Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (9 page)

Looking for any clues that might get them the same success, the One Percent went beyond mere study; while Van Zant's band was on stage, they thought nothing of performing all the songs on
Hour Glass
. What was more shocking than the bald theft was that, according to the Hour Glass's keyboard player Paul Hornsby—who later was in Grinderswitch and produced top-selling albums by the Charlie Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Wet Willie—“They played it as good or better than we played it.” What's more, with his typical honey-coated bullshit, Van Zant smoothed it over with sweet talk.

“Man, I gotta tell you,” he said to Hornsby, “we
worship
you guys!”

Nor did the Allman boys press the point, possibly because they too knew of Ronnie's reputation. As Hornsby remembers it, Duane and Gregg told Van Zant his band was too good to do cover tunes; they had to get crackin' writing their own stuff. Indeed, rival bands would probably not have hesitated to pilfer songs from the One Percent, if only they had some. At the time, they had none that they felt confident enough to play live yet. Jim Daniel, a local booker, had been loosely representing the band for a few years and pleaded with them for original material. One of the earliest attempts, “Chair with a Broken Leg,” apparently was the first song ever recorded by the band soon to be known as Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were still the Noble Five at the time, around mid-1967.

“Chair,” copies of which do not exist, was some sort of pseudofolk protest rock that few could make sense of. Daniel got it on a reel-to-reel tape, not in a studio but in Ronnie's aunt's house, intending to use it as a demo, but he thought better of it and never did. As the band were reluctant to play any new songs on stage, “Chair with a Broken Leg” went into the dust bin of history. Mainly, they went with covers of distinctly nonsouthern bands—the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, Cream. Allen Collins in particular loved to do riffs on Pete Townsend's guitar-playing moves, such as the famous windmilling of his arm. They began to carve out a niche for themselves—rock and roll, hard and intense, stir-fried
with a Merle Haggard-type haughtiness, a tang, and an implied twang, with Allen injecting some bottleneck-blues effects by sliding his palm up and down the neck of his guitar and making redneck banter with the audiences, mainly invitations to hecklers to step outside when the songs were over.

There was no distinctive sound to it yet, but the seeds for a mutual accommodation of backwoods southern blues and contemporary British rock were there. They began looking ever more grizzled, the vestiges of county-fair-appropriate dress, with no jeans and high school haircut codes giving way to musty, faded jeans, sweat-stained T-shirts, dangling locks, and bristly whiskers. The search to find the right alchemy, an emblem that was workable and believable in both tonality and look, was in its infant stages in other dive bars within smelling distance of the One Percent's gigs, undertaken by similar bands also on the make. And in the end, it was more the attitude, the smug, put-up-your-dukes component of Ronnie's vocals, not to mention his sinister Elvis-like sneer—and the quick, ingratiating grin signaling that much (but not all) of his tough-guy posing was a put-on—that seemed to stick in minds and ears, propelling the band forward.

Sensing they were in need of original material that would fortify and ideally define them, Ronnie began to collaborate with Gary and Allen, taking the lyricist role he felt comfortable with and leaving the melody to be knitted onto his words by the two guitarists. Naturally, he was a tough taskmaster, a perfectionist even then, sparking prickly arguments about song topics and direction, which would always be the case. However, they reached a critical watermark late in 1968 when yet another name for the band came into being, one that would last into eternity.

I
n 1969, Forby Leonard Skinner, a gruff, crew cut-sporting, thirty-five-year-old Army veteran, was the gym teacher at his alma mater, Robert E. Lee High. Nothing about him would have ever portended fame or even a minute of notoriety had he not been placed in history as a foil for two students, members of a still obscure band. Having taken on the sartorial and tonsorial identities of rock-and-roll musicians put Gary Rossington on a collision course with Skinner, who like any other high school gym coach was the enforcer of the lingering dress codes that existed in every high school in America.

A big man at six foot two and two hundred pounds, Skinner was a real ballbuster, taking satisfaction in ragging young men who dared creep up on the line between respectability and hippiehood. Given authority to rag, keep after school, or suspend any kid who violated the dress code, he cut a menacing, foreboding figure when he padded down the hallways. Worse were his excursions through the shower room, where, if he wanted to humiliate a naked, pubescent boy, he could leave a mental scar a mile long.

When Ronnie was a senior at Lee in 1966, Skinner's first year there, Ronnie had run-ins with the coach and was intimidated enough to keep his hair respectably short; with his blond hair cropped above the ears and swept across his forehead, he looked very much like a California surfer boy. That look, of course, had passed as daring in an era dominated by the Beach Boys' candy-striped collared shirts and white chinos, but in '69, it was cause to be labeled a nerd.

Gary, whose curly locks grew like wild shrubbery, overrunning the lawful two-inches-below-the-ears limit, was an immediate target for the coach. Skinner always carried around a ruler to measure, including into the shower room, and he had little sympathy for the young man's defense that being in a working rock band required, as the biggest musical on Broadway noted, “long, beautiful hair … down to there.” Once, Gary even brought in solid citizen Lacy Van Zant to help make his case. Skinner wasn't totally deaf to the plea; he suggested that the band members wear wigs for their rock-and-roll engagements. They did but quickly grew their long tresses back. For a time, they thought they could con Skinner by wearing
short-haired
wigs to school, tightly fitted over their taped-down long hair, but Skinner wasn't that easy to fool.

Unable to put up with the static, Rossington would drop out in '68 (as had Ronnie before him) as soon as he was sixteen and thus legally able to. Just before that, Rossington, having been suspended yet again, bravely—maybe insanely—looked Skinner in the eye and told him, “Fuck you.” Gary's dropping out killed his parents, just as Ronnie's decision had killed Lacy and Sis, but Gary and Bob needed Leonard Skinner like, well, a haircut. Indeed, dealing with him had become so unbearable that they regularly made up obscene limericks and song lyrics about him. It seemed like a gift that Allan Sherman's 1964 novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” included the line “You remember Leonard Skinner,” prompting them to sing the song when Skinner strolled by. An even better inside joke was calling the band “Leonard Skinner” in jest when they took the stage. The joke always got a hoot because so many in the audience had gone to Lee High and had their own Skinner tales.

Then one night at the Forest Inn it occurred to Ronnie that the sobriquet actually worked as an identifier on several levels. Because of who Skinner was, the name fit their image as redneck dropouts with an authority problem, and in the mold of perfectly inscrutable rock-and-roll patois used as group names, “Leonard Skinner” added some beguiling mystery.
Skinner
, rolling off the southern tongue, sounded something like a sneer, their predominate stage affectation, or in redneckspeak, something like “I just skinnered that there mule.” As the band mounted the stage at the Forest Inn, Ronnie did the joke intro and then on a whim asked the audience, “Hey, how many y'all want us to change our name to ‘Leonard Skinner'?” The room cheered its approval, and the
deed was done. It did occur to them that Mr. Skinner, not having been asked permission to appropriate his identity for a rock-and-roll band—the idea was just too delicious for them to risk asking and being shot down—might take umbrage and lawyer up to stop it. So, rather than ask, they tried different spellings of the name, going for the time being with “Lynard Skynard” on the blackboards of the local pubs billing their gigs.

It was a turnabout of roles, them mocking
him
now, and proof that they had only the most snarky of intentions. Of only secondary consideration was whether it would ever be commercially useful or if Skinner might still press the issue, it being obvious who “Lynard Skynard” was. For now, however, they knew just a little bit more what they were about. And Lord knows, they wouldn't ever change.

Armed with a new name and a good reputation in the local rock scene, the band took the next logical step up the ladder, a recording session. In May 1969, David Griffin, the manager of a Jacksonville record emporium called Marvin Kay's MusiCenter, arranged with a local record company, Shade Tree Records, to finance a session for them and another band called Black Bear Angel at a studio owned by Norm Vincent, a former top-rated disc jockey at radio station WMBR. Shade Tree was operated by producers Tom Markham and Jim Sutton, who, after seeing the band with the revolving-door names at the Comic Book, gave them a five-year contract, for a generous advance of … nothing.

Two songs cowritten by Ronnie and Allen were cut in mono on an eight-track recorder in about an hour. Ronnie had written the first song, “Michelle,” about his daughter Tammy Michelle. It was produced as a sassy blues riff with Ronnie trying hard to sound like Gregg Allman, singing in a raspy voice, “Michelle, little girl, I need you baby more than the air I breathe,” as Collins fired up his Les Paul on a long break and a punchy fadeout. The other cut, “Need All My Friends,” was an augury of “Free Bird”: “Woman, I have to leave you / I can't stay where there is no pay / And I really don't care where I'm going to.” Here, Collins's mellow guitar accents swathed Van Zant's plaint about the call and loneliness of the long road and the comforts of playing music and doing “the things I love.” The mellowness was cleaved by spikes of hard rock, backed by fiddles and violins. It's an amazing song to behold, the guitars tightly
meshed even then and the strings a real curio, never again to be heard on a Skynyrd recording. The songs ran over five minutes, long by contemporary standards but not deemed finished until Ronnie said so.

Markham and Sutton thought they might be onto something, so they pressed three hundred copies of the two-sided 45-rpm disc by “Lynyard Skynard” and flooded radio stations with them. The publisher of the songs was listed as Double “T” Music—so named by Ronnie, reaching back to the “double trouble” appellation hung on him by Gary in jail—although the group would never see a penny of any publishing royalties. Markham and Sutton contractually owned those rights, a common meed taken by record company honchos in exchange for recording unknowns. Berry Gordy, for example, was notorious for doing this to members of Motown groups who wrote their own material, averse to allowing anyone but his stable of writers (including himself) to profit from the publishing.

Like all unknown bands, Skynyrd signed their rights away for a chance to hit it big. But after they'd heard their first record a few times on the radio, it fell off the radar screen, selling something like a hundred copies. (After the Skynyrd plane crash, Shade Tree would sell the masters to a small local label, Atina Records, which would issue them in 1978 on a 45-rpm disc inside a jacket that read S
KYNYRD
'
S FIRST
. In 2000, MCA would issue them again, included as “Shade Tree demos” on the
Skynyrd Collectybles
album of odds, ends, and rarities.) As well crafted as the songs were, the main problem wasn't the music: there just seemed to be no definitive format where it could be played regularly. It was similar to the old conundrum of 1950s R&B crossover records judged too black for white stations, too white for black ones. With country rock still not a format, the question was, where are these records supposed to go? It was a roadblock faced by the Allman Brothers as well, one they would do the most to tear down. Of course, in this case, it could have also been that the songs just weren't good enough.