Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera 9781501331787, 9781501331817, 9781501331794

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SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet —Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock “n” roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “3331” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Peepshow by Samantha Bennett Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Southern Accents by Michael Washburn Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin Timeless by Martin Deykers The Holy Bible by David Evans The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick xx by Jane Morgan Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more . . .

Southern Rock Opera

Rien Fertel

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Rien Fertel, 2019 Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3178-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3179-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-3180-0 1

Series: 33 3

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Dedicated to those who endeavor to write and sing new songs about the Southland.

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Contents

Track Listing Acknowledgments Act I 1 A Mean Old Highway—U.S. Route 72 2 That Muscle Shoals Sound—The Shoals, Alabama 3 Dying Before Your Time—Macon, Georgia 4 Hell—Birmingham, Alabama

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Act II 5 Fly Around the World and Back—The Road 71 6 From the Swamps of Northern Florida— Jacksonville 86 7 Hurtling Through Space—Outside Gillsburg, Mississippi 107 8 America—Huntsville, Alabama / Oxford, Mississippi 116 Notes

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Track Listing

Act I 1. “Days of Graduation” (2:36) 2. “Ronnie and Neil” (4:52) 3. “72 (This Highway’s Mean)” (5:26) 4. “Dead, Drunk, and Naked” (4:51) 5. “Guitar Man Upstairs” (3:17) 6. “Birmingham” (5:03) 7. “The Southern Thing” (5:08) 8. “The Three Great Alabama Icons” (6:51) 9. “Wallace” (3:27) 10. “Zip City” (5:16) 11. “Moved” (4:17)

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Act II 1. “Let There Be Rock” (4:19) 2. “Road Cases” (2:42) 3. “Women Without Whiskey” (4:19) 4. “Plastic Flowers on the Highway” (5:04) 5. “Cassie’s Brother” (4:58) 6. “Life in the Factory” (5:28) 7. “Shut Up and Get on the Plane” (3:38) 8. “Greenville to Baton Rouge” (4:11) 9. “Angels and Fuselage” (8:00)

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Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the support of my editor, Kevin Dettmar, and the 33 1/3 team. Thanks to the following, who helped shape this book with their input and ideas, who sheltered me and accompanied me to shows: Brett Anderson, Jami Attenberg, Sarah Baird, Ellie Campbell, Jay and Elizabet Coleman, Shome Dasgupta, Russell Desmond, Dwain Easley, John T. Edge, Randy Fertel, Kirk Walker Graves, Andy Horowitz, Brett Martin, Bobby McDaniel, Mike Miley, Ted O’Brien, Gene Odom, Ted Ownby, Amanda Petrusich, Mike Rounsaville, Michael Buffalo Smith, Bobby Ticknor, David Turner, and Maarten Zwiers. A special shout-out to my generous colleagues at Foghat Community College: Take it easy. A big shout-out to Harry Barton, who introduced me to so much music over the past two decades of friendship. Thanks, as always, to Mom. Love to Susie Penman, my first reader and rockingest person I know. This book goes out to Danny Northcutt, who believed in the greatness of the DriveBy Truckers before I did.

Act I

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1 A Mean Old Highway U.S. Route 72

The purity of the road Glancing at a map, U.S. Route 72 looks like an innocuous stretch of southern road, an unexceptional five-hour drive, the perfect route to go nowhere fast. From its western terminus in midtown Memphis, the highway unwinds eastward, dipping into Mississippi to trace the southern border of Tennessee, before descending further south into north Alabama. There, 72 meets the Tennessee River, meandering alongside the river valley’s south bank, crossing over to the opposite shore and back again, and climbing the gentle hills of the lower Appalachians, until finally ending its 337-mile journey on the western fringes of Chattanooga. But do not be deceived: Route 72 is a mean old highway. Lacking the conveniences and speed of the modern interstate system, brief sections of the four-lane highway occasionally narrow to terrifying stretches of undivided two-way traffic, with frequent turnoffs down gravel roads and other partially paved pathways. Here, white crosses proliferate to mark the sites of

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fatal traffic accidents. Together with those crosses, “Jesus Saves” signs and Confederate rebel flags—once ubiquitous, then rare, but now enjoying an upsurge in popularity—complete the triumvirate of southern symbols, each raised to remember the damned and dearly departed. There are certainly easier, quicker, and safer ways to get from Memphis to Chattanooga, but the highway’s meanness might be its main draw. It is along Highway 72, and others like it, that we long to travel, old highways where we seek to get lost while searching out history, those routes that we drive to encounter what Jack Kerouac called “the purity of the road.” Interstates are not pure. Rest stops, toll booths, and Waffle Houses are not natural. But those mean old stretches of blacktop asphalt, like Highway 72, remain deeply, cogently, and defiantly perfect. The duality of the southern thing There are road-trip records, albums, and mixtapes, conducive to long drives, music to fill out the emptiness of the open road. And there are any number of albums that seem able to transport their audiences to a specific place: standing on a New Orleans street corner, say, or exiled to a seaside mansion in southern France. Finally, there are a multitude of songs dedicated to treading paths both real and imagined: roads lonesome, long and winding; electric avenues; highways to hell; and streets with no name. But few albums sail the sonic highways seeking to document a place in space and time quite like Southern Rock Opera, a big, overblown, but beautiful mess of a record that attempts to unravel southern history. 4

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This book, like the album that inspired its composition, is dedicated to the purity of the road as Kerouac evoked—the abstract but perfect Platonic piece of pavement; the idyllic form of byways and highways, of backroads and crossroads that cut across the annals of American music and haunt much of southern history. That great snarl of roads that we navigate in order to uncover and understand a place, its peoples, and their cultures. Dating back to their formation as a band in 1996, the Drive-By Truckers have lyrically explored the stories behind those pure roads that blanket the South, a region where pasts, presents, and futures converge. A corner of the country brimming with conflicts, complexities, and contradictions. A place mapped with mean old highways. Released in 2001, Southern Rock Opera is the DriveBy Truckers’ double-disc, triple-guitar-pounding, Lynyrd Skynyrd–influenced homage to what both bands call the Southland. Beginning and ending at gruesome fatal crash sites, Opera—and it is most resolutely an opera—is an album in constant motion. The songs move the listener from place to place, geographically and temporally trekking across the Deep South, from Alabama to Florida to Mississippi and Louisiana, with detours to Heaven and Hell, while touching on the Civil War, civil rights, and most every era before, after, and in between. With Southern Rock Opera, Truckers’ frontman Patterson Hood and his bandmates, southerners all, drew their map of the Southland. They designed a road trip toward understanding the modern South. And the key to understanding the Truckers’ South is the theme that lies at the heart of their album, the opera’s 5

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leitmotif, if you will, an idea Hood calls the “duality of the Southern thing.” In a July 9, 2015, essay for The New York Times Magazine, Hood writes that his song “The Southern Thing,” the album’s seventh track, was written to “express the contradictions of Southern identity.”1 Like W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of the “double consciousness” of black Americans—in the great thinker’s words, “This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”—the duality of “The Southern Thing” expresses what one historian of the region described as the “two-ness of southerners,” black and white.2 This duality explains the historic parallels of jazz and Jim Crow. It illustrates how a place can give rise to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. It connects the region’s famed gospel of southern hospitality with its distrust—a reactionary distrust, often expressed as fear turned to violence—of outsiders. “Proud of the glory / stare down the shame,” Hood sings to describe the binary that informs his Southland. Southern Rock Opera is a story of mirrored opposites, Southlandic binaries. Like twin paths that intersect and diverge before somewhere, somehow merging again, the album weaves and unravels two narrative strands about a pair of bands over the course of two rock-operatic acts. One strand tells the story of the fictional band Betamax Guillotine, a stand-in for the Drive-By Truckers. Founded by best friends, Bobby and the opera’s unnamed protagonist, the band doesn’t survive past high school, after Bobby is killed in a gruesome highway car accident on the night before their graduation. Growing up in North Alabama in 6

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the 1970s, as this opera’s libretto-slash-liner notes detail, the Betamax brothers devoured records by the Stones, the Who, and Zeppelin, alongside more faddish fare like Blue Öyster Cult and the Sweet. But they listened to no band more than Lynyrd Skynyrd. In the pantheon of southern rock, that explosively brief genre highlighted by stridently shredded guitars and questionable neo-Confederate lyrics and lifestyles, Skynyrd were, and remain, gods. They are the second strand that threads through Southern Rock Opera (the album dedication reads: “To America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band[:] Lynyrd Skynyrd”). Charismatic Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant rose from the swamps of North Florida to become a Jack Daniel’s-andcocaine-consuming, bar-and-bandmate-brawling, immortalanthem-composing, nonstop touring, rock-and-rolling genius, who tragically perished, alongside several bandmates, in a plane crash outside a south Mississippi swamp. On the opening track of Southern Rock Opera, a song delivered in spoken word by Hood, Bobby’s and Ronnie’s paths converge on that fateful night along Highway 72. Bobby leaves a graduation party with his best friend’s best girl, and takes her joyriding in his Oldsmobile 442 (pronounced fourfour-two), one of the era’s great testosterone-fueled cars—all chrome and muscle on four wheels. As Bobby and the girl tear down empty country roads, he switches his headlights off to take in the light of the three-quarters moon. Bobby misses a curve in the road and the Oldsmobile is sent airborne. The 442 “Hit a telephone pole and split in two, / Bobby’s skull was split right in two,” Hood casually drones in his guttural rumble, a voice weary with telling an oft-told 7

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tale. Bobby lives like his hero Ronnie Van Zant: fast, hard, and doomed to die violently. The paramedics arrive to find the girl pinned to her seat, her bloody screams accompanied by “Free Bird” playing on the stereo. Skynyrd’s final track on their debut album, “Free Bird” is the decade’s superlative rock ballad: nineplus minutes of overwrought sentimentality—the song was dedicated to the memory of Van Zant’s southern rock comrade Duane Allman—churchy organ fills, and guitar solos universally deemed so excessive that they instantly became popular music’s most recognizable meme. Free Bird! “You know,” Hood reminds us, “it’s a very long song.” Savage and lonely streets Mean old highways, like the one that took young Bobby’s life, canvas the Southland like scar tissue, cutting deep into the southern psyche, while sparking the national, and even the global, imagination. These roads define the South and its people. So let’s spin our wheels once again along U.S. Route 72 to shine a light on the duality that is the southern thing. On the opera’s third track, “72 (This Highway’s Mean),” Truckers lead guitarist and cofounder Mike Cooley, in the voice of the album’s protagonist, introduces the song with the lines: “Don’t know why they even bother putting this highway on the map / Everybody that’s ever been on it knows exactly where they’re at.” It’s a sentiment we’ve all undoubtedly experienced: the youthful feelings of hometown entrapment, 8

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combined with the inclination to hit the highway at the first opportunity to escape our surroundings. For some, the road out of town offers freedom; for others, it’s a line of confinement to never consider crossing. Any given road can lead to a new life, while threatening death at every curve. Roads give and roads take. Examples in southern arts and letters abound. Southern Gothic literature often features roads—whether of the dirt, tar, or watery variety—remote, sinister, filled with menace and misfits, like in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or James Dickey’s Deliverance and its film adaptation. Down South, it’s often said, is where the Devil makes his home—perhaps the sweltering weather fits his mood—and so he takes up residence along rural crossroads, offering Faustian bargains to aspiring blues masters. But you don’t have to be Robert Johnson to find yourself lost on a mean old highway. We all find ourselves there eventually. There’s “a thousand savage and lonely streets out there,” according to the great southern bard, William Faulkner, and it takes just one. One dead end, one toxic corridor, a single lost highway, like the one Texas country-western singer Leon Payne immortalized in verse—one of history’s most covered songs: “I’m a rolling stone all alone and lost / For a life of sin I have paid the cost / When I pass by all the people say / Just another guy on the lost highway.”* *Payne’s “Lost Highway,” first recorded in 1948, has been sung by everyone from Hank Williams to Dylan, the Replacements to the Mekons; more recently, pop-country singer Kurt Nilsen topped the charts in Norway with a Willie Nelson duet.

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One road or many, each is a road just the same, especially when that road is mean old Highway 72. In Chattanooga, oldtimers remember billboards touting Route 72 as the “Beeline to Memphis,” a scenic quick-shot across Tennessee. But others still know the road by another name: the Lee Highway. Named after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the Lee Highway was one of the nation’s first transcontinental auto trails, a semi-formal system of roads that crisscrossed the United States and Canada before the advent of numbered highways. The Lee integrated local routes, like the soon to be named U.S. 72, stretching coast-to-coast from San Diego to Washington, D.C. (supplementary sections expanded the Lee Highway to New York and San Francisco). President Warren G. Harding personally commemorated the installation of milestone marker zero on the grassy lawn of the capital city’s Ellipse, the public park located just steps south from the White House. The improbability of a notorious rebel honored on nationally sacred soil illustrates the duality of the southern thing. Though the national network of auto trails was shortlived—they were replaced in 1926 by the national highway system—signs for the Lee Highway still pop up along U.S. Route 72. That name, Lee Highway, still appears on official maps and gives name to a popular Appalachian fiddle standard written in the 1920s, “The Lee Highway Blues” (sometimes called “Going Down the Lee Highway”). Today, the Lee Highway incongruously passes by Native American heritage sites, Civil War battlefields, and one of the nation’s grandest socialist-leaning construction projects, while weaving its way through unreconstructed counties 10

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next to communities that promote the idea of a reformed, progressive South, to traverse the whole of the Southland. And just as the Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera operates as a road trip of sorts, their Southland demands an actual road trip. We begin at a stop along Highway 72.

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2 That Muscle Shoals Sound The Shoals, Alabama

The sound of the Shoals I tiptoed to the banked lip of the Tennessee River and bent my ear toward its waters. Local legend claims the river is enchanted, crediting its currents with spawning North Alabama’s musical heritage. The Tennessee’s fluent motion, its soft symphony of gurgling eddies and windswept waves, I’m told, might even bless me with a song. The Yuchi tribe, whose few remaining members live out West due to forced relocation long ago, called this waterway nunnuhsae, “the singing river.” More recently, local residents have capitalized on a good story. Following Highway 72 through the Quad Cities, a quartet of towns—Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Florence—that hug the Tennessee’s curves, I steered past the Singing River Bar and Grill, Singing River Equine Rescue, and a chain of Singing River dental offices that dot this area like so many cavities. But from where I stood, on the shores of an east bank recreational park overlooking the Wilson Dam, the Tennessee

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River barely registered a murmur. An imposing but graceful series of Roman aqueduct-esque arches governed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the mighty Wilson drowned out the Tennessee with the constant mechanical purr of a soft drink machine hungry for quarters. That’s not to say this area lacks a distinct and intangible musical quality. Raised in Florence, within shouting distance of the Tennessee’s shores, a young W. C. Handy, nicknamed the “Father of the Blues” for writing the first pages of what became the American songbook of jazz-blues standards, “knew the music of every songbird,” he wrote in his memoirs. He could recognize every squawk and whistle from the “whippoorwills, bats and hoot owls, with their outlandish noises” that haunted the woodlands surrounding his family’s log cabin.1 Like Handy, Sam Phillips, another Florence native who skipped town to find fame and fortune elsewhere (elsewhere being, of course, Memphis, alongside Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash), first found inspiration in the Tennessee River Valley’s grand orchestrations: “Nothing passed my ears. A mockingbird or a whippoorwill—out in the country on a calm afternoon. The silence of the cotton fields, that beautiful rhythmic silence, with a hoe hitting a rock every now and then and just as it spaded through the dirt, you could hear it. That was just unbelievable music.”2 The Quad Cities are also the birthplace of Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and many members of the Drive-By Truckers’ shifting lineup. This is where Southern Rock Opera is rooted, here, along the banks of the Tennessee, where the Wilson sends hydroelectric energy surging through the power lines of an area better known as the Shoals, an inauspicious name 13

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upon which to build a community. Shoals are the shallow but dangerous embankments that often line rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. When Shakespeare wanted to express the agonizingly limited time we have here on Earth, he looked toward the shoals: “this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all here, / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, / We’d jump the life to come.”3 It’s a metaphor—those hellish, harrowing shoals—reiterated by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: & he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks & shoals with which he is beset.”4 And repeated by no less a sailor and scribe than Herman Melville: “Better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals.”5 The point being that Tennessee River singing we hear might just be the song of the Sirens. Moving on Up through at least the late 1980s, a metal sign near the airport greeted visitors to this tiny nexus of sound and music. “Welcome To City of Muscle Shoals,” it read, “Hit Recording Capital of the World.” The man most often credited for putting the Shoals on the musical map is, as of this writing, still actively working in the recording industry well into his 80s.* He has no use for singing rivers and songbird symphonies, multicultural sensitivity be damned. “They believed—they *During the editing stages of this book, Rick Hall succumbed to prostate cancer at his Muscle Shoals home on January 2, 2018. He was eighty-five years old.

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really believed—that we were cutting hit records because there’s a special air here or there’s a moon beam that hits this country on the northern border or there’s a mist from the river drifting over here,” he scoffed to a reporter. “We made it Muscle Shoals in spite of Muscle Shoals, not with the help of Muscle Shoals.”6 The truth is Rick Hall made Muscle Shoals with plenty of help. But before he could turn it into a hit recording capital, Hall needed to remake himself. A self-proclaimed hillbilly and redneck, he was born Roe Erister Hall in 1932 to Herman Hall and Dolly Dimple Daily, residents of Tick Hill, Mississippi. Tiny Tick Hill— which no doubt was crawling with the bitty bloodsuckers that gave it a name—sprouted up along the state’s northeast border with Alabama, near the town of Bloody Springs, deep in an untamed timber and moonshine country called the Freedom Hills. When he was just a few months old, Hall’s older brother, H. M., died after falling into a boiling washpot. His mother soon ran away with a bootlegger. Heartbroken, Herman Hall moved his son and daughter, Wenoka, to the nearby community of Ricketts Hill, where they squeezed into the log cabin of the long-widowed Grandma Hall. One of Rick Hall’s earliest memories involved his grandmother’s doctor, whose feet were, in his telling, “grown on backwards,” as in his toes pointed in the same direction as his ass.7 Roaming the Freedom Hills, the Halls lived the tenant farming life, picking cotton and pulling corn, much like the characters in the contemporaneous reporting by James Agee and Walker Evans in their iconic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But for Rick Hall, fame was a far-flung dream. After he turned eighteen, tragedy hit like a series of lightning strikes. 15

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An automobile accident broke his back. A subsequent wreck took the life of his first wife, Faye Marie. After losing his father to an overturned tractor, he squandered a few years of his life to mourning, boozing, and chasing skirts. Only the power of music could bring Rick Hall back from the brink. He joined the Country Pals, a six-piece swing band with a standing live half-hour slot on radio WERH out of Hamilton, Alabama. He played the fiddle, the electric mandolin, and sang background vocals, three instruments he had picked up from his dad, an amateur country and western crooner, who urged his children to join him in Sunday gospel sing-alongs throughout the Freedom Hills. While on the road with the Pals, Hall struck up a friendship, and eventually a songwriting partnership, with Billy Sherrill, a multitalented musician from a rival band. Their first big song, “Sweet and Innocent,” recorded by Roy Orbison in 1958, was not the hit they expected, but it was enough to get the attention of an enigmatic, hunchbacked music geek with an opiate addiction and family money to burn named Tom Stafford. Now officially bankrolled, Hall and Sherrill set up shop in a former podiatrist’s office belonging to Stafford’s father above the City Drug Store in downtown Florence—also the source of his son’s addiction to paregoric, an opium-laced antidiarrheal and cough suppressant. The largest town in the Shoals, Florence would also provide a name to the nascent publishing house, Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, or FAME for short, an audacious name for a company operating out of a shabby office still littered with plaster casts of patients’ feet. There, they tacked sound-buffering egg cartons to the 16

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walls, building a demo studio from scratch, before signing artists and churning out a catalog of country ballads in the hopes of scoring a smash record up in Nashville. But just a year into their partnership, despite selling minor hits to George Jones and Brenda Lee, Hall was ousted from the group, in his telling, for being too ambitious (Stafford preferred long hours in the movie theatre, marinating in cough medicine, to writing songs). His partners kept the studio and talent roster, and Hall kept the FAME name. Once again sinking into a mire of melancholia and moonshine, he spurned the promise of Nashville—where Sherrill would soon relocate and find success as the father of the “countrypolitan,” or pop-country, sound—and resettled across the Tennessee River, in an abandoned tobacco and candy warehouse in blue-collar Muscle Shoals, fueled by what he called “a burning vengeance.”8 Subsisting on penning penny-ante jingles for local radio commercials, Hall struggled to move on from the split until late 1961, when Stafford came calling with a sure-fire hit in need of a producer. “You Better Move On,” written and sung by Arthur Alexander, a young, black, Sheffield-born rhythm and blues singer moonlighting as a bellhop, surely spoke to Hall on several levels. Art imitates the mysteries and miseries of life we’ve been told since Plato unleashed his first batch of Academy graduates upon the world some twenty-four centuries ago, but the inverse more often holds true, at least according to Oscar Wilde: “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”9 And so it went for Rick Hall. “You Better Move On” peaked at #24 on the US charts and would be covered by the Rolling Stones on their debut EP, released in January 1964. 17

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It was finally time to move on. With the money he earned from Alexander’s record, Hall purchased a lot at 603 East Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals and built himself a musicmaking workshop in 1963. A squat, cinderblock shack bordered by cotton fields, the new FAME Recording Studio didn’t look like much from the outside, but Hall knew that the tall ceilings, louvered walls, and sound-buffering baffles, all finished to his specifications, would make a great sound room, a home for local artists. His session musicians were, like him, young white boys cultivated from the local rock and roll circuit, but gifted with the sonic dexterity to transform themselves into just about any genre of band Hall might demand: a crack country backup group, a troupe of soul serenaders, or a funky R&B rhythm section for an up-andcoming singer like Jimmy Hughes. On weekdays, Hughes labored in a Muscle Shoals rubber factory. On weekends, he sang lead in a gospel quartet called the Singing Clouds, modeled after Sam Cooke’s Soul Stirrers. All day, every day, he dreamed of the time he watched Arthur Alexander slowly steering circles around downtown Muscle Shoals in his brand new Lincoln Continental. Jimmy Hughes wanted a Lincoln of his own. And so, on Hall’s advice, he worked to write a song worthy of the FAME name. In “Steal Away,” Hughes tells a tale of a clandestine rendezvous between two paramours, over a jangly-pop piano and gospel-fied backing vocals, before culminating in the singer’s stained glass-shattering falsetto. Hall just knew he had produced his second hit record, although label after label turned him down. So he loaded two thousand newly printed 45s and two cases of vodka into the 18

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trunk of a borrowed Ford Fairlane, and for two weeks road tripped through the southeast, bartering a bottle for airplay at “every black radio station that had a tower,” to turn “Steal Away” into a Top 20 hit.10 The legend of the Muscle Shoals Sound was born. That Muscle Shoals sound It’s ironic that the musician recognized for making FAME famous did not record at Rick Hall’s studio. In fact, a busy Hall passed on recording an unproven soul singer named Percy Sledge in late 1965, dismissing him as just another wannabe. The fact was that Sledge, then working as a hospital orderly in Sheffield, could not only sing but had learned from his cousin Jimmy Hughes that an artist needed just one song to make a career. That song, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” would be recorded at Norala—short for “North Alabama”—a oneroom studio in Sheffield recently opened by Quin Ivy, a deejay, record store owner, and sometimes songwriting partner of Hall. Lacking any connections to the big city labels, Ivy brought the record to Hall, who smelled a smash. He rang up Jerry Wexler, co-honcho at Atlantic Records, and played the acetate for him over the fuzzy phone line, all the while promising that this record would be a chart-topping hit. Hall’s assurance came true when Atlantic released the song in March 1966. It’s difficult to quantify the seismic shifts that “When a Man Loves a Woman” had on not only the handful of 19

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men responsible for its production, but the entire world. How many millions of dollars did the song earn for Sledge, Ivy, Hall, and Atlantic Records (not to mention Michael Bolton, Bette Midler, and the dozens of artists who have covered the tune)? How many first dances danced, pairs of lips locked? How many last dimes spent? How many lovers done wrong? How many trysts consummated, babies procreated?* What can be measured though is the immediate impact that the aura surrounding the Shoals, not to mention Hall’s uncanny ear, had on Jerry Wexler. The Jewish, Freud-bearded record executive had first made his mark on the music industry a dozen years earlier, coining the term “rhythm & blues,” replacing the outmoded “race records,” to help make black music palatable to a baby-booming white audience. Wexler would soon begin flying his label’s heavyweights, most notably Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, into the nondescript Northwest Alabama Regional Airport to reach new heights of fame at FAME. It’s a moment captured on Southern Rock Opera’s second track, “Ronnie and Neil,” a song that illustrates one of the countless paradoxes that define the Deep South and were brought to light during the era’s civil rights movement: how *How many people died, unable to keep their minds on nothing else as Spooner Oldham’s haunting organ dirge launches the song? “I’ve heard stories of people driving off the road when they heard that record come on the air,” the record’s producer, Jimmy Johnson, told an interviewer. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999), 210.

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a region defined by white supremacy could simultaneously host the nation’s premier black artists. All this hate and violence can’t come to no good end A stain on the good name. A whole lot of good people dragged threw [sic] the blood and glass Blood stains on their good names and all of us take the blame Meanwhile in North Alabama, Wilson Pickett comes to town To record that sweet soul music, to get that Muscle Shoals sound Meanwhile in North Alabama, Aretha Franklin comes to town To record that sweet soul music, to get that Muscle Shoals sound. Initially, that Muscle Shoals sound was distinguished less by a readily identifiable musical style—think Stax Records’ gospelfunk groove stilettoed through with horns or New Orleans’s Caribbean-tinged syncopations—than by the malleability and improvisational skill of the second iteration of FAME’s house band. Nicknamed the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Roger Hawkins (drums), Barry Beckett (keys), and David Hood, a phenomenal bass player and father of Patterson, showcased the sublime alchemy of interplay. “We never really wanted a defining sound,” Hood told The New York Times. “If you came to Muscle Shoals, you could get a pop or rock or rhythm ’n’ blues sound, because we did it all.”11 21

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Like Rick Hall and FAME’s earlier studio players, the quartet were defined by a single constant: all were young, white men. “Alabama white boys who took a left turn at the blues,” Wexler called them. Stories abound of white musicians fooled into thinking they were hiring the services of a black backup band. According to David Hood, after hearing the Rhythm Section’s work on the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” Paul Simon called looking to record with the “black Jamaican musicians” (the reply: “I can give you their number, but they’re mighty pale”).12 Place was a constant reminder of race, and the Shoals, despite visions of interracial collaboration, were not colorblind. Hall recalls integrating area restaurants with Otis Redding, among other visitors. Wilson Pickett would never forget his first impressions of FAME and the surrounding cotton patches, filled with black laborers. “They’re still slaves here,” he remembered thinking to himself. “I’m gonna be ruined.”13 When Aretha Franklin came to town in January 1967, her husband and manager, Ted White, took offense at the all-white session men (it didn’t help that Wexler asked for, and didn’t get, a black horn section). A drunken argument between White and Hall escalated into punches. Aretha would skip town after recording a single song, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” Wexler, who hated Hall’s authoritarian streak, never recorded at FAME again, instead flying the Muscle Shoals musicians to Atlantic’s New York studios. Two years later, he would bankroll the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, soon to be labeled the Swampers for their swampy sound and environs, moving them into their own studio. 22

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Johnson, Hawkins, Hood, and Beckett relocated to nearby Sheffield and an ugly cement building, 3614 Jackson Highway, the former site of a casket factory. The men nicknamed their cramped quarters the “burlap palace,” for the stopgap sound insulation they used to blanket the studio’s walls, but officially their business would be known, in an unsubtle eye-poke to their former boss, as the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Artists soon began siding with the sidemen over the record producer. By the end of the following year, Cher, Joe Cocker, and, most famously, the Rolling Stones would record at the burlap palace. Though separated by a less than five minute drive, the two studio’s client rosters couldn’t be more different. While Rick Hall was producing the Osmonds’ debut album at FAME in the fall of 1970, the Stones were readying the release of their Muscle Shoals Sound Studiorecorded singles “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.” When Hall was charting with the forgettable 70s-soft rock schlock that is Mac Davis’s “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” David Hood was injecting one of pop music’s most instantly recognizable bass lines into the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.”* But the rivalry likely meant little to Hall. The money he made helping to resurrect the career of pop-crooner Paul Anka could buy enough Swampers-produced Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan albums to dam up the Tennessee River, again. Today, both studios are open to tours. Hood, Johnson, Beckett, and Hawkins shuttered the Sheffield property in *Davis’s hit ranked as the eighth hottest single of 1972, while the Staple Singers bottomed out at #19, but history has proven that excellence prevails.

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1979, moving to larger digs, which they kept until divesting their interests six years later. The coffin-factory-turned-hit factory would fall into a state of disrepair until a nonprofit, the Muscle Shoals Music Foundation, with the help of a nearly $1 million grant from Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones company, rehabilitated the building’s interior. On my visit, our tour guide encouraged us to explore and touch most everything, to even sit on the cracked-vinyl couch that once cushioned some of the finest leather- and denim-clad asses in history. I stepped into the closet-sized bathroom where Keith penned “Wild Horses” and shook maracas in the sound booth where Jagger once did the same. I made Mick lips and laughed at myself. Unlike its former crosstown rival, FAME is still a fulltime working studio. Over a half century old, the house that Rick Hall built has been renovated, expanded, and now resembles Noah’s ark, only upturned and moored in an asphalt parking lot. The surrounding cotton fields have been replaced by a pair of polished, corporate drug stores that stare each other down from across this bustling stretch of commercial highway. Inside, after passing beneath a sign that reads in decorative script, “Through these doors walk the finest Musicians, Songwriters, Artists, and Producers in the World,” I scanned the gold records that wrap the walls of the entry foyer. We were a tour group of a half-dozen devotees speaking in whispered voices. In Studio A, portraits of soul gods—Clarence Carter, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha—peered down like icons. Our feet shuffled silently through the halls of this sacred place, a sanctuary to a sound.

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Take a song and make it better In the middle of the schism that rocked the Shoals, sometime in early- to mid-September 1968, straggled in a young guitarist with long strawberry hair, mutton-chopped whiskers, and pale, almost translucent, skin. Duane Allman looked otherworldly, a hippie ghost come back to haunt FAME studios in the name of peace and love. Rick Hall not only didn’t like the look of what stood before him he also didn’t need another session man. “I’ve got guitar players running out of my ass,” he told Allman. To which the guitarist replied, “Would you mind if I just kind of camped out around here?”14 And so that’s what he did: amid the cotton fields and the pop stars exiting their fancy cars, Duane Allman pitched a pup tent in the parking lot and waited for his call. This wasn’t Allman’s first time down in the Shoals. Back in April his band the Hour Glass had cut three tracks at FAME. The band’s first two albums had failed to garner any attention from the press or public and fell well short of capturing the group’s live sound. Since moving to Los Angeles from Jacksonville two years prior, Hour Glass had torn up and down the Sunset Strip; opened for Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Animals, and Buffalo Springfield; and even secured Neil Young to pen the liner notes to their second album. “We listened to the sounds of the South,” Young wrote about watching the band play San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. “Sweet country sounds swelled through the Hour Glass.”

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Problem was the Hour Glass albums didn’t sound very southern. Duane and his brother Gregg, Hour Glass’s gravelly gulleted lead singer, had never been hip to the way the overlords at Liberty Records had marketed their band. They arrived in LA as the Allman Joys, a silly name, sure, but no more ridiculous than most every other band that came out of the 1960s (Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band, the Beatles), and certainly more meaningful than the name foisted upon them. The Allman Joys had been a blues cover band popular on the Florida circuit, but the label chose which songs Hour Glass would record, smothered Duane’s guitar and Gregg’s vocals in horns, dressed the brothers in velvet jackets and frill collars, and promoted this Summer of Love train wreck as a “psychotic phenomenon, from rhythm and blues to driving psychedelic beats. And soul . . . reeking of soul.”15 After two weeks of living in that parking-lot pup tent, Allman no doubt reeked of soul, to say nothing of body, and a hunger for the opportunity to play some guitar for Rick Hall. When FAME’s proprietor eventually invited him into the studio to record some demos, Allman came bearing his secret weapon, a bottleneck slide in the form of an empty glass bottle of Coricidin, a cough suppressant popular among the era’s pill poppers, who nicknamed the scarlet-colored capsules “Red Devils.” While living in LA, Allman got turned on to using a glass slide after hearing the eclectic musician Ry Cooder, the unlikely inheritor of a blues tradition rooted in the Mississippi Delta of Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters. Years later, he would describe his Coricidin technique: “You just slide a bottle up and down ’til what you 26

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want out of it comes out.” You tune it to a chord, and then you just slide away.* With the sound made by that Coricidin bottle thrumming in every wrinkle and fold of his brain, Hall recorded Allman for a handful of unnotable, slideless sessions, including a few cuts with Wilson Pickett, before dredging up the perfect song to showcase his latest find. Two years earlier, he had begun recording a series of singles for Clarence Carter, a blind Alabama bluesman blessed with the swamp-caramel voice and bawdy charisma of a backwoods Baptist preacher. One song in particular, “The Road of Love,” a sure hit in Hall’s estimation, failed to grab the attention of disc jockeys, so he decided to re-record the tune with Duane on slide guitar. Hall’s “The Road of Love” 2.0 leads off with a routine organ-and-bass soul vamp that chugs along as Carter unfurls his tale of a dead-end affair. At the end of the third verse, Allman’s guitar enters the mix with a cacophonous howl, like a creature blowing the blues harp from the ocean floor. A dozen notes in, Carter shouts “I like what I’m listening to right now!” as Allman’s slide builds to a frightening roar, at one point sounding like a banshee’s wail. The solo lasts for just twenty-five seconds, but reverbs throughout the song’s next minute and a half. Carter sounds like he’s seen the devil. *Other biographers, in addition to Gregg Allman, attribute Duane’s epiphany to Jesse Ed Davis, Taj Mahal’s brilliant, early slide guitarist. But in the following interview, the most thorough on the subject, Duane credits Cooder: Ellen Mandel, “The Georgia Peach,” Good Times Magazine (April 1971), reprinted in Guitar World (November 1991).

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Two weeks later, Pickett returned to Muscle Shoals for the third time in three months, sans Wexler or any promising material to record, but hungry for a hit. Allman had been anticipating this moment, brimming with the dread harbored in that moment when a younger, less-established artist dares offer a suggestion to a living legend. But Pickett knew this boy could play. He had spotted Allman in town weeks earlier, initially mistaking the longhair for a “gorgeous blond.” Pickett called Allman “Sky Man” because of his proclivity for cannabis and other psychedelic pharmaceuticals. Years later, he enjoyed telling the story of the day when Allman spiked the studio’s water cooler with two tabs of mescaline. He “fucked my session up,” Pickett laughed in an interview. “But I loved him . . . he could play!”16 The next day Allman sprung his long-simmering suggestion—he proposed that Pickett cover the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Hall and Pickett must have thought the peyote had permanently rattled Duane’s brain. “That’s the most preposterous thing I ever heard,” Hall remembers shouting in refusal, “it’s insanity.”17 The megahit had only just spent nine consecutive weeks in the top slot of the singles’ chart—a Beatles record. But Allman’s enthusiasm convinced Pickett, and eventually Hall, to give the song a shot. Pickett’s “Hey Jude” is one of the rare homages that not only works as a standalone work of art, but somehow makes the original version better. As in Carter’s “The Road of Love,” Allman is relatively silent until the song’s halfway mark, when Pickett’s primal scream heralds the guitarist’s animalistic echo. Allman’s minute-long solo—all fingers, no slide—is scuzzy, menacing, and mean, the quintessential 28

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rock guitar soliloquy. It’s a sound that sent the rock and roll world spinning down a whole new trajectory, a moment, according to Jimmy Johnson, when the musicians assembled in the studio that day “realized then that Duane has created southern rock.”18 “It smelled like it came out of the bottom of the Tennessee River,” Hall said years later, “ragged and funky and dripping with sweat and stink.”19 I can’t say for sure what the “Hey Jude” solo smells like, but I do recognize the sound of white exceptionalism, as voiced by Johnson, Hall, and countless rock scholars since. Wilson Pickett hardly sat silent during Duane Allman’s guitar solo. Isolating the singer’s vocal track produces an entirely new listening experience, a groundbreaking solo in its own right. As Allman wails, Pickett wails right along with a series of howls, yelps, and vocal cord-shredding caterwauls. “Wilson would scream notes,” Wexler said, “where other screamers just scream sound.”20 If Allman deserves credit for suggesting the “Hey Jude” cover, then Pickett warrants much more than a footnote in the creation of southern rock, a genre in the making that would be defined by a host of dualities.*

*Credit goes to Emily J. Lordi for first making this argument. See: “Black Magic, White Soul,” The New Inquiry (November 19, 2013), https:// thenewinquiry.com/black-magic-white-soul.

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3 Dying Before Your Time Macon, Georgia

The Colonel I came to Atlanta in search of southern rock in its purest, most primordial form. The goal was to develop a grand theory, a verifiable formulaic equation of the sound and culture that defines southern rock as southern rock. My testing lab was a sold-out, seventieth birthday concert celebration honoring the life and career of Bruce Hampton. Most attendees that night no doubt knew him as the godfather of the jam-band scene that helped fill the void left by the 1995 death of Grateful Dead guru Jerry Garcia. Others, especially if they’d followed every chord of Hampton’s eclectic career since the late 1960s, considered him a southern rock patriarch. Everyone would agree he was an enigmatically mercurial musician, a man who defied categorization, a genuine Georgia weirdo. He was born Gustav Valentine Berglund III in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just five years after the federal government scratch-built the town as a production site for the Manhattan

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Project, though this biographical tidbit, like most Bruce Hampton factoids, carries as much weight as a handful of nuclear dust. Growing up in Atlanta, he binged on local rock and soul pioneers—Little Richard, Otis Redding, James Brown—and, most discordantly, the Polish avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. At some point, he renamed himself Colonel Hampton B. Coles, Retired and, later, Col. Bruce Hampton, Ret., though he was neither a colonel nor retired. His fan base called him Colonel Bruce, or simply the Colonel. His music career exceeded the eccentricity of his pseudonyms. In 1967, Frank Zappa overheard Hampton rhapsodizing on the subject of Penderecki’s melancholic masterpiece, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” at a Greenwich Village bar and invited the teenager guitarist to join his chorus on a pair of albums. Back in Atlanta, he sang and played the trumpet in the Hampton Grease Band and somehow convinced Columbia Records to release the group’s Music to Eat (1971), two discs of surrealist bluespsychedelia that, so the legend goes, became the label’s second-lowest selling album of all time, underperformed only by a French-Canadian instructional yoga record. He released over a dozen more albums and performed countless live shows with a litany of bands, each with a name more fantastical than the last: the Late Bronze Age, the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Fiji Mariners, the Quark Alliance. Over time, he became an extraordinary guitarist, and sometimes played a four-stringed mandolin-cello hybrid he called a chazoid. He cultivated a philosophy-lifestyle cult called Zambi. He acted, appearing in Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade, stealing 31

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a scene as a singer-poet who serenades a roomful of hillbillies with lines like “part the waters of the medulla oblongata of mankind.” All the while, the Colonel remained distinctly, defiantly, southern. Held at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, a storied venue that feels like being trapped inside a neon-lit Egyptian crypt, the Colonel’s birthday concert, aka Hampton 70, featured a rotating cast of over thirty-five musicians whom he had influenced or mentored. The lineup spoke to the diversity of Hampton’s impact and the variety of the South’s musical vernacular, black and white: jazz, blues, soul, country, alt-country, funk, neo-funk, bluegrass, rock, folk rock, alternative rock, pop rock. They covered songs by Howlin’ Wolf, Taj Mahal, the Rolling Stones, soul jazz activist Gene McDaniels, kooky jazz starchild Sun Ra, Delta bluesmen Skip James and Bukka White, and, this being Atlanta, the Allman Brothers. After four nonstop hours of music, thirty-something musicians crammed onstage for an encore performance of Bobby Bland’s R&B standard “Turn On Your Love Light.” It was cacophonous, beautiful, and, from my center, orchestra seat, all a bit much to behold. And then, as the ragtag orchestra reached its umpteenth crescendo, I watched as Colonel Bruce Hampton grabbed his chest and collapsed to the floor. The band kept playing, three minutes, five minutes, while the crowd, expecting a typical Colonel gag, waited for their hero to rise. Then, panic. Screams. A scramble to close the stage curtain, which remained half-open to reveal a handful of musicians tripping over their instruments as they rushed an unresponsive Hampton offstage. Three hours later, as I sat in the Atlanta airport, shocked into silence and 32

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unable to sleep, news blips alerted me that Colonel Bruce Hampton had died. The big house On the night of January 6, 1969, in the South Georgia town of Leary, Jimmy Carter spotted a flying saucer. “It was about 30 degrees above the horizon and looked about as large as the moon,” the governor told a crowd of constituents years later. “It got smaller and changed to a reddish color and then got larger again.”1 Though Carter admitted that the extraterrestrial enigma was likely an electronic flareup, he thought enough of the incident to file a report with a crackpot nonprofit out of Oklahoma City called the International UFO Bureau. Three decades later, Carter, the twentieth century’s most terrestrial world leader, our peanut farmer turned plainspoken president from Plains, Georgia, was still talking up, while downplaying, the incident. “It was a flying object that was unidentified,” he said in an interview. “But I have never thought that it was from outer space.”2 I’d like to believe that Carter bore witness that night to Duane Allman’s star shimmering bright, ascendent, his plane jetting back and forth like a shooting star perpetually splitting the unruffled fabric of the winter sky. Since Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude” recording in late November 1968, Allman had become the hot session guitarist for a who’s who of R&B hitmakers. He cut tracks for Aretha Franklin (alongside the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section at Atlantic Studios), Clarence Carter (again), James Carr, Otis Rush, the 33

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Soul Survivors, Arthur Conley (check out Duane’s riffs on his cover of “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”), and saxophonist King Curtis (his “Games People Play,” featuring Allman on slide guitar and electric sitar, won a Grammy), in addition to his own solo project—all in just four months. It was a nonstop loop between his Jacksonville, Florida home, Muscle Shoals, New York, and Macon, Georgia, where he would relocate in April with a new band of brothers. A weekend in Macon is enough to convince, as the city did for me, that there does not exist a more archetypal vision of the urban South, imbued, as it were, with all of the region’s culture and character, complexities and dualities. Tennessee Williams, who lived here for a brief stay in the early 1940s, simply deemed this “the hottest little town in America.”3 Macon does not make an appearance in the lyrics and libretto of Southern Rock Opera, but the city is essential in understanding the operatic, or melodramatic, and ultimately melancholic, motif that defines the southern rock genre. Located in the heart of Georgia, less than an hour’s drive from the southern outskirts of Atlanta, Macon’s lofty mansions and loftier churches, twin vestiges of antebellum cotton wealth, stretch heavenward to cast a shadow over the members of the city’s black-majority community, who languish from generations of economic and educational inequality, ranking this city as one of the nation’s most consistently impoverished. But for all its dubious charms, Macon’s place in music history astounds. “Little” Richard Penniman was born in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood and grew up singing gospel in several of the city’s churches. Otis Redding grew up in the Tyndall Heights housing project across town and switched from 34

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gospel to rock ’n’ roll just like his idol, Little Richard. And a 22-year-old James Brown launched his career here, demoing his first single, “Please, Please, Please,” while standing atop an upturned Coca-Cola crate so that he could reach the mike. But it’s easy to forget Macon’s soulful history. Sure, there’s a Little Richard Penniman Boulevard and a life-size bronze statue of a guitar-strumming Otis Redding sitting near the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge (unfortunately, the Godfather of Soul is still waiting for his local canonization), but Macon endures as a shrine to the first name in southern rock, the Allman Brothers Band. If Memphis has Elvis and Macon has the Allmans, the Big House is this city’s Graceland. A three-story Tudorstyle residence on a quiet avenue blanketed with lush lawns and ancient, gnarled oak trees, the Big House acted as home, rehearsal space, and psychedelic playhouse for one of nation’s biggest rock acts during the first three years of the 1970s. Today, it’s a museum that catalogs the Allman Brothers’ history through the handbills, t-shirts, and broken instruments they abandoned over time. But the Big House also stands as a memorial, and even a mausoleum of sorts, to the bodies, too many bodies, that the band left in its wake. Enlightened rogues It was in the Big House, in January 1970, where five men assembled by Duane Allman first set up, plugged in, lit up, and lit in to their fusion of blues-country-rock (with a touch of jazz) that so many bands were experimenting with 35

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at the time. But there was something deeper going on here, some sort of weightier groove. There were two guitarists, nothing exceptional for the era, except both were playing lead. And there were two drummers—Allman’s strategy to replicate that funky James Brown sound—including one with a head full of Coltrane. They dipped in and out of the rhythmic pocket; communicating without a word; harmonizing; contextualizing the complexities of this place, their home, the South; feeling the future, on the wings of Duane Allman’s guitar, which could sound like a pailful of Mississippi Delta dirt one moment, a chirping bird the next. For three continuous hours they played. Hitting the notes. They discovered the key to nuclear fusion. They jammed. Nine months earlier, Duane Allman travelled from the Shoals to Jacksonville with his new friend, a jazzy drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. Jaimoe, as he was called, earned his chops backing Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, among other popular R&B acts of the day. The duo planned to crash with an acquaintance of Allman’s, Butch Trucks, his drummer from a previous, short-lived band, the 31st of February. Trucks hesitantly retreated into his house at the sight of his rival, a large African American man who wore a silent frown and a bear claw necklace. It was the year of cults, and for a moment, Trucks, who was raised in an ultraconservative, Southern Baptist household, thought some deep Helter Skelter shit had arrived on his front doorstep. But the two drummers eventually hit it off, and at Duane’s behest the trio was soon joined by a local blues-rock band, the Second Coming, a name bestowed by rock executives eager to capitalize on the Jesus-on-acid good looks of the 36

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group’s bassist, Berry Oakley. The Second Coming’s virtuoso guitarist, Dick—later changed to Dickey—Betts, would become the group’s elder, a wild child born to a family of bluegrass fiddlers and pickers, who could play the ukulele by the time he was five years old. They’d eventually be joined by Duane’s baby brother, Gregg, a raspy-tenored charmer weary of the West Coast scene, who arrived on Trucks’s doorstep with a lyric-choked notebook. Together, the sextet made the quick move three hundred miles north to Macon, the soon-to-be home to a label and studio financed by Jerry Wexler and led by his handpicked trio of music industry lifers. Frank Fenter, a veteran Atlantic executive and the man responsible for signing Led Zeppelin, would be joined by the Walden brothers, Phil and Alan, a pair of precocious Macon-born scenesters who managed Otis Redding up until the singer’s fatal airplane accident in late 1967. They would call their company Capricorn, after the mythological sea-goat, an auspicious symbol for the hybridized music Duane Allman and his band of alchemists was mixing up. Duane and company soon christened themselves the Allman Brothers Band—Brothers being the keyword. More than the pair of brothers that fronted the band, they agreed to emphasize the Age of Aquarius’s belief in the beauty of universal brotherhood (or, in the words of that year’s top record of the same name: “Harmony and understanding / Sympathy and trust abounding.”). Biracial, they would represent the fraternity of mankind—perhaps not quite fulfilling King’s dream of integration, but at least becoming one of the rare non-segregated rock bands before or since. 37

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Just take a glance at the now classic cover of their eponymous first album, released on November 4, 1969. Dressed in their freshest bohemian duds—including Jaimoe’s totemic bear claws—the six band members strike severe poses on an antebellum mansion’s ivy-covered, plasterpeeling, Corinthian-columned front porch. They look like a bunch of hippies ready to burn down Tara a second time (Capricorn marketed them as “a bad bunch of electric Southern longhairs”).4 But a double-page spread in the album’s gatefold interior offered an alternate, soon-to-be iconic, take. The band poses nude in a shallow, tree-lined brook. Hands, knees, and Berry Oakley’s cleverly positioned mop of hair hide their genitals. The portrait is lighthearted, sexy, and the best ever advertisement for a gay bathhouse that was never meant to be. Enlightened rogues, Duane called his bandmates, who toured relentlessly (by Econoline, Winnebago, and finally jetliner), imbibed heavily (Red Ripple, tequila, PBR), ingested illicitly (sniff, snort, gulp), and fucked (groupies) indiscriminately. Along the way they burned through a case of topical lotion for the treatment of crabs, sent thousands of butts a-boogieing, and left one Buffalo, New York club owner stabbed to death (a judge acquitted tour manager, Twiggs Lyndon, ruling that life on the road with the Allman Brothers had driven him temporarily insane). They might have even helped Jimmy Carter win the presidency. “When the Allman Brothers . . . adopted me and began to let the nation know I was okay with them,” Carter said in 2016, “most people said, ‘Well, if he’s okay with the Allman Brothers then he must be qualified to be president of the United States.’ ”5 38

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It’s as if the Allman Brothers Band were living according to their quintessential song, Gregg Allman’s existentialist yowl of a lament, “Whipping Post.” Everything about the song—though requiem might be more apt—portends the end: the end of a relationship, the end of the corporeal self, the end of a band’s life on the road. “Whipping Post” is the final track on the band’s first record and often served as the group’s encore (a 22-minute version wraps up one of American music’s must-own albums, At Fillmore East). “Sometimes I feel / Sometimes I feel,” Gregg howls in the song’s refrain, “Like I’ve been tied / To the whipping post.” His brother meanwhile slashes a series of chords that sound increasingly unnerving, full of dread, as if he’s building a stairway that goes anywhere but heavenward. “Tied to the whipping post,” Gregg repeats twice more, “Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.” From the A(llman Brothers Band) to Z(Z Top) With the Allman Brothers’ success, Capricorn hoped to launch a full-fledged southern rock movement. Today, these initial signees come off as imitation Allman extracted from that band’s Deep South sonic salmagundi. Among the first to sign was Cowboy, a posse of bland blues-rockers signed on Duane Allman’s order. Early hitmakers soon followed, including Wet Willie, an unfortunately named outfit of feelgood funksters from Mobile, Alabama, who charted big with their 1974 single “Keep On Smilin’,” and the Marshall Tucker Band, a country music–leaning outfit (with frequent 39

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flute solos!) out of Spartanburg, South Carolina, who quickly became the label’s other standout. But this being the 1970s, a decade defined by costume changes and onstage alter egos, Capricorn’s southern rock roster spanned the era’s eclecticism. There was Grinderswitch, who played train-centric blues rock; Hydra, perhaps the first in the genre to toy with heavy metal; Stillwater, a group doomed to be overshadowed decades later by the fictional, completely unrelated band of the same name at the heart of Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous; the jazz fusiony Dixie Dregs; Black Oak Arkansas with its frontman, Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, the white spandexed progenitor of David Lee Roth; and White Witch, an unjustly forgotten psychedelicglam band that sought to balance the black magic embraced by contemporaries like Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper with a more positive, Wiccan-focused occultism. By the time Jimmy Carter announced his candidacy for president in December 1974, every major American record label wanted—no, needed—a southern rock group on their rolodex. Charlie Daniels, a session multi-instrumentalist— he played electric bass on three Dylan albums—and elder statesman who earned the nickname the “Godfather of Southern Rock,” topped the roster at Epic Records. Epic, no doubt trying to position itself as the astrological Cancer to Capricorn’s zodiac, also released albums by Blackfoot, a hard rock act who named themselves to honor the indigenous American heritage of three of its four founding members; Mother’s Finest, a multi-racial funk-soul group with a black female lead singer; and Molly Hatchet, who, if one were to believe their Frank Frazetta-painted album covers, were a 40

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bunch of ax-wielding Visigoths, but, in reality, were, like most southern rockers, long-haired dudes sporting cowboy hats and creatively cropped facial hair. But the most bizarre southern Epic artist might have been Nantucket, arena rock strivers with no viable connection to Massachusetts—they hailed from Jacksonville, North Carolina—apart from adopting a cartoon lobster as their mascot and modeling themselves after Boston (yes, they of the guitar-shaped spaceship, who took us by surprise and made us realize how awful pop music can be). Not to be outdone, and this being the 1970s, most every other major record label gambled on finding the South’s answer to the sun- and coke-soaked California harmonies of the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers. Polydor had the Atlanta Rhythm Section, the newly formed Arista went in with the Outlaws, and Buckacre made its short-lived home at MCA Records, which also signed the greatest, most southern southern rock band of them all: Lynyrd Skynyrd—who will get their due treatment down the road. Even the UK record label London got in on the hotness that was the Allmans, signing ZZ Top, the Texas-based trio who, before they adopted their trademark waist-length beards, dark sunglasses, and synthesizers, sounded like some sort of primordial, proto-southern rock risen from the dank marshes of Southeast Texas. On the southernness of southern rock The problem is how to build a working definition of southern rock that incorporates every band from the Allmans to 41

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ZZ Top. Being from the South is an obvious requirement, yet one that does not always hold true. Founding Allman Brothers’ bassist Berry Oakley was born and raised in Chicago, while the introductory guitar lick and pair of iconic solos belonging to southern rock’s most identifiably southern anthem, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” appeared note-for-note in a dream to Californian Ed King. The fact is, the geography of the South has been a tricky subject at least since Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed their eponymous border back in the 1760s. Since then, southerners have not agreed on where the Southland begins and ends: With the Mason-Dixon line, thus incorporating Maryland into the fold? The slave-holding states of the Old South, including the very un-southern state of Delaware? The states of the former Confederacy, excluding the very southernish states of Kentucky and West Virginia? Many south Louisianians, including myself at times, often repeat the maxim that “the South is north of here,” despite living in the geographic belly of the Deep South. We like to think of ourselves—pointing to such outliers as jazz music and Cajun food—as the exception to the southern rule. But southerners everywhere issue a similar sentiment: we all know a place and people more backward, more redneck, more southern than ourselves. The South, wherever that is, does not tell the whole story of the South. We could look to culture, specifically the hybridization of southern cultures, as a second possible facet to understanding southern rock, where purity is forsaken for cross-pollination across the region’s musical vernaculars: blues, country, rock, gospel, and even jazz. B. B. King, for example, despite 42

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being very southern and quite the rocking guitarist, cannot be categorized as southern rock because he was among the purest of pure bluesmen. Playing my own devil’s advocate, we don’t need to look at a band as diverse as the Allman Brothers to agree that all music is arguably derived from earlier musical forms. I propose the following thought experiment. On a followup visit several years later, the extraterrestrial Jimmy Carter made famous tunes into Q106.3, central Georgia’s premier station for classic rock. It jams out to some Allmans, a little Marshall Tucker, followed up with some Rolling Stones. I posit that that poor alien will soon be asking for directions to the local community college where Mick first met Keith. The lesson being, all popular music is southern music. Or, in the oft-repeated words of Gregg Allman: “Saying southern rock is like saying rock rock.” Gregg wasn’t the only southern rocker to eschew the tag. “We just put up with it,” Wet Willie frontman Jimmy Hall confessed with shrugged shoulders when I asked him about the label. Even Phil Walden, who could be credited with popularizing the phrase “southern rock,” admitted that “It’s not a term I am particularly crazy about.” Allman, Hall, and Walden were, of course, all white dudes, and white dudes, as we should all by now recognize, love nothing more than eschewing their whiteness, bringing us to the third and fourth possible definitions of southern rock: race and gender. Southern rock is, no doubt, music made for and consumed by white, heteronormative men (despite the lineups of the Allman Brothers and Mother’s Finest). A whole heap of scholars have waxed scholarly on the concept 43

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of white masculinity embedded in southern rock’s lyrics, fashion (or lack thereof), and accompanying symbols (guns, trucks, alcohol, and the Confederate battle flag).6 But as even more historians of the 1970s have shown, the decade was the heyday for the convergence of multiple pop music genres— cock rock, prog rock, and even yacht rock—that we could distill down to an essential essence of white dudeness. Which brings us to potential definition number five, the timeline factor. Southern rock list makers point to the 1970s as the genre’s heyday, a decade that marked the zenith of the New South, the historical term for the post–Civil War era of economic modernization, political progressivism, and cultural reawakening. It’s here, they say, smack in the middle of the “Me Decade,” Tom Wolfe’s term for the nation’s nudge toward individualization—contrasted with the communal love-fest and civil rights collectivity that defined the 1960s— that the answer to our What Is Southern Rock? question lies.* Much like punk or hip hop, the other great, though much more influential and long-lasting, musical movements that emerged from the 1970s, southern rock is an atomized genus. Wet Willie does not sound like White Witch. Duane Allman thankfully did not dress like Jim Dandy. The Allman Brothers, as most every listener notes, and their fan base confirms, resonate more with the Grateful Dead than with most of their southern rock brethren. But unlike punk and *If you have not read, or need to reread, Wolfe’s New York magazine cover story from August 23, 1976, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” the journalist’s gonzo exegesis on sex, religion, and hemorrhoids, please do so now!

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hip hop, southern rock had a hard time escaping the 1970s, when the best the genre had to offer crowded the nation’s airwaves and turntables. Many of the Capricorn-era bands were one-record wonders, others imploded in spectacular fashion, while a few survivors turned to the riches offered by the rise of country radio in the 1980s, a decade that gave us Alabama, a former southern rock cover band turned country music leviathan, who rank as one of the best-selling musical acts of all time. But timelines don’t always move linearly. The Drive-By Truckers can be categorized as a southern rock band (as well as, at certain career moments, an alt-country band, a college rock band, and just a plain old rock group). According to Patterson Hood, neither cartography nor culture, and not even history define the southernness of the South. “Ain’t about my pistol / Ain’t about my boots / Ain't about no northern drives / Ain’t about my southern roots,” he sings in the opening lines of Southern Rock Opera’s “The Southern Thing.” A fondness for the Second Amendment and a good pair of cowhide shitkickers do not a southerner make, nor, for that matter, does a family tree as kudzu-twined as that of Faulkner’s Sartoris clan. Hood makes clear, the South is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I’d like to offer a sixth and final path at getting to the heart of southern rock. More than considerations of place, influence, and time, southern rock bands were defined by an aesthetic, sometimes aural, sometimes atmospheric, and at other times emotional. Like pornography or bigotry, you know southern rock when you see and hear it. We can turn to Charlie Daniels, whose 1974 paean to the movement, “The 45

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South’s Gonna Do It,” namechecks nearly every southern rock artist, making it the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” of the southern rock world.* Daniels, who because of his frequent racist, homophobic, and jingoist remarks I am not fond of quoting, nevertheless said, “When people talk about southern rock, I say it’s not a genre of music—it’s a genre of people.”7 So was Tom Petty a southern rock artist? He seemed to fit the bill: born in Gainesville, Florida; his Heartbreakers played a blend of country-accented blues-rock rooted in the South (and before that he fronted Mudcrutch, arguably the most southern rock band name in the history of southern rock); and their first three albums came out when our peanut planter of a president lived in the White House. But despite these checked boxes, his music doesn’t feel very southern. Same goes with Dr. John and R.E.M., neither of whom have that southern rock feel. And then there’s the catalog of contemporary rock bands often grouped under the southern rock paradigm because they do feel southern, if just slightly, for either their connection to the South (the Band, for instance) or for trading heavily in southern themes (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Little Feat, and Canned Heat). That southern rock feeling is still best felt in Macon, but not in the Big House. Not in the H&H Restaurant, where the Allmans gorged themselves on plates of soul food, and *Or, if you’re not a fan of Billy Joel analogies, Arthur Conley’s homage to 1960s soul, “Sweet Soul Music” (“Spotlight on Low Rawls, y’all . . . Wilson Pickett . . . James Brown, now,” etc.), recorded at FAME Studios in January 1967.

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Allman pilgrims now come for the biscuit sandwiches named after band members (I suggest the Jaimoe: salmon croquette and cream cheese). And certainly not at the shuttered Capricorn Studios, which are currently being rehabbed as the Lofts at Capricorn (“the platinum record property”). The southern rock aura surrounding Macon is arguably best experienced at the Rose Hill Cemetery, a vast, hillside graveyard where the Allman Brothers hung out, dosed on psilocybin, summoned songs from names on random headstones, and, yes, accomplished more than a few groupie trysts. Rose Hill is also where Duane Allman is buried—killed on his motorcycle on November 1, 1971, just as his band had started to peak. Almost one year later to the day, Allman’s bassist Berry Oakley died in a similar motorcycle accident just three blocks from Duane’s crash site. At Rose Hill they lay side-by-side, both just twenty-four years old, in simple, matching graves bordered by hedges and a simple iron gate. Oakley’s epitaph quotes the band’s “Midnight Rider”: “. . . and the road goes on forever . . .” The never-ending highway, the devil at the crossroads, death waiting by the side of the road—the best of southern rock combines that devil’s music, the blues, with country music’s heartbreaking tales of rambling.* The Allman’s early output and biggest hits cogently, and often quite gloomily, expressed this feeling. In “Midnight Rider,” Gregg Allman *This includes southern rock’s biggest hits: Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See,” Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” in addition to much of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s catalog.

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sings of a man who’s “got to run” from a unnamable, deathly presence along that forever winding road. Allman sings again of outrunning death in “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More”: “I still have two strong legs, and even wings to fly. / So I, ain’t a-wastin’ time no more.” In the band’s biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” Dickey Betts tells of a drifter apologizing for his roving ways, while placing blame on his equally itinerant father, who “wound up on the wrong end of a gun.” Southern Rock Opera pursues these same themes. By my count, all but two of the album’s twenty tracks reference the dead and the dying. It’s a Decoration Day—the southern tradition of annual cemetery gathering, as well as the title of the Drive-By Truckers’ subsequent album—set to music. The opera swells with corpse-strewn car wrecks, bulletriddled bodies, and whiskey-addled men headed “six feet underground.” Heaven makes several appearances, as characters sing of wanting to “walk through heaven’s gate” and meeting “St. Peter at the pearly gates.” But Hell, and the hell that manifests from earthly living, is conjured just as often throughout. The Truckers, in fact, might just be the most Hell obsessed band of all time (at least among those that haven’t dedicated themselves to worshipping Satan). The Devil and his dominion appear front and center on the band’s first five albums, and pop up again and again on most of their subsequent releases, but no more so than on the next stop in our journey.

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4 Hell Birmingham, Alabama

1964 On March 24, 1964, future Drive-By Truckers’ cofounder Patterson Hood was born in Muscle Shoals to Jan Adams and David Hood. The elder Hood—a struggling musician, and now a parent at the age of twenty—likely saw a hazy future, not just for young Patterson, but his beloved Alabama, a state that incited equal measures of disgust and devotion, especially back in 1964. It was the year Bear Bryant would capture his second National College Football Championship as head coach of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. But it was also the year an Alabama icon of a different sort, Governor George Wallace, a man Martin Luther King Jr., 1964’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, described as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today,” would launch the first of four presidential bids.1 Though Wallace ruled the roost down in Montgomery, all eyes were on Birmingham, Alabama’s largest and most politically, economically, and culturally vital city.

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Nineteen sixty-four would be a relatively quiet year for the place once known as the “City of Perpetual Promise,” but now more commonly called Bombingham. Over the previous two years, six African American churches and at least that number of residences were dynamited by white supremacists. George Wallace would lose the Democratic primary—a foregone conclusion—to incumbent Lyndon Johnson, whose monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law that July, was in many ways a direct reaction to the oppressive and often homicidal segregationist policies and culture that infested the governor’s state. Johnson’s victory would herald the ascent of the US Sunbelt, the southernmost third of the nation (more or less below the 36th parallel). It seems like everyone was moving southward in 1964—including a twelve-year-old girl who would become my mother, relocated from Detroit—to take part in the region’s unparalleled promise of prosperity, and, for the first time in history, cheap and readily available air conditioning. The Sunbelt would soon dominate sectors ranging from politics (every elected president from LBJ to Obama was born in or represented the region) to college football and the Billboard Hot 100. It was a year for musical beginnings—1964. Rick Hall had only begun to put the first notes of what would become the Muscle Shoals Sound on wax—Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” would arrive by summer’s end. Down in Daytona Beach, Florida, Duane and Gregg Allman recycled hits as a talented but unexceptional cover band called the Escorts—they would open for the Beach Boys the following year. Up the coast, in Jacksonville, a teenage delinquent named Ronnie Van Zant, with ears attuned to the same pop and R&B chart-toppers as 50

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the Allmans, formed his first band, My Backyard. On both sides of the Atlantic, everyone wanted to be the Beatles—this was the year the Fab Four invaded American shores, airwaves, and turntables—to shake up the world by fashioning a new sound. On his nineteenth birthday and feeling preternaturally old, a Canadian folky by the name of Neil Young would pen “Sugar Mountain,” the first in a slew of bleak and bitter songs that would define his mercurial career (two of his most caustic songs—both to be released in the next decade— would denounce the South, and specifically Alabama). While back in the UK, a quartet of London lads known as the Who began to trod a new course in pop music, a postmodern path, by maximizing the volume, maximizing the violence, and maximizing the high art pretension. In June 1964, Pete Townshend would smash his first guitar on stage, a performance that was at once destructive, dramatic, and, to say the very least, highly operatic. A brief history of the rock opera In the land of Oprania, a term devised by classical music scholar Sir Denis Forman, the imaginary, theatrical world of opera is, like Alice’s Looking Glass, über real. Time passes quickly in an opera; settings shuffle as frequently as costume changes. Characters think and dream and act and, most of all, speak through song. In Oprania, characters do not sleep, and they rarely eat, but there is romance and there is almost always the promise of violence. An opera is not an opera unless there is death, a great profusion of dead. Spend a night 51

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at the opera and witness a killing field, a dramatic, staged massacre set to music.* A rock opera is no different. Despite what the general consensus says, Pete Townshend and the Who were not the first to operatize popular music or popularize opera. Each few years brings a new discovery, an old LP fished from the dustbins of rock history that antedates the genre’s beginnings. The latest “first” is A Man Dies, an early 1960s attempt to stage the New Testament for the Boomer generation of rock ’n’ roll-mad teenagers. Co-written by the Reverend Ernest Marvin of the St. James’s Presbyterian Church in Bristol, England, and a Scottish actor named Ewan Hooper, with the musical input of local bands, this passion play-turned-rock opera still sounds revolutionary today. Cribbing from the Beatles, Roy Orbison, Elvis, and Harry Belafonte, A Man Dies considers racism, poverty, crass capitalism, and nuclear war, a full decade before two monumentally popular portrayals, Jesus Christ Superstar (a rock opera album released in 1970 before becoming a musical and film) and Godspell (a 1971 musical), took up the same social justice issues by reinterpreting the life of Christ in all its campy, hippie glory. Charges of blasphemy, most notably from Parliament, who objected to the production’s *The major difference between rock operas and rock musicals, at least according to the Los Angeles Rock Opera Company—yes, there is such a thing—is the former is “told entirely through singing,” while the latter “usually has spoken dialog as well as songs.” See the LAROC’s website: http://www.larockopera.com/what_is_rock_opera.html. Though musicals may also stack the bodies rafter-high, I like to think that for every bloodsoaked Stephen Sondheim production, there are at least a dozen My Fair Ladies.

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sexual undertones and blue jeans-clad Jesus, likely helped the production become a nationwide, though fleeting, hit, televised, recorded, and staged at the Royal Albert Hall in 1964. Though it’s doubtful Marvin and Hooper’s Presbyterian pop-pageant unleashed the impending torrent of rock opera librettists in the UK, A Man Dies was one of many contemporary signals that popular music had entered its baroque period. It was the era of ornamentation, extravagance, and flamboyance; harpsichord solos, orchestral arrangements, and concept albums. The rock opera was only a matter of course for British bands big and small and soon to be massive.* But it was the Who who would become rock opera deities. The closing track from the band’s second album, A Quick One (1966), a six-movement medley titled “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” only whetted guitarist and head-Who-guru Pete Townshend’s appetite for something much grander. Subsequent albums Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973) arrived sonically and narratively overstuffed, forever equating the Who with the rock operatic form, and unleashing a wave of renderings and revivals (including films, musicals, symphonies, a ballet, and *An almost comprehensive list includes The Story Of Simon Simopath (1967) by Nirvana, side two of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake (1968) by Small Faces, S.F. Sorrow (1968) by the Pretty Things, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) by David Bowie, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis, and, of course, Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979). The Kinks enjoyed an entire rock operatic period, recording five: Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969), Preservation Acts 1 & 2 (1973 and 1974), Soap Opera (1975), and Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975).

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an opera—Tommy is likely the only rock opera to spawn an actual opera production) that will likely linger until the end of time. American musicians generally strayed from the rock opera in the 1970s—though Frank Zappa briefly parodied the genre in 1974’s Apostrophe (’) before going all-in with Joe’s Garage (1979). And then there was Lou Reed, perhaps the least rock operatic dude this side of the Lower East Side. His Berlin (1973) is rock opera at its simplest, bleakest, and most beautiful: ten songs chronicling a doomed love affair from meet cute to sex, addiction, abuse, prostitution, and, finally, suicide. Reed compared the album to both Hamlet and Othello, but it better correlates to the star-crossed lovers at the core of Oprania’s most beloved works, like Aida, Carmen, and Madame Butterfly. Berlin, like the best rock operas, Tommy, Quadrophenia, Ziggy Stardust, narrates the rise and fall of individuals, be they a pinball wizard, alienated mod, or bisexual alien rock god. Which makes Southern Rock Opera, operating as both a southern rock opera and an opera about southern rock, such a singular example of the form. Rather than being rooted in the lives of people, the Drive-By Truckers’ opus is rooted in the life of places: the cities, towns, and highways that compose the Southland.* Though the opera’s first act narratively zigzags across the state of Alabama—Highway 72, the Shoals, Zip City—this half of the album pivots further *One more singularity worth mentioning: the best rock operas, like the best classical operas, are overladen with sex. Southern Rock Opera, however, is as chaste as a turntable lacking a needle.

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southward to find its center in the geographical heart of the South, Birmingham. The second song, “Ronnie and Neil,” denounces the city with such rage, one can almost hear Patterson Hood’s spittle splatter the microphone. “Church blew up in Birmingham,” he howls in the song’s first line, “Four little black girls killed for no goddamn good reason.” The reference, as every American should recognize, is to one of the most horrific events in our nation’s long and continuing history of white supremacist terrorism: the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, which killed four young black girls. Born six months following, Hood would have been raised, like many white Alabamians growing up in the 1970s, with the awareness of this stain on Birmingham’s soul. “Birmingham,” the opera’s sixth song, resembles the city he would have known: a former steel-industry powerhouse, now economically depressed. A city where men, specifically Commissioner Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace, entrusted with ensuring the public safety of everyone, did their best to diminish the lives and livelihoods of its black citizens. A community with districts like Dynamite Hill, named for the weapon of choice with which Ku Klux Klanners, alongside the covert support of Connor and Wallace, attempted to rid the neighborhood of black homeowners. A city dominated by a 56-foot tall statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, an ominous symbol for a city too often compared, because of the fire-belching steel furnaces and entrenched culture of racial injustice, to Hell. Birmingham—a mountain-ringed model of American glory, “the middle of this sultry state,” Hood calls it. A place, 55

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once nicknamed the Magic City and the City of Perpetual Promise, brought, as the end of each line in the first stanza repeats, down, down, down. There are few happy songs about Birmingham. Dozens of early bluesmen and women wrote of dying in the city’s coal mines and jails. In the 1960s, progressive artist-crusaders like John Coltrane, Richard Fariña with Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, John Lee Hooker, and Harry Belafonte penned angry anthems denouncing Birmingham’s Jim Crow apartheid, white supremacist bombings, and police state repression by way of stick, shotgun, water hose, and dog. The Truckers themselves had even vilified the place on their preceding studio album in the song “One of These Days”: “It’s no wonder everybody’s scared of downtown Birmingham / It’s just a little too close to home / But there’s more crooks down here and the cops don’t care, / While old white men wearing ties can do anything they want.” But the city’s most damning lyrical indictment comes from Randy Newman’s satirical “Birmingham,” a tale of blue-collar striving and “the meanest dog in Alabam’.” It’s the second track off Newman’s careerdefining Good Old Boys, a concept album mostly told from the viewpoint of a bigoted steelworker named Johnny Cutler (with a healthy dose of notorious Louisiana Governor Huey Long as the Wallace-like villain). Patterson Hood would call Good Old Boys the “original Southern rock opera.” “In terms of actual influence,” he wrote in a short appreciation of Newman, “no other record had a bigger impact on the one we made.”2 Hood has said that he wanted to address the “amazing reinvention and rebirth” of Birmingham, an integrated but 56

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heavily gentrified city chockablock with shops vending cappuccinos and craft beers, James Beard Award–winning restaurants, and, most importantly, the profoundly moving Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which sits with a watchful eye directly across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church.3 The last stanza of “Birmingham” exults that “Magic City’s magic getting stronger / Dynamite Hill ain’t on fire any longer / No man should ever have to feel He don’t belong in Birmingham.” But this being a Truckers’ song, on Southern Rock Opera to boot, the song’s middle verse hazily recalls the shooting of someone named Stanley, a victim perhaps of a robbery gone wrong, with no ties to the civil rights era chronicled in its beginning and end. In one of the first interviews done in support of the album, Hood tells of his young band’s Monday night engagements at the Nick, a crusty Birmingham bar and live-music venue. “The first time we ever got a decent gig there,” he says, “someone was killed in the parking lot the night before.”4 Hood offers no additional details—no name, no motive—but remains transformed, maybe even traumatized, by the living legacy of violence down in Birmingham. Ain’t If “Birmingham” begins with a pouring of downs, that song’s follow-up, “The Southern Thing,” leads with a deluge of ain’ts. There’s something of a musicality quality in an ain’t. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. Ain’t that a shame. Is you is or is you ain’t 57

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my baby. Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough. You ain’t seen nothing yet. It ain’t necessarily so. A contradictory word and confusing contraction—does it mean ‘am not’? ‘are not’? ‘is not’? all of the above?—ain’t is a key element of the linguistic landscape that unites the Southland. Ain’t provides a repetitive core to “The Southern Thing,” a song written, according to a Patterson Hood essay published in the New York Times Magazine following the 2015 Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston, to “express the contradictions of Southern identity.”5 With an ain’t contained in nearly every line, the song’s first two stanzas express the feelings of a young, progressive southerner living at odds with the history and culture of a cruel, often unrepentant South. “Ain’t about excuses or alibis / Ain’t about no cotton fields or cotton picking lies,” Hood sings, reclaiming a few of the more famous symbols associated with the region. “Ain’t about no hatred[,] better raise a glass / It’s a little about some rebels but it ain’t about the past / Ain’t about no foolish pride, Ain’t about no flag / Hate’s the only thing that my truck would want to drag.”* The song’s third and final stanza drops just a single but powerful ain’t, an apology, by way of absolution, for a place that once unleashed the ultimate American ain’t, as in We ain’t gonna be a part of this country no more: the Civil War. Hood tells a real-life story of his great-great-grandfather, a land-poor farmer, who received a Yankee bullet in his side while fighting for the *This last line is likely a reference to the murder of James Byrd Jr. by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998.

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Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh. “Ain’t no plantations in my family tree,” Hood insists on his ancestor’s behalf. “Did NOT believe in slavery, thought that all men should be free.”* Each of the song’s three refrains ends with the phrase that gives “The Southern Thing” its name. The first is worth quoting in its entirety. “Don’t get me wrong[.] It just ain’t right / May not look strong, but I ain’t afraid to fight / If you want to live another day / Stay out the way of the Southern thing.” Taken out of context, these lines sound like the all-toofamiliar brand of southern machismo, a modernized take on the old saying of regional pride: “southern by the grace of god.” But Hood complicates matters in the second refrain: “You think I’m dumb, maybe not too bright / You wonder how I sleep at night / Proud of the glory, stare down the shame / Duality of the Southern thing.” Our narrator is still overcome with pride for the Southland, but guilt now frames the portrait he has painted of the region. Faulknerian levels of remorse for the damned war, and that no good flag. This, as Patterson Hood defines it, is the great southern duality. By the third refrain, Hood is able to accept the South’s, as well as his family’s, past and present, failures and successes, while uniting the canonized leaders of the Confederacy and civil rights movement in verse. “Four generations, a whole lot has changed / Robert E. Lee / Martin Luther King / We’ve come a long way rising from the flame / Stay out the way *On the album, Hood clearly sings, “He didn’t believe in slavery.” But the official lyrics give the above line reading, capitalization included, perhaps providing a peek into Hood’s unconscious: he really wants, or needs, to emphasize that the fact that his family did “NOT” own slaves.

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of the Southern thing.” At song’s end, Hood has embraced his homeland’s dialectical narrative, while re-challenging both Confederate apologists and “Sahara of the Bozart”* detractors to steer clear of a dynamic, tolerant South that seeks to “honor our Southern forefathers,” as he writes in his Times essay, “by moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them.” Since 2001, “duality of the Southern thing” has become a regional catchphrase, used in popular and academic discourse. But despite its popularity, “The Southern Thing” does not appear on their greatest hits compilation, Ugly Buildings, Whores, and Politicians (2011). The band, which has long combated the occasional surfacing of racismspouting deplorables among their fans, rarely plays the song in concert. “People were treating it as a rallying cry,” Hood writes, lamenting that some fans used the song to wave Confederate flags. “I’m still grappling with how easily it was misinterpreted.”6 Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so surprised. “The Southern Thing” can and should be read as a direct response— the antithesis, in fact—to one of the most misunderstood, maligned, and popular songs in music history: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” The embodiment of the *For those unfamiliar with H. L. Mencken’s take-down of southern arts and letters, an essay that many southerners are still smarting from, please see Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” New York Evening Mail (November 13, 1917), and readable here: https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/thesahara-of-the-bozart.

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southern rock ethos with an undeniable southern rock sound, Lynyrd Skynyrd existed for a brief and turbulent period as the anti-Allman Brothers. Where the Allmans originated as mushroom-gobbling hippies who explored the infinite cosmoses of jazz improv, Skynyrd emerged from Jacksonville, Florida, as a blue-collar group of bourbon-boozers who played set after set of tightly structured solos. When “Sweet Home Alabama” was released in 1974, it not only became the band’s biggest hit but provided a symbolic soundtrack for their brief and brilliant career. Penned by Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant in response to a pair of Neil Young songs, “Southern Man” (1970) and “Alabama” (1972), that dismissed Alabama as the rotten, racist core of the southern heartland, “Sweet Home Alabama” glorified the state as Heaven on Earth. Van Zant praises Alabama’s blue skies, its music heritage (with a call out to the “Swampers,” a nickname for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section), and, in a handful of ambiguous lines that are still being decoded and debated today, Governor George Wallace. The key line, analyzed at Zapruder-esque levels, is, “In Birmingham they love the governor, Boo! Boo! Boo!,” a sentiment that simultaneously seems to cheer and mock Wallace (it doesn’t help that many listeners hear the line as, “Boo! Hoo! Hoo!”—an unsubtle taunting of anti-Wallace liberals). Van Zant remained coy as to the lyric’s meaning. In the same interview he would eschew politics, call the song “a joke,” and describe Wallace as an admirable, gutsy “gentleman.”7 Southern dualities indeed. What became immediately and absolutely clear are the unambiguous ways in which Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced “Sweet Home Alabama,” and how their fans embraced it in return. In 61

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concert, a massive rebel flag would unfurl, framing the band, at the end of the Neil Young-dissing line, “A Southern man don't need him around anyhow.” The band, at times, took to donning Confederate Army uniforms and paraphernalia, and often entered the stage to the minstrel song-turnedConfederate anthem, “Dixie.”* They even became honorary lieutenant colonels in the Alabama State Militia at the behest of Governor Wallace. The song swiftly became an anthem for the Stars and Bars–waving unreconstructed set, and was more recently ranked as the fourth-greatest conservative rock song of all time by the National Review.8 “Sweet Home Alabama” has possibly spawned more covers, reimaginings,** and rebuttals*** than there are actual *Besides Lynyrd Skynyrd, the only major southern rock band to heartily welcome the Confederate battle flag on stage was Molly Hatchet. But lost in the decades-long Confederate kerfuffle is the fact that the Allman Brothers also adopted the flag for a short period, circa 1974. A display case for that year at the Big House Museum in Macon contains t-shirts and concert posters that prominently feature the Stars and Bars. Tom Petty briefly embraced the rebel flag on tour for his 1985 album, Southern Accents (see the upcoming book on the subject by my fellow 33 1/3 author Michael Washburn). **Jonathan Bernstein’s Sweet Home Everywhere: The Life and Times of a Unlikely Rock and Roll Anthem (Montgomery: The New South, 2014) makes the case for the universality of “Sweet Home Alabama,” which has been recycled into, among other songs, “Sweet Home Australia,” “Sweet Home Jerusalem,” and “Sweet Home South Korea.” The less said about Kid Rock’s “Sweet Home Alabama”–quoting hit, “All Summer Long,” the better. ***The award goes to Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long” (1980), a song about drunks, daughter-diddling daddies, and brucellosis-stricken cattle. It containing one of the most cynical stabs ever taken on the South: “There ain’t much to country living / Sweat, piss, jizz and blood.”

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homes in Alabama. And despite the fact that a generation of southern teenagers no doubt dreamed wet dreams of Van Zant and Young pistol dueling under the oaks, the two rockstars remained nonplussed, even friendly. The former unironically wore Neil Young t-shirts in concert performances, while the latter would return the favor, in addition to purportedly offering three songs, including the now classic “Powderfinger,” for Lynyrd Skynyrd to record. In his 2012 memoir, Young apologizes for his own “Alabama,” which he derides as “accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue,” and fondly reminisces of covering “Sweet Home Alabama” in concert.9 Much of the duo’s contentious relationship is detailed in Southern Rock Opera’s third track, “Ronnie and Neil”— though there seems to be no truth to the song’s claim that Young acted as a pallbearer for Van Zant. Toward the song’s end, Hood includes one of the album’s most stirring moments, a rewrite of Van Zant’s famous barbed line from “Sweet Home Alabama.” “To my way of thinking, us Southern men need both of them around.” Very close to Hell itself Born in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and raised in south Louisiana, I likely didn’t recognize George Wallace’s name until my college years—though my Harvard-educated high school US history teacher made sure to acquaint me with the horrors of pre-1964 Birmingham. But I certainly grew up knowing about Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band was inescapable 63

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for a white kid growing up in the South. I remember slow dancing at proms and winter formals to Skynyrd’s slow jams, “Free Bird” and, especially, “Tuesday’s Gone,” their bittersweet ode to love and loss that enjoyed a 1990s revival after being featured in the films Dazed and Confused and Happy Gilmore. Both songs swelled with extended guitar solos and sweaty palm-inducing string crescendos that were enough to make any puberty-suffering boy flee the dance floor for the refreshment table.* I would come to appreciate “Free Bird” as the overstuffed turkey it is: contrived and unavoidable, best enjoyed once a year, savored, vigorously, with no room for leftovers. And then there was “Sweet Home Alabama,” a staple of classic rock FM, a song I might not have then interpreted as historically complicated and perhaps even racist, but definitely judged to be maudlin at best, embarrassing at worst. I associated Skynyrd’s biggest hit with summer holidays along the Gulf Coast panhandle, its sandy stretches of highway choked with Confederate-flag bumper stickers, its souvenir shops swamped with “Heritage Not Hate” keychains, airbrushed t-shirts, and beer koozies. (It was also around this time, my early teens, when I realized that that funny-looking flag painted on the roof of Bo and Luke’s bright orange Dodge Charger, my favorite childhood car, was deeply problematic, to say the least.) “Sweet Home Alabama” meant an opportunity to change the station, or, if listen I must, to turn the volume down, roll the windows up, and *Even Saturday Night Live parodied the awkwardness of “Free Bird” at the high school dance, in the final skit of season 20, episode 2.

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listen in some close approximation of silence. Such was the power of Lynyrd Skynyrd for a teenager growing up in the 1990s South. Ronnie Van Zant was iconic enough to leave an assortment of impressions, yet not quite enough to be considered an icon. But for Patterson Hood—and no doubt an entire generation of Alabaman youth—Van Zant, despite being a lifelong Floridian, achieves a spot, alongside Coach Bear Bryant and Governor George Wallace, among “The Three Great Alabama Icons.” Delivered in a theatrical, spokenword snarl, the song, which Hood has described as the album’s centerpiece, reveals Van Zant’s complexities and the godlike immortality of Bryant, who gets a pass when it comes to discussions of southern dualities.* But on this bizarro Mt. Rushmore it’s Wallace who bears the brunt of Hood’s anger. “Icons” details the rise, fall, and redemption of the man a Second World War buddy once dismissed as “just a skinny little country bumpkin” from Clio, Alabama. The bumpkin was a boxer, lawyer, state representative, and, by his early thirties, judge. His political and judicial track records were “very progressive and humanitarian,” as Hood affirms. He fought for dozens of legislative bills that bettered the education, infrastructure, welfare, and health care of Alabamans, white and black. He sat on the board of trustees for Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college founded by Booker T. Washington. He ran for governor in *Since Bryant’s death in 1983, he has been portrayed as by turns a racist accommodationist and a well-meaning coach stonewalled from integrating his team.

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1958, lost to a segregationist, and noxiously avowed that “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” Opponents whispered that Wallace had signed a deal with the Devil. Alabama’s “Fighting Judge,” as he took to calling himself, won the next governor’s race with the slogan, “Vote right—vote white—vote for the Fighting Judge.” As governor, he became the country’s leading segregationist voice, one of its staunchest conservatives, and one of history’s great demagogues. He built a devoted voting base through bullying, skullduggery, and a firm belief in the divine right of white supremacy. He red-baited JFK and MLK, and, outside a University of Alabama doorway, did his damnedest to fulfill an inauguration promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” He fiddled, and, truth be told, helped foster the transformation of Birmingham into an approximation, in the words of the reverend and civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth, “very close to hell itself; the Johannesburg of the South.” Constitutionally prevented from seeking a second term, Wallace ran his wife, Lurleen, in his stead (“I didn’t know so many people in Alabama chewed tobacco,” she confided to advisers. “And they’re all for me”).10 The state’s very first First Gentleman governed through the 1960s as its de facto leader. But by the 1970s and 1980s, after winning second and third and fourth gubernatorial terms, Wallace would, in the words of “Icons,” spend his life “trying to explain away his racist past.” Now born again, he appointed minorities to political positions, reached out to black voters, and begged forgiveness from the civil rights freedom fighter turned Georgia politico John Lewis, who received more than one scar while marching down in the 66

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governor’s Alabama. But it was too little, too late for Wallace’s soul, according to Patterson Hood. “He’s in hell now,” he plainly states toward the end of the monologue, and “not because he’s a racist.” Blindly ambitious, insatiably hungry for power, Wallace ignored the suffering of black America, Hood charges, and begat even more suffering in return. Fortunately for the governor, Hood declares in the song’s final line, one of the album’s few punch lines, “the Devil is also a southerner.” Sympathy for the governor Hood’s righteous anger turns to outright fire and brimstone in the next song, the finale of the opera’s Birmingham song cycle, “Wallace.” The narrator, as the libretto tells us, is the Devil. The setting: September 1998, Hell. The soul of George Wallace has just been turned away from the pearly gates— Hood as Satan quips that “a black man stood in the way”—to alight at the Devil’s doorstep. There, Satan encourages his minions to “throw another log on the fire” to make Hell “just a little bit hotter” for their newest neighbor. Whether it was Patterson Hood’s intention or not, Wallace’s fate dovetails with the litany of operas, both rock and traditional, that doom their protagonists to the fiery abyss that is Hades, or some close approximation of physical and existential damnation. Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Gounod’s Faust, Verdi’s operatic Requiem, and the host of Orphean operas all feature hell-bound antiheroes. The cinematic adaptations of the Who’s two essential rock operas culminate with their protagonists, Tommy’s titular character 67

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and Quadrophenia’s Jimmy, marooned on a rock and being swallowed by the sun. In Southern Rock Opera, poor Wallace perhaps receives the harshest treatment of all. Depending on your religious persuasion and/or politics, “Wallace” is either one of the cruelest songs ever recorded or one of the most bitingly sharp. But it’s a song Hood was destined to write. He’s spoken often of being a lifelong member of what he has called the “fierce resistance” and the “loyal opposition.” “I'm a fucking liberal . . . and goddamn proud of it,” he told one interviewer. Growing up in an unabashedly anti-Wallace household, Hood’s father, David, “looked at what he did as a ‘fuck you’ to George Wallace.”11 And what better way for a son upstage his father’s pissedoff progressivism than to banish an archenemy to Hell. For what it’s worth, Hood has written that Wallace’s grandson, George Wallace IV, not only was a fan of the band, but had personally thanked him for “writing a fair assessment of his grandfather.”12 By song’s end, even the Devil falls under the sway of the great Alabama icon—he’s last seen speeddemoning down Hell’s highways with a “Vote Wallace” sticker on the back of his car.

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Act II

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The beautiful and damned Rock ’n’ roll is dead we’re often told, but critics and fans have been lamenting the death of the form since at least the 1950s, when record and radio executives began segregating the genre into racially distinct categories, white (pop) and black (soul). Whether or not the vultures are circling, one thing is for certain: in the not too distant future the great American literary genre known as the rock memoir will cease to exist. Shelves currently crowd with a wealth of rock reminiscences and tour diary tell-alls, but no one will be scrambling to read Justin Bieber’s Chronicles, Volume 1. This is less an estimation of the teen idol’s worth as an artist and a storyteller than the state of musical stardom. All rock star memoirs—and, by extension, the sub-genre that collects groupie and roadie accounts—contain the same basic four-act structure. Act one: a teenager dreams of rock immortality. Act two: he or she joins a band, hits

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the road, builds a small fan base. Three: success and all it entails—sex and drugs, seedy managers and sleazy bars, stretch limos and sordid hotel rooms. And finally, act four, hubris followed by the fall: the divorces and bankruptcies, paternity tests and suicides; the car crashes, motorcycle crashes, plane crashes. But as rock ’n’ roll nears its centennial, and its practitioners, new and old, turn to repetition rather than innovation (bands reunited, trends revived, songbooks resung), the life of the typical rock star has shifted dramatically. Though the song remains the same, the last verse has been rewritten. Simply and grimly put, rock ’n’ rollers don’t die like they used to. They don’t die like they and, arguably, we, have always wanted and needed them to—before they get old, laughing with the sinners rather than crying with the saints, better burned out than faded away. Death by decrepitude now far outnumbers the once all-too-common overdose. The tour bus has seat belts. Rock star planes don’t fall out of the sky anymore. Every great rock memoir is at its heart a road-trip story, and central to its plot are the promise and perils of the journey, the main themes of Southern Rock Opera’s second act. Composed of two song cycles, the album’s latter half weaves together the histories—real, imagined, and mythologized—of a trio of bands: the Drive-By Truckers, Betamax Guillotine, and, most of all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Despite such grand ambitions, the opera’s second act is more coherent narratively, more overtly operatic than the first. Set in the present day, “in some alternative universe,” according to Hood’s libretto, our hero’s quest for rock 72

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immortality has been cemented in song and verse and overblown stage shows. His band, Betamax Guillotine, barnstorms the arena rock circuit, besieging the ears of their fans with a strident three guitar attack before hopping a jet to do it again the following night. Just as planned, his songs tell stories of the neglected and rejected Southland. “Stories that own up to the terrible while telling of the beautiful.” The beautiful and damned. For our hero, it seems, dreams do come true, though at a price. “George Wallace sold his soul to be the Governor of Alabama,” Hood notes. “Our hero might have sold off a little of his too. Sometimes shit happens.” He dwells in that state of smile-at-the-camera complacency so commonly associated with celebrity. “He ain’t necessarily happy,” the libretto remarks with a shrug, “but at least he ain’t dead.” Though the four songs that comprise the second act’s first song cycle chronicle the rise and fall of Betamax Guillotine, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley incorporate personal details from their band’s life on the road into the songwriting, fully merging the fictional Betamax Guillotine with the real-life Drive-By Truckers (four songs from the first act also inform this convergence, and will be included in this chapter). All the while, Lynyrd Skynyrd—a band whose postmortem biography has blended fact and fable like no other—thumbs for a ride along the highway, silently and subtly making inroads into the opera’s narrative, until becoming fully formed in the album’s final five songs. Like some bastardized version of the Holy Trinity, Betamax Guillotine, the DriveBy Truckers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd finally coalesce as one. Three bands. Three histories. One road. 73

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Crazy, stupid, shit Patterson Hood grew up in McGee Town, Alabama, nine miles northwest of his dad’s recording studio and two farms over, he’s proud to say, from the one that birthed Sam Phillips, the “man who invented rock ’n’ roll.” David Hood wished his son to obtain a respectable livelihood—a pharmacist, a lawyer, anything but a musician like himself. “It’s not a settled life,” he liked to say.1 But destined to follow the path his father trod, Hood picked up an instrument—a guitar rather than the bass—and began writing songs by the thousands. Like other precocious songwriters, heartbreak, bullies, and other anxieties associated with school became his lyrical mainstays, but so did politics. “I wrote about Watergate when I was in elementary school,” Hood told one interviewer. “I got in trouble for that . . . . They didn’t like what I said about Richard Nixon in third grade.”2 Alongside politics, a conjoined pair of trouble-causing obsessions carried over from adolescence to adulthood: narcotics and rock music. “Let There Be Rock” pays homage to it all—the booze, drugs, and bands that Hood adored— and how well they go hand in hand. The song acts as “a pretty damned autobiographical account of my teenaged years,” Hood writes in the album’s notes, and works as a compendium of his youthful transgressions: marijuana, cheap vodka, canned beer, drunk driving, nearly drowning in his own vomit, and a bad acid trip triggered by the laserlight show at a Blue Öyster Cult concert, in addition to, he sings, “a whole lot more crazy, stupid, shit.” 74

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Alternatively, in “Dead, Drunk, and Naked,” the fourth song in the opera’s first act, Hood conjures a parallel world of a life without music. Narrated by a glue-sniffing wastoid who has turned to the comfort of Jack Daniel’s, the storyteller assures his audience that he is living his best life. “My scars are patched up; my arms have almost healed,” he sings. “My demons almost tranquilized, my pains almost killed.” But as the song proceeds, it becomes apparent that the narrator, despite what the preachers and psychiatrists say, is a dead man walking. “Let There Be Rock” is ultimately a song about survival, a tribute to the arena rock concerts that helped Hood escape from what he describes as, “going off the deep end in high school.” The song’s refrain name-drops the bands that he lived to see—Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, and others: his literal rocks of salvation—while mentioning four times the one band he regrets missing. “I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he laments, “but I sure saw Molly Hatchet.” “I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he repeats later on, “but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne.” Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, many of the bands referenced in the song did not survive fully intact, doubtlessly a willful incorporation on Hood’s part. Thin Lizzy lost their lead singer, Phil Lynott, to heroin in 1986. Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitar prodigy, died in a bizarre airplane accident in 1982. And then there’s AC/DC, whose song “Let There Be Rock,” recorded in 1977, acts as a precursor to and influence on the Truckers’ song of the same name. In the final refrain of the opera’s “Let There Be Rock,” Hood boasts of witnessing Bon Scott, AC/DC’s famously screech-throated frontman, snarl his version of the song, a rock ’n’ roll rendering of the 75

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biblical creation story—“Let there be sound / Let there be light / Let there be drums / Let there be guitar / Oh, Let there be rock”—during the band’s Let There Be Rock Tour. Three years later, Scott would die of alcohol poisoning, or as his death certificate called it, “death by misadventure.” “Let There Be Rock” invites listeners to interact through reciprocation, to reminisce on our own teenage transgressions, while encouraging us to fill in the blanks with our own transformative concert experiences. Go ahead, give it a try! I never saw Nirvana but I sure saw Neil Young. And I never saw Tom Petty but I sure saw Wu-Tang. And I never saw R.E.M. but I sure saw U2 on the ’97 Pop Tour, with Bono singing “With or Without You.”* Road warriors In 1985, Patterson Hood met Mike Cooley, a talented budding guitarist as rail-thin and long-haired as Hood was stocky and white boy-afroed. Though they were both guitarists and lyricists, they moved in together, formed a band, jammed in Hood’s grandmother’s basement, and picked a name, Adam’s House Cat, from a southern colloquialism—I wouldn’t know him from . . .—denoting utter unfamiliarity. Thank goodness for the greatness of Hood’s grandmama, otherwise life might have felt like the story told in “Guitar Man Upstairs,” another act-one track that offers an alternative universe of sorts. Credited to Cooley, and sung from the point of view of a *Perhaps my generation’s concert-going experiences don’t exactly measure up.

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“feeble old man,” the song tells of a new upstairs neighbor, the titular guitar man (likely Cooley himself), whose debauched lifestyle is incommensurate with the narrator’s worldview. Picturing an apartment full of “punks” and “freaks” smoking dope and swigging booze, the crotchety elder smiles to himself, knowing the cops he summoned are on their way. But it’s not as if Hood and Cooley felt entirely at home. At a time when the Shoals was crawling with classic-rock cover bands, the duo’s punkish rawness and somber lyrics—the Replacements were a major influence—must have seemed totally alien. Adam's House Cat “was so locally hated,” Hood admits. “They hated us at home.”3 The boys were despised less for their effort than their output, especially the bitterly belligerent “Buttholeville,” a grouch-fest of a song narrated by a man dreaming of escaping the soul-suck of the small town he calls home for a life filled with sun, sand, and unlimited glugs of Scotch whisky. “Tired of living in Buttholeville,” the malcontent grumbles, “Tired of my job and my wife Lucille / Tired of my kids Ronnie and Neil.” This pairing of Ronnie (Van Zant) and Neil (Young) would later resurface in the first act of Southern Rock Opera. “Buttholeville” would appear on the Drive-By Truckers’ first album, Gangstabilly, and, according to Hood, act as an integral part of the opera’s larger narrative. Hood would often introduce the song to local audiences with a snotty sneer: “If this song pisses you off, it’s about you!”4 “Buttholeville” got Adam’s House Cat banned from not one but two area music festivals, and earned the enmity of local powerbroker, and longtime music partner to Hood’s father, Jimmy Johnson, who threatened to publicly whip young Patterson’s ass for denigrating his beloved hometown. For what 77

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it’s worth, Hood has denied that Buttholeville is an actual place, much less the Shoals, but rather a “general state of mind.”5 Adam’s House Cat turned to the safety of touring, becoming road warriors, whirligigging across the nation in a van, accompanied by their drummer, bassist, and, more often than not, a late-period Velvet Elvis. In 1988, they won a national unsigned bands search contest judged by Elvis Costello, Mark Knopfler, and T Bone Burnett. Two years later they would record an album. But they were burned out. “We fought,” Hood says of his relationship with Cooley. “We fought hard, and we fought every day. Every night was a bloodbath because we didn’t agree on anything.”6 They fought for six long years. They fought over stolen equipment and unpeopled concerts. They fought until the band broke up, but by then they were inseparable. The song “Road Cases” offers a palliative to the in-fighting that torments every musical outfit in recorded history. “The road breaks you,” Hood said in an interview. “It breaks your gear, it breaks your vehicles, and at times it breaks your head.”7 Road cases, the ubiquitous heavy-duty containers that offer peace of mind while in transit, offer protection, and not just for equipment. “Got them pretty road cases,” Hood sings. “Protect our asses, protect our faces, protect our guitars, protect our amps. / Got them pretty road cases throw them out an airplane and they’ll just bounce.” Road cases signify a band’s success, proof that they are not only able to afford the added security but are transporting those fancy road cases via cargo holds. “Paint our name on them road cases . . . / ‘Drive-by [sic] Truckers’ on every one or maybe just ‘DBT’ / Gonna get ourselves a big tour bus, maybe even 78

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an airplane / Fly around the world and back,” Hood allows himself to dream, before dropping another Lynyrd Skynyrd reference that acts as a foreshadowing of what’s to come: “Hope it don’t run out of gas.” Road cases could bestow prestige, as the Allman Brothers Band’s live At the Fillmore East album showcases. In an instantly iconic set of photos, the album’s front cover presents the band posing, laughing, amid a mountain-sized pile of their road cases, each stenciled with the band’s name in white spray paint. On the back cover, the band’s roadies perch themselves on the same cases, grimfaced and clutching beers. Road cases are, naturally, only as good as the band using them. In concert, Hood has, on occasion, introduced the song with the story of seeing road cases spray-painted with “ARS”—short for southern rockers the Atlanta Rhythm Section—in every music store and pawn shop spread across the metro Atlanta area. If and when success evaporates, the cases are the first to go—to pay off managers, lawyers, or, as the song states quite plainly, coke dealers. “A fitting parable for fame and fortune if ever there was one,” Hood writes in the libretto. More prestigious than song royalties and ticket sales are the road cases themselves, the ultimate symbol of a band on the run—indestructible, adaptable, and, the song states, able to “outlive our usefulness.” Dismal failures If every great album needs at least one great break-up song, “Women Without Whiskey” is Southern Rock Opera’s. One 79

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of five Cooley-written or co-written tunes on the twentytrack album (for comparison, he pens about half the material on the Truckers’ more recent releases), “Women Without Whiskey” is an imperfect fit to the opera’s overarching narrative. But the song exemplifies the kind of character studies—frequently menacing, occasionally funny, and always injected with pathos—that Cooley excels at writing. Sung from the viewpoint of an alcoholic facing simultaneous separations from his favorite drink and his romantic partner, the song’s narrator is crumbling “piece by piece,” watching six feet under inch closer with each sip, already missing the bottle that he is only considering abandoning in some hazy, undefined future. “Tell me how to tell,” he begs his lover, “when I’ve had enough.” By 1991, Hood and Cooley had had enough: Adam’s House Cat had outlived its usefulness. The band separated and their album was never officially released, but Hood and Cooley stayed together. Creative partnerships might be the hardest to dissolve. “We didn’t get the memo that the band broke up,” Hood would laugh years later.8 They hightailed to Memphis, where they performed as an acoustic duo, Virgil Kane, after the mythical Confederate veteran-turned-bootlegger (more often spelled Kaine or Caine, and memorialized by the Band in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which begins “Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train.”). Relocated to Auburn, Alabama, they started another group, Horsepussy, one more in the long line of unfortunately named southern rock bands. Southern Rock Opera contains two additional break-up songs, both in the first act, and both just as bleak as “Women 80

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Without Whiskey.” In “Zip City,” a Cooley contribution, a man writes a Dear Jane letter to his teenage girlfriend. Her daddy hates him; everyone knows the relationship will not end in marriage. He’s hitting the road, he says, “I get ten miles to the gallon / I ain’t got no good intentions.” Act one’s final track is “Moved,” a composition by short-time Trucker Rob Malone. Narrated by a recovering heroin addict who has long been ostracized from his circle of friends, it doesn’t get darker than this, a song Hood calls, in the album’s notes, “the lonliest [sic] song on the album.” He moves to Georgia, gets himself a girlfriend, but reconciles to the fact of a preordained life. “I made a valid attempt,” he admits. “But I can’t change my spots. / Lost everything again. / Everything I got.” By 1994, the fight had gone out of the relationship, and the friends separated after a trio of musical ventures. “All three,” in Hood’s estimation, “had been dismal failures.”9 Cooley relocated to Birmingham, where he smoked pot and painted houses. Hood moved back home for a spell, then to Athens, Georgia, a hip college town outside Atlanta with a music scene that had churned out dozens of local heroesturned-international stars and indie darlings since the 1970s (R.E.M., the B-52s). He open-mic’ed, worked soundboards at local clubs, and formed a band called the Lot Lizards (slang for truck-stop prostitutes). It was only a matter of time before destiny pulled him into the orbit of the Redneck Underground, a loose scene of musicians, poets, and other misfits that haunted the dive bars and basement nightclubs of Atlanta’s Cabbagetown neighborhood. The Underground’s poet laureate was Timothy Tyson Ruttenber, a construction worker by day and performance artist by night who appeared 81

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under the name Deacon Lunchbox. The Deacon died in a car wreck two years before Hood moved to town, but if it was not for the movement he left behind, there would likely be no Drive-By Truckers. Even if it kills us Before he had a band, Patterson Hood had a band name, a waggish moniker that incongruously combined his love for trucking-themed country music and hip hop: the Drive-By Truckers. After eighteen or so months apart, he gradually began to reconcile with Cooley, luring his friend to reunions with promises of rock ’n’ roll glory. They’d meet over beer and pizza to 4-track new songs. They enlisted two buddies—Rob Malone on banjo and, on drums, Chris Quillen, a multi-instrumentalist who played bass in the waning days of Adam’s House Cat— to perform a Shoals-area one-off billed under the name Pizza Deliverance. Hood booked studio time for June 10, 1996, in Athens, and planned for Cooley to pick up Quillen en route east. Two weeks before their scheduled studio slot, Quillen was killed in an automobile accident outside Florence. A staunch non-driver, he nevertheless borrowed a set of keys one early morning and, drunk and seatbeltless, crashed head-on into a telephone pole. He was twenty-six years old. One of at least three songs the Truckers have recorded in tribute to their fallen comrade, and the second of three Southern Rock Opera tracks about fatal crashes, “Plastic 82

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Flowers on the Highway” concludes the mini song cycle that launches the opera’s second act.* The song opens with a gruesome car wreck—a man with a promising future speeding along the highway to his new life in the city, a perfect day for driving interrupted by an inattentive truck driver—before dwelling on the detritus left behind: bits of glass, the grease-stained asphalt, and those ubiquitous plastic flowers that bloom sad and silent along every roadside. The glass and grease disappear over time, but for the song’s narrator, a ne’er-do-well cutting grass to work off community service hours, new bouquets of plastic perennials will always offer “something new to cut around.” In the song’s final line, he acknowledges the fragility of life, while confessing the impermanence of such thoughts: “for the next few minutes I drove a little slower.” After Quillen’s death, heartbroken and haunted, Hood and Cooley nevertheless used the studio time to demo a handful of songs that led to the Drive-By Truckers’ first EP, “Bulldozers and Dirt”/“Nine Bullets,” which would define the band up until the present day: character-driven, country-tinged rock vignettes steeped in macabre violence and grotesque humor. Two punnily titled, country music– derived albums, Gangstabilly (1998) and Pizza Deliverance (1999), followed in quick succession, each self-released and recorded with a revolving cast of musician-friends. When it came time to record a third album, Hood, a longtime film freak, turned to a screenplay project gestating *“Tales Facing Up,” which appears on Pizza Deliverance, and Decoration Day’s “Careless” are the other two tracks inspired by Quillen’s death.

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since the mid-1980s. It was sparked by his childhood passion for seventies rock, chiefly the mythology surrounding the short and brilliant career of Lynyrd Skynyrd. “I got this kickass band,” Hood thought to himself, sick of struggling with a screenplay, “why don’t we turn this into a rock opera.”* In the midst of writing it, George Wallace died on September 13, 1998. As Hood watched the high- and mostly lowlights of the governor’s political career replay on the nightly news, he remembers getting “so fucking pissed.”10 He snapped off a trifecta of songs before night’s end, three cornerstones that would cement the southern, rock, and opera themes in Southern Rock Opera: “Wallace,” “Let There Be Rock,” and “Angels and Fuselage.” Labels interested in signing the Truckers accused Hood of career suicide. Few ideas could be more embarrassing for a young band than a concept album, especially one devoted to a group often associated with Governor Wallace and his vision of an unreconstructed, proudly racist South. He raised $20,000 from friends and fans, “a little bit of a fuck-you to the music business,” Hood says.11 But the money wouldn’t necessarily salvage a project that felt too big, an undertaking that seemed destined to terminate another one of his bands. They recorded the album three times, each time with a different bass player, before settling on Earl Hicks, who also *Hood had flirted with the idea at least once before. On Pizza Deliverance, the printed lyrics to “The President’s Penis Is Missing,” a silly, sea shantyish satire of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, comes complete with stage directions for characters including the White House press corps, Walter Cronkite, the ghost of William Randolph Hearst, and Senator John Glenn.

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acted as producer. “It got to the point to where I honestly think that’s what kept us from breaking up,” Hood recalls. “We had talked about it for so long and had so many people tell us we were crazy . . . we couldn’t accept that kind of failure. And so, God damn it, we’re going to make this record, even if it kills us and we kill each other in the process.”12 The band finally self-released Southern Rock Opera on the worst date imaginable, September 12, 2001. But reviews and word-of-mouth induced Lost Highway Records, a Universal subsidiary, to re-release the album the following summer. Patterson Hood had spent nearly half his life engrossed in the album, five years writing the songs, and one year recording the tracks. The Truckers would spend the next two years touring the world in support, including several dates opening for the band that inspired the whole damn thing: Lynyrd Skynyrd.

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6 From the Swamps of Northern Florida Jacksonville

The first son of southern rock The land bogged underfoot, unsteady and unwelcoming, with each spongy step. Each breath felt ozone-rich, shot through with an impossibly verdant sea of living, breathing, deep, dark greenness that enveloped the landscape. I half expected kudzu vines to wrap my ankles and swallow me whole, but all I got were lizards: zigzagging up and down tree limbs, across the toes of my tennis shoes, along the rungs of the chain-link fence that swung open with a rusty sigh, allowing us uninvited access into the boyhood backyard of the greatest of all southern rock legends. Gene Odom, my guide, was forced to shout over the cicadas to tell me the story he’s delivered countless times. It was here, the corner lot of Mull and Woodcrest, where Ronnie Van Zant, Odom’s around-the-block neighbor and best friend since they were “old enough to start walking,” lived until the age of sixteen or so. These were the ditches, he pointed

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out, where the pair fished for Coke bottles, redeemable for pennies, and swam when the summer storms flooded the neighborhood. This was Ronnie’s bedroom, he said, as we peered through the cobwebbed window of a door decked with a wreath of faded plastic flowers. It’s a drab gray house, with pipes and wires and whole additions patched, plywooded, and stuccoed in place— none of it up to code, I presumed and Odom acknowledged. Calling the house ramshackle would be kind. “We used to call this ‘Shantytown,’ ” he laughed, “now it’s called the ‘Bottom.’ ” As far as I can tell from later looking at maps of this neighborhood, mired somewhere in the middle of Jacksonville, Florida’s Westside, the tangle of swampy streets that Odom grew up calling Shantytown officially carries no name. Bordered by the poshly labeled enclaves of Avondale, Edgewood, and Sweetwater, it’s clear that real estate agents aren’t rushing in to rebrand the Bottom. I’d wager it’s gonna be awhile. “It was rough,” Ronnie Van Zant said of his adolescent surroundings, “there was a lot of street fighting, a lot of adventure.” He described it as a “ghetto,” a soggy “skid row” devoid of concrete.1 Odom showed me the corner where the childhood friends tossed a football, the woodlands where they hunted squirrels and target practiced with spent beer cans, the country store that later inspired one of his most sentimental songs. He pointed out the homes where band members, their high-school sweethearts, and local celebrities lived and died, including LeeRoy Yarbrough, a NASCAR legend who slowly went insane after contracting Rocky Mountain spotted fever from a tick bite. Back then 87

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they called these simple, wood-framed cottages “Cracker” houses, after the pejorative used to describe the region’s eighteenth-century Anglo pioneers, whom the ruling classes dismissed as prideful braggarts, tellers, or crackers, of a good story or joke.* And no cracker could out-crack the rest like Ronnie’s father, the architect of the patchwork paradise that stood before us: Lacy Van-Zant. A Second World War Pacific veteran, Van-Zant worked the road as a long-haul trucker, while raising a Shantytown brood of six with his wife, Marion Hicks, whom everyone called Sister. Van-Zant wasn’t a musician, but he did insist on a rhythmic quality in the naming of his children. There were Marlene and Darlene (he adopted Sister’s daughter Betty Jo from a previous marriage), and Ronnie, Donnie, and Johnny. The sons were each a mirror image of the next: squat, pudgy, and with long blonde hair frizzed to gentle waves by Jacksonville’s humidity. All three became southern rockers, but not without the influence, it should be noted, of dear old dad, who taught his boys to hunt, fish, and, above all else, appreciate the whiskey-pickled poetry of Merle and Hank. Ronnie led Lynyrd Skynyrd, of course; Johnny reunited the band following his brother’s death; and Donnie, the middle brother, co-founded the band .38 Special with another kid from Shantytown. For the part he claimed to play in his sons’ good fortunes, Lacy frequently called himself the “father of southern rock.” *Though “Cracker” mostly remains a slur today, Cracker houses have become white trash chic. Southern Living sells Cracker house blueprints for upwards of $1,800.

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As Lacy’s eldest son, Ronnie suffered the brunt of his old man’s abuse, doled out in every form imaginable and fueled by alcohol and the generational trauma of growing up impoverished and uneducated in the South. Nevertheless, when it came time for a young Ronnie to get a tattoo on his right bicep, he eschewed the conventional ink-and-needle remembrance of mom to settle on an American flag-shrouded bald eagle holding, in its talons, a scroll reading “Lacy.” But when it came time to become his own man—in the name of rock ’n’ roll glory—Ronnie changed his surname, shuffling off the hyphen and any highfalutin associations that might precede it. He became, in effect, the South’s anti-Faulkner, who famously added the “u” to his family name because it looked more fashionably British (the two Van Zant brothers would eventually follow their sibling’s lead). Each facet of the Ronnie Van Zant story sounds too contradictory, too southern gothic—just too damn good to contain a set of verifiable components that when combined constitute the fact of a man. “From a literary standpoint,” Patterson Hood has said, “it has everything you could ask for.”2 “Let me tell ya’ll [sic] a story,” Hood sings in the first lines of “Life in the Factory,” “So far fetched [sic] it must be true.” Written to “tie all of the Act II loose ends together,” according to Southern Rock Opera’s libretto, “Factory” provides a quick and easy version of the Van Zant and Lynyrd Skynyrd legend as if recited by Homer—sing to me of Skynyrd, Muse, the band of twists and turns driven time and again off course. To escape the drudgery of bluecollar life, a bunch of “fatherless boys from Florida,” led by a 89

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charismatic frontman, unite to seek salvation in rock ’n’ roll. They practice twelve hours a day, for years, in a sweltering swamp-side shack on the outskirts of town. They hit the road—three hundred shows a year!—open concerts for, and outduel, all of their rock idols. Then, just as their pile of platinum records stretches higher than the Moon, just as “the fame and all the glory,” as the song says, is theirs, the most precipitous of crashing-to-earth falls occurs in a swamp just north of Baton Rouge. By reducing the band’s timeless tale of rock ’n’ roll heroics—Odysseus meets Icarus—to a five minute and twenty-eight second song, the Truckers surpass all tell-all biographies or weepy Behind the Music drivel of the band. From Shantytown to sold-out arenas. Ashes to ashes, swamp to swamp. Gene Before heading to Shantytown, I rendezvoused with Gene Odom at the Jug Saloon, a smoke-filled biker’s den once named the Pastime, and before that the West Tavern. I sipped a Bud Light, he a Coca-Cola, as we traded introductions and small talk. Ronnie Van Zant, who grew up just a mile away and was known to water his hole here, would have likely ridiculed both beverages. For Lynyrd Skynyrd superfans, this bar is holy ground, the inspiration for the band’s first single, “Gimme Three Steps,” a story of one infamous night in Van Zant’s life. The songteller is dancing with sweet Linda Lou at a bar called the Jug—because what rhymes with

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Tavern?—when, suddenly, her husband/boyfriend bursts in, spouting threats against his life. Staring down the barrel of a .44 Magnum, our hero begs for a head start—just three steps is all he needs to scoot out the door to safety. The song sets a pattern for most of the Lynyrd Skynyrd songbook to follow: violent, humorous, and unmistakably southern, like a Flannery O’Connor short story in rhyme and verse. “Gimme Three Steps” also encapsulates the band’s astronomic ascent and meteoric fall: raise hell, struggle to dodge death, and leave a good story behind. Odom has enjoyed a backstage pass for just about every Lynyrd Skynyrd story—the good, the bad, and the bullshit. He was present at the band’s founding, watched as the Shantytown boys became the nation’s biggest rock group, watched as his friends did their best to drink and snort themselves to death, and joined their One More from the Road Tour as the band’s head of security in late 1976. A physically unimposing presence—short and lacking a bouncer’s beef—he made for an odd, but sensible, addition to the band’s retinue. An army veteran and union man in the Iron Workers Local 597—like his father before him, Odom was a crack welder—Gene has never smoked, drank, or drugged in his life. Lynyrd Skynyrd, of course, was the craziest confederacy of heathens who ever took the stage. But Odom came armed with a .357 Magnum, a stint as Mick Jagger’s personal bodyguard, and a grittiness earned on the mean streets of Jacksonville’s Westside. He took a knife for the band at a concert in Salt Lake City—a crazed slasher scaled the stage—and remained at his post, finishing the set, vigilant and bleeding. Odom survived Skynyrd’s

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1977 plane crash, though not unscathed—suffering chemical burns across his face and upper torso, losing sight in his left eye, and fracturing several vertebrae. But most damaging was the loss of his lifelong friend. Ronnie’s death turned Gene Odom into a Lynyrd Skynyrd lifer, a keeper of the band’s long-sputtering flame. His name appears on the cover of three Skynyrd-centric books: a somber, self-published memoir that seeks to canonize Van Zant (“He ranks right along side [sic] of Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson, and a lot of great men from the South,” he writes); a standard band biography released by a big publishing house; and an unsanctioned, follow-up memoir, the mere mention of which sends Odom into acrimonious spasms.3 Unlike the Allman Brothers’ Macon, there is no museum dedicated to the memory of Lynyrd Skynyrd in Jacksonville (a Southern Rock Museum and Hall of Fame has been proposed more times than there are actual southern rock bands—Odom griped that the city’s powers that be just don’t give a damn). But over the past dozen years, visiting Skynyrd devotees have hired Odom as a tour guide, expert eyewitness, and sharp-tacked but bluntly candid raconteur. One hundred dollars and lunch buys a chauffeured ride in his aging Mercedes, which audibly and visibly convulses like a resentful rattler—the odometer was nearing four hundred thousand when I sat shotgun—but Odom is good for at least half that number of deep-cut Skynyrd tales. He piloted through the concrete snakes’ nest that is Jacksonville’s tangle of highways to show me the iconic locations, arcane locales, and many automotive crash sites of Lynyrd Skynyrd lore. And though I didn’t ask, Odom dished on the band’s 92

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sordid afterlife—unpublicized lawsuits, allegations of money laundering, forthcoming bankruptcies—prefacing each story with a threat to add me to his running list of asses he can and should and, if provided the right opportunity, will kick one day, if I dare name names or tell stories I shouldn’t. What’s your name? Odom’s Mercedes rattled to rest at the next stop on our tour: Criswell Park, a jumble of ball courts and sandlots on the outskirts of Shantytown. It’s prophetic, and perhaps more than a little ominous, that the band that would become Lynyrd Skynyrd was launched in the summer of 1964 with an errant projectile, in this case, a Ronnie Van Zant line drive. The sixteen-year-old’s foul ball fortuitously smacked Bob Burns, knocking him unconscious. Van Zant no doubt recognized the young lad with a knot swelling on the back of his head as a neighborhood drummer with connections that he, a singer then fronting a talentless band, lacked. By day’s end, Ronnie was garage-jamming with Burns and his guitar wiz bandmate, Gary Rossington (their friend Larry Jungstrom would soon chime in on bass). A few weeks later, Van Zant returned to the baseball field and forcibly conscripted Allen Collins, a lanky pitcher and guitar phenom, into his group. Collins, who previously lost a Battle of the Bands to Shantytown’s most notorious teenage street fighter, knew that no one said no to Ronnie Van Zant. Odom reeled off the quintet’s early names—Conqueror Worm, My Backyard, the Noble Five, the Pretty Ones, One 93

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Percent (he forgot the Wildcats and Sons of Satan)—as we pulled into our next destination, Robert E. Lee High, a lushly lawned campus populated with palm trees and Spanish moss-swaying oaks. It was here, as any rock trivia hound can tell you, that Lynyrd Skynyrd found a name that stuck. With a new bride and a baby on the way, Van Zant dropped out of Lee High months before Leonard Skinner joined the staff. A Korean War vet-turned-gym teacher whose haircut and build made him look like a mesa with muscles, Skinner functioned as the rules-enforcing captain to the high school’s resident Cool Hand Luke-wannabes. Gary Rossington, almost four years Ronnie’s junior, ran headlong into Coach Skinner’s Nixonian anti-longhair policy. He tried an oil slick’s worth of Vaseline and even a wig—anything to hide his beautiful bramble of dark curls— but was suspended repeatedly. With a scowl and a wave of his middle finger, Rossington eventually quit school (Skinner went to his grave quibbling that he didn’t kick anyone out, despite what the band’s mythology and the Truckers’ “Life in the Factory” says). Like the cruelest scribblers of Pompeiian graffiti, Van Zant and company guaranteed that Leonard Skinner’s name would be forever preserved in trash talk. Ronnie began introducing the band as “Leonard Skinner” as early as 1968, no doubt sending the band and in-the-know locals into tittering fits. In order to evade a possible lawsuit, handbills and the group’s first 7-inch single soon advertised the band as “Lynard Skynard.” Renamed Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band would go down in history as arguably having the most misspelled name in music history. But the band’s managers 94

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assured that the public would never forget how to enunciate it, insisting that their first album title be (pronounced 'lĕh'nérd ‘skin-‘nérd). Coach Skinner, who retired from teaching in 1969, proved shrewder than the band would realize, turning his famous name into a realty company and series of bars. He would even grow out his hair, relatively speaking, out past the tops of his ears. As we were leaving Lee High, Odom told me that the school enrolled a single black student in the 1960s, but that African Americans now make up “99.9%” of the student body. I nodded along, recognizing the common assumption that white students disappeared from the public school system, especially in the South, post-integration. But when I later checked the school’s website for verification, I was happy to learn that Lee High is more diverse than Jacksonvillians might realize.* If they could only do something about that awful name. The American Rolling Stones Lynyrd Skynyrd quickly established themselves as North Florida’s answer to the Allmans, after the Brothers had absconded to Macon. One song in particular secured the attention of Alan Walden, who had recently launched his own publishing and management company, Hustler’s Inc., *According to a 2016–17 school year data report, Lee High’s student body is 65 percent African American, 20 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian.

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after resigning from Capricorn Records over a power struggle with his older brother Phil. In a decade defined by power ballads, “Free Bird” was destined to become the king of the FM airwaves. The opening organ solo and closing trio of time- and mind-stretching guitar solos (ranging from 7 minutes and 26 seconds to over 14 minutes in most live versions) were de rigueur for the period. But it’s the song’s opening lines, “If I leave here tomorrow / Would you still remember me?” could be read as a sentimental question to a lover, an adversarial kiss-off, or the ultimate expression of the Easy Rider-ethos—we’re all free birds in our own way. “Free Bird” is suitable for weddings, funerals, prom, afterprom sex, ditching your date after the after-prom sex, driving cross-country, and even yoga* (“Stairway to Heaven,” on the other hand, only befits late-night, pot-smoking sessions of Dungeons & Dragons). An entire stratosphere’s worth of butane fumes has been released skyward, via cigarette lighters, while shouting “Free Bird!”—first sincerely, then ironically—in every dive bar, concert hall, and stadium on the planet Earth, which, in the midst of writing this book, seemed destined to stop spinning when cellphone footage revealed that Bob Dylan had covered the song in concert after an audience member unleashed the shout. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the songwriter laureate of the United States knew the lyrics. We are, after all, a “Free Bird” nation. Countless bodies bear the song’s title tattooed in ink, alongside a rebel flag and a dove frozen *Should this come as a surprise? I found at least three yoga studios using the name.

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in flight, though a bald eagle is more likely, because few songs flaunt the great American myth of freedom more than this. Walden auditioned 187 bands in 1970, and signed one: Lynyrd Skynyrd. He scheduled sessions with Jimmy Johnson at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and disseminated the demos to nine record companies, anticipating that “Free Bird” would make him, Alan Walden, the next Phil Walden. Reviews were not kind. The band’s songs were too long for radio play, they said. “They sound too much like the Allman Brothers.”4 It was back to the bar circuit for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Enter Alan Peter Kuperschmidt, stage-named Al Kooper, the Zelig of the 1960s and 1970s pop-rock scene. A musical visionary from Queens, stricken at a young age with the dreaded Elvis disease, Kooper joined a touring teenybopper band at the age of fourteen. At twenty, he would write his first number one hit, “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965). By year’s end he was backing Bob Dylan (that’s his Hammond organ solo on “Like a Rolling Stone”). He plays piano on Electric Ladyland; piano, organ, and the melancholic French horn intro on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”; and piano on Taj Mahal’s The Natch’l Blues. He basically invented the jazz-rock genre, by combining brass and the blues with his group Blood, Sweat & Tears. And then, in July 1972, he discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd playing a weeklong stand at Funochio’s, a menacing, midtown Atlanta rock club. To Kooper, who was shopping for bands to sign to his MCA Records–distributed Sounds of the South label, the complete unknowns from Shantytown looked 97

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patently ridiculous. The twin guitarists, Rossington and Collins, resembled “a coupla Cousin Its on stilts,” compared to their middling but charismatic frontman, an impish, pot-bellied tornado who stalked the stage in—by the holy names of Saints Dylan and Hendrix—bare fucking feet.* But unlike most of the bands he scouted—cover bands fronted by Jagger wannabes—Skynyrd came prepackaged with their own polished set of songs.** No matter how much Ronnie Van Zant wanted his band to become the “American Rolling Stones”—a comparison often repeated by himself and rock journalists throughout his career, and alluded to in Southern Rock Opera—he knew his place (blue-collar, slightly sinister, defiantly but stereotypically southern) in the world of rock ’n’ roll. Thus, the workaday uniform: black t-shirt, black jeans, black gambler’s hat lassoed with a rattlesnake skin band. The moody scowl and raspy growl. His obsession with violence and death. Kooper lusted over Lynyrd Skynyrd, eventually making them the fourth signee on his new label’s roster.*** He *He liked feeling the stage’s energy, Ronnie Van Zant would tell interviewers. Shoes irritated an old football injury, said his widow, Judy. But Donnie, who perhaps knew him best, said his big brother just preferred the barefoot life. **This hadn’t always been the case: back in the One Percent days, the boys once opened for Hourglass, the early Allmans outfit, who were back East to promote their new album, which the ornery Shantytowners defiantly covered track-by-track, playing nearly every song. Surprisingly, the greatest brawl in southern rock history did not go down that night. ***For the trivia buffs: the first three were Mose Jones, a southern rock group from Atlanta; a Chicano funk-horn band from East Los Angeles named Elijah; and Kooper’s own Blues Project.

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produced their first album, and in true Kooperian fashion injected himself into almost every track: some Mellotron here, a few plucks of mandolin string there. He tried to get the band to change their name, settled for branding them with a fascistic death’s-head logo, and set them loose upon the world—plus a few lineup changes, including pianist Billy Powell and veteran songwriter and session man Ed King, who became the group’s third lead in the band’s “guitar army” (take that Allman Brothers!). After two months of warm-up shows that took them up and down the East Coast, they opened a dozen dates in late autumn 1973 for the Who’s Fallout Shelter Tour, the US leg of their Quadrophenia rock opera circus. Overnight, Skynyrd’s crowds jumped from 1,000, on a very good night, to 19,000-plus sellouts. So followed their rock star excesses. Whether the debauched influence of Pete Townsend and company, or a palliative to sooth their road-wracked nerves, Lynyrd Skynyrd went full Moon, Keith Moon that is, in all his boozeguzzling, pill-popping, hotel furniture defenestrating glory. The band had avoided life in one factory, only to be trapped in an industry that few, if any, escaped intact. The rotgut life Gene Odom missed most of his buddy’s early successes, after being drafted into the army in 1969 and sent to Germany, he’s lucky to say, rather than Vietnam. He returned home in 1971—“big mistake” not signing on for another tour of duty, he told me—and jobbed as an ironworker around Florida 99

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and Georgia. When work would dry up, he’d make hours freelancing as a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s security team. “Big mistake,” he said again, signing up to work for Ronnie Van Zant. The Who tour helped expose the band to a wider audience, but promoters didn’t know what to make of this act, booking them for gigs with bill-sharers as diverse as Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Eric Clapton, Queen, and the New York Dolls. Skynyrd’s first two albums didn’t exactly jive with fans either, that is until “Sweet Home Alabama,” the first track, but second single, off their second album, the unsubtly titled Second Helping, took the summer of 1974 by storm. The record, and the band’s subsequent single, “Free Bird,” ensured that Skynyrd could tour until the decade ran out, if they could survive that long. Because, truth be told, Ronnie Van Zant could be as pleasant as poison ivy, especially when it came time to practice. At Van Zant’s direction, the band held marathon rehearsal and writing sessions in an isolated cabin in a quaggy copse of woods south of Shantytown. “The owner was a real swamp boy,” according to Gary Rossington. “He'd go around and hit big rattlesnakes on the head, so we had a bunch of snakes in barrels.”5 They called it the Hell House, for the lack of air conditioning, the gators that swarmed the nearby creek, and their bandleader’s authoritarian rules: practice every day from 9:00 a.m. to dusk, no entourage, no excessive drinking or drugging (pot and mushroom tea were allowed). The opera’s “Life in the Factory” describes the scene well: “Practiced twelve hours a day in the Hell House / In the swamps out side [sic] of town. / 100 degrees 100

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without no open windows / Heat radiating off the tin.” Reflecting on Van Zant decades later, longtime bassist Leon Wilkeson summed his bandleader up nicely: “Ronnie ran Skynyrd like Stalin ran Russia.”6 When away from the Hell House, Van Zant filled his days with boozing, bullying, and brawling, a livelihood he somewhat affectionately called the “rotgut life.” The rotgut life was double Scotch breakfasts and a fifth of Chivas for dinner. The rotgut life was attempting to toss a roadie from the cabin doors of an in-flight plane, and punching your pianist in the face and knocking out his two front teeth, and doing it again, several months later, for good measure. The rotgut life was arguing with one of your lead guitarists over the correct pronunciation of the word “schnapps” while on tour in Portsmouth, England, and shattering a bottle of said schnapps over the head of your tour manager, before goring the hand of your guitarist (who kept right on mispronouncing schnapps) with the broken bottle.* The rotgut life was unsustainable, got Lynyrd Skynyrd banned from hotels and, in a snowball-turned-avalanche set of consequences that wouldn’t become immediately apparent, from commercial airlines. And like poison ivy, the rotgut life spread throughout the band. Their tour manager had to carry $2,000 in cash, liability for what was deemed “impromptu pillage,” such as when Artimus Pyle, the band’s drummer and ersatz hippie, obliterated a hotel after room service forgot the sugar for

*For those playing along at home, both /ʃnɑps/ and /ʃnæps/ are correct.

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his iced tea. One could fill a junkyard with the rooms they trashed and cars they crashed, or maybe even write a song. Halfway through our tour of Jacksonville, Gene Odom swung by a quiet residential thoroughfare made famous after Gary Rossington plowed his brand new Ford Torino into an oak tree. Van Zant and Allen Collins penned a cautionary tale to their friend, “That Smell,” one of the first and, to this day, most bluntly honest portrayals of a hell-bound rockstar: “Angel of darkness is upon you / Stuck a needle in your arm / So take another toke, have a blow for your nose / And one more drink fool, will drown you.” Not that the band took heed of their own warning: After his driver’s license was suspended for too many drunk-driving arrests, Allen Collins took advantage of Jacksonville’s labyrinth of waterways and bought a boat to get around town. Over forty years later, the oak still wears an ugly gash across its trunk. I couldn’t tell if it was from Rossington’s wreck, or Skynyrd souvenir takers like Odom, who pried off a six-inch hunk of the bark and tossed it to me. Later in the day, as the mid-summer sun scorched the wet ground, Odom steered his Mercedes toward the site of the Hell House. The band’s rehearsal space burned down long ago, and the fishing dock back behind the shack, where Van Zant allowed himself rare moments of peace and quiet, rotted to stumps years before. As we passed mile after mile of golf courses and gated communities carved from swamp and forest, he reached into the back seat to fetch a glossy brochure for our destination, Edgewater Landing, a 114-acre residential and recreational development. We

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passed Big Mac-sized McMansions in various phases of construction on the way to Lot 129, an acre-sized patch of dirt where the Hell House once stood. In a nod to history, the planned community’s developers have named the surrounding streets Tuesday’s Cove and Free Bird Loop, and tacked on another hundred grand or so to the property’s asking price: $395,000. As long as we possibly can During the final weeks of 1976, Gene Odom joined Ronnie Van Zant’s entourage as Skynyrd’s full-time security chief, and, perhaps more importantly, their morally incorruptible babysitter. Odom chased shady drug dealers from the backstage shadows, replaced Jack D. with Dom P., and poured the rest of the band’s favorite brown liquors down the drain. The almost clean and semi-sober living was part and parcel of a Van Zant attitude shift after his cocaine habit forced a smattering of canceled tour dates. In an effort to retool himself and the band, he hired guitarist Steve Gaines in May. The young Okie guitarist restored the glory of Skynyrd’s three-necked guitar army, after Van Zant’s rotgut bullshit chased away Ed King the year prior. Gaines owed his good fortune to his sister, Cassie, who had joined the band as a member of their traveling trio of backup singers, the Honkettes. Steve’s story is told, simply and with little to no exaggeration, in Southern Rock Opera’s “Cassie’s Brother,”

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a song that directly precedes “Life in the Factory,” despite the illogical narrative this track listing establishes. (Written by Rob Malone, “Cassie’s Brother” is, like “Moved,” among the weakest tracks on the album—two strikes that might explain its odd placement.) As the song tells it: Cassie, knowing that Van Zant is looking to rebuild his army, asks if her brother can sit in with the band. Skeptical, the bandmates agree, and are promptly blown away by the “writin’ and playin’ fool.” Though born less than two years after Van Zant, Gaines looked at least a decade younger— the band had gained a singer-songwriter hungry for his big break. As “Cassie’s Brother” says, a revitalized Skynyrd dropped their first live release and fifth studio album in rapid succession—half of Street Survivors tracks would be written or co-written by Gaines, including the album’s closer, “Ain't No Good Life,” the only Skynyrd song lacking lead vocals by Van Zant. An unpopular song among Truckers’ cognoscenti, “Cassie’s Brother” nevertheless unspools a good story, while foreshadowing the opera’s three-song denouement tracing Skynyrd’s end. “Beyond expectation, sounding better than ourselves,” Malone writes of Skynyrd’s rejuvenation. “Just wanna keep playing / As long as we possibly can.” Ronnie Van Zant would—spoiler alert—fulfill a self-determined prophesy of dying before his thirtieth birthday. But he could never portend, of course, that he would be joined in death by Steve and Cassie, or that he would be buried steps from the shared gravesite of the siblings, in Jacksonville Memory Gardens Cemetery, located halfway between Shantytown and the Hell House. 104

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For forty years now, no Lynyrd Skynyrd pilgrimage to Jacksonville has been complete without a visit to Ronnie’s, Steve’s, and Cassie’s final resting places. That is, until June 29, 2000, when vandals broke into the crypts of the two men. The grave robbers withdrew a bag containing Gaines’s cremated ashes from its metal urn (1 percent of the cremains were spilled when the bag tore during removal, according to the police). They also managed to force Van Zant’s casket from its tomb but were unable to pry it open. Rumors have since circulated that the perpetrators, who have never been identified, wanted to confirm the rumor that Van Zant had been buried in a Neil Young t-shirt. The mausoleums remain a site for adoring fans, but the remains they contained were promptly relocated. Ronnie’s reinterment spot remained a closely guarded secret for a dozen years, until a Craigslist posting advertising two plots adjacent to Van Zant’s vault finally revealed the secret: a sprawling cemetery called Riverside Memorial Park, located not two miles from his boyhood home. (Riverside would also provide the burial sites for Skynyrd’s Allen Collins and Leon Wilkeson, who both survived the crash, but not the long aftermath, and Leonard Skinner, whose epitaph reads “Dedicated Coach.”) Ronnie Van Zant’s grave site sits at a bend in the cemetery road, surrounded by palm trees, pink-blooming azalea bushes, and his dear parents, Sister and Lacy. On one of the final stops on my Gene Odom tour, floral displays, real and plastic, crowned his modest marble headstone, where visitors had left coins, cards, votive candles, and an empty airplane bottle of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. Four souvenir-sized 105

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Stars and Stripes fluttered in the breeze, outnumbering the lone Confederate flag, which drooped in the grass. I looked on in silence as Odom spruced up his best friend’s grave, clearing stray lawn clippings and debris from the earth. Before we left, he made sure to replant the flag by gently tap, tap, tapping its plastic finial spear with his open palm, like a father patting the head of an obedient child, before whispering into the wind, “See you later, buddy.”

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7 Hurtling Through Space Outside Gillsburg, Mississippi

The day southern rock died Twice I’d tried—and twice I failed—to locate this place: once, on a whim, after detouring from the interstate while en route to Memphis several years before; and again, exactly one year prior to this day, October 20, 2017, the fortieth anniversary of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. The internet provided GPS coordinates to the crash site, which lay somewhere above the Mississippi-Louisiana border, out there amid a pastoral jumble of chicken farms, cow pastures, and pine tree forests awaiting the lumber mill. Twice I pulled over to the side of the road to peer between the pines, beyond the multitude of “No Trespassing” signs, to some spot no doubt slithering with what the great southern writer Harry Crews called “a feast of snakes,” and thought better of bushwhacking. Today I got lucky, arriving at a highway crossroads near the site at the same moment as area resident Bobby McDaniel. He knew what brought me here without my asking, and told

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me to pile into his vintage, military-issue Jeep. He drove for ten minutes, deep into the thicket, to a place I never would have found on my own. There, a circle of Skynyrd pilgrims stood in a grove of tall pines. I shook hands with the group, which included several first responders, a crash survivor, and a couple who had travelled from Florence, Italy. We all knew the story well: a living trauma for some gathered here, a four-decades-long disaster for many more, the cataclysm that put the opera in Southern Rock Opera. On October 20, 1977, a Convair CV-240 fell out of the sky and crashed, killing Ronnie Van Zant, siblings Cassie and Steve Gaines, longtime roadie Dean Kilpatrick, and the two pilots, Walter McCreary and William Gray. Purported causes for the accident have been numerous. Several band members saw flames blasting from the plane’s starboard engine on the previous flight from Miami to Greenville, South Carolina. The twin-prop plane was old, decrepit; drummer Artimus Pyle said it looked as if it belonged to the Clampett family. Aerosmith chose not to rent the plane after inspection, and because a tour manager allegedly witnessed the pilots passing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the cockpit. But in the end, the National Transportation Safety Board crash report determined that the plane just ran out of gas. It was a solemn hour beneath those crash-site pines. We listened as Marc Frank, the band’s then drum tech, recounted the sad details of that day. Jaime Wall, a volunteer firefighter, showed off the ax he used to free bodies from the wreckage. We searched the ground for remnants from the wreck, and found a dozen or so pieces of metal and plastic that we positively identified as belonging to the Convair. We ran our 108

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hands over the carvings of names, song lyrics, and rebel flags that decorated a nearby beech tree, a makeshift memorial to the band. And when we exhausted ourselves with talking and taking pictures, each of us stood silently and looked up, into the trees. The end Ronnie Van Zant was buried five days following the crash. The dirt had hardly settled on his grave before the redeeming began. He always said he wouldn’t live to see the age of thirty, and now, at the age of twenty-nine, he had died a rock ’n’ roll martyr on his way to becoming the sinning saint from Shantytown. The arrest record and battered bandmates remained, a testament to his rotgut life, but the songs—despite being recorded, disseminated, and adored— could be rewritten. The duality of the southern thing meant that even Ronnie Van Zant could become a voice for progressivism. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t go political— “Things Goin’ On,” a honky-tonk cut from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s first album, bemoaned the budgets of the Vietnam War and NASA: “Too many lives they’ve spent across the ocean. / Too much money been spent upon the moon.” A late-career track “All I Can Do Is Write About It” is a Joni Mitchell-ish take on the pavementing of the southern paradise: “Did you ever see the beauty of the hills of Carolina / Or the sweetness of the grass in Tennessee . . . I can see the concrete slowly creeping / Lord take me and mine before that comes.” But it’s damn near impossible to cogently argue the contrarian 109

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position, as so many Skynyrd partisans attempt to do, that “Sweet Home Alabama” is a clever, anti-Wallace battle cry—believe me, I’ve tried . . . and failed, again and again. The songs “Poison Whiskey” and, more famously, “That Smell,” Van Zant’s constituents argue, expose the horrors of alcoholism, despite the fact that the man pickled his innards on a daily basis. “Saturday Night Special,” true believers say, is a story detailing the tragedy of gun violence, ignoring the fact that the follow-up song, “Cheatin’ Woman,” from the band’s third album, Nuthin’ Fancy, repeatedly threatens the titular stand-in with the same: “I’m gonna get that pistol gal / I’m gonna shoot you and all your pals / You ain’t gonna bother poor me / Won’t bother poor me no longer.” Ronnie Van Zant survives surrounded by myth and legend, but he did not, as Patterson Hood’s Betamax Guillotine gag speculates, die from being decapitated by a Betamax VCRturned-errant missile. The fact is the Skynyrd frontman’s head remained resolutely attached to his shoulders. Van Zant did perish, though, from a single blunt force trauma to the forehead, perhaps from a flying Betamax or Sony Trinitron television set, but more likely from a tree limb that penetrated the airplane’s cabin. Cassie and Steve Gaines and assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick suffered massive injuries and died on impact, along with the two pilots, Walter McCreary and William Gray. Southern Rock Opera’s concluding song, “Angels and Fuselage,” details the final moments, thoughts, and dreams of a Van Zant-esque character staring out the window of an airplane in crash descent. He broods over his darling wife, his high school beginnings “Smoking by the gym door, 110

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practicing my rock-star attitude,” and his desire for just one more drink. Outside the plane window he sees trees, their tops stretching ever closer, their branches perched with a surreal and frightening flock of angels. “I’m scared shitless of what’s coming next. / I’m scared shitless, these angels I see in the trees are waiting for me.” For me, these lines always conjure visions of Marc Chagall’s expressionist paintings of winged celestials— art I have otherwise found unbearably mawkish. But “Angels and Fuselage” is powerful, melancholy and mournful, far and away the best tribute to Van Zant and his fallen comrades,* and certainly one of the best among the catalog of songs that seek to capture the deep sadness of a hero dying too soon. One of the first three songs Hood wrote for the album, scribbled in a flash of inspiration the night George Wallace died, “Angels and Fuselage” inverts the Wallace song cycle from act one: a villain doomed to Hell, a hero so close to Heaven he can already see the angels. By song’s end, the crash has occurred. There are no explosions, no blood and gore, the horrible moment simply happens. In the final lines, the Van Zant character surveys the scene—the listener gets the feeling he, now also an angel, is observing from above. There is his plane, or what’s left of it, dismantled and strewn across

*I could scrounge up three others worth a mention: Charlie Daniels’s American Pie-ish take on the deaths of Elvis, Janis Joplin, and Van Zant in “Reflections” (1979); a bit of saccharine songwriting from brother Donnie Van Zant in .38 Special’s “Rebel to Rebel” (1991); and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “The Freebird Fell” (2006), which, despite being co-written with Ed King and Artimus Pyle, is so atrocious that every time the song is played Ronnie Van Zant’s poor heart must ache and break just a little bit more—may the man rest in peace.

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the landscape, rendered into a word that sounds and feels grotesque: fuselage. And there are his friends: in the swamp, on the ground, in the trees. Ain’t no time Like “Angels and Fuselage,” the preceding song, “Greenville to Baton Rouge,” takes the form of a brief moment of contact—a payphone call or telegram—sent to a loved one. But unlike the dirge-like mood of the album’s finale, “Greenville to Baton Rouge” is a performance of such fury and velocity—“This ain’t no time for moving slow,” the song says—that it sounds like the Truckers recorded the track while hurtling through space. The song’s lyrics, like its sound, are all about movement, specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd jetting from one concert to the next. “Greenville to Baton Rouge / I’ll call you up when I get through,” Hood sings. “The life I live is the life I choose / Greenville to Baton Rouge.”* But the *Linking New Orleans with Houston and destinations further west, Baton Rouge rarely pops up in song lyrics, but when it does it’s a city defined by movement. “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train,” the first line reads in the hitchhiking anthem “Me and Bobby McGee.” In “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” first performed by the Oak Ridge Boys but popularized by Garth Brooks, a truck driver begs an operator to “put me on through / I gotta send my love down to Baton Rouge.” Similarly, in “Louisiana Rain,” Tom Petty sings of a lovesick wanderer searching for a woman from coast to coast; he discovers that she’s living in Louisiana’s state capital, but fears that “I may never be the same when I reach Baton Rouge.” Baton Rouge—it’s a city where everyone seems to be coming or going, but no one wants to be heading.

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song quickly turns from triumph (“The shows have sure been great this year”) to terror (“The right engine gave a little flash, the pilot panicked and dumped the gas”), tracing the arc of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup’s final, and fatal, journey. They were so close, just forty-eight miles from their scheduled destination, the Baton Rouge airport. At the end of a nearly 500-foot path of carnage lay the plane’s cabin, wingless, split in two, and twisted into a boomerang shape after colliding with a pair of massive pine trees. The screams of the survivors filled the swamp, where moments before, in the air, they cried and prayed, but mostly silently awaited their fate, heads between knees. Everyone, that is, but Ronnie, who either dozed from an afternoon date with the bottle or the sleeping pills provided by Gene Odom, unable to hear the copilot shouting: heads down, seatbelts tight—we’re out of gas. The order shouldn’t have come as a shock. Both engines had been sputtering for several minutes, following a ten-foot eruption of hellfire that came blasting out of the starboard motor two hours into the flight, sending the passengers scurrying back to their seats, interrupting the disco dance-off in the aisles, the heated poker match, the boom box blaring country hits (the last song played, according to Odom, was, most fittingly, Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever”). Before Ronnie had passed out, the band agreed that they would scrap this rent-a-plane for good and buy themselves a Lear jet, the transport of choice among contemporary rock gods. At takeoff, the band tried to make the best of the situation, while at least one member sat in her seat, fidgeting with fright. Just 669 miles to Baton Rouge. 113

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Survivors Before the crash, back on the ground in Greenville, Cassie Gaines worried over which flight to take. Her fellow Honkette JoJo Billingsley, laid up at home with a stomach virus, had missed the first four dates of the Street Survivors tour. The night before the Greenville gig, Billingsley awoke from a terrifying dream: a nosediving airplane, her bandmates dead and dying. The next morning, she left an ominous message for each and every one. Engine trouble on the flight from Miami to Greenville, coupled with Billingsley’s warning, encouraged Gaines to book a sole seat with a commercial airliner to Baton Rouge, a luxury not afforded to a band that trashed too many an airplane. In the opera’s antepenultimate track “Shut Up and Get On the Plane,” an anonymous bandmate—Cooley no doubt had Van Zant in mind when writing the song—bullies Gaines to choose the band over self-preservation, to literally embrace death. There’s an infinite number of ways to die, he tells her, “Screaming engines, shooting flames / Dirty needles and cheap cocaine / Some gal’s old man with a gun / To me it’s all the same.” Cooley’s lyrics mirror the last words Van Zant ever spoke while standing with two feet on this planet Earth: “If it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” he told Gene Odom while stepping aboard the Convair.1 Life is not a fleeting way station to death, Cooley warns in the song’s final, somber lines, but, for the majority of humanity, death unrealized. “Dead is dead and it ain’t no different than walking around if you ain’t living,” he sings, before unleashing what Patterson Hood has called “probably 114

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the most important line on the record,” a lyric that sums up the life and death of Lynyrd Skynyrd (not to mention Duane Allman, Colonel Bruce Hampton, and a host of southern rock lives) and the entirety of Southern Rock Opera: “Living in fear’s just another way of dying before your time.”

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8 America Huntsville, Alabama/ Oxford, Mississippi

Southern American I had put off seeing Lynyrd Skynyrd for what felt like years, skipping tour dates that took the band to nearby state fairs, casinos, and motorcycle rallies. First, there was the question of relevance. With Ronnie Van Zant’s youngest brother, Johnny, fronting the band, the lineup contains just a single cofounder and crash survivor: guitarist Gary Rossington. But I especially dreaded seeing them now, the summer of 2017, mired in the first year of President Donald Trump’s regime. Everything about the man, and my country, that I despised—conservatism, chauvinism, white supremacy— seemed entangled with the legacy of Skynyrd. Remaining resolutely unreconstructed during the first dozen or so years of their reformation, Lynyrd Skynyrd gradually transformed into a quintessentially American band.

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During the second Bush era, the band became a staple on country music television and radio stations. They headlined Sean Hannity’s jingoist Freedom Concert series (the talk show host-turned-birther idiot joined the band onstage for “Sweet Home Alabama”), palled around with Kid Rock, and played countless shows benefiting military veterans. The refrain of “Red White and Blue (Love it or Leave),” a minor hit from 2003, is the perfect representation of the politically and culturally conservative shift among baby boomers during the era: “My hair’s turning white, / My neck’s always been red, / My collar’s still blue, / We’ve always been here / Just trying to sing the truth to you. / Yes you could say / We’ve always been, / Red, White, and Blue.” But even Lynyrd Skynyrd must change with the times, and in 2012, the unfurling of the Confederate battle flag during “Sweet Home Alabama” was, very quietly, removed from the setlist. “The KKK and Skinheads and people have kind of kidnapped the [D]ixie rebel flag,” Rossington told CNN by way of explanation.1 But in less than two weeks, the sole survivor was backtracking, promising irate fans that the rebel flag would remain on stage in some capacity for every show. “We are and always will be a Southern American Rock band, first and foremost,” he said, a clever turn of phrase that sounds like both the pinnacle of the Republican Party’s southern strategy and the final death knell for southern rock.2 But research, curiosity, and southern pride demanded I see Skynyrd in concert. Plus, during the writing of this book, I had become a fan, though one who still felt compelled to roll up the windows. So, I headed back to a stop along Highway 72: Huntsville, Alabama. 117

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I expected the Von Braun Center concert arena to be choked with fans waving the Confederate Stars and Bars.* Throughout the nation, and especially and unexpectedly throughout the South, Confederate flags and statues had toppled like papier-mâché tombstones in a hurricane, evaporating from the streets of one city to the next: Charleston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Dallas. The backlash to the backlash, coupled with President Donald Trump’s support, had invigorated neo-Confederate redeemers nationwide. But I saw only two Confederate flag bearers throughout the entire show: a young dude sporting a vintage Skynyrd t-shirt, and a Nathan Bedford Forrest–looking bozo wearing a truck-stop ball cap. What I hadn’t expected to see was a concert awash in the American flag. Old Glory—invariably paired with skulls and/or bald eagles—dominated the sartorial spread at the merch table and among the audience. The Stars and Stripes decorated the stage’s constantly shifting backdrops, the pianist’s baby grand, and Johnny Van Zant’s vest and mic stand (at one point, he ran backstage to exchange his faded flag for a fresh set of colors). The military, police, and other first responders were saluted twice as often as Ronnie Van *Funny story: The city’s main arena shares a name with a nearby museum, both dedicated to Nazi rocket engineer-turned-NASA scientist, Wernher von Braun. Google Maps brought me to the latter, situated amid the sprawling Redstone Arsenal, on the city’s southwest edge. Pulling up to a safety outpost outside the heavily fortified military complex, I was asked for identification, causing me to wonder, for just a moment, whether I should have packed my passport, proof that I was a true, blue American. “I’m here to see Skynyrd,” I said, with a cautious glance at my surroundings. The guard sighed and pointed me in the direction of the other Von Braun Center.

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Zant and the rest of the band’s dearly departed members. It was a display of pageantry unwitnessed since our nation’s post-9/11 fervor subsided a dozen years before. Every element of the Lynyrd Skynyrd experience felt forced, recognizable but inauthentic. The band played all their hits—and, thankfully, not one song from the postRonnie era—but still couldn’t help but sound like a tribute band. During “Sweet Home Alabama” the backdrop featured a hybrid symbol: the thirteen stars of the Confederacy layered atop the state flag of Alabama (a cowardly gesture, in my opinion: embrace your hate or move on). Johnny, wholly lacking his brother’s charisma, blessed the audience with the sign of the cross more often than a television evangelist. But when Van Zant asked if there were any “die-hard Lynyrd Skynyrd fans out there tonight,” I hollered along with the roar of the audience. When he asked if we, “Skynyrd Nation,” “still believe in America,” I whispered what was likely the quietest affirmation in the entire arena. And when the band closed with “Free Bird,” as they must, I closed my eyes, filling with tears, and sang every damn word, joining voices with a great sea of humanity, for the United States, for the South, for Ronnie Van Zant. It was the most American thing I’d ever done, this side of voting in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. Southern, American I attended my first Drive-By Truckers concert, at the iconic Tipitina’s in New Orleans, on August 21, 2004. Completely 119

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unfamiliar with the band, but very much a live-music junkie in those days, I accompanied a group of friends to the show. About halfway through I walked out. What can I say? At the time, the jam-band cult (Phish, Widespread Panic, and others that followed in the noodly footsteps of the Grateful Dead) was just beginning to loosen its decade-long hold on me. Entering my mid-twenties, I was rediscovering the classics: the Clash, A Tribe Called Quest, Dylan, and Morrissey. In 2008 or thereabouts, just after relocating back to New Orleans after three post-Katrina years exiled in New York City, my stepfather, Danny, handed me a Truckers mixtape CD he had made. The song list was heavy on the three albums the band had recorded immediately following Southern Rock Opera, an era highlighted by the inclusion and emergence of a brilliant young singer/songwriter/guitarist, from just north of the Shoals, named Jason Isbell. I listened once through, maybe twice, and never gave the band another thought until hearing back-to-back interviews with Isbell and Patterson Hood on the comedian Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in the spring of 2014. I was on the road, in South Carolina, wrapping up research for my previous book, a study of race, labor, and myth-making in the South, using barbecue as the focus. As I listened to Hood run down his career, my antenna went up at the mention of Southern Rock Opera. The duality of the southern thing, as he described it, jibed with my thinking about the South. I immediately cued up the album, and was smitten. I’ve since wound my way through the thicket that is the Truckers’ dense catalog, all the while listening to the opera in each of the places mentioned on the album and in 120

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this book. Soft spots in my knowledge do remain—they will never be my favorite band—but whenever they make it to town, I make sure to be there. I last saw the Truckers in Oxford, Mississippi, late September 2017. Despite being in their early fifties, Hood, Mike Cooley, and crew were still working the road in support of their eleventh studio album a full year following its release. That album, American Band, not only was the band’s most politically provocative set of songs in their two-decade career but arrived as one of the twenty-first century’s rare, fullblown protest records. The cover, the first not to feature the art of painter Wes Freed since Southern Rock Opera, shows an American flag at half-mast, the symbol for a nation in mourning. One song scorns the rebel flag and those who still wrap themselves in it, another the government’s suppression of art. Several songs target gun violence, including the lead track, “Ramon Casiano,” which calls out the hypocrisy of the National Rifle Association, and “What It Means,” which memorializes the murdered black teenagers Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In concert, the band took to prominently displaying a “Black Lives Matter” sign. If Southern Rock Opera provided proof that the Truckers, unlike Lynyrd Skynyrd, had forged an identity resulting not from their experience as southerners but in spite of it, American Band proves much the same: the most American of bands wrestling with the great hope and great tragedy that is America. The release of American Band coincided with news that Patterson Hood had recently relocated to—of all places—Portland, Oregon. The album’s liner notes offer an 121

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explanation, or excuse, of sorts: “I (now) live in one of the most liberal cities in America but I can get into my car and drive twenty minutes in any direction and culturally be back in Alabama.” The album’s strongest song answers, consciously or not, any flabbergasted fans who might doubt Hood’s southern credentials. In “Ever South,” a love song presumably written to his wife, Hood traces his family’s American roots from the Irish Isles to Appalachia via Ellis Island. He talks of moving further west, like so many Americans did before: “Where everyone takes notice of the drawl that leaves our mouth / So that no matter where we are we’re ever south / No matter where we are we’re ever south.” A sequel of sorts to “The Southern Thing,” the song (re-)acknowledges the everyday burdens that result from grappling with the region, its people and history: whole lifetimes of fighting lost causes, surrendering to misbegotten saviors, always “coming up a little short.” But by song’s end, Hood reaffirms his southern identity, for both himself and his children. He promises to tell them “stories of our fathers and the glories of our house,” stories that can unravel the beautiful tangle that is southern history; true stories (and noble myths) about causes worth fighting for, flags worth flying, rebels worth admiring; stories “Always told a little slower, ever south.”

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Chapter 1 1 Patterson Hood, “The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag,” The New York Times Magazine (July 9, 2015). 2 The quote and Du Bois parallel come courtesy of Carl N. Degler, Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 127–28.

Chapter 2 1 For my understanding of the Shoals, its history and culture, Blake Ells’s The Muscle Shoals Legacy of Fame (2015), Carla Jean Whitley’s similar study of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and Rick Hall’s biography were especially helpful, as was Greg Camalier’s popular documentary film, Muscle Shoals (2013). No book is as important to understanding the time and place as Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music. W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 2. 2 Peter Guralnick, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 3.

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3 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (1.7.479–480). 4 In a letter to Maria Cosway (October 12, 1786), Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. IV (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 317. 5 Herman Melville, Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, vol. II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), 272. 6 Carla Jean Whitley, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio: How the Swampers Changed American Music (Charleston: The History Press, 2014), 40. 7 Rick Hall, My Journey from Shame to Fame (Clovis, CA: Heritage Builders, 2015), 19. 8 Hall, My Journey from Shame to Fame, 171. 9 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay Of Lying—An Observation,” in Intentions (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1891), 26. 10 Hall, My Journey from Shame to Fame, 205. 11 Alan Light, “The Muscle Shoals Sound Finally Gets Its Due,” The New York Times (July 21, 2015). 12 Whitley, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, 33, 82. 13 Tony Fletcher, In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 85–86. 14 Randy Poe, Skydog: The Duane Allman Story (New York: Backbeat Books, 2008), 77. 15 Poe, Skydog, 44. 16 Fletcher, In the Midnight Hour, 138–39. 17 Poe, Skydog, 81. 18 Fletcher, In the Midnight Hour, 141. 19 Alan Paul, One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 7.

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20 Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999), 214.

Chapter 3 1 In addition to Poe’s Skydog and Paul’s One Way Out, Scott Freeman’s Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (1995); Gregg Allman’s memoir, My Cross to Bear (2012); and Please Be With Me (2014), by Duane’s daughter Galadrielle Allman, are necessary to understanding the band. For southern rock in general, Marley Brant’s Southern Rockers is a fair overview (1999), Martin Popoff ’s Southern Rock Review compendium (2001) is vital, and Kemp’s Dixie Lullaby is a mustread classic. Howell Raines, “Carter Once Saw a UFO on ‘Very Sober Occasion’,” The Atlanta Constitution (September 14, 1973). 2 Wil S. Hylton, “The Gospel According to Jimmy,” GQ online (December 5, 2005), https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-carterted-kennedy-ufo-republicans. 3 In a letter to Mary Hunter (August 1, 1942), Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, eds., The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, vol. I: 1920–1945 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 389. 4 Poe, Skydog, 128. 5 “Former President Jimmy Carter Addresses Mercer Graduates,” The Macon Telegraph (May 14, 2016), http://www. macon.com/news/local/article77677157.html. 6 See Paul Wells, “The Last Rebel: Southern Rock and Nostalgic Continuities,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor,

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New York: New York University Press, 1996, 115–130; Ted Ownby, “Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997, 369–387; Barbara Ching, “Where Has the Free Bird Flown? Lynyrd Skynyrd and White Southern Manhood,” in White Masculinity in the Recent South, ed. Trent Williamson, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2008, 251–266; Maarten Zwiers, “Rebel Rock: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Normaal, and Regional Identity,” Southern Cultures 21:3 (Fall 2015), 85–102. 7 Mark Kemp, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South, New York: Free Press, 2004, 104.

Chapter 4 1 Carter’s George Wallace biography and Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the civil rights era in Birmingham, Carry Me Home (2001), should be mandatory reading for every American. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 156. 2 Patterson Hood, “The Original Southern Rock Opera,” New Orleans Gambit Weekly (April 26, 2005), https://www. bestofneworleans.com/gambit/the-original-southern-rockopera/Content?oid=1244161. 3 Drive-By Truckers interview on All Things Considered (July 29, 2006), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=5586939.

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4 Drive-By Truckers interview with Dick Cooper (October 2001), http://swampland.com/articles/view/title:driveby_ truckers_keep_on_truckin. 5 Hood, “The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag.” 6 Ibid. 7 Marley Brant, Freebirds: The Lynyrd Skynyrd Story (New York: Billboard Books, 2002), 98. 8 John J. Miller, “Rockin’ the Right,” National Review (June 5, 2006), http://www.nationalreview.com/article/217737/rockinright-john-j-miller. 9 Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2012), 417. 10 All quotes from Carter, 62, 96, 106, 11, 116, 284. 11 Quotes from Drive-By Truckers interview on World Cafe (December 2, 2016), and Patterson Hood interview with Chuck Reese, The Bitter Southerner (September 27, 2016), http://bittersoutherner.com/patterson-hood-bitter-southernerinterview-drive-by-truckers. 12 Patterson Hood, “The New(er) South,” The Bitter Southerner (August 20, 2013), bittersoutherner.com/patterson-hood-thenewer-south/.

Chapter 5 1 Weissman’s Drive-By Truckers’ documentary is the best source out there for understanding the band and is a telling portrait of band-life on the road. Steve LaBate, “Drive-By Truckers: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Redneck Warrior Poets of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Paste online (August 1, 2004).

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2 Drive-By Truckers interview on World Cafe (December 2, 2016). 3 Hood interview with Reese, The Bitter Southerner. 4 Eric Weisbard, “The Mouth of the South,” Spin (July 21, 2003). 5 Patterson Hood, “Buttholeville,” Drive-By Truckers Facebook note (July 18, 2011), https://www.facebook. com/notes/drive-by-truckers/buttholeville-by-pattersonhood/10150257281012347. 6 Grant Alden, “The Drive-By Truckers: Rocking Tall,” No Depression (June 30, 2003). 7 Steven Hyden, “Drive-By Truckers Carry On,” Grantland (March 4, 2014), http://grantland.com/features/drive-bytruckers-carry-on. 8 The Secret to a Happy Ending, dir. Barr Weissman, 2009, documentary film. 9 Hood interview with Reese, The Bitter Southerner. 10 Patterson Hood interview on WTF with Marc Maron (March 28, 2014). 11 Weisbard, “The Mouth of the South.” 12 Alden, “The Drive-By Truckers: Rocking Tall.”

Chapter 6 1 There’s plenty of Skynyrd reading material out there (and plenty of trash). The Ribowsky biography is reviled by fans— there are more than a handful of factual errors—but is a fun and honest read. Marley Brant’s Freebirds: The Lynyrd Skynyrd

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Story (2002) is a breezy read. Gene Odom’s Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering the Free Birds of Southern Rock is probably the best source out there. Turn It Up! (2011), a self-published memoir by the band’s tour manager Ron Eckerman is dishy. Al Kooper’s memoir, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards (1998), is dirty, but so much fun to read. Freebird . . . The Movie (1996) is worth tracking down. Mark Ribowsky, Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars: The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 2. 2 Baker Maultsby, “Ronnie Can You Hear Me?” No Depression (September/October 2001). 3 Gene Odom, Lynyrd Skynyrd: I’ll Never Forget You, selfpublished, 1983, 98. 4 Alan Walden interview with Michael Buffalo Smith (January 2002), http://www.swampland.com/articles/view/title:alan_ walden. 5 Gary Rossington interview with James Sullivan, Rolling Stone (March 6, 2006), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-2006-lynyrd-skynyrd-20060306. 6 Mark Schone, “The Encore from Hell,” Spin (April 1999), 138.

Chapter 7 1 Gene Odom with Frank Dorman, Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering the Free Birds of Southern Rock (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 3.

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Chapter 8 1 “Obama in Florida; Romney in Virginia; Lynyrd Skynyrd Touring,” CNN (September 8, 2012), http://edition.cnn.com/ TRANSCRIPTS/1209/08/cnr.04.html. 2 Gayle Thompson, “Lynyrd Skynyrd Confederate Flag Waves On,” The Boot (September 25, 2012), http://theboot.com/ lynyrd-skynyrd-confederate-flag.

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Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 1.

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder

ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

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58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch

125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

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