Obituaries

The smell of death surrounds you

Posted on by brucehhackett

October 20, 1977. Gene Odom, bodyguard for Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and the band’s head of security, got into a heated argument with pilot Walter McCreary. The 1948 Conair twin-prop plane the band had been using for most of its tour was scheduled to depart Greenville, North Carolina shortly for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the next stop on their concert tour.

Lynyrd Skynyrd, circa 1976 (L-R): Leon Wilkeson, Allen Collins, Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington, Artemus Pyle (rear), Steve Gaines, Billy Powell

The previous day on the flight from Lakeland, Florida to Greenville, flames had been observed shooting out of the plane’s right engine during the flight. Odom insisted the pilot should have the matter investigated in Greenville, but McCreary said his mechanic would be meeting them in Baton Rouge, where repairs would be made. “No, man,” Odom protested. “We’ve got a day off between shows. Have a mechanic check it here today.” McCreary refused, telling Odom to back down or be removed from the flight. “You’re a fool,” Odom angrily told McCreary.

The band and its entourage took off, and 20 minutes into the 600-mile flight, first one engine and then the other failed. It turned out they were out of fuel, which couldn’t be detected in the cockpit because the fuel gauges were broken. An emergency landing was attempted in Mississippi, but the plane clipped multiple pine trees 200 yards short of a landing strip, crashing into dense, swampy forest.

The wreckage of the band’s ill-fated Conair flight in Mississippi

Six people were killed, including Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, singer Cassie Gaines, road manager Dean Kirkpatrick and both pilots. The rest of the band — guitarists Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, keyboardist Billy Powell, bassist Leon Wilkeson and drummer Artemus Pyle — were all seriously injured with punctured organs, broken bones and deep emotional scars.

For Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had been riding an ever-broadening wave of success since their debut LP in 1973, it proved to be a devastating blow. The survivors chose to disband. Although various lineups made new albums and returned to live performances years later, they were clearly never the same after that fateful trip.

Rossington, at age 71, the last surviving original member, died this week of complications from a heart condition. As one fan commented mournfully on the group’s website, “They’re all together now.”

************************

I’ve always been mostly ambivalent about Lynyrd Skynyrd. Their brand of Southern fried boogie rock was competent enough, even exceptional at times, but I could never get past their unabashed Dixie leanings, especially the insufferable hit single “Sweet Home Alabama,” with its apparent support of segregationist George Wallace. I’ve been revisiting the band’s catalog the past several days, and I have concluded it’s a damn shame that too many people know the group mostly for that grossly overplayed, simplistic ditty. Truth be told, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s first five LPs (the pre-crash era) are chock full of great tracks, but as is too often the case with classic rock bands, their exposure is limited to just three or four songs played ad nauseum.

“Freebird,” of course, is in a category by itself. It ranks up there with Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” as a fine song so completely ruined by overexposure that it became a joke perpetuated by drunks at wedding receptions. I know I’m not alone in saying I would be very happy to never hear either of these songs ever again.

The band in August 1977

But damn, when you listen to the musicianship on Skynyrd’s repertoire, it’s abundantly clear that these guys were loaded with instrumental talent, and played like the proverbial well-oiled machine when they were at their peak. Case in point: Check out their scorching cover of J. J. Cale’s “Call Me the Breeze” from their strong “Second Helping” album, or “I Know a Little,” the infectious track Gaines wrote for their “Street Survivors” album. This was one vibrant boogie-rock band that deserved its success.

They may have been long-haired hippies who got in their share of trouble at the Jacksonville, Florida, high school where they met, in the mid-’60s, but they developed a strong work ethic and a passion for what they were doing. Even in their earlier incarnations as My Backyard, The Noble Five and The One Percent, these guys worked hard. Van Zant was notorious for insisting the group rehearse for untold hours to ensure their performances at parties, dances and clubs would be tight and precise.

The story behind their choice of the name Lynyrd Skynyrd is well known. They selected it in mock parody of their former gym teacher Leonard Skinner, who had given them a hard time about their long hair, but they thought it would be wise to alter the spelling to prevent any legal entanglements. What I didn’t know is that the name also came, in part, from a line in musical comedian Allan Sherman’s hit novelty single from the early ’60s called “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” written as a letter home from a boy at summer camp where things weren’t going so well. One verse says, “You remember Leonard Skinner? He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner!”

By 1972, the band had a decent regional following in the Deep South. At an Atlanta club called Funochio’s, rock producer/musician Al Kooper was impressed enough by their act to sign them to his new Sounds of the South label, to be distributed by MCA Records. Guitarists Collins and Rossington came up with engaging melodies and memorable riffs while Van Zant penned the lyrics, and with Kooper manning the studio boards, the group came up with a dynamic debut LP entitled, awkwardly, “Pronounced ‘Lėh-‘nérd ‘Skin-nérd.” FM stations nationwide were attracted to the interesting blend of country boogie and Southern soul inherent in eventual classics like “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Simple Man” and “Gimme Three Steps.” Meanwhile, “Freebird,” which clocked in at well over nine minutes, took on a life of its own, thanks to Rossington’s deft slide guitar on the song proper and Collins’s quicksilver soloing on the four-minute second half.

Collins, Van Zant and Rossington in concert, 1975

Said Rossington in the 1990s, “We always said we had a lot of balls back then, or gumption, whatever you call it, for playing a song that long. Singles are only three, four minutes at the most, and five is unusual. ‘Free Bird’ was nine minutes. They said, ‘Nobody will ever play that song. You guys are crazy.’”

I suppose it was inevitable that comparisons would be drawn between the group and The Allman Brothers Band, also from the South but with much more of a jazz/jam band bent. I was among those who didn’t find much similarity between the two groups, other than the guitar-heavy arrangements. Van Zant’s one-dimensional singing wasn’t in the same league as Gregg Allman, and Skynyrd’s music had little of the blues roots that so dominated the Allmans’ stuff. Still, the fact that both bands lost key members to tragic accidents perpetuated the comparisons.

Indeed, Rossington cheated death more than once. He survived a nasty drunk-driving wreck in 1976, which inspired the ominous track “That Smell” the following year that presaged the plane crash: “Whiskey bottles, brand new cars, /Oak tree, you’re in my way, /There’s too much coke and too much smoke, /Look what’s going on inside you, /Ooooh, that smell, can’t you smell that smell? /Ooooh that smell, the smell of death surrounds you…” Collins, too, had his issues with alcohol and drugs, ending up paralyzed from a 1986 car accident he caused. 

The two guitarists teamed up in 1980 to form the Rossington-Collins Band, which lasted for two albums but never approached Skynyrd’s level of popularity. Rossington was back in the fold when new lineups of Skynyrd (including Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny on vocals) were assembled in the late 1980s to stage a tribute tour to their fallen bandmates. New releases were mostly ignored by radio and the buying public, but the group attracted a new generation of fans to their concerts, registering decent crowds in the 1990s and the years since.

In recent times, when Skynyrd courted controversy by continuing to use the Confederate flag in promotional materials (which they finally dropped in 2012), Rossington said the polarizing symbol was meant to show where they were from and not to offend. “I know that sounds naïve to say, but it’s how we felt,” he admitted. “If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd,” a 2018 documentary about the star-crossed band, is a worthwhile retelling of their history.

But as I said up front, the music is what matters. Once you get past the overplayed tracks (which I included anyway for posterity), my Spotify playlist illustrates just how much Lynyrd Skynyrd had to offer and the legacy they left behind.

************************

 

Forever, forever, you’ll stay in my heart

Posted on by brucehhackett

Upon hearing of Burt Bacharach’s death last week at age 93, and then immersing myself in his many dozens of songs recorded by numerous artists, I was overcome by an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia.

I often get nostalgic when I look through old photo albums, watch old movies or, most notably, hear music from my childhood. Music from the 1960s, when I was between ages five and fifteen, can really trigger vivid memories and warm remembrances.

I can’t truthfully say I was an enormous fan of Bacharach and the songs he created with longtime lyrics-writing partner Hal David. They seemed pleasant enough, but they seemed decidedly unhip to me. Songs like “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” or “Make It Easy On Yourself” may have been easy on the ears, but that’s because they were undeniably part of the “easy listening” genre my parents enjoyed. I was a Beatles devotée, and early rock and roll, and Motown, and electric blues. Bacharach’s music was pretty far removed from those musical styles.

So it was very interesting for me to discover how nostalgic I felt when I assembled the Spotify playlist you’ll find at the end of this essay. Song after song after song transported me to a simpler time when my hours were filled with riding bikes, playing catch, watching mindless TV shows or playing with HO racing cars.

Take Dionne Warwick’s treatment of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” a US Top Ten hit in the spring of 1968. Listening to it again this past week made me realize how deceptively simple it is when, in fact, it’s quite a sophisticated piece of pop music. Bacharach used unpredictable chord progressions, syncopated rhythm patterns and irregular phrasing, influenced by jazz harmonics, while David’s lyrics told a marvelously poignant tale of a guy who moves to L.A. to become a big singer, finds no luck and must return home to San Jose. Anyone who has ever had to give up on a dream can relate.

Hal David, Dionne Warwick and Bacharach in 1965

In the many obituaries and tributes published in the past week, the Bacharach-David song that has been referenced most often is “What the World Needs Now is Love,” made famous in 1965 by Jackie DeShannon. It starts off kind of corny but settles into a dramatic melody with moving lyrics that have stood the test of time and are just as relevant in today’s divisive world as they were nearly 60 years ago when Vietnam, civil rights and assassinations were tearing the country apart.

And then there’s “I Say a Little Prayer,” which reached the Top Ten twice in versions by Warwick in 1967 and Aretha Franklin in 1968. David said he wrote the words from the perspective of a woman at home worrying about her soldier boyfriend in Vietnam, but he wanted to keep the lyrics more general to avoid any controversy.

These songs and many other Bacharach compositions are, without a doubt, “earworms” — irresistible little tunes that, once in your head, seem to be permanently lodged there. I found myself singing/humming “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” and “Alfie” all damn day…and I didn’t mind in the least. I marinated in them.

My research into the Bacharach-David catalog revealed a number of things I hadn’t known:

I didn’t know they wrote “Baby It’s You,” the 1962 hit by The Shirelles that was covered by The Beatles on their debut LP.

It was news to me that they wrote “One Less Bell to Answer,” the #2 hit by The 5th Dimension in 1970.

Were you aware they wrote the title song to the 1965 Woody Allen film “What’s New Pussycat?” by Tom Jones? I wasn’t.

They wrote two hits that qualify as quasi-western, both for Gene Pitney — “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” in 1962 and “24 Hours From Tulsa” in 1963.

Written by Bacharach-David and first recorded in 1963, “(They Long to Be) Close to You” became the breakthrough #1 hit that launched the careers of Karen & Richard Carpenter in 1970.

Bacharach helped co-write “Heartlight,” Neil Diamond’s last Top Ten hit, with Diamond and Carole Bayer Sager in 1982.

Between 1962 and 1970, the names of Bacharach and David appeared on the US Top 40 nearly as often as Lennon and McCartney.

Bacharach was nominated FIVE Times for the Best Song Oscar, winning twice, for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Arthur’s Theme” from the 1981 comedy “Arthur.”

Bacharach’s music was recorded by many top artists of the era and more recent decades as well. You can hear loads of diverse covers of Bacharach songs by the likes of James Taylor, The Chambers Brothers, Patti Labelle, Naked Eyes, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel, Christopher Cross, Cilla Black, Seal, Herb Alpert, Bobbie Gentry, Michael McDonald, Stan Getz, The White Stripes, Rod Stewart, B.J. Thomas, James Brown, Paul Carrack, Jeffrey Osborne, Diana Krall, Bobby Vinton, Greg Kihn, Stevie Wonder, Cher and Elvis Costello, among many others.

*******************

Born in 1928 in Kansas City, Bacharach grew up in Queens, where he learned cello, drums and piano at the encouragement of his mother, an amateur singer and pianist. While still a teen, Bacharach often sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs to hear Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who proved influential to his later musical stylings.

While serving in the Army, he met singer Vic Damone and ended up spending three years as a pianist and conductor for him.  Said Damone in 1997, “Burt was clearly bound to go out on his own.  He was an exceptionally talented, classically trained pianist, with very clear ideas on the musicality of songs, how they should be played, and what they should sound like.  I appreciated his musical gifts.”  Bacharach later served for five years as arranger, conductor and music director for the legendary Marlene Dietrich, accompanying her on tours until he decided he wanted to concentrate on songwriting.

He met Hal David at the famous Brill Building, the Manhattan songwriting hub where teams like Carole King and Gerry Goffin churned out hits for the teenage market, but Bacharach and David wrote more sophisticated stuff in the Cole Porter vein.  By the early ’60s, they had scored hits for Marty Robbins (“The Story of My Life”) and Perry Como (“Magic Moments”).  In 1963, singer Jerry Butler asked Bacharach to produce the session for his song “Make It Easy On Yourself,” and with that, his career as a producer was off and running.

In his obituary in The New York Times last week, writer Stephen Holden succinctly captured Bacharach’s niche:  “He was a pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism.  Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs he wrote (with David) during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.”

Bacharach and Angie Dickinson in the 1970s

Bacharach seemed to be the epitome of sophisticated cool when he was paired to his vivacious second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-1981. They were among Hollywood’s elite couples as both enjoyed star turns on the charts and on television.

The Bacharach-David team’s uncanny good fortune seemed to run out when they signed on to write the songs for the 1973 musical version of the classic film “Lost Horizon,” an unmitigated disaster with critics and at the box office. Bacharach let his ego get the better of him, blaming David for not supporting his attempts to wrest control from the film’s music people, effectively ending their partnership virtually overnight. He compounded his problems by reneging on a promised to produce Warwick’s next solo project, which caused estrangement between him and the most successful interpreter of his songs.

“Look, there’s no point in going over all the gory details,” Bacharach said in 1993, as he recalled the estrangement period. “It’s all behind us now. If I had to do it over again, I never, never would do it the same way.”  It took more than ten years, but they ended up mending their differences in 1986 when they combined forces on the hugely popular hit “That’s What Friends Are For,” Warwick’s collaborative effort with Gladys Knight, Elton John and Stevie Wonder that reached #1 and won multiple Grammy awards.

Bacharach, Dionne Warwick and Hal David in 1987

In a 1995 interview, Bacharach offered his thoughts on his songwriting process. “I didn’t want to make the songs the same way as they’d been done, so I’d split vocals and instrumentals and try to make it interesting. For me, it’s about the peaks and valleys of where a record can take you. You can tell a story and be able to be explosive one minute, then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution… It may be easy on the ears, but it’s anything but easy. The precise arrangements, the on-a-dime shifts in meter, and the mouthfuls of lyrics required to service all those notes have, over the years, proven challenging to singers and musicians.”

Bacharach added, “As a songwriter, I’ve been luckier than most. Many composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like. People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television. Because I’ve also been a performer, I got to make a direct connection with people, and I’ve been very grateful about that.”

In 1997, he had enough self-deprecating humor to appear as himself singing “What the World Needs Now is Love” in the hit comedy “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” spoofing the ’60s James Bond cool vibe.

Rest in peace, Burt Bacharach. The world still needs “love sweet love” and will continue to sing along to your songs like the lovable, nostalgic earworms they are.

************************

It was a challenge trying to decide which versions of Burt Bacharach’s classic songs to include on this playlist. In some cases, I’ve include two or even three different renditions to show the range of styles and arrangements out there.