On the morning of Aug. 23, many of Ed King’s Facebook friends were shocked by the announcement that the former Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist and founding member of the ’60s psychedelic group Strawberry Alarm Clock had died at his home in Nashville the day before. Best known as one of the writers of the iconic Southern rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama,” which kept King and his wife living comfortably in a lake house north of town for years thanks to “mailbox money,” King occupied a unique position in rock history.
Though he still considered himself a California boy at heart — stretching back from his days playing loopy tracks like “Incense and Peppermints” with the SAC — King was also beloved as a Southern rock hero. That’s him counting off “1, 2, 3” at the beginning of "Sweet Home," offering an immediate surge of adrenaline to any Crimson Tide football fan. When the state of Alabama decided to add the song’s title to their interstate welcome signs and license plates, King enjoyed another windfall of an annuity. (Smart guy, that Ed!)
King had struggled with health problems including cardiomyopathy for years. Writing for the Scene in 1997, Beverly Keel documented the time when he turned down a heart transplant because he felt like his luck was changing after he recovered a beloved ’59 Les Paul that had been stolen from him at gunpoint a decade earlier. In 2011, King did undergo a heart transplant. After a slow recovery from the surgery, he experienced a new vitality and began to really engage with the thousands of fans whom he accepted as friends and followers on Facebook. He was so open with his personal opinions that more than once he got suspended from the platform for expressing his strong views. (“I’m in jail again,” he joked.)
I’m as big of a music fan as most folks, but I’ll remember Ed in different ways as well. I first encountered him when I began writing for the Scene's Bites blog almost a decade ago. Back then, readers frequently commented on posts, and there were great conversations going on in the comments section, where people shared information and opinions. In those days, you could actually further your knowledge on whatever I was blathering on about by reading what other people thought.
An avid commenter used the handle EdKing1949. I noticed this particular reader was critical and insightful in his opinions of Nashville restaurants, and I began to notice that he was also commenting under the same name on Yelp. I put two and two together and timidly reached out to one of my guitar heroes with the query, “Excuse me, but are you the Ed King?” He responded, “I am who you think I am,” and we struck up an email friendship. He would ask my opinions on local restaurants and always offer his strong rebuttals. Eventually we decided to meet face to face, and he suggested his new favorite restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall pupuseria on Morrow Avenue named Taqueria & Pupuseria Lupita. One thing to know about Ed: If he decided he liked a place, he would eat there five times a week until he got tired of it or they pissed him off somehow. (Cold plates were a definite turn-off. He liked his food hot.)
I pulled up at the nondescript Mexican joint to see Ed and his wife Sharon waiting out front with their beloved English goldendoodle Ollie. Outside of hot plates, the one thing that Ed insisted out of a dining establishment was a dog-friendly patio so he could take Ollie (and later his kennel mate Petey) along on just about any trip out of the house.
Ed and I met soon after his transplant surgery. He was still unsteady on legs that had withered away after weeks in a hospital bed, but his spirit was as strong as ever. As he slathered Purell on every exposed skin surface constantly to stave off the potential of infection and organ rejection, we talked about some of the great meals he had enjoyed through his illustrious career. His favorites came from down-home joints like Doe’s Eat Place in Greenwood, Miss., and Claud’s Hamburgers in Tulsa, Okla. He told me he was frustrated by one of the side effects from his transplant: “I don’t know if my donor had something wrong with him, but I can’t stand Italian food anymore, and I used to love it!”
He did still like fine dining, though. I pulled a couple of strings to get him and Sharon a reservation at The Catbird Seat, and he became so smitten with the cuisine of Josh Habiger and Erik Anderson that he dined there multiple times a month — until he changed his mind about it, as he always did.
Another fond memory I have of Ed relates to a time I was meeting at Flyte with local and regional management from Yelp as part of a story I was working on. I commented that one of their top local commenters was the guy who wrote “Sweet Home Alabama.” They expressed disbelief, and at that exact moment I happened to glance over at the hostess stand to see Ed and Sharon coming through the front door. I said, “Well, you can just ask him yourself!” Ed could have earned Elite Yelper status had he not tired of the platform and given it up — which he did.
Through the years, we talked about how he was my favorite self-acknowledged “deplorable,” and I was one of his favorite lefties. He was especially proud of his son, who serves as a member of an elite military unit that he couldn’t really talk much about. I could always count on him for a boffo quote, whether I was working on a story about food or music. (If you’ve seen the award-winning documentary Muscle Shoals, that’s Ed giving the last word in the final minutes of the film. (He told the story about how both the major guitar solos in his biggest hit came to him in a dream, complete and ready to lay down for the track.) He told me: “Getting that closing spot in the movie made my musical life complete. It’s the best music doc I’ve ever seen.”
Although he was generous with his fans, he was also a pretty private guy, preferring to spend his days by the pool or puttering around the lake on a pontoon boat with his wife and pups. Occasionally, one of his fans would reach out to me because they knew I was friends with him. Once I received a random Twitter DM from a guy who was looking for Ed’s email address. I never gave that out, but when he told me that he had a copy of Skynyrd’s Nuthin' Fancy album signed by every member of the band except Ed, I put them together. Ed graciously made a special effort to meet the young man and sign the album cover, and he was quite pleased to be able to do so.
Ed played down the seriousness of a recent surgery to remove a cancerous node from his lung, but I could tell something was up — he began to manically work on a memoir of his life in music. Hints about chapter titles and specific stories piqued my interest, and I sincerely hope that the book does come out sometime soon. Unfortunately, my concerns about his seeming desperation to finish the book ahead of some self-inflicted deadline proved to be founded, and when he sent me a humorous photo of him looking all disheveled in a hospital gown, I worried that he wasn’t doing as well as his jovial Facebook persona would indicate. (I won’t share that photo with you, but it still makes me laugh.)
Instead, I’ll end with the last photo he sent me, a man in his manor looking quite content with his life. Although that life ended too soon, it was definitely well-lived, and he was well-loved. Sometime this week, I’m gonna get out the skillet, fry up an Oklahoma-style “depression burger” studded with onions to extend the meat like the Okies did during the days of the Dust Bowl, and think of Ed while I listen to “Sweet Home” on repeat. (But not the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Sorry, Ed — I never got into that hippie sitar crap.)
Ed King 1949-2018
