“I Don’t Even Expect To Live Very Long”: Ronnie Van Zant Gets Sad
“D'yknow Ronnie Van Zant’s dad was a truck driver and he’d go with him on these drives up to New York and stuff as a kid.” I tell my friend RJ one night during a round of shoot the musical shit.
“Jeezus,” he says stone serious, “I can’t even imagine the horrifying things he saw.”
“Oh shit, you’re right. I hadn’t even thought about that."
"Lacy”’s the name tattooed on Ronnie Van Zant’s arm. That’s dad, the man who piloted a flatbed up and down the East Cast, Merle Haggard and Hank Williams on the radio, Ronnie and sometimes his brothers Donnie and Johnny along for the ride too. Lacy taught Ronnie to box as a toddler — reportedly suffering, probably rather proudly, a black eye during the first lesson — and built him into the tough neighborhood boy who’d boss and, if necessary, kick around the others on the baseball field, and later in the Hell House. The Navy vet gave his kids buzz cuts, wasn’t afraid to be tough on them, but also slipped the Skynyrd boys a few extra bucks before they went out on their early tours. He pleaded Gary Rossington’s case to the assistant principal of Lake Shore High School, who was about to expel him cause of the boy’s long hair. Lacy liked to call himself the father of Southern Rock though he played little more than a lick in his life.
“He is the fairest most beautiful person I have ever known,” a rather drunk Van Zant told Jaan Uhelszki of his father for a piece that appeared in Creem about a month after the release of Gimme Back My Bullets. “I learned everything I know from him. He used to say to me, ‘Ronnie, if a man says he’s never been beaten, it’s just because he hasn’t fought enough times.’ He always wanted me to be something I could never be — and I’m sorry to disappoint him — he wanted me to be just like him. But I couldn’t be like him.”
The Van Zant men, L to R: Johnny, Donnie, Lacy, Ronnie
The don’t-wanna-dissapoint-dad itch Van Zant never felt he was able to scratch seems to stem, according to friend Gene Odom in Remembering the Free Birds of Southern Rock, from the singer’s failure to finish high school. Education was paramount to Lacy, and Ronnie always regretted dropping out, even if it was to focus all his energies into Lynyrd Skynyrd. The platinum records he decorated his father’s wall with were fine enough — a diploma, he felt, would’ve been better. But Lacy, by all accounts, never seemed as bothered by this as Ronnie, so perhaps it can be chalked up to hyper-Freudian instincts and ideals of familial/patriarchal honor that festered for years under a Southern sun.
The man Ronnie Van Zant became was one undeniably molded in his father’s stoic, fearless, rambling image, but also imbued with the resolved passion and caring of his mother Marion Virginia Hicks. All that’s in his lyrics — simple and straightforward in meaning, but profound and vivid in execution—as well as the proud, but humble self-certainty he radiated throughout his life. Whatever anxiety Van Zant felt about his inability to meet his father’s expectations seemed to manifest itself in the earnest ear and sage advice he lent to friends and family; a desire, as his brother Donnie put it, “to take care of the whole world."
But a drunk Van Zant was a world class asshole. Once he broke a few of Rossington’s fingers after a show in Hamburg, Germany in October 1975 for no particular reason (this was after he’d smashed a bottle over a roadie’s head no less): "He turned on Gary and said: 'You think you’re a guitar player? I’ll do it without you,’” tour manager Craig Reed recalled to Uhelszki years later. “Maybe he missed a lick,” he continued. “But it didn’t matter if he messed up or not. If Ronnie wanted to kick your ass he would. He was mean. He used to say to us, 'When I’ve been drinking I’m nobody’s friend.’” Alcohol was the constant, what had allowed Van Zant and the rest of the band to loosen up just right before taking the stage during those early days, and what ultimately gave Van Zant the illusion of control as his band began to slip away from him. He probably felt boned and betrayed by shady managers and bookers who scammed him out of his hard earned cash; by the pencil pushers and journalists who tried to tell him who he was; and certainly by Ed King, whose departure had rattled Skynyrd’s understanding of itself. The man was self-aware something awful — a characteristic that at once allowed him to become a stunningly relatable songwriter and storyteller, but one that by '76 had him speaking liberally, drunkenly about the impending end of Lynyrd Skynrd and his own life: “I don’t even expect to live very long,” he told Uhelszki, “because I’m living too fast.”
Ronnie seemed to relish the certainty that rock and roll would eventually kill him. For someone so hellbent on achieving that dream in the first place, it’d only be fitting to meet the same fate Robert Johnson agreed to the crossroads; for someone so hellbent on being the man of his father’s dreams, death at the hands of the thing he chose over finishing school would be the only suitable punishment. This is beyond stupid, beyond childish, beyond egomaniacal, especially considering all Van Zant had done to dig himself into the petulant, unsatisfied hole he found himself in by the mid-70s.
Perhaps behind all of it was a cripplingly pragmatic resignation to a rule that no great rock achievement goes unpunished — something he’d assured himself a decade before when he cut “Was I Right Or Wrong” at Muscle Shoals. As much as he was a kind, caring, generous, simple kind of man, he was a disgustingly wealthy drunk with a penchant for fighting at the drop of a hat. And maybe he’d convinced himself he had to be both, that reconciliation was impossible because this is what he’d signed up for. Rock and roll was never life or death for Van Zant, it had to be life until death.
Until the latter hit far too close to home for comfort: Over Labor Day weekend in 1976 both Allen Collins and Gary Rossington managed to get royally fucked up and crash their cars. Collins’ was a minor fender bender all things considered, but a hammered Rossington drove his Ford Torino into an oak tree. “I can’t tell you how mad I got at him for that,” Van Zant told Cameron Crowe for a piece in the L.A. Timesin September '76. “We’re glad he’s gonna make it, he’s tremendously lucky to be alive… but it was his fault. He passed out at the wheel of his brand new Ford Torino, with his foot on the gas. He knocked down a telephone pole, split an oak tree and did $7,000 worth of damage to a house. That’s being just plain stupid. I told him that on his hospital bed.”
The alleged, infamous oak tree in the way
By that time Van Zant was already feeling revitalized: Steve Gaines had helped Skynyrd conquer the '76 Knebworth Festival — a particularly important victory for Van Zant, who’d always felt under-appreciated by the Brits; plus what better way to solidify your rock god status than out playing the Rolling Stones, the very band that got you into this whole thing in the first place — and the frontman believed the young guitarist’s supreme talent as a player, singer and songwriter would allow him to relinquish some of the band’s workload. It was plenty to make Van Zant want to swear off drinking and rowdiness for good (which he kinda sorta did, tapered back is a better way of putting it), but Rossington and Collins’ car crashes were the proverbial cherry: Without them, the band was over, no questions asked, but more importantly without them Van Zant would have lost the two brothers he’d built this whole god damn wonderful thing with from absolutely nothing.
