Record basics

• Album name: One More For From The Road
• Group name: Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Year: 1976
• Number of discs: two
• Label: MCA Records
• Collection: Essex
• Distinguishing characteristics: price sticker on back of album
• Buy it on Amazon: $34.83

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’ve listened to my fair share of Lynyrd Skynyrd, though not much in the past twenty years or so (and once described Sweet Home Alabama as “half-loathsome, half-exquisite”). I’ve never listened to this record, though.

What I expected

This is a live double album from mid-1970s Lynyrd Skynyrd.

What it was actually like

This record was great and I loved listening to it! In general I found it to have been really tightly performed and well produced, with a ton of guitars and rhythm overlaying and interplaying with one another across almost every song.

Besides the three backup singers, by the way, the album credits seven band members – three playing guitar plus another playing bass guitar, one playing keyboard, one on drums, and another dedicated vocalist – highly unusual for rock groups, which often have three members (power trio) or four (adding a “rhythm” guitar or keyboard, or a singer who doesn’t play an instrument). Having four guitars and a keyboard really seems to have helped Lynyrd Skynyrd make their songs more powerful.

Tuesday’s Gone was the only song that I didn’t like very much at all. It was far slower than all the rest, less complex musically, less interesting, and just boring enough that I could barely keep track of what was going on from one line to the next.

There was also a problem with the second LP that caused it to be a bit warped, which meant that the first tracks on each side, Saturday Night Special and Gimme Three Steps skipped a lot. Missing the former didn’t bother me that much, but I was disappointed not to hear the latter, since I had remembered it as one of my favorite of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s songs, but fortunately Youtube has preserved it.

Whiskey Rock-a-Roller and Call Me the Breeze stood out as being more blues songs than hard rock like the rest of the record, with more prominent piano (and also slightly Oompa Loompa), and I found both more fun, while T for Texas was an outstanding electric blues song.

The vocals on this recording of Sweet Home Alabama were not that strong (probably an artifact of the concert environment), but as I listened to it, I thought it was totally understandable why it was a hit, as it really is a great song. And interestingly, though I’m not sure if it was intended or not or if I’m just imagining things, parts of The Needle and the Spoon sounded like a reprise of Sweet Home Alabama, especially the guitar riff, reminding me of The Who.

The song that I was most interested and excited to hear, Crossroads, turned out to be the best on the record, and although it was credited to Robert Johnson alone, it was very similar to Eric Clapton‘s version that I thought was on Cream’s Disraeli Gears, but actually was released as a single.

And finally, Free Bird, which of course I think is kind of a lame song, but they really pulled a lot out of it and I would have enjoyed hearing it in person – as long as everyone around me wasn’t doing cringe concert stuff^[1].

Grade

5/5: love it