![]() It happened when Nirvana played MTV Unplugged (they surprised with a bit of “Sweet Home Alabama,” something they’d previously done at a few in-stores) and one spring evening in 2016 at a Bob Dylan concert in Berkeley, California, the call came out for “Free Bird” - and he famously obliged, working a snippet into his show-closing performance of “Love Sick.” And then there’s The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock & Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, a fiction in which MAGNET writer/NPR storyteller Mitch Myers imagines the guy who first requested “Free Bird” at an unrelated concert. Haven’t we all heard someone yelling for “Free Bird” at some random show? More than once? Hell, that’s what people still want to hear at everyone else’s concerts. It’s one of the few that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ever had,” he said.“What song do you wanna hear?” singer Ronnie Van Zant asks the crowd before Lynyrd Skynyrd kicks into 14-minutes of “Free Bird” on their 1976 live album, One More from the Road.īy then, the whole world knew what song everyone wanted to hear at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. “This kid was telling me that they used it for their graduation song and not too long ago somebody told me that they used it at a funeral. In a commentary on the song in 2010, John Van Zant explained that every listener feels a different connection to it. One of the elements that make “Free Bird” so special is that it means something different to everyone who listens to it. Instead, the band played the song as an instrumental, letting the crowd fill in the lyrics. After the tragic loss of Van Zant, his brother and bandmate John Van Zant became too emotional to sing it onstage. “Free Bird” worked perfectly as the closing track to the album, so it was always the last song the band played at concerts. To fix this problem, the band created a separate recording of “Free Bird.” The radio version was just under five minutes, with the instrumental cut down to just one minute. Many executives at the label cautioned against putting such a long song on an album because it could not be played on the radio. They continued to work on the song while creating the album, and the nine-minute-long “Free Bird” made the cut. It ran seven and a half minutes long, but they still did not feel like it was finished. When the band recorded “Free Bird” for the first time in 1972, there were no guitar solos at the end. It wasn’t anything heavy, just a love song about leaving town, time to move on.” Recording Process “After about 20 minutes, Ronnie started singing, ‘If I leave here tomorrow,’ and it fit great. “We were sitting around, and asked Allen to play those chords again,” Rossington recalled in an interview. ![]() When frontman Ronnie Van Zant heard Collins and Gary Rossington playing it one night, he ended up writing the rest of the lyrics. His girlfriend Kathy Johns actually asked him the question, If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? He wrote her words down and used them as inspiration for the song.īye, bye, baby, it’s been a sweet love, yeah yeahĭespite the finality of the lyrics, Collins and Johns eventually got married in 1970.Ĭollins worked on the song for about two years before the band played it for the first time. These words were inspired by a real experience of Skynyrd guitarist and songwriter Allen Collins. ![]() He expresses that he does not want to hurt her, but there are too many things he wants to do before committing to a relationship. The lyrics tell the story of a man leaving a woman because he cannot bring himself to settle down with her. While the band occasionally dedicated the song to Allman during performances, “Free Bird” was actually written years before his death. The guitar riffs at the end are reminiscent of Allman’s, causing people to believe it was about him. When “Free Bird” was released, some fans speculated that it was a tribute to Duane Allman, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist who passed away in 1971. ![]()
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