It’s hard not to find today’s country stars who didn’t grow up with their parents playing seminal Seventies bands like the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. People like Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, Blake Shelton, Randy Houser and Jason Isbell. The latter are two among an all-star cast who pay tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd on the newly released One More For The Fans, a two-CD and DVD package recorded last November at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.
The site is the famed historic theater where the original Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded One More From The Road, their seminal double-live album. Millions of fans who have played “Freebird” over the last forty years have ingrained in their heads the introduction by the late Ronnie Van Zandt when he uttered the words that forever immortalized the song: “Play it pretty for Atlanta.”
With a tip of the hat so to speak and a finger waved up to Heaven, his younger brother and lead singer Johnny Van Zandt carries the torch as the present day leader of the band along with guitarist and the only surviving member guitarist Gary Rossington. The concert featured a house band put together by Don Was with a rotation of guest artists, a pattern followed by such recent tributes to Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Emmylou Harris.
The Skynyrd concert juxtaposes the appearances of their contemporaries like Charlie Daniels and Gregg Allman with stars of the present day including Isbell and House who declares that Skynyrd is his favorite band of all-time. Charlie Daniels, who is now pushing 80, cuts some great guitar licks on “Down South Jukin’,” bringing out Donnie Van Zandt, Ronnie’s younger brother and lead singer of :38 Special. The middle Van Zandt who has been sidelined for health reasons is still blessed by the family’s lineage and trademark baritone and it’s great to see him standing onstage and on sacred ground.
Alabama-born Jason Isbell sings the playful swinging R&B of “I Know a Little” and displays a tasteful and unflashy virtuosity. The horn section really cuts a groove here and Was does us a great service connecting the band’s lineage all the way to Muscle Shoals. Houser, who’s never at a loss for exuberance or confidence, opens the show by asking “Are y’all ready to have a helluva time?” before proceeding to cut into a raucous version of “Whiskey Rock and Roller,” the song that came out the year he was born. The song is perfect pedigree for Houser who knows a thing or two about both whiskey and rock and roll and his deep, husky voice resonant and worthy of someone who cut his teeth playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in bar bands. “You grow up in the South, you play some Skynyrd,” Houser shares in the DVD interview on the band’s influence on country music, declaring Skynyrd to be his favorite band of all-time.
It’s clear that Aaron Lewis studied Ronnie Van Zandt’s mannerism as he massages and hovers over the mic with the lead singer’s visual intensity. Lewis doesn’t rush through the narrative, faithfully letting the anti-handgun anthem develop in a song that is ironically still claimed by gun rights advocates. Warren Haynes, an Allman Brother for the last two decades and leader of Gov’t Mule, recounted on the concert DVD how he saw his first concert in Asheville at 12 or 13 and snuck up to the front of the stage to see the then new band called Lynyrd Skynyrd. He does an admirable job in two songs, “Simple Man” and “That Smell,” another morality tale written by Van Zandt; it too was misinterpreted when it came out, seen as glamourizing drugs when in fact it was an anti-drug song. Haynes savors the lines Van Zandt wrote and espoused: “One more drink fool will drown you,” Van Zandt sang in the warning he penned to other band members describing the “smell of death around you.”
The all-star revue has the feel sometimes of what an R&B show would sound like on Broadway, with some of the ageing stars like Greg Allman and Cheap Trick making no doubt they’re watching the teleprompter or following the words from handwritten lyric sheets. Allman’s reading of “Tuesday’s Gone” can’t quite live up to the still haunting original and his voice is a little thin and a little less soulful than the Van Zandt’s who have sung it through the years. Cheap Trick, a contemporary of Skynyrd but not of southern rock, seem oddly out of place on the line-up but comes barreling with full force on “Gimme Back My Bullets,” faithful to the wall of guitar sound and still a treat to see Tom Nielsen’s flashy guitars on display.
There are a couple of songs which tear up the theater. When R&B great Jimmy Hall sings “You Got That Right,” he is paired up in a duet with pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph who singlehandedly owns the Fox this night getting all kinds of sounds out of his instrument, at one point leaning back on his knees and pulling the steel back as he cuts lick after searing lick. “Somebody got joy out here tonight,” he says on ending the song. My other favorite performance is by John Hiatt, “The Ballad of Curtis Loew,” a song Van Zandt wrote about a street musician he saw at the age of ten. Van Zandt shows his life precociousness recalling the impression the one-eyed dobro player left on him and declaring all the people who belittled his playing as being fools. The great detail that is trademark Van Zandt is appreciated and revered by Hiatt and helps to show Van Zandt’s genius, and why Skynyrd’s songs are not dated after all these years.
By the time the band itself comes out, it is homage of sorts to the bygone era, a ritual that is still being performed night after night. Johnny gives a shout-out to his brother and all who are in Heaven but here tonight. And then he “damn guarantees” that statement. If you close your eyes, it sometimes might be hard to tell the difference between Johnny and Ronnie. “Travelin’ Man” is stellar as the younger brother introduces his brother and sings verses with the footage of Ronnie on the screen as if he were doing a remote from the great beyond. The emotional “Freebird” always gets me as the video screen captures Ronnie fishing, describing the meaning of the bird as a metaphor for the freedom we all seek and the values of this country. There is never a dry eye in the house as the names and faces are shown of each of the members who perished in the infamous plane crash and have left us in the near forty years since.
There is a confederate flag that appears in the footage of Ronnie and during “Freebird,” someone in the front row lays out the flag that’s caught on camera. The debate over its meaning and what it symbolizes has heated up in the month since this show was filmed. For one night, it seems a relic of a different era when it had different meaning and symbolism in the band’s heyday than it does all these decades later. For one night, we’re reminded that Ronnie Van Zandt was himself a civil rights champion. If you want proof, “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” will tell you everything you need to know.
Originally posted here.
