Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (28 page)

One of the many tributes to Jacksonville's most famous native son is Ronnie Van Zant Memorial Park, an eighty-five-acre stretch of greenery and crystal blue lakes in the Penney Farms area—the sort of spot where Ronnie might get away to fish, though he likely would have disobeyed the NO CURSING signs.
CAMERON SPIRITAS

“S
weet Home Alabama,” the big bang of an already explosive act, didn't quite cause a seismic sonic boom nationally, but it did give Skynyrd the only Top 10 hit they would ever have, which at the time was a must, as even an FM-oriented band needed at least a decent-sized hit single regularly to keep album sales at a peak. Despite rising no higher, it seemed to be heard endlessly wherever one went, and also went to number six in Canada and made the charts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The next single wouldn't need to be released until late November, when the band allowed a four-minute version of “Free Bird” to go out, which would be further edited down to three and a half minutes on some AM stations. Though hardly reflective of the glory of “Free Bird,” it still got to number nineteen in the United States and to thirty-one in Britain. Meanwhile, the two albums sold apace—
Second Helping
hitting number twelve,
pronounced
reaching number twenty-one, both soon to go gold. This cascade seemed to revolve around “Sweet Home Alabama,” the success of which unsealed Skynyrd to the masses and further honed their professionalism and raised the bar for them.

Gradually, they occupied more and more space in the music press, with the Brits genuinely fascinated by them, even if not quite getting some details right. Playfully echoing the marketing campaign, the headline
WHO THE HELL ARE LYRNRD SKYNYRD?
ran in the February 1974
Disc and Music Echo
, a UK version of the teenage-geared fanzine
Tiger Beat
, tracing the roots of the band back to “a used-car salesman somewhere in Florida,” meaning Leonard Skinner, who was never a car
salesman. Another English rag,
Melody Maker
, told of Al Kooper's triumph with the band in a profile titled
SWEETHEART OF THE SOUTH
. Perhaps the earliest American music magazine to start spreading the news was the short-lived, Florida-based
Zoo World
, which in April wrote of them as “an alcohol band … steeped in southern blooze [who] create that perfect sleazy barroom atmosphere both in concert and on record.” However, once “Sweet Home Alabama” hit, the big rags fell in line.
Rolling Stone
reviewed
Second Helping
by, mandatorily, comparing them to the Allman Brothers, saying that while Skynyrd lacked the Brothers' “sophistication” the work had a “certain mellowing out that indicates they may eventually acquire a level of savoir faire to realize their many capabilities.” And Robert Christgau called it the work of a “substantial, tasteful band” that “will expose you to their infectious putdowns of rock businessmen, rock journalists, and heroin.”

The album has lost none of its sheen over the years. The
Rolling Stone
album guide calls it “the consummate Skynyrd platter; the guitars sigh and sting like a stiff breeze as Ronnie Van Zant draws a line in the dirt.”

After completing their second exhausting US tour, opening for acts like ZZ Top and Savoy Brown and capping it off with a boisterous headline gig in Memphis's cavernous Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium on July 28, they could barely take a breath before they were back in the studio with Al Kooper. In early August they cut at Studio One a song they'd been asked to write for the Burt Reynolds movie
The Longest Yard
, director Robert Aldrich's black comedy about a prison-yard football game between prisoners and guards; with a song needed for a scene involving cops with guns drawn, Ronnie and Ed King worked out something much more significant, which took form when Ronnie had King play a riff over and over until, from somewhere in his soul, Van Zant came up with the line “Two feets they come a creepin' like a black cat do.” Says King: “I was just amazed by that—it was brilliant. That was Ronnie at his best as a songwriter.”

The verse continued, referencing three grim tales of people reaching for no good reason for a “Saturday Night Special,” the cheap, poorly constructed .38 caliber Smith and Wesson handgun, the kind that flows so freely in the United States, no less now than they did then. Ronnie likely
was unaware that the pejorative nature of the term derived from “niggertown Saturday night special,” a term coined by fearful whites about blacks who armed themselves in fear of
whites
, though by the 1970s it pretty much applied exactly as he used it in the lyrics, as a way to end a drunken Saturday-night argument. Thus did he define the most salient argument for avoiding guns altogether, that far more likely than preventing a tragedy, a gun will
cause
one—though this was
not
an induction he bought entirely. In fact, he had a few of those .38s himself and had bought one for Judy to protect herself with when he was on the road. Rather, Ronnie, who'd had his share of run-ins when he was looking down a barrel, and often worried what he might do with his own pistol if he was provoked and drunk enough, simply regarded a .38, unlike a hunting rifle, as completely useless for anything but killing people.

It was a radical position for a redneck band to take in a song—indeed, when Donnie Van Zant formed his band in 1974, they took their name from the weapon—but Ronnie had something to say, and as always he said it. His chorus hook, grim and sung as if with clenched teeth, could make one shiver: “It's a Saturday night special, got a barrel that's blue and cold / Ain't no good for nothin' but put a man six feet in a hole.”

Just so the point wasn't being missed, he had another killer line—“Hand guns are made for killin', ain't no good for nothin' else / And if you like to drink your whiskey, you might even shoot yourself.” It was a seething, riveting alter-ego argument, coated with balls-to-the-wall rock and an ominous undercurrent that was so convincing, when Kooper noodled a dark-sounding passage on the synthesizer, Ronnie remarked that it sounded “like an airplane crashing.” He was satisfied that he had done something against the grain, even if its unambiguous meaning would be lost for some who heard its stew of overwrought guitars and bone-jarring bass and drums—“heavy-metal-under-funk,” Christgau called it—as a seal of
approval
for keeping a gun concealed in one's pants.
The Longest Yard
, which made $43 million and was one of 1974's most successful films, whetted the appetite for Skynyrd, enough that the song would be released as a single nine months later in May 1975 and become so entrenched in pop culture that it would also be used on the soundtrack for the 1978 Richard Pryor film
Blue Collar;
when
The Longest Yard
was remade in 2005, the song was there too. Some songs and some causes never get old. “Special” was immediately earmarked for the
third Skynyrd album, sessions for which were set for January 1975—but this album proved so difficult to make that it would send Al Kooper fleeing from the South.

First, though, there would be Skynyrd's landmark first trip to Europe, an obligatory act since there now was the exigency to expand their sales profits in the important European market—and a chance to play for American soldiers on the German dates. England in particular was a natural for any American band with a new sound carved by either soul or country music, which Britons were continually fascinated by. Indeed, the Eagles' first two albums, their most country-flavored work, were recorded in London, produced by erstwhile Beatles engineer Glyn Johns, a country-music buff. English rock audiences, notorious for showing displeasure by means of catcalls, streams of spit, and sundry objects thrown at performers, mainly had a jolly old time with the strange new American band, even if few knew just what they were supposed to do when they were cued onto the stage by “Dixie” and that unfamiliar flag was lit up on the wall behind them.

Skynyrd couldn't have sold out the tour alone and were booked as an opening act for most dates. In Glasgow they opened for the veteran Dutch band Golden Earring, who'd had their first US and UK hit, “Radar Love,” in 1973, but a review in
Sounds
said that Skynyrd ate Earring's lunch. That pattern continued when they stole shows from Humble Pie—then two years into its post-Peter Frampton era and heard often on the FM album rock stations—in Belgium and Paris, and even from Queen in Hamburg, though this may have been the last time Freddie Mercury would ever be upstaged, his band still a year from its international breakout with their
A Night at the Opera
album, which included “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Indeed, at the first show at London's Rainbow Theatre, when they were to open again for Golden Earring, the promoter flipped the acts, making Skynyrd the headliner.

However, while they came back home triumphant, they were also short a drummer. In Paris, Bob Burns had become a casualty of the pressures and his own mounting troubles. Never having resolved being abandoned in childhood, Burns had been slipping downhill for some time. Months before, driving on Jacksonville's Buckman Bridge, he had
collided with another car, killing the driver. It was ruled an accident but Burns came away shaken and with no time to get his head together before having to go right back on the road. After a gig at New York's Avery Fisher Hall he polished off a fifth of Jack Daniel's in one shot, went berserk in his room, and ripped a sink off the bathroom wall.

The last thing he needed was the long, hectic trip to Europe. Once there, he behaved more bizarrely, his behavior apparently worsened by mixing up his drink of choice, whiskey, and codeine. Having just seen
The Exorcist
in a theater at one stop, he began screaming that he saw the devil in the eyes of a cat and threw it from a hotel roof to its death below. Then, in Paris, he saw the devil again, this time in soundman Kevin Elson, whom he began to chase down a street with an axe he had somehow found before someone restrained him. With only one date left, at the Rainbow in London, Ronnie told the band they'd need to find another drummer when they got back home, and told Bob he was out, at least until he got himself some help. While all of them would have benefited from that advice, Burns was undeniably the worst off. When he did seek help, he says, “My parents put me in a hospital in Jacksonville, and they found the problem. They found that I was bipolar. They gave me medication, antidepressants, lithium—the stuff people who went crazy used to be given—lithium, whatever.” Not until after Prozac was approved for prescription in 1987 did he begin to finally recover, saying, “I've been a free man ever since.”

As he fought to gain his sanity and equilibrium, Burns never asked to come back to the band. For one thing, he cringed at the very thought of getting caught up again in the meat grinder of pressure, drugs, and drinking. “Everybody was doing it in the band and they were going in one direction with it and I was kinda headed off in another, because my bipolar was pulling me in a different way,” he says now. “But nobody understood what in the world was going on. We were like best of friends since we were like four or five years old yet we didn't see what was happening to us until it became something that literally threatened to kill us all.”