Yes, that really was Ed King of
Lynyrd Skynyrd sauntering through
Gibson's Custom Shop Summer Jam a few weeks ago. When not shaking hands, or answering questions about who "Free Bird" was about, or if it is true that he wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" in his sleep, this member of Skynyrd's formidable three-prong guitar army was stationed at a wall of beautiful
Custom Shop Les Pauls. At the Jam, King found a chambered
1958 VOS Les Paul, which he swears measures up to his original 1959 Les Paul Standard. In fact, since he brought the new guitar home, his ’59 has hardly been out of the case.
In this candid interview with
Gibson.com, King holds very little back, talking frankly about the his stormy relationship with Skynyrd lead singer and majordomo Ronnie Van Zant, who once said King "wasn't a pimple on Allen Collin's ass," to how he's always hated the band’s name, to the violence and mean-spiritedness that led up to what was the second most infamous plane crash in rock history—something that he avoided by a fortuitous combination of luck and providence. King also doesn't pull any punches about the guitars he has played and hated, the Gibsons he champions, and why. This is a story of a man who has seen it all, remembers most of it, and the guitars that he has loved and lost.
I understand that you were at Gibson Custom Shop's Summer Jam a few weeks ago. A couple of friends from the East Coast, they come down to the Custom Shop Summer Jam, and they invited me over to the party. Once I got there I saw that they had all these Les Pauls on the wall, and this guy says, "I want you to try this guitar." It's a 1958 Les Paul reissue, a chambered guitar. They've routed out some of the mahogany and then put a maple top on top of it. I said, "Sure, I'll try it out." Well, I played it acoustically because to me that's the test of a real good electric guitar, if it has a real good resonance acoustically. And it had it. I said, "Okay, now I need to find an amp." So he finally located, out in some trailer, a little Epiphone amplifier. I plugged it in and the guitar just melted in my hands. And it sounded great. I said, well, I think this guitar sounds and plays as good as my '59. So I bought it. I brought it home, and that was about, maybe three weeks ago. I've been playing this guitar every day. It’s funny. I went up and got my '59 out the other day, because I've been playing this new one now for three weeks, and I plugged it in, and sure enough, it's the same exact thing.
That's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. The new guitar has a little bit fatter neck. But as far as tone and feel and just the way every note, you can feel go through you, it's the same experience. See, that's the thing. It's the same experience. I am just as satisfied playing the new one as I am the old one, and that's the key to it, is what makes you feel that feeling of satisfaction when you play it, is when every note just rings true and it has that honk to it.
How else does it compare to an original '59? Well, as for an original '59, like I said, I've owned five of them, and I've played quite a few more, and a lot of them are great guitars. You might find a couple that aren't as good. But I think a lot of it had to do with the old wood they were making guitars with back then. I mean those guitars sounded as good the day they were made. A lot of people think it's the aging of the wood. For the old ones, I think it had a lot to do with the wood itself, but I think the fact with the new one that they hollowed out some of the mahogany and were able to, how can I say this, compensate for the lack of the aging of the mahogany. They were able to compensate the resonant factor in this body, and the maple on top is real nice and the neck is really great. I think it's the closest thing you can get to an old Les Paul, and to me it's just as satisfying.
Well that was a great commercial; you should have gotten it for free. Well, I don't know. I have a saying: "Cost nothing, worth nothing." And I don't ever mind paying for a good guitar.
Do you play guitar every single day? Every day, yeah. I've been playing this Les Paul every day since I got it three weeks ago. And of course I A/B'd it with the old one soon as I got it, but then I put the old one up for three weeks. Just the day before yesterday, I took the old one out again, and yup, it's the same exact feeling.
Can you talk a little about some of your earliest guitars? My first guitar was a Gibson. It was a
Melody Maker, probably 1962. I begged my mother to get it for me, and we didn't have any money. And so that was my first electric. And then after playing along with the radio for a while I kind of realized the only job I could really get was playing bass, so I traded the Gibson for a Japanese bass. And now at the age of 15, I was making like 50 bucks a week playing bass; I guess that was 1965 or '66. That was pretty good.
That's kind of amazing that you could get a job as a bassist and not a guitarist. I imagine because everyone wanted to be a lead guitarist. Yeah, there were no bass players. Every band I was in had an awful bass player, so I figured, well…. Actually I knew where all the notes were. I'm actually a better bass player than a guitar player. And so anyway, I was playing with these guys who were like six, seven years older than I was, playing bass. There came a time when I was asked to join this band, so I traded the bass and some cash for an old Fender Telecaster, which is the only thing I could find. And I hated that guitar.
Why was that?
I hated Fender guitars because they were too tinny and they didn't have a real fat sound. I played that Telecaster, I played it on “Incense and Peppermints,” actually. But as soon as I got the money I went down to my local guitar store and I got this Gibson SG Special, which is the same kind of guitar that Robby Krieger of the Doors used, and I really loved the sound he got. I bought one of those in, and in Memphis I bought a Gibson SG Standard once I finally got on the road with the Strawberry Alarm Clock. That guitar was probably two years old, sitting in the shop, when I found it. Those two were my main guitars for a number of years, and just to make a long story short, when I joined Skynyrd as a bass player, okay, I had these two Gibson guitars. I actually had a Gibson SG Standard and I had a '54 Les Paul at that point. And when Ronnie Van Zant fired me as the bass player, because he said I was the worst bass player that he'd ever played with, that's what I was using.
He really said that to you? What was the circumstance? It happened one day at rehearsal. Our first album was just about done, and Leon Wilkerson showed up at rehearsal. And Ronnie said to Leon, he said "Leon, put on Ed's bass and let's play Ed the song called ‘Simple Man.’ I had never heard the song before. And I had already been in the band about eight months. I'd never heard the song. So they played that and it hit me like a ton of bricks, like, "I'm the wrong guy for this job. This is your bass player, you know?" But I did learn a lot from Leon just that one day, and so that's why the bass part to "Simple Man" is really different than any other bass part on that record.
So you saw how he played it and then you played it Leon-style. I actually didn't play it Leon-style, because I can't remember his bass part. His bass part was different than mine—it had more of a rolling feel to it, and so I tried to emulate the way I felt that day when he played. And to me that felt good. But anyway, right after that album was done, that's when Ronnie fired me. And I thought I was out of a job and he said no, he said, "We're gonna go down to this ice cream plant where Leon works. We're going to talk him back into the band, and we'll switch you over to guitar."
After I left Skynyrd, to just jump way ahead in the story, like in the '90s, I'd go to these guitar shows and I'd always take my Les Paul with me. But then everybody'd say, well, play "Sweet Home Alabama," and you cannot play that song on a Les Paul. Now to back up a little bit, I hated the Fender Stratocaster. I mean it was just tinny. I couldn't really get any sound out of it. It's funny, I only owned that guitar for probably three months before I recorded "Sweet Home Alabama," and now there's no guitar that I could ever use on that song.
I read that you said you didn't particular like the sound you got out of the guitar that you used on "Sweet Home Alabama." Yeah, it was a horrible guitar. But I do think it was the banjo-like tone that prompted Ronnie to write about Alabama, like "I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee." But that didn't help; I still hated the guitar.
So tell me about your relationship with your Les Paul.
There are things you can play on a Gibson Les Paul that you can't play on anything else.
And why is that? Okay, well, the old vintage Les Pauls, which are my favorite, every note has a certain honkish quality to it. I'm saying, not even plugged in. I heard someone describe it as like a woodwind type sound. Every note. And the best recorded sound I can think of to demonstrate that would be the first minute of ZZ Top's "Brown Sugar." That is the sound. And I'd say Paul Kossoff on Free's "All Right Now" is a good example. But the guitar has a certain honkish quality to it, and you can play blues on it forever. A Les Paul through a Marshall is just a great sound. Cream's first album,
Fresh Cream, is the ultimate vintage Les Paul sound, just all around. I mean his solo on "I'm So Glad" and "Sweet Wine," that's a classic Les Paul sound. There will never be any Les Paul sound better than that.
Let's do a little bit of your history, too.
Oh, wait, wait, wait. I'm not quite finished with the story yet. So anyway, I'm stuck with this Stratocaster, and like I said I was making up different guitars on the road and I remember I bought an old Les Paul on the road that I played on like one or two songs onstage, but the Stratocaster set me apart in the band as a totally different sound. And that's why I had to use it. I had to use it on the majority of everything, just so I wouldn't sound like Gary, and I wouldn't sound like Allen.
What did Allen and Gary play? Allen used a Firebird. And Gary used a Les Paul. You can listen to those old Skynyrd records and you can pick out who's playing what, because everybody sounds so different. Actually there's one writer who put it perfect, he said in Skynyrd you had really James Burton, Paul Kossoff, and Eric Clapton kind of playing in the same band.
Can you talk a little about how you wrote the solos to "Sweet Home Alabama" in your sleep? Gary had done some part of it and then you went home and finished it in your dreams?
Well, when I came to rehearsal that day Gary was playing this riff that you can hear in the verses. It's not the main riff that I play; it's a part that he plays. And as soon as I picked up the guitar I immediately bounced off his riff. And that's when Ronnie looked at me and he gave me this whirling sign with his finger, like keep going, keep playing that over and over. And so I mean if it hadn't been for Gary writing his part, I never would have written my part. And once I heard what Ronnie had, I just wrote the rest of the song in like a half hour, it just came so fast.
Have you ever written a song in your sleep before, or the whole solo? No, that was the only solo I ever saw in a dream. And I saw both of ’em. And I pretty much play them note for note, even today, except one part I change. But I remember when I recorded that in Atlanta, like we recorded that song four days after we wrote it. And we were thinking about putting it on the first album because our first album wasn't even out yet, but Al Kooper wanted to save it for the second album. But Kooper argued with me the whole time I was there, saying "You're playing the solo in the wrong key." Because it starts on a D chord but it really resolves in G. It's really in the key of G. And he says "The solo should be in D." And he, unbeknownst to me, was telling the rest of the guys, "Look, we can't have this guy do the solo on the record."
That is really funny. But the guys stood behind me. You know why they stood behind me? Because they said, man, he saw the solo in a dream. And you know how like the whole Southern mysticism thing really kind of fell in, played in my hands, because I'm not that big into Southern mysticism, you know? I'm from Southern California. But I figured, well, it meant enough to them that I saw it in a dream that it has to be used. I thought that was pretty cool.
I know you say that, and you've talked about this before in other interviews, the fact that when Steve Gaines replaced you and he had the same birthday, and it was almost like he took your place in all things. Including the crash. The way I always look at your life is that if you hadn't gotten pissed when Peter Rudge came into manage the band, and ultimately quit, you wouldn't be here. You seem to have a lot of those kinds of coincidences in your life.
Yeah, I know. Don't think I haven't thought about all that stuff.
Even though you're a Southern Californian, your life certainly has been like a testament to a sense of destiny or serendipity. Or for you, really like a guardian angel, you know? I call it Providence, too.
Actually that's a better way to describe it. Yeah. With a capital P.
Didn't providence play a role in meeting Lynyrd Skynyrd in the first place? You were in the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the band was all but broken up, but you decided to go out on tour one more time after you heard another band had fraudulently booked a tour under the Alarm Clock.
Yes, exactly. We filed this injunction against this band who had booked a three months college tour as the Alarm Clock. We had just gone through a bankruptcy and we figured we got no money, so we figured, "We're broke, let's just do it." Skynyrd was our opening act. Actually it was their first tour as Lynyrd Skynyrd. They had just changed the name of the band. I would have never met those guys had it not been for that bogus Strawberry Alarm Clock wanting to tour as us.
I know, and that's that sense of destiny. When Ronnie Van Zant called you on the phone and asked you over to listen to some of their songs, did you have an inclination that he wanted to hire you?
No, I didn't even think about it. I said, "Just get in the car and come pick me up. I don't have a car." And they were there the next day. The moment I met him, I really understood what Ronnie was about, even though he had only written three songs by then, the last one being a song called "Need All My Friends." That was the song that he asked me to listen to. They played the song for me at a club in Jacksonville called the Comic Book and that's when it hit me. I said to myself that I would do anything to play music with this guy. And so when he called me two years later, I didn't have to think about it.
What do you think that he saw in you? You know, I can't answer that. I mean you would think there would have been a bass player in town that they could have called. I mean Larry Junstrom, I know he was the original bass player. Larry Junstrom is like one of the best bass players. He's very melodic. Matter of fact, when they played that song for me that day at the Comic Book, Junstrom's bass part was just, it was miraculous. It was just genius, you know. So I don't know what Ronnie saw in me. Like I said, it's Providential with a capital P. There's no logical reason for me to be in that band when you think about it.
No, there's not. I had some real problems with Ronnie. I didn't understand why a genius had to act like that. And I was real sorry to give it up but I didn't have any regrets. I had regrets on how I did it—I just walked out mid-tour—but I had to because it was just one of those things that the longer you stay, the more it has its teeth in you and you can't let it go.
I
remember you said that if Ronnie had called you and asked you back, you would have come back.
I would have come back. Yeah, absolutely.
Did you spend much time wondering why he didn't? No. No, I knew that it was, well, it had to do with two things. Number one is pride. I walked out on him. And number two, Rudge said, "We don't need him." I mean he was really mesmerized by Peter Rudge, which I—he was the only person that I'd ever met that mesmerized Ronnie. Because Ronnie had it all over everybody. But he didn't have it over Pete Rudge.
To me that was the beginning of the end. I wasn't surprised that it ended badly. I knew it would, I just didn't know it would end like that.
It had gotten so violent and it had gotten so mean. It had gotten mean. And I had seen so many mean things. Not necessarily against me but just against people that were close to him, that to me was totally unnecessary. So I got out, and I've never regretted. I never went through a day sitting around the phone saying, boy, I wish he'd call. It's just if he had, we'd have had a talk and I would have gone back. But I would have had to set some ground rules, you know? I mean like I think I told you there's a picture of the band standing in front of Hell House. You've got six guys on one side and you got Ed King on the other, and that says it all. I'm from Southern California, I'll say it again. I'm like from a different mindset from those guys. I was just there to play music. I wasn't in there to get beat up, get spit upon, get dragged around a room, get jagged glass held up to my throat. I wasn't into all that. So, yeah, that was unfortunate.
But it always amazed me that everyone put up with it. Had to. They had to. What else were they gonna do?
He gave them an out, but there was a price to pay. No, there was no out.
No, I meant out of the blue-collar life that faced them growing up in Jacksonville. No, there was no out for anybody, because when you're born on the west side of Jacksonville and you've got this success on your plate right in front of you, what are you going to do, walk away? And I wasn't from there. So I could. I just, I didn't know what the future held but I knew it wasn't there.
Did you ever have a day where you felt accepted? You were kind of close to Leon Wilkerson, the bassist, right? Leon talked a lot, but I wouldn't say we were close.
What was your last straw? I mean was there one moment that you knew you couldn't go on?
Well, yeah, the night before I quit. We had, actually two nights before, we played in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Ronnie got thrown in jail along with this guy I knew, John Butler, who took care of my guitars. And it was his job to change my strings every day. Anyway they didn't show up at Pittsburgh, the next show, until like five minutes before the show. They showed up, they'd gotten out of jail. Got into Pittsburgh and that night during “Free Bird,” I broke two strings, which I never did. And by the way, I played a Gibson on "Free Bird." Played that Gibson SG every night, which I still have.
Anyway, on the limousine ride back to the hotel, Ronnie was just telling me that I didn't amount to a pimple on Allen Collins' ass, which, I wasn't going to argue with any of that, but then Ronnie started, you know, wanting to fight in the limousine and the driver pulled over and got out of the car and said, "You guys can drive your own car back." When I got back to the hotel I said, well, that's it. I just don't need this. You know. I mean, if they want to act crazy and fight amongst themselves, that's one thing. But don' t steer it my way.
You had already had a number one song with "Incense and Peppermint," when you joined Skynyrd, did you think that they had a hit single in them? No. I hadn't heard any of their material until I walked into their first rehearsal, and "Free Bird" I didn't really care for because I didn't understand it. I didn't understand "Free Bird" till it was completely recorded, then I got it. "Gimme Three Steps" I thought was great. "Things Going On," great song. "Tuesday's Gone," I didn't care for. Of course “Simple Man,” when I heard it, which was the last song on that album. That song just blew me out of the water, just incredible. There were just too many things, too many songs that were good. Actually, there were some songs they recorded in Muscle Shoals before I joined, called "Was I Right or Was I Wrong," "Lend a Helping Hand." Those songs are just absolute genius, which the majority of people out there have never heard. They think it's just "Free Bird," "Alabama," "That Smell," and that's it.
I always remember Ronnie Van Zant saying he never wrote anything down because if it wasn't good enough to remember, it wasn't good enough. Oh, yeah. I never saw him write a lyric down. Also, if you ever showed up at rehearsal the next day and couldn't recapture the groove? I mean you might have the chords right but if you'd lost the groove of that song, the lyrics were gone forever. We did it one time and he said, "I can't remember it." And we were just shocked. We go, "What happened?" And he said, "You guys lost it, man." He said, "You lost it." So you know, that song was gone. But that didn't happen anymore. I mean we'd stay there till dark—not too much after dark. By dark we were pretty much gone, but we played stuff over and over until we were playing it in our sleep that night. No wonder that solo came to me in a dream, because we just played and played and played.
It just seeded your subconscious.
Yeah, it was in the subconscious. Ronnie ruled with an iron fist that way, and that was fine with me. But really, the songwriting was the best part, and rehearsing. Going on the road, that was an ugly part. But the writing and rehearsing, that was a lot of fun. Even in hot Hell House, with all those hot amps and no air conditioning, sweat just pouring off, it was fun, man. Like when we were writing "Saturday Night Special." I'm showing Ronnie this riff and it's really loud in Hell House, and we're playing this thing, and Ronnie's sitting there in the corner of the couch with his head in his hands, and 15 minutes later he comes up and cups my ear with his hand, and sings me the whole first verse. I was the only one to hear it.. I was the only one to hear it. And I went, " Well, I know right where to take this." You know, and it just, bam, bam, bam. You finish the song and it's done, you know.
I have a picture of all of you at Hell House on my office wall. It's funny you bring that up because I've always thought that was such a revelatory picture about the dynamic of the band. You're the lone Northerner.
Oh, when I saw that picture for the first time when that box set came out—I went, "Oh, my. Man, that's it, right there, isn't it?"
That always seemed a polarizing thing for me. That and the crash. After Skynyrd came back together in 1987, at the Volunteer Jam, there was a division between those of you who were in the plane crash and those who were not. It was like that polarized every single thing. Oh, sure, and for good reason.
They went through something, it was like they were in Vietnam together and you weren't in Vietnam.
That's exactly right, and I had no problem with that. I mean if I felt that certain thing going on, I would never interfere with that because that's something that you just don't mess with.
I know, it's true. So how do you think "Sweet Home Alabama" stands up next to "Free Bird?" Oh, it stands up great against anything. CMT did a special of the best Southern rock songs of all time and of course "Alabama" was number one, and it should be. I'm sure Dickey Betts disagrees, but "Alabama" is the Southern anthem.
Didn't Ronnie say something like "That's our ‘Rambling Man’"? That's what Ronnie said after we wrote it. He goes, "Well, Ed, that's our ‘Rambling Man.’"
The Allman Brothers really were the standard that all Southern rock is compared to.
Well, yeah, but I mean the Allmans were so different from us. I remember one time we played Macon, Georgia, and three guys from the Allman Brothers came, and they walked out during the first song.
They did not. Well, yeah. I mean we just weren't as talented as they were. We couldn't jam and improvise. Our songs were written, they were structured. We had the four-minute song. At the most, five-minute song, and that was it, you know? Where those guys just could play, just play and play and play, and it was two totally different things.
What do you think the secret of Skynyrd's success was, the reason that Northerners liked it? You know, that I can't answer. I mean like the first time we played up North with Black Sabbath, they threw shit at us. We could only play like three songs and get off the stage. And then three months later we came back and we were headlining. There's no answer to that. But I mean Ronnie has a universal appeal to rednecks no matter where they live. And I didn't know that, but I didn't know there were rednecks in upstate New York and in Michigan and Idaho and everywhere. I didn't know that.
They liked them despite the name. I always hated the band’s name anyway, but that's another story.
What, you always hated the name Lynyrd Skynyrd? I didn't care for it, no. But it was Ronnie's idea. The funny thing about it, about Skynyrd and rednecks everywhere, is that in my mind Ronnie Van Zant really wasn't a redneck. Ronnie Van Zant was very sophisticated. I mean people think he was just this rowdy, whisky drinking, going out, gathering other women, but Ronnie had a level of sophistication that even early on just grew so fast. Every day you'd see a change. So I wouldn't, didn't even classify him as a redneck. But the thing about him that appealed to everybody is you could tell by listening to him sing that that's exactly what he was like in real life. I mean it's exactly him. All you had to listen to was six Skynyrd songs, and then you'd have the whole gist of what that man was about.
Where were you when you heard about the plane crash? I was making dinner. My mother called me, actually. She had heard the news first. And I flipped on the TV, and saw a little bit and then got in the car and went to Mississippi. I went to visit everybody in the hospital. And then I went to Ronnie's funeral after that, then I just drove home. It was an unbelievable week.
You rejoined Skynyrd in 1987 at Charlie Daniel's Volunteer Jam. What got you to rejoin? Why was that a good idea?
Gary Rossington called me, and asked me to come back, and I figured it would be a way to make it right. And I really missed playing guitar, and I thought it would be the right thing to do. You know, it's funny, I didn't know that Steve Gaines and I shared the same birth date until I actually was at rehearsal and one morning I went out to Ronnie's gravesite and Gaines is buried next to him. That's when I saw 9/14/49. And I went, oh, man, I did not know that.
Let's talk a little more about your guitars, the 1959 Les Paul that you like so much. I've owned five old Sunburst Les Pauls. I guess I've owned eight or nine altogether. But of this particular year, I've owned five of them, and I had one that was the best one I'd owned, and somebody at gunpoint stole it from me back in 1987, on Father's Day. I had some other stuff for sale and it's a long story, but I kind of got caught unawares and that guitar left, and it's a good thing I didn't get shot and killed over it.
Anyway, ten years later I'm thumbing through a book at the Dallas Guitar Show. It's a guitar book, pictures of different guitars, and there's my guitar in this book. And so I bought a copy of the book. I took it home, and the serial number of the guitar was in the book. So I matched it up against some old inventory records that I had and sure enough, it's the same guitar. So I tracked it down. Here I thought the guitar may have landed in Japan because the book I bought was totally written in Japanese, but my wife figured out that this guy in Long Island had it. And so we got him on the phone, and it was April Fools Day, 1997, and he thought I was just pulling a joke. He owns a recording studio on Long Island. He was glad to talk to me because he thought I might want to use his studio, and I said, no, I'm calling for a different reason. So he was very upset, and anyway the guy that I talked to was the procurer of very special vintage guitars for this billionaire in Long Island. And the billionaire owned the guitar, along with many other fine guitars. So anyway a few months went by and, see, I'm going to make a long story short here. We haggled about it. A writer here in town, Beverly Keel helped me get it back. She wrote a story in New York magazine about it and she talked with the attorneys for this guy in New York. Anyway I never talked to the guy who had the guitar, but after six months the attorneys called up and said, "You can have the guitar back. Do you want the guitar or the money?" I said, "I want the guitar." So they said, "Well, come up and get it." So I sent a friend of mine to get the guitar, and I still have it. And it's the best '59 Les Paul I've ever played. It just about plays itself.
What are you working on now? I am not doing anything. I mean I am in my twelfth year of retirement. My pool is open four months a year and I swim in it every day. I go out there with a Cuban cigar. I have a butterfly net in my right hand, a Cuban cigar in the left hand, my umbrella hat, and no swimsuit. And I swim around in the pool and I pick up leaves and whatever else is in the pool. Every day I spend two hours out there, and I love it.
Okay, I'll let you have that one, because that's very rock. What's the most rock thing you've ever done?
The most rock thing? I'm not like that.
You must have been. Okay, when I was 18 years old, I bought a brand new Ford Mustang and then I went out and bought eight of the guitars I'd always wanted, and I put them all in the back of the car and went for a ride. I took my guitars for a ride.
Photos courtesy of Frank Pine