Lynyrd Skynyrd
One More From The Road
The Legendary July, 1976 Atlanta Fox Theater Live Album - Expanded, Remixed & Remastered
2CD SET
BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED
MCA Records
0600753278529
UPC | 600753278529
Remastered (2001)
Made in Europe
1976, 2012
TRACK LISTING
DISC 1
01. Introduction / Workin' For MCA
02. I Ain't The One
03. Saturday Night Special
04. Searching
05. Travellin' Man
06. Simple Man
07. Whiskey Rock-A-Roller
08. The Needle And The Spoon
09. Gimme Back My Bullets
10. Tuesday's Gone
11. Gimme Three Steps
12. Call Me The Breeze
13. T For Texas
DISC 2
01. Sweet Home Alabama
02. Crossroads
03. Free Bird
04. Introduction / Workin' For MCA (Alternate Take)
05. I Ain't The One (Alternate Take)
06. Searching (Alternate Take)
07. Gimme Three Steps (Alternate Take)
08. Call Me The Breeze (Alternate Take)
09. Sweet Home Alabama (Alternate Take)
10. Crossroads (Alternate Take)
11. Free Bird (Alternate Take)
JULY 4, 1976, was America’s bicentennial. It had been two hundred years since the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. It had been three years since the Lynyrd Skynyrd band signed with MCA Records. Now the nation was celebrating its birthday. Skynyrd was rehearsing. The Southern rock band from Jacksonville, Florida, was feverishly preparing a display of musical fireworks for their upcoming shows at the fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta. Their three sold-out nights were being recorded for the band’s long awaited live album. The pressure was on. They were breaking in a new guitarist who had only played three prior gigs with the band. Their last album had been a commercial disappointment. Their next record had to be a hit. This live album was going to either make them or break them.
BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED
MCA Records
0600753278529
UPC | 600753278529
Remastered (2001)
Made in Europe
1976, 2012
TRACK LISTING
DISC 1
01. Introduction / Workin' For MCA
02. I Ain't The One
03. Saturday Night Special
04. Searching
05. Travellin' Man
06. Simple Man
07. Whiskey Rock-A-Roller
08. The Needle And The Spoon
09. Gimme Back My Bullets
10. Tuesday's Gone
11. Gimme Three Steps
12. Call Me The Breeze
13. T For Texas
DISC 2
01. Sweet Home Alabama
02. Crossroads
03. Free Bird
04. Introduction / Workin' For MCA (Alternate Take)
05. I Ain't The One (Alternate Take)
06. Searching (Alternate Take)
07. Gimme Three Steps (Alternate Take)
08. Call Me The Breeze (Alternate Take)
09. Sweet Home Alabama (Alternate Take)
10. Crossroads (Alternate Take)
11. Free Bird (Alternate Take)
JULY 4, 1976, was America’s bicentennial. It had been two hundred years since the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. It had been three years since the Lynyrd Skynyrd band signed with MCA Records. Now the nation was celebrating its birthday. Skynyrd was rehearsing. The Southern rock band from Jacksonville, Florida, was feverishly preparing a display of musical fireworks for their upcoming shows at the fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta. Their three sold-out nights were being recorded for the band’s long awaited live album. The pressure was on. They were breaking in a new guitarist who had only played three prior gigs with the band. Their last album had been a commercial disappointment. Their next record had to be a hit. This live album was going to either make them or break them.
During the previous three years, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s loud, rowdy, “Southern raunchy roll” had made them one of America’s top concert headliners. Their relentless “Torture Tours” broke attendance records everywhere they played. “We once did 123 nights straight!” Skynyrd’s lead singer Ronnie Van Zant boasted in a 1976 interview “By the time it was over, we were really brown around the edges. We do about 300 dates a year now. We’ll never take it easy."
THREE YEARS OF NON-STOP TOURING had taken its toll. First, road-fatigued original drummer Bob Burns “blew a 50-amp fuse.” Afraid the same thing might happen to him, a few months later guitarist Ed King packed up his Fender Stratocaster in mid-tour and disappeared into the night. Suddenly Skynyrd’s powerful triple lead guitar assault was ground down to the twin Gibson axes of Allen Collins and Gary Rossington.
Burns was quickly replaced by powerful North Carolinian Artimus Pyle, an ex-Marine. Skynyrd chose not to fill King’s spot right away, preferring to rely on Rossington and Collins until the right picker could be found. “Whoever comes in will have to be great," Van Zant said at the time, “but first of all he must be able to get along with us. Where his head’s at is the most important thing. The requirement will be that he grabs his suitcase because he’ll be gone for awhile.”
Skynyrd pulled off the road long enough to record Gimme Back My Bullets. which was produced by Atlantic Records legend Tom Dowd. Expectations for Bullets were high when it was released in February 1976, but after busting out of the gate into the Top 20. the LP stalled on the charts. “We were going for a completely different sound,” Van Zant later told journalist Cameron Crowe, “and it didn’t work. We had always been so heavy and muddy, we decided to make a clean Lynyrd Skynyrd album. The material was good, it was just too...refined.”
Then came the unexpected million-selling success of Frampton Comes Alive, a two-record live set that would reach #1 on the album charts. In the months before his sudden acclaim, Peter Frampton had been Skynyrd's opening act. If Frampton could do it with a live album, why not Skynyrd? “We decided immediately to do an honest live album with three guitarists,” said Van Zant, “and get back to the thing that had always worked so well.” We had always been saving a Skynyrd live album as our trump. An intact recording of the band in concert. No overdubbing.... All we had to do was find a hot new guitarist.”
After jamming on stage with a series of well known players such as Leslie West of Mountain, Muscle Shoals session player Wayne Perkins, and Huey Thomasson of the Outlaws, Skynyrd tentatively decided on Barry Lee Harwood, an Atlanta session guitarist with whom they had grown up with in Jacksonville. But first, Harwood had to fulfil a month-long European touring commitment with the singer Melanie. The band told him to call them when he returned.
With Harwood pencilled in, the live recording dates were set for May 5, 6 and 7,1976, at the Fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, the “Showcase of the South.” It was also announced that Skynyrd’s concerts were to be filmed by Universal Pictures for release as a promotional movie about the group and its lifestyle. A portion of the proceeds from the concerts, album and film would be donated to the “Save The Fox” Foundation.
+ + +
THE FOX THEATER stood in the heart of old downtown Atlanta on the corner of Peachtree Street and Ponce De Leon Avenue. Opened in 1929, the ornate, “acoustically impeccable” Moorish-style movie palace seated 4,600, making it the second largest movie house in the U.S. The last remaining Atlanta movie palace from the golden age, it was scheduled to be sold and demolished. Skynyrd knew it well. “We would play down the street at Funochio’s on Peachtree, the same street, just three or four blocks away, and we saw the Fox Theater every night,” says Rossington. “We used to stay at the hotel across the street from it and go to the movies there...it’s a gorgeous theater...beautiful. So Alex Cooley, our promoter here in Atlanta, was a big fan of the theater, and he said, ‘Why don’t you do your album there and donate some of the money to the Fox and help save it, ’cause they’re gonna’ make a parking lot out of it.’”
With the Fox dates just a month away, Skynyrd continued their Bullets America ’76 tour. Then, the day before the band’s April shows at New York’s Beacon Theater, disaster struck. Rossington broke the ring finger on his fret hand when he slammed a car door on it...or at least that’s what the rock press was told. “There was a hotel with a bar across the street,” says Rossington. “I went over there with a friend, like a dumb ass, after our show and we got all drunk and got in a fight and I hurt my finger. I still played that next night but then we went to New York and I couldn’t play real good.”
Although Rossington was able to continue the tour, the accident forced Skynyrd to postpone the live recordings until July to allow him time to fully recover. This untimely accident led the band to extend their tour an extra month. The first new date was in Kansas City, Missouri.
+ + +
FOR CASSIE GAINES, one of Skynyrd’s new background singers, “The Honkettes,” the Kansas City gig was the moment she’d been waiting for. Born and bred in Miami, Oklahoma, only a few hours drive away, she called her brother Steve, who was now living in nearby West Seneca, Missouri, and invited him to the show. She told him to bring his guitar.
“Cassie said, ‘My brother’s in town, playin’ at a club with his band,'" Rossington remembers, “and we went, ‘Yeah, good.’ Then she said, ‘Can he come jam with us?’ And we went, ‘Man we can't have some clown come over and jam with us, we’re big time,' So we said no. But he came over anyway and we met him pre-show, got to talkin’ to him and found out he was hip and pretty cool.”
“Cassie comes in and says, ‘You want to hear somebody smoke “T For Texas’’?”’ Honkette Leslie Hawkins recounted, “and she was talking about Steve. They went out on stage and were jamming up a storm. After only a couple of songs, Allen just turned around to us and held up three fingers and said, ‘That’s number three.’”
“He played like a motherfucker!” Collins said later.
“I shook hands with them all after the gig," Steve Gaines remembered. “It had been a big thing for me to play with them. I couldn’t believe it when they phoned me a couple of weeks later and asked me to join!”
The twangy Okie guitarist quickly packed up his axe and headed to Jacksonville, where he spent weeks cramming and jamming, learning Skynyrd’s carefully conceived repertoire in marathon rehearsal sessions. Modest Steve Gaines was such a quick study that, by the time Harwood returned from the Melanie tour, the Oklahoman was already locked into the third guitar spot. (However, Harwood would play dobro on Skynyrd’s next studio album.)
As the rescheduled Fox dates approached, Skynyrd’s album Second Helping received the newly created platinum certification from the RIAA, making them the only other Southern Rock band besides the Allman Brothers to achieve a million selling record.
It was a good omen.
TRIUMPHANT HOMECOMING
It had been almost four years since Skynyrd had first come to Atlanta as an unknown club band from Jacksonville. They had quickly made a name for themselves at a sleazy bar called Funochio’s, where New York producer AI Kooper heard the group and signed them to his MCA affiliated label, Sounds of the South Records. Their explosive MCA debut performance at Richard’s, Atlanta’s premiere rock club, in July 1973, instantly made them the talk of the industry. “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” their biggest hits, were recorded at Studio One, in the Atlanta suburb of Doraville. Now their story had come full circle. They had moved up Peachtree Street from tiny Funochios to headline the gigantic Fox. Atlanta had made Skynyrd. Now it was only fitting that the group record its first live album in the city that was had become their second home.
Skynyrd and producer Tom Dowd convened at the Fox to prepare for the upcoming shows. “The only reason we would do the live album is because Dowd did Cream’s Wheels Of Fire and the Allman Brothers’ Live At The Fillmore East, and they were so great,” says Rossington. “They were our two favorite live albums. We took all his advice for this live album. He was our idol for doin’ live bands, and the Cream and the Allmans were kinda’ our heroes. So we thought, Tom Dowd’s gonna’ do our live album. Unreal! We’d do anything he said. We called him Father Dowd ” “The day before the live album, we rehearsed on stage and cleaned a couple things up,” says Dowd. “Steve Gaines had just joined the band. We talked about the show, which songs to do, how you don’t want to do certain songs back to back. Some songs w rearranged drastically to make them more presentable. Others we left alone. Basically, the wanted to try and make this live record the best thing they’d ever recorded.”
At the last minute plans to film Skynyrd at the Fox were suddenly cancelled because the band was “freaking out” from the pressure of playing, recording and filming simultaneously. “We’re not very photogenic,” Van Zant cracked.
July 7, 1976, was a steaming hot Georgia summer night. The Atlanta bicentennial fireworks display of a few days earlier had died down, but at the Fox, Skynyrd’s pyrotechnics were about to begin. Outside the wrought iron box office, extra tickets to the sold-out concerts were selling for a fortune, while inside the marbled lobby, Skynyrd T-shirts were going as fast as Collins’ “Free Bird” solo. With “Father Dowd” ready in the mobile recording unit, all the elements of a classic live album were in place.
+ + +
FROM THE FIRST NOTES of “Workin’ For MCA,” Skynyrd was on fire. With a frenzied, Confederate-flag-waving mob of sweating Atlanta faithful cheering them on, the band delivered a thunderous, triple-barrelled hurricane blast of Skynyrd classics which rocked the ancient Fox to its foundation. Playing just his fourth gig with the band, Steve Gaines’ energetic picking ignited Rossington and Collins to new heights, while Van Zant prowled the stage, using his mike stand like a cattle prod, exhorting his “mules” with piercing “wolf-whistles.” When Skynyrd’s giant 20' by 25' Confederate flag was unfurled behind the band during their encore rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama,” the crowd of New Southern boys and girls went crazy. “When Lynyrd Skynyrd was functioning on all cylinders, it was just an incredible experience,” says Fox promoter Alex Cooley, whose opening night greeting would end up leading off the album. “They were so hyped up for that show...just so pumped. There can be this magic that happens every once in a while. It’s like this huge boulder starts rolling. That’s what Skynyrd’s set was. It built in intensity until at the end everybody was just...worn out.”
+ + +
SKYNYRD’S SHOWS at the Fox were a rowdy celebration of the cream of their catalog, with the band recording incendiary live versions of fan favorites such as "I Ain’t The One,” “Saturday Night Special,” "Whiskey Rock-A-Roller” “Gimme Three Steps," “Call Me The Breeze" and a 14-minute version of their legendary guitar rave-up “Free Bird.” With three nights of live recording, there were multiple versions of many of these songs to choose from for the album. Amazingly, a few tunes like “Simple Man,” “The Needle And The Spoon,” “Gimme Back My Bullets” and the bluesy ballad “Tuesday’s Gone,” were nailed in a single definitive take. “Before we did the taping, I made up a list of 21 tunes I was interested in,” Dowd said later. "Way at the bottom was ‘Tuesday.’ It hadn’t been done live for about two years, and the guys were a little hesitant. Whether it was the challenge, the nostalgia or what they played, it’s a beautiful song and Ronnie sings his butt off. The energy’s really there. Like Otis and Booker T. in Europe.”
Skynyrd also recorded three songs that had not appeared on any of their previous albums. “Travellin’ Man” was the first composition by bassist Leon Wilkeson ever cut for an LR “I came up for the music for that one on my birthday,” Wilkeson explained. “The inspiration for the music was having a brand new set of bass guitar strings. Later, I heard Ronnie singing a line, and I realized my line fit his perfectly, so I asked him if I could take a shot at it and the song finally happened. T For Texas’ is another one we’ve performed before but haven’t recorded. We worked it up when Ed King was still in the band. Ronnie had always liked that song. He had an old Jimmie Rodgers album on eight-track he listened to all the time and just liked the words to that.”
The third previously unrecorded song was “Crossroads,” a note for note cover of Cream’s version of the Robert Johnson blues classic. Skynyrd had played the song as an encore since their garage band days, with Collins playing a musical tribute to his guitar hero, Eric Clapton. “Well, I didn’t want to put it on there,” Collins revealed, “it being exactly like Cream’s version. I really like that song and that version goes over really well live. Using it on the album, though, was something I didn’t want to do.”
Following Skynyrd’s SRO opening night performance, they were feted by MCA Records to a gala bash at The Abbey, a converted church that was now one of Atlanta’s most exclusive restaurants. Each guest at the invitation-only party was treated to an individual cake fashioned in the form of a platinum record. MCA President Mike Maitland first presented the band with a platinum album award to commemorate the sale of over one million copies of Second Helping. Maitland was then “held up” by Rossington, who fired a Gimme Back My Bullets six-shooter loaded with a flag thanking MCA. Group members promptly ordered duplicate platinum albums for their moms as belated Mothers Day gifts.
After the second night’s show, Skynyrd and Dowd returned by limousine to their swanky hotel on Lake Lanier outside Atlanta to evaluate their first two night’s work. “I filled the bathtub with bottles of champagne and had them sit and listen to cassettes of both shows,” says Dowd. “We went through every song and compared each night. They’d say, ‘That’s it! We can’t do it any better.’ Then I’d say, ‘This song we have to do over again.’ That’s how we picked the set list for the last show. At the end of the three nights, we had a dozen or so songs to choose from. That’s how it became a two-pocket LP.”
+ + +
IN EARLY AUGUST, Skynyrd and Dowd convened at Miami’s Criteria Studios for a week to mix the live album. “When we left Atlanta, we had it in the can,” says Dowd, “but we decided to clean it up in a few places. Ronnie touched up some of his vocals and we redid the girls on one or two songs. Allen also wanted to make another pass on his ‘Free Bird’ solo. That was a running joke. He’d already done twenty-nine passes at it, and we were all happy, but Allen still wanted to do just one more. I think he also made another pass at ‘Crossroads.’ I was so damned proud of that record when it went out there because it represented all the records they had done, but it was recorded and played better than their hits.”
With the Lynyrd Skynyrd band’s endorsement, Kevin Elson, who grew up with them in Jacksonville and became their original live sound engineer, serving in that capacity up until the plane crash, was brought in to create new mixes of each song. A vintage Neve 8078 mixing console was utilized to capture the full analog warmth of the original recordings.
For this new 2-CD Deluxe Edition, Skynyrd’s performances were put back in their original live concert sequence to give a more authentic representation of what the Fox shows were actually like. In addition, ten bonus tracks that did not appear on the original album have also been added, including three never-before-released alternate takes.
We’ve also included never-before-heard dialogue and extended audience response, which was probably cut due to time limitations on the original LP version.
+ + +
FOR THE DELUXE EDITION BOOKLET we’ve reproduced the surviving original album artwork elements. These include color versions of many of the black-and-white photos included in the souvenir booklet, as well as a few never-before-seen shots. Also included are the LP’s inner jacket collage and Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe’s 1976 album essay.
A final note: For this Deluxe Edition, the actual live performance of Allen Collins’ legendary “Free Bird” solo from Skynyrd’s July 8, 1976, Fox Theater show was used instead of the overdubbed version that appeared on the original LP release, which was recorded by the late guitarist at Criteria Studios, Miami, in August 1976. Unfortunately, the 2" multi-track master tape containing Collins’ overdubbed recording was not available. Nevertheless, when you hear his original solo, you may wonder why he wanted to do those 29 retakes.
Fly high, Free Bird. ~ Ron O’Brien
THREE YEARS OF NON-STOP TOURING had taken its toll. First, road-fatigued original drummer Bob Burns “blew a 50-amp fuse.” Afraid the same thing might happen to him, a few months later guitarist Ed King packed up his Fender Stratocaster in mid-tour and disappeared into the night. Suddenly Skynyrd’s powerful triple lead guitar assault was ground down to the twin Gibson axes of Allen Collins and Gary Rossington.
Burns was quickly replaced by powerful North Carolinian Artimus Pyle, an ex-Marine. Skynyrd chose not to fill King’s spot right away, preferring to rely on Rossington and Collins until the right picker could be found. “Whoever comes in will have to be great," Van Zant said at the time, “but first of all he must be able to get along with us. Where his head’s at is the most important thing. The requirement will be that he grabs his suitcase because he’ll be gone for awhile.”
Skynyrd pulled off the road long enough to record Gimme Back My Bullets. which was produced by Atlantic Records legend Tom Dowd. Expectations for Bullets were high when it was released in February 1976, but after busting out of the gate into the Top 20. the LP stalled on the charts. “We were going for a completely different sound,” Van Zant later told journalist Cameron Crowe, “and it didn’t work. We had always been so heavy and muddy, we decided to make a clean Lynyrd Skynyrd album. The material was good, it was just too...refined.”
Then came the unexpected million-selling success of Frampton Comes Alive, a two-record live set that would reach #1 on the album charts. In the months before his sudden acclaim, Peter Frampton had been Skynyrd's opening act. If Frampton could do it with a live album, why not Skynyrd? “We decided immediately to do an honest live album with three guitarists,” said Van Zant, “and get back to the thing that had always worked so well.” We had always been saving a Skynyrd live album as our trump. An intact recording of the band in concert. No overdubbing.... All we had to do was find a hot new guitarist.”
After jamming on stage with a series of well known players such as Leslie West of Mountain, Muscle Shoals session player Wayne Perkins, and Huey Thomasson of the Outlaws, Skynyrd tentatively decided on Barry Lee Harwood, an Atlanta session guitarist with whom they had grown up with in Jacksonville. But first, Harwood had to fulfil a month-long European touring commitment with the singer Melanie. The band told him to call them when he returned.
With Harwood pencilled in, the live recording dates were set for May 5, 6 and 7,1976, at the Fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, the “Showcase of the South.” It was also announced that Skynyrd’s concerts were to be filmed by Universal Pictures for release as a promotional movie about the group and its lifestyle. A portion of the proceeds from the concerts, album and film would be donated to the “Save The Fox” Foundation.
+ + +
THE FOX THEATER stood in the heart of old downtown Atlanta on the corner of Peachtree Street and Ponce De Leon Avenue. Opened in 1929, the ornate, “acoustically impeccable” Moorish-style movie palace seated 4,600, making it the second largest movie house in the U.S. The last remaining Atlanta movie palace from the golden age, it was scheduled to be sold and demolished. Skynyrd knew it well. “We would play down the street at Funochio’s on Peachtree, the same street, just three or four blocks away, and we saw the Fox Theater every night,” says Rossington. “We used to stay at the hotel across the street from it and go to the movies there...it’s a gorgeous theater...beautiful. So Alex Cooley, our promoter here in Atlanta, was a big fan of the theater, and he said, ‘Why don’t you do your album there and donate some of the money to the Fox and help save it, ’cause they’re gonna’ make a parking lot out of it.’”
With the Fox dates just a month away, Skynyrd continued their Bullets America ’76 tour. Then, the day before the band’s April shows at New York’s Beacon Theater, disaster struck. Rossington broke the ring finger on his fret hand when he slammed a car door on it...or at least that’s what the rock press was told. “There was a hotel with a bar across the street,” says Rossington. “I went over there with a friend, like a dumb ass, after our show and we got all drunk and got in a fight and I hurt my finger. I still played that next night but then we went to New York and I couldn’t play real good.”
Although Rossington was able to continue the tour, the accident forced Skynyrd to postpone the live recordings until July to allow him time to fully recover. This untimely accident led the band to extend their tour an extra month. The first new date was in Kansas City, Missouri.
+ + +
FOR CASSIE GAINES, one of Skynyrd’s new background singers, “The Honkettes,” the Kansas City gig was the moment she’d been waiting for. Born and bred in Miami, Oklahoma, only a few hours drive away, she called her brother Steve, who was now living in nearby West Seneca, Missouri, and invited him to the show. She told him to bring his guitar.
“Cassie said, ‘My brother’s in town, playin’ at a club with his band,'" Rossington remembers, “and we went, ‘Yeah, good.’ Then she said, ‘Can he come jam with us?’ And we went, ‘Man we can't have some clown come over and jam with us, we’re big time,' So we said no. But he came over anyway and we met him pre-show, got to talkin’ to him and found out he was hip and pretty cool.”
“Cassie comes in and says, ‘You want to hear somebody smoke “T For Texas’’?”’ Honkette Leslie Hawkins recounted, “and she was talking about Steve. They went out on stage and were jamming up a storm. After only a couple of songs, Allen just turned around to us and held up three fingers and said, ‘That’s number three.’”
“He played like a motherfucker!” Collins said later.
“I shook hands with them all after the gig," Steve Gaines remembered. “It had been a big thing for me to play with them. I couldn’t believe it when they phoned me a couple of weeks later and asked me to join!”
The twangy Okie guitarist quickly packed up his axe and headed to Jacksonville, where he spent weeks cramming and jamming, learning Skynyrd’s carefully conceived repertoire in marathon rehearsal sessions. Modest Steve Gaines was such a quick study that, by the time Harwood returned from the Melanie tour, the Oklahoman was already locked into the third guitar spot. (However, Harwood would play dobro on Skynyrd’s next studio album.)
As the rescheduled Fox dates approached, Skynyrd’s album Second Helping received the newly created platinum certification from the RIAA, making them the only other Southern Rock band besides the Allman Brothers to achieve a million selling record.
It was a good omen.
TRIUMPHANT HOMECOMING
It had been almost four years since Skynyrd had first come to Atlanta as an unknown club band from Jacksonville. They had quickly made a name for themselves at a sleazy bar called Funochio’s, where New York producer AI Kooper heard the group and signed them to his MCA affiliated label, Sounds of the South Records. Their explosive MCA debut performance at Richard’s, Atlanta’s premiere rock club, in July 1973, instantly made them the talk of the industry. “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” their biggest hits, were recorded at Studio One, in the Atlanta suburb of Doraville. Now their story had come full circle. They had moved up Peachtree Street from tiny Funochios to headline the gigantic Fox. Atlanta had made Skynyrd. Now it was only fitting that the group record its first live album in the city that was had become their second home.
Skynyrd and producer Tom Dowd convened at the Fox to prepare for the upcoming shows. “The only reason we would do the live album is because Dowd did Cream’s Wheels Of Fire and the Allman Brothers’ Live At The Fillmore East, and they were so great,” says Rossington. “They were our two favorite live albums. We took all his advice for this live album. He was our idol for doin’ live bands, and the Cream and the Allmans were kinda’ our heroes. So we thought, Tom Dowd’s gonna’ do our live album. Unreal! We’d do anything he said. We called him Father Dowd ” “The day before the live album, we rehearsed on stage and cleaned a couple things up,” says Dowd. “Steve Gaines had just joined the band. We talked about the show, which songs to do, how you don’t want to do certain songs back to back. Some songs w rearranged drastically to make them more presentable. Others we left alone. Basically, the wanted to try and make this live record the best thing they’d ever recorded.”
At the last minute plans to film Skynyrd at the Fox were suddenly cancelled because the band was “freaking out” from the pressure of playing, recording and filming simultaneously. “We’re not very photogenic,” Van Zant cracked.
July 7, 1976, was a steaming hot Georgia summer night. The Atlanta bicentennial fireworks display of a few days earlier had died down, but at the Fox, Skynyrd’s pyrotechnics were about to begin. Outside the wrought iron box office, extra tickets to the sold-out concerts were selling for a fortune, while inside the marbled lobby, Skynyrd T-shirts were going as fast as Collins’ “Free Bird” solo. With “Father Dowd” ready in the mobile recording unit, all the elements of a classic live album were in place.
+ + +
FROM THE FIRST NOTES of “Workin’ For MCA,” Skynyrd was on fire. With a frenzied, Confederate-flag-waving mob of sweating Atlanta faithful cheering them on, the band delivered a thunderous, triple-barrelled hurricane blast of Skynyrd classics which rocked the ancient Fox to its foundation. Playing just his fourth gig with the band, Steve Gaines’ energetic picking ignited Rossington and Collins to new heights, while Van Zant prowled the stage, using his mike stand like a cattle prod, exhorting his “mules” with piercing “wolf-whistles.” When Skynyrd’s giant 20' by 25' Confederate flag was unfurled behind the band during their encore rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama,” the crowd of New Southern boys and girls went crazy. “When Lynyrd Skynyrd was functioning on all cylinders, it was just an incredible experience,” says Fox promoter Alex Cooley, whose opening night greeting would end up leading off the album. “They were so hyped up for that show...just so pumped. There can be this magic that happens every once in a while. It’s like this huge boulder starts rolling. That’s what Skynyrd’s set was. It built in intensity until at the end everybody was just...worn out.”
+ + +
SKYNYRD’S SHOWS at the Fox were a rowdy celebration of the cream of their catalog, with the band recording incendiary live versions of fan favorites such as "I Ain’t The One,” “Saturday Night Special,” "Whiskey Rock-A-Roller” “Gimme Three Steps," “Call Me The Breeze" and a 14-minute version of their legendary guitar rave-up “Free Bird.” With three nights of live recording, there were multiple versions of many of these songs to choose from for the album. Amazingly, a few tunes like “Simple Man,” “The Needle And The Spoon,” “Gimme Back My Bullets” and the bluesy ballad “Tuesday’s Gone,” were nailed in a single definitive take. “Before we did the taping, I made up a list of 21 tunes I was interested in,” Dowd said later. "Way at the bottom was ‘Tuesday.’ It hadn’t been done live for about two years, and the guys were a little hesitant. Whether it was the challenge, the nostalgia or what they played, it’s a beautiful song and Ronnie sings his butt off. The energy’s really there. Like Otis and Booker T. in Europe.”
Skynyrd also recorded three songs that had not appeared on any of their previous albums. “Travellin’ Man” was the first composition by bassist Leon Wilkeson ever cut for an LR “I came up for the music for that one on my birthday,” Wilkeson explained. “The inspiration for the music was having a brand new set of bass guitar strings. Later, I heard Ronnie singing a line, and I realized my line fit his perfectly, so I asked him if I could take a shot at it and the song finally happened. T For Texas’ is another one we’ve performed before but haven’t recorded. We worked it up when Ed King was still in the band. Ronnie had always liked that song. He had an old Jimmie Rodgers album on eight-track he listened to all the time and just liked the words to that.”
The third previously unrecorded song was “Crossroads,” a note for note cover of Cream’s version of the Robert Johnson blues classic. Skynyrd had played the song as an encore since their garage band days, with Collins playing a musical tribute to his guitar hero, Eric Clapton. “Well, I didn’t want to put it on there,” Collins revealed, “it being exactly like Cream’s version. I really like that song and that version goes over really well live. Using it on the album, though, was something I didn’t want to do.”
Following Skynyrd’s SRO opening night performance, they were feted by MCA Records to a gala bash at The Abbey, a converted church that was now one of Atlanta’s most exclusive restaurants. Each guest at the invitation-only party was treated to an individual cake fashioned in the form of a platinum record. MCA President Mike Maitland first presented the band with a platinum album award to commemorate the sale of over one million copies of Second Helping. Maitland was then “held up” by Rossington, who fired a Gimme Back My Bullets six-shooter loaded with a flag thanking MCA. Group members promptly ordered duplicate platinum albums for their moms as belated Mothers Day gifts.
After the second night’s show, Skynyrd and Dowd returned by limousine to their swanky hotel on Lake Lanier outside Atlanta to evaluate their first two night’s work. “I filled the bathtub with bottles of champagne and had them sit and listen to cassettes of both shows,” says Dowd. “We went through every song and compared each night. They’d say, ‘That’s it! We can’t do it any better.’ Then I’d say, ‘This song we have to do over again.’ That’s how we picked the set list for the last show. At the end of the three nights, we had a dozen or so songs to choose from. That’s how it became a two-pocket LP.”
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IN EARLY AUGUST, Skynyrd and Dowd convened at Miami’s Criteria Studios for a week to mix the live album. “When we left Atlanta, we had it in the can,” says Dowd, “but we decided to clean it up in a few places. Ronnie touched up some of his vocals and we redid the girls on one or two songs. Allen also wanted to make another pass on his ‘Free Bird’ solo. That was a running joke. He’d already done twenty-nine passes at it, and we were all happy, but Allen still wanted to do just one more. I think he also made another pass at ‘Crossroads.’ I was so damned proud of that record when it went out there because it represented all the records they had done, but it was recorded and played better than their hits.”
With the Lynyrd Skynyrd band’s endorsement, Kevin Elson, who grew up with them in Jacksonville and became their original live sound engineer, serving in that capacity up until the plane crash, was brought in to create new mixes of each song. A vintage Neve 8078 mixing console was utilized to capture the full analog warmth of the original recordings.
For this new 2-CD Deluxe Edition, Skynyrd’s performances were put back in their original live concert sequence to give a more authentic representation of what the Fox shows were actually like. In addition, ten bonus tracks that did not appear on the original album have also been added, including three never-before-released alternate takes.
We’ve also included never-before-heard dialogue and extended audience response, which was probably cut due to time limitations on the original LP version.
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FOR THE DELUXE EDITION BOOKLET we’ve reproduced the surviving original album artwork elements. These include color versions of many of the black-and-white photos included in the souvenir booklet, as well as a few never-before-seen shots. Also included are the LP’s inner jacket collage and Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe’s 1976 album essay.
A final note: For this Deluxe Edition, the actual live performance of Allen Collins’ legendary “Free Bird” solo from Skynyrd’s July 8, 1976, Fox Theater show was used instead of the overdubbed version that appeared on the original LP release, which was recorded by the late guitarist at Criteria Studios, Miami, in August 1976. Unfortunately, the 2" multi-track master tape containing Collins’ overdubbed recording was not available. Nevertheless, when you hear his original solo, you may wonder why he wanted to do those 29 retakes.
Fly high, Free Bird. ~ Ron O’Brien
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