Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (25 page)

“Sweet Home Alabama,” with the flip side again “Take Your Time,” hit the stores on June 24, 1974, and began to scramble up the chart, stopping at number eight on the
Billboard
Hot 100 chart in late summer. On its way up, it did more than give Lynyrd Skynyrd its first and only Top 10 hit. It unfurled the symbolic pennon, and the accompanying baggage, that they have carried ever since. Even before it was released as a single, it had become their virtual theme song out on the hustings, so it was only logical to develop some sort of stage atmospherics to help frame it as such. Thus came the entrance of the highly contentious monogram that still causes delight and consternation to this day.

There is no agreement about who exactly made the decision to pin the literal Confederate flag on Skynyrd's figurative hide. After it began to appear, it drove redneck fans into a frenzy and nonrednecks into a state of revulsion that an American band had adopted this long-shunned symbol of intolerance at a time when de facto segregation was still extant in the South. When the sharp divide became apparent, Ronnie was not prepared to fall on a Confederate sword—not when it might cut to pieces Skynyrd's carefully crafted mainstream appeal. Finding a convenient fall guy, he put the blame squarely on the bosses. The flag, he said, was “strictly an MCA gimmick … you know, Southern band, drunken fighters and all that. They put out that publicity. Hype, nothin' but hype.”

Gary on the other hand maintained that the flag entered the picture as a result of their corporate owners
not
caring much about contributing any ideas or angles for the band to use. “MCA didn't promote us,” he said. “
We
promoted us. We were from the South and our audience always had rebel flags, flying 'em and putting 'em on stage. One night we just said, ‘Hey, let's just get a big one and put it behind us.' It was just that simple. We didn't mean nothing by it. There was no meaning; like the flag means this, or we're against blacks. We're just from the South. It wasn't no big thing to us, it's not a ‘Hell no, we ain't forgetting, let's be rednecks' kind of thing.”

Although Alan Walden boasted that he and Mike Maitland had sat down and put together a “brilliant marketing plan” for Skynyrd, neither took ownership of the flag idea. Putting the onus back onto the band,
Bob Davis, an executive at MCA Records who in the 1980s became vice president of the label, said, “I don't [believe] that MCA as a company, from a policy point of view, was in any way involved in decisions as to stage presentation, whether or not Confederate flags or anything were part of the presentation of the live show. That being said, that doesn't mean there were not people out in the field, whether they were sales or marketing people, promotion people, who weren't making suggestions … in connection with marketing a record.”

Those people would have had a great influence on a fairly wide-eyed band in the maw of free-wheeling, free-ranging record company lackeys, either under contract or as loosely affiliated promotional leeches and lemmings—think Artie Fufkin, Paul Shaffer's bumbling record-company stooge in
This Is Spinal Tap
. People just like that swarmed around bands on the rise, meeting them backstage or in hotels looking for an in, the pockets of their faux-satin baseball jackets stuffed with envelopes of cocaine. Not only were such supplies liberally dispensed to Skynyrd, fueling their descent into an addiction inferno, but the yes men, amoral as they were, eagerly endorsed the Confederate flag as a marketing tool, on the assumption that racism could be cool.

Certainly, Skynyrd needed
something
to enliven a rather static onstage persona. Davis thought they were “very bland” and wanted to add pizzazz. And Al Kooper had perhaps unwittingly opened the door for something more daring than an image of long-haired rednecks when he applied the skull-and-bones motif to their album and subsequent promotional materials; soon T-shirts with that motif were selling quite nicely at arenas. Adding one more promotional tool might put them over the top, and it surely made sense to some at the record company that the Stars and Bars conveyed some sort of nativist pride, if seen in the narrow context of southern “heritage.” When Skynyrd would enter the stage to “Dixie” playing through the hall and a giant Confederate flag covering the entire back wall, there was surely a surge of regional pride in the air—but also a surge of anger.

This helped them in the South but elsewhere left a decided unease and instant revulsion. For many African Americans and for northern liberals, including the most respected music critics, the flag was tantamount to a swastika, and defending it was a very tricky business, as the band would learn. Ronnie, who would usually act on gut instinct and
say the hell with whoever disagreed with him, burned up the phone line with calls to Charlie Daniels, his confidant, concerned the band was asking for big trouble. Daniels told him to keep it in the act, that it would do more harm than good to remove it, and that the issue would recede when critics came to size up Skynyrd as a nonpolitical bunch with a regional angle that cut to the heart of the South's identity—not as racists but good, decent folks keeping the faith with its traditions sullied by civil war and opprobrium for its mistakes. Skynyrd's songs were, after all, about just those elemental themes.

Or
most
of them. With “Sweet Home Alabama” they would inject a new element, taking them into deeper water. Indeed, the first manifestation of the flag was the jacket art for the single release of the song, featuring an image of a young woman's beckoning lips, onto which were stuck a color image of the Confederate flag. This put the race angle in blatantly sexualized terms, always the most incendiary of all in matters of race, not long separated from the days of Emmett Till when a black man could be lynched for merely looking at a white woman. As squeamish about it as the band was, when the lights went up on their shows, audiences went absolutely crazy. There would be deafening shouts of
yee-haw!
and others cries that sounded like they emanated from barnyard animals. On the opening guitar bars, feet stomped, hands clapped, and the building shook. When Ronnie sang, “Big wheels keep on turning,” a mass sing-along would erupt. Emotions would keep rising until the great climax of “Free Bird” left everyone limp.

The phenomenon was unlike anything they had seen, and it helped manufacture an institutional engraving for the song. As Ed King says, “I'm sure Dickey Betts disagrees, but ‘Sweet Home Alabama' is the Southern anthem.” But, as it happened, part and parcel of this was that most southerners and those who
felt
like southerners listening to Skynyrd took the lyrics of the song as a cue to release some not-so-courtly feelings. The easiest thing for the band to explain was the fight they had picked with Neil Young, who for his part refused to take the bait and indulge in a cheesy “feud.” He expressed no ill will and said he greatly admired Skynyrd, which he proved in future years when he said the lyrics of his that Ronnie had objected to were “condescending and accusatory” and “not fully thought out.” Indeed, Young had some repenting to do; in 1972 the soundtrack of his pseudodocumentary
Journey Through
the Past
was released with cover art depicting hooded horsemen carrying cruciform staves and an inset photo of Young glaring at a Confederate flag. If Van Zant wasn't pissed off by
that
, he may as well have walked away from his birthright.

Al Kooper helpfully confirmed that Young “loved” the Skynyrd song. And proving that there never was a schism between them, Van Zant and Young began discussing collaborating on future songs. Ronnie pointedly wore T-shirts on stage screened with Young's face. Neil would wear a Skynyrd/Jack Daniel's T-shirt. After Ronnie's death, Neil Young would perform a cover version of the very song that had taken him to task.

Not so easily dispensed with was the reaction to those confusing lyrics about Wallace and Watergate. With people in his circle beginning to wonder if he had produced a racist band, Al Kooper suddenly was not so sure about what the song said. “Hey, you have to be more careful when you write a song now,” was his revised opinion. Skynyrd might have wanted to say to him, “Hey, Al, nice of you tell us that
now
.” Pissed off that they even had to address the issue, they acted as if anyone who asked was an idiot. Ronnie, far from what he told Artimus Pyle later, called it a “joke song” and “a party tune” that he never thought would ever be released as a single, and that when it was, it “hit Top 10 and we've been paying for it ever since,” though they also had been
paid
for it ever since, quite well. “We're not into politics,” he said. “We don't have no education, and Wallace don't know anything about rock n' roll.”

Ed King, however, doesn't toe the company line these days. Contrary to what Van Zant may have told Pyle, King says, “Ronnie was a big fan of George Wallace. He totally supported him. We all did. We respected the way Wallace stood up for the South. Anybody who tells you differently is lying.”

What Van Zant was trying to do was clear the biggest hurdle for any Southern Man: separating the concept of “standing up for the South” from the chaff of innate racism. It would seem impossible that he could have worked Wallace into these lyrics as he did without realizing that the man was a breathing synonym for intolerance. Wallace himself would need to go to great lengths later in his life to remove the stigma, saying in 1998, “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be
over.” The need for Van Zant to walk the racial tightrope was unavoidable, especially after his own record company had put him up there on that high wire. If the crackers embraced Skynyrd, it was still incumbent on him—not on the suits at MCA but the band's leader—to assure the record-buying public that nothing racist was meant by “Sweet Home Alabama.” And, no matter his feelings about “the Gov'nor,” he did so, with great contrition.

“Of course I don't agree with everything Wallace says,” he said. “I don't like what he says about colored people”—yet the fact that he used a pejorative term for African Americans while insisting nothing had been pejorative in the song only underscored the quandary of acting southern without malice carved out of southern conditioning.

He went on, “We're southern rebels, but more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong…. My father supports Wallace but that doesn't mean I have to…. I've heard him talk and wanted to ask him about his views on blacks and why he has such poor education and such a low school rate there, such a low housing rate,” meaning for African Americans.

His best case for proving that the song was actually a sly rebuke of Wallace lay in those three repetitive syllables in the verse that he explained were the key to understanding the entire song. “The lyrics,” he said, “were misunderstood. The general public didn't notice the words ‘Boo Boo Boo!' after that particular line, and the media picked up only on the reference to the people loving the governor.”

Not everyone bought it. As was the case with the rest of the lyrics, the
“Boo! Boo! Boo!”
refrain could be construed any way the imagination wanted. If he had been serious about debunking Wallace, why not
say
it, in words, something like, say, “In Birmingham they love the Gov'nor / Well, that ain't something they should do.” Why go with a guttural ballpark response to an umpire's bad call? Still, it provided plausible deniability, though that was not really needed; in fact, the murky connection with Wallace seemed only to add another whiff of outlaw chic. Skynyrd might have been pissed about the brouhaha, but they could live quite nicely with having a hit. And if anyone needed a period to put on the end of the sentence, Leon Wilkeson offered it. “I support Wallace about as much as your average American supported Hitler,” the inscrutable bassist said.

Wily bush dog that he was, Van Zant likely was apolitical, it not being worth the aggravation of lecturing people who just wanted to hear him sing, not talk. The only endorsement for a candidate he ever made was still on the horizon, support he would offer when another son of the South ran for president—a
Democrat
, of all things, a clear case of regional loyalty being political enough for him. He did know that he had a tightrope to walk, playing to type in his writing and stage persona while avoiding any taint of too-literal Confederate status; it was already a heavy enough lift for MCA's radio liaisons to get Skynyrd played on FM stations in the North. And in fact, Ronnie
was
a different sort of Confederate soldier, as was Wallace, who despite his segregationist stance never got on board with standard right-wing doggerel about the underclass being, in the contemporary vernacular, “takers”; indeed, by then Wallace had won a certain fealty among Alabama's black underclass, having raised taxes on the rich to sink money into the ghettos.