'Freebird' ultimately unforgettable

Lynyrd Skynyrd released the song 35 years ago. Since then, it has been an anthem, a demand, an ode to personal independence and the lamest heckle in the history of rock.

Thirty-five years ago, Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd -- playing next Sunday with Kid Rock at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park -- released the single "Freebird," and in the decades since it has been an anthem, a demand, an ode to personal independence, 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.

And yet, Finkelman is right -- depending whom you ask, 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.

Besides, there's a case to be made that whatever dignity it had, Chicago may have soiled it.

Birth of 'Freebird'

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, 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.

"People forget that was a meaningful song," said Tim Tuten, owner of North Side pub/music venue The Hideout. "It was about someone who wasn't going to accept what was doled out. It may sound goofy, but that was a real sentiment back then."

"Freebird" was an extension of one's values, he said. "Anyone could play for three minutes, but real music meant real long music. The heavy lifting. It was like a class thing."

Tuten would spend summers in South Carolina with cousins "embarrassed by Skynyrd -- because Skynyrd were celebratory rednecks. But music was getting wimpy in the late '70s -- Joy Division, Bauhaus. 'Freebird' was becoming a joke."

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."

Patterson Hood, leader of Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers -- which released a 2-CD exploration of Skynyrd's legacy, "Southern Rock Opera" -- said he grew up in a small town in Alabama in the 1970s and that song was "deadly serious, and still is. But I feel like I could write you a dissertation in defense of it as being one of the most underrated songs in rock history and I could write about its utter banality, and in both papers I would be sincere. To be truthful, it didn't even occur to me there might be irony in 'Freebird' until I moved from my small town to a city."