Nothing is as sleepy as a one-highway Southern town, particularly on Sunday, when the dry laws postpone any serious public drinking until after sundown. The landscape is dusty and dry, still shimmering with midday heat. At an intersection near the Ramada Inn—where I'm due to join Lynyrd Skynyrd for the last leg of their deep South tour—a solitary Texaco station squats in the shade, adorned with cracked yellow paint, dented gas pumps and faded advertisements for minnows and worms.

Half an hour after their Dothan, Alabama, concert, the Skynyrd troupe roamed the Ramada Inn parking lot looking for double-trouble. Twentyfour thousand dollars of road receipts, cash and valuables were stolen the night before in Savannah, Georgia, and tonight's audience offered up only the most lukewarm applause. The band would prefer to forget their problems and enjoy themselves. How they accomplish this is another matter entirely. If your tastes run towards fear and loathing, fights and rot-gut liquor, then you're tuned in to the right channel.

Back at Dothan's version of Fernando's Hideaway, the Skynyrd rhythm section worked off some post-concert tension with a spirited set of soul standards, including Jr. Walker's "Road Runner," "Route 66" and "I'm A Rocker," an old Howlin' Wolf-style shuffle which Leon punctuated with a wicked chicken wolf bassline.

"Anyone that's got a complaint," Artimus crowed drunkenly from his drum mike, "you just send up a $100 bill with it." He burped and added, "And watch out for old Leon. He ain't figured out how to work the mike yet." They finished with "Sweet Home Alabama," the one song that filled the dance floor with smiling couples.

For Lynyrd Skynyrd, flirtation with violence is something of a hobby. If the band had not been born with such an awesome reservoir of musical talent and ambition, they could have easily flourished as checkered flag stock car aces. They are like a wet, sputtering stick of dynamite with a short fuse— there's no telling when their self-destructive sound and fury will next erupt.

As the band relaxed and played poker on their twin-engine prop plane heading from Dothan to Athens, Georgia, I ran through a check list of the group's collective brushes with death. They've wrecked more cars than they have gold albums.

Billy Powell, the band's pianist, suffered a well-publicized cycle wreck which postponed a previous tour and left hobbled for months afterward from bruises, breaks and internal injuries. Artimus smashed his car into the side of a mountain. Gary Rossington, the group's sleepy-eyed guitarist, recently crashed his car into a tree, then ricocheted through a nearby garage (Van Zant, who adapts many lyrics from real life escapades, used this particularly gory wreck as the basis for "That Smell," a riveting but gruesome tale describing the odor of rotting, burning flesh.)

"On giving up drinking: I don't know how long It'll last...but It's the first time we've seen our audience in eight years."

Allan Collins, who fills out the group's awesome lead guitar triumverate, still sported a bruised torso, two black eyes and a hairline fracture of the skull. He drove his new jeep off a bridge into a nearby embankment. Over breakfast, he sheepishly pulled into a flesh down from under his right eye, which has a piece of plastic surgically implanted where the bone once was. This is what the Eagles meant by life in the fast lane.

If the Allman Brothers' extended lyrical jams recalled the lazy aristocratic charm of Faulkner's Sutpen clan, the Skynyrd's brash celebrations of barroom brawls ("Gimme Three Steps") and regional pride ("Sweet Home Alabama") owe much to the dirt poor arrogance and wet-tar endurance of the Snopes.

Skynyrd's most evocative songs (Van Zant writes the lyrics—one or more of the guitarists collaborate on the music) are snub-nosed, blood stained boasts like "Gimme Back My Bullets" and "Saturday Night Special." The latter song ostensibly denounces hand guns, but its temptingly erotic imagery romanticizes road-house revenge with chilling effectiveness.

"Two feet come a creeping like a black cat do, two bodies are laying naked..." Van Zant growled, "and while a man's reaching for his trousers, shoots him full of .38 holes."

"I confess," Van Zant said with a knowing wink, "those songs are there to cause some controversy. I like looking for trouble. I mean, I always dug Neil Young (subject of some criticism in "Sweet Home Alabama") and we've been friends ever since the song came out. It was just there to provoke a little excitement. Ya gotta catch the audience off guard to keep 'em listening."

Van Zant is far tamer on the road than recent exaggerated press accounts would like us to believe. ("Damn, you're not gonna make up more brawl stories," he muttered when I asked him for his version of the group's English tour fisticuffs which sent the Skynyrd contingent up against a British police boxing team with predictably devastating results.) At home in Jacksonville, Florida, Van Zant claimed to be little more than a puppy dog, spending most of his time fishing and writing country lyrics for his first solo album.

"I confess, those songs are there to cause controversy...I like looklng for trouble."

"The other boys are still pretty wild," he admitted, watching TV in his tennis shorts. "Since my wife had a baby, I've calmed down a lot. I figure they raise enough hell on the road as it is."

Van Zant grew up listening to Merle Haggard, but his true idol was LeRoy Yarborough, one of the South's premier stock car drivers who lived down the block. "I was a regular hot rodder," said Ronnie, fishing for a cigarette, "until I was speeding down the main drag racing another guy and saw this car stalled in the middle of the road. We all piled into each other—there was nothing I could do to avoid 'em." He rolled his eyes skyward. "That sorta cured me of that habit."

"I'm the only one that stays at home," he admitted. "The other boys are wild and drunk. I tell ya—every policeman in Jacksonville knows their cars and their faces. They get stopped for blowing their nose." Van Zant paused to order some Cokes from room service, using his favorite motel pseudonym, Robert Johnson. "Everybody knows it now," he shrugged, when I asked if I could use it in the story. "I figure I'll go back to my old favorite, A. Mess. I love charging dinner to Mr. Mess."

Robert Johnson, in addition to being an apt alias, is an appropriate starting place for any discussion of Skynyrd's musical heritage. Near the end of their live set they often play a fiery version of "Crossroads," which, like home-grown remakes, owes a greater debt to Eric Clapton than its author.

Besides Johnson, Skynyrd has adopted Memphis soul stew chefs like Otis Redding and R&B masters like Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley as their mentors. Van Zant's first band, US, played strictly black Delta music, occasionally seasoning the brew with a pinch of Yardbirds fuzz-tones.

Though their appearance on the 1973 Who tour launched them nationally, the original Skynyrd stock company (now minus drummer Bob Burns and guitarist Ed King who succumbed to the rigors of Artimus Pyle and Steve Gaines respectively) kicked around the formidable North Florida club circuit before being discovered by a novice in Southern musical hospitality, Al Kooper. Kooper and the group parted company after three albums—amicably, according to Van Zant. "I don't think he thought we knew what we were doing," he explained, "so we retired his ass to the tune of $1 million."

Van Zant grew up in the shantytown section of Jacksonville, a part of town decidedly on the wrong side of the tracks. His father was a truck driver who occasionally hauled his fair-haired eldest son into the cab and took him on rides up and down the East Coast's grid highways. "We'd go up all the way to New York sometimes," Van Zant remembered, "and daddy'd let me shift gears for him. I can still hear him say, 'Watch that gear, boy!' " (Both of Van Zant's younger brothers are in bands as well. Donnie sings in 38 Special while the younger offspring plays with the Austin Nichol Band.)

Later, when we convened in Chicago to discuss the group's new album, the band was collectively on the wagon—Skynyrd style. Beer was allowed backstage, but champagne and Jack Daniels were strictly Verboten. "I don't know how long it'll last," said Van Zant, "but I know it's the first time we've seen the audience in eight years. Also, we're getting along better—we're not fighting with each other so much."

Skynyrd's major difficulty has been with the studio facilities. They began the new album in Miami, at Criteria Studios. Dissatisfied, they moved to Doraville's 24-track unit (the Atlanta Rhythm Section's home studio).

There the group will re-cut "That Smell" (your scribe's choice for most promising Skynyrd song of 1977) as well as "One More Time," a moving and evocative jam culled from Skynyrd's Anthology album that Van Zant says "could be another 'Free Bird'. "

Written in 1969, the song features several ex-Skynyrds, plus bassist Rick Medlock—now with little brother Donnie's 38 Special. The band is going to attempt to re-cut the second half of the tune—so Dowd will have his hands full, cutting and pasting new rhythm and vocal tracks onto a seven-year-old master tape.

The band's reputation as raving alcoholics apparently derived from their '73 Who tour, which came as somewhat of a shock to a band accustomed to playing bars, not 18,000 seat cow palaces. "We totally shit the first night," Van Zant laughed. "We were so nervous we musta played all our five songs in about 10 minutes and rushed off for a drink." He wagged his head. "Then we drank a little more— for courage and to get rid of the stage fright."

Onstage, the band exudes a disheveled charm. After each tune, they retire to the amps to adjust levels and sip beer. Van Zant, no longer barefoot but wearing a navy blue Neil Young t-shirt adorned with the slogan Everything's Cheaper Than It Looks, roams the stage like a python after a heavy banquet of rodents. He edges up to the apron of the stage, pulling Rossington's hair during one of his guitar solos and gently kicks a security guard in the head, who seems a bit over-zealous in combatting the fans crowding the bandstand. Van Zant swings his mike like a fishing pole, as if he were casting for some small mouth bass.

"We got tied up in politics...and man, we got messed around--really exploited...Let's Just say we got out real quick and won't come back."

Skynyrd plans a prison concert in Huntsville, Alabama ("Why should the country people be the only ones to play jails?" said Van Zant), but in the future their political involvements will be limited to songs like "Tax Man," a new number which cheerfully attacks the I.R.S. and welfare chiselers alike. "We got tied up in politics a year or so back," Ronnie said ruefully, "and, man, we got messed around—really exploited. I won't name any names...let's just say we got out real quick and won't come back."

With that, Van Zant and I, now on the plane headed for Athens, rejoined the floating card game that commences whenever the band has a few free hours between gigs. They also lug a bunch of baseball gloves around so that when the mood hits, they can play some ball. Van Zant has saved a bundle of dollar bills from his per diem, so he eagerly plunged into the fray, sweeping an early hand with a straight flush, but soon settled down into the ebb and flow of the game, winning an occasional hand, losing others. Up front, near the cockpit, Joe Billingsley, one of the three backup singers traveling with the group, slept noisily in a reclining chair, waking long enough to tickle Allan Collins' crotch with her bare feet.

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Leon, his ever-present tape recorder loaded with epic recordings of Japanese bar room exchanges between the band and the Nipponese geishas, taught me how to launch matchstick spitballs at the poker game. Van Zant endured a few direct hits, then stormed to the front of the plane to hurl a few bolsters at Wilkerson.

"You know, I can fly this plane," he grinned sheepishly. "Ask Peter Rudge [Skynyrd's manager, who also handles the Rolling Stones]. He's scared of flying as it is, but once when I staggered into the cockpit and had the pilot dip the plane a little bit, you couldn't have torn his hands away from the seat belt to save his life." Van Zant cackled with laughter, then disappeared into the rear of the plane. I went back to listening to Leon's tape collection, which included a dozen or so early Skynyrd tunes that will surface someday on a Skynyrd anthology album.

The hushed tones of a Van Zant country ballad began to drift into my ears and the plane's syncopated progress through the soft, fluffy clouds of North Georgia gently rocked me to sleep. It was a deep but not entirely dreamless reverie. The rough, red clay Georgia hills embraced a long, dark stretch of Alabama asphalt and a lone voice echoed, "You had it made in the shade, don't let that tree fall down on you."