Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (38 page)

Ronnie now had to reconsider getting back to the formula that had gotten Skynyrd to the dance. He put out the word for a guitar man, and the first to answer the call was no ordinary one. Leslie West, a man with a resume nearly as long as anyone's in rock, had recently disbanded the power trio Mountain, which he had created in 1969, with the Rascals' producer Felix Pappalardi, to be what was called a “louder version of Cream.” Because of the hit “Mississippi Queen,” Mountain, for whom Skynyrd had opened a show in 1970, was sometimes mistaken for a country-rock unit, but West, a Jewish native New Yorker, had played the underground Greenwich Village circuit in the 1960s, played on sessions for the Who with Al Kooper, and produced and played on an album with Jack Bruce.

Although Ronnie couldn't have given a hang about hiring a so-called country musician, he was taken with West, a massive man with a gregarious stage presence, and for West the proposed pairing was tantalizing. He auditioned for Ronnie in a New York hotel bar when Skynyrd was in town, and then waited … and waited for the invitation that never came. There never was any reason given, but Ronnie was perhaps unwilling to do what the Eagles had done when they brought in Joe Walsh: make way for a known figure with a resume and better personality. The same may have applied when they also dabbled with hiring Wayne Perkins, a former Muscle Shoals Swamper who had played on scores of sessions—including Jimmy Johnson's sessions with Skynyrd—before forming the band Smith Perkins Smith, touring Europe, and then playing sessions with Bob Marley and the Wailers, Leon Russell, and Eric Clapton. Perkins sat in on a few concerts with Skynyrd but was let go. He couldn't have been too upset, though; the same year, the Rolling Stones hired him to play lead guitar on their
Black and Blue
album, and he later cowrote the soundtrack albums for
Back to School
and
The Karate Kid, Part II
.

It was only as a favor to one of the Skynyrd brood that the right man for the job came along. Seeing these auditions going on, Honkette Cassie Gaines touted her younger brother Steve, an itinerant guitar player born and living in Oklahoma and struggling along on the lounge circuit with a band of his own, Crawdad, which had recorded without success at the Capricorn Studios and Leon Russell's studio in Tulsa. (MCA put the Russell session tapes out in 1988 in an album called
One in the Sun.)
He'd also played with the redoubtable white-soul master Mitch Ryder in Detroit, but now he was going nowhere and was a tough sell. Cassie, a bright and determined woman, met resistance when she suggested they let him jam with them. “Fuck no,” Gary told her. “Nobody jams with us!”

She persisted, though, and when they got to Kansas City on May 11, they relented. Steve Gaines came straight from a club his band was playing nearby, and without hearing them play one note or ever having played any of their songs, he was thrown into the frying pan, joining them onstage for the show they were playing. The first song he had to somehow keep up with was one of the band's staples, the great old Jimmie Rodgers country yodel “T for Texas.” They told Kevin Elson to be ready to cut Gaines's microphone if he fell behind, but as soon as he began, Rossington would recall, “Allen and I looked at each other and our jaws dropped…. He could play anything, chicken' pickin', country blues, hard rock.”

After the show, Gaines shook their hands and left, not expecting to hear from them again. But later the band was assured by Kevin Elson, who had heard Gaines's parts clearly through his headset, “This guy can play.” They did audition a few other guitarists, not only for talent but, as Ronnie said, “to check out their heads, y'know, see if they can put up with our shit.” Apparently none of them made either or both grades, and within a week they called Gaines and told him to get his rear end to another gig, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on May 31. After giving Gaines one more chance to shine or wash out, the band agreed to offer him a contract. Gaines, wasting no time, dumped his own band and signed. For the next month, they would be preparing for the live album, playing a gig here and there, but mainly holed up in Jacksonville rehearsing, and Gaines would become a hugely valuable asset.

Boyish and handsome, as lean and lanky as Rossington and Collins, Gaines was by appearance as innocent as they were grizzled. Born coincidentally on the same day as Ed King, September 14, 1949, he was
married but far more committed to the concept than the rest of the band, being nothing like the ritual philanderers he was now among—and this trait, they seemed to know, would be a welcome change from their usual demented behavior. For a while, he merely kept up, playing quiet rhythm parts. Audiences did not yet know who he was and were a little baffled when Ronnie would call him out by name. But gradually he began to let loose and provide the same depth, fullness, fire—and idiomatic “bluesiness,” as Tom Dowd called it—to their raging guitar assaults. Soon he was playing on those long solo interchanges with Gary and Allen as if he had been there all along, and Ronnie had already decided to push him far more out front than those two, asking him for song material for the next album and telling Steve he would be singing lead on them.

As Ronnie perceived, the timing of Gaines's entry was perfect for such a widening of the Skynyrd borders. Indeed, it seemed that Fate had intervened when the live album had to be scrapped from its original record date, which was to be during their two-day engagement at the Beacon Theatre on April 10 and 11. Before they even got there, there arose, as Dowd once said, “a comedic set of circumstances,” beginning with the issue of Ronnie's throat. He had never cut back on his cigarettes and booze consumption and was paying for it, big time, now that cocaine was also in the equation. He would normally cough up so much bloody phlegm that it was alarming. It was touch and go whether he would be able to sing at all or whether he'd be ordered to rest his savaged vocal cords for a few months. Indeed, at a major gig that year at New Orleans' Sugar Bowl his voice was gone. The band was to share the bill with ZZ Top that night, but when the show began, Skynyrd's roadies were there but not Skynyrd. This happened again at a May 23 concert in Charlotte when Ronnie walked off the stage midshow. By the time of the Beacon shows Ronnie could only sing in a rasp.

But another problem developed when Artimus Pyle, during a stopover in South Carolina, decided to do some hang-gliding off a cliff and promptly broke his leg. The rest of the band was in New York for the Beacon shows, but for three days no one heard from him. When he finally showed up, he was on crutches. That might have sufficed, but
by then Gary had somehow slammed a door on his left hand, breaking his ring finger. Though the live album was shelved, the Beacon shows limped on, with rabid audiences close to seeing a Skynyrd crack-up. During the final show, Allen and Leon blew fuses on their guitars and then their own fuses; in a fit of pique, aping the Who, they smashed their instruments to bits on the stage floor and threw broken pieces into the audience—one piece caused a bloody cut on a girl's face, another expense Pete Rudge had to pay for. Then, during the wrap party, Ronnie punctuated the freak show engagement by “creepin'” Charlie Brusco, right in the jaw.

Dowd and the band hopefully rescheduled the live album recording for July 7–9 during a three-night run at Atlanta's Fox Theater. It was during this interval that Gaines came aboard, and in a real break he would have a place on the very important live double LP. For Gaines, who followed Cassie and their father Bud in moving to Jacksonville with his wife Teresa and their young daughter Corrina, it was a relief to be out of the club grind and playing in an A-list band; and his sense of boyish optimism was a rare departure in a cesspool of fatalism and dark obsessions. “This is the beginning,” he bubbled after his hiring. “I hope to be playing for the rest of my life in some way. My head's cleared out and I can just think about music more.” In many ways, Steve Gaines, who was not a heavy drinker or drug user, seemed like a metaphor for renewal, even rebirth. Ronnie would begin to elucidate some of these same thoughts, seeing in the fresh-faced Gaines something he himself would like to be, if only he could allow himself to give it a try.

I
n 1976 Lynyrd Skynyrd was in full throttle, and so was southern rock. In an ever-lengthening chain, along came analogs like Foghat, Wet Willie, White Witch, Jonathan Edwards, Grinderswitch, Itchy Brother, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and Molly Hatchet. The last, a direct descendant of Skynyrd, had formed in Jacksonville (its name taken from a prostitute who had murdered her clients) and was being managed by Alan Walden's former partner Pat Armstrong, their recordings made in Skynyrd's newly built Riverside Studios, which Donnie Van Zant's .38 Special also used and helped finance. The parallel arc of L.A.-based country rock was evolving, too, its chain made longer by highly talented acts such as the post-Richie Furay incarnation of Poco, Rick Nelson in his post-Stone Canyon Band phase, Little Feat, Firefall, Elvin Bishop, and the bluegrass-rooted New Riders of the Purple Sage. But the kings of the hill were the Eagles and that prickly band of rednecks from Jacksonville whose name had once been unpronounceable but by now had elevated even former gym teacher Leonard Skinner into a lowercase, incidental icon.

Phil Walden, on the other hand, was not enjoying himself as much as Leonard Skinner was thanks in part to the success of the band named after him. With Capricorn Records' meal ticket, the Allman Brothers Band, in decline, Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts began solo careers while Allman's checkered life became a gossip-page favorite during his short-lived marriage to Cher, the chanteuse of cheesy pop. Allman's drug abuse escalated, as did that of the rest of the Allman band, and their
1975 album
Win, Lose or Draw
was a critical and commercial bomb, a prime example of how fickle success can be. A year later, Allman, busted on federal drug charges, turned state's evidence against the band's tour manager Scooter Herring, prompting four Allman bandmates to vow never to work with Allman again—a vow that was easily discarded, given the perpetual touring proceeds brought in by the epochal group long after their prime and even to this day.

There would be no new Allman Brothers product for two years, a period during which it was assumed they had broken up. In the meantime, the hard upward thrust of the band the elder Walden brother had turned down, which his little brother had ushered to success, was the death knell of Capricorn Records. Once, Walden's operational battle cry was that no southern band could possibly burgeon outside of his arc. Now they
had
to. Riding the idiom Phil Walden had foreseen, southern rock was making a fortune for bands scattered on labels mainly outside the South. Foghat, for example, was on the Bearsville label founded by Bob Dylan's former manager Albert Grossman and based near Woodstock, New York. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils were on A&M. The Outlaws, still comanaged by Charlie Brusco and Alan Walden, were going strong at Arista. The way to the promised land for southern rockers was to follow not Phil Walden but the money, the kind handed to them in advances from the big national record houses that dwarfed Capricorn.

Walden was still a highly respected music apparatchik, however. When the South laid on hands for Jimmy Carter during the '76 presidential campaign, country music—country
rock
, not the Nashville brand, which was staunchly Republican—followed Walden's lead and united behind the smiling Georgia peanut farmer. Walden even brought the Allmans together for fund-raising concerts and enlisted the redneck band that had bragged about not being bothered by matters such as Watergate. For Skynyrd, joining this crusade was a half-hearted endeavor at best. What tipped it was their sense of southern pride. While Carter was a former naval officer, engineer, and thriving businessman, his less intellectually gifted, beer-guzzling brother and his silver-haired matriarch with the honeyed drawl were being parodied as typical of a Deep South gooberocracy. And so southern rockers far and wide came to play at a gigantic fund-raiser for Carter on May 1 at Jacksonville's cavernous
Gator Bowl, calling the event the Southern Jam. One by one they laid on hands for
this
far more enlightened “Gov'nor,” first the Allmans, followed by Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, the Outlaws, and .38 Special.