Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (20 page)

Yet Ronnie, being Ronnie, never would see completely eye to eye with Al, one departure being that he thought Ed King's bass playing was not up to snuff. This was something that King would find out soon enough. But his guitar sorcery would keep him in the fold, feeling not entirely accepted and almost lost in the shuffle among the indigenous rednecks, but quite nearly indispensable, at least for a while.

The song that Kooper had first heard them play, to a tepid reception, ate up the most studio time, as it would have to, given its length. “Free Bird” had by then become a running soap opera in itself. When Rossington and Collins first erected the melody, Ronnie couldn't make it work lyrically until Allen simplified the chords. Rather than because of any artistic or rule-breaking consideration, the long instrumental break and fadeout came about because Van Zant, the only singing voice on every song, needed to almost literally take five to keep from losing his voice. Thus he had no objection to standing on stage with little to do but caress the microphone and catch his breath. There would be no forced participation, no banging on a tambourine, no leaping about or swiveling of the hips; like Jim Morrison had done during the extended break of “Light My Fire,” all Van Zant need do was to look cool, something he could manage quite well.

Kooper let his version run to a stupefying 9:09 when the song was cut on April 3. Until then, the intro through two previous recordings had been Gary's straightforward lick, joined by Allen's mournful-sounding slide guitar. But when Ronnie heard Billy Powell's off-the-cuff piano swirls at Bolles, he had a different idea: to kick the song off with a similar riff. Kooper, however, heard the song as an anthem of redneck royalty and decided that it needed a regal, gospel-like feel, similar to what had been created so effectively by Keith Emerson's Hammond organ on Emerson, Lake and Palmer songs like “Hoedown,” not to mention the contributions of Booker T. Jones, the Doors' Ray Manzarek, and
good-old Texas boy Doug Sahm in the Sir Douglas Quintet (“She's About a Mover”).

Such a feel, played beside Powell's delicate piano line, Kooper said, could give “Free Bird” an opening like the reverent, fugue-style chorale intro of “You Can't Always Get You Want.” Indeed, Stones fan that Ronnie was, all it took for Kooper to convince him was to mention for the hundredth time that he had played on Stones sessions, as if he could transfer some of that same magic to a hillbilly band. The organ, of course, was an instrument Kooper was rather familiar with, having made a particular Hammond B-3 accompaniment a rock-and-roll staple eight years before in Bob Dylan's studio. And so he came onto the floor and played as he had back then, on feel and instinct, creating for himself yet another link to rock immortality, joining southern-fried rock and Bob Dylan. Kooper would list himself on the album credits in code as “Roosevelt Gook,” something he had been doing for years whenever he played a session.

Kooper's main task was to make the song's waves of guitars ring in balance, none louder or more commanding than any other, a real challenge given the sheer overload of it all. Both Rossington and Collins doubled their own parts on a separate track, making for a faintly echoing quality to their lines. Yet it was all interwoven, all firing in unison, each seeming to challenge the others during a particular segment, and then each receding in turn to begin another mounting wave. It was so over the top that no one inside the studio that day believed the song would ever be released as a single. When MCA saw that 9:09 in the tape can, executives sent word to Kooper to cut it down to a reasonable length; but he knew better than to ask Ronnie to do that. Besides, he believed it would play right into the maw of the now entrenched long-form FM radio formats.

“Free Bird,” however, was not considered for the album's first single. Instead, “I Ain't the One” was thought to be the best choice. Van Zant and Kooper cut it as the album's “Free song,” one reserved on each LP for Ronnie to try to sound like Paul Rodgers, though it usually came off more like ZZ Top than Free. Its catchy beat and funky acoustic and electric guitar pickin', along with Ronnie's bluesy, throaty vocal and brief spoken rap formed a real platform for the lead man, whose bad-boy image was aided by the provocative, metaphoric line: “I never hurt
you sweetheart, oh Lord / Never pulled my gun.” That line, analogizing the penis to a gun, would make the song a concert favorite. The song sounded so good that, even though a guitar part was played slightly out of time, the band ordered Kooper to go with it anyway.

The consensus pick, however, became “Gimme Three Steps,” the first song recorded on March 29. It sprung from a once scary but now humorous incident at a Jacksonville club—usually assumed to be the Little Brown Jug on Highway 17 (thus “the Jug” in the song)—that had occurred early in their existence. (Rossington seems to think it was the West Tavern on Lenox Avenue.) Ronnie, self-deprecatingly described in the song as the “fat fellow with the hair colored yellow,” took a woman, “Linda Lou”—a nod to Allen Collins's aunt, a onetime country singer who had sung under that name—onto the dance floor, only to have her boyfriend break in. Suddenly the fat fellow was “staring straight down a forty-four” and making one request: “Mister, gimme three steps toward the door.”

The band liked to have fun with the tune on stage. Ronnie's line that night in the bar was actually, “If you're going to shoot me, it's going to be in the ass or the elbows. Just gimme a few steps, and I'll be gone.” The classic rock structure of that tune—simple three-chord repetition, intro, chorus, break, and fade, sung and played with brio and pickle brine—would be the song template for the life of the band; the rejected Muscle Shoals song “Was I Right Or Wrong,” for instance, is a virtual note-for-note copy. The only sound not played by the band on “Three Steps” was a faint bongo part by former Motown percussionist Bobbye Hall.

With the album in the can and the first single chosen, the last order of business for Kooper was one that no amount of personal cache or begging would make the band budge on. His intention was to get them to change their name, which he loathed. “Lynyrd Skynyrd” struck him as unpronounceable and abstruse, and left him concerned that it might be impossible to market. Kooper says he “hated” it and that it “didn't make any sense” and “certainly didn't conjure up what their music was about.” But left no choice, he set out to make it work. With the self-effacing cheekiness that would become their sine qua non, the album was named
(pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd)
, thus addressing the dual need to clarify the name and provoke curiosity about what it meant. The “nerd” part was a hoot, the mark of a band with a sense of humor, though if
one were to judge by the album jacket, they could be taken for Allman Brothers wannabes. On the cover shot they struck the same pose the Brothers had on College Street in Macon for their '69 debut album, unsmiling and looking a trifle pissed off. The shot, taken on Main Street in Jonesboro before Wilkeson split, was nonetheless the one they went with, keeping faith with Leon, who as it happened gave the photo its only panache, wearing aviator shades, a constable hat with badge, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a lightning bolt decal.

The back cover featured a photograph of a cigarette pack reading L
YNYRD SKYNYRD
'
S
S
MOKES
next to the eight-song listing. (The 2001 rerelease added five demos from Muscle Shoals as bonus tracks.) The band's name was lettered in bones on the cigarette pack, above and below a skull and bones and surrounded by a ghoulish blood-red umbra, thus merging the imagery of rising heavy-metal bands like Black Sabbath with the nicotine stains of Tobacco Road. One could hardly have imagined how, in a corridor of America where southern Christian conservatives marched in lockstep behind Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Oral Roberts, folks could also get behind leather-clad merchants of devil worship. But then again, Skynyrd's was not the South of their grandfathers.

As contrived as such imagery was, Kooper knew the industry and the imperative of getting attention in a swarm of similar acts. He also knew the target audience of restless youth with a thirst for restless rock. Most of all, knowing Skynyrd as he did, as a bunch “always getting into fist-fights,” he would say, “I decided to paint a rough-house image for them.” As a $100,000 ad campaign approved by MCA rolled out, promotional albums sent to radio stations were bundled in packages engraved enigmatically with the question
WHO IS LYNYRD SKYNYRD?
Full- and half-page ads were bought to run in the hippest of counterculture newspapers like the
Village Voice
in New York and the
Free Press
in L.A. Snobbish big-city music critics who might otherwise have ignored a backwoods band of pigpen rednecks took notice; maybe this band was actually made up of southern apostates, a hint of a new wave happening in Dixie, with rock and roll the elixir of liberal notions bubbling down there in the trailer parks and swamps. Stoking such suppositions would be critical to their breakout, and whether it was jive or not, the men of Skynyrd were ready for some altered realities as the price of inordinate fame.

A
l Kooper was so demanding about making
(pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd)
a reference point in a new order of rock and roll that he took the master tapes to New York three separate times to mix the album to his satisfaction at state-of-the-art mixing facilities. During the process, he threw a kickoff party for himself and his label on July 29, 1973, at Richard's, a posh nightclub on Monroe Drive that billed itself “Atlanta's finest rock club,” with “full theatrical lighting and 360-degree sound.” Kooper invited executives at MCA Records to hear the band they were paying for, and to position Lynyrd Skynyrd as a welcome addition to the label's enormous parent company, Music Corporation of America Inc. For Skynyrd to be associated with this gigantic megacorp seemed a fable in itself. MCA's entertainment conglomerate had grown into a dominant role across the show business terrain under the storied leadership of the prototypical Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman. MCA Inc. had already gobbled up movie studios like Paramount and Universal and publishing houses like G. P. Putnam's Sons, and its music division had annexed labels like Decca and Kapp. The company even purchased the Danelectro guitar company.

In 1972 MCA Records had, after consolidating all its sublabels, gone worldwide with its first release, Elton John's “Crocodile Rock.” Seeking all manner of acts, its executives were quite receptive to Kooper's southern rock designs, and for the coming-out party of Sounds of the South,
plunked down $10,000 without blinking to arrange and cater the night's festivities. One of the company's most valuable artists, Marc Bolan of the English glam-rock band T. Rex, was a guest. Even though the event was on a Sunday night, the company's éclat was such that the Atlanta police waived the blue law against serving booze on Sundays, just this once, or until they wanted to do it again. Gary Rossington surmises that Kooper wanted Skynyrd to perform at the party so that the suits could validate his ardor for a band of freaky redneck hippies and he wouldn't be left out on a limb if they flopped. “He invited all the MCA reps and everybody down to hear these three Southern groups that he had found,” Rossington explains. “And so the other two went out and played, and we were last.”

Throughout the spring and summer of '73, Skynyrd had returned to the clubs and dive bars, the album garnering them nothing more ornate than dates backing up the bands Traktor and Mose Jones (Kooper's “Beatles”) at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta and taking them back to Funochio's where they backed up Mason and Traktor. Knowing the stakes for them at the Richard's party, they had a good gimmick ready, a song called “Workin' for MCA,” cowritten by Van Zant and King, about their rise coinciding with that of a certain “Yankee Slicker”: “Worked in every joint you can name, yessuh, every honkytonk / Along come Mister Yankee Slicker, sayin' maybe you what I want.” Kooper loved every word, especially the lyric that went, “Nine thousand dollars, that's all we could win / But we smiled at the Yankee Slicker with a big ol' Southern grin.” It wasn't merely a gimmick either; it was a damn good song, those frontal guitars on fire. The MCA boys loved it as well, rising from their seats, loosening their ties, and stomping around to the band's molten, ear-splitting, three-guitar assault and Van Zant's riveting voice. Kooper knew right then that he had it right about Skynyrd: they had a cheeky impudence and cleverness and could play with the fire and play
loud
.