Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Read Online Free PDF Page A

teen. Commencing that day, he informed Gary, “I’m gonna be your singer.”
    As was usually the case with Van Zant, there was no discussion. What he said went. He was so adamant about it, in fact, that the four of them went right over to Burns’s house and, without changing out of their dirty uniforms, began jamming. Ronnie pronounced quick judgment. “When we started playing,” he would recall years later, “we were just terrible.”
    It didn’t take long before the band was in his control, reliant solely on his full-throated baritone voice, which seemed to seamlessly shift from mellow to bellow but could tire easily and start to crack. Accordingly, he kept it in a tightly controlled range, never launching into a falsetto flutter or twang. Like Gregg Allman’s vocals on the big Allman Brothers hits to come, there was no obvious connection of voice to region beyond that flat northern Florida drawl. He wasn’t Elvis or Conway Twitty. This wasn’t Nashville; it was Jacksonville.
    Ronnie knew exactly what direction he wanted for the band, which would go through a half dozen names before finding the right one. That direction was rock and roll, not country—and no one would argue the point with him. Clearly the future of the group, which added one more guitar player, Allen Collins, was going to be determined by one factor: Ronnie Van Zant. He had the attitude and presence of a good leadsinger. Knowing he had two left feet, he didn’t try to prance around like Mick Jagger. He would stand there, erect, foursquare, under his Stetson, pouring out the words he composed. His aura projected an animal magnetism, his guise as a prowling lion enhanced by the sincerity of his voice, the cock of his head, the wink of his eye. He bit off the words of a song in earnest and sometimes in anger. He was, well,
different
.
    He was, wrote one chronicler of southern culture, Mark Kemp, “at once honest and wily, good-hearted and mean as a rattlesnake, sometimes innately progressive, other times as reactionary as George Wallace.” Undeniably, there was
something
about him, something that pulled people into his world without giving them the feeling that they’d been dragged in. And, by instinct, he was prepared to go to the mat, down and dirty, to make this project a success. He would fight with his voice and, if necessary, with his fists to convince people. To be sure, one could call Ronnie Van Zant many things; but “harmless” would not be one of them. Thank God, too, because all that was dangerous and excessively redneck about him was the propulsion that sent Skynyrd skyward and kept them flying higher and higher for as long as the devil allowed.

    At seventeen, Ronnie Van Zant was a young man on the make, with a battle plan in his head. He also was a young man with a range of feelings and loads to say. For more reasons than he understood, he had a hard side and a soft one, the latter rising up when a girl he was sweet on, Nadine Incoe, a classmate at Lee High, entered his life. Actually, no one girl at a time was enough for him. Always on the prowl, he also took up with another girl at the school, a redhead named Marie Darsey. How he was able to pull
that
off no one knows, but each of the girls believed she was the only one. Both saw the charmer in him, probably because they received the same love letters, with only the names changed. One that Darsey has kept to this day reads, “I would really love to have a date with you. I think you are very, very cute. I really crave red hair.” Perhaps leaving himself some wiggle room, he added that, most of the time, “I just want to be alone.”
    When Ronnie and one of the girls were together, it was usually in the front of his ’65 Mustang or in the dark of the neighborhood movie theater. It mattered little what film was playing; tough guy that he was,Ronnie didn’t mind if it was Doris Day up on the screen