Lynyrd Skynyrd
(Pronounced Léh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

It was a Thursday evening, like many others... I must have been 13 or 14 years old, and after dinner, I plopped down on the couch to see what was on TV. I switched to Rete 4, and guess what the heck was on!? "Walker Texas Ranger"!! A small aside: I am now 29 years old, I flip channels on TV to Rete 4, and what do they show? Always Walker!! Not that I mind, I consider Chuck Norris a second father, having grown up on bread, Chuck Norris, and bagna cauda, but seriously!! Don't they have anything else to put on Rete 4???? Anyway, after Walker, there was a Terence Hill movie, I think it was "Renegade-un osso troppo duro" (and here again, almost all the seasons.. damn Piersilvio!!). In the opening scene, there was Terence traveling in the middle of the desert in an off-road vehicle, with a simple but direct guitar arpeggio in the background that got stuck in my head.. The next day at school, I asked my friends whose guitar piece that was (they had seen the movie too..) and after various investigations, a friend of mine said, "it's Scainards!!" It was the intro to "Simple Man," with Gary Rossington on the Les Paul.. a bolt from the blue!!

From then on, Lynyrd Skynyrd became one of my favorite bands, especially this debut album: listening to it immediately brings to mind the wild and desolate roads of the West, motels and saloons filled with Hell's Angels drinking, belching, and playing pool... what a spectacle! The band formed in '64 from the passion for music shared by three friends and college mates in Jacksonville (Florida). They were Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington, and Allen Collins, three hotheads passionate about the rock bands of the British Invasion (Who, Stones, Kinks..). Their first group was called "The Noble Five," which became "My Backyard" after Rickey Medlocke and Leon Wilkenson joined them, the future drummer and bassist of the band.

Their sound was based on aggressive guitar riffs, over which vocalist Van Zant came in with his rough and charismatic singing, like a true Southern man! After touring various clubs in Florida, the band managed to build a small but very loyal group of fans and began to play outside their state, especially in Alabama and Georgia, where they achieved increasing success. They decided to change their name to Lynyrd Skynyrd around 1970, as a joke paraphrasing the name of their high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, a staunch supporter of repressive policies towards young people with long hair; their relationship was terrible at school, but over the years they became friends, and the teacher, who passed away in 2010, even opened one of their concerts with a speech at the Memorial Coliseum in Jacksonville in 1975.

In 1972 (after various lineup changes and with the entry into the band of third guitarist Ed King from the Californian band Strawberry Alarm Clock), they caught the attention of a certain Al Kooper, formerly a member of Blood, Sweat & Tears and the author of the magnificent organ piece in Bob Dylan's famous "Like a Rolling Stone." Kooper was impressed by the group and decided to take them under his protective wing, becoming their producer and endorsing them to MCA Records, which signed them.

The Skynyrd secluded themselves to write on a farm in the middle of the countryside and in August 1973 brought to light “Pronounced..”, their debut, which immediately became a cornerstone in the history of Southern Rock: 8 tracks encapsulating rock, country, and blues, three-guitar solos, honky-tonk piano, and loads of energy! The band picked up the baton from the Allman Brothers Band, an exceptional group that had created Southern Rock a few years prior by merging various musical genres such as blues, country, and jazz, which during that period had been struck by various misfortunes, including the death of guitarist Duane Allman in a motorcycle accident in '71, and a year later, under the same circumstances and on the same road, the bassist Barry Oakley.

The album begins with the fierce "I Ain't the One," opened by a great guitar riff by Gary Rossington that creates the base where King's Stratocaster and Collins' Gibson Firebird intertwine, and continues with the dreamy "Tuesday's Gone," a standout piece of an entire career, a slow ballad with a country blues flavor, enriched by Kooper's mellotron and the delicate piano of keyboardist Billy Powell, a former roadie who was recruited by the band before the album's release. The song was also covered by Metallica on their 1998 album "Garage Inc".

After the blues-based "Gimme Three Steps" which flexes its muscles with its determined pace, you move to the marvelous "Simple Man," another ballad where the narrator’s mother urges her son to be a simple man in life, stay out of trouble, appreciate the little things, but also be strong and prepare for life's problems and sad moments. Noteworthy is the central solo always by Rossington, who co-wrote the piece with the singer. Following that is "Things Goin' On," with its fabulous country piano, the acoustic "Mississippi Kid," which sounds like it sprung out of a delta blues by Robert Johnson, a pure blues piece where Collins tackles the bottleneck, and "Poison Whiskey," another harder but equally beautiful piece.

The cherry on top is a song that will enter the annals of rock history, performed as the closing track in their concerts from '73 to October 19, 1977, the date of the last performance of the original lineup, due to a terrible plane crash near Gillsburg (Mississippi), where Van Zant and three other band members perished. The song is "Free Bird," a manifesto with "Jessica" and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" by the Allman Bros (not to mention "Sweet Home Alabama" by the same Skynyrd) of the true and pure Southern. The piece starts as a slow ballad, where Rossington's slide guitar and Powell's piano dominate, then accelerates and spills into a historic and ever more frenetic solo where the three guitarists perform an infernal tour de force with their instruments, maximizing their talents, especially live, where the song would reach 15-20 minutes in length. The piece itself (which was dedicated to Duane Allman, who passed away a couple of years earlier and was a hero to Ronnie and company) was covered by many bands, including Dream Theater, who made their own live version in the nineties. "Free Bird" entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart directly at number 19 and achieved incredible success, both at the time and still today.

One of the greatest debut albums and, in my opinion, an essential work in the history of rock. Thank you Lynyrd Skynyrd and thank you Terence Hill!!