‘Freebird’ endures as song, heckle

By CHRISTOPHER BORELLI

The joke seems to be fading.

CHICAGO — Thirty-five years ago, Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd released the single “Freebird,” and in the decades since it has been an anthem, a demand, an ode to personal independence, and the lamest heckle in the history of rock.

But what it has never been is forgettable — not to the band who played it, not to the disparate acts who still get a rowdy “Freebird!” shouted at them, regardless of what they play or who they are.

“The best thing about touring Europe is no one yells ‘Freebird,’” said James McNew, bass player for the indie band Yo La Tengo.

But some say people aren’t shouting “Freebird!” like they used to.

Tim Rutili, the Chicago musician who once fronted Red Red Meat and now leads Califone, said he only gets “Freebird!” shouted at him “maybe once every few years.” Which is sad, because what would going to a concert be without that one person who shouts “Freebird”?

Yet, earlier this year, the world came closer to no Lynyrd Skynyrd at all — the current touring incarnation of the 40-year-old band was on the verge of calling it quits after pianist Billy Powell died in January of heart failure at 56. (He wrote the plaintive opening melody of “Freebird.”)

Indeed, the legacy of “Freebird” is so long and misunderstood — whatever meaning it once had stripped by years of drunken hollers — it only feels right to return that dignity, before it’s too late.

In October 1977, the band — formed in Jacksonville, Fla., and set to play seven sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden — was traveling to Baton Rouge, La., when their plane ran out of gas and plunged into a swamp in Mississippi.

Three seconds before impact, Gene Odom, head of security for Skynyrd and a close friend of Ronnie Van Zant’s, said he remembers grabbing the sleeping singer and slapping him. “Then someone said, ‘Trees,’ and I got thrown by the fuselage.”

Odom lost an eye, broke his back, broke his neck and lost a friend — Van Zant died, effectively ending Lynyrd Skynyrd. “So when you tell me people yell ‘Freebird’ as a joke?” Odom asked. “I would say that’s offensive. Knowing how hard that band worked, how much that song meant — that’s sad.”

Said Artimus Pyle (also injured in the crash), former drummer for Skynyrd: “Someone yells it as a joke, I’m in that room, I’ll punch them in the mouth. That’s no joke. My friends died living out that song.”

The origins of the song date to a 1969 rehearsal, said guitarist Gary Rossington.

Guitarist Allen Collins “had the chords. He walked around playing them for hours. Ronnie was laying on the couch, then just started singing the words.”

But Odom remembers differently. He said the opening lines — “If I leave here tomorrow/would you still remember me” — came from Collins’ wife. She was frustrated with the band’s constant touring.

Skynyrd had become a monster on the Southern bar circuit, performing five sets every night.

“Thing is, though, people didn’t clap,” Rossington said. “‘Freebird’ was the first song we had [that] people clapped for.”

So they kept it in their back pockets to solicit applause, even after they graduated to stadiums.

Which is how the best-known version — from the 1976 live album “One More for the Road” — came together. “What song is it you want to hear?” Van Zant asks the Atlanta audience and gets a roaring “Freebird!”

According to music publisher BMI, that version — 14 minutes long, with the audience shout — has been played on rock radio more than 2 million times.

Pyle puts the transition at about 1980. For him, “Freebird” had become “this defiant thing.”

Which is how it played in the South — as a sassy thumb in the eye of encroaching cosmopolitanism, and a dare to other bands to deliver “the level of excitement that Skynyrd did,” said Marley Brant, author of 2002’s “Freebirds: The Lynyrd Skynyrd Story.”

Generally, bands ignore the shout. But Flight of the Conchords will play it. Aimee Mann, faced with it, will feign ignorance and play “Sweet Home Alabama.” And Built to Spill plays it straight.