In truth, beneath the anger was a hard reality: the Muscle Shoals tapes were definitively not the best songs the band could write, nor even the best they could record them, as would be made clear down the road when a chosen few, recorded more competently, would become hit fodder. It wasn’t Johnson’s fault. His role was not really to alter anything they did, just to get them on tape in a technically professional manner. The band simply wasn’t yet good enough to get by on raw talent alone. They needed time to hone their sound and understand how to present this hybrid creature—rock with a country smirk and attitude but not necessarily a belch. To get to that point, they needed clever arranging and production under a sort of guru whose word was law, even for Ronnie.
As for the tapes, nine of the tracks, some of them having been embellished with additional guitar parts for potential release after the band exploded in popularity, would eventually appear on the posthumous 1978 Skynyrd’s First and … Last album; a 1998 rerelease, retitled Skynyrd’s First, carried all seventeen tracks, including “Free Bird” (despite its not being ready for prime time), “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Simple Man.” Amazingly, after the plane crash the thirst for any “lost” Skynyrd product was such that even these tracks were reviewed on the same level as their biggest albums.
The Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau’s verdict upon the album’s release was that “I expect more from Skynyrd than good white funk and second-rate message songs”—never mind that the songs had not been released for these very reasons. Some latter-day critics would have a fairer perspective. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the website AllMusic.com, conceding that their value was mainly as curios, nonetheless believed that “it’s possible to hear Ronnie Van Zant coming into his own as a writer” on the early efforts.
The “white funk” of Lynyrd Skynyrd almost never came to the attention of the record-buying public. Though they may have positioned themselves as free birds, they were still strange birds in the overall rock milieu. At times they seemed painfully true to their image; perhaps a little too eager to play the redneck role, Ronnie would come out for gigs in his bare feet or in flip-flops, his eyes increasingly glazed by “poison whiskey.” Still, it is of note that not a single Confederate flag was anywhere in sight—an important detail to keep in mind, as their original instinct was that the most egregious (yet for many the most prideful) symbol of the South seemed way too tasteless. If their native turf and themes of “down south jukin’” and simple men wistfully seeking flights of freedom but coming home to their kin and women weren’t enough to pinpoint them as trailer-park friendly, emblazoning their venues with that symbol of human bondage—leaving aside labored alibis insisting it was about heritage—would be as subtle as a kick in the nuts, something they only wanted to accomplish through their music, not pedantry.
However, something had to give. With nothing earned by way of royalties or advances, the starving, Bohemian life of nomadic rockers getting nowhere was a dead-end street shared by many acts. For Ronnie, the thought of Lacy telling him “I told you so” was depressing enough, but having to keep working irregularly at menial jobs magnified the indignity. While he still went in every once in a while to the auto parts store, Gary and Allen actually had to take jobs at Clark’s meat-rendering plant, their hair tucked under hairnets similar to what the ladies in the Lee High cafeteria wore. Rickey Medlocke grew so frustrated that, with his role becoming less defined, he decided to re-form Blackfoot, which he relocated to Jacksonville and would keep together until the 1990s, when the past would again beckon.
No one needed to remind Skynyrd that they were falling further behind in the southern rock derby. In 1972 Phil Walden signed the Toy Factory—now renamed the Marshall Tucker Band, after a blind piano tuner the bandmates knew. So popular were their first two albums that their third was a double LP: one record of studio cuts, the other of live shows. All six of their Capricorn albums went gold, even though they wouldn’t have a Top 20 hit until “Heard It In a Love Song” on the fifth album. This was certainly proof that the era of single hits as the overriding priority was over, opening a new market that Skynyrd would seek to exploit as well. Another band, Pure Prairie League, formed in Ohio in 1969 by Craig Fuller, had both critical and commercial success with five straight Top 40 albums.
Although the Muscle Shoals tapes did not click with the record companies that heard them, at some point the band may or may not have been offered a contract with Capricorn Records. A story, perhaps apocryphal, has been told that such an offer was in fact proffered but that Ronnie vetoed it because he didn’t want to put his band in the shadow of the Allman Brothers. But this is not how Charlie Brusco remembers it. “Alan tried but couldn’t convince his brother to sign them. Alan Walden was not Phil Walden. He was the kid brother. And Phil wasn’t about to bail him out. It was a very difficult thing to get them signed. They weren’t really a country-rock act—they were a three-guitar rock band in the country fold, and there just wasn’t anything like that around. Phil never considered signing them, a decision I’m sure Phil came to regret.”
Around the industry, it was taken for granted that Alan had no desire to run up against Phil; most of those who knew them both believed the kid brother was physically afraid of the bigger, elder brother, whose volatility and impetuosity were ironically much like Ronnie Van Zant’s and who got himself into the same trouble with drugs, which would later cost him his music empire. In any case, Alan Walden says he never actually asked his brother to sign the group, and the point became moot one night when Skynyrd played the Grand Slam club in Macon. Not only were the Allman Brothers there that evening to watch them, but so was Phil. After the set, said Alan Walden, “I walk up to Phil, start talking to him. Well, he’s arrogant as hell, acting like he’s the shit. He says, ‘Your lead singer’s too goddamn cocky, he can’t sing, the songs are weak, and they sound too much like the Allman Brothers.’”
In Alan’s story, Phil made this critique (which was the same as that of the record companies that had rejected them) loudly so that Ronnie, lurking nearby, could hear it. But he couldn’t quite. When Phil exited, Ronnie sat down next to Alan.
“What’d he say?” Ronnie asked.
“Nothing important,” Alan lied, sparing him. “Let’s go have a drink.”
Putting a period on the story, Walden says, “And we went and had a drink—a whole bottle, actually. J&B Scotch.”
Nothing more was ever said about Capricorn Records. But the hurt inside Alan Walden only grew deeper and more scathing.
Alex Hodges, who was the closest person to Walden, says, “Alan was so hurt by Phil that I don’t even know if they ever spoke to each other after that. Alan felt that Phil had insulted him and he was pissed off. I remember Phil called me around that time and said, ‘Alan won’t speak to me.’ And the fact is, it was Phil who had encouraged Alan to sign Skynyrd. Phil told me that if Alan didn’t want to manage them, that I should. He said, ‘Go talk to Alan about it.’ And I had lunch with Alan to talk about it, and that’s when he made the decision he would sign them. But when Phil rejected them, it blew a hole between them. And it became an obsession for Alan to get them a record deal, just to show Phil. Alan has spent half his life trying to get out from under the shadow of the great Phil Walden, and Alan has mishandled that, because he exaggerates so much. It’s always ‘I was the guy, I was the guy.’ But there were a lot of guys who had a part in Skynyrd. I have never blown my horn, but I was right there every step of the way with them for the first five years.”
Indeed, Alan Walden was no Phil Walden. But even though he was right about Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Phil wrong, he would have scant time to rub it in. And it might not have been Alan Walden but Fate who played the biggest role.
It seems unimaginable today that no record company was interested in Skynyrd. Charlie Brusco, for whom Alan Walden played the shelved Skynyrd tapes, was stunned by how good the band with the funny name sounded. “The guitars were just on fire,” Brusco recalls. “It really was something that grabbed you by the ears and the balls.” Yet it was that very metal overkill that easily explained the industry aloofness. Brusco indeed had the same barrier to scale with the Outlaws, charting new territory in the country-rock genre that was just too over the top as defined by the Allman Brothers’ formula of not-too-heavy-duty rock.
Skynyrd, however, was close enough to the Allman Brothers’ style and substance to ride on their coattails. It helped that the Brothers’ roadhouse boogie blues cover of “One Way Out,” the old Elmore James blues standard originally recorded by Sonny Boy Williamson, featured a transcendent bottleneck slide guitar line by Duane Allman and could provide some cover for their harder electric country-rock emphasis. There simply has never been a better slide guitarist than Duane Allman. Eric Clapton knew it too. He had been dabbling in country-rock sounds, touring with southern singers Delaney and Bonnie, and in 1970 when he came to Florida to record in Miami’s Criteria Studios, he hired Allman to play the soaring, searing slide guitar lines of the pomp-rock opus “Layla.”
Duane Allman would become a rock martyr when on October 29, 1971, the Harley-Davidson he was riding through Macon smashed into a flatbed truck. He was thrown from the bike, which then landed on him, pinning him and crushing him to death at age twenty-four. Amplifying the tragedy, just over a year later Allman bassist Berry Oakley crashed his motorcycle, only three blocks from where Duane had finished his final ride, and died as well. The Allmans carried on, with Dickey Betts taking Duane’s place, providing the electrified blues guitar; two brilliant Betts compositions in 1973, the country/pop/rock monster crossover hit “Ramblin’ Man” and the rollicking seven-minute instrumental “Jessica,” among the greatest country-rock grooves ever written and played, created an almost visual sonic field. This assured the band’s unbroken dominance—though this enormous success soon sowed the seeds of their destruction. Drummer Butch Trucks later said the band “got away from the music” with “country-fried hit records,” creating egos that “ripped [them] all apart.”
This aspect of fame, with booze and drug excess—one imitated by Skynyrd all too well—wrote an end to the Allmans’ heyday, which would essentially be over by 1975, though their reunion tours would become endless. Still, their footprint was so large that FM stations had no compunction playing in full their live-album jams, which stretched as long as twenty-three minutes. Had they not broken radio’s time barriers, a song like “Free Bird” never would have been written in the form it was. By that time southern songwriters had become the modern southern literati, and in their pens lay the definitions of a new reconstruction of the South and southern manhood. The classic stereotypes had taken a beating through the twentieth century, but certain instincts were inbred, such as a courtly kind of regional and sexual chauvinism in which southern women, as one historian notes, were “put firmly on the pedestal of an impossible purity.”
If the songwriters’ aim was to “recoup white male power, even as they admit[ted] that their terms of that power [could] never be the same,” as southern historian Caroline Gebhard postulated in an essay in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson’s essential 1998 cultural analysis of the region, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, the new crop of native southern rock and rollers had to walk a fine line between racial rehabilitation and racial reversion, a very risky theme for any band. To Bartow J. Elmore, a noted history professor at University of Alabama, the southern rock idiom was “essentially reactionary,” a bastion of “unquestioning traditionalism.” To yet another, Ted Ownby, author of “Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music,” it was “upholding traditions while they were at the same time, as young rock musicians, rebelling against authority” and thus espousing a sort of closeted liberalism. Still other commentators anointed southern rockers as the first role models of the region who were not evil or buffoons, providing young southerners with a new way of healing from the scars of their ancestry.
For Lynyrd Skynyrd and their cohorts, such arguments were nearly irrelevant. To them, they merely sang of bonding, extreme loyalty to God and family, and the land, and of being men who admitted to needing “all my friends” one day and nobody the next. The bad boys of Skynyrd had good cause to cast their own image in an Allman-like molding. Even so, major deviations in style and substance distinguished the two bands. Van Zant’s writing was far more personally rooted in real-life yearning, pride, fear, and insecurity, and would grow even more so, a clear sign that none of his alienation ever eased. If he was after solace, all he could find was in his writing and singing about what he saw through the windows of his life, but he never really flew free like the bird he longed to be.
Needing to seem like a smart-ass whiskey-bar singer more than a blues singer, he wanted to sound as if he had just picked up the microphone after a stiff belt of liquid courage and a drag on an unfiltered cigarette. Mission accomplished, he decided that background vocals would not be sung by any band members, not just because they weren’t polished singers or because as front man he wanted the spotlight all to himself—though that certainly was the case—but because the intricate guitar lines played by Gary and Allen might be disrupted if they had to remember lyrics and sing them into microphones. Thus most of their songs would be written without harmony parts—another departure from most every band of the day and, specifically, the Allman Brothers—and on those that benefited from a backup vocal, Leon would handle that well enough.
The anomaly of “Free Bird” aside—and the irony, given its influence on FM radio—Skynyrd was more attuned to cutting discrete hard-rock songs that were bar blues based and country themed and lasted three to four minutes, making their point and getting on to the next song, rather than letting a set flow into one big, interwoven jam session. Ronnie’s thinking was that the Allman Brothers had done that, and only a band of fools would try to beat them on their own turf. His credo would be: Let’s don’t overstay our welcome. To Ronnie, it was all from the heart, the gut. The rules mattered only in how far they bent. After all, this whole thing was, as Paul Rodgers sang, a “rock ’n’ roll fantasy.”
“Ronnie Van Zant and those guys, they were totally independent from all the bullshit record-industry nonsense,” recalls Alan Walden. “Ronnie was a leader—he wasn’t no follower. Other bands I’d auditioned had misconceptions about how to act. They’d follow the magazine stories to try to figure out what to say and do to be successful. Not Ronnie. He was totally down to earth.”
By the time the Allman Brothers Band self-obliterated, the band from Shantytown would be there to pick up the fallen torch of the New South.
The problem for Skynyrd was remaining on the upward path before they burned out. As it was, they were building a following in the Deep South, the absence of a record-label contract notwithstanding. With the next big break ostensibly waiting around each new corner, the grind went on through three years of, as Gary Rossington puts it, “just starvin’ and payin’ dues and stuff.” It could be rough out there in the sticks. Rossington tells of the time at a nightclub when, from the stage, he witnessed “a guy getting his head blown off” in a typical sort of altercation, the reason unknown but probably a woman. It all went with the ambience of their existence, that of seamlessly stitched wasted days and wasted nights.
Walden, who kept reassuring them they would get their break sometime, could only pray he was right. As he recalled, “I had one hundred dollars in my pocket” at the time, and “I had encountered problems with some of the other partners and was looking at starting all over again. I got about thirty miles out of Muscle Shoals one day when the old Cadillac broke down with a bad fuel pump. The wrecker service left me out there waiting until after 5 PM so he could charge more. There went all but ten dollars. Add $90,000 that I was in debt back home, and you might understand how bad it was. I walked out into a cotton patch, shaking my fist at the sky, shouting, ‘I am going to make Lynyrd Skynyrd happen even if it kills me!’ It was my solemn oath.”
Ronnie, who in the past wouldn’t have given a hang about borrowing money, felt guilty as hell that he had to keep asking Judy to loan him enough to get to a gig. She had to take a job as a waitress, which was another thing he felt guilty about and probably one reason why he decided that, even if he had nothing in his pockets, it was time to marry Judy, lest he lose her. They took their vows on November 18, 1972, in Waycross, Georgia, her hometown, during another tour of the Atlanta clubs in which Skynyrd opened for Bob Seger’s band on a few nights at the Head Rest club. When they got home, the newlyweds moved into an upstairs apartment in the Boone Park section of Riverside, at least symbolically far from Shantytown and metaphorically a million miles from Lacy Van Zant.
For some time, Ronnie’s catchphrase had been to tell people that he had no doubt the band would make it—one day soon, they’d have it “made in the shade,” he’d say, to the point where people rolled their eyes. He even wrote a song with that as the title. But where was the shade?
One little sliver of success came late in 1972 when they landed a critical gig opening for the Allman Brothers on some shows in Macon, the first time that the similarities and differences between the two bands could be gauged. Not that the Allmans had any particular reason to separate Skynyrd from the buffet of southern rock bands Phil Walden hired as his meal ticket’s opening acts—most of whom Walden managed and had given contracts with Capricorn Records, thereby goosing sales for them and profits for himself. Skynyrd of course was not on his roster, but the link with his brother gave the band a few advantages. And when they were allowed to play in front of the Allmans, they continued making their bones. Van Zant’s gritty vocals and the stampede of guitars made for a very difficult act to follow, especially for a blues-rock band that didn’t punch listeners in the face but instead wove trance-like spells with long, free-form jams. Skynyrd even had their own soundman traveling with them, mixing their sound to specification on the board. Record deal or no, they were making perfectionism a rule of what seemed like a no-rules, anything-goes act.
Seeing the fuss Skynyrd was causing, the Allmans started keeping their distance, perhaps afraid that the much more aggressive southern band might eclipse them someday on their home turf. Indeed, Gregg Allman rarely had anything nice to say about them and, even decades later, still seemed to be looking down his nose at them. In his 2012 memoir, he mentioned Skynyrd exactly once, in an oh-by-the-way fashion, with ambivalence and perhaps arrogance. “In 1972,” he wrote, “we had a lot of Capricorn bands that Phil had brought to Macon opening for us—Eric Quincy Tate, Wet Willie, Dr. John, Alex Taylor, Captain Beyond, and Cowboy—and it was a very good thing for everybody. There ain’t but one Allman Brothers, and there ain’t but one Marshall Tucker. There ain’t but one of any of those bands, so we weren’t worried about them stealing our thunder or whatever.” Interestingly, giving them credit for success they hadn’t had at that point, he added, “I would imagine that Lynyrd Skynyrd had more hits than anybody else, but they sure ended up appealing to a real redneck bunch of folks.”
Ronnie felt the sting of this condescension. Cameron Crowe—now a movie director, but then a wunderkind reporter for Rolling Stone—was privy to some of Van Zant’s unguarded thoughts on the band’s bus rides during long tours. Ronnie, he says, “didn’t feel like Gregg was giving him too much back in terms of respect or acknowledgment. It wasn’t a rift or anything, but I know Ronnie sort of wanted his props from Gregg, more than he was getting…. [He’d ask], ‘Did you talk to Gregg? Did Gregg say anything?’” The irony was that by dissing the “redneck” audience they may have made Skynyrd more appealing to that crowd, establishing a building block to the latter’s growing momentum. Gregg Allman’s arrogance was duly noted by Ronnie and his band, generating a good deal of motivation for wanting to surpass the great godhead of the Allman Brothers.
Gregg, who still tours with the Brothers (or, like Skynyrd, a reasonable facsimile), can take pride in his unlikely longevity—after a lifetime of drugs and booze and having contracted hepatitis, apparently from dirty needles, he required a liver transplant in 2010 at age sixty-three. Yet even four decades later, he is no more generous to those southern rockers who followed in his path. “[T]here was some competition between bands—there has to be,” he wrote. “But we weren’t out there to sell southern rock, we were out there because we had the best goddamn band in the land. The Allman Brothers has had its bad nights, but we are some Super Bowl motherfuckers compared to all them other bands.”
Allman may be a victim of his own hubris, but he did have a point when he noted that the term “southern rock” was so amorphous as to be meaningless, given how different the bands all were in terms of musical style and sound. Unlike most rock-and-roll idioms, country rock was splintered before it hit its apogee. And that left a door wide open to any band with a fresh approach to get through it. Skynyrd made the most of its opportunity. Their concert appearances were like Fourth of July parties, with half-naked crowds baking in the southern heat and getting off on the sonic fireworks on stage as Ronnie, affixed in place and never breaking character with any awkward dance steps or patter for the audience, stood nonetheless as a transfixing presence, spilling southern populist soul into the microphone amid the concretion of screaming guitars and pounding drums melting the air. The Allmans were no match for them in sizzle factor, no doubt a factor in the Brothers deeming that it would be better if Skynyrd didn’t open for them anymore.
Skynyrd’s time was nearing, even if the industry—even if they— didn’t know it.
Fate was a stronger force than all of Alan Walden’s designs and connections. For no reason other than pure chance, the man who would help bring Lynyrd Skynyrd to fruition crossed their path in mid-January 1973, during the same swing through southern Georgia on which Ronnie married Judy. That man, born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt but better known as Al Kooper, was in Atlanta at the same time that Skynyrd was playing in a club on Peachtree Street called Funochio’s, a dim, suffocating cavern with a sign on it reading ATLANTA’S ORIGINAL HOUSE OF ROCK. There was almost no room between performers and audience, some of whom would sit on the foot of the stage during sets. As bands played, the crowds would dance as if on top of one another, and if there was a capacity limit or fire code, the owners seemed not to care.
Alan Walden, knowing pretty much all the dive bars in southern Georgia, calls Funochio’s a “hell hole, a real fruit and nut bar. The booze was good, the women were wild and we stayed until I thought I would die there.” On one Skynyrd date there, Ronnie’s grandmother died, and he didn’t want to sing. He and Walden went to see the manager of the bar, who was unmoved by their request to cancel the show. “The old bitch is dead, and you go on!” was his answer. It took all the self-control Ronnie had not to separate the guy from his spleen. He went onto the stage, burning hot under the collar. Then after the band played its finale—“Free Bird,” as always—he snapped. Says Walden: “Ronnie started throwing amps onto the dance floor, smashing chairs, and breaking bottles. He totally wrecked the joint! People were screaming and running, cops rushing in. I reached him just as the cop was about to bust him with a billy club. I screamed, ‘His grandmother died! Don’t hurt him!’”
The cops just wanted to get Ronnie out before he could level the joint. “We got him outside,” Walden says, “only to find out I had to go back and collect the money for the week.” Seeing how crazed Van Zant could get, the manager paid up. What’s more, Skynyrd had been so good that night, they kept on getting asked back. Kooper, an archetypal New York industry big shot, who had a list of music industry credits as long as his arm, frequented many such clubs. After visiting Funochio’s for the first time, he regarded it as a “bucket o’ blood,” where “shootings and stabbings regularly took place, and bodies were routinely carried out”—in other words, the very sort of place where one might find some fairly cool music being played. Not since Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s, he says now, had he seen such a “fertile breeding ground” of music.
Kooper was in Atlanta at the time with a two-act band he had formed called Frankie and Johnny, whom he wanted to tune up for a recording session in the city by having them play some clubs. During his stay, someone suggested he hang at Funochio’s, where he was given a private box with flowing booze and easy women to trifle with while listening to the music. Kooper had earned that kind of sway. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he was a prodigy at fourteen, playing guitar on “Short Shorts,” the Royal Teens’ twelve-bar blues riff that became a seminal rock-and-roll hit in 1958. Plying his skill as a songwriter, he composed the Gary Lewis and the Playboys smash “This Diamond Ring.” A peripatetic presence, he was in Bob Dylan’s backup band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the same year, when Dylan cut his breakthrough folk-rock album Highway 61 Revisited, Kooper played the immortal, spindly Hammond organ line on arguably the most existential long-form rock song ever, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
He had also played on Dylan’s landmark Blonde on Blonde sessions in Nashville and would become involved with just about everyone in the rock sacrarium, either producing, writing for, or playing sessions with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Blues Project, B.B. King, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. He was a cofounder of the Blues Project, teamed up with super guitarist Mike Bloomfield and singer-guitarist Stephen Stills in several legendary live albums in the late ’60s and somehow found time to found and produce the horn-driven jazz-rock unit Blood, Sweat and Tears. By 1973 the curly-haired Queens Jew with the thick “Noo Yawk” accent had seen enough of the percolating native southern rock scene and was so taken by the sanctuary the region seemed to offer from the industry jungle he despised that he considered moving to Dixie and creating a label similar to Capricorn. Kooper rhapsodized about a new South, saying that Atlanta had changed drastically in the three years he’d been away from it.
“It was looser,” he said. “It wasn’t so … Southern. There was a sociological gentrification in attitude…. The rednecks had long hair now. They were no longer the enemy. People got along better. I liked this. The women were beautiful and willing.”
This was, of course, the South that bred a new music. Phil Walden’s success with the Allman Brothers proved to Kooper that the timing was right for a rock retrenchment. Everyone, it seemed, was into rock forms that had strayed far from their original charter, and a heavy corporate canopy hung over all of it. The sterile nature of L.A. rock had seeped across the industry, in the formation of contrived, profit-geared “intellectual” supergroups like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. A polar opposite but equally contrived animal had also emerged—the glam rock of T. Rex (“Bang a Gong”) and Gary Glitter (“Rock and Roll Part 2”), a tide that took the Rolling Stones into their mascara-caked “It’s Only Rock and Roll” phase. Kooper envisioned an antidote to all the pretension and cerebral marketing strategies, something stripped down and from the gut and loins—“basic rock and roll,” as Kooper put it, recalling the predominant music of the time as “schmutz,” Yiddish vernacular for, well, garbage. Kooper had it exactly right when he said, looking back, that if a southern band didn’t rate with Capricorn, “they were pretty much doomed, because no other label understood this phenomenon.”
As a real mover and shaker in the industry, Kooper had the influence to get such a label up and running, as well as backing by the music label MCA. But he would need to have a strong act as his selling point. As fate would have it, Skynyrd would enter his purview with perfect timing, even if they were still rounding into shape—during a six-show run at Funochio’s from January 15 to 20, club posters billed them as LYNYRD SKYNNYRD, an opening act for a band called Boot, along with another called Smokestack Lightnin’. But Kooper’s first impression of them was ambivalent. Skynyrd might have sung about the pride of being a “simple man” of southern stock, but Kooper’s snap judgment of them was much like that of most nonsouthern music people.
Seeing the front man on stage at Funochio’s—“blond and barefoot, and sw[inging] the mikestand around like a majorette’s baton”—Kooper admitted, “I hated Ronnie Van Zant upon first look at him…. He was so unusual. I never saw anybody like that—he was a very weird front man.” The word weird, in fact, was Kooper’s operative word for them. Rossington and Collins, he said, were “like two Cousin Its on stilts”—referring to the Smurf-like, mop-topped Addams Family character—“you literally couldn’t see their faces when they played.” The sound that emanated, he thought, was—again—“a weird amalgam of blues with second-generation British band influences.” He wasn’t alone in first-impression coldness. Even among those who paid to see them, there were sometimes crossed signals. While the band was determined to play “Free Bird” at every gig, the venue could make that dicey. Ronnie once recalled that at dance clubs, “they wanted to hear ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘Midnight Hour.’ They said [‘Free Bird’] wasn’t a good dance song, and we’d get a lot of boos and things thrown at us.”
As it happened, the first time Kooper walked into Funochio’s, they were playing “Free Bird,” and, he recalled, “nobody was paying attention.” That would have been an off night, for sure, since it was the charge they put into audiences—in lieu of a record deal and hit songs—that kept them employed. But, like most audiences a tad baffled by Skynyrd, Kooper quickly warmed to them over three straight nights in his box, the “weird amalgam” suddenly making sense, such as when they played the song Kooper was taken with, “I Ain’t the One.” By night three, he thought “they had the sound I was looking for—that return to basic rock.” Having been introduced to the band by the club owner before the show, Kooper asked if he could play guitar with them on stage. As aware as they were of major studio musicians, the band knew Kooper had played with Michael Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix and made room for him, with no idea that Kooper saw them as a possible linchpin in his future plans.
For his part, Kooper says he was “flattered” that they had heard of him and would open their clique to the “Yankee slicker,” as they called him with affectionate sarcasm. What he learned off the bat was that the redneck facade might have been their shtick, but they had a level of musicianship that impressed even him. He recounted his informal jam with the backwoods boys this way: “I strapped on a guitar and said, ‘Let’s go!’ [Van Zant] called out ‘Mean Woman Blues’ in C# [C-sharp] and counted it off…. In all my years of jamming, nobody ever called C#. It’s a weird key between two relatively easy keys that would just as easily have sufficed.”
Later, Kooper said, “I found out it was an intimidation process they dreamed up to keep jammers offstage.” Realizing they were smarter than he had anticipated, Kooper didn’t know if they were testing his renowned mastery or whether perhaps they were not as eager as they seemed to have an outsider on stage with them, no matter who it was. In any case, Kooper would proudly boast, “I could play fine in C#,” and he continued sitting in with the band for three more nights, more than enough time for him to make them an offer to get them to commit to his incipient label. Following the last of those shows, Kooper was talking big.
“We talked and he said he’d make us an offer and he was interested,” Rossington said, “but, actually, he didn’t.” Indeed, for all the attention he lavished on them, Kooper had also seen other acts to whom he had paid the same sort of attention and made the same promises—big talk being the most abundant and cheapest commodity a music nabob has. And there remains a fuzziness about how and when Skynyrd was in fact signed. Kooper, who has taken bows for having “discovered” them, liked to say that the opportunity was like “walking into a real funky bar someplace where you could get shot and hearing the Rolling Stones [and] finding out they weren’t signed to anybody.” Kooper says he offered to sign and produce them. “They said they would mull it over and discuss it with their manager. We said our goodbyes, and that was it. I hoped [their] manager would call me back.” Soon Alan Walden—whom Kooper knew only as “Phil Walden’s younger brother”—did.
But even now Kooper didn’t push it, possibly because he wasn’t particularly fond of Walden and vice versa. Kooper didn’t mind who overheard him belittling the junior Walden for not being able to convince his own brother to sign his redneck rock act. Walden on the other hand saw Kooper as a northern sharpie stereotyping “dumbass Southern[ers].” And so nothing happened for three months. Kooper would later say this was merely because “they had to get to know me really well before they would sign,” but if so, Walden never heard a price from Kooper that seemed satisfactory; the most he could offer, based on the ceiling given him by MCA for signing talent, was $9,000.
During the interim, Kooper didn’t stand still. He moved from New York to the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs and opened his label—Sounds of the South (SOS), the logo of which was a two-hundred-year-old log cabin on the grounds. He went ahead and signed a number of other acts, his new favorite the Mose Jones band, who also played at Funochio’s and sometimes jammed with Skynyrd there. Once signed, Mose Jones—who, as Kooper likely appreciated, had named themselves after Bob Dylan’s Mister Jones—kept pitching Kooper to sign Skynyrd, says the band’s drummer Bryan Cole. “We were close to them for a while,” Cole said. “Ronnie actually asked me to join [Skynyrd] at one point but I think he was just pissed off at his drummer at the time. [Bandmate] Jimmy O’Neill and I both told Al that he should check this group out. Even then they were tight and powerful and looked like stars.”
Charlie Brusco, who kept tabs on Skynyrd’s progress, sure that they were on the edge of a breakout, says that Kooper “was unsure about them. He had two or three bands that he was seriously interested in over Skynyrd. It wasn’t a slam dunk. They were just so different. Again, no one in southern rock had that kind of hard-rock sound. It was a real gamble, and nobody was eager to take it.”
Kooper indeed had his eye on many acts. He wanted to sign a hard-rock country group, Hydra, but they spurned him for Capricorn Records, as did country rock singer Eric Quincy Tate. And in a very odd choice, he did sign Elijah, the Latino horn-funk band hailing from East L.A., whom Kooper had seen playing at the Whisky a Go Go. Fudging the sequence of the Skynyrd signing, Kooper has said simply that he “also” signed Mose Jones, whose tight three-part harmonies and nearly pop hooks appealed to him. “Stylistically speaking,” he said, “Mose Jones were my Beatles, and Skynyrd were my Stones.”
Yet when he took Mose Jones into the studio early in 1973 to cut the first product on the SOS label, he didn’t have his “Stones” under contract. All that changed when, at 2 AM one night in February, Kooper was awakened by the ring of his phone. On the other end, he heard a familiar husky voice—not cocky for once but despondent—with a request he felt he couldn’t make of anyone else.
“Al,” said Ronnie Van Zant, “our equipment van got broken into last night … We have engagements to fulfill immediately, and unless you can send us five thousand dollars by tomorrow morning, we’re fucked!”
As Kooper remembered, there was no need to think it over. Whether or not Ronnie would ever be able to pay it back, five grand was a stiff but reasonable price to pay if it would break the negotiation logjam with Walden. “Where do I send it, buddy?” he said.
Grateful, a relieved Van Zant stunned him. “Let me tell you somethin’,” he told Kooper. “You just bought yourself a band for five thousand dollars.”
Walden, when he heard about this oral agreement, nearly fell down. He knew that Ronnie’s word was good as gold, and he would never go back on it. That meant that any leverage Walden might have had was gone with the wind. Walden had known the band would wind up with Sounds of the South—there just was no place else for them to go—and as he says, “the band would not have survived” any longer without a deal. But he nevertheless believed he had turned over a fortune for peanuts—the same bargain-basement $9,000 advance that Kooper had dangled all along. What’s more, Ronnie had vowed to pay back the money, southern men not being prone to charity.
So Skynyrd finally got their contract. It was drawn up by the MCA lawyers, dated February 5, 1973, and signed shortly thereafter. Kooper was quite pleased about having committed highway robbery—though in his purview it was the reasonable advantage he reaped as an industry veteran. The contract broke down the split of every dollar in sales royalties thusly: Kooper ten points, Skynyrd five. But five was better than 0 percent of zero, and Kooper still cackles about how happy the rednecks were “that they got a major-label deal, and they were braggin’ about it.” In truth, they were no fools. They knew how lousy the deal was, because Walden told them. The manager, justifiably uneasy about how much power Kooper might grab from him, was in the parking lot outside the Macon Coliseum, contract in hand, waiting in his pickup truck for the band to finish a show. When they came out, Ronnie came over and hopped into Walden’s pickup truck. He asked Alan what he thought of the deal.
“It’s the worst piece of shit I ever seen,” Walden told him.
Ronnie, who had no intention of taking back his handshake agreement, also understood there was no other option, “What else we got?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Nothin’,” Walden said.
“Gimme the goddamn pen,” Ronnie told him.
Walden looks back on that moment with not much glee or pride. Lynyrd Skynyrd, he says, “signed away two million dollars that day.”
But they’d make up for it. Lord knows, they would make up for it.