Lynyrd Skynyrd
I Never Dreamed

It is true that it takes about a minute and twenty seconds before Ronnie starts singing. And in that minute and twenty, the guitars dazzle to the point that it's hard to focus on the words when they finally arrive. But you can give it a try. Let the music flow. Wait for that moment and listen carefully to what the lyrics say. The first sentence would be enough.

“Dad told me ‘Be strong, my son, and don’t cry’.

Dad.

But how. Wait a minute.

They told us that rockers were the rebellious ones, those who I hope I die before I get old, those who to hell with the old generation. And now I hear someone (who truly was a rocker, and who would ever say otherwise) bringing up his dad, and not to send him to hell. Recalling what once his father told him, when Ronnie was still too young to grow a beard.

But it sounds strange up to a certain point. Beyond that point, everything begins to sound more familiar.

Who doesn't remember ‘Simple Man’?

There it was the mother, who took Ronnie aside. She told him ‘come here for a moment, sit next to me. I have something to tell you’. That is, to teach you. And one day, you'll find this teaching useful.

A Mick Jagger would never have sung anything like that.

And in fact, he never did. When he tried to sound tender, more often than not he sounded sly. Either he managed to play the lecher, or he went for the romantic, churning out the syrupy stuff he often served us, from the falsetto of ‘Fool to Cry’ onwards. Mom and dad, though, not so much. Geez. Leave them where they are (and ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ doesn't count, for obvious reasons). It's okay to be tender, but mom and dad don't go hand in hand with rock'n'roll.

Of course, one might argue whether songs like ‘Fool to Cry’ and ‘Memory Motel’ (two names for two) really have anything to do with rock'n'roll, but that's not the point. That (the point) you've already got. Or I hope.

Ronnie Van Zant didn’t need to act tender; that wasn’t his purpose. Nor did he intend to make you think of scenarios from Little House on the Prairie or, I don’t know, McLeod’s Daughters or some of those (ammmmerican) tender things with violins and tearful notes in the background. Those kinds of things. The kind where you’d say: get your tissues ready (if you have time and if you have them on hand). Because someone always dies, and if it’s the horse, all the worse.

By the way: I've never seen an episode of McLeod’s Daughters (which I hear are Australian and not American), and I don't even know what those sisters look like or how many there are, but I’ve always had the feeling that it’s one of those things where someone dies and then there are tears. And if it were the horse? No, I could never handle it.

But in Southern mythology (which is a myth for us, but for Ronnie Van Zant it was a mixture of myth and childhood memories; and this we often forget), there is always that moment; the one where a parent takes the child aside and tells him a truth. That over time, the child will discover to be true.

After all, they’ve been through it already: the old ones predicted everything, the old ones always knew it, the old ones were right. And now, only now, do I realize it. How true it was.

The real blues of ‘I Never Dreamed’ is all here: it’s not despair, demons, nihilism. It’s just how you remain when you discover loneliness and abandonment for what they really are. The void. It’s the... "yes, I had heard about it (from mom or dad), but I didn’t think it was really like this".

I would have never expected it.

Beyond the guitars, beyond ‘Sweet Home Alabama’”, beyond those who “the Southern is always the same rhetoric + the usual boogie nonsense”, I would explain the Southern like this. If you like.

It's whiskey and screaming amplifiers, but sometimes it’s this blues of a something looming that often arrives unexpectedly. When it arrives, it hurts. I thought I was so strong, and yet here it is.

His mother had told Ronnie. Don’t live too "over the top", be content. Because then the bad times come. Not to mention destiny, which has the habit of getting in the way.

And where is the rhetoric?

The Lynyrd Skynyrd (the real, that is the only ones) end here, without knowing they’re writing their own epitaph. Or perhaps they had some intuition?

In just under thirty-six minutes (long live brevity), ‘Street Survivors’ provides a perfect summary of what rock’n’roll is. But apart from the flames on the cover (stay with the thoughts you prefer...), more than once this something looming resurfaces.

‘That Smell’ is a song that reeks of death, as well as cocaine. They say Ronnie wrote that text because he felt something, he had a premonition. "You say tomorrow everything will be fine, but tomorrow might not be here for you". Rhetorical too?

How can there be rhetoric, when reality surpasses the script of the best film. Think of Allen Collins, and everything that happened to him from that October 20th ‘77 to 1990. It's easy to get carried away, with words like "curse". And yet Death, which couldn’t take him on that flight, had no peace (and didn’t let him have peace) until it returned to settle the score.

In Little House on the Prairie, you'll never hear stories like this.