The explosive rise of Lynyrd Skynyrd, America’s greatest southern rock band

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In spring 1969, the British group Free rocked up in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, to play the local ice rink during their first US tour. Free’s lead vocalist Paul Rodgers came from Middlesborough which, like Jacksonville, was an industrial city noted for its steelworks and chemical plants. Free’s frontman also had a reputation for solving trouble with his fists. It was something he shared in common with a 21-year-old singer and local tearaway named Ronnie Van Zant, who turned up to watch the show.

Stood alongside Van Zant were two friends, teenage guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington. The three had been playing in a group together since high school. But witnessing Free changed their lives forever. “We didn’t even know their songs,” says Gary Rossington. “But we watched them set up with their beat-up old Marshalls, and we thought they were cool ’cos they had long hair. And, boy, when they played, we were just floored. It freaked us out.”

After the show, the three went back to Van Zant’s apartment and stayed up all night, talking. “Free were the first guys that really made us get serious,” reveals Rossington. “After we saw them we started rehearsing a lot harder.”

Like Paul Rodgers in Free, Ronnie Van Zant’s no-nonsense attitude helped drive Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ronnie was a wayward child raised in the tough self-styled ‘Shantytown’ district of Jacksonville. His father Lacy (whose name Ronnie had tattooed on his left arm) was a truck driver and amateur boxer. “He used to say to me, ‘Ronnie, if a man says he’s never been beaten, that’s just because he hasn’t fought enough times’,” Van Zant told American rock magazine Creem.

“We were playing little league baseball when we all first met,” says Rossington. “Then The Beatles came out, and the Stones, and all these British groups.” By then, Van Zant and Rossington were pupils at Jacksonville’s Robert H Lee High School. It was the ‘invasion’ of the US airwaves by The Beatles, Kinks and Stones in 1964 that prompted them to team up with another pupil, drummer Bob Burns.  The three would meet in Burns’ parents’ garage and thrash away at the latest pop hits. Before long, Van Zant decided they needed a bass player and another guitarist. Enter: Larry Junstrom and Allen Collins.

Playing local dances and high school parties, the group went through countless names – The Wild Cats, The Noble Five, Conqueror Worm, The One Per Cent – before settling on Lynyrd Skynyrd. “We had this gym teacher called Leonard Skinner,” explained Van Zant in 1974. “He always made Allen, Bob and Gary get haircuts. When we picked the group’s name, we thought of the teacher and just changed the spelling.”

“Actually it was just me who was taught by Skinner,” says Rossington. “The other guys weren’t in his class but they knew of him because he always kicked guys out of school for having their hair too long. We had little bangs, like Beatle cuts. We were playing school dances and parties and stuff, so we tried to have a little long hair. I’d put Vaseline in my hair and comb it back like a greaser. And then when we got out of school we’d comb it down into bangs and try to look hip.”

The band announced the name change while playing a local dance. Rossington: “All the people there were from the same school, so we said, ‘We’re not gonna be The One Per Cent anymore, we’re calling the band Leonard Skinner’. Everybody laughed and clapped and thought it was cool.”

Whether inside or outside the band, their lead singer had a formidable reputation. A boxer like his father, Ronnie Van Zant’s final days at Robert H Lee turned especially sour when he was expelled after being arrested for attempted murder. “It was a street fight,” he said later. “It wasn’t my fault, and I was acquitted.”

“Ronnie was the leader,” states Rossington. “He was the oldest, and back when you’re that young and still a kid and somebody’s two years older, they’re already driving and dating girls. So he was like our big brother. Allen’s mother was divorced and my father had died when I was 10, so we didn’t have fathers or older brothers. Ronnie was kind of it.”

After two years of playing Satisfaction and Day Tripper, Skynyrd found inspiration closer to home. Brothers Gregg and Duane Allman from  Macon, Georgia had been playing the local bars, clubs and naval bases in various guises since 1963. Van Zant and co saw them play Jacksonville in 1967 and decided to quit school and concentrate on music there and then.

“The Allmans were three or four years older than us,” says Rossington, “and we thought they were so great.” The British beat boom of three years earlier had now been succeeded by the harder likes of The Who, Cream and Hendrix. Duane and Gregg’s group, later known as The Allman Brothers Band, reflected the sea change. The Allmans merged psychedelia and heavy rock with soul, country and jazz, creating the prototype for what would soon be called Southern rock, a sound reflecting the disparate influences of musicians from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Having found a rehearsal space, which they nicknamed the Hell House, Skynyrd began practising harder than ever. Rossington: “We were in a one-room cabin with a stove that didn’t work and a bathroom that didn’t work, on a farm with pigs and cows and a river out back. We rented it, because we were too loud to play around houses.”

Van Zant instigated a strict routine: putting the band through their paces for anything up to 16 hours a day. The pressure was too much for some; Larry Junstrom soon bailed. Eventually, a teenage Beatles obsessive named Leon Wilkeson took the bassist’s job, after being recruited by Ronnie’s sister. For a time, Bob Burns was joined by a second drummer, Ricky Medlocke (now guitarist in the current Skynyrd line-up). When Burns quit for a time, Medlocke stayed, but would eventually leave Skynyrd to form his own band, Blackfoot.

In time, Skynyrd came to the attention of Alan Walden, a local promoter and co-founder of the Southern rock label Capricorn Records. Walden agreed to manage them. But Van Zant was wary of signing to Capricorn. The label was already home to fellow Southern rock groups Wet Willie, the Marshall Tucker Band and The Allman Brothers Band. The Allmans’ latest album, Idlewild South, had made the US Top 40. Ronnie was wary of Skynyrd being in the Allmans’ shadow.

Salvation came in the form of Al Kooper, Bob Dylan collaborator and co-founder of the soul-rock band Blood Sweat & Tears. Brooklyn-born Kooper may have been a Yankee, but as soon as he came across Skynyrd playing an Atlanta club, he was smitten. With the backing of MCA, he set up his own Sounds Of The South label as a rival to Capricorn, and signed them. “The Rolling Stones can dance around and have Southern accents, but these are the real thing,” Kooper raved to Disc & Music Echo. “These boys have a shack in the Florida swamps... In their spare time, they chase alligators.”

In spring 1972, Skynyrd descended on Doraville, Georgia’s Studio 1 to record their debut album, (Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd), with Al Kooper producing. By now the line-up had expanded to include a third guitarist, California-born Ed King, previously of the psychedelic group Strawberry Alarm Clock, and keyboard player Billy Powell, a Jacksonville boy who had been working for Skynyrd’s road crew.

Kooper’s mentoring was what Skynyrd needed (Van Zant: “Al’s pretty set in his ways. Sometimes we had to fight for a compromise”), but there was a downside. Bassist Leon Wilkeson walked out during recording, returning later, but leaving Ed King to play most of his parts on the album.

Yet for all the bust-ups and creative friction, Pronounced…, released in August 1973, was a powerful first move. Gimme Three Steps and Tuesday’s Gone proved they could switch from rabble-rousing hard rock to a thoughtful ballad in a moment, without sounding remotely compromised. Van Zant’s Gator Country drawl placed it firmly in the South, but Skynyrd had created their own strand of everyman rock’n’roll that acknowledged blues, country, the Allmans and even the spacious hard rock of Free. As Al Kooper revealed: “Some things are outright tributes to Free. There’s a track called Simple Man, which they wrote right at Free.”

The album’s signature tune, though, was Free Bird: an epic track that would quickly come to define Lynyrd Skynyrd – and continues to do so today. But the nine-minute-and-six-second guitar extravaganza had the simplest of beginnings. “Allen had those chords and the melody of the song,” recalls Rossington. “But Ronnie would say, ‘There’s too many chord changes – I can’t sing to that.’ One day we were just sitting around at rehearsal and Allen started playing these chords – it wasn’t even a song – and finally Ronnie said, ‘Play it again’. And all of a sudden they wrote it real quick. It’s just a simple love song, really. But it turned into a lot bigger than we had thought.”

In November, Skynyrd began an arena tour of the US, opening for The Who. “It was a challenge, a competition,” said Ronnie. Onstage, Free Bird took on a life of its own, strung out for anything up to 12 minutes, with Rossington, Collins and King huddled at the front of the stage, trading solos. Offstage, Skynyrd drank and fought so hard that The Who’s singer Roger Daltrey – no stranger to a brawl himself – felt moved to intervene. “He took me aside and scolded me,” Van Zant told Creem. “Telling me that I don’t have to do this shit.” But Daltrey’s advice would go unheeded. For now, Skynyrd were having too good a time to consider slowing down.

Coming off the road, Skynyrd and Al Kooper flew straight to Los Angeles in January ’74 to begin the next album. Second Helping appeared in April. Gnarly blues-rockers such as Don’t Ask Me No Questions and Working For MCA saw Ronnie griping about ‘Yankee slickers’ and ‘pencil-pushers’, while the opening track, Sweet Home Alabama, was a love letter to the American South that would become both a big hit and the subject of even bigger misunderstanding.

Ronnie’s lyric, ‘Well I heard Neil Young talk about it/ I heard ole Neil put it down’, was written in response to Young’s 1970 song Southern Man, in which he’d referred to slavery and racism in the South. Critics and fans sensed a feud. But while Young’s lyric may have needled Ronnie, who maintained that racism was widespread across America and not just in the South, he was a huge Neil Young fan.

Sweet Home Alabama also namechecked George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and supporter of segregation, who was now running for President. Van Zant’s jibe at Wallace – ‘In Birmingham, they love the governor/boo boo boo’ – was lost on some, though, who only heard the first part of the line. Rossington: “George Wallace was a racist. Nobody liked him.”

That summer, Sweet Home Alabama became a US Top 10 hit, with Second Helping peaking at No.12. In July, Skynyrd played to their biggest crowd yet: 350,000 at the Ozark Music Festival in Missouri, on a bill that also included Ted Nugent, The Eagles and Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.

Keen to capitalise on the breakthrough, MCA put out Free Bird as a single in November. It reached Number 19, just as the band flew across the globe for a run of Scandinavian and European shows. It was their first time out of the US. Bizarrely, Skynyrd found themselves on a bill with Queen, then at the height of their androgynous pomp. “Skynyrd couldn’t believe it when they saw us four caked in make-up and dressed like women,” said Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor. It was an unlikely pairing. In Germany, Skynyrd’s audience mostly comprised GIs from the local army bases. As Queen guitarist Brian May later admitted: “We got nothing back.”

In November, Skynyrd arrived in the UK, where they were due to open for Dutch prog-rockers Golden Earring. “We’ll kick any band’s ass,” stated Van Zant. Wisely, the promoter flipped the bill. Skynyrd headlined London’s Rainbow Theatre, saluting one of their British heroes by encoring with Eric Clapton’s Crossroads. “We once collected Coke and soda bottles for weeks to earn enough money to see this man,” Ronnie informed the audience. “To us, he is God,”

The group that had once aped the Stones and The Beatles, and stared wide-eyed at Free, were now filling the very same venues as their idols. But Skynyrd had no time to celebrate, and were back in the studio in the new year – albeit minus Bob Burns. On tour, the drummer had received a dressing down from Ronnie after playing badly. Later that night, he chased the group’s tour manager with an axe. “Bob blew a 50-amp fuse,” said Van Zant.

Burns was replaced on Skynyrd’s third album by Kentucky-born Artimus Pyle. Released in March 75,  Nuthin’ Fancy rode the wave of goodwill created by Sweet Home Alabama and went Top 10. The album’s opening track, a cautionary tale of guns and trouble called Saturday Night Special, gave them another Top 30 hit, but failed to match Sweet Home…’s success. Before they could draw breath,  Skynyrd were back on the tour bus. A 90-day, 61-city trek, aptly nicknamed ‘The Torture Tour’, would take them across the US and Europe. But not every band member would last the journey.

Van Zant knew that the stakes were higher than ever. Their direct competition was now The Who, the Stones and Led Zeppelin. On stage, with the brim of his hat pulled down low and bare feet visible beneath frayed flared jeans (“I love to feel that stage burn”), Ronnie paced the boards, gripping the microphone stand like it was a makeshift weapon, marking out his turf.

After the show, harsh words, and often a beating, would ensue if he thought any of the band had screwed up. Hotel suites were wrecked, bottles broken over roadies’ heads and Billy Powell lost two front teeth when Ronnie punched him out for showing off too much one night during Free Bird. Fuelled by beer, vodka, Jack Daniel’s and Chivas Regal, the pressure-cooker environment increased. “Nobody dares say nothing to me,” Van Zant told a visiting journalist. “They just stay away from me, ‘cos that’s when I get mean.”

Halfway through the dates, Ed King cornered the singer and told him that the band was burnt out, and they should consider cancelling some shows. They also had a deadline looming for yet another album. At first Ronnie was sympathetic. But Skynyrd were now being managed by The Who’s former tour manager, Peter Rudge, described by one close associate as “a smart, fast-talking, street-wise Cambridge University graduate”. Together, Rudge and Van Zant were a daunting pair.

“Rudge put a wedge between me and Ronnie,” said Ed King. “Ronnie was drinking a lot, and I was into drugs pretty good. So, in the middle of the night, I just walked out. I had good reason to leave. But I should never have done it the way I did it.”

Taking his standard bullish approach, Van Zant insisted it was ‘business as usual’, with Rossington and Collins made to work harder and cover King’s guitar parts. As such, it was a six- rather than seven-piece Skynyrd that rolled into Britain that summer. The UK visit included a headline show at the Hammersmith Odeon and a performance at London’s BBC TV Theatre, broadcast on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Even a guitarist down, the group ripped through I Ain’t The One, Sweet Home Alabama and Free Bird with total conviction.

At the BBC Theatre, Skynyrd also premiered three new songs. Somehow in those rare weeks off during the ‘Torture Tour’ they had found time to make a new record. Gimme Back My Bullets had been pieced together over the summer and early autumn in Los Angeles and Georgia. Besides the departed Ed King there was another change in personnel. Al Kooper had been replaced by Eric Clapton’s producer Tom Dowd. “We were fightin’ all the time with Al in the studio,” explained Van Zant.

“When we found out that Tom did [Derek & The Dominos’] Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, we just went head over heels for him,” said Rossington. “We called him ‘Father Dowd’.” Gimme Back My Bullets was released in February ’76. Double Trouble, Searching and the title track’s heavy funk were among some of Skynyrd’s best work, but the album didn’t sell as well as hoped. In the meantime, their appetite for trouble seemed to have grown. The LP cover shot of the band resembled a police identity parade. Tellingly, on the day of the album’s release, Van Zant called Tom Dowd from a jail cell, informing him that he’d just been arrested, for the 12th time.

Something had to change. Van Zant finally admitted that Lynyrd Skynyrd missed Ed King and needed a third guitarist. Backing singer Cassie Gaines suggested her brother Steve. Twenty-six-year-old Missouri-born Steve Gaines auditioned one night in Kansas City, playing a beautiful slide solo on Call Me The Breeze, a JJ Cale tune that Skynyrd had covered on Second Helping. Other players had been auditioned, but there was no contest. Better still, Gaines also sang and wrote his own songs. His arrival reinvigorated Rossington and Collins, but also Van Zant, who’d now gained a songwriting partner and a co-vocalist. “Steve Gaines breathed life back into Lynyrd Skynyrd,” explained Artimus Pyle.

Out on the road that summer, Ronnie was determined to curtail the violence and booze and drug-fuelled chaos – his own included. There was still a long way to go, but it was a start. “I don’t get into many fights now, not me, ’cos, fuck it, you get hurt – hit on the throat and you miss a gig. Cut the guitar player’s fingers, and there goes Lynyrd Skynyrd for a while,” he told Melody Maker. “We’ve had enough of it. It’s been carried a little bit too far.”

“Onstage, Lynyrd Skynyrd are as white hot as a band can get,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe later, of that summer’s performances. The band that had once watched enviously as Free tore up Jacksonville’s local ice rink had now long surpassed their idols. After all the fights, bloodshed, turmoil and tension, 1976 was shaping up to be Lynyrd Skynyrd’s best year yet.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Lynyrd Skynyrd