BEFORE: This week is all about rock bands going on tour, umm, and the good and the bad about all that. Thankfully this is a rich tapestry of subject matter, so many docs have been made about this - it's not JUST about putting the band together and making records, we know the real money comes from getting out on the road and selling concert tickets and t-shirts. And if you're not recording the new album in a studio, you need to be out there on tour promoting the last album. C'est la vie.
John Lennon carries over again from "Elton John: Never Too Late". I'm now past the halfway point for this year's Doc Block, so there's no clear winner yet for who's going to appear in the most films, either in-person or via archive footage. But Sally Field is now still leading for the year with 10 appearances after appearing in "Forrest Gump" footage in that terribly-made doc about Tom Hanks. Tied with Eddie Murphy for third place right now are Johnny Carson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, who could all turn up some more in the 2nd half. Heck, so could Eddie Murphy, he gets around.
THE PLOT: Explores the music and back story of the legendary American band - frontman Ronnie Van Zant's roots, work ethic and contradictory persona as well as the relationships between his friends and bandmates.
AFTER: I'm not even that big of a Skynyrd fan, I do own their Greatest Hits album (do people still buy albums?) and that may be due to my long-time membership in the Columbia Record & Tape Club (does that still exist?) where I bought greatest hits albums from a LOT of bands - but not from Elton John, for some reason. I only have Elton's "Rare Masters" CD and also a collection of 16 covers he released from 1969/70. So, weirdly, I have recordings of Elton John covering two songs that CCR was known for - "Travelin' Band", "Up Around the Bend" and "Cottonfields". The "Rare Masters" CD has the cover of "I Saw Her Standing There" that he and John Lennon played live in that Thanksgiving concert. I don't know what made me check my iTunes (does anyone else still use iTunes?).
I'm pretty sure that Elton never covered Lynyrd Skynyrd, or vice versa - that would just be too weird. So maybe this is a bit of an odd turn I'm taking tonight, but the acts next to each other in the Doc Block don't need to be similar, or related, or even if they've never met each other, it doesn't matter - as long as John Lennon appears in yesterday's doc and also today's, then the chain remains unbroken. We're approaching a Beatles/John Lennon weekend, and that's a little weird because 300 movies ago, or last year around this same time, I was also using John Lennon as a link. Hey, John Lennon got around and met a lot of people in the music industry at various times.
Anyway, the album I own is called "Skynyrd's Innards" and I don't listen to it very often, but I don't listen to any music very often these days. It's got "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird" on it, also "That Smell" and "Call Me the Breeze" and "Gimme Three Steps", really, what more do I need from that band? Oh, right, "What's Your Name", but that's there too. So no need for me to do any deeper dive, if I want to listen to Skynyrd, I'm covered. For southern rock I kind of prefer the Georgia Satellites, but they haven't made a new album for a while, I think Dan Baird went solo and the band broke up. They only had three albums, but the third one was the best - by their second album they were already covering "Whole Lotta Shakin" from Jerry Lee Lewis and "Don't Pass Me By" by the Beatles, so people had pegged them as a one-hit wonder and didn't stick around for album #3, which was a shame.
Skynyrd, right, sorry, got off track again. You're probably here for stories of the plane crash in 1977 where two band members and a back-up singer died, and put the whole band on hiatus for ten years. Well, sure, the doc's going to get there, but it's got to build up to it - I'm a bit surprised they don't lead off with the plane crash and then flash back for the whole history of the band, which is a technique I just learned the name of last night - "in media res". A conversation with a co-worker about the screenplay he wants to write let me to learn this, I'd been calling it the "splashpage" technique after comic books. Come to think of it, I think this doc DOES mention the plane crash straight away and then flashes back to the whole history of the band. So never mind, all is as it should be. First we have to see how the band comes together, before we can understand how it falls apart.
The Elton John doc did the same thing, we saw how Elton started out on solo piano and then he added a two-piece combo of a drummer and a bassist, and that worked well for a few years before they found out about regular guitars and added one of those. Most of those guys stayed with Elton for his whole career, I think maybe two passed away during his career, but the rest played at the Farewell Concert. Well, the Lynyrd Skynyrd band had a different fate in store, the core of the band played together at high school dances and such, but then after graduation (for those that did graduate, one just stopped going) they had to really expand the band line-up if they were going to make records and go on tour like the Beatles.
The first line-up was Ronnie and Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Larry Junstrom and Bob Burns, and the original bandname was My Backyard. Several line-up changes followed, their roadie Billy became their keyboard guy when he accidentally showed them he could play, and they added guitarist Ed King, who'd been in a real band before, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, but he was an L.A. and felt like he didn't belong. When Burns had a meltdown and left, he was replaced by drummer Artemis Pyle, who was a hippie vegetarian, and everyone else in the band felt he didn't belong. The band managed to be rather successful between 1973 and 1977, but as one band member put it, it's hard to get to the top, and even harder to stay there.
We do finally learn the answer to where the band got their better name, for years people have wondered if it came from the novelty song "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" by Allan Sherman, which mentions a kid named Leonard Skinner who "got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner" - or did it come from a gym teacher that the band members had in high school? Both answers are correct, because they were aware of that comedy record, but also had a P.E. teacher with the same name, Leonard Skinner, and wanted to make fun of him. The teacher hassled the kids with long hair because there was a school policy against it, so this was their revenge.
The band got signed by Al Kooper, who you may remember was depicted playing the organ at the start of "Like a Rolling Stone" in the studio with Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown". Al worked in the studio to produce their albums a certain way, but Al was also very afraid of Ronnie Van Zandt who was known for having temper tantrums after drinking. The band went on tour in 1973, opening up for The Who, promoting their album Quadrophenia - and if you think Keith Moon from the Who was famous for trashing hotel rooms, the guys from Skynyrd apparently put him to shame. A few just wanted to relax after a concert, but most of these Southern bros just wanted to party - so alcohol, drugs, groupies, you know the drill.
A few ironies happened before the plane crash - Allen Collins and Garry Rossington both had bad car accidents over Labor Day weekend in 1976, and this is what inspired the band's song "That Smell", a cautionary tale about drug abuse and how bad it is to drive stoned. So Van Zant and other band members were actually trying to cut down on the band's substance abuse, because they'd seen how dangerous it could be. Then there were more line-up changes, Van Zant had yelled at Ed King one too many times (because of guitar strings breaking, but if you believe Ed King's story, that happened because his roadie had been partying for days with other band members) so Ed left the band, and was replaced by Steve Gaines, who just showed up to play replacement guitar at the next concert and, well, passed the audition. Second drummer Rickey Medlocke wanted to transition from drums to guitar, and when there were no openings in that department, also left the band (Again this is a year before the crash - Ed and Rickey left, and Steve joined at perhaps the worst possible time. But hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?)
Their plane had been having problems - but it was always, "Well, we'll get to the next stop, then we'll really have someone take a look at the plane." Probably in all of aviation history nothing good has ever come after saying something like that. And after their performance on October 20, 1977 in Greenville, South Carolina, they needed to get on the plane because they had a concert in Baton Rouge the following night. So the choices were to either cancel the concert and get the plane fixed, or go ahead with the flight, and so the concert got cancelled anyway. At least if they'd stopped for plane maintenance three band members might not have died and the rest wouldn't have been injured. So the next time your flight is delayed because they're doing some maintenance on the plane, just think how your situation could be so much worse.
It's a horrible, horrible thing, six people died and others were injured and took months, years to recover. It was probably little solace that the band had released their fifth album three days before, and the publicity from the crash moved the album to number 5 on the Billboard 200. The band literally dis-banded without their lead singer and founding member, and didn't come back together until 1987, with Johnny Van Zandt replacing his older brother and Ed King came back to join the crash survivors, and Rickey finally got to play guitar instead of drums. The reformed band was only supposed to do a tribute tour, but then made a new album in 1991, which caused all kinds of legal problems, because there was some kind of legal agreement with Ronnie and Steve's widows that nobody could use the band name for profit, so as a settlement they were allowed to collect 30% of the band's income going forward, theoretically what their husbands would have earned if there were no plane crash.
The band is still touring now, I think, but all the original members have passed away at various times, I mean, I guess people still want to hear the songs live but I wonder how many of the fans are aware of the band's history and realize they're looking at nothing but replacements. Maybe they know and they don't care. Fans did complain when the band stopped displaying the Confederate flag, so that should give you some idea what the politics are of Skynyrd fans - southern and conservative. I bet they also don't know that the band use to record songs in favor of gun control, and some of them were hippies or vegetarians. But hey, at least some of them were genuine Florida swamp people, unlike those San Francisco kids in Creedence Clearwater Revival, who only pretended to be.
There is a longer documentary about Lynyrd Skynyrd, but I'm not that sure about the linking, and so I'm going to table that one, maybe next year, we'll see. I'm probably covered on the subject.
Directed by Stephen Kijak (director of "Sid & Judy" and "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed")
Also starring Bob Burns, Larry Junstrom, Edward King (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Al Kooper (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Rickey Medlocke, Artimus Pyle, Gary Rossington, Johnny Van Zant, Michael Cartellone, Carol Chase, Keith Christopher, Randall Cooper, Charlie Daniels (last seen in "Dare to Be Different"), Dwain Easley, Kevin Elson, Bill Fehrs, Brantley Gilbert, Devon Gilfillian, Leslie Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, Peter Keys, Dale Krantz-Rossington, Mark Matejka, Rodney Mills, Mike Rounsaville, Samuel Torres-Duque, Judy Van Zant Jenness, Alan Walden,
with archive footage of Ronnie Van Zant (also last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Allen Collins (ditto), JoJo Billingsley, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Remastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black"), Roger Daltrey (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), Keith Moon (ditto), Pete Townshend (ditto), John Entwistle (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Cassie Gaines, Steve Gaines, David Johansen (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Dean Kilpatrick, Jim Ladd, Walter McCreary, Jack Nicholson (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), May Pang (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Billy Powell, Lacy Van Zant, Leon Wilkeson, Tom Wills, Neil Young (last seen in "Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon")
RATING: 5 out of 10 trips to Muscle Shoals
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