LYNYRD SKYNYRD: Not Even A Boogie Band Is As Simple As It Seems

Early this spring, before 11,000 fans in Tuscaloosa, the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were declared Honorary Lieutenant Colonels in the Alabama State Militia by the governor of that state, George Wallace. Although a fair share of country singers have been so honored, these were the first such "hard rock" stars anyone can name. They were singled out, according to a state press aide in Montgomery, for their declared, willingness to assist the Governor should he, er, require their assistance, to raise funds on college campuses, say. The aide was referring not to charity but to politics, another hard rock first: the public support of Ronnie Van Zant, the trucker's son from Jacksonville, Florida, who is Lynyrd Skynyrd's lead singer, for the Governor's presidential candidacy.

But Vqn Zant's politics were certainly not .the reason that Mark Gaughan, a University of Alabama student from Buffalo, New York, conceived and promoted this chauvinistic shebang. Gaughan just wanted an Alabama-style party, and he thought Lynyrd Skynyrd deserved recognition for yet another hard rock first: "Sweet Home Alabama," a top-10 state song. Of course, in addition to celebrating the state's blue skies and muscle shoals and parrying the insults of Neil Young, this anthem does include a troubling reference to the Governor himself: "In Birmingham they love the Governor (Boo boo boo) / Well we all did what we could do/Well Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you?" But Mark Gaughan says he doesn't vknow what these lines mean, and I believe him, because neither do I. I'll bet the Governor doesn't either. In fact, I'm not even sure Ronnie Van Zant knows. Attached as they are to the most likable music ever recorded by an immensely likable, and very Southern, hard rock band, the question remains a compelling one. But confusing.

Ronnie Van Zant, the Truckers son, supports Wallace? Rockstars for Racism?

Yes, the whole business is confusing. As a loyal New Yorker, I was distressed by those lines until I caught the "Boo boo boo" part, first in concert at the Academy of Music, accompanied by raised fists, and then on record, where somehow I'd never noticed it before. What a relief: they were booing him! How reassuring to explain away the whole stanza as an attack on liberal self-righteousness, maybe the selfrighteousness of Neil Young himself. Just because we're from the south, I could imagine Van Zant saying, that doesn't make us all George Wallaces, and you, you Southern California asshole, did you do all you could do? There were some Southern Californians mixed up in Watergate, isn't that so? Right on, Ronnie. The New South, I felt indicted myself.

If you've been following me closely, however, you have noticed that this explanation leaves one contradiction hanging: Why did the Governor's aide believe Lynyrd Skynyrd would do benefits for the Governor? The answer, I must report, is that Van Zant said so, and he does not seem to have been fibbing. This doesn't mean any benefits will materialize—they often don't. But the gesture remains, and if it confuses you, imagine how it makes me feel. I love Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band that makes music so unpretentious it tempts me to give up subordinate clauses. But before I can get down into this music, I am compelled to construct three paragraphs of tortuous rationalization, and still it's not over. Are even Southern boogie bands less simple than they seem? For Lynyrd Skynyrd does look like the next great one, far ahead of the pack of rebgl-rousers now vying for the domain of the twice-decimated, semiabdicated Allman Brothers.

What makes all the ^rationalization worthwhile, let me make dear, is not that Lynyrd Skynyrd is a great Southern band but that it is a great band which happens to be Southern. Loyalty to a region 'or a genre is a waste these days: quality is where you find it. Nevertheless, once you do find it, the specifics of that quality become charged with meaning. I can't share the pride of the South, where Charlie Daniels has just scored a band-naming hit called "The South's Gonna Do It"— "Be proud you're a rebel "cause the South's gonna do it again." And I don't trust, let alone identify with, the flannelshirts who wave Confederate flags at Lynyrd Skynyrd when they're in New York—the mbst joyously unreconstructed of all Southern bands, Lynyrd Skynyrd flies the stars-and-bars on stage in Dixie itself, but is mannerly enough to put away its colors when touring up North. Still, if I love Lynyrd Skynyrd I'm obliged to come to terms with its Southefnness. Which is why I spent the weekend after Lynyrd Skynyrd joined the Alabama State Militia watching the band play to crowds of 7000-plus in Johnson City, Tennessee, and Roanoke, Virginia.

What has happened here is, that Easy Rider has ended up in the South in a way Dennis Hopper never imagined. The free-ranging pastoral individualism that was at the heart of the pop counter-culture is an American ethos that has always flourished in the South, counter-cultural in the deep and eVen ominous sense that it rebels against values that are analytic, modern, Northern. In the case of the Allman Brothers, who ranged as far as San Francisco before returning to the Georgia woods to bring their music to* gether, fundamentalist rapture takes on a psychedelic aura. The spiritual flow underlying the Allmans" virtuoso raveups, buoying not ohly their exhilarating highs but their tedious lows, is the kind of thing that can induce a Northern teenager to wave a Confederate flag. Lacking both hippie roots and virtuosos, however, post-Allmap soundalikes like Marshall Tucker and Grinder1 switch become transcendency boring and nothing else, except when they get off a good song, and all the auto-hyped nouveau-rednecks in the Academy of Music can't change that.

Lynyrd Skynyrd avoids this treadmill by working for good songs. Lack of virtuosos is a virtue of this staunchly untranscendent band. Its music is structured vertically instead of horizontally, condensed rather than stretched until it disappears. When it rocks, three guitarists and a keyboard player pile elementary riffs and feedback noises into dense combinations that are broken with abbreviated preplanned solos; at quieter momerlts, the spare vocabulary of the oldest Southern folk music is evoked or just plain duplicated. The standard boogie-band beat, soulish but heavier and less propulsive, is slowed down so that the faster tempos become that much more cleansing and climactic. In other words, as Ronnie Van Zant explained to me amiably on the way to the limos at the Johnson City Holiday Inn: "We're more commercial than the Allmans."

At 25, Van Zant has led this band since meeting guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington 10 years ago in high school. As with so many Southern rock musicians, his demeanor both on$tage and off is casual enough to resemble torpor. But it soon becomes clear that he is shrewd, confident, and gifted. Van Zant's specialty is the intelligent deployment of limited resources, beginning with his own husky baritone. Although it is not as flexible or powerful an instrument as, say, Gregg Allman's, it is much more subtle and evocative simply because Vqn Zant permits it to be; where Allman is always straight, shuttling his voice between languor and high emotion, Van Zant feints and dodges, sly one moment arid sleepy the next, becoming boastful or indignant or admonitory with the barest shifts in timbre, or slipping up to falsetto head voice for an extra accent. A similar selectivity is applied to the group's material. The melodies most( often come from the guitarists, but it is Van Zant who shapes them into songs. On the most recent album, Nuthin" Fancy, two or three cuts sound like heavy-metal under funk. Van Zant pleads no intent, but the new catch is typical of his ambition and his talent— "Saturday Night Special," to name one killer, is great heavy metal.

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Van Zant'is so eager to broaden his audience— Nuthin" Fancy almost shipped gold, but there's always platinum—that he sometimes grouses about the band'k Southern rep, but those colors still fly in Dixie. The huge (by population percentage) crowds in Johnson City and Roanoke clearly identified with the band as rebel brothers. At once straighter and rriore hippie (as opposed to more hip) than the Lynyrd Skynyrd crowds at the Academy and the Capitol in N. Y., they had a lot more in common with their band than most rock audiences in 1975, ranging from naively hedonistic (guitarists Collins and Rossington) through sincerely hip (gujtaristEd King, the band's only non-Southerner, and rookie drummer Artimus Pyle, who replaced Robert Burns when Burns fled the pressures of the big time for Jacksonville) to slightly wiggy (keyboard man Billy Powell and bassist Leon Wilkeson). But the focus at both concerts had to be Van Zant himself.

Van Zant's hair is as frizzy as old cornsilk, no Allmanesque tresses, and he has worn the same washed-out black T-shirt three of the four times I've seen him. He is stocky, short, but instead of trying to look taller he performs barefoot (though you have to look to notice) and tends to tilt the mikestand in a way that accentuates his height. Until he gave up hard liquor—he used to drink a fifth or two of J&B a day but stopped cold when convinced it would ruin his throat—he liked to share his bottle with ringsiders. All Southern rock stars play the good old boy, but with Van Zaqt it fe^ls like the real thing. Using his persona to extend the undefended commonhess of his voice, he makes even his most assertively banal ramblin"-man lyrics sound ^crediblelike refcl, defensive boasting rather than showmanship.

Not that all Van Zant's lyrics are banal. Many of them show a droll and/ or baleful distance from the dumber ; truisms of the good old boy ethos, like the faint ridicule of "Mississippi Kid" or the prophetic (for Van Zant) "Poison Whiskey." My favorite is "Gimme Three Steps," which like Charlie Daniels's "Uneasy Rider" is the tale of a man trapped in a saloon with somebody feeling nasty. But whereas Daniels's longhair delights in one-upping the dumb rednecks, Van Zant is just a guy who has to balance valor and discretion like a philosophy professor: "Gimme three steps, mister/And you won't see me no more/" is his offer to the jealous lover with the .44, and when lover-boy turns to bawl out his Linda Lu, Ronnie turns tail out of there, in perfect time to a very catchy hook.

But although all this low-key cleverness is there to be shared with the band's fans, Lynyrd Skynyrd does remain a simple Southern boogie band. And it has to do "Freebird." The same call goes up in the South, where the Allmans are almost taken for granted and Lynyrd Skynyrd accepted on its own terms, and in the North, where the Allmans are still agrarian exotics and Lynyrd Skynyrd still an Allmans surrogate: "FREE BIRD!" "Freebird" is Skynyrd's automatic encore, a tribute to the late Duane Allman and the late Berry Oakley. It combines an assertively banal ramblin"-man lyric with a nonvirtuoso rave-up in which all three guitars soar in effortless kinetic interplay. A perfect example of technopastoral counter-culture transcendence. Its central image: male freebirds like Duane and Berry flying off on their motorcycles.

Ah, freebirds. Behind the arena in Roanoke, there was a sparrow that couldn't fly, and Leon Wilkeson decided to investigate. Wilkeson is a zany who makes a lot of jokes about oral sex and wears a Boer War helmet that he calls his Nazi hat because he bought it in a shop called the Blunderbuss. He grabbed the bird just before it could hop under some crating, then cradled it sweetly in his hands while I went off for peanuts. By the time I got back it was soundcheck time and Leon decided to free the bird—not on the asphalt parking areji, where we'd found it, but on a patch/of lawn. The bird hopped off, very fast, spurning our peanuts even when we tossed them in its projected path. Leon returned to the arena and I watched the bird, which ate an insect or two before hopping back onto the asphalt.

We are cynical about such stuff up North, but in the South they like to believe. The comfort and tradition of the place is enough to make a person expect that freedom is just around some corner of time. Every rock and roller knows that the fruits of such faith have invigorated us up here,, and yet we continue to ask our stupid questions. Van Zant, an opinionated type, has even written a song about it. "Don't Ask Me No Questions," it's called, but its ending is conciliatory: "If you wanna talk fishin"/Well l guess that'll be ok."

It was to forestall stupid questions, I think, that Van Zant brushed off the Alabama militia business when I first met him. "We say "Boo boo boo," " he reminded me indignantly. Our conversations were stiff until I complained politely about a kink in the Johnson City show that had also bothered him. He seemed to like that. In Roanoke the kink was gone, and the energy level of the concert palpably higher. Afterwards Van Zant and I were talking in his room at the Holiday Inn and I asked him how the Wallace benefit rumor had started. Van Zant told me the rumor was true ^ he was sure three or four band members would be happy to-h£lp the Wallace campaign if it got off the ground. V

This confounded me mightily; my question had been nothing more than a reporter's double-check. I asked lamely about the "Boo boo boo," and his explanation, which seemed to imply that the jeers were intended in softie abstrusely satirical way, made-no sense to me, but I didn't have the heart to pursue it.

"Of course I don't agree with everything the man says, I don't like what he says about colored peoplg." I believe that; Van Zant's "Things Goin" On" indicts conditions in the black ghetto all the more powerfully for being "rather unspecific. "Chances are he won't even want us, he doesn't have much use for longhairs, y'know." I said nothing. "Course the real reason I'm doin" it is my Daddy would whup me if I didn't." I began to talk about Wallace lies and a roadie interjected a few arguments. "Aw shit, I don't know anything about politics anyway," Van Zant said, and the discussion closed.

That may be close to the truth. In the cool, questioning light of reason I halfbelieve that stuff about his Daddy, too. But more important is a fact half-remembered from 1968—that most Wallace voters listed RFK as their second choice. Van Zant is opinionated: I like that. Better he should name his man than slither off into some apolitical void. His populist instincts extend from his music itself, so much less mystical than the run of Southern boogie, to a gesture the band made in Detroit, where tickets were distributed free to those with proof of unemployment. While it would be nice if Ronnie would turn on to Fred Harris, I can't blame him for liking George Wallace's image. And 1 don't really expect him to peer beneath it like some damn Yankee. ®

(Reprinted from the Village Voice)