Solid southern blues/rock and featuring the epic nine minute Freebird, this album should be up my street, but unfortunately it comes with a big red flag - literally in this case. Lynyrd Skynrd (probably the only band named after a strict PE teacher) made a thing of using a confederate flag as part of their stage set and on album covers. They also had a beef with Neil Young’s song ‘Alabama’ and wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ as a response, saying it was unfair to blame the whole of the South for slavery. Given that their music owes a huge debt to the delta blues, this is a disingenuous stance to say the least.
A plane crash in 1977 killed lead singer and front man Ronnie Van Zant, two other band members, their roadie and the two pilots of their charter plane. The surviving members reformed the band 10 years later with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny as singer, but carried on using the flag until 2012, dropping it for a while and cravenly restoring it for a while after ‘fans’ complained.
Giving this two stars purely for memories of Freebird always being played at school discos that I went to as a kid.
https://album.link/gb/i/1440838012
No comments:
Post a Comment