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told Van Zant his band was too good to do cover tunes; they had to get crackin’ writing their own stuff. Indeed, rival bands would probably not have hesitated to pilfer songs from the One Percent, if only they had some. At the time, they had none that they felt confident enough to play live yet. Jim Daniel, a local booker, had been loosely representing the band for a few years and pleaded with them for original material. One of the earliest attempts, “Chair with a Broken Leg,” apparently was the first song ever recorded by the band soon to be known as Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were still the Noble Five at the time, around mid-1967.
    â€œChair,” copies of which do not exist, was some sort of pseudofolk protest rock that few could make sense of. Daniel got it on a reel-to-reel tape, not in a studio but in Ronnie’s aunt’s house, intending to use it as a demo, but he thought better of it and never did. As the band were reluctant to play any new songs on stage, “Chair with a Broken Leg” went into the dust bin of history. Mainly, they went with covers of distinctly nonsouthern bands—the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, Cream. Allen Collins in particular loved to do riffs on Pete Townsend’s guitar-playing moves, such as the famous windmilling of his arm. They began to carve out a niche for themselves—rock and roll, hard and intense, stir-friedwith a Merle Haggard-type haughtiness, a tang, and an implied twang, with Allen injecting some bottleneck-blues effects by sliding his palm up and down the neck of his guitar and making redneck banter with the audiences, mainly invitations to hecklers to step outside when the songs were over.
    There was no distinctive sound to it yet, but the seeds for a mutual accommodation of backwoods southern blues and contemporary British rock were there. They began looking ever more grizzled, the vestiges of county-fair-appropriate dress, with no jeans and high school haircut codes giving way to musty, faded jeans, sweat-stained T-shirts, dangling locks, and bristly whiskers. The search to find the right alchemy, an emblem that was workable and believable in both tonality and look, was in its infant stages in other dive bars within smelling distance of the One Percent’s gigs, undertaken by similar bands also on the make. And in the end, it was more the attitude, the smug, put-up-your-dukes component of Ronnie’s vocals, not to mention his sinister Elvis-like sneer—and the quick, ingratiating grin signaling that much (but not all) of his tough-guy posing was a put-on—that seemed to stick in minds and ears, propelling the band forward.
    Sensing they were in need of original material that would fortify and ideally define them, Ronnie began to collaborate with Gary and Allen, taking the lyricist role he felt comfortable with and leaving the melody to be knitted onto his words by the two guitarists. Naturally, he was a tough taskmaster, a perfectionist even then, sparking prickly arguments about song topics and direction, which would always be the case. However, they reached a critical watermark late in 1968 when yet another name for the band came into being, one that would last into eternity.

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NEED ALL MY FRIENDS
    I n 1969, Forby Leonard Skinner, a gruff, crew cut-sporting, thirty-five-year-old Army veteran, was the gym teacher at his alma mater, Robert E. Lee High. Nothing about him would have ever portended fame or even a minute of notoriety had he not been placed in history as a foil for two students, members of a still obscure band. Having taken on the sartorial and tonsorial identities of rock-and-roll musicians put Gary Rossington on a collision course with Skinner, who like any other high school gym coach was the enforcer of the lingering dress codes that existed in every high school in America.
    A big man at six foot two and two hundred pounds, Skinner was a real ballbuster, taking satisfaction in ragging young men who dared creep