Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Page 9

  Thus the possibility loomed that Muscle Shoals might be aligned with Alan Walden, and FAME with Phil Walden. Before accomplishing much of anything, it seemed Lynyrd Skynyrd was already at the center of a sibling rivalry—for now, only in Alan Walden’s imagination—between two southern industry heavyweights. That of course only upped the pressure on the band to come up with some good material and blow the doors off the studio. The whole world was seemingly riding on these sessions when Skynyrd returned to Muscle Shoals early in 1972 after six months of intensive writing and rehearsing at Hell House. Looking back, Jimmy Johnson said that, after hearing their lead man sing live in the studio, “I totally fell in love with Ronnie Van Zant’s fantastic voice,” and that the now instinctively intermeshed guitar licks of Rossington and Collins were almost revelatory. “Gary and Allen,” he said, “were doing solos that were twinned”—as if they were on separate tracks and mixed as perfect complements. Not that the other guys in the band didn’t have their own vital roles, but to Johnson the sum and substance of Lynyrd Skynyrd was the skill and chemical interaction of its core; on the first day, he said, “I fell in love with those three guys.”

  Given this skew, it was almost insignificant that the band once again changed faces. During the follow-up sessions, Bob Burns came back for the time being. “I decided after I left that I would rather have nothing, no shoes or nothing, rather than not be in the band. I knew I had given up my dreams, my hopes, my everything. The first prayer I ever had in my entire life, I looked up at the sky, and I said, ‘If there’s a God there, I’m sorry if I’ve done wrong, but I want back in that band, it’s just not working for me out here.’ The next night, Gary called me up and said, ‘Man, you want to play in this band or not?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Be here about as fast as you can get here.’ I left that night, hopped into my Corvair and went back to Jacksonville fast as I could get there.”

  Still having no place to stay, Burns made Hell House his home, sleeping there in a place so hot that, he says, “you could fry an egg there.” As for food, “if I didn’t catch fish,” he says, “I didn’t eat.”

  Leon Wilkeson, his schoolwork done, was also in tow, having been allowed by his parents to accept the long-standing invitation he had to be the permanent Skynyrd bass player. This meant that Greg T. Walker was excused, but Rickey Medlocke was too important to let go, having provided the bulk of the new stuff the band took to Muscle Shoals. He went back with them as a third guitarist, but more centrally, to take the lead vocals on his songs, which only he knew well enough to sing.

  As Gary remembered it, from the band’s standpoint, especially among those who suffered indignity at home, the experience was something like gaining an instant family. “They adopted us, took us in,” he said. Although Rossington likely gilded the lily a tad later, saying that the tutorial they received from the Muscle Shoals producers was so revelatory to them that it was the first time they realized the bass and drum had to play in complementary tandem; when Johnson or his coproducer Tim Smith called out the downbeat—the “one, two, one-two-three” cue to start playing—as the tempo of the song, only then did they understand that was how it was done. Studio drummer Roger Hawkins worked with Bob Burns for twelve hours tuning his drum correctly. Johnson and Smith also imparted a critical method for accentuating Ronnie’s vocals—having the band play in a lower key than the one in which he sang so that his voice would sound higher and harsher, something like his idol Paul Rodgers.

  Like Peck’s bad boys, they clambered in and proceeded to act like, well, themselves. David Hood recalls that “they’d have fistfights, actual fistfights. Someone was supposed to [play] a G-chord instead of an A-chord and boom, a fist would fly. That’s how they settled their disagreements, they just fought.” Those spats continued as if they needed such contretemps to clear the air and get themselves into the Skynyrd frame of mind. Cigarette butts littered the studio floor. But when Johnson called a take, mouths quieted, and heads snapped to attention. The singing and playing were sharp. There were limited retakes. Some wonderful counterpoint acoustic lines emerged among the electric guitar madness, with just the right echo and reverb. The sessions went smoothly and rapidly, and a few Muscle Shoals sidemen came in to play with the band, buffing and adding nuance to the scorched-earth quality of the Skynyrd sound. With the previous eight songs in the can from Quinvy (the Broadway studio), the band cut nine more, almost as if in a blur, by Johnson’s reckoning; years later he seemed to think almost all of them went on for around nine minutes, including the second studio version of “Free Bird” and that “one thing I would not do was edit them.” Here his memory is clouded a bit; the still-evolving “Free Bird” on these tapes ran seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, still long but still far shorter than the later versions, a couple of which went over eleven minutes. Eight of the seventeen tracks did run longer than five minutes—“One More Time,” “Was I Right Or Wrong,” “Simple Man,” “Comin’ Home,” “Things Goin’ On,” “You Run Around,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Pray,” and “Free Bird.” As with “Free Bird,” the tracks for “Simple Man” and “Things Goin’ On,” and an early version of “Gimme Three Steps,” are historical curiosities, all instantly recognizable but obviously works in progress at the time, destined to see better days ahead.

  The songs that all agreed were the best and that would go on a possible album of the sessions, were three Van Zant-Rossington songs—“Down South Jukin’,” “Was I Right or Wrong,” and “Things Goin’ On”—as well as the Van Zant-Collins composition “Comin’ Home” and the Van Zant-Rossington-Collins original “Lend a Helpin’ Hand.” Three Medlocke songs made the cut—“White Dove” and “The Seasons,” essentially poems turned into redneck rock, and “Wino,” cowritten with Ronnie and Allen. For these, Ronnie willingly stood aside and allowed Rickey to handle the leads in his high falsetto, the only time any Skynyrd songs would be fronted by anyone other than its regular lead singer for the next five years. And Medlocke added an even dreamier tone to “Free Bird” with a soprano backing vocal, a role almost never again taken by a band member.

  Amazingly, “Free Bird,” which nearly everyone who has ever heard it says knocked them out, was not deemed worthy of the final cut. If there was one song judged to be a potential single, it seemed to be “Was I Right or Wrong,” a tale of deep-seated angst producing high art—the narrative told of a young rocker living out his dreams and then returning home to find his parents dead, no doubt a nightmare that had jarred Ronnie awake more than once. Little wonder that the song, with Ronnie yearning to be a “restless leaf in the autumn breeze” and a “tumblin’ weed,” caused the rock critic Dave Marsh to opine years later that it was “hard to believe the song is only a fantasy.”

  But with Skynyrd, such breezes always led back home. As “Comin’ Home” made clear, the long road just might be too long and full of “broken dreams and dirty deals.” There were also the night-trolling comforts of “Down South Jukin’,” the objective of which was to head to town trying to “pick up any woman hanging around,” which would have to suffice as peace of mind. There was, too, a cautionary note in “Wino,” which warned: “Wino, you wasn’t born to lose. Sweet wine is making you a fool.” Not content with presenting a catalog of redneck ups and downs, Ronnie took another stab at a message song. “Things Goin’ On,” with its honky-tonk vibe, took aim at an easy target, big government, for “too many lives” spent “across the ocean” and too many dollars spent “upon the moon.” “They’re gonna ruin the air we breathe,” he seethes, ending on a massively ironic note, coming from a rock band: “I don’t think they really care / I think they just sit up there and just get high.”

  Johnson was quite sure the songs chosen were valuable record label bait. Alan Walden, further leaning on the reputation of the highly respected Swampers, taking the approach that a hard sell wasn’t necessary, went to L.A. with the mild-mannered Johnson and made the rounds of the big record company headquarters. Wincing still, Walden tells it
this way: “Nine record companies had turned us down! I don’t mean, ‘We like you but you need better material.’ I mean ‘Not interested! No need to contact us again.’ Atlantic, Columbia, Warners, A&M, RCA, Epic, Elektra, Polydor … they all passed after hearing ‘Free Bird,’ ‘Gimme Three Steps,’ ‘Simple Man,’ ‘I Ain’t the One,’ and about twelve other originals. Their comments were: ‘They sound too much like the Allman Brothers!’

  “Now, I ask you—put them on back to back and tell me they sound alike? We all came from the South, played hard, had long hair, drank and chased women. But we did not sound alike! The Allmans had their jazz influences, and we were a straight-ahead juking band! I remember one executive telling me to turn that noise off while I was playing him ‘Free Bird.’” Says Johnson: “It hurt because the stuff was fantastic.” When word got back to the band, recalls Rossington, “We were all angry, freaked out, thinking we didn’t know what we were doing. Because those were the best songs we could write.”

  Out of frustration, they even took to blaming Muscle Shoals. As the house bass man David Hood recalls, during the trip out west, “somehow the tapes had gotten twisted up on the reel so when they’d play it, they’d be playing the wrong side of the tape, and it would be all muffled. So Skynyrd thought that Jimmy had done something to sabotage them. They were a little mad at us—at Jimmy, really—and we all felt real bad about it. Later on, they found out about the technical glitch, and they made up with Jimmy.” To make good, Ronnie swore he’d make those Swampers famous by getting their name into a song. Hood laughed. Yeah, like that would ever happen.

  5

  DOWN SOUTH JUKIN’

  In truth, beneath the anger was a hard reality: the Muscle Shoals tapes were definitively not the best songs the band could write, nor even the best they could record them, as would be made clear down the road when a chosen few, recorded more competently, would become hit fodder. It wasn’t Johnson’s fault. His role was not really to alter anything they did, just to get them on tape in a technically professional manner. The band simply wasn’t yet good enough to get by on raw talent alone. They needed time to hone their sound and understand how to present this hybrid creature—rock with a country smirk and attitude but not necessarily a belch. To get to that point, they needed clever arranging and production under a sort of guru whose word was law, even for Ronnie.

  As for the tapes, nine of the tracks, some of them having been embellished with additional guitar parts for potential release after the band exploded in popularity, would eventually appear on the posthumous 1978 Skynyrd’s First and … Last album; a 1998 rerelease, retitled Skynyrd’s First, carried all seventeen tracks, including “Free Bird” (despite its not being ready for prime time), “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Simple Man.” Amazingly, after the plane crash the thirst for any “lost” Skynyrd product was such that even these tracks were reviewed on the same level as their biggest albums.

  The Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau’s verdict upon the album’s release was that “I expect more from Skynyrd than good white funk and second-rate message songs”—never mind that the songs had not been released for these very reasons. Some latter-day critics would have a fairer perspective. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the website AllMusic.com, conceding that their value was mainly as curios, nonetheless believed that “it’s possible to hear Ronnie Van Zant coming into his own as a writer” on the early efforts.

  The “white funk” of Lynyrd Skynyrd almost never came to the attention of the record-buying public. Though they may have positioned themselves as free birds, they were still strange birds in the overall rock milieu. At times they seemed painfully true to their image; perhaps a little too eager to play the redneck role, Ronnie would come out for gigs in his bare feet or in flip-flops, his eyes increasingly glazed by “poison whiskey.” Still, it is of note that not a single Confederate flag was anywhere in sight—an important detail to keep in mind, as their original instinct was that the most egregious (yet for many the most prideful) symbol of the South seemed way too tasteless. If their native turf and themes of “down south jukin’” and simple men wistfully seeking flights of freedom but coming home to their kin and women weren’t enough to pinpoint them as trailer-park friendly, emblazoning their venues with that symbol of human bondage—leaving aside labored alibis insisting it was about heritage—would be as subtle as a kick in the nuts, something they only wanted to accomplish through their music, not pedantry.

  However, something had to give. With nothing earned by way of royalties or advances, the starving, Bohemian life of nomadic rockers getting nowhere was a dead-end street shared by many acts. For Ronnie, the thought of Lacy telling him “I told you so” was depressing enough, but having to keep working irregularly at menial jobs magnified the indignity. While he still went in every once in a while to the auto parts store, Gary and Allen actually had to take jobs at Clark’s meat-rendering plant, their hair tucked under hairnets similar to what the ladies in the Lee High cafeteria wore. Rickey Medlocke grew so frustrated that, with his role becoming less defined, he decided to re-form Blackfoot, which he relocated to Jacksonville and would keep together until the 1990s, when the past would again beckon.

  No one needed to remind Skynyrd that they were falling further behind in the southern rock derby. In 1972 Phil Walden signed the Toy Factory—now renamed the Marshall Tucker Band, after a blind piano tuner the bandmates knew. So popular were their first two albums that their third was a double LP: one record of studio cuts, the other of live shows. All six of their Capricorn albums went gold, even though they wouldn’t have a Top 20 hit until “Heard It In a Love Song” on the fifth album. This was certainly proof that the era of single hits as the overriding priority was over, opening a new market that Skynyrd would seek to exploit as well. Another band, Pure Prairie League, formed in Ohio in 1969 by Craig Fuller, had both critical and commercial success with five straight Top 40 albums.

  Although the Muscle Shoals tapes did not click with the record companies that heard them, at some point the band may or may not have been offered a contract with Capricorn Records. A story, perhaps apocryphal, has been told that such an offer was in fact proffered but that Ronnie vetoed it because he didn’t want to put his band in the shadow of the Allman Brothers. But this is not how Charlie Brusco remembers it. “Alan tried but couldn’t convince his brother to sign them. Alan Walden was not Phil Walden. He was the kid brother. And Phil wasn’t about to bail him out. It was a very difficult thing to get them signed. They weren’t really a country-rock act—they were a three-guitar rock band in the country fold, and there just wasn’t anything like that around. Phil never considered signing them, a decision I’m sure Phil came to regret.”

  Around the industry, it was taken for granted that Alan had no desire to run up against Phil; most of those who knew them both believed the kid brother was physically afraid of the bigger, elder brother, whose volatility and impetuosity were ironically much like Ronnie Van Zant’s and who got himself into the same trouble with drugs, which would later cost him his music empire. In any case, Alan Walden says he never actually asked his brother to sign the group, and the point became moot one night when Skynyrd played the Grand Slam club in Macon. Not only were the Allman Brothers there that evening to watch them, but so was Phil. After the set, said Alan Walden, “I walk up to Phil, start talking to him. Well, he’s arrogant as hell, acting like he’s the shit. He says, ‘Your lead singer’s too goddamn cocky, he can’t sing, the songs are weak, and they sound too much like the Allman Brothers.’”

  In Alan’s story, Phil made this critique (which was the same as that of the record companies that had rejected them) loudly so that Ronnie, lurking nearby, could hear it. But he couldn’t quite. When Phil exited, Ronnie sat down next to Alan.

  “What’d he say?” Ronnie asked.

  “Nothing important,” Alan lied, sparing him. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  Putting a period on the story, Walden says, “And we went and had a drink—
a whole bottle, actually. J&B Scotch.”

  Nothing more was ever said about Capricorn Records. But the hurt inside Alan Walden only grew deeper and more scathing.

  Alex Hodges, who was the closest person to Walden, says, “Alan was so hurt by Phil that I don’t even know if they ever spoke to each other after that. Alan felt that Phil had insulted him and he was pissed off. I remember Phil called me around that time and said, ‘Alan won’t speak to me.’ And the fact is, it was Phil who had encouraged Alan to sign Skynyrd. Phil told me that if Alan didn’t want to manage them, that I should. He said, ‘Go talk to Alan about it.’ And I had lunch with Alan to talk about it, and that’s when he made the decision he would sign them. But when Phil rejected them, it blew a hole between them. And it became an obsession for Alan to get them a record deal, just to show Phil. Alan has spent half his life trying to get out from under the shadow of the great Phil Walden, and Alan has mishandled that, because he exaggerates so much. It’s always ‘I was the guy, I was the guy.’ But there were a lot of guys who had a part in Skynyrd. I have never blown my horn, but I was right there every step of the way with them for the first five years.”

  Indeed, Alan Walden was no Phil Walden. But even though he was right about Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Phil wrong, he would have scant time to rub it in. And it might not have been Alan Walden but Fate who played the biggest role.

  It seems unimaginable today that no record company was interested in Skynyrd. Charlie Brusco, for whom Alan Walden played the shelved Skynyrd tapes, was stunned by how good the band with the funny name sounded. “The guitars were just on fire,” Brusco recalls. “It really was something that grabbed you by the ears and the balls.” Yet it was that very metal overkill that easily explained the industry aloofness. Brusco indeed had the same barrier to scale with the Outlaws, charting new territory in the country-rock genre that was just too over the top as defined by the Allman Brothers’ formula of not-too-heavy-duty rock.