Lynyrd Skynyrd: Gimme Back My Bullets

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By the time Skynyrd began to hammer out the familiar opening riff of “Sweet Home Alabama,” their last song of the performance, the scene felt more like a real concert than a promotional stop by a band getting the word out on its latest—in Skynyrd’s case, 15th—album. Nobody could have predicted such a scene back in 1987, when the band played together for the first time in a decade. That tour marked the 10th anniversary of the plane crash that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines, and seemingly ended the band in the midst of their prime.

Singer Johnny Van Zant stepped in for his late brother back in 1987, and he’s still at the mic. Much else has changed, however. Keyboardist Billy Powell died from a heart attack in January 2009, in the middle of recording God & Guns. That left guitarist Gary Rossington as the band’s sole original member. Suffice to say, change has been a constant in the band’s lineup. More than 25 members have passed through Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ranks since Rossington, Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Allen Collins first formed the band in Florida 45 years ago. Guitarist Rickey Medlocke, who has emerged as a spokesman for the group, has been with Skynyrd for 13 years, but he was with them back near their beginning. He was actually the band’s drummer from 1970 to 1971, before he left to form and front the band Blackfoot. He rejoined Skynyrd in 1996 and is now a core member, along with Rossington and Van Zant.

For a band with such a long history, Skynyrd could rest on their laurels. But God & Guns is an ambitious work, and with it Skynyrd have honored their traditions and polished them with a modern sheen courtesy of producer Bob Marlette (Black Sabbath, Saliva, Shinedown). Several tracks, notably the flag-waving anthemic title track and “Gifted Hands,” a tribute to Powell, will fit right in to country radio. Elsewhere, Skynyrd turn up the crunch, taking a hard-edged musical approach that would sound at home next to Nickelback. The first single, “Still Unbroken,” is among those rockers, a defiant statement by some of rock’s ultimate survivors, which has been adopted as a theme song by the WWE.

The wide musical range is also reflected by the album’s guest musicians. Marilyn Manson guitarist and noted chicken picker John5 co-wrote six songs and plays a couple of finger-blistering solos, while Rob Zombie and country Dobro ace Jerry Douglas make appearances as well. But the heart of the music remains the band’s signature three-guitar attack, delivered here by Rossington, Medlocke and Mark “Sparky” Matejka. The guitarists animate the songs, sparking off one another and creating rich textures with pumping rhythms and screaming three-headed leads.

GARY ROSSINGTON Oh yeah! We wanted to show people that we still had some new, different, exciting stuff left in us. We love to play our classics and always will play them, but we also need to keep things fresh. We took a long time to write this album. Johnny, Rickey and myself worked on songs and went to Nashville and got a few more writers involved, and we tried really hard to write some good stuff that would stand up to our classics but also stand apart from them.

My old man Shorty was a huge figure in my musical life. He wrote [Blackfoot’s] “Train, Train” and Ronnie wrote “The Ballad of Curtis Lowe” [from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 album, Second Helping] with him in mind. The old guy once told me, “If you ever want to make something happen and be noticed, do something different.” And that’s basically the advice we followed here, and it started with getting a really different kind of producer, Bob Marlette, who brought a lot to the table.

I know a lot of people fear getting older, but in a way it’s great. You lose fear and don’t really care about how others see you. And after you get older and have been around long enough, people show a little respect whether they like your music or not. It’s hard for anybody in life to keep going through tragedy, but we all lose loved ones. Tragedies happen to everyone, and they happened to us in the public eye. People who have been following us have seen the band go through a lot and they relate to that. When people see you go through so much, they get closer to you. We’ve been through a lot and we’re still standing. Still unbroken.

We actually began writing “Still Unbroken” right after Leon [Wilkeson, original bassist] passed in 2001. We worked on it with Hughie [Thomasson, who left Skynyrd in 2005 to reunite the Outlaws and passed away two years later] but never finished it. Then, as we were getting ready to start writing sessions for this recording, Gary listened through a bunch of cassettes of old songs to see if there was anything worth going back to, and he came across this song. We could hear Hughie talking and it was really moving in ways that are hard to describe. It’s what really got us going on this album. It all started there.

MEDLOCKE In the middle of recording this album, we lost our bassist, Ean Evans, and Billy Powell, one of our best friends, a brother, one of the original guys who had been with us all those years. We were at a point where we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We thought that maybe we should call it a day. But you’ve got an obligation to the fans, the people who have been there all those years. And we are three generations deep into fans, just like we sing on [the God & Guns track] “Skynyrd Nation,” and we owe it to them, to give them something. We decided to finish the record and go forward.

MEDLOCKE I really took my time to get a great sound, and Bob helped me come up with a cool approach to my tone. I’ve got a few great old Marshalls that I use live: ’71 and ’72 heads and an old combo with 2x12s. When I did the heavy tracks with drop tunings, I used both heads into different cabinets and then ran into the Marshall combo with a totally clean sound. I got different tones on all three, and they were mixed together for one huge sound. I tracked using either my new Floyd Rose–equipped, hollowed-out center Les Pauls, which the Gibson Custom Shop has made me, or my old Black Beauty. Once I got a solid rhythm track, I would come back and use an old Tele that has a real pristine ping on the top end and run it through the same amp setup and run another rhythm track. Bob mixed it all together to form the basic tracks for most songs, and it just sounded huge.

ROSSINGTON [laughs] I don’t know. That’s two pretty wild bookends. Musicians respect each other if they think one another are good. We didn’t all get in the same room and become buddies, but everybody was on the same page. Jerry is a friend of ours and is so great. He’s the best Dobro player there is. I called him up and asked him to come in, and he laid down his tracks in one or two takes, and we all watched him in awe. He played Dobro on “God & Guns” and electric slide on “Unwrite This Song.” Rob came in because he was a friend of Doug Marlette and John5, and he did some really cool vocal tracks on the song “Floyd.”

MEDLOCKE Through Bob Marlette. Johnny, Gary and myself were writing and John came by. He walked in wearing the whole stage getup—spiked hair, big boots, black fingernails, no eyebrows—and we kind of stared at him. The first thing we asked was, “What’s your background?” And he goes, “My parents raised me on Hee Haw.” Then he took out his Telecaster and started playing Roy Clark licks better than Roy Clark. And he was in! This guy is an unbelievable guitar player who can play everything, from country to jazz to the heaviest rock. We just enjoyed having John with us so much.

I will say this much, however: we are all looked at like we don’t work, we just run up and down the road and party all the time, that it’s nothing but sex, drugs and rock and roll. But fuck that. We work our asses off for a living. You’re looking at a band that’s got granddads in it, a band that’s been through hell and high water. Now after all that work, all that time paying my taxes—and I’ve always adhered to the law and walked that line—I’m finding that I’m paying out so much of my hard-earned money to cover everything from A to Z. And I am very much upset about it.

MEDLOCKE I’m not sure what Ronnie was thinking when he wrote that [“Saturday Night Special”] or what he believed in. I for one heavily believe in taking guns out of the wrong hands. I am all for background checks before anybody’s able to own anything. I happen to have a concealed weapons permit, and I’ve had background checks on me. I don’t have a criminal record. As for assault weapons, get them off the street. There are certain steps we could take to make it right for everybody, and I’m all for them.

As for the gun part, I happen to be old school and own a lot of guns, but I collect them. Guns to me represent your choice, your freedom to be an individual. People shouldn’t take it so bluntly and verbatim, but Skynyrd’s always been pretty damn bold and outspoken and known for pushing the envelope. One of the reasons we didn’t call it “Still Unbroken” is we wanted to move past all the bad stuff and make a new statement, something that reflected contemporary America.

ROSSINGTON At the time, Ronnie liked Wallace and was for him, and the whole country seemed to be against [Wallace]. The background singers did sing “Boo boo boo” because that was supposed to represent everyone else saying they didn’t like him. The very last ad lib Ronnie did on there [during the piano solo] was “Montgomery’s got the answer.” Montgomery was the capital where Wallace was. No one’s ever really noticed it’s on there.

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