"If
I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?" the singer
asks in "Free Bird," Lynyrd Skynyrd's most famous song. It's
been more than thirty years since the band as we first knew them
left us, but Lynyrd Skynyrd continues to be remembered and
revered. "Their three guitar lineup gave them an uncommon
musical muscle," the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame noted following
the band's belated 2005 induction, "while their down-to-earth
songs spoke plainly and honestly from a working class
Southerner's perspective."
Every
great band needs a leader, a charismatic frontman who calls the
shots, and in Lynyrd Skynyrd that was Ronnie Van Zant. The
youngest of six children, he was born January 15, 1948 on the
outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a truck
driver and his mother worked in a donut shop. He did well in
school, even making the honor roll a few times, but quit toward
the end of his senior year. It's a decision he came to regret.
"I made a bad mistake," he said later. "You gotta have
education." If he never had a high school diploma to hang on his
wall, he made a name for himself in other ways. He had a passion
for fishing and fighting. He was, as childhood buddy Gene Odom
recalled, "always looking for a fight, and some people thought
he was just plain mean." He was short (5'7") and scrappy, but
had an attitude of a muscle-bound six footer.
Van Zant
ran with a rough crowd, and some of the friends from his youth
would do prison time. Like most of those who grew up on the
working class dominated west side of Jacksonville, he was
thought of as a "hood," someone destined for trouble, especially
by many of his wealthier classmates at Robert E. Lee High
School. He may not have related to the more affluent kids with
whom he shared classrooms, but their lives made him examine his
own more closely. "Man, I gotta be better than this," he told a
friend. "I can't go to prison."
It may
have been a fighter who inspired Van Zant to start writing
lyrics. With his father, he followed the career of Cassius Clay,
aka Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxer fond of spouting rhyme,
often to taunt his opponents. Amused by Ali's seemingly
impromptu verse, Van Zant began to write his own in a notebook
he kept hidden under his bed. Van Zant wouldn't be the first
world-renowned songwriter to emerge from Robert E. Lee High
School. Mae Axton, who co-wrote "Heartbreak Hotel," the song
that gave Elvis Presley his first number one hit, taught English
at the school, and her son, Hoyt, a 1960 graduate, wrote such
hits as "Joy to the World" and "Never Been to Spain" for Three
Dog Night.
Any
notions he had about making music a career didn't take hold
until May 8, 1965 when he saw the Rolling Stones perform at the
Jacksonville Coliseum. Still, while he enjoyed singing, and
frequently roamed the school's hallways crooning "Little Red
Rooster " or "Sloop John B," Van Zant had a disadvantage in that
he neither read nor wrote music, and played no instrument. What
he did have was attitude, and with that he walked into a
practice session of a local band called the Squires and
announced, "I'm your new lead singer."
The band
that would come to be known as Lynyrd Skynyrd would revolve
around lead singer and lyricist Van Zant, and guitarists Allen
Collins and Gary Rossington. Other members would come and go,
but these three would provide the nucleus of the original group.
The roots
of the band's unusual name can actually be traced back to
comedian Allan Sherman's 1964 novelty hit, "A Letter From Camp"
("Hello mudder, hello fodder/here I am at Camp Granada"). In one
of the song's verses, a boy gets ptomaine poisoning. Sherman
named the boy Leonard Skinner, no doubt because "Skinner" rhymed
with "dinner." Allen Collins often sang the song in jest,
particularly amused that Leonard Skinner was also the name of
Lee High School's Physical Education teacher who roamed the
halls enforcing the dress code, and sent kids to the office for
having long hair. The teacher became the basis of a running gag
in the band. If there was a knock on the door while they
rehearsed their music, or maybe when they were smoking pot,
they'd joke that it was Skinner coming to bust them.
As their
musical abilities grew and deepened, the band recorded at Muscle
Shoals Sound Studios, but a contract with a major label eluded
them. They were, however, landing gigs at some of the South's
hottest nightclubs, including Funochio's in Atlanta. It was
there that they were seen by Al Kooper who had written "This
Diamond Ring," a number one hit for Gary Lewis and the Playboys
in 1965, the same year he had conned his way into a recording
session to play organ on Bob Dylan's fabled "Like a Rolling
Stone." Kooper had also been part of the Blues Project and
founded Blood, Sweat and Tears. Now he was offering to produce
Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album.
The band
was fully prepared to seize their moment. Under Van Zant's
strict leadership, the band whose sound would be influenced by
the presence of three guitarists was in the habit of practicing
as early as 6 a.m., determined to play every note exactly right.
The first album, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd, was
released on MCA on August 16, 1973. A month later, the band that
Kooper had dubbed "America's Rolling Stones" were opening for
the likes of B.B. King, Dr. John, and Muddy Waters on a tour
that centered on the South but also included a stop in New York
City. A critic for Cashbox alerted his readers to "Watch
for this band. Tight, mean and rough, they're one of the few
rock acts in the business that really get it on."
By the
time the tour concluded, producer Kooper had met with Pete
Townshend of the Who, the legendary British quartet about to
embark on a U.S. tour to promote Quadrophenia. Lynyrd
Skynyrd would reach its biggest and most challenging audience to
date as the Who's opening act in cities such as Los Angeles,
Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston. The first stop was a sold out
performance at San Francisco's Cow Palace on November 20, 1973
where the band that had previously played to no more than a
thousand people in one night, faced 18,000 diehard Who fans.
They were understandably nervous, and the band consumed plenty
of liquor beforehand, but Van Zant was confident. That night,
Lynyrd Skynyrd became the first opening act for the Who to be
invited back to the stage for an encore. When it was time for
the Who to take the stage, they asked Skynyrd's drummer, Bob
Burns, to fill in for an inebriated Keith Moon, but Burns was
too drunk himself and a drummer from the audience volunteered in
his place.
Their next
album, Second Helping, was recorded at the Record Plant
in Los Angeles in early 1974. In between sessions, they opened
for Dave Mason at the Whisky a Go Go and played a stadium show
in San Diego with Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. By the time
their sophomore album hit the shelves in April, Lynyrd Skynyrd
was a headliner, selling out the Memphis Stadium the month
before. "Sweet Home Alabama" would become a top 10 single that
summer, becoming one of the songs that any young person
listening to the radio that summer could not avoid.
The album
had some competition from their debut offering which was selling
steadily as the band gained momentum, and would earn "gold"
status on the strength of its constant airplay on FM radio. The
closing track, "Free Bird," which the band had first performed
on May 9, 1970 at the opening of the Jacksonville Art Museum,
was beginning its ascent, soon to challenge Led Zeppelin's
"Stairway to Heaven" as rock radio's most requested and,
perhaps, overplayed song.
Success
meant more travel, more parties, more groupies, more drugs and
booze, but Van Zant remained, like the title of one of the
band's most famous songs, a "Simple Man" who told a friend, "I
can't let a dollar burn a hole in a seventeen-dollar pair of
jeans."
They were
also courting controversy, or rather their record label did by
suggesting the band fly a Confederate flag on stage as a
marketing gimmick. Soon, they were also opening their concerts
with an instrumental of "Dixie." This led some observers to
believe that this was a band of unrepentant racist rednecks, an
image that was furthered by "Sweet Home Alabama," whose lyrics
were tongue-in-cheek, but which some listeners misheard as a
challenge to Neil Young's "Southern Man," a song that attacked
racism and some of the attitudes that lingered following the
Civil War. But like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.,"
which in 1985 was thought to be a flag-waving anthem to those,
like then President Reagan, who missed the song's irony, "Sweet
Home Alabama" was misinterpreted. Neil Young was himself an
admirer of both the band and the song in which he was
mentioned.
Following
a charity show in Jacksonville in August 1974, a journalist who
had known the band since high school noticed how success had
given them more poise and confidence. "Gone is the precarious
cockiness of vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, He now speaks with his
audience rather than to them. No longer does Gary Rossington
stand insecurely on stage with his eyes fixed to the floor, his
face hidden by a cascade of dark hair. Nor does Allen Collins go
flashing about the stage, staring at Van Zant as if waiting for
a cue to continue. Each man has developed into a self-assured
musician, confident of the group's music and aware of his
position within the band."
Their
third album, Nothin' Fancy, was released in 1975 to lower
than expected sales, but it included the anti-handgun classic,
"Saturday Night Special," a song, like the earlier "Sweet Home
Alabama," that could be misinterpreted by those who fail to
listen closely to the lyrics. In a review of a February 1975
concert at the Academy of Music in New York City, The New
York Times called Lynyrd Skynyrd "a common denominator of
Southern rock groups, a little Allman Brothers sound, some
Chicago black blues riffs and relentlessly rolling rhythms built
around simple phrases. It was simplistic music, a perfect
reaction to the heavy metal rocking currently in vogue."
A fourth
album, Gimme Back My Bullets, followed in 1976 along with
another lengthy tour and the live album, One More for the
Road.
A two
night stand at New York's Beacon Theater received a rave from
revered rock critic John Rockwell. Lynyrd Skynyrd's songs and
Ronnie Van Zant's approach to singing them, he wrote, "are
really first rate. (Van Zant's) visual image and the import of
the words are of a tough yet sensitive white populist, one who
sometimes espouses liberal views but never forsakes his
heritage. And the music sweeps along in the manner of all the
best rock - cumulatively exciting and fresh enough to escape the
obvious." Critic Robert Palmer was less complimentary about in
his review of a show from October that year, but made a
prescient observation: "It is difficult to imagine where Lynyrd
Skynyrd can go from here, musically speaking," he wrote.
One year
later, in the midst of what was ironically called "The Tour of
the Survivors," the band would join the list of rock 'n roll
casualties who perished in plane crashes. "If it's your time to
go, it's your time to go," a philosophical Van Zant said before
boarding a plane that many of the passengers had concluded was
unsafe. Flames had been seen emerging from one of the engines as
the plane flew from Lakeland, Florida to Greensville, South
Carolina but, as Gene Odom, the band's security manager,
recalled, the pilots ignored the warnings. "There's nothing
wrong," they told him. "Go back to your seat and stay put 'til
we're in the air."
The plane
crashed in a forest in Gillsburg, Mississippi on October 20,
1977 killing Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, assistant
road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and
co-pilot William Gray. The other passengers all suffered serious
injuries. Ironically, the cover of their final album, Street
Survivors, released only three days before and already
certified "gold," had pictured the band engulfed in flames. This
image was replaced on future pressings, with the original cover
restored only when a deluxe edition of the album was released on
compact disc three decades later. Not surprisingly, the tragedy
boosted sales, and Street Survivors became the band's
second album to reach platinum status, signaling sales of more
than one million copies. A final single, "What's Your Name,"
reached number 13 on the Billboard chart early in the next year.
Lynyrd
Skynyrd disbanded, but only two months before the tragedy that
brought about the band's demise, Elvis Presley proved that death
need not hinder a successful showbiz career. Like the King, and
like the Who and other musical brand names that continued to
perform on multiple "farewell tours" even as its members died or
just gave up, Lynyrd Skynyrd would rise from the ashes and make
a comeback. In 1987, crash survivors Gary Rossington, Billy
Powell, Leon Wilkeson, and Artemus Pyle, as well as Ed King, a
guitarist who had left the band in 1975, joined Ronnie Van
Zant's younger brother, Johnny, and hit the road on a world
tour, but not without attracting lawsuits for exploiting the
Lynyrd Skynyrd name.
The lineup
has changed through the years, enough so that it's difficult to
know what, if any, connection this band has to the one from
which they take their name, but they play on regardless. One
survivor of the original lineup, Gary Rossington, defends the
decision to continue performing as Lynyrd Skynyrd.
"It's
about the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd," he says, "and what it
stands for, what the fans are all about. There's nothing like
getting out there playing a great show with Skynyrd and seeing
people love this music."
The
original Lynyrd Skynyrd lives on, as all great musical artists
do, through the music they left behind. In 2005, after seven
nominations, the band was finally inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. A year earlier, Rolling Stone ranked
the band at 95 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All
Time. "In matters of unpretentiousness, power and invention,"
the mag wrote, "the best hard-rock band in America during the
first half of the 1970s might well have been Lynyrd Skynyrd."
It's a statement that would be difficult to challenge.
--by
Brian
W. Fairbanks