Posts Tagged ‘Sweet Home Alabama’

LYNYRD SKYNYRD – “WISH YOU WERE THERE” (PART 1)

Friday, September 9, 2011

Vintage Ben Upham Lynyrd Skynyrd Rock Photos

Allen Collins jams lead guitar with Lynyrd Skynyrd at Winterland, California

LYNYRD SKYNYRD-
“WISH YOU WERE THERE”
(PART 1)
BY BEN UPHAM

It’s very easy for me to remember the very first time I ever heard Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was in January of 1974, and I was in the middle of my Junior year at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California. I had been practicing hard for 3 months to make the school baseball team, and it was the day that I saw the list of who had made the team. My name was not on the list, which was a crime…I was a better player than at least 4 or 5 of the players that survived the cut. I knew in my mind that politics had come into play and I had been dealt a bad hand…

The news was devastating because baseball was my life at that time. This was a serious lesson about injustice. I remember coming home from school that day feeling like the world wasn’t such a great place. I ignored my Mothers attempts to cheer me up with milk & cookies and I closed myself in my bedroom where I could sulk in privacy. After about 10-15 minutes of lying on my bed cursing the coaches who had caused my misery I decided to see if the radio on my nightstand could help ease my troubled mind.

I turned it on to my favorite F.M. station and they were playing a song that I’d never heard before, that sounded really good. The lyrics seemed as if the singer was singing about what I was thinking. The lines “If I leave here tomorrow would you still remember me” felt like something I would have wanted to say to the coaches that cut me. Then I heard the line, “There’s too many places I’ve got to see”, which made me think about all of the time I’d spent practicing for the team, missing out on so many of the other things I could have been doing, had I known I would be cut. All of a sudden I began to realize that there was a positive aspect to this otherwise negative situation…I was Free…and just as I’m having that thought the singer says, “I’m as Free as a Bird now”, which really was perfect and very “In the Moment” for me.

I reached over and turned the volume up on the radio, as this song was reaching deep inside of me at this point. The songs tempo was changing and I could feel the energy building musically. At that point the singer says, “Oh won’t you fly high, oh Free Birds yeah”, and this otherworldly lead guitar literally jumps out of the radio at me! I was starting to feel better and my Spirit began to smile as the music started to take off. This song was GREAT! The guitars kept reaching out at me and I listened in amazement as the song seemed to keep building and building in intensity. I remember thinking, “My God, who is this Band?”… My question was answered after the song had reached its final notes when the D.J. came on and said, “That was ‘Free Bird’ by Leonard Skinner”.

I shut off the radio and ran out to my car to head down to “Village Music”, the Mill Valley record store. As I walked in I was greeted by the owner, my friend John Goddard. I said hello back but headed right over to the “S” section of albums so I could find this record by Leonard Skinner! I found nothing! So I asked John about it. He said, “Oh, you must mean Lynyrd Skynyrd”, and he calmly walked me over to the “L” section and produced the album “Lynyrd Skynyrd- Pronounced” for me. I loved what I saw, made sure that it had “Free Bird” on it and then paid John for the record. When I got back home I was so anxious to hear “Free Bird” again that I played it first…I totally relived the experience I’d just had, only this time being able to gaze at the album jacket as it was playing. I now had photos of the band which helped me to visualize the band that was creating this Magical Music. I was able to put all of the frustrations of my bad day behind me and become completely absorbed into the energy of this fine new music. It felt really good!

At that point I decided that before I would listen to the rest of the album I would step outside and smoke a joint first. As I was getting high the words and music I’d just heard kept going through my head, and I was pretty well convinced that “Free Bird” had just replaced “25 or 6 to 4? (by Chicago) as my favorite song.

I went back inside, told Mom I’d gladly take the Milk & Cookies now, and then headed back to my room. I wondered what the rest of the record would sound like as I cued up the first track, “I Ain’t the One”. My jaw dropped, my spirit soared and Lynyrd Skynyrd were now totally in my life! The album was (and still is) spectacular from start to finish…A true Masterpiece in Rock Music History…I played the entire album 3 times and was totally Rocked by the Music I was hearing. The back cover of the record stated “Lynyrd Skynyrd Smokes” and that is the Truth!

The arrangement of the music seemed to blend perfectly with the sentiments and philosophies of vocalist Ronnie Van Zants lyrics. If you check out the lyrics on that first Skynyrd album you’ll see how diverse of a writer Ronnie was. He would blend his personal experiences with his acquired wisdom to create stories in musical form. I had just turned 16 a couple of months earlier and honestly feel that the lyrics on that record wound up shaping many of my opinions and feelings about life, values, and goals. My favorite lyric from the album came from the song “Simple Man” where Ronnie sings, “Be a Simple kind of Man, be Something You Love and Understand”. I’ve taken that to heart and tried my best to keep things in my life as simple and understandable as possible, good advice, and shared in a beautiful piece of music.

“Pronounced Lynyrd Skynyrd” introduced me to a band that I would follow intensly for many years, and although they produced many fine albums, that will always be my favorite of theirs.
LYNYRD SKYNYRD ROCK PHOTOS BY BEN UPHAM

LYNYRD SKYNYRD DISCOGRAPHY:
1973 Pounounced Lynyrd Skynyrd
1974 Second Helping
1975 Nuthin’ Fancy
1976 Gimme Back My Bullets
1976 One More From the Road (Live)
1977 Street Survivors
1978 First and Last
1982 Best of the Rest
1987 Legend
1991 Box Set
1998 Skynyrds First (Complete Muscle Shoals)
2000 Collectybles
2009 Live at Winterland 3-7-76
2009 Live at Cardiff 11-4-75

Tags: 1977, Allen Collins, Artimus Pyle, Billy Powell, Bob Burns, Coach Leonard Skinner, Dean Kilpatrick, Ed King, Florida, Free Bird, Gary Rossington, Gimme Three Steps, Leon Wilkeson, Leonard Skinner, lynyrd skynyrd lyrics, LYNYRD SKYNYRD PHOTOS, Mill Valley California, ronnie van zant, Saturday Night Special, Southern Rock, Sweet Home Alabama, Tamalpais High School
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1977 Interview with Ronnie Van Zant

Monday, May 30, 2011

Ronnie Van Zant lead singer and songwriter of Lynyrd Skynyrd

PEOPLE magazine interview with Ronnie Van Zant, October 1977:

UP FRONT: The Rock Road claims another tragic victim: Ronnie Van Zant of
the Lynyrd Skynyrd band

Too old to Rock-N-Roll, Too young to die is just a sardonic song by the Jethro Tull group. The terrible reality of this 25-year-old art form is
that a disproportionate number of its stars have died in their creative prime. Some OD’d on the instant fame and the temptations of too much disposable income. Some artists confused drugs and drink for a muse until they became a fatal addiction, especially in combination with overpowered motorcycles and cars. Life in the fast lane(as the Eagles hymned it)only worsened the actuarial odds. The more money that was spent on dangerous pursuits, the more that had to be earned on merciless touring schedules in which the all-night travel miles–and the risk–inexorably mounted. Sometimes, admittedly, the blame was greedy management or perverse fate. But major figures from Buddy Holly(1959) to Otis Redding(1967) and Jim Croce(1973) were lost in plane crashes. The latest was buried near his native Jacksonville last week. He was Ronnie Van Zant, 28, co-founder, writer and lead singer of LYNYRD SKYNYRD. It had supplanted the Allman Brothers as the reigning Southern boogie band and as a leading U.S. challenger to the British hegemony of the concert coliseums. The group members who eight years ago were working $100-a-week Florida
honky-tonks this year reached a new peak of commercial importance–and threat of drunken self-destruction. Single concert-concert guarantees
ranged up to $150,000. Three of their LP’s sold a million. At the same time Van Zant was noting, “we made the WHO look like church boys on
Sunday. We done things only fools’d do.” Ronnie, after a dozen arrests for brawling and misconduct himself, helped convince Lynyrd Skynyrd this
summer that “we had one last chance to get it together–we ain’t getting any younger.” Their latest LP, Street Survivors, which just hit the
stores gold, had been recorded, uncharacteristically, cold sober.

Similarly, they jokingly dubbed the three-month, 50-city journey they launched last month as “The Torture Tour”–their first in years when they would try to face audiences without being dead drunk. Then, between Greenville, S.C. and Baton Rouge, en route to their fifth date, the band’s chartered Convair 240 prop jet, reportedly low on fuel, nosedived into a swampy thicket in southwest Mississippi. Van Zant was killed instantly. Also dead at the site were guitarist Steve Gaines; his backup vocalist, sister Cassie Gaines; the assistant road manager, and the two-man flight crew. There were 20 survivors, but many were hospitalized. If ever reconstituted, LYNYRD SKYNYRD could not be the same.

Wreckage of Lynyrd Skynyrd plane

Stunned and mournful, the rock world had lost one of its mosy
colorful and distinctive artists.

A few days before his final week on the road, Van Zant had invited PEOPLE’s Jim Jerome for a rare interview at his home in Doctor’s Inlet,
Florida.
Jerome’s Report:

The most devastating irony of the Skynyrd tragedy was that Ronnie Van Zant really seemed to be recovering from what he himself described as
“five years of alcoholism.” Anyone who had heard his pained and snarling blues delivery in performance, seen his barefoot inebriated swagger and
met him backstage afterward–often thicklidded and stuporous–would hardly have recognized him. Alert and athletic, he was trimmer than he had appeared in years and exuberantly personable in conversation. it was a jolt to meet the new Van Zant, legendary trasher of hotels, when he knocked on the door announcing “Room service.” He strode in confidently, his long hair past his shoulders, shoeless and precariously carrying a huge tray of food playfully borrowed from a bellboy. “Will that be all?” he asked, before cracking into a smile. It made one believe that musicians as well as politicians can be reborn. As he hunched over the wheel of his pickup truck driving to his lakeside home 30 minutes from Jacksonville, Ronnie was a vision of self-renewal. He pointed out the track where he was jogging two miles daily to get in shape for the tour, and he detailed the high-protein diet his wife was holding him to. Then he gave in and stopped for a six-pack, apologizing, “This is the most I’ll have drunk in the past six weeks.” As the guided tour continued, he drove by a prison farm. “Hey,” he said, “if prisons, freight trains, swamps and gators don’t get ya to write songs, man,
y’ain’t got no business writin’ songs.” Once at his home, the serenity he enjoyed around his wife of five years, Judy, and daughter Melody was
clear.(He also had a daughter, now 10, by a failed previous mariage.) Van Zant crawled around on the living room rug, circling an armchair with his delighted daughter on it, playing “gonna GETCHA.”"The baby’s had a lot to do with my maturing,” he believed.

Ronnie showed off his own supserstar toy, a ’54 white Mercedes “that I found settin’ up on blocks in a junk shop. Found out there was only nine in the world,” he explained, “and I put $11,000 into it already.” Then Van Zant decided to try some fishing. He carried three poles and a long sleek gun “to blow away any gators that might come up on my land.” While casually fly-casting and sipping beer, he talked about his tumultuous past. “I was abusin’ myself on the road, because after all, man, if it ain’t fun, it ain’t worth it.” But he didn’t condone the “fool things” like pouring Jack Daniels into the TV set until it exploded. “If you’re into drinkin’ and tearin’ up hotels and blowin’ gigs, that’s fine. But it’ll take years off your life too. I ain’t as old as I look,” he added, “and there are plenty of false teeth in our group. There’s been treatment by doctors and hospitalizations for our drinkin’.”

The extent of treatment was understandable, as his narrative of the bad old nights continued. “We were doing bottles of Dom Perignon, fifths of
whiskey, wine and beer, and we’d all have to puke once each before goin’ onstage. We couldn’t even remember the order of the songs. Some guy
crouched behind an amp and shouted them to us. We once looked at tapes of shows–man, we was sloppy drunk,” he flushed. “I couldn’t believe
kids applauded for that crap.” Other audiences–around his hometown, oddly– were less accepting, and he hadn’t played there in six years.
Ronnie claimed he was once so zonked “I spit up one of my tonsils onstage and walked off. The people demolished our equipment, threw bottles, and four cops were hurt.”

Later that October evening, which was to be one of his last at home, Van Zant was visited by his two younger brothers, both lead vocalists in rock groups–Donnie with the promising 38 SPECIAL and Johnnie with the local AUSTIN NICHOLS BAND. His brawny ex-trucker dad, Lacy–who first got young Ronnie hooked on music while highballing up the east coast to the crackling sound of country(their favorite: Haggard)–also stopped by. Van Zant grew up in a tough shantytown section of Jacksonville, got his first highs singing with the family’s Holy Roller church choir. As a teenager he had already formed a primitive precursor of LYNYRD SKYNYRD with Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, both guitarists(and survivors of the crash). The title was a corruption of the name Leonard Skinner, who was a hard-nosed high school phys ed teacher.

The name began to mean something nationally in 1974 with their hit single, SWEET HOME ALABAMA. As for their own Florida home, LYNYRD SKYNYRD was rarely off the road for more than days at a time. That was before this summer, when Van Zant seemed ready to end the disorienting
years on the run. He’d bought 29 acres of choice Tennessee hill country where the family had recently camped out for a few days, but Ronnie also
pondered a more family-style neighborhood in Jacksonville. As he said in his idiom, “My wife don’t want our daughter to grow up a swamp hermit.
Other kids’ll be good for her.” Yet on the eve of four rehearsals, Van Zant conceded he felt restless after the unprecendented six weeks
hiatus. He could not deny that “the road is home to you after 12 years.

I went crazy eight years ago,” he said with a devilish grin, “so the road don’t matter no more.” What did matter to Ronnie Van Zant was headlining for the first time ever at New York’s Madison Square Garden. To him the gig–it would have been next week–represented LYNYRD SKYNYRD’s official recognition among the rock superelite. he also knew, looking back, that he had given–and taken–a lot to earn the honor. “In the beginning,” he said, “we use to play one joint till midnight for kids; then they turned it into a bottle club and we’d go til 6 a.m. It really tightened us up as a band,” he
recalled. “When you’re from the south, man, you learn to work your azz off, and we did. It was HELLATIOUS.” He stopped and turned to invite a
lasting eye contact. After a pause he added: “Hellatious and the best years of our lives.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd – What’s Your Name

Tags: 1977, Allen Collins, Artimus Pyle, Billy Powell, Cassie Gaines, Coach Leonard Skinner, Convair 240, Dean Kilpatrick, Free Bird, gene odom, interview, jacksonville, Leon Wilkeson, Leonard Skinner, Leslie Hawkins, lynyrd skynyrd, Lynyrd Skynyrd album, lynyrd skynyrd lyrics, Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash, lynyrd skynyrd songs, ronnie van zant, Southern Rock, Steve Gaines, Sweet Home Alabama, The Torture Tour
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