Lynyrd Skynyrd
Live At Knebworth ’76 EAGLE ROCK
Unnecessary history-rewriting tweak renders the extraordinary ordinary.
If ever there was a live performance that had no need of restrospective revisionism, it was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s show-stealing support slot (third on the bill beneath 10cc) to the Rolling Stones at the tail end of the summer of ’76. I was there, and it was one of the greatest sets I’ve ever witnessed. The way that it went down was cinematic, you couldn’t have written it better (Cameron Crowe’s Roadies devoted an entire episode to Knebworth’s climactic Free Bird alone), and the way it went down was not like this.
So how do you change history? Suck the intrinsic magic out of a unique moment in time? In this case you simply change the audience track. Obviously that doesn’t sound like much, but in the case of Live At Knebworth it’s pivotal. For it was how Skynyrd (on the up, but to most of the 200,000 Stones fans in attendance, an unknown quantity) went from zeros to heroes over the course of a single song, in the eyes of a blasé audience who initially only saw them as yet another superfluous obstacle between themselves and the Stones, that made the show so special.
Sure, the rest of the set was fine – 53 minutes that took us from Workin’ For MCA to Sweet Home Alabama: excellent southern boogie, numerous guitars and a little bloke with a big voice in a huge hat – but it wasn’t until Free Bird that the magic happened. While there were a hardcore upfront (who’d probably caught Skynyrd on Whistle Test) who were in the know, most weren’t, so the set’s final song kicked off to little more than polite applause. Thirteen minutes later, Skynyrd were stars.
It’s a staggering performance. I’ve watched it countless times down the years on pub video jukeboxes and YouTube, and it never gets old. In the original cut there’s a brilliant shot of a supine punter blearily rousing himself and peering stagewards as he realises something amazing is about to happen. But that has been cut from this release, along with other similar shots, because it doesn’t support the hysterical applause clumsily helicoptered in from a Fillmore show (when Skynyrd played with Peter Frampton) and dubbed across the entire set. It virtually drowns out Free Bird’s piano intro, offers an unreliable, misleading account of a genuinely historic event, and ultimately slaps an ugly moustache on Skynyrd’s Mona Lisa.
Live At Knebworth ’76 should have been a nine out of 10, but…
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