But a drunk Van Zant was a world class asshole. Once he broke a few of Rossington’s fingers after a show in Hamburg, Germany in October 1975 for no particular reason (this was after he’d smashed a bottle over a roadie’s head no less): "He turned on Gary and said: 'You think you’re a guitar player? I’ll do it without you,’” tour manager Craig Reed recalled to Uhelszki years later. “Maybe he missed a lick,” he continued. “But it didn’t matter if he messed up or not. If Ronnie wanted to kick your ass he would. He was mean. He used to say to us, 'When I’ve been drinking I’m nobody’s friend.’” Alcohol was the constant, what had allowed Van Zant and the rest of the band to loosen up just right before taking the stage during those early days, and what ultimately gave Van Zant the illusion of control as his band began to slip away from him. He probably felt boned and betrayed by shady managers and bookers who scammed him out of his hard earned cash; by the pencil pushers and journalists who tried to tell him who he was; and certainly by Ed King, whose departure had rattled Skynyrd’s understanding of itself. The man was self-aware something awful — a characteristic that at once allowed him to become a stunningly relatable songwriter and storyteller, but one that by '76 had him speaking liberally, drunkenly about the impending end of Lynyrd Skynrd and his own life: “I don’t even expect to live very long,” he told Uhelszki, “because I’m living too fast.”
Ronnie seemed to relish the certainty that rock and roll would eventually kill him. For someone so hellbent on achieving that dream in the first place, it’d only be fitting to meet the same fate Robert Johnson agreed to the crossroads; for someone so hellbent on being the man of his father’s dreams, death at the hands of the thing he chose over finishing school would be the only suitable punishment. This is beyond stupid, beyond childish, beyond egomaniacal, especially considering all Van Zant had done to dig himself into the petulant, unsatisfied hole he found himself in by the mid-70s.
Perhaps behind all of it was a cripplingly pragmatic resignation to a rule that no great rock achievement goes unpunished — something he’d assured himself a decade before when he cut “Was I Right Or Wrong” at Muscle Shoals. As much as he was a kind, caring, generous, simple kind of man, he was a disgustingly wealthy drunk with a penchant for fighting at the drop of a hat. And maybe he’d convinced himself he had to be both, that reconciliation was impossible because this is what he’d signed up for. Rock and roll was never life or death for Van Zant, it had to be life until death.