The lights went out all at once, like the sudden throwing of a breaker switch. It could have been the power. It was a cold autumn night with those big fat clouds rolling across the sky with ill intent, blotting out the moon at intervals as if life was a spooky horror film. It was threatening rain and in the rundown neighborhood we had gathered at this evening, with landlords investing most of their dollars on tall boys and white powder and Church’s chicken and very little on utility bills and electrical upkeep, unannounced darkness was not unexpected.
Maybe twenty dudes were stuffed into a ghetto side apartment that had one bedroom, one couch, seven folding chairs and one epically filthy bathroom. The carpet hadn’t seen a vacuum since Halley last saw the comet and it was its own living ecosystem. The kitchen sink and the bathroom sink were both indistinguishable, essentially lab experiments testing the survivability of various strains of fungus. It would not have dawned on anyone to empty the trash so every available surface became a trashcan by proxy and you could track the eating habits of the college freshman, going back maybe thirty or forty days, just by analyzing the wrappers, bags and containers that littered the place. In was 1979 and for an improbable collection of fraternity pledges, this was their natural habitat.
There was Mickey’s Big Mouth, Lowenbrau, Miller High Life and maybe Henry Weinhard’s. There was a Frisbee-full of homegrown, Nacho Cheese Doritos, rolling papers, cigarettes and clove cigarettes for the contingent trying to get in touch with their feminine side. Most of us were playing a drinking game called Bullshit, a wonderfully uplifting and intellectual game where each player gets a shitty name (like dumbshit, tuffshit, chickenshit, etc.) and, should his name be called, has to respond bullshit! and then has to call on someone else using the correct secret phrases. This continues until everyone is sufficiently drunk to the point that they can’t remember their shit name and, well, everyone loses his shit.
We had the radio on. I was in control of it. Some of these dudes, my pledge mates, weren’t from L.A. so I showed them the way, turned them onto the only one true L.A. radio station – 94.7 KMET. We were tuned into the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy. I knew everything there was to know about rock music, everything, it turns out, except one thing.
Night turned into early morning and the bros were fairly well marinaded. A few were face-down on the carpet, their sleepy drool blending with the grime and dirt and DNA and insect carcasses that oozed out of the carpet fibers. But a few of us were hanging in there groovin’ on the tunes, passing the last few beers around, wondering how many days in a row you could miss psychology 201 and still get a passing grade. At some point the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy had signed off and, unconsciously, my actions controlled by some alien life force, I reach for the radio tuning knob and changed the channel. That’s when the lights went out.
Well, they didn’t go out for everybody, just me. I was slumped in one of those folding chairs, I had a ferocious headache and a sharp pain on the right side of my jaw. When I opened my eyes it was a freaky scene, three or four drunk faces, within inches of mine, staring at me like I had horns.
“Are you okay?”
“Maybe, what happened?”
“You changed the station and Chris punched you.”
While I was trying to wrap my head around that concept and wondering about the availability of beer, Chris came back into the room. He was torched. “Hey man, I’m really sorry about that, but they were playing “Free Bird” and, well, you should never change “Free Bird” … And I just lost it, but … You should never change “Free Bird.”
I seriously have no recollection of the song that was playing when fist met jaw, but I’d be lying if I said I was heavily into Skynyrd in 1979. This Chris dude was wiry and kind of a rough and tumble guy. People, even the bros, tended to give him a wide berth. Looking back on it now, maybe he was channeling Ronnie Van Zant, who was never shy about throwin’ down. As the years passed I began to dig Skynyrd a lot and I consider Ronnie and Gary Rossington and Allen Collins and Billy Powell and the rest close friends and, yeah, I see it now, you can’t change “Free Bird” … I got what I deserved.