Lynyrd Skynyrd: My Objective Assessment
I spent a week researching and listening through their classic line-up discography.
A talented group of professional musicians (especially with Steve Gaines) and a singer that always sounds a hair flat to me, whose songwriting is marred by mawkish sentimentality, regressive white nostalgia, and a total and utter lack of feel and groove. They’re stiffer than Bill Cosby at a pharmaceutical convention. They can’t choogle like CCR. Can’t swing like the Band. Can’t slay like Johnny Winter or Hendrix. Lack the Allmam Bros. pathos and virtuosity (a song like “Whipping Post” is world’s away from anything Skynyrd could fail at, let alone attempt with interest or pull off.) However, there are high points: the arrangement of “Simple Man” is brilliant and demonstrates profound dynamics; “That Smell” has one of the great blues rock solos and actually evinces some type of groove or menace; “Whiskey Poison” is the closest thing to “hard” or “mean” the band ever sounds (even if the song’s intro is something of a milquetoast rip-off of James Gang’s “Funk #49” riff, just without without the neck-breaking swing of Joe Walsh’s rhythm playing).
"Whiskey Poison" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Given the work of Hendrix, Winter, James Gang, CCR, The Guess Who, the Band, and yes, the Allman Bros., I’m unsure why anyone would like the band when they are so inferior to the aforementioned groups. Their über-popular anthemic songs are their worst efforts, by the way. “Free Bird” is the Speilberg of melancholy and anguish—professionally rendered but lacking real innovation or insight and “Sweet Home Alabama” is basically Ronnie Van Zandt whinging that Neil Young justifiably characterizes he and his kin as Confederacy nostalgists stalling progress and growth in the name of a “tradition” that is worth less than the average net income of its trailer-dwelling progeny.
Yes, yes, yes, I’m aware of the apocrypha surrounding Van Zandt and Young’s friendship, Young’s affection for “Sweet Home Alabama,” his supposed status as honorary pallbearer at Van Zandt’s funeral and guess what? I don’t give a fuck. It’s about what the song represents to their idiot fans. It’s about the band continuing to cash in on its seemingly glib romanticization of Jim Crow, terminal poverty, anti-intellectualism, and ignorance. There’s plenty to celebrate about the south: Faulkner (or is he worth celebrating? see below), O’Connor, Townes (the vastly superior) Van Zandt, the cuisine, even, I daresay, jazz and the blues.
According to Taysha Murtaugh’s deep dive into the song on the website Country Living, the song’s “celebration” of the South had more than a little tongue in cheek:
The portion of the song referring to Governor George Wallace in particular made some believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd disagreed with desegregation, seeing as how the governor stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".
But others interpreted the lyrics as a reminder to Young that not all Southerners are the same. "We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two," Van Zant later said. "We're Southern rebels but, more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong." In fact, those "boos" are thought to imply that the band disagreed with Wallace's politics—and that bit about Watergate seems to be a pointed remark about the hypocrisy of the North, which had its own problems, too.
By all accounts, there was no real "feud" between the artists. "We wrote 'Sweet Home Alabama' as a joke," Van Zant clarified a few years following the release. "We didn't even think about it. The words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell and said, 'Ain't that funny.' We love Neil Young. We love his music."
The North is not blameless in politics and race relations. The draft riots in Manhattan dramatized in Scorsese’s Gangs of NY should make that abundantly clear within the popular imagination. History is not kind to any part of our country when we dig into the treatment of any minority (African Americans, indigenous people, Latinx people, LGBTA+ people, women, Asians, hell even yes cishet white male with a 7th grade social studies education, the Irish, Italians, and other “swarthy” Europeans). But the ambiguity around Wallace’s stance on segregation is not something to take lightly. And the what-aboutism of the rejoinder about Watergate is a strategy that we see played out all to often amongst the MAGA crowd today. What about the Clintons? What about Hunter? Yes. Get them. Visit Epstein’s island? Embezzle money oversees and use it to buy crack and pay sex workers? Get prosecuted. I don’t care if you are a Clinton, a Biden, or Trotsky. (Which is the salient difference between the MAGA crowd and, well, thinking, rational human beings.) Also, rat-fucking the DNC is a lot less morally odious than segregating and attempting to dehumanize a race of people kidnapped and enslaved here and now subjecting them to de facto apartheid, terror, and murder.
The “rebel” flag is a flag of treason. Fucking Robert E. Lee refused for it to be included in his funeral and refused to be buried in his Confederate uniform, yet we’re supposed to believe it’s some integral part of their cultural heritage? Please. It’s a symbol of racial resentment, a cultural temper tantrum that fractured the republic, and is only useful as kindling for fires or a substitute for a flag of surrender.
Unlike Young (as Murtaugh notes in the same article quoted above), who walked back his “accusatory” words in “Alabama” I don’t feel the least bit squeamish about my condemnation of the “rebel” culture Van Zandt and his cohorts lionize in their most popular song. A song which deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history if for no other reason than that it is sampled by Kid Rock (though to be fair, so is Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” which you’ll see is funny once you get to the very end of this piece) whose own shitty politics and unbelievable stupidity are manifest. Notice the surviving members (boo, boo, boo, to quote the song in question) haven’t refused the hefty royalty checks or donated them to the Southern Poverty Law Center or NAACP (at least so far as I know.) And they certainly have no problem fucking the corpse of Van Zandt or the Confederacy with their tribute tours, replete with stars and bars, rebel yells, and pathetically unironic cries for “Freebird.”
Even far more erudite Southerners have struggled with this question, we must admit. William Faulkner would rail against the murder of Emmett Till in one interview and then advocate a middle ground and a reasonable pace of change, noting he’d make the same choice Robert E. Lee did if necessary, despite seeing the South as “wrong” and “untenable.” As he is quoted in a New Republic review of Michael Gorra’s book exploring Faulkner’s complicated and sometimes troubling sentiments surrounding race and the South: “As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes…” (the full review is here). So forgive me, if I cannot take Southerners—self-professed rebels or otherwise—at their word. It’s far too complicated to be unquestioning about. I’m not proposing incivility. Or a presumption of guilt. I just don’t want to be taken as a rube either.
So, after that long aside, my conclusion:
If Lynyrd Skynyrd is your favorite band, you have shitty taste and are likely a shitty person. If you just like them, but don’t consider them a favorite, just...really? I listened to all three records. The first and Street Survivor a couple times. I really listened. Tried to decipher things I liked and on rare occasions found and catalogued them. Otherwise, my opinion stands: that plane crash is only tragic in that some of them survived to peddle mediocrity and the tradition of losing a war. As Warren Zevon wrote:
Sweet home Alabama
play that dead band’s song
Turn that music up real loud
Play it all night long