Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (6 page)

A hard-livin' good ol' boy with a head of high, prematurely graying hair, Lacy Van Zant—one of eleven children fathered by a rugged logger named George Van Zant—was born in 1915 in Evergreen, a sparsely populated woodland northwest of Jacksonville. It seems George must have had a wry or twisted sense of humor, as the name Lacy derived from his own father's not-so-kind pet name for him: Lazy Boy.

It was a description no one could accurately use for the adult Lacy, who was doing odd jobs at twelve and would work almost every day of his life. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was one of the first in line at the navy recruiting station, and he went on to serve four
years on a battleship in the Pacific. During a furlough in Jacksonville, he met and romanced a pretty fifteen-year-old girl, Marion Hicks, who was called “Sister” or “Sis,” a nickname given her by her grandfather. Worn down by his proposals, she married him in 1947, by which time he had a job as a trucker and she already had a child, a daughter named Betty Jo Ann, from a failed marriage. Lacy adopted the girl, and the family bounced around trailers and shotgun shacks in Shantytown until they had their first child together, a son born on January 15, 1948, in Saint Vincent's Hospital.

They called him Ronald Wayne Van Zant, a fairly high-falutin' name for the son of a truck-drivin' man. He was a big, robust, loud baby and as a toddler was apt to wander off on his own, impatient for something challenging to do, climb, or hit. Tales are told about a young Ronnie going after a teenage gang that had stolen his bicycle, and leaving a few bloody noses in his wake while getting it back. He also liked to sing, and when he did, it was not “The Wheels on the Bus” or “I'm a Little Teapot.” Aping what he had heard Lacy croon at home or behind the wheel of his rig, Ronnie got up in front of his first-grade class at Ramona Boulevard Elementary School and trilled “Beer Drinking Daddy” and “Ricochet Romance.” Sis Van Zant got a kick out of telling people how she was called to the school to rebuke Ronnie for his precocious behavior. But even then, nothing could have made him change his ways.

Many families in postwar Jacksonville were headed by former or current employees of the naval yards over at the port area on the ocean. In this amorphous, blue-collar town, postwar optimism ran high, but uncertain days lay ahead. As anyone within these borders could tell you, nothing was ever taken for granted in Jacksonville. Moreover, the city was something of a poor stepchild with a hazy identity when compared with other booming Florida cities like Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. For one thing, people had less to live on here. For another, the state as a whole had developed as almost two separate states with discrete identities. The old saying was that in Florida the North is in the south, and the South is in the north; the more north you go, the more southern it got.

This contradiction was due to the original settlement of the northern part of the state by predominantly German and Dutch immigrants, creating a dialect flatter and blunter than the twangy, melodic
Anglo-American accent prevailing in the rest of the state and region. However, while the panhandle identity is in some ways less southern than in the phallic peninsula, pride in being a Southerner has been, and is, feverishly high. Nowhere is the heritage mantra of the Confederate flag issue heard more often or louder than in these parts, where it is still a matter of great pride that Florida was the third state (after South Carolina and Mississippi) to secede from the Union—and that Tallahassee was the only Confederate capital never captured by Abe Lincoln's generals.

In Jacksonville, a port city located on the eastern coast, there were fewer ties to southern traditionalism than the more obvious southern culture of other Florida cities to the south. A curious anomaly is that, despite being just over the border from Georgia and within tobacco-spitting distance of Alabama, the twangy accent is largely absent, largely due to the constant coming and going of transient populations.

Lacy wanted to live in a certain style, but the postwar flood of returning soldiers looking for work created an instant middle class, all competing for jobs and living space. With limited resources, Shantytown was his only option for a home, and driving a truck his only choice for a job. Lacy, a descendant of that wave of Dutch immigration—his surname a derivative of Van Zandt, Old World Dutch for “from the sand” or “from Zante,” an island in the Mediterranean—never complained about the hand dealt him. He was a proud man with rock-ribbed, conservative southern values, who would work like a maniac to provide for his family. He may not have kept all his teeth by the 1960s, but he kept his wife and would continue to do so for just short of half a century, until her death in 2000, preceding his by four years.

Sis Van Zant, like most wives of the era, stood respectfully in the shadow of her husband, but in the privacy of the home, she had the dominant hand, a necessity with her husband on the road so often. Because Lacy wanted a big family, she obliged him, giving birth to a parade of children—six in all, including Betty Jo, with a rhythmic progression of names: Ronnie, Donnie, Marlene, Darlene, and Johnny. Yet Sis somehow found the time to work nights in a doughnut shop to add extra cash to the family pot. When Ronnie was two, she had to be the one to go down to the bank and persuade a loan officer to give the Van Zants a loan to mortgage the house on Woodcrest where Lacy would live, happily if not always easily, until the day he died in 2004.

Lacy could never quite understand his boy, in particular the unfocused sense of boiling anger inside him. Ronnie, he once said, “had a temper and a ‘don't mess with me' attitude, which he would need growing up.” With pride and a little bit of a wince, he recalled that when his boy was all of two, “he had miniature gloves that I bought for him and he gave me a black eye.” He paused for a beat and then added, “He's been giving me black eyes ever since,” though he meant this only in the figurative sense. His conclusion was that Ronnie “was well thought of, very popular—because he fought for his rights.”

Lacy indeed could be proud that the boy, for all his rough-and-tumble traits, had a good side. He was quick-witted and completely charming; he could sing and express himself, and he excelled on the football and baseball fields. The football dream ended only when he broke his ankle during a game, leaving him with a faint limp, but the individualism of baseball was more his thing anyway. As a fleet center-fielder with a big, lusty cut at the plate and a Ty Cobb-like zeal to slide into bases with his spikes up (aimed right at someone's head), he led his American Legion team one year with a simple batting philosophy: “I just swung for the fences,” he once said. “That was my whole philosophy in life.”

As it happened, of course, he and Gary Rossington had met on a ball field, the Hyde Park Elementary School field on Park Street, where all the sandlot teams played. In 1965, Ronnie, a junior at Robert E. Lee, was playing for the Green Pigs, sponsored by a restaurant of that name. Rossington, not yet fifteen, was on the Lakeshore Rebels, his junior high team. That gap in age and experience should have made him a blip on Ronnie's screen, except for the fact that Ronnie always seemed to know who the talented kids were, as if he had filed away such data for future reference. Besides, Us, the band Ronnie had formed when he was attending Lakeshore, had become an afterthought; no one in it could play a guitar as well as Gary.

Ronnie also had a good deal of sympathy for the younger teen, who had lost his father when he was ten; for Ronnie this harsh fact redefined the itchy relationship he had with Lacy, giving him a cold chill at the thought that his old man might not always be around to give him hell. Death indeed was a matter that unsettled Ronnie and gave him much
food for introspection. His later work would occasionally feature death as a theme, most prominently on “Free Bird,” a song he kept in his head for years before setting it down on vinyl, with its metaphoric yearning for eternally open skies, a sadly ironic consequence.

This might seem to conflict with his tough-guy ways, but anyone who knew him understood that Van Zant was not out to hurt a guy he egged on to fight him; rather, the fine distinction was that he was laying down who was boss of Shantytown. Indeed, when the prospect that he might in fact have done serious damage to someone arose, which happened at least twice, the kid who was always in control of his emotions nearly came unglued. One time he and a buddy drove to the woods to hunt squirrels. Wielding a .22-caliber shotgun, he fired at one but missed; a woman standing nearby, whom he hadn't seen, collapsed to the ground. As it turned out, she was an elderly woman who lived in the woods and drank heavily; coincidentally, she had passed out just as the shot was fired.

Ronnie came running over, almost in tears. “You all right?” he kept asking the fallen woman, who finally stirred, looked up, and made a request.

“Give me my bottle,” she said.

Per Skynyrd legend, a remarkably similar incident supposedly occurred out on the ball field. During one at bat, Ronnie hit a blistering foul line drive down the third-base line. At the time, Rossington was standing in foul ground with Bob Burns, the friend from Forrest High School who also played drums in You, Me and Him. They ducked, but the ball glanced off Burns's head. More stunned than hurt, he went down to the ground. Aghast that he might have killed the kid, Ronnie dropped his bat and tore down the third-base line.

“You killed him, you bastard!” Rossington growled at him—taking his own life in his hands.

Burns, who lives in Seminole, Florida, and still plays in local bands, remembers it differently. “It looked like an aspirin comin' at me, and I turned around to run, and it caught me right between the shoulder blades. It hit me hard, knocked the breath out of me. And I'm layin' on the ground, and the coaches are pullin' my belt up, saying, ‘Breathe, son, breathe.' I finally came around, and I looked up, and Ronnie was staring down at me. He went, ‘Sorry, kid,' and he walked off.”

After a few minutes Burns rose, and all was well. Greatly relieved, Ronnie went back to bat. Then, after the final out, he sought out the two younger kids and pulled some beers out of his duffle bag, and they got to talking about music in one of the dugouts. It was during that colloquy that Ronnie decided he was going to annex their band and become the singer they didn't have, whereupon they repaired to Burns's basement and, still wearing their sweaty uniforms, informally jammed—badly.

The problem was that Gary had the right equipment but couldn't play it to maximum effect. He owned a Silvertone electric guitar, an inexpensive in-house brand sold at Sears, which for years had a record label by that name. Those Silvertone models would be discontinued in the early 1970s, later making them rare and enormously popular among musicians such as Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Jerry Garcia, and Chet Atkins. A Canadian band that began in the 1960s as the Silvertones, in homage to the guitar, became the Guess Who.

But Gary was
not
getting out of his Silvertone the commonly played rock riffs of the day, not yet having mastered bar chords, which are played with multiple fingers or even a whole hand pressing down strings on the fingerboard. Indeed, country music had made liberal use of bar chords, with guitar players sliding their entire hands up and down the fingerboard, yielding a twangy, wailing sound. Not incidentally, Ronnie had been to a Rolling Stones concert at the Jacksonville Coliseum in May 1965, observing at close range Keith Richards's work on the fingerboard of his guitar. While it said something about the town that the arena was only half filled that night, the show no doubt produced for Ronnie more than one epiphany.

Agreeing with Ronnie's assessment that a second guitarist was needed, Gary brought up the name of a classmate, Allen Collins, who could play those pleasing bar chords on his own Silvertone, bought for him by his mother Eva, after whom he named the instrument, etching it in the body just like the L
UCILLE
inscribed on B.B. King's guitar. Collins, originally taught to play by his grandmother, Leila Collins, a low-level country singer, was a serious music student, and he had a band called the Mods. That was all Ronnie needed to hear. He decided, before even meeting him, that Collins, a frizzy-haired string bean of a kid with jack-o-lantern facial features, was going to be the second guitar player in the still-unnamed band.

Ronnie, Gary, and Bob jumped into Ronnie's Mustang and drove over to Collins's house in Cedar Hills, to the east across I-295. When they got there, Allen was riding his bike in the street in front of his house. Seeing Van Zant eyeing him, he became uncomfortable, a not-uncommon reaction when Van Zant stared at someone. Collins pedaled hard, tearing down the street, the Mustang on his tail. In a panic, he jumped off the bike and ran through some woods. The trio in the car got out and followed him on foot, with Gary shouting, “Allen, man, we ain't gonna hurt you—we just wanna play!”

Collins finally stopped running, and listened, at a distance. Then he said, “Gee, guys, I'd like to play with y'all, but I'm afraid the Mods would beat me up.” Those, of course, were fightin' words for Ronnie. The target: not Collins but his band.