Y’all.
Your faithful correspondent is a deep lover of documentary films. After my husband died, I had insomnia for years. I’d stay up all night watching documentaries on every subject imaginable.
I didn’t know what else to do.
But as a result, you can ask me ANYthing about the Kennedy Assassination, serial killers, or the mating habits of the golden hamster.
Recently I found myself binging on rock docs about Lynyrd Skynyrd.
They were super popular as I was entering my teens and I considered their songs pretty memorable, even if Southern Rock wasn’t really my jam back then.
The term “Southern Rock,” my ATL friends might be interested to know, was most likely coined roundabouts 1972 by Mo Slotin in a review of an Allman Brothers concert published in Atlanta's underground paper, The Great Speckled Bird.
Through my adolescent eyes, all Southern male rockers who were not Tom Petty were slightly suspect. The seven members of Lynyrd Skynyrd looked unwashed to me. This British girl didn’t vibe with redneck rock — or redneck anything — and I didn’t enjoy the collective facial hair either.
Sit down, Linda Lou. No need to whup my butt. I was a teenage girl, full of teenage girl opinions. In those days I liked my rock stars clean-shaven, underweight, and androgynous, wearing eyeliner, with swoon-worthy hair.
But I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd in concert when I was 15.
Oh yeah l did.
I was a fanatic for live concerts, and still a few years away from falling into the ungovernable lure of punk rock.
My motto was “If you’re a rock band playing live, I’m on my way.”
It was my first of very few Southern Rock concerts. My massive record collection held no albums by the band. It was one of fewer shows still where l didn’t buy a t-shirt because it had the canton (top left corner) of the second flag of the Confederacy on it, these days known as “the Confederate flag.”
I couldn’t see wearing it. Besides, my mother would have killed me. She was from Mississippi and had no tolerance for romanticizing the Civil War, always referring to it as “that mess.”
The show was festival seating, common in those days, and the coliseum was so filled with pot smoke it hung like a thundercloud over the audience.
We wandered in front of the stage, talking to everyone. People passed joints to friends and strangers. I demurred. It was so hot in the venue and I was but a delicate flower. The last place I wanted to hit the floor was a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
Everyone was as high as a giraffe’s ass. While the opening act, Dickie Betts and Great Southern, played, I wondered how much of a contact buzz I was gonna endure.
I was wearing blue jeans and a flower-print, low-cut filmy shirt. I had an ill-advised perm and a baby face.
Did I mention the show was in Mobile, Alabama?
If you never heard the original Skynyrd bad boys play “Sweet Home Alabama” in Alabama, I am telling you (whether a fan or not) you missed a rock history moment. It was a scream scene.
The audience lost their collective mind from the first recognizable chord. It was so energetic I thought there was gonna be another war.
I was glad to hear “Gimme Three Steps,” a rowdy country-rock number that was based on a true story. I don’t think they played “Tuesday’s Gone,” another song I liked, or “Gimme Back My Bullets,” which I secretly loved then and do to this day.
Confession time. There was nothing quite like being with thousands of other teens, many straddling the stratosphere, when the piano intro of “Freebird” started. I thought the roof was going to come off the place. That song can run 14 minutes live and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, as I breathed the marijuana atmosphere and pumped my fist in the air like a daughter of Dixie, which I assuredly was not.
As much as some people make fun, it was not an anthem you could not escape in the 1970s, hitting the charts not once, but twice. You knew every word whether you wanted to or not. And you still know the words 50 years later.
It was a shared concert experience we teenagers didn’t know would never be repeated.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s tour plane crashed almost exactly 5 months later. Pilot neglect and error took it down in a wooded, swampy area about 2 hours from where I lived in coastal Mississippi.
I heard the news on the radio the following day. When they announced that 29-year-old band founder and lead singer Ronnie Van Zant was dead, along with two group members, an assistant road manager, and the pilots, I thought “Well, that’s over.”
And it was. Until they re-formed a decade later, giving Ronnie’s brother lead vocal duties, and became their own cover band.
Three days before the accident their LP “Street Survivors” was released and it became apparent that the rock band we had lost was hotter than the flames shown engulfing the group on the album art. (I believe they pulled that cover soon after the crash and replaced the image for a time.)
“That Smell,” a pointed warning about the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and inevitable death knell of drugs and drink (“Whisky bottles and brand new cars/Oak tree you’re in my way”) is a searing punch of a song. The Honkettes (Skynyrd’s female backup singers, one of whom perished in the plane crash) seal the deal with powerful background shouts that are as much commentary (“You fool you!” “Hell yeah!” ) as accompaniment.
Hearing it now through older ears, I can’t help but be mightily impressed.
Eerily enough, an insert in the first run of the album also offered a “Lynyrd Skynyrd Survival Kit.”
Skynyrd’s Muscle Shoals-tinged piano and background vocals, along with heavy song hooks, were rock radio-friendly and, to my mind now, better than most Southern rock bands (I’m not gonna argue about the Allman Brothers here, their place in history is secure).
Watching the Lynyrd Skynyrd documentaries tossed me right back to when they, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Heart, Queen, Fleetwood Mac (and even the now doubtable Eric Clapton) were constantly throwing memorable tunes at us on our radios and turntables.
Rock music was an extended party, and until it went the way of the pharaohs it was the best bang-for-your-buck shindig in town. Concert tickets, gas, weed, and beer (no one drank actual wine) were cheap and plentiful.
I don’t remember any show being sold out and being unable to get tickets. Even if it was packed, you could get in somehow.
When the Eagles toured behind their new concept album “Hotel California,” my ticket was $8.
It was an orgasmic period for popular music and rapidly expanding, rollicking, live shows. Rock music and its variations (AOR, soft rock, country rock, and pop rock), along with some super-fine soul music, was our youthful soundtrack.
Hazy halcyon days, long passed.
Gary Rossington, the last surviving founding Skynyrd member, died this year at 71.
Lynyrd Skynyrd is just as gone as their heyday.
If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?
Hell yeah I will. And I’m not the only one.