We remember Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ed King who passed away on Thursday, August 23 with a look back from our archives. —Ed.
When people—and by people I mean people who can’t believe a person of reasonable intelligence could possibly like the rednecks in Lynyrd Skynyrd—ask me why I love the band, I always tell them the same thing. I tell them that Lynyrd Skynyrd was the best Southern rock band ever, Fight Club, a future meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that was never held, and rock’s greatest tragedy all rolled into one. Of course it doesn’t convince them for all kinds of reasons, including Skynyrd’s prominent display of the Confederate battle flag, its contentious celebration of the state of Alabama and mock feud with Neil Young, “Free Bird”—you name it. Some people just love hating Lynyrd Skynyrd, and I wish I knew why.
I get the “Free Bird” bit—it’s long and goes on for a really long time and its been played to death on the radio—but as for the rest of it, I say phooey. I don’t believe—Stars and Bars and pro-Alabama song notwithstanding—that Lynyrd Skynyrd had a racist bone in its body, and people consistently fail to hear female back-up singers Clydie King, Merry Clayton, and Sherlie Matthews singing “Boo boo boo” after Ronnie Van Zant sings “In Birmingham they love the guv’nor” in “Sweet Home Alabama,” perhaps because they simply cannot conceive of a bunch of ignorant rednecks like Lynyrd Skynyrd possessing a sense of irony.
But I always thought Ronnie Van Zant was one highly intelligent guy, albeit rough around the edges and when intoxicated prone to punching people in the face and on occasion even attempting to push them out of airplanes in mid-flight. But I always found Ronnie’s foibles amusing, endearing even, and the fact is that when he wasn’t knocking Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell’s teeth out—twice—he was writing great and nuanced songs in the vein of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, only set to a rock beat. And still he couldn’t win; the same people (Yankee hipsters all) who think loving Merle and Waylon proves their open-mindedness still despise Skynyrd. As Robert Christgau noted when MCA released the compilation Gold and Platinum in 1979, “It’s not fair, really–everybody who was dumb enough to dismiss them as another pack of redneck boogie freaks now gets to catch up.” But most of ‘em failed to catch up even then, and what is to be said about such adamant close-mindedness except their loss?
But screw ‘em all, cuz Van Zant, as I knew and Christgau knew and Greil Marcus knew, could surprise you—while the frail fossils, knee-jerk jingoists, and Second Amendment nuts who continue to roam the continent pretending to be Lynyrd Skynyrd for financial gain put out truly repugnant LPs like 2009’s God & Guns, Ronnie sat himself down and wrote an anti-gun song about Saturday night specials, the inexpensive and easy-to-buy handguns that helped fuel crime, especially in low-income neighborhoods. In this respect Van Zant was some 30 years ahead of the NAACP, which filed suit against the manufacturers of such weapons in 2003.
I’m writing this because today marks the 37th anniversary of the tragic crash of the Convair CV-300 bearing Lynyrd Skynyrd from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana on the evening of October 20, 1977. Three Skynyrd members—Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and his sister and “Honkette” Cassie Gaines—died when their plane skimmed the treetops (it sounded like “someone hitting the outside of the plane with hundreds of baseball bats,” according to Powell) and finally slammed into a swamp near Gillsburg, Mississippi. (Cue “Swamp Music.”) Basically, the plane had run out of fuel. The precise reason for this is still contentious, although the National Transportation Safety Board attributed it to “crew inattention to the fuel supply.” If you’re too lazy to read one of the handful of books about the band but want a rundown of the tragedy, I suggest you run out and buy a copy of the Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera. It’s a five-star LP album about Dixie, dread, and the Skynyrd dead, and if it doesn’t give you pause and cause you to reevaluate your opinion on the greatest band to ever come from South of the Mason-Dixon Line, nothing will.
Anyway, I spent a good hour Friday trying in vain to contact Johnny Mote, the farmer who turned tragedy into farce when he saw Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle approaching his farmhouse after the crash, looking like a blood-drenched hippie, and promptly shot him. Or maybe he didn’t. The most plausible story is that Mote saw Pyle—who later said, “I’ve got long hair and I look like Charles Manson and I’m covered with blood”—and fired his shotgun into the air to warn off the fearful apparition, managing to pepper Pyle with some stray buckshot in the process. Talk about your days from Hell.
In any event, Van Zant was dead, and Lynyrd Skynyrd died with him. And this just three days after the release of the band’s Street Survivors LP, whose initial cover depicted the band engulfed in flames and came complete with an eerily prescient song about dying young in “That Smell.” But when Skynyrd released Second Helping their rendezvous with that Mississippi swamp was still 3 years in the future, and the band was feeling its oats following the success of their 1973 debut (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd), which spawned “Free Bird” and a handful of other instant classics.
The band went through some changes prior to recording Second Helping. Ed King, ex- of the Strawberry Alarm Clock, had filled in for bassist Leon Wilkeson who left the band during the sessions for Skynyrd’s debut but returned in time for that album’s cover photograph. Wilkeson’s return allowed the Yankee King (he was from California, and helped write “Incense and Peppermints”) to become the band’s third guitarist, and it made a whale of a difference, as King was the fella who produced the guitar parts (he says they came to him in a dream) as well as the great solo in “Sweet Home Alabama,” and who helped write many of the band’s other greatest songs.
And it’s King who opens Second Helping, by counting off “1,2,3” before Van Zant utters one of rock’s most iconic ad libs, “Turn it up.” I always thought he was telling the listener to turn it up, but it turns out he was talking about the headphone volume. In any event, “Sweet Home Alabama” is an odd tune for a bunch of Floridians to have come up with, but they—and this is another great irony of the North-South divide—wrote it out of sheer gratitude towards the people they met there, who Skynyrd expected to hassle them because of their long hair or write them off as no-good hippies but were the picture of welcoming gentility instead.
As for the song, I don’t have much to say about it except it’s a classic, from its great opening guitar riff to Powell’s natty piano work to King’s awe-inspiring solo, which was played in the key of G even though the song was in the key of D, and which producer Al Kooper (the Northern Dylan protégé who discovered them, signed them, and said of the first time he heard “Free Bird,” “Every kid in America wants to hear this… Some little kid in the middle of the country wants to put this on in his bedroom and run head first into the wall”) didn’t like because he thought it sounded like John Coltrane suddenly appearing in the middle of a country song. But the band liked it and it stayed, as did all of Van Zant’s cool interjections, my favorite being the one where he sings, “Here come, Alabama,” after which King plays that mighty solo of his while the female back-up singers stretch out the “Alabama.”
“I Need You” is a heavy, lumbering number, with some big blues licks taking up the first minute before Van Zant finally comes in. It’s my least favorite song on the LP, because it lacks a compelling melody and goes on for seven minutes to boot, but it includes some stellar guitar work, including a pair of excellent solos, and Van Zant’s at the top of his game vocally. Meanwhile “Don’t Ask Me No Questions” finds Van Zant in confrontational mode, and opens with another great guitar riff that gets ratcheted up tempo-wise when Powell comes in playing some honky-tonk piano. The horns that Kooper suggested add flavor to the tune, and the way Van Zant pronounces “you” in “So don’t ask me no questions/And I won’t tell you no lies” makes the song worth listening to all by itself. Basically Ronnie doesn’t want to be interrogated (by rock journalists? Friends? He doesn’t say) when he’s not on the road, although if you want to talk to him about fishing, well, he probably won’t knock out your teeth or put a gun to your head and threaten to blow your brains out, as he once did to drummer Bob Burns because Burns didn’t want to play a certain song at a rehearsal. It’s a lively tune, and definitely (now that we’re talking fishing) a keeper. And did I mention it includes yet another great guitar solo?
“Working for MCA” gives the middle finger to the band’s record label, and it doesn’t open, it explodes, with the guitars firing off big bursts while Van Zant lets loose with a literally frightening growl that really reinforces the notion that he was not an individual to be crossed. The song’s a fast hard rocker and I love everything about it—Powell’s great keyboard solo, Van Zant’s vocals, the excellent pair of back-to-back guitar solos that’ll work their way into your brain—except the chorus, which has never fitted the song in my humble opinion. That said it’s still a great rock song, and a masterpiece of sustained guitar work, and Van Zant’s lyrics (“9000 dollars, that’s all we could win/But we smiled at the Yankee Slicker with a big ol’ Southern grin/They’re gonna take me out to California gonna make me a superstar/ Just pay me all of my money and mister maybe you won’t get a scar”) remain both a cautionary tale for aspiring bands and a threat from a guy who didn’t utter empty threats.
“The Ballad of Curtis Loew” is a delicious slice of country pie with a deliriously great chorus. Lots of cool country guitar, it tells the story of a young Van Zant befriending an old black man who could play the hell out of the dobro, “the finest picker to ever play the blues.” Ed King’s slide guitar work in the song is otherworldly from beginning to end—his solo is both nuanced and lovely—and evidently both Kooper and Van Zant thought it was hilarious, their giving the song’s black hero the name of the Jewish owner of a famous theater chain. Follow-up “Swamp Music” is a rollicking piece of country funk, with the rhythm section keeping things chugging along while the guitarists kick ass. The tune features yet another fantastic solo—these guys just toss ‘em off, and the amazing thing, as Kooper noted with amazement, is that they actually composed them note for note beforehand rather than just let ‘er rip in the studio—while Van Zant sings “Swamp, swamp, swamp music/Swamp, swamp, swamp music” on the choruses and declares he’d sooner live with his old singing hound dog (“When the hound dog start barkin’/ Sounds like ol’ Son House singin’ the blues”) for the rest of his life than live in the city.
The very hard rocking but melodic “The Needle and the Spoon” is, in my opinion, the best anti-heroin song ever written. Or the best musically in any event. It comes out of the starting gates like gangbusters with a cool guitar riff then kicks into overdrive, with Van Zant singing “I’ve seen a lot of people who thought they were cool/But then again Lord, I’ve seen a lot of fools” before crying, “Lord, they’re gonna bury you boy” before he sings an echoing “I know, I know, I know.” And of course there’s another powerful but subtle guitar solo, and I have to say I’m not sure I’ve heard another album with such a high ratio of great guitar solos. As for “Call Me the Breeze,” it sounds like J.J. Cale’s original on steroids, thanks in large part to Burns’ powerhouse drumming. The band takes Cale’s laidback shuffle, speeds it up, and piles guitars atop horns atop more guitars, and what can I say except this baby should be arrested for speeding. The guitars sting and bite, Van Zant tosses in a cool ad lib or two, and the midsection features a frantic guitar solo set to handclaps that’ll sweep the toupee off your head. Billy Powell plays a sweet piano solo to that great rhythm, and then the horns come in, and the guitars are uniformly fantastic. And Van Zant’s extended “Whoo” at the very end is a great close both to a great song and a great album.
The tragedy of Lynyrd Skynyrd is we’ll never know what gems Ronnie Van Zant might have conjured up had he lived, because Ronnie Van Zant was Lynyrd Skynyrd, all of the band’s great top-notch players notwithstanding. He had the heart of a rocker and the soul of a country musician, and as Robert Christgau wrote in the aftermath of that tragic plane crash, “I mourn him not the least because I suspect he had more good music left in him than Bing and Elvis put together.” Me, I think he had more good music left in him than the Rolling Stones and all the Beatles put together, and that’s to say nothing of all the great music he left behind. I can’t hear “Tuesday’s Gone” without getting goosebumps, and I have never and will never tire of “Sweet Home Alabama,” and Second Helping, with the exception of “I Need You,” is every bit as great in its way as The Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters. And to come full circle I’ve come to accept that many people will continue to write off Lynyrd Skynyrd as a band of hillbilly bigots, but such people should look in the mirror.
Van Zant was a complex man, intelligent but a psychopath when drunk, and he seemed to have the foresight that his time on this earth was limited, which is perhaps why he drove his band so hard. “You won’t find me in an old folk’s home” he sings in the great “You Got That Right,” and according to Artimus Pyle he rolled his eyes at Pyle good-naturedly when the doomed plane’s co-pilot showed up in the passenger’s cabin to announce that they were going to have to make a crash landing and should strap themselves in and put their heads between their knees. Van Zant did neither, but grabbed a pillow and laid himself down on the floor of the plane instead. Because he was a fatalist, and knew that there are “things goin’ on that you don’t know,” one of which is if your number is up, it’s up.
The best obituaries of both Van Zant and Lynyrd Skynyrd come from the Drive-By Truckers’ eerie and moving “Angels and Fuselage” (“The engines have stopped now/And we all know we’re going down/Last call for alcohol/Wish we could have one more round”) and oddly enough, Warren Zevon’s demented ode to country living, “Play It All Night Long.” Zevon sings, “Sweet Home Alabam’/Play that dead band’s song/Turn those speakers up full blast/Play it all night long.” I think Van Zant would have seen the humor in the song. He may even have said—and I like to think these were his final words as the Convair CV-300 bearing Lynyrd Skynyrd from Greenville to Baton Rouge was going down—“Turn it up.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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