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Gary Donehoo holds a photo of him, Alan Walden and Eddie Floyd with Lynyrd Skynyrd in front of his wall of memorabilia of the band. “They were all good guys,” Donehoo said. “The original band, they were hungry, they all came from west Jacksonville… they knew the only way out was education, music or sports.” SAMANTHA SINCLAIR/White County News
Gary Donehoo now lives on a quiet mountain in Sautee, but 50 years ago he was living the highs and lows of a rock and roll manager.
“I kinda fell into the music business,” Donehoo said. “Backed into it, you could say.”
After his father suffered an injury, Donehoo returned home to Macon from college at Auburn to help take care of him, and continued his education at Middle Georgia College.
He kept running into singer Eddie Floyd, who he became friends with, and Alan Walden. Walden and his brother Phil had a huge stable of rhythm and blues artists at the time.
Floyd’s management contract was coming to an end, and he and Walden started talking about owning their own management and music publishing company.
They approached Donehoo to help them.
“So, I joined them and Hustlers was born,” Donehoo said, assuring this was before the magazine with the same name, and hustlers were hard workers. “We considered ourselves hustlers.”
Through the ‘60s and early ‘70s, rhythm and blues were big for their company, then rock and roll became popular and rhythm and blues fell off.
“And our business fell off,” Donehoo said.
They closed the Macon business and moved it to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in 1971.
“We met some of the most amazing artists over there,” Donehoo said.
The studio was where artists including the Rolling Stones, Joe Cocker and Bob Seger had recorded music.
“They had so many gold records on the wall, the wall was covered with gold records, and when they ran out of space on the wall, they leaned the records against the wall on the floor,” Donehoo said.
But, before they got there, they looked into getting a rock and roll band at the advice of Walden’s brother, who was putting together The Allman Brothers Band at the time.
A guy working out of their office overheard the conversation and told Walden and Donehoo there were a lot of rock and roll bands in Jacksonville, Fla.
So, they put an advertisement in the Jacksonville newspaper and set up a call center for bands to call to set up an audition time.
During auditions, they heard 33 bands. A lot were horrible, Donehoo said, but they ended up signing two — Birnum Wood and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
They put Lynyrd Skynyrd in the Muscle Shoals studio to cut a demo.
“It was a pretty good demo,” Donehoo said.
But, he was in the minority.
They shopped the demo to 17 record companies, and every single one told them they didn’t have a band.
“But, we knew we had a band,” Donehoo said.
They cut a finished album in 1971, shopped it again, and it was turned down by everyone again.
“It was getting aggravating,” Donehoo said.
In 1972, they went back in the studio, cut another album, and once again were told by everyone they didn’t have a band.
Meanwhile, Al Kooper was looking to launch his Sounds of South record label with a good Southern rock band. Everyone told him he needed to see Lynyrd Skynyrd.
He saw them play at a club in Atlanta.
“They blew his socks off,” Donehoo said, noting it was a lot different seeing Skynyrd live than listening to them on tape. “We got them a record deal.”
Skynard turned out to be “a monster” for them.
“They played with everything under the sun in the ‘70s,” Donehoo said.
In 1975, when they were opening for the Eagles at the Orange Bowl, the band had a meeting to decide if they wanted to leave Hustlers. Peter Rudge had been talking with the band since 1973 when they played with a band he managed, The Who.
“Anytime you get an act as hot as Skynyrd, you’re going to have people try to take them,” Donehoo said.
They ended up selling the management of Lynyrd Skynyrd to Rudge.
Less than two years later, was the plane crash.
The band had just started their “Street Survivors” tour in Greenville, S.C., and Rudge put them on a “raggedy 1948 prop plane” — as Donehoo called it —to fly to Baton Rouge, La. Donehoo said the band members didn’t like the plane to start with.
“And the plane went down,” Donehoo said. “It was pilot error… evidently, the pilot didn’t fuel up the plane properly before leaving Greenville.”
But, Donehoo noted, if the plane was properly fueled, everyone would have been killed in the fire the crash would have caused.
Ronnie Van Sant, Steve Gaines, and his sister Cassie, a backup vocalist, were all killed. All other band members suffered injuries — lots of broken bones, and Billy Powell’s nose was barely hanging on his face, Donehoo said.
“That pretty much ended Skynyrd,” Donehoo said.
The surviving members did get back together after about 8-10 years he said, and Van Sant’s younger brother Johnny took up lead vocals, but wouldn’t sing “Free Bird” at first.
“That was just too much,” Donehoo said. “The band would play ‘Free Bird,’ and the crowd would sing along.”
Donehoo stayed in music business for only seven years. Over that time, the company managed eight artists, including six rhythm and blues artists.
Although there were some hard time, he mostly enjoyed the career, and met and managed “really fantastic artists.”
“Some contributed to my grey hairs,” Donehoo said. “Al Green for one.”
Willie Mitchell of Hi Records Studio in Memphis, Tenn., had a minor hit with Green called “Back Up Train.”
Mitchell asked Donehoo and Walden if they could manage Green for him, and they did for a little over a year.
Green was having problems with substance abuse at the time, and even though Donehoo said he was a nice guy, he was also “a pain in the butt.”
He was missing dates, which reflected poorly not just on him, but on his managers.
They ended up giving him back to Mitchell.
Two months later, as Donehoo was driving, he heard the disc jockey say, “Here’s Al Green’s new hit, ‘Tired of Being Alone.’”
“I almost wrecked the car,” Donehoo said.
He called Walden and told him to turn on the radio.
Mitchell and Green made hit after hit after that, Donehoo said, explaining they finally found the right elements together to put out hits.
Donehoo left the music business because he got tired of friends dying.
Otis Redding died in a plane crash, and every year on Dec. 10, Donehoo and Walden would take flowers to his burial site on the family property and say a prayer.
Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971.
The next year, Berry Oakly was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Other friends in the business died as the result of overdoses or car accidents.
Then, Skynyrd’s plane crashed.
“Emotionally, that was one hell of a lick,” Donehoo said.
He and Walden went to Jacksonville for Ronnie’s funeral. Van Sant’s wife spat in their face, and told them she hoped they were happy for keeping them on the road all the time.
“I’m pretty sure we never would have put them on that raggedy old plane,” Donehoo said.
After leaving the music business, he ended up working in the maintenance department for Bibb County School District in Macon for 27 years.
“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” Donehoo said. “They were the finest people I ever worked with, and, I promise you, the most talented people… Anything that needs to be done, the maintenance department can do it.”