Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (18 page)

“Al,” said Ronnie Van Zant, “our equipment van got broken into last night … We have engagements to fulfill immediately, and unless you can send us five thousand dollars by tomorrow morning, we're fucked!”

As Kooper remembered, there was no need to think it over. Whether or not Ronnie would ever be able to pay it back, five grand was a stiff but reasonable price to pay if it would break the negotiation logjam with Walden. “Where do I send it, buddy?” he said.

Grateful, a relieved Van Zant stunned him. “Let me tell you somethin',” he told Kooper. “You just bought yourself a band for five thousand dollars.”

Walden, when he heard about this oral agreement, nearly fell down. He knew that Ronnie's word was good as gold, and he would never go
back on it. That meant that any leverage Walden might have had was gone with the wind. Walden had known the band would wind up with Sounds of the South—there just was no place else for them to go—and as he says, “the band would not have survived” any longer without a deal. But he nevertheless believed he had turned over a fortune for peanuts—the same bargain-basement $9,000 advance that Kooper had dangled all along. What's more, Ronnie had vowed to pay back the money, southern men not being prone to charity.

So Skynyrd finally got their contract. It was drawn up by the MCA lawyers, dated February 5, 1973, and signed shortly thereafter. Kooper was quite pleased about having committed highway robbery—though in his purview it was the reasonable advantage he reaped as an industry veteran. The contract broke down the split of every dollar in sales royalties thusly: Kooper ten points, Skynyrd five. But five was better than 0 percent of zero, and Kooper still cackles about how happy the rednecks were “that they got a major-label deal, and they were braggin' about it.” In truth, they were no fools. They knew how lousy the deal was, because Walden told them. The manager, justifiably uneasy about how much power Kooper might grab from him, was in the parking lot outside the Macon Coliseum, contract in hand, waiting in his pickup truck for the band to finish a show. When they came out, Ronnie came over and hopped into Walden's pickup truck. He asked Alan what he thought of the deal.

“It's the worst piece of shit I ever seen,” Walden told him.

Ronnie, who had no intention of taking back his handshake agreement, also understood there was no other option, “What else we got?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Nothin',” Walden said.

“Gimme the goddamn pen,” Ronnie told him.

Walden looks back on that moment with not much glee or pride. Lynyrd Skynyrd, he says, “signed away two million dollars that day.”

But they'd make up for it. Lord knows, they would make up for it.

T
he men—no longer boys—of Lynyrd Skynyrd saw the money for a fleeting, giddy moment. As Ed King recalled, having been told of it by the band when he joined, “Ronnie cashed the check from Kooper and literally brought all the money to Hell House. Once we were all there, he threw the money up in the air and [they] just sat there for a while looking at it laying everywhere while drinking some beer.” However, after rolling around in the green, cold reality set in, and every dollar of it, King noted, “was poured back into the band for equipment and for those that needed money to get by,” which was actually everyone. For the time being and until the advance was earned back, there would be no additional bread; when—if—they earned out, they were told they would be put on a weekly salary. Thus, little changed for them materially. They were still starving artists, living hand to mouth, still selling auto parts and packing meat in their nonband hours. King could be glad he was in Greenville, North Carolina, earning his own money.

“If I had been in the band twelve months prior to Kooper signing the band,” he says, “it would've been
very
frustrating. You have to recognize how much Collins, Rossington, and Van Zant believed in and supported each other in those early days.”

Of course, Al Kooper, too, had no way of knowing if there would ever be any sort of return on his investment or whether he and MCA would in the end take a $9,000 bath. To test the waters of his newly signed act, Kooper, with his New York connections, landed them a one-shot gig as the opening act for Black Sabbath on February 25 at Long Island's
Nassau Coliseum. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Sabbath, fronted by the not-quite-all-there Ozzy Osbourne, was touring the United States in support of its
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
album, a brilliant, widely praised milestone in metal, and would play in April at the California Jam before two hundred thousand people on a bill with the Eagles, Deep Purple, Black Oak Arkansas, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Yet Sabbath fans were a loony lot, and so was Osbourne, who in the '80s would legendarily bite the head off a bat at one concert. To the fruitcakes in the Long Island audience, there was no accommodation to be made with Skynyrd.

First they threw bottles at the stage. That was not new for Skynyrd, but then, recalled Kooper, “the audience came at them.” Guards had to intercept several fans before they reached the stage. Not knowing what they might do, Leon Wilkeson had worn a holster with a gun, loaded with blanks. As Skynyrd played their set, their ears stinging from catcalls like “You guys suck!” and “Get the fuck off the stage!” and “Ozzy rules!” Wilkeson, Kooper said, “pulled out his gun and fired off a blank but convincing round right at them that caused a few wet pants in the crowd and an immediate cessation of catcalls.”

Score one for the Thumper. He was let alone by the cops when it was learned the gun had fired blanks, but the band, shaken by the experience, surely had to wonder, flying home after the show, what the hell they had gotten themselves into.

As it happened, however, the deal Skynyrd had signed with MCA was so weighted in the company's favor that it was highly unlikely that Kooper or anyone else beside the band would suffer. As Alan Walden recalled, “I knew from the beginning we needed MCA on our side. I made sure we gave them a deal that would give them a chance to make millions. We recorded [the debut album] for $22,500. Can you believe it? We did not try to borrow a lot of money. We did not call [MCA] every day. We were a working machine fully tuned and oiled. Independent!” Indeed, the MCA honchos wondered why the band and Walden were so detached from the pomp of signing a deal with a big company. “When I met [MCA Inc. president] Mike Maitland, he was shocked,” Walden goes on. “I was all business and not into hanging out in the Hollywood scene like
most.” Nor did Skynyrd particularly care about going out west and shuffling their feet down Sunset. Right after the Nassau Coliseum debacle, Kooper got the group into the studio, in this case Studio One in Doraville, just outside of Atlanta, where the owner of the studio, Buddy Buie of the soft country rock band the Atlanta Rhythm Section, gave him the run of the place. The session, at which Kooper would produce tracks for a debut album, was scheduled for March 26, 1973. Skynyrd tuned up for it by playing a seven-date engagement back at Funochio's—the first three still as a backup act, to the headliners Blackfoot and Hooker, before getting top billing as “Lynyrd Skynyrd” for three shows and then returning to backup for Orpheum Circuit and Kudzu.

By then Kooper had filled their heads with garrulous promises of what he could deliver them, no less than superstardom. One night, Kooper, as always looking to sample the charms of southern women, found himself invited home by a girl he'd met in a club. When he got there, he had to rub his eyes when he saw Allen Collins, who had also been invited, possibly for some sort of rock-and-roll ménage à trois. For Collins, the encounter was a tad awkward, what with his recent marriage. Kooper, meanwhile, jumped not on the girl but on the opportunity to butter up Collins, telling him that Skynyrd was “the missing link” in rock's evolution. Kooper remembered that “we forgot about the girl and talked all night.”

This rendezvous with Kooper wore down the group's initial wariness of him as a sharpie and user. Ronnie—still grateful about the loan, ripoff or no—had grown to respect Kooper as he did no other industry figure. He was impressed to no end with the MCA signing, boasting a year later that “we were the first southern group to go with a label that wasn't in the South.” It's not at all clear, however, whether Kooper ever really
liked
the band members or just tolerated them for his own purposes. But then, who knew how long he, as an industry bumblebee, would even sojourn in the South before taking off on another conquest somewhere?

Just as with Skynyrd's trip to Muscle Shoals, personnel adjustments had to be made before the Doraville sessions. Leon Wilkeson, who, if he didn't bitch and moan about
something
during any given day, caused Ronnie to give thanks, began acting crazy during the three-month
writing and rehearsing period at Hell House. He frequently came in piss-faced drunk, muttering about Jesus, the devil, and rock and roll stealing his soul. Little got done, and with the band about to take a road tip to Saint Augustine for a gig, Leon said he might not be a-goin'.

Ronnie, steaming as he was, did not want to cut Leon adrift any more than he'd wanted to cut Bob Burns, knowing his value to the band. So he cut Leon slack so the bassist could make up his mind, but insisted he teach the bass lines he had developed for the new songs to another bass player. And it seemed they got a real break when Larry Steele, a real heavy hitter, agreed to play with them until the Wilkeson matter was settled. Steele had played sessions for a staggering range of artists, including Cat Stevens, Al Stewart, jazz organist Jack McDuff, and blues guitarist Stefan Grossman. Recently he had contributed to Elton John's
Honky Chateau
and Stephen Stills's eponymous solo album. He had far more experience than Leon but played good soldier, patiently taking direction from the boozy, barely coherent kid. Both made the trip and roomed in a hotel—ironically, the Headrest—getting drunk and running up excessive room service tabs that Ronnie had to empty his pockets to pay for.

Now
really
steaming, Ronnie thought
Steele
, not Wilkeson, was the bad influence. Plans had been made for Bob Burns to pick up Larry for the trip to Doraville; he waited on the side of the road for Burns, who never came around. That was Skynyrd's way of firing Steele, who chalked it up to bad judgment on his part, wasting his time with a bunch of two-bit redneck punks. He has hardly suffered for it; he's been working constantly in the years since, including regular gigs playing bass on and writing songs with both the Johnny Van Zant Band and Donnie Van Zant's .38 Special. Leon, shaky as he was, got himself together enough to go to Doraville, though Ronnie could not go without a backup ready to step in if—when—Leon got crazy again. That man turned out to be an old ally. A few days before, knowing Steele was a goner, Ronnie had called Ed King at his home in Greenville, North Carolina, and invited him to join Skynyrd, not on guitar but bass. King, who'd wanted to get just such a call from Skynyrd ever since he'd first met up with the band, was surprised nonetheless.