"I'm a boy only a mom could love," says Ronnie Van Zant as he watches the interstate roll past the windows of Lynyrd Skynyrd's customized Greyhound bus. Ronnie normally has a grizzled look, but even though it's early in the day and the next stop down the road, Nashville, is far away, he's especially haggard because, just before an otherwise flawless concert last night, somebody gave him a bad drink.

"You can't come to Atlanta without something happening," he says. "There are a million people backstage. And you know most of 'em."

The backstagers last night included brass from MCA, who had come to present Lynyrd Skynyrd with a gold record for their album Second Helping. Skynyrd is only the second southern band to have reached this pinnacle; and they wanted the presentation to be in Atlanta, where just three years ago they were a rowdy bar band playing at legendary local spots like Funocchio's. Now, as established album sellers with a single, "Sweet Home Alabama," bulleted high on national charts, they are headliners in the Georgia Tech coliseum.

Last night's audience knew the band well; many had followed Skynyrd since before Al Kooper heard them on an Atlanta trip that was the genesis for his Sounds of the South Records. To underscore the homey nature of the visit, the Georgia Tech show opened with a spotlight on a huge Confederate flag while a big-band version of "Dixie" boomed out of the PA ("we don't do that up North," Van Zant said). The crowd bawled a lusty ovation when the gold record was announced, but they were saving most of their strength for the magic lines of "Sweet Home Alabama":

Well, I've heard Mistuh Young
sing about us,
Well I've heard old Neil put it
down,
Well, I hope Neil Young will
remember,
A southern man don't need him
around anyhow!

When Van Zant sneered out that final line, the electricity almost became visible and the entire coliseum exploded in a triumphant roar. Our boys! they screamed. The group that had given it to a hated high school gym teacher called Leonard Skinner by naming their band after him had now answered Neil Young's "Southern Man," vindicating the thousands of kids who were wondering why they didn't feel guilty about loving life in the Deep South.

"We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two," says Van Zant, who wrote the lyrics to the song. None of the seven members of Lynyrd Skynyrd have gotten any personal reaction from Young on "Sweet Home Alabama," but Ed King, one of the group's three lead guitarists and, with Van Zant and Gary Rossington, a composer of the song, knows him personally from a tour years ago on the West Coast (he is the only Skynyrd member who is not from Florida). "I showed the verse to Ed and asked him what Neil might think," says Van Zant. "Ed said he'd dig it; he'd be laughing at it."

A cut from Young's On The Beach album, "Walk On," is widely taken as an answer to "Alabama," although the response is, if anything, generalized:

I hear some people been
talkin' me down
Bring up my name, pass it
'round
They don't mention the happy
times
They do their thing, I do mine
Oh baby that's hard to change
I can't tell them how to feel
Some get strong
Some get strange
Sooner or later it all gets real
Walk on

Van Zant has no interest in turning the dialogue into a volleyball match. He smiles and says, "Neil is amazing, wonderful . . . a superstar."

Lynyrd Skynyrd is not quite sure how to handle their Top 40 notoriety, because the last thing they are is a singles band. Both of their singles ("Gimme Three Steps" from the first album and "Sweet Home Alabama") have lazily sauntered out into release with no particular intent, and the Skynyrd organization is frankly flabbergasted at the success of the current one. "The single just sort of happened," says Van Zant, "but we're glad it did. Al Kooper wanted another song at first, but this one just got out." It is the only track on Second Helping recorded in Georgia, and the lazy feel of it is exemplified by Kooper's decision to leave on the record Van Zant's request for more headphone volume: "Turn it up!"

Some of the sweetness on the cut comes from Clydie King and Merry Clayton singing backgrounds, and there's a tribute to laying back in the band's arrangements: They mix the three lead guitars (King, Rossington and Alien Collins) with keyboards (Billy Powell), bass (Leon Wilkeson) and drums (Bob Burns), along with an occasional horn overlay arranged by Kooper and led by Bobby Keys.

The current tour takes them to spots where the Confederate flag is folded up and tucked away, but the band can't hide its intrinsic southernness. "We want to get away from the South," says Van Zant. "Not musically -- we're proud that we're southern, but we've got to play where we're weak. We are tired of all this 'southern scene' crap that follows us in newspapers; it's gotten so that a great band from New York has less of a chance now than an average band from the South. People have come in and started to make money, and there are folks now that'll snap you up just because you're from Dixie. That ain't good and it ain't fair."

The concert in Atlanta and the few gigs surrounding it are the "fun" part of the current Skynyrd tour, which also includes a number of dates in the Midwest -- all of them reached by way of a leased bus which exclusively transports the band. "We hate to fly," Rossington says, "and we have more fun on the bus anyway." It is tailor-made for traveling groups, including a large sleeping area and plush seats in the front, a color television set, a cartridge player (complete with a copy of Second Helping) and the trucker's friend, a CB radio. Though buses are in wide use by country bands, few rock musicians travel that way; the number is growing, though, and Skynyrd will probably let another rock group use the Greyhound when they take their first tour of Europe in November.

"Lynyrd Skynyrd is one of the few bands that honestly likes being on the road," says road manager Russ Emerick, "because we like what we're doing. They ask us when we're going to do the next album: We say, when we feel like it. What's our follow up to the single? We say we probably won't pull another one from this album. We take our time, and that way we give our best." The band has turned down two TV rock-show offers, preferring to wait until the group can be shown in a pure concert format.

Lynyrd Skynyrd has gone over extremely well in the North, undoubtedly helped by the national success of "Alabama." Emerick credits it to what he calls a "return to reality" in rock music, "away from the fantasy of the drug period. That's universal; it's not southern. There are no frills with this band, no glitter or costumes: They just go out there and play good music. We don't have any stars, and it's part of the nature of this band that we give our best interviews onstage -- but if you want to talk to us more, you have to come to our home. "As the Murfreesboro, Tennessee, marker passes by he says, "We can sho' tell a difference when we cross that Mason-Dixon line."