ALBUMS: One for the Road (live) (1976); Gimme Back My Bullets (1976); Nuthin’ Fancy (1975).
MVT Rating: Live 4/$$$$; Bullets 4/$$$$; Fancy 4/$$$$
I remember some lunchtime conversation in Orlando with a few colleagues although I can’t remember who was there. But we started talking music and Lynyrd Skynyrd came up. This was the 90s so Skynyrd had already crashed their plane and had settled into comfortable Southern rock ‘classic rock’ kind of a band, without their most significant participant, Ronnie Van Zant. Before he died, he was their lead singer and had written most of their songs.
Everybody at the table dissed them leading me to proclaim, they are/were one of the best bands ever. I was the only one in the group to have seen them live.
I brought up the Allman Brothers and, now,they said ‘Oh they aren’t the same, the Allman’s were cool.’
Now I’ve heard this before. Skynyrd had a string of big hits and were on the radio quite a bit in those early days in the 1970s. Just because they didn’t put on albums of one song per side: See In Memory of Elizabeth Reed — doesn’t mean they weren’t great.
The Allmans were certainly pioneers, combining smooth almost country vocals to rhythm and blues, jazz and rock. Skynyrd absorbed that influence, amped it up a bit and wrote shorter, catchier — but still intelligent — songs. The cautionary (anti) drug song, ‘That Smell’ and the anti-gun song, ‘Saturday Night Special,’ and of course their magnum opus —‘Free Bird.And there was’ ‘Call me the Breeze’ and ‘The Ballad of Curtis Loew and ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’
I first picked up ‘Nuthin’ Fancy’ with the classic shot of one of the band members flipping off the camera person, I guess.
I was told by a friend that his big sister said we couldn’t listen to Skynyrd because the band took a shot at Neil Young in ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’
“I hope Neil Young will remember, Southern Man don’t need him around, anyhow.”
Those words are a response to Young, the Canada-born rocker who wrote the song “Southern Man,’ an unflattering portrait of its title subject.
Young reportedly said upon hearing it: “Sounds like they mean it.”
According to Wikipedia Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from Leonard Skinner, a high school P.E. teacher who rigidly enforced the hair length rule.
What’s a little confusing to me is that a picture of real estate For Sale signs printed inside the ‘Nuthin’ Fancy’ album have the name Leonard Skinner, Real Estate Agent.
Maybe he was both PE coach and agent. I don’t know but it has gnawed at me for long time.
“What song is it you wanna hear?