In 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 SKYNYRD’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.
Still, Markham and Sutton held to their hunch. Early in 1970, they would cut another session with the band, producing two ballads, “No One Can Take Your Place” and “If I’m Wrong,” both cowritten by Van Zant, Collins, and Rossington. As with “Need All My Friends,” there is some real history to these obscure songs. The former is so anti-Skynyrd, so effusively old-school country, that one would never guess it was them. To the accompaniment of Allen’s weeping slide guitar, Ronnie, heartbreak dripping from every syllable about love gone bad, sounds more like Cowboy Copas than Paul Rodgers, his nasal twang almost at parody level—another idiom never again to be heard from him.
“If I’m Wrong” did reflect a rock sensibility, its spare instrumentation pairing a splendid B.B. King-like blues guitar line with a rhythmic acoustic guitar beat. Ronnie, back in his comfy lower register, seemed to rescind the cloying sentiments of “Need All My Friends”:
Don’t need no friends, I don’t play no games
I need lots of room to roam before I go home….
If I fail no one can ever tell
And if I’m wrong I’ll soon be gone.
This theme of breaking free from even those who loved him was clearly much on Ronnie’s mind. With time left in the session, the group cut a third song, though without nearly as much attention to detail.
Ronnie and Allen had been honing the composition for a couple of years, expressing a similar worldview in the opening line—“If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”—an actual question that Allen’s girlfriend Kathy Johns had once asked him. The lyrics spoke of the flight of a “free bird” that “you cannot change.” Compared with the later, immortal version, the song sounds much like a demo, stripped of its many layers and shadings. An almost identical slide guitar jag by Collins opens the song, and the two guitars fire the same chords but are more clanging and nowhere as nuanced or explosive. Ronnie’s vocal is as convincing but a bit thin, leading Markham and Sutton to buff it with a thick echo that nearly swallows it up at times, with an odd “whoa whoa whoa” prelude to the line preceding the long guitar break, which never really takes off, sonically or technically. At seven and a half minutes, it was long, all right, if short by the standard of the later version, but never particularly grabbing.
Shade Tree might have had a tiger by the tail had it released the song, as radical as it was and suited to FM rock play. Instead the record company sat on this tape too. (All three songs would go on Collectybles.) But “Free Bird,” in more complete form, would soon have a new life, a life without end.
Even with scant radio play, the band now had a catalog of original songs, something promoters had been waiting for before booking them. According to some sources, “Free Bird” was played for the first time live in May 1970 at a wedding of a friend of the band’s. Moreover, along the underground country rock circuit, a surprising number of people in the clubs knew the songs and could even sing along to them. Now out-of-town gigs came their way: one each in Savannah and Macon, Georgia, and two in Saint Louis. Late in 1970, they were invited to open for Eric Burdon and War at a club in downtown Jacksonville. Things were clearly happening now.
Not that Lacy was convinced it was worth it for his son to wear the stigma of a dropout. He was still after Ronnie to return to school and get a diploma, considering the very real prospect that the rock thing would fizzle. Ronnie, in fact, still worked part time at the auto parts store since the money from the band gigs was hardly sufficient to pay child support to Nadine for the daughter he rarely saw. Band doings aside, everything Lacy had predicted would happen otherwise had already materialized—the failed marriage, the child who now needed to be fed and clothed—and through it all Lacy had less hope that his son knew, or would ever know, how to be a man. To a degree, nearly all the members of Skynyrd had daddy issues of some kind, none as serious as Gary losing his early in life, but a matter of gritted teeth nonetheless. Allen, for example, harbored a deep grudge against his father, Larkin Collins, who split from his mother after much acrimony when he was a small child; the guitar thereafter became a sanctuary in a hardscrabble life.
Possibly as a result of being rudderless and having no paternal influence—which to an unruly kid in the South meant the possibility of a big, wide belt being removed and used to lay down the law at home—Collins began careening easily and a little too fast into the rock netherworld of chemical experimentation. Most of the Skynyrd boys were pot smokers, sharing what was a common enough predilection for those of their generation. In fact, when they went on the road early on, they would brandish their emerging “redneck rebel” credentials with absurd tales about getting their stash from some unusual sources. One time they insisted they had just played in Alaska and had brought back with them “Alaskan Thunder Fuck” ganja—which was really just Jacksonville Gold; then they passed their joints around to watch the psychosomatic overreaction of the guys who tried it.
But Collins’s behavior, even before junior high school, had hinted that he was willing to cross more perilous borders. Gene Odom related that Collins had once told him, probably not completely joking, that he had taken wood shop back then “so he could sniff wood glue every day.” One day he blacked out after inhaling toluene, a glue solvent and paint thinner, and fell in a heap against the classroom door. The shop teacher, this apparently not being the first time it had happened, opened the door so that Allen could lie flat until he came to. If these stories are indeed true, then it was just a fact of life that Allen Collins had few limits on self-destructive behavior. Ronnie treated these sorts of incidents somewhat as a joke, not really in a position himself to lecture anyone about the evils of drugs or firewater, having been a hooch drinker since, well, who even knew? Besides, how would a former jailbird even try to play Mr. Clean? For both him and Allen, and for everyone else who would come through the band, the hard lessons about going down the road to addiction and dissipation would only be gleaned after too much time and too much consumption.
As for Ronnie’s complicated relationship with his father, all the younger man could do was hope Lacy would one day come around. Lacy would never ridicule his boy about the rock and roll, which he viewed as just a diversion. In fact, always trying to do what he could to get deeper into Ronnie’s world, he even helped the band out; after receiving a few thousand dollars in insurance money after a traffic accident, he purchased a drum kit for Bob Burns and a trailer, and then a Chevy station wagon, to help lug their equipment around from gig to gig. But telling his boy he was proud of his excursion into music was a more delicate, complicated affair; that was one thing he felt he could not do. Ronnie took it personally, saying years later that the rift was never healed because Lacy would hold over his head the fact that he had been able to decorate his walls with his son’s gold records—“but never a diploma.”
Country rock came through the 1960s with a growing sense of swagger and comfort, perfectly matching the mind-set of a nation that had survived a near meltdown, battered daily by headlines about setbacks in Vietnam and assassinations of men of vision. With Dante’s inferno burning out of control, it was a symbolic exclamation point that the last rock-and-roll convocation of the ’60s, held at a raceway in Altamont, California, turned barbaric and deadly, causing America to pine for what the Rolling Stones had sung on stage that dark day—“Gimme Shelter.” So sick and fearful of turmoil and tumult were Americans that they had actually turned to the mortuarial Richard Milhous Nixon, one of politics’ biggest demons, who gained election to the White House by running on a “southern strategy.” Nixon, by appealing to their lingering prejudices, won over enough Dixiecrat votes to net five states of the Old Confederacy, while also benefiting from third-party candidate George Wallace’s own race-baiting campaign, which grabbed the rest, save Texas.
Down in Jacksonville, with its myriad military installations, and in the home of Army veteran Lacy Van Zant, Nixon carried the vote handily, but as with most national issues, the war and the racial struggle seemed remote. Jacksonville had rarely been the site of any controversy. Martin Luther King had come close in 1964 when he was arrested in Saint Augustine at a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. That was the same year the Florida Supreme Court ordered Jacksonville to desegregate its schools. The mayor, W. Haydon Burns, resisted the order. During Burns’s term, racial violence became common. A 1960 protest to integrate downtown lunch counters in the Hemming Park shopping area was ended by segregationists wielding ax handles.
The grisly death toll of Vietnam hit home hard in Jacksonville—202 of its citizens were killed in combat, more than any other Florida city, and it seemed everyone had a friend or relative who didn’t make it home. Not incidentally, Ronnie’s old football injury had gotten him 4-F status when in accordance of the law he registered for the draft in 1966 at age eighteen. The others drew high numbers in the draft lotteries from 1969 through 1973. The Shantytown boys talked casually about the war, quietly expressing their opposition to it among themselves if not to their parents. Ronnie’s attempt at a protest song was painfully inept, and never again would he try his hand at such a theme, ceding that turf to established rockers like the Doors, who were recording masterpieces like “The Unknown Soldier.” Skynyrd would stick to what they knew best, the jagged turf of their homeland, the soil and the state of mind, and resolved that they would not encroach on political issues in the songs they sung. That was wise, given the terrain. Their purview, they decided, would be universal topics of young men.
As they cut their teeth in the clubs around Jacksonville, Daytona, and Sebring, the band’s original songs about love and the road to somewhere peaceful and productive were sprinkled into their swaggering sets of Stones and Free cover tunes—the latter’s “Walk in My Shadow” was a constant. Somewhere along this locus of touring they also made another modification to their name, settling now on a version that magnified the sneering tone of the surname and made any speaker of the phrase sound like a good old boy. They heard it being pronounced like that anyway, so, tongue twisting and confusing as it was, they went with the new spelling—“Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
By the end of the decade, their upward progression was still slow but more sure. In late 1970 they won a local “battle of the bands” contest at the Regency Square shopping mall in downtown Jacksonville; appeared on a local TV station dance party show where they fake-played and Ronnie lip-synched “Need All My Friends”; and then played at the opening of the Jacksonville Art Museum. The gigs weren’t so small anymore, nor were they confined to smoky clubs. Indeed, all this dues paying allowed Skynyrd to open several shows for the L.A.-based psychedelic rock band the Strawberry Alarm Clock, who were still extant three years after recording one of the most gloriously unlikely hits of all time, “Incense and Peppermints.” This song, one of the first psychedelic rock works, wrote the Magna Carta of alienation for the baby boom era with the line “Who cares what games we choose / Little to win but nothing to lose.” The song went all the way to number one in the summer of 1967, but now, painfully passé and running on fumes, the band was to Ronnie a reminder of how sudden the arrival—and devolution—of fame could be. Seeing them as a soon-to-be corpse, he picked their bones by hastening the departure of their guitarist, Ed King.
The New Jersey-born King, who had composed the sapid guitar solo in “Incense and Peppermints”—a sound that became the stamp of psychedelic rock songs—had been steaming since ’67 that the band’s producer had deprived him of a writing credit for the song. He also had a desire to relocate to the South. Working him, Ronnie would hang out with the burly, round-faced guitarist between shows, coyly planting in his mind the seed that he would be welcome in another band poised for major stardom, or so Ronnie promised. King might have laughed at such an entreaty from a relative unknown, but he was taken with the young redneck, both as a tintype of the South and as a singer. A few years earlier, the Hour Glass had opened for the Strawberry Alarm Clock for a show in L.A., and King had been blown away by Gregg Allman’s soulful blues voice. Now, he was hearing a similarly impressive voice in Ronnie. As a whole, he recalled, Skynyrd “were just borderline. They only had a few original tunes, one of which was ‘Free Bird.’ But Ronnie was already amazing. I’d never seen anybody with so much charisma. I made up my mind right then that I’d do anything to play music with this guy.”
King and his Clock returned to Los Angeles, with a special sort of road map of the back roads from Ronnie, which told them where the cops lurked in the shadows eager to bust guys with long hair. Those cops, Ronnie said, “will pull you over and they will throw you in jail and you’ll be there for a while.” And of course he knew what he was talking about. King got himself an education about the South during that tour. At one gig in Alabama, when the club owner ordered the Clock to sweep the floor and they refused, “he ran us out at gunpoint.” After the group hired a black driver for their van, they felt especially ostracized, to the point of fear. But the driver had an instinctive way of avoiding trouble, another sign of life in the new South. “It was so bizarre,” King said. “But it was very interesting.” King did subsequently quit and move to the South, to Greenville, North Carolina. He played in a bar band for a couple of years, biding time before he got the call from Skynyrd, something he would learn fell under the category of “be careful what you wish for.”
As Skynyrd gained maturity, record-company bird dogs began coming to see them perform. But clearly they were in the same beaker as other groups of Southern rockers. There was the Toy Factory, a South Carolina quintet with four Vietnam veterans, so named because of front man Toy Caldwell, who had been wounded in ’Nam. Like the Allman Brothers, the band had two brothers, Toy and his brother Tommy, the latter of whom would die in 1980 in a manner eerily similar to the way Duane Allman would, on a motorcycle. Their easygoing southern-fried style seemed to have gotten the jump on the rest of the talent pool and signaled that competition in the top tier of southern rock was going to be stiff.
A good number of country-rock veterans look back fondly on those early days of the genre, recalling a kind of collegial, even familial, bonding between bands. Charlie Daniels, who was older than the young rednecks but also looking for a big break for his eponymous, fiddle-fueled rockabilly band, attributes this bond to most of them sharing similar Tobacco Road socioeconomic deprivations in their youth. In solidarity, he says, bands would go out of their way to help other bands, offering suggestions, lending out players, getting drunk and stoned with them, and touting them to industry bird dogs.
However, at the very top even friendly rivals were regarded as the enemy. Gregg Allman, for one, seemed to have little use for friendships along the circuit that he and his brother fully intended to own, thus they avoided bending elbows with the competition. Having already seen the lengths to which one particular band would go to steal a good song, the Allmans respected the hell out of Ronnie Van Zant and did indeed bend elbows with him after shows on which they and Skynyrd played. But less and less would Gregg and Duane carry any water for them. That being the case, Lynyrd Skynyrd having a born fighter as a front man, a guy who seemed to know everyone in his orbit but wanted to kick all of their asses, was surely going to be an advantage.
Indeed, Ronnie was not going to let Skynyrd bask in small-time success. Rehearsing in their living rooms and basements would not cut it anymore, and when complaints by neighbors chased them from house to house, Ronnie and Gary went out scouting locations where they could make their noise in splendid isolation. Splendid or not, what they decided on was a dilapidated wooden cabin with an overhanging tin roof located deep in a wooded field on a farm out in Green Cove Springs in the town of Russell near Black Creek. They rented it for sixty-five bucks a month and made it their center of operations. Soon they had their own phrase for the godforsaken shack with no air conditioning where they sweltered in sauna-like conditions while writing their first two albums—Hell House, they called it. The house became another salient marker of the band’s legacy, and it would be preserved as such for years before eventually being torn down to make way for the inevitable interstate highway.
Not surprisingly, Ronnie’s rules applied. There would be a band rehearsal and a writing session almost every morning at 10 AM. The atmosphere inside Hell House was brutal. Because there was no insulation in the walls, an air conditioner could not be made to work, rendering the name of the place all too literal on humid summer days. They would stock a fridge with beer and sandwiches and get at the music. At the beginning they’d turn out the lights after a session and go home, barely bothering to lock the door. But that changed when some guitars left in the shack were stolen. Now, by rotation, one of them would stay behind and sleep there, with one eye open, and armed with a shotgun. In an early photo taken of the band at Hell House, a pistol is tucked into Ronnie’s waistband. He and Lacy were accomplished marksmen, often spending time at a shooting range or hours in a duck blind. But never had Ronnie thought he might have to use a piece on a human until those expensive instruments became an inviting target for thieves. Fortunately, with the lights on all night, no one tried to pilfer anything; if they had, whoever that night’s sentry was would have shot to kill.
But defending their fortress and their instruments was worth the time, trouble, sweat, stench of backed-up toilets, and lack of creature comforts. Indeed, in their Bohemian visions, living in these conditions and extracting down-home music from their collective soul was not unlike what the great old Delta blues men had done. They might have finished the day drunk to the gills or strung out on reefer, but their only true comfort was the music. Their alchemy produced a gusher of song ideas, fragments, and riffs and lent a sweaty, gritty genuineness to whatever they played.
Leon Wilkeson was another piece of the puzzle, though so far his presence in the band had been on-again, off-again; he filled in for Larry Junstrom when the latter had better things to do than play a gig. Nothing was being left to chance, and the work ethic bred inside the log walls of Hell House left the sprite-like Wilkeson, who weighed maybe 120 pounds, bathed in sweat and wrung out like a drained sponge. Wilkeson once said, “Ronnie dropped me and Bob Burns off there one day and told us that we were going to stay there till we could make the bass and drums blend into one sound, so we wouldn’t detract from the guitars. He said, ‘If you can’t do it, you’re fired.’” Still, Leon felt swept up in the swelling sense of confidence and swagger. A man of few words, he would later say that Ronnie Van Zant ran Skynyrd like Stalin did Russia, “but without his cracking whip, it would have all been for naught.” At Hell House, Wilkeson said, “We worked our asses off … and it paid off.”