Free Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars by Mark Ribowsky

billing their gigs.
    It was a turnabout of roles, them mocking
him
now, and proof that they had only the most snarky of intentions. Of only secondary consideration was whether it would ever be commercially useful or if Skinner might still press the issue, it being obvious who “Lynard Skynard” was. For now, however, they knew just a little bit more what they were about. And Lord knows, they wouldn’t ever change.

    Armed with a new name and a good reputation in the local rock scene, the band took the next logical step up the ladder, a recording session. In May 1969, David Griffin, the manager of a Jacksonville record emporium called Marvin Kay’s MusiCenter, arranged with a local record company, Shade Tree Records, to finance a session for them and another band called Black Bear Angel at a studio owned by Norm Vincent, a former top-rated disc jockey at radio station WMBR. Shade Tree was operated by producers Tom Markham and Jim Sutton, who, after seeing the band with the revolving-door names at the Comic Book, gave them a five-year contract, for a generous advance of … nothing.
    Two songs cowritten by Ronnie and Allen were cut in mono on an eight-track recorder in about an hour. Ronnie had written the first song, “Michelle,” about his daughter Tammy Michelle. It was produced as a sassy blues riff with Ronnie trying hard to sound like Gregg Allman, singing in a raspy voice, “Michelle, little girl, I need you baby more than the air I breathe,” as Collins fired up his Les Paul on a long break and a punchy fadeout. The other cut, “Need All My Friends,” was an augury of “Free Bird”: “Woman, I have to leave you / I can’t stay where there is no pay / And I really don’t care where I’m going to.” Here, Collins’s mellow guitar accents swathed Van Zant’s plaint about the call and loneliness of the long road and the comforts of playing music and doing “the things I love.” The mellowness was cleaved by spikes of hard rock, backed by fiddles and violins. It’s an amazing song to behold, the guitars tightlymeshed even then and the strings a real curio, never again to be heard on a Skynyrd recording. The songs ran over five minutes, long by contemporary standards but not deemed finished until Ronnie said so.
    Markham and Sutton thought they might be onto something, so they pressed three hundred copies of the two-sided 45-rpm disc by “Lynyard Skynard” and flooded radio stations with them. The publisher of the songs was listed as Double “T” Music—so named by Ronnie, reaching back to the “double trouble” appellation hung on him by Gary in jail—although the group would never see a penny of any publishing royalties. Markham and Sutton contractually owned those rights, a common meed taken by record company honchos in exchange for recording unknowns. Berry Gordy, for example, was notorious for doing this to members of Motown groups who wrote their own material, averse to allowing anyone but his stable of writers (including himself) to profit from the publishing.
    Like all unknown bands, Skynyrd signed their rights away for a chance to hit it big. But after they’d heard their first record a few times on the radio, it fell off the radar screen, selling something like a hundred copies. (After the Skynyrd plane crash, Shade Tree would sell the masters to a small local label, Atina Records, which would issue them in 1978 on a 45-rpm disc inside a jacket that read S KYNYRD ’ S FIRST . In 2000, MCA would issue them again, included as “Shade Tree demos” on the
Skynyrd Collectybles
album of odds, ends, and rarities.) As well crafted as the songs were, the main problem wasn’t the music: there just seemed to be no definitive format where it could be played regularly. It was similar to the old conundrum of 1950s R&B crossover records judged too black for white stations, too white for