Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering The Free Birds Of Southern Rock

—Fred Mills
http://www.magnetmagazine.com/interviews/skynyrd.html

While growing up in a tiny (population less than 5,000) Carolina textile and farming town, I witnessed a fair share of overtly racist acts practiced by some of the most virulent rednecks the burg could offer up. By the time I became a teenager I must have made a subconscious decision to deny much of that Southern heritage. Move-in day my first year at college and this guy in my suite we called Big Bill (who wasn’t from the deep South but from upper Maryland) finds it necessary to play “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” over and over and over—to the point where all I could do was grit my teeth, regret the fact that my daddy’s .22 rifle is several hours’ drive away and complain to as many of my fellow dormies about how here we are off at school, finally free of our hometown shackles, being forced to endure that most egregiously redneckish Southern-rock combo, Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Cue up four ensuing years of sanctimonious musical stiff-upper-lipdom on my part, courtesy of as much U.K. and German prog I could get my well-manicured mitts on.)

Many years—and much prying open of what I didn’t want to admit was an extremely closed mind—later, I came to appreciate Skynyrd for what they were: superb songwriters and outstanding musicians whose brawny appropriation of blues and psychedelia has stood the test of time. For every massed smirk you spot at a concert when some wag hollers out “Free Bird!” at an inopportune moment, there’s likely to be at least a couple of knowing nods from cats at the back of the audience who understand that cultural iconography isn’t carved from thin air, but earned on the heels of a lot of balls-out hard work, artistic sweat and blood, and sometimes even a measure of personal tragedy.

Last October 20 marked the 25th anniversary of the plane crash that took the lives of singer Ronnie Van Zant and five others members or employees of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Significantly, last year also saw Georgia roots-rockers the Drive-By Truckers issue their Southern Rock Opera album (which is loosely based on the Skynyrd tragedy), and recent releases by N.C.’s Cherry Valence (Riffin’) and Pennsylvania’s Raging Slab (pronounced eat-shit, sporting a front sleeve homage to Skynyrd’s ‘73 debut, pronounced leh-nerd skin-nerd) suggested the Skynyrd guitar sound isn’t unwelcome in indie-rock circles, either. There was also a moderately good biography, Freebirds, by Marley Brant, based on firsthand interviews with original and latter-day members who carried on after Skynyrd was revived in ‘87.

It’s Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering The Free Birds Of Southern Rock, however, penned by lifelong Skynyrd associate and former security manager Gene Odom (with the editorial assistance of journalist Frank Dorman) that brings the story all back home. Less a comprehensive bio than a memoir, Odom’s book puts a human face on a band whose public image was too often portrayed along clichéd, less-than-flattering lines. Odom had previously published a slim volume entitled Lynyrd Skynyrd: I’ll Never Forget You several years after the plane crash; he was on the fatal flight and freely admits that, like several of the other survivors, he carried around a fair amount of guilt over whatever he might have done to help prevent the tragedy. (Probably nothing, as subsequent investigations suggested the pilot and co-pilot—who both perished—either overlooked or ignored some serious mechanical indicators that should have delayed or altogether cancelled the Lakeland, Fla.-to-Greenville, S.C., flight.)

Rock ‘n’ roll bios are tricky beasts. At the hands of scholars and academics, you can get plenty of stats and musical analysis but precious little heart and insight into the musicians’ personalities. Conversely, when written by an intimate (or, worse, a lover/wife/groupie), you get excessively first-person verbiage, lots of drank-this/snorted-that/shagged-her blather that reads well when excerpted in a magazine but rarely proves to be a reliable source of musical reference in the long run.

Odom, though, walks the tightwire with an amazing adeptness. He’s able to extract a clear-headed, detailed and trivia-rich narrative from his memories without sacrificing his essential, stated-up-front warmth and fondness toward his subject. He traces the band back to its late-‘60s roots in Jacksonville, Fla., discussing each Skynyrd member’s family and musical upbringing (hell-raising but extremely focused singer Van Zant in particular) and chronicles their rise as regional contenders. (One choice scene, from ‘70: Skynyrd appearing on a local ABC-TV affiliate’s variety program that included, among other luminaries, actor Frank Sutton who played Sergeant Carter on the Gomer Pyle show; the band performed Free’s “Walk In My Shadow” and unveiled their own “Free Bird” publicly for the first time.)

The band’s trajectory accelerates commencing with the release of pronounced leh-nerd skin-nerd in ‘73. Within a year, “Free Bird” is the most-requested song on FM radio, eclipsing “Stairway To Heaven.” More albums and more hits follow, as do the requisite amounts of booze and blow, and Odom doesn’t sugarcoat any of it. His close friend Van Zant, for example, is portrayed as an occasionally mean, aggressive drunk, punching out band and crew members for real or perceived offenses. (Van Zant tended to be at the center of the not infrequent post-show fracases—such as a Tokyo bar brawl with some loud-mouthed German tourists—that helped contributed to Skynyrd’s image as a hard-rockin’ and -partyin’ group of Southern bubbas.) But Odom does make it clear that when Van Zant wasn’t drunk, he was musically driven, generous to a fault and completely anti-rock-star in both demeanor and comportment.

Odom dissects the music in song-by-song fashion on each Skynyrd record, but he does so in concise, descriptive and not overly technical terms. He additionally provides glimpses here and there of the mid-‘70s rock zeitgeist; Skynyrd, after all, was huge at the time of its fateful flight, headlining massive outdoor festivals and rivaling groups like the Stones for attendance records. As such, Odom gives the reader a crucial sense of time and place that, had the book been authored by someone not at the eye of the hurricane, might have gone wanting. (Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous features a ‘70s band that’s a composite of the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Free, the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd, with whom Crowe spent a fair amount of time while a cub reporter for Rolling Stone.)

There’s a detailed post-crash section in the book as well in which Odom writes about the surviving members’ struggles. Guitarist Allen Collins fared the poorest, going from DUI to DUI to, eventually, an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, unable to participate in the 1987 “Tribute Tour” Skynyrd reunion (he died in 1990 from respiratory failure). Other misfortunes are outlined too, from a legal tussle over money instituted by Van Zant’s widow to drummer Artimus Pyle’s arrest on charges of sexual abuse of a minor to bassist Leon Wilkeson’s losing battle with liver and lung disease.

Odom manages to report with just the right amount of empathy and objectivity. Never so much as when he debunks the urban legend surrounding Lynyrd Skynyrd’s so-called “racist” underpinnings—“Sweet Home Alabama,” then-governor George Wallace, “I hope Neil Young will remember/‘Southern Man’ don’t need him around anyhow” and all that. Sure, the band members came from blue-collar, other-side-of-the-tracks backgrounds, and they definitely liked to party harder than anyone else in the room. But more than anything, their love of rock ‘n’ roll and its resident blues and country components helped bestow a generally open-minded outlook. Van Zant especially, who’d just as soon sit down and write a song in tribute to an old black musician from his hometown, or go onstage wearing one of several Neil Young T-shirts that he owned in order to fuck with any yahoos in the crowd who missed the humor and irony of the “Sweet Home Alabama” lyrics.

In a way, that’s one of the central points of Odom’s book, even if it’s not one he lays out explicitly. To be a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd carried a twofold implication: one, to rise up and transcend your humble—some might say redneck—roots; and two, to never forget or deny those roots. Such acknowledgement is what helps give us the proper dose of humility when it comes to assessing ourselves against those around us. As Big Bill himself might bellow from down the college dormitory hallway, “Turn it up!”