Read Online Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars by Mark Ribowsky - Free Book Online Page B

up on the line between respectability and hippiehood. Given authority to rag, keep after school, or suspend any kid who violated the dress code, he cut a menacing, foreboding figure when he padded down the hallways. Worse were his excursions through the shower room, where, if he wanted to humiliate a naked, pubescent boy, he could leave a mental scar a mile long.
    When Ronnie was a senior at Lee in 1966, Skinner’s first year there, Ronnie had run-ins with the coach and was intimidated enough to keep his hair respectably short; with his blond hair cropped above the ears and swept across his forehead, he looked very much like a California surfer boy. That look, of course, had passed as daring in an era dominated by the Beach Boys’ candy-striped collared shirts and white chinos, but in ’69, it was cause to be labeled a nerd.
    Gary, whose curly locks grew like wild shrubbery, overrunning the lawful two-inches-below-the-ears limit, was an immediate target for the coach. Skinner always carried around a ruler to measure, including into the shower room, and he had little sympathy for the young man’s defense that being in a working rock band required, as the biggest musical on Broadway noted, “long, beautiful hair … down to there.” Once, Gary even brought in solid citizen Lacy Van Zant to help make his case. Skinner wasn’t totally deaf to the plea; he suggested that the band members wear wigs for their rock-and-roll engagements. They did but quickly grew their long tresses back. For a time, they thought they could con Skinner by wearing
short-haired
wigs to school, tightly fitted over their taped-down long hair, but Skinner wasn’t that easy to fool.
    Unable to put up with the static, Rossington would drop out in ’68 (as had Ronnie before him) as soon as he was sixteen and thus legally able to. Just before that, Rossington, having been suspended yet again, bravely—maybe insanely—looked Skinner in the eye and told him, “Fuck you.” Gary’s dropping out killed his parents, just as Ronnie’s decision had killed Lacy and Sis, but Gary and Bob needed Leonard Skinner like, well, a haircut. Indeed, dealing with him had become so unbearable that they regularly made up obscene limericks and song lyrics about him. It seemed like a gift that Allan Sherman’s 1964 novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” included the line “You remember Leonard Skinner,” prompting them to sing the song when Skinner strolled by. An even better inside joke was calling the band “Leonard Skinner” in jest when they took the stage. The joke always got a hoot because so many in the audience had gone to Lee High and had their own Skinner tales.
    Then one night at the Forest Inn it occurred to Ronnie that the sobriquet actually worked as an identifier on several levels. Because of who Skinner was, the name fit their image as redneck dropouts with an authority problem, and in the mold of perfectly inscrutable rock-and-roll patois used as group names, “Leonard Skinner” added some beguiling mystery.
Skinner
, rolling off the southern tongue, sounded something like a sneer, their predominate stage affectation, or in redneckspeak, something like “I just skinnered that there mule.” As the band mounted the stage at the Forest Inn, Ronnie did the joke intro and then on a whim asked the audience, “Hey, how many y’all want us to change our name to ‘Leonard Skinner’?” The room cheered its approval, and thedeed was done. It did occur to them that Mr. Skinner, not having been asked permission to appropriate his identity for a rock-and-roll band—the idea was just too delicious for them to risk asking and being shot down—might take umbrage and lawyer up to stop it. So, rather than ask, they tried different spellings of the name, going for the time being with “Lynard Skynard” on the blackboards of the local pubs