Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars

by Mark Ribowsky

  Rossington and Jenness, each of whom were said to have a net worth estimated at around $40 million, were able to shelve their petty sniping long enough for Skynyrd’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2006 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ballroom. But Judy again prevailed on band protocol. When they would be called up from the audience to receive statuettes and say a few words, only those who had played in the band up until the time of the crash would be permitted onstage. Also on stage would be Ronnie’s two daughters and granddaughter, Larkin Collins, Allen’s daughter, Leon’s son, Teresa Gaines Rapp, the two surviving Honkettes, Johnny Van Zant, and Rickey Medlocke. In a move seemingly calculated to tap the band into the consciousness of the modern music market, the induction speech was given not by any contemporary such as Charlie Daniels but, irrationally, by the Detroit hip-hop/country star Kid Rock—who nonetheless would provide a handsome new source of royalties two years later with a song called “All Summer Long,” conjoining “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” with Billy Powell on piano.

  Judy was the first to speak. “No one deserves to be here tonight any more than Ronnie Van Zant,” she said, setting an emotional tone. When the band performed “Sweet Home Alabama”—with Kid Rock inexplicably doing a duet with Johnny—and “Free Bird,” Bob Burns and Ed King took their places, no doubt with a flood of mixed feelings.

  But while King enjoyed the evening and the recognition he had never gotten before, this was yet another tease. He had finally gotten word that a heart donor had been found and that he would have the transplant soon after. The surgery went well, and before long King was up and about, playing his guitar with a new energy. Remembering that Rossington had told him he’d be taken back when he was healthy, Ed tried to punch that ticket. But he was told there was no room for him and that he should enjoy his retirement. Crushed, he sued the band for going back on a vow that had never been put in writing, something Gary Rossington was too smart, or cunning, to have done.

  The bright side of the Skynyrd legacy has lived on in the music, but the dark side pops up in unfortunate ways. When a drug smuggler was arrested in Miami 2002, the warrant said that among his physical characteristics were a tattoo on his left arm (“face Ronnie van Zant”) and one on his right arm (“flag confederate w/dead soldier”). In 2008 a fifty-year-old man with a familiar surname and a job as leader of a rock band in Jacksonville was busted on cocaine possession charges. The local paper reported, with no real proof, VAN ZANT ARRESTED ON DRUG CHARGES. HE IS RELATED TO FORMER LYNYRD SKYNYRD LEADER, RONNIE VAN ZANT.

  To be certain, Skynyrd wears its many-edged legacy fitfully—and tenuously. After they were dropped by BMG, their 2009 album God & Guns was released on a sublabel of Roadrunner Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, with a specialty label for them, Loud & Proud Records. The album, recorded in Nashville, was produced by Bob Marlette, a curious choice given that his past work included albums by David Lee Roth, Marilyn Manson, and grunge-metal bands like Saliva and Seether. If the aim was to give Skynyrd an outlaw edge again, the band—now composed of Rossington, Powell, Johnny Van Zant, Rickey Medlocke, bassist Ean Evans, and drummer Michael Cartellone, with Dale Rossington née Krantz moving in as a Honkette with singer Carol Bristow—was defiant only in its dive into half-witted redneck parody. The songs, mainly written years before by Hughie Thomasson, who had returned to the Outlaws before his untimely death in 2007, were odes to vapid right-wing paranoia blended with now tiresome grudges about the industry, even if it kept bending over backward to accommodate them. Sniffed Robert Christgau upon hearing it, “Really, [Johnny] ought to have some inkling that nobody worthy of his trepidation wants to ban hunting, burn the Bible, or slam old Uncle Sam.”

  Billy Powell had already laid down tracks for the album when, on January 28, 2009, he awakened in his Orange Park condo just after midnight, having trouble breathing. Powell, who lived with his wife Ellen Vera and their four children, had heart problems but had passed up a doctor’s appointment the day before. He called 911, but by the time a rescue crew arrived, phone still in his hand, the fifty-six-year-old had lapsed into unconsciousness and was pronounced dead. No autopsy was done because his cardiologist signed the death certificate identifying the cause as a heart attack. The band and a horde of industry VIPs came to his funeral, but no Skynyrd music was played, only the religious rock he had recorded with the band Vision, sung by Kid Rock.

  Only three months later, Ean Evans died of cancer at forty-eight. Braving what was now being called the “Skynyrd death curse,” the band kept moving ahead, battered but unbowed. They hired Peter Keys of the 420 Funk Mob to play keyboards and Robert Kearns of the Bottle Rockets to play bass. Crowds were still generally big and full of verve, their fervor, as Faulkner wrote in “A Rose for Emily,” “a sort of hereditary obligation”—not that Skynyrd had any obligation to political correctness. In 2010 they appeared at a thinly veiled political front billed as the Freedom Concert series, hosted by Sean Hannity, the right-wing radio and TV host who used their song “That Ain’t My America” as a propaganda tool.

  However, being an American “treasure,” the band had been feted two years earlier by the US Congress and visited the White House, to be greeted by the president—a black president. It was quite a tightrope to walk, and they did. Though obviously pandering to a more hard-core Dixie crowd now, they were also something no one had believed Lynyrd Skynyrd could ever be—safe.

  The sad rhetorical question Ronnie Van Zant had asked so long ago was answered: He certainly was remembered after he left here, sometimes in weird and mysterious ways. In the 1997 movie Con Air, “Free Bird” plays as escaped prisoners are partying on an airplane, prompting Steve Buscemi’s character to muse, “Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.” Like the mysterious Poe Toaster, who visits Edgar Allen Poe’s grave on his birthdays, leaving a partially filled bottle of cognac and three roses, Skynyrd fans habitually visit Van Zant’s grave with Jack Daniel’s and old Skynyrd albums and raise a bottle to him. In 1981 a stone-carved bench beside his grave was stolen. In 2000, committed “fans,” who should be committed, actually tried to dig up his body, necessitating that his remains be moved, to a fenced-in family plot at Riverside Memorial Park, where his firstborn daughter Tammy’s plot still awaits beside his. Just to be sure, a cement slab was implanted under the surface of the grave, to prevent other ghoulish body-snatching attempts.

  Judy Jenness, who turned sixty-five in 2013, retained the stringy-haired, hippie look of the twenty-one-year-old who fell for Ronnie Van Zant. Being remarried certainly did not crimp her commitment to preserving his memory and good name. After opening Made in the Shade Studios, she began a charity, the Freebird Foundation, though it soon suffered the same fate as the studio when it ran out of money and closed up in 2000. She also financed a Ronnie Van Zant Memorial Park down the road from the old Hell House grounds. The book and movie she envisioned never happened; Larkin Collins died in 2013 at age ninety-one, not having to fight anymore about it.

  Judy still oversees the licensing empire. Ronnie’s daughter Melody lives in the house on Brickyard Road where her parents lived at the time of the crash. In 2012 she married a man like her old man, guitarist Jasin Todd of the Jacksonville hard-rock band Shinedown, which has sold six million albums. The “Father of Southern Rock,” Lacy Van Zant, toothless, with a white beard down to his belt buckle, died on August 3, 2004, four years after Sis Van Zant’s heart gave out. Both of them had known the end was near—Sis had bought a new dress days before she died, giving instructions to bury her in it. Their home was opened to Skynyrd fans so they could see the couple’s massive collection of the band’s gold and platinum records.

  Leonard Skinner, who was able to cash in on his name and enjoy a few minutes of being almost famous, had for many years posed for pictures with the ever-changing band and appeared in Skynyrd documentaries. Just how oversized that name
had become was proven after the crash when a law firm for the band’s corporation sent a letter to Skinner threatening legal action if he did not stop using his own name, a threat that was soon rescinded. In 2009, with Skinner near the end and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, a “Tribute to Coach Leonard Skinner & Southern Rock” was held at the old National Guard Armory on the west side, a satisfying moment a year before he died at age seventy-seven. Artimus Pyle, alone among the Skynyrd clan, made it a point to attend his funeral.

  Pyle’s constant verbal ragging of the band did not serve him well. His claim that the reborn Skynyrd had been doomed by “drugs, cocaine, alcohol, lying, cheating, thieving” that was “more important than the music” was something Rossington could neither forget or forgive. Gary blasted back, saying Pyle had been so drunk and high that he couldn’t play drums anymore and that “everyone wanted to fire, get rid of him, so we did.” More offensive to him was the role Pyle had taken as storyteller-in-chief of the plane-crash saga, especially the notion perpetuated by Pyle that he had saved lives after the accident.

  “He didn’t save our lives,” Gary insisted. “He was so freaked out lookin’ at us all sittin’ there sufferin’ and dyin’ and burnin’, and he ran away. People were comin’ to get us, they saw us go down. He didn’t run off and get the people to save us, that’s his story.”

  After Wilkeson’s death, Pyle believed the band should take him back at long last, as one of only two “originals” left, the final hurdle having been cleared when in 2009 he was acquitted on charges of failing to register as a sex offender when he renewed his Florida driver’s license. Although his name and photograph are on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sexual offender database website, the daughters he had been accused of molesting both came to court in his support, saying he had never in fact acted inappropriately. With his image thus rehabilitated, or so he thought, he offered his services to Skynyrd. “I would help them out if they needed me,” he said, “and I think they need me.”

  However, Rossington said Pyle had never been anything but a replacement. Pyle then lashed out at Gary and Judy “for being so damn greedy…. All these lawyers and managers, fuck it, man. Judy wants all the money and Gary wants all the power. They fight with each other and everybody else loses. Dammit! … Why should they have a problem with me? They’ve got all the money, they’ve got the name. I’m just a little old drummer.” He reiterated, “I left Skynyrd in ’91 because of their massive, gluttonous consumption of cocaine and alcohol. I was a part of the real Skynyrd. I didn’t want to be a part of something less.” For rants like that, Pyle’s 2012 album entitled Artimus Venomous could not have been more apt for him.

  Pyle and Rossington, two old warhorses, had come through hell together and were indeed the last of a dyin’ breed. They had long since left Jacksonville, Pyle to live in North Carolina, Rossington in Georgia. Time had healed their physical wounds. But with Skynyrd, personal grudges never seemed to heal.

  Clearly not Skynyrd anymore, they weren’t a rock-and-roll dynasty as much as a Duck Dynasty, full of gun erection and prideful simplemind-edness. The soggy grits of their 2009 God & Guns were even soggier in 2012’s Last of a Dyin’ Breed, which Stephen Thomas Erlewine called “sturdy, old-time rock and roll for an audience that’s likely peppered with Tea Partiers, the kind of Middle American worried that the world they knew is slipping away, and [for whom it] provides a bit of a rallying point.” Ryan Reed, in the Boston Phoenix, was blunter: “The shit quality isn’t much of a surprise: Skynyrd haven’t released a listenable album since Ronnie Van Zant’s plane-crash death…. [Now] the once-venerable flagship of genuine, heartfelt, inventive Southern Rock have plummeted with no remorse into the grimy waters of Redneck Rock…. Ronnie Van Zant rolls wildly in his grave. For God’s sake, for America’s sake, for Coon’s sake, for Rock’s sake—let’s hope Last of a Dying Breed is an endangered species.”

  Still, whatever and whoever they were, they could position themselves between a South that had been new in the 1970s and a newer South that had begun to look a lot like the old South Van Zant had tried to navigate around. Late in 2013 another tour was announced with Skynyrd and Bad Company—Ronnie’s favorite—coheadlining a fortieth anniversary summer tour, playing at venues such as Jiffy Lube Live in Barstow, Virginia. Then they would play on what they called the Simple Man Cruise to Miami before jetting off to Australia for their first tour down under.

  Once, Ronnie Van Zant had worried that the band he’d fought so hard for was becoming too mired in the mud of the South or crass provincialism. He craved the world. And while old Lucifer may have taken him down, those who perform under the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd do so on international stages and invoke his memory, even as they sell it short. That leaves Artimus Pyle with an even greater sense that the band not only sold him out but themselves out as well. He told Marley Brant, “If there would have been integrity and character within the band [they] would be able to raise money for cancer and AIDS and Eric Clapton would be jamming with us.” For Charlie Brusco, the sense of loss was more personal, centering on their cursed front man. “Had Ronnie lived, he would have been the biggest rock star in America. He would have made solo albums—he was about to do one with Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings when he died. Skynyrd would have been as big as the Rolling Stones. As big as they were, they never made a video, never won a Grammy, never had the artistic freedom to do exactly what they wanted to do, but they would have been given a king’s ransom to do that—if Ronnie could have survived himself.”

  Nearly four decades after Van Zant ran out of time, the fighter surely remained, in spirit, punching through the lyrics of the old songs. It was the only thing left of Lynyrd Skynyrd that could pay for the whiskey bottles and the brand-new cars, and keep the smell of death and the clutches of the devil off them all. At least for one more day. God help them—please, just one more day.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Literally one day before this book went to press, the author was contacted by someone who claimed he had been a member of the Skynyrd inner circle since the mid-1980s. He said he had “invaluable” information about the band and “[was] willing to help anyone who will try and tell the story of Skynyrd as it really was.” But he would only share this insider information off the record for fear of retribution from the band, which he said would try and “shut down” the book if they discovered he was involved.

  If one lives in or around the ongoing Skynyrd culture for many months, this is the sort of thing that often crops up. People who claim to know the “real story” of the band seem to exist far and wide, but especially in the beehive of Jacksonville and its environs, which is where the late-arriving source lived. Many of these people are flat-out crazy, drunk, or both—a byproduct of the band’s legendary craziness and drunkenness—and these old-timers spend much of their time in the same honky-tonk bars as they did forty years ago. The difference was that this fellow was armed with a sheaf of documents and photos he said Artimus Pyle had given him years ago, and his name could be traced to some Skynyrd studio work.

  And so the author interviewed him at length. While the results of this interview can hardly be called “the real story”—much of what he claimed seemed to be overwrought conspiracy theory, paranoid, and delusional (hey it’s Skynyrd we’re talkin’ about here!)—he did add a counterpoint to several areas of discussion in the book. So though it goes against the author’s grain to use unnamed sources, the saner claims are offered here in chronological order, mainly as a glimpse into the underbelly of the “this-is-the-real-truth” Skynyrd culture and with the caveat that, in the world of Skynyrd, reality can seem to appear at the bottom of a shot glass.

  Below the surface, Ed King was a more prominent member of the band than he let on. He purportedly “manipulated the band,” and also ran up hotel tabs that at times reached $10,000. “Ed King used to tell people that Ronnie gave him permission to run the band. After a while, Ed was interfering in the band’s business and Allen got real peeved ab
out it. He’d say, ‘Hiring Ed King was the worst thing we ever did.’ And Ronnie agreed.” A laugh. “I think Ed left before the band could kill him. He left without taking his guitars, just left ’em behind, blew out without telling anyone he was leaving.”

  Ronnie came to so detest Gary Rossington that by 1977 he would call out, “yonder comes pretty boy” during Gary’s solos. “In Ronnie’s way of speaking, he was calling Gary a faggot, ’cause Ronnie thought that was what he was.”

  Linda Blair may have served other purposes than as an underage conquest for Dean Kilpatrick. She was indicted for conspiracy to buy cocaine shortly after attending the Skynyrd funeral. After singing to the authorities, she was given three years’ probation and a $5,000 fine. “Everyone in Skynyrd used Blair’s dealer to buy their coke. But they were never charged, and I still can’t believe they weren’t. That’s what big-time lawyers can do.”

  “Allen Collins never had a thing with Dale Krantz. Dale first threw herself at Allen, who blew her off. Allen told me, ‘Everyone bagged her but me.’” She then turned to Gary, in order to “gain power within the band,” provoking the inevitable static between Allen and Gary.