LYNYRD SKYNYRD & GOLDEN EARRING – Rainbow Theate, London, November 1974

        Here's another 50 Years Ago This Week post.

        Back in London during a three-month break from my tenure as Melody Maker’s US correspondent, this would have been the last concert I saw at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park. My date was a secretary on MM, same of Sue, and we had great seats, next to the aisle about five rows back from the stage. I’d seen Skynyrd in New York’s Central Park earlier in the year and knew they were hot shit, and this was their first ever UK appearance. I suspect Golden Earring didn’t know much about them or they wouldn’t have agreed to have them as support and, in the event, it was a bit of a coup perpetrated their manager, my friend Peter Rudge, whom I would go on to work for after I left MM. Golden Earring were on Track Records, The Who’s label, and Pete looked after The Who’s US affairs at the time, hence the connection.

Here’s the Caught In The Act I wrote for the MM issue dated November 30, 1975. 

Rarely has a supporting act received such an ovation as that afforded to Lynyrd Skynyrd at their concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre with Golden Earring on Saturday evening. 

And it was richly deserved. The seven strong Skynyrd band, on their debut tour of the UK, brought with them a brand of southern rock and roll that has been sweeping the southern states of the USA for the past two years in the wake of the Allman Brothers.

Such was the response that Skynyrd have added a second Rainbow appearance to their British itinerary. This time they’re topping the bill. 

Lynyrd Skynyrd utilise three lead guitars, each instrumentalist taking turns to come forward and whip up excitement with music that seems to flow like a river in flood. Each player seems to play as if in competition with his two rivals, each one determined to extract even more from his axe than his immediate predecessor. Responsible for this ever increasing surge of inventiveness are Allen Collins, Gary Rossington and Ed King.

Their material seems tighter and more arranged than other Southern outfits, and each number incorporates an instant hook that simply gallops along. Singer Ronnie Van Zant plays a relatively minor role – he dedicated the band’s closing number ‘Freebird’ to Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, the two Allman Brothers who died in motorcycle accidents – but pianist Billy Powell made his presence more than felt with some fine rattling keyboard work.

Golden Earring are taking a gamble on this coupling – the reason is that both bands are on the road together is that upcoming rock mogul Pete Rudge, now resident in the US, has an interest in them – but it must be stated that they successfully appeased an audience that would certainly not have complained had Skynyrd played for another hour. There were isolated shouts for Skynyrd as Earring took the stage, but half an hour later they had ridden the storm and claimed an equal response. 

They’re much improved since the last time I saw them, and guitarist George Kooymans, dressed for the occasion in a sparkling white suit, obviously has his eye on becoming a guitar hero for the seventies and rightly so: his fluid technique, speed and general good taste in the lines he played impressed me a lot.

Earring eventually had everyone out of their seats, just as Skynyrd had done earlier, as ‘Radar Love’ echoed around the Rainbow rafters. It was, after all, two good bands for the price of one, and there can be few who returned home from Finsbury Park dissatisfied with the value they received.

In 1977, working at Pete Rudge’s Sir Productions in New York, I would do promo work for Skynyrd and I still have my ‘management’ laminate from that time, as seen above. Elsewhere under Skynyrd on Just Backdated I write about my involvement with the group and the night of the plane crash that devastated them in October of that year. 

LYNYRD SKYNYRD BOOK – The Sequel

Further to my post on Monday I have received word from the publishers of the Lynyrd Skynyrd biography Whiskey Bottles and Brand New Cars, and also its author Mark Ribowsky. Both have apologised for misquoting me on the matter of allegations that Pete Rudge’s penny-pinching was an indirect cause of the 1977 plane crash insofar as this false economy resulted in his hiring a cheap and therefore defective plane. They have also agreed to remove this citation from further printings of the book.

         I think it’s worth adding here that these allegations would only really hold water if the cost of the plane rental came directly from Rudge’s own pocket, but this is highly unlikely to have been the case. It is the custom in the music industry for an act to pay tour costs such as staging, transportation, hotels, together with the wages and expenses of additional musicians and road crew. At the end of a tour these costs, together with advertising, agency and management fees are deducted from the gross takings and the remainder goes to the act. (Since these costs, which are often exorbitant, do not escalate in direct proportion to the size of the audience, it is easy to understand how financially important it is for an act to graduate to bigger and bigger venues.)

         So thank you Chicago Review Press and Mark Ribowsky for agreeing to amend the book. And while you’re at it, remember to spell Townshend with an ‘h’.

LYNYRD SKYNYRD – Why I Don’t Like This Book

Browsing Amazon last week I came across a Lynyrd Skynyrd biography published last year called Whiskey Bottles and Brand New Cars: The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Lynyrd Skynyrd by Mark Ribowsky. Amazon invited me to ‘look inside’ so I did so and discovered that my name appears in the index with seven page references. I was unable to access these pages but my curiosity got the better of me and I bought it.

         My brief but memorable relationship with Lynyrd Skynyrd is detailed in a post elsewhere on Just Backdated. In a nutshell, in 1977 I worked for the company that managed them, Sir Productions, which was headed by my friend and former Who associate Peter Rudge. 1977, of course, was the year in which the group was decimated by a plane crash that killed three members of the band, including singer Ronnie Van Zant, their personal roadie and the two pilots.

         Surprisingly, Mark Ribowsky did not get in touch with me about his book which would not have been difficult as I’m hardly the shy and retiring type who’s cut off means of communication. Instead he accessed the story about my experiences with Skynyrd on the website Rock’s Back Pages, which is more or less the same as a post about the group on Just Backdated (but lacks the postscript about my presenting Skynyrd with a Classic Rock award in 2012), and reproduced large sections from it in his book, either directly or as paraphrased material. Ribowsky didn’t ask permission to do this but like most writers I tend to accept that once something is out there on the internet it’s pretty much fair game, though I think he has taken a bit of a liberty in lifting as much material as he has without so much as a by your leave (though I am credited in the bibliography). More seriously, though, he states that in the course of this article I imply that Peter Rudge was “always looking for ways to scrimp and save”, with a veiled suggestion that this parsimony on the part of Rudge may have prompted him to rent a substandard plane on the cheap, the logical inference being that this might explain why it fell out of the sky.

         Over the weekend I re-read my Lynyrd Skynyrd article and cannot find any suggestion whatsoever in it that Peter Rudge was a cheapskate. If fact, I don’t believe he was at all. So this supposed ‘testimony’ from me – “according to Chris Charlesworth, Rudge was always...” is what it says in the book – is an outright invention, and I’m not happy about it. Neither am I happy that this invention seeks to indirectly lay the blame for the tragedy – completely erroneously – at the feet of my friend Peter Rudge.

         Rudge’s name is not mentioned in the acknowledgements which suggests he didn’t interview him. Neither is mine, of course.

         Also, amongst other things that don’t quite ring true, Pete Townshend’s name is spelt wrongly throughout (missing the ‘h’) which always pisses me off and leads me to believe that a writer who makes this elementary error doesn’t know his stuff.

         I will complain to the publishers – Chicago Review Press – and hope the complaint reaches Mark Ribowsky. If I get a response I’ll let you know. 

LYNYRD SKYNYRD 1977, Part 2

Unfortunately all the graft – and, believe me, Skynyrd grafted – came to nought as a result of the events of October 20. I was actually due to fly to Baton Rouge in Louisiana the following morning, pick up the Street Survivors tour which was three days old and co-ordinate various interviews I'd set up for them along the way, mostly at Texas radio stations, and I was looking forward to it as I’d never been to Texas before and a visit to the Lone Star State with Lynyrd Skynrd for company was likely to be an interesting experience. I would, of course, have travelled on the same private plane as the group and had the crash occurred 24 hours later I might not have been here to tell this tale.

My first intimation that anything was amiss came at around 8pm when a girl I knew in St Louis rang me at my flat in New York. She told me she'd just heard on the local news that a private aircraft had come down in Mississippi and that it was 'believed' that the rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd was aboard. Did I know? Of course I didn't. I then called UPI who confirmed that a small plane had indeed come down near a town called McComb. I then tried to call Rudge at home. His wife Frankie answered. Peter had just heard too. He was on his way to the office. I grabbed a cab and went straight there. I was the first to arrive and the phones – all five or six lines – were all ringing at once. It was pointless to try and answer them. I called UPI back and explained who I was and how I would be prepared to help them with regard to accurate information on Lynyrd Skynyrd if they could keep me up to date with developments from McComb. We agreed to help each other and stayed in touch all night.

Then Rudge arrived. He'd been to pick up a carton of cigarettes because he figured it would be a long night. I told him everything I knew and what I'd done. He looked distraught and opened a bottle of red wine but he somehow maintained his composure until, eventually, around 1 am, we heard that Ronnie was dead. Then he went alone into the office kitchen and wept. In the meantime all the office staff had arrived. The girls who worked at Sir manned the phones all night, crying as they did.

The various wives and girlfriends of the guys in the band and the road crew, almost all of whom lived in and around Jacksonville, were on the lines permanently, wanting to know the latest news from McComb. Eventually they all gathered at the home of Ronnie's wife Judy and what dreadful scenes of hysteria and grief that house would have witnessed that night I can barely imagine. It was, after all, full of frantic young women desperately uncertain about the fate of their loved ones. We relayed the news, almost all of it bad, as best we could to the girls in that house, every one of them unsure whether their men were dead or alive. The job of telling Judy that Ronnie was dead fell to Rudge. Radio stations were calling, wanting statements from me; reporters were calling. I believe my choked-up voice was heard on over 30 stations across the USA that night. Friends of Rudge and the band called offering help; private planes were put at our disposal. It went on all night and I got home dazed at around 9 or 10 am the next day. A night like that is not something you forget easily.

Six people died – Ronnie, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister Cassie (who sang back up), their tour manager Dean Kilpatrick, and both pilots. All the band sustained bad injuries, as did some of the roadies and lighting crew. Those at the front of the plane came off worst, those at the back were less badly injured. Inevitably the group and those closest to them were at the front, with the part-timers at the back. The word was that Ronnnie was asleep, lying in the aisle, when the plane went down. No one could move him to a seat, let alone strap him in. He and the rest of the band had been drinking all day in a hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, waiting while the plane was ready. Someone said something about the pilots having been drinking too.

All sorts of stories came out at the inquest: how the band, and Ronnie in particular, had complained to Rudge that the plane was dodgy and he’d complained to Ron Eckermann, their tour manager and told him to get it fixed. Someone said they saw flames coming from the engine on their flight from Miami to South Carolina the previous day. Eckerman was due to get the plane serviced in Baton Rouge. In the event, it seemed that the plane had ran out of fuel – there being no fire when it crashed – but it was obviously burning up fuel faster than it should have done.

Nothing was ever the same again at Sir Productions. The whole company seemed to go into a kind of stupor. All the plans we’d had for Skynyrd and the other bands were dashed. In two weeks’ time they would have headlined Madison Square Garden for the first time. It really did look like they were about to be elevated to the top bracket of touring rock bands, though how they would have dealt with it God only knows as they were such a wild bunch. Skynyrd were bringing in plenty of money and without them the funds dried up, so it was obvious Sir wouldn’t last. Rudge told me I’d have to go just before Christmas, 1977, and gave me a cheque for $2,000 which he didn’t have to do.

Later, after the funeral, the grief turned to anger, and there were terrible recriminations: lawsuits, bad vibes, deep shit. Some of the road crew never really recovered and neither did guitarist Allen Collins who died from pneumonia several years later. In the meantime he’d crashed a car in which his girlfriend was killed. Peter Rudge himself went into a terrible tailspin. When I walked out of Sir Productions I didn’t see him again for 22 years, but now he’s remarried, and healthy after a cancer scare (he’s even given up cigarettes and he was once a 60-a-day man) and happy. His son Joe, whom I remember as a baby, went on to work for MTV. At one time Peter was on the brink of controlling the fortunes of two of the three biggest British rock bands in the world. Ironically, the remains of the third – Led Zeppelin – became partly controlled by Bill Curbishley, who took over The Who from Peter.

 Lynyrd Skynyrd ultimately reformed as a kind of tribute act to themselves with Ronnie’s youngest brother Johnnie on vocals. ‘Freebird’, forever associated with Van Zant, was played as a closing instrumental while a single spotlight picked out Ronnie’s old black cowboy hat sitting atop a central mike stand. ‘If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?’ went the words. I do, anyway.

There is postscript to this. In November 2012 I was asked by Classic Rock magazine to present their ‘Comeback’ award to Lynyrd Skynyrd at their annual awards bash at London’s Roundhouse. I took my son Sam, a big Skynyrd fan, and introduced him to the band who were sat at an adjoining table to us. Of the group I knew, only Gary Rossington remained. Later I had to make a speech, some of it adlibbed, some prepared. It went something like this:

The Roundhouse. The first time I came here was December 1970. Pete, Roger, John and Keith were playing and before they launched into ‘Tommy’ Pete dedicated the evening’s performance to the support act, a piano player who wore glasses and began his set with a song that went ‘It’s a little bit funny….’ 
         That’s Classic Rock for you. 
         But I’m not here to talk about the Who and Elton. I’m here to talk about Lynyrd Skynyrd. 
         In 1977 I was working in New York for a company called Sir Productions which managed Lynyrd Skynyrd, the original band fronted by Ronnie Van Zant. 
         On June 11 I saw 100,000 fans rise to them at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Madison Square Garden was booked for later in the year. All of us in the office knew they were heading for the top of the Premier League. All of us who worked in that office were smiling. 
         I went to bed early on October 20. I had an early flight next morning to link up with the band in Baton Rouge. I was asleep when the phone rang. A girl I knew in St Louis told me there’d been a plane crash in McCombe, Mississippi. I made my way to the office and every phone line was blinking. We weren’t smiling any more. It was hard to hold back the tears. I stayed up all night manning the phones and never made that morning flight. 
         I’m here tonight to present Lynyrd Skynyrd with the Comeback Award. For just about every other band Comeback means they’ve reformed after splitting up and doing solo albums or simply taking it easy. For Skynyrd it means coming back from one the worst tragedies in the history of rock. Coming back from a situation no other band had ever faced. 
         It’s a different band now, but they’ve stayed true to the principles laid down by their forbears. They're still out there playing to thousands of fans all over the world. That’s some fucking comeback. 
         No band has ever deserved this award more.
         Ladies & gents... Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Later that night the newly constituted Lynyrd Skynyrd took the stage to play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Freebird’. It was the highlight of the night, just as it had been for me in Philadelphia all those years ago. 

LYNYRD SKYNYRD 1977, Part 1

Lynyrd Skynyrd was managed by my friend Peter Rudge from late 1973. Rudge’s main pre-occupation at this time was The Who, for whom he’d worked in a quasi-managerial capacity since 1969. As Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp shirked their responsibilities and fell out of favour, Rudge became The Who’s day-to-day manager in 1971, then set up in business in New York to look after their US affairs. His company was called Sir Productions and their offices were located on 57^th Street, not far from Carnegie Hall. In November, 1973 Lynyrd Skynyrd supported The Who on their US Quadrophenia tour and Rudge took over their management around this time. In due course he would also manage .38 Special, whose singer Donnie Van Zant was the younger brother of Ronnie, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s charismatic singer and principal songwriter, and two other bands – The Dingoes, from Australia, and LeBlanc & Carr, from Muscle Shoals.

         Peter Rudge was a smart, fast-talking, street-wise Cambridge University graduate who loved sport and could handle himself well if things became physical. At Cambridge he’d booked bands for college events and on June 11, 1968, booked The Who for a college ball. According to his account, he’d received a telegram from The Who’s management 24 hours before the gig cancelling but instead of accepting the situation he’d caught a train to London and marched uninvited into Kit Lambert’s offices at Track Records in Old Compton Street demanding the group perform and threatening to sue them if they didn’t. Lambert was impressed by this show of bravado and offered him a job on the spot.

         In the event Rudge graduated first, then turned up at Track where he was given the onerous task of ‘looking after’ The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. It was only a matter of time before his business acumen led to him ‘looking after’ Track’s main attraction, The Who. His speciality was organising US tours and he became so good at it that Pete Townshend recommended him to Mick Jagger in 1971 when The Rolling Stones were looking for someone to run their international tours after the death of Brian Jones. Rudge’s ultimate ambition was to build up a stable of successful acts and Sir Productions was the umbrella under which this goal was to be achieved. It had eight employees, including a girl on the west coast, an accountant and a travel agent.

I worked for Sir from March 1977 until the end of that year, at which point Rudge drastically reduced the size of the company, a decision brought about as a direct result of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. The reason I worked there in the first place was because of my long-standing friendship with Peter which came about through my fondness for The Who. During my years on Melody Maker Rudge had told me that if I ever felt like leaving MM, he’d give me a job, and he was as good as his word. At Sir I worked on promoting his bands and getting them publicity, but I also went out on the road with both The Dingoes and LeBlanc & Carr as their tour manager, dealing with day to day events on the road, collecting and disbursing cash, making sure the rest of the crew did what they were supposed to do and everyone got from place to place and to the gigs on time. I remember firing a useless roadie in Milwaukee, sorting out a bass player's clap problem in Chicago and running on stage to drag off an over-excited punter in Memphis. 

By the time I got to Sir, Rudge’s relationship with The Who was fast deteriorating, largely because he’d been devoting a disproportionate amount of time to The Rolling Stones, and The Who felt he’d somehow betrayed them by shifting his loyalty. Also Bill Curbishley, strongly supported by Roger Daltrey, had emerged as a formidable rival for The Who’s management. In the meantime, though, Lynyrd Skynyrd were coming up fast. 

During 1977 I saw Skynyrd perform about half a dozen times, arranged various press and radio interviews for them and helped produce the press kit that accompanied the ill-fated Street Survivors album. By this time they were at a peak of popularity, their previous (double live) album One More From The Road having sold over a million copies. Much of their popularity could be put down to Rudge’s hard work ethic – they played something like 200 gigs a year under his management, and just got better and better at it. Now the top prize of a headlining show at Madison Square Garden was within their grasp.

The seven individual members of Lynyrd Skynyrd all drank like fishes, took all known illegal drugs, fucked anything female on two legs and liked nothing better than to fight with their fists, either against others or amongst themselves. Singer Ronnie Van Zant, who sang barefoot because, he said, he liked to feel the stage burn beneath his feet, was the toughest of the lot and he could more or less silence any of the others with the threat of a beating. Before their shows Skynyrd liked to psyche themselves up in their dressing room, winding themselves up by breathing deeply together like US football players, passing the Jack Daniels around in a ritual drink, willing each other on to perform as if their lives depended on it. Rudge, a sports fanatic, encouraged this. It worked, too.

Group meetings in Rudge’s big office were all day and night affairs at which bottle after bottle of Jack Daniels was consumed, piles of coke snorted, and carton after carton of cigarettes smoked. Voices were often raised and the language was as bad as you could hear anywhere. Anyone who’d crossed them was dead meat. MCA Records threw a party for them that summer at a bar near Nathan’s Restaurant which almost got out of hand when someone made a loose remark to one of Skynyrd’s women. Keith Moon, then living in LA, turned up in a loud pinstripe suit, drunk as a lord, and Rudge told me to keep Moon away from him as he’d probably beg for money. It was my first intimation that Moon, of all people, was broke – and sick with booze too. He was very podgy, glassy eyed and mournful. It was the last time I ever spoke to Keith.

I took particular pleasure that same summer when Skynyrd appeared as the penultimate act on an all-day show at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium and half the audience of 100,000+ walked out during Peter Frampton's very limp closing set. They’d played an hour’s set – short for them – and restricted themselves to their best known songs, performed back-to-back with a minimum of fuss and maximum of swagger. The closing ’Freebird’, their best known song, brought that huge crowd to their feet and as I watched from the side of the stage, just behind their amplifiers, it seemed to me that all 100,000 of them were stomping and cheering as the band played faster and faster, running away down the tracks to the song’s stupendous finale. Perfect. Philly conquered. Rudge and the band were laughing all the way to the Garden, or so we all thought.