Hey Gene,

My name is Big Jim,and I just finished reading your book about "The Skynyrd Boys". And let me just say it was a great read. I am not one to sit down and read a book but I could not put this one down. I was finished in two weekends.

I have to tell you why I’m writing this note to you. I was reading the passage in the book that told about the time Skynyrd was playing two nights at the Beacon Theater in N.Y.City In 1976 and Leon threw his guitar into the crowd. Well, I was in that crowd… We were in the 2nd row on the right-center isle. I guess that would be stage left. And at the end of Freebird, Leon smashed his guitar a couple times until it broke in two, held together by the strings he wirld it over his head and let it go into the crowd. There were four of us there but only three of us ducked. My friend Bob caught the guitar by the strings, While the rest of the guitar landed in the fourth row. The guys in the fourth row pulled the guitar so hard that my friend had to let go of the strings. And when he did, they got wrapped around a girls neck in the third row. I’ll never forget that. She turned all kinds of colors before her boyfriend got her loose. Her neck was cut up pretty good. And so were my friends fingers….

That was just an incredible night, and I can’t believe I read about that in a book thirty two years later.. I was 17 at that time, Now I’m 49 and I still go to see Skynyrd every time they come to New Jersey.

Please let me know that you get this,
Big Jim

Dear Gene:

Thank you for taking the time and putting in the effort it took for you to write your book "Remembering the Free Birds…:" I have just finished it, and couldn’t put it down. I am a pain management physician (and anesthesiologist) in Mobile and found myself reading it in between seeing patients in the office!  

I’m also a guitar player and with my local band here, we play a few Synyrd songs of course, which is quite fun. I’ve got tickets to see the band with Johnnie in Gulf Shores, Al. this Memorial Day weekend. Can’t wait. I’ve got a couple of my patients who are musicians , rockers (and also LS fans) whom I’m gonna purchase a couple of copies of your book for as gifts, as well. I’ve been a fan since I was an 10 year old kid in 1975 growing up in Atlanta. I remember the fall of ‘77 as being a depresing time for me, as Elvis passed in August and then the accident with you guys in October. I told my brother David, the other day,  who is an attorney now in Atlanta, that I couldn’t believe it’s coming up on 30 years.

Thanks again,

J. Patrick Couch, MD
(rockindoc)

Gene,

I completed the book in 2 days. I could not put it down and I’m reading it for a 2nd time and it’s even better reading this time around after watching the DVD As I sit sending this email I’m waiting for delivery of my Gibson Explorer guitar. And I will be replacing some hardware on it to match Allen Collins explorer and the reason for this is I don’t have 11,000.00 for the Alan Collins reissue.

Thank you for letting me close my eyes and going back in time and growing up with you and the boys in the band.

Rick

Rating: ***** - I REALLY enjoyed this book!!!!
I want to say thank you to Gene Odom for writing this book. Just a little comment to Brilliant, Ohio, THIS IS NOT A BIOGRAPHY. This book was written by a friend about a friend and I think it was well written. I felt that I learned what Ronnie was like and as wierd as it may seem, I felt like I knew a part of him. I have been to Green Cove Springs, FL and have visited Ronnie’s grave in Jacksonville. Ronnie VanZant is a “legend”. He wrote music for the working man. Unlike alot of music today. I’m glad that Lynyrd Skynyrd is still carrying on. I also had the opportunity to meet Gene Odom himself at Southern Rock Woodstock in Fairhill, MD and thanked him for writing the book and sharing personal things about him and Ronnie. My father had bought the book at a Molly Hatchet concert back in the late 80’s and that was the first time that I had read the book. The book is tattered and torn from so many people borrowing it, I had to buy my own and Gene autographed it for me. I have read “I’ll Never Forget You” many times and enjoy reading it everytime. I grew up listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and music of the like. I guess you could say that I was raised well. =) Thanks again to Gene Odom for sharing.

Mr Odom,
I read your book and loved every page of it. Some people write books about entertainers just for money, but your writings are from the heart. I am 50 years old and was born and raised in Billings, Montana. About the only exposure to rock and roll my parents allowed was the weekly Monkees show on TV. After I graduated high school in 1975 I joined the Air Force. After completing basic training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio I was shipped to Keesler AFB for technical training. Man was that a culture education for me! A Montana boy in the deep south for the first time! I did well and for the first time was exposed to the south and rock and roll. I only spent four months at Keesler, but we used to go to Sears at Edgewater Plaza in Biloxi to but tickets to concerts when we had the money. I remember driving to Montgomery, Al to see a southern rock band called Point Blank. It blew me away! I still have a picture of the concert somewhere in the garage. I never had the chance to see Skynyrd, but have been a fan since I bought the “One more from the road” album in 1976. On a final note, in your book you have a lot of remorse about not being able to save Ronnie’s life in the plane crash and all of the things that could have been done to prevent the accident. I hope you have been able to find closure with all of this. My mother taught me one thing when my father died in 1973 that I will always remember: “We could go back a thousand times to save his life and he would still die a thousand different ways.” God Bless you Gene Odom.

Tim Price
Spokane, WA

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.) (more…)

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Remembering The Free Birds Of Southern Rock

by Gene Odom, with Frank Dorman
On Nov. 28, 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd rocked Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters as few bands ever did. Storming the sold-out hall like redneck rebels, the South rose again with anthems like “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Tuesday’s Gone,” and naturally, “Freebird.” Less than a year later, the band was history, four of its members and crew dead, and the rest injured in a plane crash in the Mississippi swamps.

Lynyrd Skynyrd opens with Gene Odom’s harrowing, first-person account of the hellish accident. He then recalls growing up with founder/vocalist Ronnie Van Zant and working for the band as they chased fame. He paints Van Zant as a rooster of a frontman, short and stocky with a cock-of-the-walk attitude that swelled when he took the microphone. The band’s prodigious drug and alcohol consumption, and Van Zant’s propensity for rowdiness? Products of the era. The Jacksonville, Fla., swampers were unique, however, melding Allman Brothers’ bluesy soul with a metal whammy, and blue-collar choruses of faithless women, bad luck, and hard livin’. Odom’s strength as a storyteller lies in having been there, so it’s hardly an unbiased account. But his insight into the relationships between band members and the sad fate of the survivors (two have died since) is told with empathy and humor (including interviewing the real Leonard Skinner).

Band members, friends recall band’s fast rise and fall

Few bands have been as poorly served by the jukebox as Lynyrd Skynyrd. Reduced to a series of sing-a-long choruses by inebriated bar patrons, one of rock & roll’s most pure practitioners has received some positive revisionist treatment over the past year. First, the Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a left-field success that revels in the Skynyrd mythology from a narrative that uses the legendary band as a touchstone, all the way down to a reverent co-opting of Skynyrd’s three-guitar attack. And more recently, a pair of books released this month, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the plane crash that killed frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and background singer Cassie Gaines, furthers Skynyrd’s overdue, reconstructed myth.

(more…)