Though the band formed in Jacksonville, Florida in the mid-‘60s, most music students (and casual listeners, too) know well the tragedy that hit Lynyrd Skynyrd a decade later: a plane crash killed vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and his older sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines, on October 20, 1977 in Mississippi, badly injuring the rest of the group, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Larry Junstrom, and Bob Burns, in the process. Skynyrd’s career immediately went on pause, remaining dormant until a reunion 10 years later featured Ronnie’s brother, Johnny Van Zant, singing lead. The core lineup made five albums together—some great (Street Survivors), some lopsided (Gimme Back My Bullets), and some right down the middle (Second Helping; Nuthin’ Fancy)—but none of them usurp the endurance of Skynyrd’s debut, Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd: a Southern rock joint potent with fire, whiskey, and gigantic riffs.
In my head canon, the Lynyrd Skynyrd that reunited in the ‘80s with Johnny in the saddle is a different band entirely. Ronnie was the soul of the first iteration, his legacy imagined and immortalized in the 43 minutes it takes to sit with every ounce of Pronounced. His twangy drawl held powerful dimensions, fluttering between an E5-reaching stadium rasp and gentle, bedside coos. His range wasn’t technically impressive, but his conviction was next-to-none. I call it “everyman singing,” in that his performances felt no more spectacular than the urchins you might hear cutting it up at your local dive. Perhaps I am drawn so easily to Skynyrd’s catalogue because those songs could have been built by any group of dudes making noise in a shed. You probably know a guy or two as talented as Van Zant or Rossington and Collins were. Those Florida boys weren’t tone-chasing, they were shredding—and Van Zant’s voice was the badass, unpretentious glue.
In the years leading up to Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd, the rock genre was catapulted first by Deep South blues players like Bo Diddley and rock first-wavers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. The British Invasion, Greenwich Village scene, and impending psych-rock introduction plucked rock and roll out of the South and relocated it across the US and UK. It was Lonnie Mack and Dale Hawkins’ surging popularity in the mid-‘60s that opened the door for the Allman Brothers Band to form in Jacksonville in 1969. Then came the panhandler Leon Russell, Texan Janis Joplin, and swamp rock picker Tony Joe White. And then came Lynyrd Skynyrd, led by a 22-year-old crooner in a hi-roller hat.
Around that time, Al Kooper—the multi-instrumentalist who played on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and later formed Blood, Sweat & Tears—discovered Skynyrd in Atlanta. He wanted to manage them, and he wanted to produce their debut album. So, he took on the pseudonym “Roosevelt Gook,” plucked the sextet out of their “Hell House” rehearsal space in Jacksonville, and brought them to Studio One in Doraville in 1973. For five weeks, they laid down takes of songs they’d already perfected on the road. Kooper denied improvisation yet was in awe of the taut, worn-in synergy Skynyrd had built through gigging around Jacksonville. But, in one of Kooper’s few missteps as Skynyrd’s veteran steward, he was against “Simple Man”’s inclusion on the album. The story goes that he and the band couldn’t come to an agreement about the song’s fate, so Van Zant made Kooper sit in his car until the recording was finished. And then, after taking the now iconic cover photo full of ghosts on Main Street in Jonesboro, Rossington promptly puked on the nearby sidewalk.
Before the plane crash in 1977, all five of Skynyrd’s records were eight songs long. I’m no rocket scientist, nor am I an expert on sequencing, but I’d reckon that eight songs is the perfect length for a rock and roll album. Limiting the tracklist helped trim the fat, which is why Pronounced is a no-skips effort. Even the “weakest” installments, like “Mississippi Kid” and “Things Goin’ On,” are big blues idioms speaking in the cursive of carnal guitar strokes. Each side of the record oscillates between cocksure chords and chest-bursting drum storms. Opener “I Ain’t the One” snarls and screams, with Allen Collins’ lead lines doing all the talking. Brief keyboard solos unfurl in one ear, while seam-splitting riffs explode in the other—all while the swaggy undercurrent of Gary Rossington’s rhythm guitar twists and repeats. “Poison Whiskey,” Van Zant and Ed King’s alcoholism cautionary tale, is ornery and robust; Van Zant sings about a street-fighting Cajun man who drank himself dead after “20 years of rotgut” and warns the “people” that there’s no future in a bottle of Johnny Walker’s Red.
The interplay of “Gimme Three Steps” is my favorite guitar song of all time. Collins and Rossington talk in paragraphs of hedonistic, raucous phrasings, and King’s bassline thumps like a trunk stereo just below them. Van Zant’s party anecdotes unravel like a short story: He flirts with Linda Lou, a spoken-for woman, at The Jug and quickly finds himself staring down the barrel of her boyfriend’s pistol. His comedy is subtle (“I was scared and fearing for my life, I was shaking like a leaf on a tree”), but most especially when the lyrics get conversational (“Oh, wait a minute, mister, I didn’t even kiss her! Don’t want no trouble with you”).
“Gimme Three Steps” is a chief parable in the Lynyrd Skynyrd lexicon, even if Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd is best-remembered for its three longest songs: “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Simple Man,” and “Free Bird.” It took the band over two years to complete the 9-minute “Free Bird,” as Van Zant was adamant that he couldn’t write a melody to fit into Collins’ original chords. When Collins played the chords again at a later rehearsal, Van Zant jotted down the lyrics in less than five minutes. By then, Skynyrd was on a steady diet of multi-set nights at clubs around Jacksonville, and the decision to tack extra solos onto the song was made so Van Zant could have a moment of reprieve. And when the band got word that roadie-turned-keyboardist Billy Powell had written an introduction for “Free Bird,” the song had finally locked into itself.
Despite label execs at MCA fearing that “Free Bird” was too long for radio airplay, Skynyrd doubled down on their tenets and kept the original runtime—and in 1975, it would crack the Top 40, becoming the sprawling, frayed anthemic passage that’s dominated crowd banter at concerts for 50 years. In the immediate years after Pronounced, Van Zant would dedicate “Free Bird” to Duane Allman and Berry Oakley onstage. The slow-burn guitar climbs of “Simple Man” would have made Allman proud, too, and they now serve as an onramp for a half-century of imitators. But the gut from which Van Zant’s howls arise is what remains unequaled. The song’s perspective rests with that of a mother speaking to her only son. It’s a laundry list of advice—words of affirmation shared between kin: “Be something you love and understand.” The music lands someplace between a prayer and a promise, in the color of hearts followed, lust forgotten, satisfaction found, and troubles passed.
“Tuesday’s Gone,” one of the greatest “side one, track two” examples in rock and roll history, is Van Zant’s opus—an achievement later pawed at on “Sweet Home Alabama” and “What’s Your Name” but never fully captured again. Listening to Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd transports me to summer Sundays spent watching stock-car races with my papaw and eating a beef stew I can’t remember the taste of now. That “Gimme Three Steps” riff, as ferocious and hard-nosed as it may be, is as delicate in my memory as an evening breeze hitting a screen-door. But it’s Kooper’s symphonic mellotron in “Tuesday’s Gone” that bends with the sweetness of my Aunt Carolyn’s homemade apple butter and radiates within me even now. The precision of “Tuesday’s Gone” is the ballast that grounds Pronounced completely; its vagabond melody billows with the very same wind that Van Zant eulogizes: “She had to be free, but, somehow, I’ve got to carry on.” Songs this good are so often reserved for conclusions. Lynyrd Skynyrd argued, however, that it was better-served as a compelling introduction.
Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd is the greatest Southern rock album not recorded at a venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. And I’m talking about those real Deep South records, not the swampy cosplay that bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival were peddling right before Skynyrd met Kooper. The songs Van Zant and his bandmates cooked up were ragged and muscular, displaying a convincing body of country-fried gravitas. Acts like .38 Special, the Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, and the Georgia Satellites would take that rollicking, booze-soaked style and translate it to fit country music subversions in the late-‘70s and throughout the 1980s, but those bids never quite flirted with the mainstream like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s OG template. After all, Pronounced made it all the way to #27 on the Billboard 200 and moved more than a million units—not too shabby for a team of subtropic rabble-rousers making a fuss about fast women, record deals, drinking, and finding exits.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
