My Free Bird Tradition

I have a tradition dating back to when I was 13 and I got my first real stereo after my bar mitzvah. When I got that stereo, I also bought my first CDs. Among them were Jimmy Buffet’s boxed set, the Allman Brothers’ Decade of Hits, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s (pronounced ‘lĕh-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd) and their live masterpiece, One More From the Road. Starting with that stereo and continuing with just about every component, speaker, Walk/Disc/i-Man/Pod/Phone and any other music-playing apparatus I’ve since acquired, the very first song I played was Free Bird. Specifically, I played the 15-minute live version. It’s a wonderful tradition and, honestly, it served a purpose. Between the piano intro, the crowd noise and, of course, the extended guitar solos, Free Bird does provide a decent workout for your new system. It lets you know if you just dropped a few hundred bucks on crap.

Well, Free Bird is allowed to have its 35 false-endings, where each crescendo begets yet another crescendo, rising in pitch, speed and might until finally, it seems as if the entire energy of the room is pointed and holding and struggling this peak note… before it collapses in exhausted revelry. And as such, the might of Free Bird comes not from Billy Powell’s sweet opening, the crowd’s jubilant air horn or Ronnie Van Zant’s famous, pleading question. Rather, the strength of Free Bird comes 15 minutes later, the end of the beginning, if you will.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I’ve bothered to share this with you. Well, I have this friend up in Toronto named Jon Tracey. Many of you know him. Well, Jon probably knows me as well as anyone in the world and expressed sincere disappointment that my very first post on this blog was not about Free Bird.

And that is why, with my 7th post, I give you Free Bird.