Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (22 page)

Billy Powell nearly didn't survive that first night. After Skynyrd was done with their thirty-minute set, Billy meandered to the foot of the stage so he could watch the Who, just as the security staff was trying to clear the area. Massive bouncers were bodily picking up stragglers without backstage passes and throwing them over a barrier behind the stage. Powell,
whose pass was in his coat pocket, was next. When a bouncer grabbed him by the hair, Billy told the guy, “Hold it. I'm in the Skynyrd band.” He tried squatting down so he could reach into his pocket for the pass; but the guy wouldn't let go, and Billy threw a punch at him.

Standing nearby was the promoter Bill Graham, a man who watched over his shows like a hawk. Graham, née Wolfgang Wolodia Grajonca, was as famous as many big rock acts. The acts he promoted in the late '60s included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin. His shows at the Winterland Ballroom and the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York all but created the era of arena rock, and he promoted the Rolling Stones' 1972 American tour, which set the standard for road-show depravity, as well as the outdoor Watkins Glen festival headlined by the Dead and the Allman Brothers. Seeing the commotion, the swarthy, scowling Graham, as Powell remembered later, “came running down the ramp and punched me in the mouth. I mean with full momentum. Knocked me about ten feet. He knocked me silly. I was bleeding everywhere, and I was about to pass out.”

As if in a scene from
Animal House
, Leon, also in the area, leapt into action. “I go running to Billy's aid,” he once said, “and here comes Ronnie, Gary, and we're all up there,” mixing it up with bouncers, fans, whoever. Somehow in this melee Powell was able to get the pass from his pocket, upon which Graham turned contrite. “He apologized, swear to God, ten times,” Powell said. Still feeling badly two months later, Graham would send a five-foot floral wreath and bottles of Jack Daniels to the Whisky a Go Go when Skynyrd was booked to play there. If they could draw an apology from Bill Graham, it must have felt like the world really was in their hip pocket.

Ronnie was also busy that night working the press. The young Cameron Crowe, covering the Who on tour for
Rolling Stone
, was backstage after the concert when a thick-chested guy with stringy blond hair sidled up next to him. “I can really relate to you,” he said, “because you're a young guy starting out and I'm a young guy starting out.” Crowe recalls Van Zant as “the first musician that crossed the line and talked to me like I was an artist or a writer. It blew me away. [He was] a straight-ahead, sensitive guy. No agenda. He didn't ask me to write about him.” But Crowe did write about him, went on the road with the band, contributed liner notes to one of their albums, and in 2000 wrote his first
movie
Almost Famous
about coming of age and then some with them (in the guise of the fictitious band Stillwater, an amalgam of Skynyrd, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin). Smart as the leader of the band was, gaining exposure in the Yankee-dominated rock media was a piece of cake, done with a dollop of charm and a load of bull.

The most obvious Who “thing” was their dance of nihilism, smashing their instruments at the conclusion of a concert, an exhibition of senseless mayhem that would send crowds, who by then expected it as part of the show, into a sometimes frightening frenzy. Jimi Hendrix had been so impressed with that dynamic of postmodern beatitude by anarchy that he started setting his own precious guitars on fire at the epochal 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, as if to outdo Townsend's earlier destruction of his own guitar by smashing it to bits, a routine he had begun in 1964. Not that Skynyrd would ever,
could
ever, have done this, even when they were rich enough to, not those gorgeous instruments of their craft that meant so much to them.

Still, there were plenty of other lessons they eagerly sucked up—including their introduction to drugs in addition to the usual booze, booze, and more booze. It was on the
Quadrophenia
tour that Skynyrd encountered cocaine, heroin, pills of many sizes and colors, and God knows what else, all readily available backstage and at the hotels where both bands stayed. As Leon Wilkeson said, getting shit faced had nothing to do with acting the part of rock rebels; it was because “we were terrified to go up on the stage and perform before The Who.” But the problem with the drinking, he said, was that “we never stopped.” Seeing them at close range, Rudge's assistant, Chris Charlesworth, formed an immediate image in his mind of the country boys. They all, he recalls, “drank like fishes, took all known illegal drugs, fucked anything female on two legs, and liked nothing better than to fight with their fists, either against others or amongst themselves.” Ronnie, he added, “was the toughest of the lot and he could more or less silence any of the others with the threat of a beating.”

Another infamous part of the Who playbook offered additional comfort: satisfying the primal urge to blow off steam by trashing hotel rooms and having the record company pay for it among the overall travel
“expenses.” Billy Powell remembered how, as a kind of rite of passage into rock stardom, starting on that tour they would throw half-filled cans at the back of the TV until the alcohol soaked the tubes and set them on fire. “We'd watch it blow up,” Powell said, still amused by such a simple pleasure. Another one was heaving beer cans out the windows and into the swimming pool below. Back in L.A., MCA would find bills, often running into the thousands, from promoters and hotels seeking recompense for the damage done by the label's new investment. Kooper could only shrug and point out that it all went with the territory of rock. Somehow, both bands were able to get it together at show time. What else mattered?

However, at times during the tour they seemed to be progressively coming apart at the seams. There were so many complicated components in trying to recreate the densely layered studio effects on the Who's
Quadrophenia
that something was apt to go wrong and often did. They brought with them a score of tapes that had to be played on the sound system at precisely the right time, and if one wasn't, the timing and texture would be thrown off. Soon, Townsend slapping Pridden wasn't good enough. The Who actually
stopped
playing songs from the album in favor of the simpler songs from the past, which required no technological appurtenances; but those who had bought the album in droves, not to mention the critics, were baffled. Right from the start, the enormous pressure that Townsend put on himself to make the tape sequencing and light shows work—and the emotional outbursts that followed when something screwed up—provided the Who with one of many excuses to unwind by wrecking themselves and, famously, whatever hotel harbored them. Such wreckage had become their signature, an all but obligatory part of their persona.

And they didn't disappoint on
that
count. Once, after a show in Montreal, they were so out of control and caused so much destruction to their hotel room that the Canadian Mounted Police were called. They were arrested and bailed out, and as usual let their managers and accountants pay for the damage. Because of the negative publicity, promoters in Denver canceled the six shows the Who was to headline there. Stepping into all this madness and chaos, Skynyrd, Billy Powell would say, “blew
The Who away.” Ronnie, however, didn't con himself into believing that. By tour's end, he would recall, “We were playing good and still getting our asses kicked by The Who.” He said of the tour, however, “I really dug it. It was like a challenge…. And we didn't have to change our show any. We're still doing what we did in the clubs.”

If the Who were grateful for Skynyrd getting audiences jacked up and perhaps a little less apt to find fault with the main attraction, they apparently were not thrilled about being upstaged. Yet those were the times when the boys from Britain would rebound and put on some of their best performances, as if to keep pace with the rubes from Florida. All in all, the bizarre juxtaposition worked to benefit both bands—even if in order to keep the tour rumbling on night after night, the Brits and the good old boys needed constant numbing. “The drinking was crazy,” agrees Rossington, “but we'd just wake up the next morning and go for it.” It was so crazy that it openly became part of the act. Wilkeson once noted that “we decided to take the bar atmosphere on stage. We had a little portable bar up there and everybody was drinking.”

Still, they won grudging admiration from the Who, and on Rossington's twenty-second birthday, December 1, Townshend came into his room with booze and a cake and, Rossington recalls, “mashed the cake in my face,” apparently a ritual of acceptance. Skynyrd got even when Roger Daltrey happened into the Skynyrd dressing room just as a bottle of beer was thrown across the room for someone, sending a sudsy spray all over him and ruining his expensive, tailored vest. The increasingly besotted tour stumbled from the Forum in L.A. to the Dallas Memorial Auditorium to the Omni in Atlanta to the Saint Louis Arena to the International Amphitheatre in Chicago to Cobo Hall in Detroit to the Montreal Forum to the Boston Garden to the Spectrum in Philadelphia to the finale at the Capital Centre outside DC on December 6. Then Skynyrd, on their own again, jumped back to their originally planned tour, headlining with Black Oak Arkansas, Canned Heat, and Brownsville Station at the Palladium in Hollywood, opening for Blue Oyster Cult at the Long Beach Arena, and finally, headlining a sold-out New Year's Eve show back in Atlanta at the Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel.

Keeping the iron hot, instead of going back home to Jacksonville to chill, they immediately headed back to the studio with Kooper for their second album. According to their contract, they would need a new
one every nine months. This time they recorded not in Doraville but across the continent at the Record Plant in L.A., a logical choice since a California tour, with them as headliners, was to begin in San Diego on January 12, allowing for recording on off days and performing at night. The backbreaking schedule would test their endurance and whether they had the right stuff. To Skynyrd, though, it was business as usual, as long as they had gigs and bottles of hooch to comfort them, not to mention vials and little paper envelopes filled with a certain white powder to keep them from collapsing.

They had picked up something else from the Who as well—a future manager. Pete Rudge had seen enough of them on the tour to decide he wanted to run their affairs and bring them even further into the rock elite. But there was a minor complication: Skynyrd already had a manager who went everywhere with them. Down the road something was going to have to give—something named Alan Walden.

Despite the band's to-kill-for gig with the Who, the rock media fairly ignored
pronounced
. If Skynyrd's presence on the tour provided a crucial lift for them—and their performances indeed killed—they were still a long way down the rock roster, more a novelty for the young, northern college-bred editors at the increasingly upscale
Rolling Stone
and even for the more fanzine-style rags such as the C trinity—
Circus, Crawdaddy!
, and
Creem
, the last of which had the brass to call itself
AMERICA
'
S ONLY ROCK
'
N
'
ROLL MAGAZINE
. In fact
Creem
was the first of the crowd to give the band any media attention, a July 28, 1973, note about Kooper's bash at Richard's. Oddly, it was the teeming British rock press that found more space for them. The October 31 issue of
Sounds
magazine smartly perceived the LP as “a raw blend of hillbilly, country, and British boogie packed with typically Southern flavor; moaning slide guitar, country-pickin' mandolin, aggressive guitars, driving rhythm section … and dry, thirst-parched vocals…. Van Zant's lyrics completed the geographical picture with tales of disapproving daddies, guns, trains, rides, ghettos, the Lord, and getting high on dope and booze.”