1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 290. Lynyrd Skynerd – Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd (1973)

Long ago, my friends and I used to frequent a pub that had a juke box and a pool table, two rarities nowadays, and we always used to put Freebird on as you got your money’s worth with it (I forget what the cost was. Something tiny like 20p for 3 songs!) 

Freebird, however, remains a classic, moving from the slow ballad into an extended super-fast guitar solo, or perhaps guitar battle, since Skynyrd are one of those bands with two lead guitarists – Gary Rossington and Allen Collins – that seem prevalant at this time. Looking at the credits, it’s probably Allen ripping up the fret board for what feels like forever but is only half of the overall 9-minute run time. 

We’ve had some bands previously on this list that get classified as “Southern rock”, including Creedance Clearwater Revivial and ZZ Top, mainly because they’re bands from Southern US states (Florida and Texas respectively), but arguably Skynyrd are the ones that define the sound, which is really quite nebulous. It’s country rock, maybe more into the country compared to the Californian version, and is as much probably due to the twang of the vocalist’s accent and the typically Rural American Male subject matter of the lyrics – freedom, liquor, trucks, guns, girls, and Jesus.  

Gimme Three Steps, for example, is a piece with the perfect line-dance tempo, in which the protagonist is “cutting a rug down at place called The Jug with a girl named Linda-Lou" when her boyfriend walks in and threatens him with a gun.  

Lest this all feel a bit Maga for your tastes, Things Going On is about a self-serving government and its effect on the common people (which, at this time, was Nixon’s Republican government, let’s not forget). 

“Well, they're gonna ruin the air that we breathe (Lord have mercy) 
They're gonna ruin us all by and by 
I'm telling all you beware 
I don't think they really care 
Think they just sit up there 
And just get high” 

I think at the end of the day, if I separate the band from the people in the comments section, I still quite like them, but they feel a bit tainted by certain cultish behaviour these days, something I think the band would probably deplore.