Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (43 page)

In truth, the album would have had no trouble gaining attention, no matter the cover. It was long awaited and would not disappoint. Robert Christgau analyzed it as a sum of more than its parts: “As with too many LPs by good road bands, each side here begins with two strong cuts and then winds down. The difference is that the two strong cuts are very strong and the weak ones gain presence with each listen.” Yet it was that cover with those engulfing flames that would turn the album into a prophecy, all too soon and all too horribly fulfilled.

Though it was largely a sham, Skynyrd kept up the public pretense of being “reformed” rednecks. Kicking off another of their seamless tours, they did their usual round of media interviews, this time pushing the party line of reformation. Not everyone, or even most, bought it. Headlines in the rock press still read more like those in the supermarket tabloids—
ROUGH, ROWDY, RIBALD ROCK, ONE MO
'
BRAWL FROM THE ROAD, HANGING OUT WITH LYNYRD SKYNYRD CAN GET YOU SHOT, SLEAZY RIDERS, LYNYRD SKYNYRD: DOES THER CONSCIENCE BOTHER THEM?
When
Time
got around to noticing them in October 1976, the headline they ran was
THE ROTGUT LIFE
. And as late as September 1977 there was a Skynyrd article with the not altogether exaggerated title
A BLOOD BATH EVERY NIGHT
. All this being the case, it stood to reason that, as
Crawdaddy's
Mitch Glazer posited, a dose of Skynyrd “goes down better if you're a little wrecked.”

Pressing on through the summer, the band rolled into Philadelphia's massive JFK Stadium on June 11, agreeing to open for Peter Frampton, the British teen-idol guitarist whose 1976 live double album
Frampton Comes Alive!
sold six million copies just that year, humbling even the exemplary sales of
One More from the Road
. Yet after three Top 20 singles Frampton was losing some sheen. That day in Philly was not kind to him, in large part due to Skynyrd. It was another of those all-day affairs with hundred-thousand-plus crowds, and another chance for Skynyrd to eat the headliner's lunch. And after their set a good half of the crowd walked out as Frampton played what Pete Rudge assistant Chris Charlesworth recalled as a “very limp closing set.”

Skynyrd, he said, hadn't even needed to exert themselves very much to steal the show. “They'd played an hour-long set—short for them—and restricted themselves to their best-known songs with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of swagger. ‘Free Bird' brought that huge crowd to their feet and as I watched from the side of the stage, just behind their amplifiers, it seemed to me that all 100,000 of them were stomping and cheering as the band played faster and faster to the song's stupendous finale.”

Four days later, they headlined at the Summer Festival in Springfield, Massachusetts, with .38 Special and Foreigner opening for them. As the tour went west, they had top billing at Bill Graham's Days on the Green on July 3 at the Oakland Coliseum and on the same night were in Tulsa, before flying right back to Oakland a day later for the finale of the three-day Graham event. At times like that, it was helpful that they now had their own charter plane, a Convair CV-300, which Rudge had first leased in April. But these backbreaking tours, combined with years of punishing their internal organs every way they could, clearly had taken a toll. They looked older now. Ronnie's waistline jiggled from years of being filled with booze and corn pone. Leon and Steve had bushy beards like Artimus, giving them the look of the three wise men. Collins had remained clean-shaven and still had the look of a crazy-eyed teenager;
but those eyes had dark circles under them, and he was sometimes unable to speak coherently. Rossington still had his curls and good looks, but his nose was red, bulbous, and frequently bloody from all the cocaine forced through his nostrils. With guitars in their hands, they were even now wiry tarantulas on stage, but Collins's frenetic leaping around and Pyle's rabid drumming were about the only thing approaching high-voltage activity that Skynyrd could muster.

Ronnie Van Zant for his part was still the fighter, albeit tempered by age, weariness, and the wisdom to pick his spots. Pyle saw the difference after Gaines had arrived. At one time or another, he said, “I pulled off [of Ronnie] Billy, Leon, Gary, and Allen. Ronnie didn't mess with me and Steve because he knew he couldn't whip my ass and he had a great amount of respect for Steve. He'd leave the stage in front of 200,000 people and let Steve sing a song. That tells you something.”

Although Pyle later claimed he had threatened to quit the band unless it cleaned itself up, clearly most of them were back on the sauce by then—the weed, the powder, the pills—and cared not who knew it. Ronnie playfully bantered between songs on the tour that “these intermissions are brought to you by the Budweiser king of beer”—a statement that, unlike in today's commercialized rock orbit, had no connection to any corporate endorsement deal, that crude rock reality still being a few years away. After taking a swig from a can of Bud, he would slyly apply the kicker: “not to mention Acapulco gold.” At a concert in Charleston, Ronnie took out a joint and blew marijuana smoke in the faces of Rossington, Collins, and Gaines, saying to the crowd, “And you don't think they ain't fucked up?”

Pete Rudge apparently was of little use in Skynyrd's half-hearted reformation. Those cocaine-covered meetings in his New York office went on unabated, and whenever the band came into the general vicinity Rudge would be there with some familiar blandishments. Before the band's July 13 gig in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Rod Stewart and Ten Years After, Mick and Bianca Jagger happened by the band's trailer. “We're talking, and the next thing I knew,” Pyle recalled, “Mick goes into the bathroom. Ronnie's in the bathroom, too, with Pete Rudge. And guess what they were doing in there.” Awkwardly, Artimus tried to make small talk with Bianca amid loud snorting noises emanating from the john. Also during that swing through the New York area, Dean Kilpatrick was said to have
been extremely close with sixteen-year-old
Exorcist
actress Linda Blair, who developed a wild crush on him after they met. As things now stood, such behavior was horrifyingly normal.

Street Survivors
was released October 17, along with the single “That Smell,” which quickly toppled cultural barriers about what a pop song could say. When the album went out it shipped gold, selling half a million on preorder alone. They were on another endless tour by then, this one scheduled to keep them occupied for four more months with major appearances that included the band's first gig at Madison Square Garden on November 10 and in virtually every other big market arena until the tour's end in Honolulu in February 1978. Four days before the album came out, on October 13, they finally headed toward home, landing in Statesboro, Georgia, for a concert at Georgia Southern College, and then went on to the Hollywood Sportatorium in Miami, the Bayfront Center in Saint Petersburg, the Lakeland Civic Center, and Greenville, South Carolina's Memorial Auditorium on the nineteenth.

In Greenville, Gene Odom recalled, he saw “an obviously inebriated” Van Zant “ranting and cursing,” another indication, among many, that “Ronnie never should have been around alcohol.” Pyle would have his own takeaway from that concert. After the show, he said, a longtime Skynyrd fan had told him, “I was totally sober and I enjoyed myself more than I had ever enjoyed myself at any concert.” It seemed that some Skynyrd adherents, at least, weren't getting quite as wrecked anymore, a rite of maturation that Skynyrd could not quite bring themselves to practice.

The next stop was two days later, October 21, at the LSU Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, 669 miles to the southwest. Once more they wearily hauled their tired bones into their leased Convair. The capacity of the plane was twenty-four, not including two pilots, and every seat was taken, though one that had been reserved for Honkette JoJo Billingsley had been given to someone else because she had gone home feeling ill, and in any case was petrified of getting on the plane. Indeed, she wasn't the only member of the troupe to believe that; others considered getting to Baton Rouge through other means. The Convair had become a matter of grave concern lately for ample reason.

The decision to lease a private plane wasn't only a matter of status or comfort but rather a necessity once the overage delinquents of Skynyrd had caused too many disturbances on their charter flights. Ronnie's attempt to throw John Butler out of a plane over Europe was not an isolated incident. Tom Dowd had flown with them and couldn't believe how rowdy they'd get, behavior that often prompted flight crews to threaten them with arrest when they got on the ground. Word had gotten out, and the airlines were loath to book them. Thus Rudge, that April, leased the Convair from a small aviation firm, the L&J Company of Addison.

The plane was a relic, a converted CV-240, the type of craft John F. Kennedy had used during his 1960 campaign, a two-propeller aircraft dating back to 1947, the third of its kind ever built. Rock being a small world, the plane had recently been used by Aerosmith, who had flown in it to several shows at which they opened for Skynyrd. When Aerosmith was about to tour again that spring, their pilot and assistant chief of flight operations, Zunk Buker, inspected the plane. To his amazement, the two pilots who would be flying it, Captain Walter W. McCreary and First Officer William J. Gray Jr., both of whom were in the early thirties and had limited flight experience, were “smoking and passing around an open bottle of Jack Daniel's in the cockpit,” according to Buker, who called the band's manager David Krebs.

“No way we are going to fly this airplane,” he said.

Krebs said, yes, they would, as it would save the band $30,000 on that leg of their tour.

“The plane isn't safe,” Buker reiterated. “We're not doing it.”

Again rebuffed, Buker gave an ultimatum: “If you're flying them in this airplane, I'm resigning—effective immediately.”

Only then did management give in, buying Aerosmith a Cessna 310 for $200,000. The fact that Rudge saved a few dollars of Skynyrd's money by leasing at bargain basement rates—three payments of $5,000—Aerosmith's old, discarded bucket of bolts could not have pleased Skynyrd, though it seemed like a typical Rudge business decision; according to Chris Charlesworth, Rudge was always looking for ways to scrimp and save. Paul Welch, a new soundman hired by Skynyrd, who was manning the board with Kevin Elson on the tour, says the band actually had for some time been after Rudge to buy them a spiffy new status-symbol
jet too but that, like Aerosmith's management, Rudge had wanted to squeeze one more tour out of the old tomato can to save money.

Perhaps tellingly, Rudge himself would not set foot on the plane. Instead, he flew first class to Skynyrd gigs on commercial airline flights while, as Pyle said, “we were flying in a plane that looked like it belonged to the Clampett family.”