would open for Skynyrd, Gary signed up. Now, all that was needed was to amend the old agreement, now stipulating that the Skynyrd name could only be used provided three Van Zantera members were on stage. A new corporate entity, The Tribute Inc., was created for the reunion tour and concurrent album project. By then Judy had remarried, to Jack Grondin, a drummer for .38 Special, with whom she had a son, and as she said, “For ten years I didn’t even want to deal with the tragedy.” But now she did, mainly she said to safeguard Ronnie’s name and legacy, to the point where she sometimes annoyed Gary, who was the new band’s leader. Ed King also signed up, making for an impressive cast—not to mention a spooky one; when Johnny Van Zant, whose albums were being produced by Al Kooper, agreed to moonlight from his band to sing lead, people would do double-takes because of his eerie resemblance to Ronnie. And so Skynyrd was back, for better or worse.

  After a few months of shaking off the cobwebs performing periodic one-nighters across the country, the Skynyrd reunion tour was ready for a fall kickoff. On September 6, they made their first official appearance at Charlie Daniels’s Volunteer Jam at Nashville’s Starwood Amphitheatre, on a bill with William Lee Golden, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Chapman, and Great White, the Skynyrd connection breaking attendance records for the annual event. The group had added guitarist Randall Hall to solo with Rossington and Ed King. They broke out the old Confederate flag imagery, but the rebel-redneck context was ameliorated by a teary sentimentality. When “Free Bird” again played, with no vocal, the arena would be dimmed save for a single spotlight illuminating Ronnie’s old black Stetson sitting atop a central mike stand.

  Artimus, his long hair and beard shaven, giving him a preppy look, acted as spokesman for the tour, introducing each member before each concert began. He would bring a bottle of beer on stage, not whiskey, and wore a T-shirt with a Confederate flag—perhaps brushing aside his stated loathing of the symbol—in the name of solidarity with the band, their fallen leader, and the South. Allen, who was billed now as the band’s musical director, looked genuinely happy to be alive. He would pump a fist in his wheelchair when introduced at each venue, before wheeling himself off stage to thunderous cheers. Pyle introduced each band member, longtime roadies, Brusco, Bill Graham, Odom, Lacy, and various Skynyrd adjutants. He called for a moment of silence for Ronnie, Steve, Dean, and Cassie, and then handed the microphone to Allen. “Hello, Nashville!” he brayed. “I gotta introduce one of the best bands in the world—the best band in the world.” Then, before the opening bars of “Free Bird,” Johnny Van Zant would tell the crowd, “We want you to keep Lynyrd Skynyrd music alive forever…. You gotta let ’em hear you in heaven tonight.”

  The vibes were all good, and they rode a convoy of sympathy, nostalgia, and raves in the press that were reflected in the headlines: LYNYRD SKYNYRD’S HAPPY ENDING and FREEBIRD RISES FROM THE ASHES. The always smarmy New York Post’s headline was SMASHED & CRASHED BUT STILL RAISIN’ HELL. Sales of new, improved Skynyrd skull-and-bones T-shirts were brisk. And the money came pouring in—$8 million in profits. This made it obvious that one reunion tour wouldn’t suffice; it would have to be extended, into an ongoing franchise, beginning with the Tribute Tour in 1988, dates for which Brusco began busily booking. That, however, sounded a sour note with Judy. She had not been consulted on these new proceedings, nor had the recently remarried Teresa Gaines Rapp. Apparently the Rossington faction had believed they could scare both women off by taking a vote ousting both as officers and shareholders. Not one to scare easily, Judy countersued, asking for sole control of the Skynyrd name.

  This put the second tour on hold, and lawyers for the band and Judy battled it out for months. As it turned out, Judy was much more like the fighter she had married than anyone thought. She was resolute, calm under pressure, and ultimately she gained the upper hand. Indeed, both Pyle and Powell became so frantic that Judy would win and cut them out that they almost begged for mercy, Powell saying in a deposition that the IRS had already placed a $179,000 lien on his house. Powell would later say, Judy “sued our pants off. And I was mad at her like you wouldn’t believe. I thought she was screwing us. Then I realized later, she had to do that to protect Ronnie’s estate from Gary and them.”

  The band in its defense claimed Judy was not a director at all since she had not actually signed the 1978 agreement; but that failed to resonate, and seeing the sympathy she generated, they settled, giving Judy and Teresa several hundred thousand dollars and a combined 30 percent of all future Skynyrd profits. As if out of spite, though, Gary refused to allow Judy and Larkin Collins, who believed he now had a say in such matters, to release any old Skynyrd recordings, including a session recorded at a Memphis radio station and a live concert recorded right before the plane crash. Skynyrd was a profitable enough concern now for these squabbles to be fought over big money. Where it had once been all about the music and attitude, the business of Lynyrd Skynyrd was now all about business.

  Allen Collins had become an effective, cheerful spokesman for antidrug and antidrinking public service campaigns, able to speak only a few words on the topic after being brought to the stage at Skynyrd concerts. By September 1989, however, he had deteriorated and had to be hospitalized with pneumonia. He lapsed into a coma, and on January 23, 1990, he died of respiratory failure, finally at peace after thirty-seven years of hell. He was buried in a grave beside Kathy in Riverside Memorial Park. His funeral had none of the fanfare or curiosity of Ronnie’s—and none of his old bandmates, most glaringly Rossington. Even though Gary was forever to be linked with Allen for giving the band its metal credentials, their falling-out was an especially ugly footnote, and Pyle for one believes it was caused by the strong-willed woman who seemed to control Gary’s thinking and never cut Collins any slack for breaking up RCB.

  “Dale drove a wedge between Gary and Allen like you wouldn’t believe,” Pyle told writer Marley Brant in the early 2000s. “I had to beg Gary to go see Allen the day he died in the hospital. I had to beg the whole band to go over and see Allen a couple of days before he died…. I shamed them into going to see Allen. He loved it, and it meant a lot to him.”

  Charlie Brusco landed Skynyrd with Atlantic Records for a 1991 album. There would be another album two years later, also produced by Tom Dowd at Criteria. Seeking the old voodoo, Rossington and Ed King cowrote six of the tracks, with help from both Johnny and Donnie Van Zant, and the work had the old swagger but could fairly be called Skyny
rd lite. Billy Altman in Rolling Stone ventured that Skynyrd could “cook up enough noisy raunch to please most of the noncoms in the invisible guitar army that’s always on red alert out there in the hinterlands. Marshall Tucker—call your office.”

  Those albums were the end of the line for Pyle. He split by mutual agreement, given what he called a “settlement” from Skynyrd. The next anyone heard about him was something so depraved it was outrageous even by Skynyrd standards. In 1993 he was accused by his live-in girlfriend of having sex with his own two daughters, aged four and eight. Thrown in jail and charged with sexual battery and lewd assault against minors, he strenuously denied the charges, which he called “worse than murder,” though rape or penetration was never alleged, and said he was set up by the girlfriend. He claimed he did nothing worse than bathe the children. But facing a maximum sentence of life in prison, he pleaded guilty to attempted sexual battery and “touching his children” and was given eight years’ probation. Having spent $500,000 in legal bills, he came back home to find all his possessions had been taken by the now ex-girlfriend.

  “Three days after I was thrown in jail, not one, but two of her boyfriends moved into my house,” he said. “She gave them all of my cars. I had four beautiful automobiles. She gave them ten sets of drums that I had collected all over the world. And my home.”

  Pyle badly wanted back in the band, but likely knew better. After his arrest, the remaining members turned their backs on him. “I went down and tried to talk to Gary and Johnny one day,” he recalled. “I told them I need to go out with the band a play a couple of shows. [They] were so far out on cocaine, neither of them could look me in the eye. I told them, ‘Fellas, this is not a joke. This is a life-threatening situation.’” Pyle said he looked straight at Gary and said, “You told me that I saved your life in the plane crash. You say there’d be no band if it wasn’t for me, that you owe your lives to me. I would ask a simple favor of this.”

  Instead, Pyle said, “Every one of them, the management, Brusco, they all turned their backs on me.”

  Brusco has no problem owning up to that. “Artimus could never be taken back into the band after copping that plea. It was an impossibility, and anything else he says to fudge that is bullshit.”

  The rites of mourning long over, “Free Bird” was just another arm-swaying, fist-pumping memory rush, no longer performed solemnly with the empty chair. Johnny now sang his brother’s immortal vocal, something that Judy regarded as blasphemous, saying sadly, “It makes me miss Ronnie even more.” There were dates at some big venues—they were booked, for example, by Bill Graham to play the Cow Palace on New Year’s Eve 1989 and 1990 and Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid event in 1992—but the bulk of their appearances were of a lowercase variety: a racetrack, a county fair, a country club wedding.

  Judy by now had assumed a lead role in the band’s affairs. In the mid-1990s she divorced and married a third time, to a country singer named “Big Jim” Jenness, and opened a recording facility in Jacksonville Beach called Made in the Shade Studios, named after Ronnie’s long-ago, swaggering pet phrase as a teenager about the sure stardom waiting for him in the future, and later Skynyrd song of the same name. Judy and Melody also paid $1 million for a Jacksonville Beach restaurant they called Freebird Live. She hired an agent to negotiate book and movie deals about the band; Brad Pitt, she thought, would be ideal for the role of Ronnie. But those ventures, too, produced static from Rossington and Larkin Collins, who refused to sign off on them without equal compensation and control. “I’m all for a new movie, if it’s done right,” said Larkin. “If it’s not, they’ll have a fight on their hands.”

  In 1997, after one album for Phil Walden’s briefly restored Capricorn label, the band put much effort into honoring—or cashing in on—the twentieth anniversary of the crash, with the double album Twenty, cutting it at Muscle Shoals for the CMC label, part of the giant BMG music publishing conglomerate, but not before they had made some changes, some voluntary, some not. First, Randall Hall, who had been made a partner in the Skynyrd corporation, had refused to go on tour with them in ’93, bringing about his firing. Hall sued the band for $500,000 and eventually won an out-of-court settlement.

  Then there was Ed King. Soldiering on with the group despite mounting health problems, he became weaker until one day he collapsed on stage. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure that necessitated, at forty-six, a transplant. King left the band, began treatment, and went on a waiting list for a transplant. Facing an avalanche of medical bills, he asked the band for some financial aid and even offered to participate in studio work.

  “They promised to take care of me,” King recalls, “and I had agreed to work on the anniversary album. Next thing I knew, the management is telling me I won’t be needed, and Gary isn’t returning my calls.”

  Clearly, Rossington was making these decisions, and things like sentimentality and gratitude did not factor in. If King couldn’t tour, he was of no value. King went on, for a time, believing that when he was well enough he could return. In the meantime, almost every cent he had went to keeping him alive and paying for heart surgery. Brusco brought on Hughie Thomasson, the quirky guitarist from the Outlaws, to replace him. Hall was replaced by Mike Estes from Blackfoot, which had disbanded in 1993. Estes was then replaced by former Blackfoot bandmate and old Skynyrd confrere Rickey Medlocke, whom Gary had wanted to join the band for years. Medlocke hadn’t cared to be a spare part, but when the Freebird documentary was being made with the approval of all Skynyrd factions, he agreed to participate in the movie. Invited to jam with them, the charismatic “rattlesnake rocker” caught the old fever and joined full time.

  Twenty, produced at Muscle Shoals by Josh Leo, a major player in soft country rock, really was nuthin’ fancy, save for a gimmicky “duet” between Johnny and Ronnie, using the latter’s old vocal track on “Travellin’ Man.” But the heavily hyped album peaked at number ninety-seven, which was still better than the 1999 Edge of Forever, which dodged the charts altogether. Still, Brusco had a lot be proud of, having taken the band from a reunion tour to multialbum deals with big labels. Feeling good, he told an interviewer in 1999 that the group had sold out its hundred-city tour, and box office receipts ranged from $70,000 to $150,000 per show. Yet no sooner had he made that glowing assessment than he too was axed along with comanager Joe Boyland.

  Brusco recalls, carefully, “I was fired because of some differences of opinions,” the kernel of which was that Skynyrd, as he saw it, had—mistakenly, he believed—veered from being a tribute band to one that seemed to want to recast itself as a contemporary country act. Both he and Boyland went on to manage Bad Company, and Skynyrd cast its lot with Nashville-based Vector Management, which represented Lyle Lovett and Hank Williams Jr. Signed by its president Ken Levitan, Skynyrd would be handled by an ambitious publicist named Ross Schilling.

  If the band sniffed money and acclaim, however, the most pungent aroma around them was indeed that of death. After the turn of the millennium, it surrounded Leon Wilkeson. By far the most likable and gentle souled of all those who ever soldiered with Skynyrd, the Thumper—so known for both his bass lines and the bible he always carried—had once defecated in a pillowcase rather than bother the band’s driver to stop the tour bus. Never completely stable psychologically and a poor candidate for booze and drug abuse given his frailty, he had married and divorced four times and now spent most of his time alone, abandoning all family and most of his friends. Despite annual royalties totaling over $100,000, he had squandered almost all his money and had been checked into drug rehab several times. But it seemed nothing could head off trouble.

  In 1995 Ed King was startled to find Wilkeson one day with his throat cut and bleeding on the empty bus. Wilkeson was taken to the hospital and recovered; no one ever knew who had tried to kill him, and he was too drunk to know himself. At decade’s end he was battling lung and liver disease and living in the basement of his manager Dale Bowman, whose home he was paying
for though he himself had no home. Then on July 27, 2001, he was found dead at forty-nine in his room at the Sawgrass Marriott Hotel in Ponte Vedra Beach. He had ingested a number of prescription drugs, fallen asleep facedown on the pillow, and with his breathing problems, smothered himself to death.

  Skynyrd, who had fairly ignored Leon’s crumbling condition, moved on after this latest loss in the family, dedicating a song to him called “Mad Hatter” on their 2003 Vicious Cycle album—a title that could not have been more apt for them.

  That album was their fourth in six years for CMC, following a double-CD live album, Lyve from Steel Town, recorded in Pittsburgh in 1997, and 1999’s Edge of Forever, produced by Ron Nevison, who had produced Ozzy Osbourne, Kiss, and Meat Loaf. Both albums did little; neither did Vicious Cycle, which was shifted to the Sanctuary Records label, another BMG subsidiary and at the time the largest independent music publisher and distributor in the world. It didn’t matter. The LP, overseen by Ocean Way Nashville’s engineer Ben Fowler, never charted; another ambitious project, the 2004 double-CD/DVD live set, Lynyrd Skynyrd Live: The Vicious Cycle Tour, also went nearly unnoticed.

  Worse still, from the start of their second incarnation they had dusted off the skull-and-bones logo and the Stars and Bars and rekindled old memories and political debates. Now that decision caused more static than it had in 1975, and Rossington in his role as sole survivor-cum-corporate soldier, had to defend it. He regurgitated the sophism that the flag was “unfairly being used as a symbol by various hate groups, which is something that we don’t support…. The Confederate flag means something more to us, heritage not hate.” Back in the glory days, tortuous explanations like that had sufficed. But now “Sweet Home Alabama” had been adopted by the spawn of the devil—in 1988, a lamentable punk rock outfit called Skrewdriver, self-described as a “white power skinhead rock band,” covered the song. Little wonder that Skynyrd made a grudging but necessary concession. They unveiled a new hybrid flag—half Stars and Bars, half Stars and Stripes. The real wonder is that no one had thought to do that way back when it really mattered, though it likely would have been shot down as a wussy compromise, something Skynyrd didn’t do then, but had to now.