Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (23 page)

It was hard to get a handle on them. Rossington, when asked what they were, could only reply, “We were kinda rebels.” Indeed, they were
kinda
a lot of things: nonhippie hippies, but far more prone to crush
flowers under their boots than wear them in their hair, more Harley hog than Magic Bus, kinda hard, kinda soft—and both in one song, their own “Stairway to Heaven,” a compost of nice 'n' easy and nice 'n' rough. Decades later,
Rolling Stone's
album guide decided that
pronounced
“boiled down its potent regional influences—blues, country, soul—into a heady, potentially crippling homebrew. They liked to play; those three lead guitars weren't just for show.” Robert Christgau's review in the
Village Voice
read, “Lacking both hippie roots and virtuosos, post-Allmanites like ZZ Top, Marshall Tucker, and Wet Willie become transcendently boring except when they get off a good song. But in this staunchly un-transcendent band, lack of virtuosos is a virtue, because it inspires good songs, songs that often debunk good-old-boy shibboleths.”

Critics have noted the tie between redneck and metal rock in songs like “Tuesday's Gone” and “Poison Whiskey,” which, as a 2012 review on the
Ace Black Blog
said, “exude animated danger festering at rock's far reaches…. Solid examples of the best elements of southern rock reaching for the solidity of metal, the vocals of Ronnie Van Zant perfectly suitable for stretching into metal, and the guitars of Gary Rossington and Allen Collins more than willing to follow…. The good material succeeds in outweighing the bad, and the greatness on the album is pronounced ‘Free-Bird.'”

Others look back at Skynyrd's flowering through a cultural lens. Historian Barbara Ching points to the album, which Van Zant always said was Skynyrd's best, as something startlingly new for its time, “the mock-didactic title … suggest[ing] that the band came from a South so deep that even the language was incomprehensible”—which in this case only worked in their favor. Indeed, all future cover art and publicity photos of the band would reflect the tableau of that Deep South, which as Ching put it, “displayed sullen and grungy members in kudzu-choked landscapes.”
Uncut
calls the LP “all spring-tight riffage, jukin' country and delinquent boogie … chicken-skin music in the raw. On ‘Simple Man' and ‘Things Goin' On,' Van Zant emerged as a lyricist with a common touch, making monuments of everyman while decrying the political hypocrisy that kept them poor.”

But all this was a taste of still-cooking stew. On the way was the song that would make them the only thing anyone would need to know—
Skynyrd
.

A
l Kooper had assembled the band at Studio One back in June 1973, a month after the
pronounced
album sessions had concluded but before Kooper's party at Richard's, to record a song that Ronnie swore to all that was holy just had to be a hit. It had come about a few weeks before at Hell House from a riff Ed King liked to say came to him in a dream but that, he says now, really began with him joining in on an idle Rossington riff. The way Ronnie incubated a song, King had come to learn, was most unusual. When such a riff was played for him on a guitar or piano, his brain would go into overdrive, but the others in the band wouldn't know until he had a microphone before him what he would sing.

“I never saw him write a lyric down,” says King. “It was all in his head, based on the groove. If you ever showed up at rehearsal the next day and couldn't recapture the groove—you might have the chords right, but if you'd lost the groove—the lyrics were gone forever. One time he said, ‘I can't remember it.' We go, ‘What happened?' And he said, ‘You guys lost it, man.' So you know, that song was gone. But that didn't happen anymore. We'd stay there till dark, playing stuff over and over until we were playing it in our sleep. No wonder that solo came to me in a dream, because we just played and played and played.

“Listen, Ronnie Van Zant really wasn't a redneck. He was a very sophisticated guy. I mean, people think he was just this rowdy, whiskey
drinking, going out, gathering other women, but Ronnie had a level of sophistication that even early on just grew so fast. Every day you'd see a change. So I wouldn't, didn't even classify him as a redneck. But the thing about him that appealed to everybody is you could tell by listening to him sing that that's exactly what he was like in real life. I mean it's exactly him. All you had to listen to was six Skynyrd songs, and then you'd have the whole gist of what that man was about.”

“Sweet Home Alabama,” as this one was called, coalesced when King locked into Ronnie's lyrical progression, which from somewhere deep in Ronnie's thought process developed as an answer to Neil Young's scalding couplet of Dixie ragging, the 1970 “Southern Man” and 1972 “Alabama,” eviscerating all southern men who didn't explicitly condemn the vestige of their “heritage” that had caused black men to hang from trees on nooses. “I saw cotton and I saw black,” Young had sung on the former, a huge hit, “tall white mansions and little shacks. Southern Man, when will you pay them back?” In the latter song he further mocked the hypocrisy of men not compelled to “do what your good book says”: “You got the rest of the union to help you along / What's going wrong?” Ronnie, who thought such generalizations ignored the obvious debt being paid to black music by country rock bands like his, decided to pay back the man he greatly admired. Indeed, he came to regard Young's 1972 smash “Heart of Gold” as a template, with its mourning slide guitar and thumping beat. He had a drawer full of Young T-shirts, which he often wore on stage and would continue to.

Ronnie, in fact, was squeamish about taunting Young. He later recalled that “I showed the verse to Ed and asked him what Neil might think. Ed said he'd dig it; he'd be laughing at it.” And so he went on, repaying Young in kind, his lyrics just as stinging, sticking up for southern manhood. There was some soft soap too about the rush of being carried home “to see my kin” and the peerless Swampers up in Muscle Shoals, who've “been known to pick a song or two.” But then there were the references that at first listen seemed affectionate about George Corley Wallace—“In Birmingham they love the Gov'nor”—followed by the most cryptic sequence of stray thoughts ever in rock: “Boo! Boo! Boo! We all did what we could do. / Now Watergate does not bother me, / Does your conscience bother you? (Tell the truth!)”

Just what this all meant was anyone's guess. Indeed, the references were in some ways outdated or predated. Wallace at the time was not
quite the roaring lion. He was recovering from the near-fatal wounds he had suffered while campaigning for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when the drifter Arthur Bremer shot him five times at a Maryland shopping center. After a hospital stay, Wallace returned to the governor's mansion, no less adamant in his support for, as he once infamously said, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Even in a wheelchair, he was still a hoary segregationist.

The reference to Birmingham was pointed, but it had been a decade since the city had witnessed the horrendous Ku Klux Klan church bombing that had killed four black girls—way back in 1963. As for Watergate, Ronnie was behind the curve. The scandal had grown and was closing in on Richard Nixon. The lyrics, then, were a weird hash of scattered, unfocused thoughts, something not surprising given that Ed King describes Van Zant's writing process as less than disciplined. “Basically,” King says, “Ronnie didn't think real hard about what he was writing. He wrote from his heart; he was a guy who wrote his feelings into songs.”

Artimus Pyle, after he later joined the group, believed he could play it with more conviction on the drums if he knew what Ronnie had in mind. As Pyle recalled, “Ronnie explained it to me he was telling the Southern Man that the Southern Man is not to be blamed for something that happened two hundred years ago. He was saying, ‘I don't have anything against African American people,' and Ronnie didn't. He'd give the shirt off his back to anybody, black or white. Ronnie was not a racist.”

Extrapolating all that from the lyrics of this song is impossible, and to be sure, Pyle would have more than one fanciful explanation about Skynyrd matters big and small. For his part, Rossington, believably, says that the picking of a fight with Neil Young was “completely fabricated. We all loved Neil. Ronnie used to wear Neil Young T-shirts all the time because he loved him and was really inspired by him. He just wrote those lines about ‘Southern Man,' which seemed cute at the time, almost like a play on words.” But the constructions that began to take hold about the overall intent of “Sweet Home Alabama” would not be so easy to dismiss as innocuous folderol.

While cutting the first vocal take of the tune, Ronnie, having trouble hearing the rhythm track in his headphones, instructed engineer Rodney Mills to “Turn it up!” For Kooper this must have brought back fond
memories of playing his impromptu organ line on “Like a Rolling Stone,” one that the record company executives in the studio hated but were overruled on by Bob Dylan barking, “Turn the organ up!” Perhaps feeling sentimental and because it caught Ronnie's sense of conviction, he left it in, prefacing King's prickly guitar intro, which repeated through the song—and which would be, ahem, appropriated four years later by Joe Perry on Aerosmith's “Walk This Way.” So profound was King's riff that the Fender Stratocaster he used that day, the same one he'd originally played the riff on at Hell House, is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—despite the fact that King liked it least of all his guitars. “It was a horrible guitar,” he later said. “It was the banjo-like tone that prompted Ronnie to write about Alabama, like ‘I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.' But I still hated it.”

Kooper also got into the swing when, after the opening lines about hearing “Mister Young” sing about the South, the producer sang a line from the Young song—“Southern man, better use your head”—in harmony. Ronnie didn't care for it, but Kooper left his rendition in, though he mixed it so low that it was “nearly subliminal,” he says. The band played at a honky-tonk blues pace, the three guitars pealing high and twangy, so sharply recorded by Kooper that they could tear off one's eyebrows. Prepared and on target as they were, they nailed it in one take, though Ronnie, who never liked anything the first time he heard it, demanded a second take to make sure. And Kooper wasn't through with it yet either. When he and the band went out to the coast for the Who tour, he brought the tape of the song so he could continue tweaking it, including adding a horn overlay at an L.A. studio. He also hired a trio of female soul singers, Merry Clayton, Clydie King, and Sherlie Matthews—proof enough to some that the song was hardly a celebration of Old South racism—to juice up the hooks; this was the second song of note Clayton would dress up, having sung a withering harmony with Mick Jagger and the unforgettable solo about “rape and murder” being just a shot away on “Gimme Shelter.”

Finally calling it done, Kooper had in hand a fisty, smug, funky, hard-rockin' ode to the New South struggling to get out of the shadow of the Old Confederacy. With its clever and catchy title hook, a listener could get lost in a dreamy milieu where “the skies are so blue” and the words “Lord I'm coming home to you” could make it actually
feel
like the South was one's home, anyone's. But those throwaway lines about
the “Gov'nor” and the most stigmatized of all Southern cities were going to be heard too—loud, if not exactly clear. Kooper was sanguine about it. “I think they were proud of where they came from,” he said breezily. “Racism didn't come into it.” Still, he had to admit that lines like “We all did what we could do” were “ambiguous.” And even Ed King says he didn't know what Ronnie meant by it, especially in relation to Watergate. Kooper's interpretation of that line somehow was: “We tried to get Wallace out of there,” although nothing in the maddeningly ambiguous song supported that point of view.