Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (12 page)

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.