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LYNYRD SKYNYRD
Street Survivors (Deluxe Edition)
(Geffen)

by GRANT ALDEN

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- But for the passionate arguments of Patterson Hood, Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably be remembered here only as the music blaring from the bondo camaros the rough smoking guys stood around with their high school girls, who probably did put out. Or as the flames LP, recalled and redesigned after the plane went down, a lower case butcher album on the collector market.

Or, and this is the most inexact fate, for its principal single: "What's Your Name," a cavalier -- wonderful word, that, for both meanings fit: its archaic sense as a gentleman, and its present connotation of disrespect -- ode to the rock star life of the 1970s. It is the kind of song which would have kept me from listening to the band, much less the album, for that kind of hedonism has always seemed both below and beyond me.

And yet.

And yet it is a finely drawn, carefully rendered song, or so it plays today. (So it played then, but I couldn't hear it, too much a fan of Peter Green and Keith Emerson.) Effortless in its simplicity, and deceptive for all that. It's a nasty guitar riff, a nasty, predatory song. And it's not. In 1977 that opening line about a limo driver smelled of debauchery, but now it seems quite self-evident that musicians should not drive themselves around strange towns, particularly when they're achieved a certain iconic status. And "little girl"; man, that plays differently now than I think it was meant when written. "I've done made some plans" and "I've found a little queen/and I know I can treat her right" roots the singer's class, there's been a fight in the hotel bar, and yet the closing line for the one night stand is this: "shouldn't you stay/little girl/though there ain't no shame." Shame. In the end, of course, the singer offers cab fare home, same time next year. A gentleman, despite himself. In addition to himself.

The temptation, then, is to let that song frame Street Survivors as an album celebrating the wretched excess of '70s rockstardom, only this simple eight-song LP is far more complex than that. Remember that it was built during the era of rock operas and concept albums, and remember that albums were conceived of as comprehensive statements, as suites. That sequencing was important.

Except the second track is "That Smell," Ronnie Van Zant's voyage through the same territory Neil Young explored with "The Needle And The Damage Done," with more preaching and less fury, if that makes any sense. The juxtaposition here cannot have been accidental. And, in passing, I wonder if some of the street jargon -- "'ludes", in particular -- is as impenetrable to most of today's listeners as Billy Joe Shaver's dominecker hen was until I realized it was a specific kind of barnyard animal, and nothing less...nor more).

Point being, the balance of the album seems like a meditation on the singer's transition from roving hotel cavalier to family man ("One More Time," "I Never Dreamed," etc.). The second side, of course, opens with "You Got That Right," another one of those feral, fighting songs for which the band was justly famous. But it closes with "Ain't No Good Life," which almost certainly has to be a nod to Willie Nelson's "Night Life," doesn't it? Only it feels more like Haggard: "I want to know/Tell me why is it so?/Well, just 'cause I don't pray/Lord that don't mean I ain't forgiven/Just because I'm alive/that don't mean I'm making a living." (There's a song begging to be recast as southern gospel, should, say, Mike Farris happen by needing material.)

And on those terms, as a self-conceived work of art, not simply as an ode to the sybaritic excesses of the road, this is one hell of an album. And, of course, it rocks.

This deluxe edition reissue appends the original eight tracks with a second disc, which you will listen to once. It includes the first version of the album, produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, known (apparently) as the Criteria Studios Album. The same eight songs, only they sound as if they were played by a really competent cover band who had learned them note by note from careful tablature. Dowd has a great reputation, though I confess to not really knowing his work. This, too, is a fascinating reminder (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is another) that musicians aren't simply being petulant artists when they reject all that work because it comes off wrong. Somehow Dowd neutered a band, neutered these songs. It's bizarre to listen to, but no fun at all.

And then there are five live tracks from August, 1977, just before the crash. But the sound quality's not much, and I can't make it through them. So you're on your own there.

Some of us will always wonder what Jimi Hendrix might have become had he struck up a working relationship with Miles Davis. What Buddy Holly might have made of Sgt. Peppers and Phil Spector, or whether he'd have gotten their first, somehow. (But not, somehow, what Kurdt Cobain might have come up with; he wasn't going to pull through, not that burning ember, though I wasn't clever enough to see that.) I don't often put Ronnie Van Zant and Skynyrd in that same dream world, the one in which he steals Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets about 1998 and...oh, that's just silly.

And this is a serious album, conflicted, complex, and a whole lot of fun. And sad, for there was no next year.