The formula that had eventually adopted the evolving Lynyrd Skynyrd was an almost perfect flip of Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children,” which captured the smooth grooves of L.A.-based country rock as it gained traction in the early 1970s. The kick-ass authenticity of the down-home Skynyrd model conjured up visions not of languid days in the canyons of the San Fernando Valley but long days pumping gas at the filling station. But all forms of country rock were joined in a real sense by the history of the form itself and its long trail of bleeding across musical borders. An important transition had come back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when L.A. producer Snuff Garrett, a good old boy from Dallas, applied a country flavor to white pop singers such as Bobby Vee on songs like “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Garrett also cut rockabilly pioneer Johnny Burnette on crossover country tunes like “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” continuing the trend of native southern singers migrating westward. And country merged with surf-rock guitars in the Fendermen’s 1962 cover of the country classic “Mule Skinner Blues.”
Later in the ’60s came a belated appreciation for the roots of rock and roll. Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited paid homage in its very title to the highway Dylan fled on from Minnesota to the picket fences of southern cities en route to the Mississippi Delta. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the first American double album, was backed on most tracks by Nashville’s elite studio musicians and was derivative in part of New Orleans R&B (such as on the 1966 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”); and his stripped-down, outright country/folk-rock offering John Wesley Harding further soldered the south to the broadening schema of pop music.
The genesis of what can be branded West Coast or L.A. country rock filtered through the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the eventual conglomeration of the remnants of those two bands into the supergroup of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young). Of all the players in these groups, only one, Stephen Stills, hailed from the south, from the same northern Florida incubator as Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. Tellingly, it was Nash, the Brit expatriate, who wrote “Teach Your Children,” a song driven by a ringing pedal steel guitar line—turned in by the pride of Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. A similar country-by-proxy example was the Band, in which Levon Helm was conjoined with four Canadians; recording in Woodstock, New York, of all places, they indelibly stamped the country-rock idiom, first by backing up rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, then Bob Dylan, before making their own mark by fusing bluegrass into rock with parables of Jesus in Nazareth and a tableau of “the night they drove old Dixie down.”
The first avowedly country-rock work—in the spangled, Nashville sense of the term—occurred when Gram Parsons, who was born in the backwoods of Florida, grew up in Waycross, Georgia, and went to Harvard, recorded Safe at Home with his International Submarine Band. A few months later, when the album came out, he was already with the Byrds recording their brilliant 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, though most of his lead vocals were later scrubbed. That album landed them a gig at the Grand Ole Opry, a first for a rock band. Parsons then led the first self-identified country-rock group, the Flying Burrito Brothers, who clad themselves in spangled, Nashville-style Nudie suits. But for all their genuineness, these Brothers were an L.A. band. Meanwhile, the soul and rock songs recorded at the Muscle Shoals studios (FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound) by artists ranging from Wilson Pickett to Donny Osmond and the Rolling Stones brought the music back to its roots in the Deep South.
Those roots had already opened the way for an ambitious, lantern-jawed parvenu, Phil Walden, who had actualized the most unlikely of cockeyed dreams. Starting out as a student at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, having been proselytized by the rhythm and blues of the first-generation rock-and-roll incarnation, and living in a town that seeded Little Richard, James Brown, and Otis Redding, he began booking soul singers—Redding was one of his first clients—into frat houses and dive bars. When Redding was given a contract by Memphis’s fledgling Stax Records label in 1962, giving it bite and soul-deep emotion, mighty joy, and quivering vulnerability, the South had its answer to the question of how to compete with Berry Gordy’s rising kingdom of distilled black music sifted and aimed at a white market. Whereas Motown called itself Hitsville, Stax was Soulsville, a critical difference—with the added irony that the company was owned by white siblings, Jim Stewart and Estelle Stewart Axton. Walden was practically the conduit of talent for Stax, his client list long and noble—besides Redding, he had under contract Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Al Green, and some forty others, all of whom he was the personal manager for.
Walden became a millionaire through his eye for talent and his keen intuition. And he was not caught flat-footed when two events changed the future rock landscape. The first was when Redding, at twenty-six, died in one of the many rock-and-roll death rides in the sky, his private plane crashing into a Wisconsin lake in December 1967, three days after he recorded “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” The other was when Atlantic Records, the New York-based titan of soul music labels that had cannily distributed Stax Records’ products, creating inroads into the South similar to when RCA Records had signed Elvis Presley, broke with Stax and, having maneuvered to control that priceless music catalog, looted Jim Stewart of nearly all the songs that dominated soul in the mid to late 1960s. Soulsville never recovered, and neither did the idiom of southern soul, with the exception of those God-blessed studios in the backwoods of Alabama, FAME and Muscle Shoals Sounds, where Atlantic sent Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to record after Stewart refused to allow any non-Stax artists to use his Memphis digs.
By then Phil Walden had a thriving agency, Phil Walden and Associates, and a separate booking firm called the Paragon Agency and had groomed as an associate his three-years-younger brother, Alan, who had little of Phil’s savvy but was an energetic, aggressive, and sometimes abrasive presence in the business. Phil had trusted Alan enough to allow him and Redding to form a music publishing company, Redwal Music, which owned not only Redding’s songs but other standards like “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Soul Man.” Alan also had a hand in Premier Talent, which operated independently from Phil Walden and Associates, affording Alan a chance to scout and sign talent and then book it, solely on his own. True to the southern way of keeping things in a tight family circle, Paragon’s officers were the Walden brothers; their father C. B. Walden, an ex-newspaperman; and their mother, Carolyn. The only outsider was something like a brother, Alex Hodges, a fast-talking former Mercer classmate of Phil’s whom he had hired in the early ’70s only because no one else knew how to type and Phil’s business relied on a constant churn of press releases. Back then, the business was run out of Phil’s garage apartment beside his parents’ house; now it was quartered in a fancy office in the Robert E. Lee Building in downtown Macon.
Phil had bigger things in mind than merely managing talent. Sick with grief, the fulcrum of his soul empire gone, he entered into a deal with Atlantic Records in 1969 to fund a new label, Capricorn Records, located in Macon. He aimed to harvest southern country-rock acts, a species yet to be fully formed or discovered. Capricorn’s first score would earn back every penny and more. He signed the then-green Allman Brothers, who had won some notice as a curio, a Deep South band that had little use for country music other than the blues aspects of it, a kind of Yardbirds grilled in smokehouse sauce. While it would take a few years for the Allmans to break out, the formation of native southern industry norms and stars would be of immense help to the still-forming genre of music they played.
Phil cut Alan in on Capricorn, but the label was really his baby, and he would run it as a monarch, with no use for the advice or help of others. Nor did he see any kind of conflict of interest in managing the talent he would, by rock-and-roll rote, be seeking to pay only as much as he had to. In this he was not alone: Berry Gordy had the same system in Motown, and as much as groups like the Temptations groused about being underpaid, they had no recourse and no outside manager to take up their case; indeed, they didn’t even see the tax returns that were prepared for them by Motown’s accountants. Walden, to his credit, paid his talent more than the usual three and a half cents per record sold but made no apologies for hoarding a fortune for himself.
As Capricorn laid down roots, mainstream rock and even soul continued to dip into country—John Fogerty with “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and “Born on the Bayou”; Canned Heat’s jug-band boogie; Bobbie Gentry’s enigmatic “Ode to Billie Joe”; and soul genius Ray Charles’s warbling of “Born to Lose” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” But an open question for music honchos in the South was whether there really were homegrown acts that could break just as big across the mainstream. Fortuitously, one, a band of brothers (at least two of them), was rolling down Highway 41. And another was tuning up, approaching the on ramp.
In 1969, Ronnie Van Zant, a man who clearly could not handle the notion of abandonment and being alone, found the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. While the band played a gig at the Comic Book Club, Gary introduced him to a pretty, shy, and very hip regular patron of the club, twenty-one-year-old Judy Seymour, who with her friends Mary Hayworth and Dean Kilpatrick—the latter a lanky, shag-haired starving artist who wore long capes and seemed the paragon of cool—shared a house in the Riverside section down the block from the Green House, where several members of the Allman Brothers Band lived. As a goof, the trio called theirs the Gray House.
What made Judy so endearing to Ronnie was that she had little awe for the most popular rockers in town, all of whom she seemed to know by their first names. She certainly didn’t throw herself at him groupie-style—not that Lynyrd Skynyrd, or whatever they were calling themselves on any given day, had risen into the category of groupie “gets.” But in Ronnie she perceived a conflicted man suffering under the weight of torturous moral dilemmas and unresolved issues every way he turned, including issues of the flesh and with Lacy. Unlike most young rockers, he didn’t seem to live for the fringe benefits of his trade and actually had a rather bluenosed opinion abut the parade of young women who would willingly become notches on rockers’ bedposts.
The conflict here was that not even he could resist a pretty, willing thing for very long. Indeed, few women were ever turned away from a hotel room by the God-fearin’ but self-destructive men of Lynyrd Skynyrd. As if creating a guilt-relieving outlet for themselves, they sang of the Lord, and nearly all would find women they felt compelled to marry in the early years of the band, not that any of these women had any delusions about their monogamy. Such double standards were baked into the loam of rock and roll, not to mention the ethos of Southern Men, etched as it was with misogyny. Judy Seymour certainly understood the rules but could rationalize that Ronnie really did need her to make his life complete. That he had a hard time verbalizing concepts like love seemed to be an indicator of the vulnerable hole in his soul. Thus, when they began dating—and in no time they were inseparable—she accepted that he could himself make the same case that Gregg Allman did in song: “I’m no angel.” Ronnie’s own songs testified to that, and if Judy had to live with that, so be it.
They soon were shacking up at the Cedar Shores Apartments on Blanding Boulevard near the Ortega Farms section of the west side. The familial nature of the extended, growing Skynyrd brood was such that Dean Kilpatrick now was acting as the band’s roadie, lugging instruments and amps onto rented pickup trucks. Soon Dean and his girlfriend Bonnie moved in too. Implicitly, it was understood that Ronnie and Judy would marry, but his haste with Nadine led him to take the necessary precautions to avoid another accidental child and to put off any nuptials until he had the bread to properly take care of a family, while still providing for his first child. Maybe Lacy could be proud of him after all. Maybe he had learned how to be a man.
Gene Odom’s recollection that the first time Lynyrd Skynyrd performed “Free Bird” in a public setting was the May 9, 1970, reception following the wedding of Allen Collins and Kathy Johns is incorrect; the wedding was actually on October 10, apparently another shotgun wedding, as Kathy had become pregnant with the first of their two daughters, Amie and Allison. According to Skynyrd lore, much of which is urban myth, Kathy’s parents didn’t like men with long hair, so to placate them the band wore short-haired wigs of the kind they had worn for Leonard Skinner back in high school. If this almost certainly apocryphal story is anywhere near true, it would have meant that Allen Collins’s parents-in-law had never seen him and didn’t know what he did for a living.
But had Skynyrd actually gotten up after the nuptials and played “Free Bird” for the first of around ten thousand times in comical wigs, the improbable scenario would have made for some sight indeed—though, granted, they were just warped enough to have gotten a kick out of doing something like that. Since the song grew from the now famous question Kathy asked Allen, which became the song’s opening line, it was logical to play the song, and they did so with relish. It was also a marker indented in time: when Ronnie Van Zant sang “Lord help me, I can’t change…. Won’t you fly, free bird” that day, he was putting rock on notice about his defiant determination to shape southern rock in a way no one would be able to change.
As if on cue, the band got a break shortly thereafter. David Griffin had taken over Skynyrd’s bookings around the Southeast, and he put on a “battle of the bands” show at the Jacksonville Beach Coliseum. This was only a year after Phil Walden had created Capricorn Records as a gold mine for southern rock and hit the mother lode by signing the Allman Brothers. The Allmans, who dressed like cattle rustlers but played the blues like nobody else in rock, had already built a cult following through their sold-out shows at the Fillmore East in Greenwich Village. The cream was their albums, from which came amazing songs like “Whipping Post,” “Dreams,” and “Midnight Rider,” mating Duane Allman’s slide guitar and Gregg Allman’s growling, soulful keyboard blues licks with blaring horns, vibraphone riffs, and a rumbling rhythm bottom.
Now, the rush was on to get in the door at Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records; in an astonishing turn, Macon, the town that had spawned so many soul legends, was becoming the emerging capital of a new generation of white southern music. In 1971 Walden signed a lucrative distribution deal with Warner Brothers, which became the Allman Brothers’ ticket to ride all around the rock map. When the show in Jacksonville came around, one of the attendees was there at the behest of Alan Walden, who had left Capricorn in 1970 in an attempt to ape his brother’s success, starting a publishing and management firm of his own, unfortunately named Hustlers Inc. Seeking acts outside his brother’s long shadow, he scoured shows like these for redneck rockers, and his liege, a guy named Pat Armstrong, invited three acts—Skynyrd, Black Bear Angel, and Mynd Garden—to audition. Armstrong sent word to Walden that Skynyrd was the real item. He had heard, he said, 187 bands, and they were the first he thought had Allman-like potential. Alan invited them to play for him next and wasted no time in signing on to manage them and book them through Premier.
“I heard them play ‘Free Bird,’ and I knew from that one song that they were on to something,” Walden said, in retrospect an understatement of prodigious dimensions.
Believing he had seen and heard the future of rock, Alan Walden signed them to a contract that gave him 30 percent of all earnings they would make if signed by a record company—double the normal manager’s fee (not counting Tom Parker’s notorious 50 percent cut of Elvis’s income). Walden also would own every cent of publishing royalties, under the name of Duchess Music, the same headlock that had applied to the band at Shade Tree. To Skynyrd, it was nothing that seemed very important. A photo of the band signing the contract shows them with Walden; his partners, Armstrong and Gary Donehoo; and the great Stax soul singer Eddie Floyd of “Knock On Wood” renown, who was also managed by Walden. The smiles were broad. To accomplish this, Walden had to convince Tom Markham and Jim Sutton to release them from their contract, which had two years left to run. The two men, who had all but given up on Skynyrd, had no objections to letting them out, though Shade Tree would still own the publishing rights on any royalties that technically belonged to Double “T,” which would one day ring up more than a few shekels for them. Now, clearing their shelves of Skynyrd product, they put out a last two-sided single, “I’ve Been Your Fool”/“Gotta Go,” a combination of titles that seemed a fair summation of both sides’ feelings at that moment.
Given how much Alan Walden, if not the band, stood to make—and the fact that, on his own, Walden himself was now about broke—his first order of business was to get them recorded, properly. Wasting no time doing so, he used his connections and a fat wad of cash to schedule a session for Skynyrd, not at the renowned FAME studio in the otherwise obscure northwest Alabama town of Muscle Shoals but rather at the newer jewel of Southern studios, Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which had been created in 1969 by the rhythm section of the illustrious house band at FAME that Leon Russell had dubbed the Swampers—guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood, keyboardist Barry Beckett, and drummer Roger Hawkins.
The new place was not actually in Muscle Shoals but two miles to the north, on Jackson Avenue in Sheffield (and would be relocated a decade later to larger digs on Alabama Avenue), but no one at FAME begrudged the quartet the use of the brand name they had helped establish. The session, scheduled for early 1970, would be produced by Johnson, who was sent a demo tape of Skynyrd songs and was intrigued by them. It would be his job, he understood, to make the band sound so good that Walden could use the tapes to land a big-time deal from a record company far more important than even his brother’s.
Ronnie and his men had no regrets. They anticipated that the Muscle Shoals sessions would surely be a windfall. After all, it wasn’t every day, or just any old band, that could walk in the footsteps of the first clients at the new studio: Cher, Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann, and the Rolling Stones, who in December 1969 cut “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” in the space about to be occupied by the boys of Shantytown. To be able to rig this, they figured, Alan Walden was more than a manager; he was a freakin’ titan.
Alex Hodges, today one of the most powerful men in the entertainment business as CEO of Nederlander Concerts, a massive, worldwide chain of theaters and music venues, and a Georgia Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has a lot less hair—actually, he has not one follicle of it—and a lot more girth than he did back then when, at not yet thirty, he was assisting both Walden brothers at the Paragon Agency. He has rarely been interviewed, by his own choice, but even through the passage of time and out of all the rock royalty that he has managed, such as the Allman Brothers and the Police, two faces haunt him the most.
“There are people who you just never forget—you see them in your head all the time. Ronnie was one of those. Otis Redding was like that. When I first met Ronnie, he came into the room of our agency, and you were thrown back on your heels. It’s not really a physical presence. Otis was a big, handsome, strapping man. Ronnie was a pudgy little fellow with thinning hair. But your eyes followed him around. He had that gut appeal. Soon as I saw him, I knew his band—and I didn’t care who they were, even—was gonna do some serious damage. I didn’t know how much damage they’d do to themselves, but you knew a band led by that guy was gonna push boundaries, break rules. He was troubled, you could tell, and maybe that was part of it. I mean, he was not a normal human being. You couldn’t figure him out. And you couldn’t wait for him to sing something so you might be able to try. That was the only way, ’cause Ronnie spoke through his music, the only way he felt comfortable doing it.”
Ronnie had some important business to take care of before the trip to Muscle Shoals. The first was Larry Junstrom, who Ronnie suspected of something less than total commitment to the band—or not being enough of a bad boy—and was canned. Once “Stalin” had made up his mind about such things, there was no further discussion. Larry, who’d come a long way with the band, took it hard. “Can you believe it, man? They fired me. Skynyrd’s fired me,” he told a Lee High classmate. Junstrom was too good a bass player to go hungry for long. (He would later resurface as part of Donnie Van Zant’s band .38 Special, which he still plays in.) And of course he would not be on that doomed plane flight. Junstrom was replaced by Greg T. Walker, who, when the offer came, quit his own band, Blackfoot—so named because all their members had some Native American heritage. But Walker, who is of Muscogee Creek descent, was mainly a placeholder for Leon Wilkeson, always Ronnie’s first choice, who often was sidetracked for some reason or other.
Indeed, Ronnie had to vie with his brother Donnie for Leon’s services. When Ronnie and Donnie’s sister, Betty Jo Ann, married and moved to another neighborhood on the west side, her neighbors were the Wilkeson family. Leon, just fourteen then, was already an accomplished bass player; and when Betty Jo Ann told him that Donnie was starting a band, the Collegiates, Leon joined up with them first, before being persuaded by Ronnie to hang around as a sometime member of his band. But a problem arose when Leon’s poor grades at Bishop Kenny High School led his parents to yank him from his bass and throw him into his studies. His presence with Skynyrd would be intermittent for the next two years, until he graduated, but even when he was part of the Hell House scene, he was apt to drop from sight, only to resurface drunk and incoherent. This of course put him in the line of fire of Ronnie’s rules, but when Ronnie got in Leon’s face, the latter often stalked out with a slurred “Fuck you.” Rather than tear into him with his fists, Ronnie admired the kid’s spunk and expected he would be back.
Next came a problem with Bob Burns, who had been a ticking time bomb for some time. When he was fifteen, his parents had moved to Orlando, allowing the tall, swarthy young man to remain in Jacksonville as he wished so he could continue playing drums with his band. Astonishingly, as Burns tells it, his mother and father simply let him fend for himself, apparently not caring enough to see to it that he had a place to live and could feed and clothe himself. Burns had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, living the life of a nomad.
“I had no place to stay,” he said. “I was crashing in people’s bushes. I was crashing wherever I could. I hung on as long as I possibly could. I was borrowing clothes from the roadies to play shows with. I didn’t even have any shoes, and it just got to me. Everybody was saying, ‘Damn, man, what if [the band] don’t make it, then what are you going to do? Your friends are driving Porches and ’Vettes, they’re in college or making good money.’ The rest of them were living with their parents or their parents were helping them out. I couldn’t stay with any of them. Their parents didn’t want me moving in with them. So I went to live with my folks in Orlando.”
Ronnie, who had his own family baggage, was sympathetic. Rather than writing Burns off, he kept him on a leash, saying he would be welcomed back if he wanted to return. In the meantime, needing a drummer for the Muscle Shoals sessions, he reached out to another Blackfoot player whom he’d had his eye and ear on for some time, lead singer and guitarist Rickey Medlocke. Sioux by descent and son of blues banjo player Shorty Medlocke, who in the ’50s had a local TV show in town, on which his son appeared, the Jacksonville native had been in New York City with Blackfoot, where the group’s manager was quartered and demanded they make their base. It was the last place Medlocke wanted to be, having cut his teeth in Jacksonville bars. (Blackfoot had once been the house band at Dub’s, a well-attended strip joint.)
When Ronnie called him, he asked if Medlocke would consider coming back home to play with Walker in Skynyrd—but could he play drums? Rickey hadn’t done so in some time but was a brilliant musician, and homesick as he was, he promised he could step right in. After brushing up on the sticks, he arrived back in Jacksonville and was ready for Muscle Shoals, thus providing another much-needed benefit that Ronnie no doubt also had in mind: Medlocke was an accomplished songwriter, having composed much of Blackfoot’s material. Skynyrd, needing good original songs from any source, could suddenly draw upon a catalog of them, most better than what they had come up with on their own.
There would be yet one more addition to the band that would pay off—Billy Powell, a wiry, affable guy who had been friends with Wilkeson since grade school. A navy brat born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and reared in Jacksonville, Powell had gone to Bishop Kenny High School then briefly studied music at Jacksonville Community College. He did a brief stint in a band called Alice Marr, in which a teenaged Donnie Van Zant sang. When Wilkeson moved deeper into the Skynyrd circle, he bugged Ronnie about hiring Powell, touting him as a superb boogie-woogie piano player, a rhythm element the band didn’t believe it needed. Ronnie did hire Billy as a roadie for the time being, to help Dean Kilpatrick and another crony of the band, Kevin Elson, carry and set up equipment, and to keep a talented piano man within reach. Powell, who dug the band and wanted in, eagerly took the job, which paid exactly nothing. He too would go to Muscle Shoals and breathe in the ascent of a band he would soon be a major part of.
Alan Walden was more than a manager to Skynyrd; he was, for all the world, one of them. As if he could vicariously be the redneck he never was, he attached himself to the band by the hip, going to gigs with them, hanging out at Hell House, and calling band meetings that were more like pep talks. When they would break open a bottle of beer, whiskey, rye, whatever, he had his glass ready, even if he wasn’t ever able to keep up with them. “I had drank with some of the best, with [soul singer] Johnnie Taylor, the best. But when I met Skynyrd, whew, I went under the table. Those guys could drink. Straight from the bottle—and they were still teens at the time.”
He may have believed in Skynyrd, even loved them as manly southern men love each other, but when it came to financing them, he could offer them exactly nothing from his empty pockets. Skynyrd had to pay their own way to Muscle Shoals in the spring of 1971, and when they got there the only lodging they could afford was a fleabag truck stop called Blue’s. So cash poor were they that they had to scrounge up empty soda bottles and cash them in for the five-cent deposits at convenience stores. Then came news that they wouldn’t be recording at Muscle Shoals at all because more important acts had booked the studio. They would have to go down the road a few miles to the Broadway Sound Studio, owned by Quin Ivy, a former disc jockey and songwriter, who had benefited from the constant spillover of sessions from the FAME studio; it was here that Percy Sledge had recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
Ivy was affiliated with the Walden brothers as well as Atlantic Records. Rather than Jimmy Johnson, Ivy’s in-house producer, David (another Johnson), would oversee the Skynyrd date. To Skynyrd, it was still a blessing, still Muscle Shoals. When the sessions began, David Johnson got them on eight tracks, which covered all the fresh material they had. By then Walden wanted to go further and cut an entire album, so more songs were needed. Jimmy Johnson, meanwhile, heard the rough tapes and wanted in. He and Walden agreed to produce a Skynyrd album at Muscle Shoals and cover the costs. If it bartered the band a record contract, Muscle Shoals would be reimbursed and become part of the Skynyrd arc as their home studio. Walden, of course, would own all the publishing rights to songs the band wrote.
Thus the possibility loomed that Muscle Shoals might be aligned with Alan Walden, and FAME with Phil Walden. Before accomplishing much of anything, it seemed Lynyrd Skynyrd was already at the center of a sibling rivalry—for now, only in Alan Walden’s imagination—between two southern industry heavyweights. That of course only upped the pressure on the band to come up with some good material and blow the doors off the studio. The whole world was seemingly riding on these sessions when Skynyrd returned to Muscle Shoals early in 1972 after six months of intensive writing and rehearsing at Hell House. Looking back, Jimmy Johnson said that, after hearing their lead man sing live in the studio, “I totally fell in love with Ronnie Van Zant’s fantastic voice,” and that the now instinctively intermeshed guitar licks of Rossington and Collins were almost revelatory. “Gary and Allen,” he said, “were doing solos that were twinned”—as if they were on separate tracks and mixed as perfect complements. Not that the other guys in the band didn’t have their own vital roles, but to Johnson the sum and substance of Lynyrd Skynyrd was the skill and chemical interaction of its core; on the first day, he said, “I fell in love with those three guys.”
Given this skew, it was almost insignificant that the band once again changed faces. During the follow-up sessions, Bob Burns came back for the time being. “I decided after I left that I would rather have nothing, no shoes or nothing, rather than not be in the band. I knew I had given up my dreams, my hopes, my everything. The first prayer I ever had in my entire life, I looked up at the sky, and I said, ‘If there’s a God there, I’m sorry if I’ve done wrong, but I want back in that band, it’s just not working for me out here.’ The next night, Gary called me up and said, ‘Man, you want to play in this band or not?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Be here about as fast as you can get here.’ I left that night, hopped into my Corvair and went back to Jacksonville fast as I could get there.”
Still having no place to stay, Burns made Hell House his home, sleeping there in a place so hot that, he says, “you could fry an egg there.” As for food, “if I didn’t catch fish,” he says, “I didn’t eat.”
Leon Wilkeson, his schoolwork done, was also in tow, having been allowed by his parents to accept the long-standing invitation he had to be the permanent Skynyrd bass player. This meant that Greg T. Walker was excused, but Rickey Medlocke was too important to let go, having provided the bulk of the new stuff the band took to Muscle Shoals. He went back with them as a third guitarist, but more centrally, to take the lead vocals on his songs, which only he knew well enough to sing.
As Gary remembered it, from the band’s standpoint, especially among those who suffered indignity at home, the experience was something like gaining an instant family. “They adopted us, took us in,” he said. Although Rossington likely gilded the lily a tad later, saying that the tutorial they received from the Muscle Shoals producers was so revelatory to them that it was the first time they realized the bass and drum had to play in complementary tandem; when Johnson or his coproducer Tim Smith called out the downbeat—the “one, two, one-two-three” cue to start playing—as the tempo of the song, only then did they understand that was how it was done. Studio drummer Roger Hawkins worked with Bob Burns for twelve hours tuning his drum correctly. Johnson and Smith also imparted a critical method for accentuating Ronnie’s vocals—having the band play in a lower key than the one in which he sang so that his voice would sound higher and harsher, something like his idol Paul Rodgers.
Like Peck’s bad boys, they clambered in and proceeded to act like, well, themselves. David Hood recalls that “they’d have fistfights, actual fistfights. Someone was supposed to [play] a G-chord instead of an A-chord and boom, a fist would fly. That’s how they settled their disagreements, they just fought.” Those spats continued as if they needed such contretemps to clear the air and get themselves into the Skynyrd frame of mind. Cigarette butts littered the studio floor. But when Johnson called a take, mouths quieted, and heads snapped to attention. The singing and playing were sharp. There were limited retakes. Some wonderful counterpoint acoustic lines emerged among the electric guitar madness, with just the right echo and reverb. The sessions went smoothly and rapidly, and a few Muscle Shoals sidemen came in to play with the band, buffing and adding nuance to the scorched-earth quality of the Skynyrd sound. With the previous eight songs in the can from Quinvy (the Broadway studio), the band cut nine more, almost as if in a blur, by Johnson’s reckoning; years later he seemed to think almost all of them went on for around nine minutes, including the second studio version of “Free Bird” and that “one thing I would not do was edit them.” Here his memory is clouded a bit; the still-evolving “Free Bird” on these tapes ran seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, still long but still far shorter than the later versions, a couple of which went over eleven minutes. Eight of the seventeen tracks did run longer than five minutes—“One More Time,” “Was I Right Or Wrong,” “Simple Man,” “Comin’ Home,” “Things Goin’ On,” “You Run Around,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Pray,” and “Free Bird.” As with “Free Bird,” the tracks for “Simple Man” and “Things Goin’ On,” and an early version of “Gimme Three Steps,” are historical curiosities, all instantly recognizable but obviously works in progress at the time, destined to see better days ahead.
The songs that all agreed were the best and that would go on a possible album of the sessions, were three Van Zant-Rossington songs—“Down South Jukin’,” “Was I Right or Wrong,” and “Things Goin’ On”—as well as the Van Zant-Collins composition “Comin’ Home” and the Van Zant-Rossington-Collins original “Lend a Helpin’ Hand.” Three Medlocke songs made the cut—“White Dove” and “The Seasons,” essentially poems turned into redneck rock, and “Wino,” cowritten with Ronnie and Allen. For these, Ronnie willingly stood aside and allowed Rickey to handle the leads in his high falsetto, the only time any Skynyrd songs would be fronted by anyone other than its regular lead singer for the next five years. And Medlocke added an even dreamier tone to “Free Bird” with a soprano backing vocal, a role almost never again taken by a band member.
Amazingly, “Free Bird,” which nearly everyone who has ever heard it says knocked them out, was not deemed worthy of the final cut. If there was one song judged to be a potential single, it seemed to be “Was I Right or Wrong,” a tale of deep-seated angst producing high art—the narrative told of a young rocker living out his dreams and then returning home to find his parents dead, no doubt a nightmare that had jarred Ronnie awake more than once. Little wonder that the song, with Ronnie yearning to be a “restless leaf in the autumn breeze” and a “tumblin’ weed,” caused the rock critic Dave Marsh to opine years later that it was “hard to believe the song is only a fantasy.”
But with Skynyrd, such breezes always led back home. As “Comin’ Home” made clear, the long road just might be too long and full of “broken dreams and dirty deals.” There were also the night-trolling comforts of “Down South Jukin’,” the objective of which was to head to town trying to “pick up any woman hanging around,” which would have to suffice as peace of mind. There was, too, a cautionary note in “Wino,” which warned: “Wino, you wasn’t born to lose. Sweet wine is making you a fool.” Not content with presenting a catalog of redneck ups and downs, Ronnie took another stab at a message song. “Things Goin’ On,” with its honky-tonk vibe, took aim at an easy target, big government, for “too many lives” spent “across the ocean” and too many dollars spent “upon the moon.” “They’re gonna ruin the air we breathe,” he seethes, ending on a massively ironic note, coming from a rock band: “I don’t think they really care / I think they just sit up there and just get high.”
Johnson was quite sure the songs chosen were valuable record label bait. Alan Walden, further leaning on the reputation of the highly respected Swampers, taking the approach that a hard sell wasn’t necessary, went to L.A. with the mild-mannered Johnson and made the rounds of the big record company headquarters. Wincing still, Walden tells it this way: “Nine record companies had turned us down! I don’t mean, ‘We like you but you need better material.’ I mean ‘Not interested! No need to contact us again.’ Atlantic, Columbia, Warners, A&M, RCA, Epic, Elektra, Polydor … they all passed after hearing ‘Free Bird,’ ‘Gimme Three Steps,’ ‘Simple Man,’ ‘I Ain’t the One,’ and about twelve other originals. Their comments were: ‘They sound too much like the Allman Brothers!’
“Now, I ask you—put them on back to back and tell me they sound alike? We all came from the South, played hard, had long hair, drank and chased women. But we did not sound alike! The Allmans had their jazz influences, and we were a straight-ahead juking band! I remember one executive telling me to turn that noise off while I was playing him ‘Free Bird.’” Says Johnson: “It hurt because the stuff was fantastic.” When word got back to the band, recalls Rossington, “We were all angry, freaked out, thinking we didn’t know what we were doing. Because those were the best songs we could write.”
Out of frustration, they even took to blaming Muscle Shoals. As the house bass man David Hood recalls, during the trip out west, “somehow the tapes had gotten twisted up on the reel so when they’d play it, they’d be playing the wrong side of the tape, and it would be all muffled. So Skynyrd thought that Jimmy had done something to sabotage them. They were a little mad at us—at Jimmy, really—and we all felt real bad about it. Later on, they found out about the technical glitch, and they made up with Jimmy.” To make good, Ronnie swore he’d make those Swampers famous by getting their name into a song. Hood laughed. Yeah, like that would ever happen.