Singing Songs About the Southlands

Following Friday's episode of My Name is Earl, I immediately went on-line and ordered Lynyrd Skynyrd's debut album, Pronounced. Yes, in the midst of a comedy show that is quite good, I was a marketing victim.

Dammit!

Quite a good album, though.

It was almost impossible to like Lynyrd Skynyrd when I was a teen in the 70s. There was punk rock, for a start, which had proclaimed all other forms of music to be self-indulgent rubbish (I didn't like punk, but still); then there was the notorious appearance of Skynyrd on the Old Grey Whistle Test, their interminable live version of "Free Bird." It was very uncool to admit to liking guitar solos in that atmosphere.

The clincher, though, for me, was that I'd committed a lot of head time to the likes of Dylan and Springsteen, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground, and the meeting of the two kinds of music in my brain would have caused some kind of anti-matter explosion.

So I didn't know that Pronounced wasn't filled with cock-rock posturing and screeching vocals, and nor was it filled with extended Blues jams, in the manner of the Allmans.

In fact, it's one step on from Exile on Main Street, but with better guitarists and un-faked American accents. I bought it for "Tuesday's Gone," but they're all quite good.

This is their album before all their songs started to be about being in a rock band that was always on the road. These are the songs they wrote before that happened to them. And, crucially, before they wrote those terrible lyrics to "Sweet Home Alabama."

Universal records proudly proclaim on the crappy CD cover that they're proud to re-issue this (and other) previously deleted records. And they wonder why people swap music on-line? They own some of the crown jewels of music history and delete it from their catalogue? What, because it wasn't selling as many copies as Britney's latest effort? Shitters.