Lynyrd Skynyrd

Every weekend, all across America, small groups of middle-aged men – the ones with at least minimal musical ability, anyway – get together at parties and town parades, outdoor festivals and lodge meetings, small bars and anywhere else one might reasonably find cheap live music, and play covers of classic rock tunes. I put forward here the proposition that, without exception, every single one of these shows features one or both of the songs “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama”.

This is the case, despite the likely fact that most of the musicians playing these songs (1) are married, settled down or otherwise as mobile as a large boulder in a ravine; (2) have never so much as visited the great state of Alabama. Irony abounds in the world of classic rock, so it hardly stops there. Take “Free Bird” itself, as a piece of music, for example. After running through a few obligatory minutes of minimal (and, frankly, boring) verse-chorus stuff, the song spins off into pure jam-band land, 9 minutes of solid Southern-flavored guitar rock – three guitars in the case of Skynyrd, something of a trademark for their first couple of albums. I have no idea how many takes the boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd actually did to get all of the long-ass jam on tape, but it sounds like a bunch of musicians having a great old time, rocking out in a single session in a studio somewhere. They came, they jammed, and “Free Bird” was what they threw out for everyone that day. All of the cover bands, though, treat the thing like it’s sacred canon. Whether they have three guitars or just one, someone in the band has painstakingly transcribed (or downloaded) the tablature for the original “Free Bird” and has set about replicating it in every detail. “Free Bird” is a classic rock catechism. One does not find improvisatory freedom in “Free Bird” these days.

That reminds me of the one and only Eagles concert I saw, back in the mid-90’s when they came together for their first reunion tour. It was called the “Hell Freezes Over” tour, and spawned a live album by the same name, and as much as I figured these guys had run their course, I wasn’t complaining about it because the get-together resulted in the release of the last great Don Henley song, “Get Over It”. Or, at least, the last Don Henley song where his usual hectoring and lecturing was still fun to listen to. In any case, the concert started really nicely, because the boys had worked up what seemed to be a new arrangement of “Hotel California” to open the show, building up a series of acoustic sounds for an oddly low-key rendition of the band’s signature hit. But eventually the electric guitars chimed in, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing except for the fact that they were being used to play the solos from the album version of “Hotel California” note-for-note. This happened with every song afterward, even the Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey and Don Henley solo tracks they threw into the playlist. Midway through the show I started seriously wondering what I had thrown my $50 away for – these guys may have been Joe Walsh, Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmit and Glenn Frey, but that night they were little more than a cover band that happened to be covering themselves.

But I digress…where was I? Ah, yes, “Free Bird”. AOR and classic rock stations started airing “Top 50” and “Top 100” of all time lists back in the 1980s, and back then, through the 90s and probably even today, the top 2 songs were set in stone. #1, of course, was “Stairway to Heaven” (about which, of course, more later). #2 was always “Free Bird”. Individual rankings were pretty fungible after that.

Lynyrd Skynyrd is a viable recording and touring outfit today, but for the purposes of a classic rock radio station they had five studio albums and one live release worth considering. The brief existence of the original band was cut short by a plane crash in 1977 that killed all but two members. As with all such plane crashes, this naturally catapulted Lynyrd Skynyrd from the ranks of a good-to-great rock band to classic rock legends, a pinnacle they will only descend from when the generation that was around to hear the real thing dies off completely. This is mostly because, the efforts of two (or, so I hear, just one, these days) surviving members notwithstanding, there is no ragtag batch of 50- to 60-something oldsters around now to put out limp renditions of the original stuff, or new material that amounts to pale imitations of the original stuff, or new material in a style different enough from the original stuff to offend fans for whom the original stuff is now catechism…you get the point.

Rock bands can age gracefully, and so can their fans, but rarely do they ever manage to do it together. Lynyrd Skynyrd fans can remember Johnnie Van Sant and the gang in their prime, or even believe that they were cut down just short of a “prime” that can only be imagined. Their style never had a chance to grow stale or overused. They never had to face the potential compromises that were just a few years on the horizon – if not disco, then new wave, MTV, synthesizers, hair bands and metal, grunge…

What, you really think they would have been immune to all of that? Need I remind you that in their last couple of years they had already added a trio of female backup singers to the group?

The point is moot, because they’re dead and gone, and all we have left are the songs, in constant rotation on classic rock stations everywhere:

The “Classic Rock Canon”, Part 1: Lynyrd Skynyrd

Skynyrd packed a lot of great tunes on their first five studio albums, and a large proportion of them have found playtime on AOR and classic rock stations in the decades since. These are the most overplayed of the bunch:

Tuesday’s Gone

Gimme Three Steps

Simple Man

Free Bird (both studio and live versions)

Sweet Home Alabama

Saturday Night Special

Gimme Back My Bullets

What’s Your Name

That Smell

You Got That Right

A few more might make the list in a pinch:

Tuesday’s Gone

Don’t Ask Me No Questions

I Know a Little

If this stuff hits you right, I’d go ahead and splurge on all five albums – “Pronounced”, “Second Helping”, “Nuthin’ Fancy”, “Gimme Back My Bullets”, and the regrettably named “Street Survivors, a title that sounds more appropriate for a release from an 80’s hair metal band from L.A. than from a Southern rock outfit.