Death of a Skynyrd member marks the end of an era

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Lynyrd Skynyrd’s recently deceased guitarist Gary Rossington thrived when rock was a cultural powerhouse akin to trends on TikTok and superhero movies now.

The last surviving founder of the iconic group was also the last mainstay of what was once a powerful part of American music: Southern rock. Or at least a rebellious version that later became loosely tied to conservative politics and didn’t shy away from some of the troublesome symbols of the South.

“They’re the band that kind of codified what we think of as Southern rock,” said Stephen Thomas Erlewine, music critic for AllMusic, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone.

Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band from Florida, sang southern life in a raw and powerful form of blues rock. The music can be raw or blossom into a long guitar solo, as in his anthem “Free Bird.”

But 2023’s Lynyrd Skynyrd bears little resemblance to nearly 50 years ago, when the original incarnation featured a group of long-haired musicians who fit into the American counterculture and were certainly not embraced by Nixon-era Republicans, he said.

The group’s use of the Confederate flag at the time was seen as part of its “rebellious” side, Erlewine said. They didn’t really see the battle flag “as insurrectionary or pro-slavery, but rather as a common rebellion,” he said.

However, in recent decades the band has come to represent a more specific type of politics, particularly after the distinctions between Southern rock and country have blurred and their audiences have become mixed.

Some of the group’s current members have been overtly political. Last year, current lead singer Johnny Van Zant wrote a song with his brother Donnie, outside the band, which praised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024. Erlewine stated that the band’s sound, and that of Southern rock in general, eventually became “a kind of old-school Red State rock”.

The original members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who released their debut album in 1973, had intense musical chemistry and were harder and grittier than other bands under the Southern rock banner, such as The Allman Brothers Band and The Marshall Tucker Band.

They eventually had three guitarists, creating a layered, thick, muscular sound that could become “a powerhouse for solos,” Erlewine said.

But the “southern rock” label was nebulous at best, said Alan Paul, a music journalist who has interviewed Rossington several times for Guitar World and for his forthcoming book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside. Story of the Album That Defined the 70s”.

The most accurate way to describe the genre shaped by widely diverse influences “would be rock bands that sound distinctly southern, they don’t hide their southern nature,” Paul said.

The Georgia-based Allman Brothers Band hated the term, Paul said, because it was too reductive. But Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced the Southern rock label “to the point of making people uncomfortable,” Paul said.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ubiquitous “Sweet Home Alabama” was a response to Neil Young’s “Alabama” and “Southern Man,” which denounced slavery in the South. The song makes a veiled reference to Young and another oblique reference to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist who later softened his views.

The band’s original singer and songwriter, Ronnie Van Zant, claimed that the reference did not endorse Wallace. “A lot of people believed in segregation and all that. We don’t. We put the ‘boo, boo, boo’, they say, ‘We don’t like Wallace’,” Rossington said, in a documentary interview.

But Paul said he didn’t really believe it: “I don’t think most people believe it.” Paul cites a memoir written by the band’s original manager, Alan Walden, who said that Ronnie Van Zant was “a total Wallace man”.

And yet, Erlewine also points out that Van Zant wrote a 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” which subtly questioned the use of guns.

“There was certainly a reactionary conservatism in some parts of Skynyrd, but it couldn’t be seen strictly in terms of what one would consider conservative politics,” Erlewine said of its first incarnation.

A plane crash in 1977 killed Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and showgirl Cassie Gaines, and injured Rossington. The band reformed a decade later with Johnny Van Zant taking on the role of his older brother. Rossington was among the returning members, and as the lineup continued to change, he stuck around.

It was this re-enacted version of Lynyrd Skynyrd that really seemed to take on a more conservative image, Erlewine and Paul said.

In the 1990s, the group’s audience began to mingle with that of Hank Williams Jr. and Charlie Daniels, a pioneer of southern rock whose sound became more country.

“A lot of the sounds that were progressive in the ’70s and rock-based got incorporated into country music and became the sound of country music,” Erlewine said. “Lynyrd Skynyrd doesn’t really play country music, but there’s an overlap between audiences…it all becomes a kind of southern music.”

He added: “Certain images, certain sounds, certain ideas fell into place. And it’s easier to keep playing with those things, because that’s where the audience is.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd, who was always on the road, regularly used the Confederate battle flag on his live broadcasts for decades. Rossington told CNN in 2012 that the group would stop using the flag due to its association with hate groups, but later took down the comment to say they would continue to use it, along with the state flag. of Alabama and the American flag.

Now, musicians who could be considered heirs to the cultural and musical ideas of 1970s Southern rock, and who continue to make art out of them, tend to be more politically progressive, Erlewine said. They include Jason Isbell and bands like the Tedeschi Trucks Band and The Drive-By Truckers who have also sung about life in the South.

The Truckers’ 2001 album “Southern Rock Opera” examined misconceptions about the South, the legend of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the legacy of Wallace, among other things.

“I was a (Skynyrd) fan in elementary school, which is when they were making records,” Patterson Hood of Truckers told The Associated Press in 2002, claiming that he had rediscovered a love for his music after buying a vinyl copy of his pre-fatal live double album, ‘One More for the Road’, years later.

“After the accident, I didn’t really care what other Southern rock was going on at the time,” Hood said. “A lot of southern rock took a right turn after the plane crash.”

In the space of half a century, Lynyrd Skynyrd has gone from innovative rock to becoming almost a tribute band to itself. They were long-haired rebels who entrenched themselves in a culture aligned with the conservative establishment. And Rossington was in on it all, with his rhythm guitar as the backbone of the band.

“That kind of rocker is gone,” Erlewine said of Lynyrd’s last original member Skynyrd.

Paul added: “Lynyrd Skynyrd were one of the greatest bands of the mid to late 70s. Back when rock and roll was really at the center of the cultural conversation – in a way, it wasn’t. It probably hasn’t since and it certainly isn’t.’t.” NOW”.