[atlantaprog] Re: atlantaprog Digest V2 #39

Sorry but that DJ claims to have started it in the "late 80's".  I heard
people yelling Freebird long before then!

I like the idea of just going ahead and playing the song, but I always
figured, why bother learning it?  Bring the Cd and if someone yells it,
just play the record through the PA system, and go take a break for a
few minutes.

Alex F

> -----Original Message-----
> From: FreeLists Mailing List Manager [mailto:ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 2:02 AM
> To: atlantaprog digest users
> Subject: atlantaprog Digest V2 #39
> 
> 
> atlantaprog Digest    Mon, 21 Mar 2005        Volume: 02  Issue: 039
> 
> In This Issue:
>               [atlantaprog] Freebird!
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> From: Allen Welty-Green <agmedia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [atlantaprog] Freebird!
> Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 10:28:17 -0500
> 
> Rock's oldest joke: Yelling 'Freebird!'
> By JASON FRY, The Wall Street Journal
> March 18, 2005
> 
> One recent Tuesday night at New York's Bowery Ballroom, the 
> Crimea had 
> just finished its second song. The Welsh quintet's first song 
> had gone 
> over fairly well, the second less so, and singer/guitarist Davey 
> MacManus looked out at the still-gathering crowd.
> 
>   Then, from somewhere in the darkness came the cry, "Freebird!"
> 
>   It made this night like so many other rock 'n' roll nights 
> in America.
> 
>   "Freebird" isn't the Crimea's song; it's from the 1973 
> debut album by 
> legendary Southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band's 
> nine-minute march 
> from ruminative piano to wailing guitar couldn't be less like the 
> Crimea's jagged punk-pop. But it was requested nonetheless.
> 
>   Somebody is always yelling out the title. "I don't know 
> that I've ever 
> seen a show where it hasn't happened," says Bill Davis of the veteran 
> country-punk band Dash Rip Rock.
> 
>   "It's just the most astonishing phenomenon," says Mike Doughty, the 
> former front man of the "deep slacker jazz" band Soul 
> Coughing, adding 
> that "these kids, they can't be listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd."
> 
>   Yelling "Freebird!" has been a rock cliché for years, guaranteed to 
> elicit laughs from drunks and scorn from music fans who have 
> long since 
> tired of the joke. And it has spread beyond music, prompting the 
> Chicago White Sox organist to add the song to her repertoire and 
> inspiring a greeting card in which a drunk holding a lighter hollers 
> "Freebird!" at wedding musicians.
> 
>   Bands mostly just ignore the taunt. But one common retort is: "I've 
> got your 'free bird' right here." That's accompanied by a middle 
> finger. It's a strategy Dash Rip Rock's former bassist Ned 
> Hickel used. 
> According to fans' accounts of shows, so have Jewel and Hot 
> Tuna's Jack 
> Casady. Jewel declines to comment. Casady says that's "usually not my 
> response to those kind of things."
> 
>   Others have offered more than the bird. On a recent live 
> album, Modest 
> Mouse's Isaac Brock declares that "if this were the Make-a-Wish 
> Foundation, and you were going to die in 20 minutes ? just 
> long enough 
> to play 'Freebird' ? we still wouldn't play it."
> 
>   A harsh reaction to "Freebird" came from the late comedian 
> Bill Hicks 
> during a Chicago gig in the early 1990s. On a bootleg 
> recording of the 
> show, Hicks at first just sounds irked. "Please stop yelling 
> that," he 
> says. "It's not funny, it's not clever ? it's stupid."
> 
>   The comic soon works himself into a rage, but the "Freebirds" keep 
> coming. "Freebird," he finally says wearily, then intones: 
> "And in the 
> beginning there was the Word ? 'Freebird.' And 'Freebird' would be 
> yelled throughout the centuries. 'Freebird,' the mantra of the moron."
> 
>   How did this strange ritual begin? "Freebird" is hardly 
> obscure ? it's 
> a radio staple consistently voted one of rock's greatest songs. One 
> version ? and an important piece of the explanation ? anchors 
> Skynyrd's 
> 1976 live album "One More From the Road."
> 
>   On the record, singer Ronnie Van Zant, who was killed along 
> with two 
> other bandmates in a 1977 plane crash, asks the crowd, "What 
> song is it 
> you want to hear?" That unleashes a deafening call for 
> "Freebird," and 
> Skynyrd obliges with a 14-minute rendition.
> 
>   To understand the phenomenon, it also helps to be from 
> Chicago. When 
> asked why they continue to request "Freebird," Hicks's 
> tormentors yell 
> out "Kevin Matthews!"
> 
>   Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his 
> fans ? the KevHeads ? to yell "Freebird" for years, and 
> claims to have 
> originated the tradition in the late 1980s, when he says he 
> hit upon it 
> as a way to torment Florence Henderson of "Brady Bunch" fame, who was 
> giving a concert.
> 
>   He figured somebody should yell something at her "to break up the 
> monotony." The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on "Freebird," saying the 
> epic song "just popped into my head."
> 
>   Matthews says the call was heeded, inspiring him to go down the 
> listings of coming area shows, looking for entertainers who 
> deserved a 
> "Freebird" and encouraging the KevHeads to make it happen.
> 
>   But he bemoans the decline of "Freebird" etiquette. "It was never 
> meant to be yelled at a cool concert ? it was meant to be yelled at 
> someone really lame," he says. "If you're going to yell 'Freebird,' 
> yell 'Freebird' at a Jim Nabors concert."
> 
>   Still, Matthews treasures his trove of recorded "Freebird" 
> moments ? 
> such as baffled comedian Elayne Boosler wondering why the audience is 
> shouting "reverb." And he argues that good bands simply 
> acknowledge it 
> and move on.
> 
>   "The people who are conceited, the so-called artists who get really 
> offended by it, they deserve it," he says.
> 
>   But did "Freebird" truly start with the KevHeads? Longtime Chicago 
> Tribune music writer Greg Kot says he remembers the cry from 
> the early 
> 1980s. He suggests it originated as an in-joke among indie-rock fans 
> "having their sneer at mainstream classic rock."
> 
>   Other music veterans think it dates back to 1970s audiences' shouts 
> for it and other guitar sagas, such as "Whipping Post," by the Allman 
> Brothers Band, and "Smoke on the Water," by Deep Purple.
> 
>   They may all be right: It's possible "Freebird" began as a rallying 
> cry for Skynyrd Nation and a sincere request from guitar lovers, was 
> made famous by the live cut, taken up by ironic clubgoers, given new 
> life by Matthews, and eventually lost all meaning and became 
> something 
> people holler when there's a band onstage.
> 
>   But as with many mysteries, the true origin may be 
> unknowable ? cold 
> comfort for bands still to be confronted with the inevitable cry from 
> the darkness.
> 
>   For them, here's a strategy tried by a brave few: Call the 
> audience's 
> bluff. Phish liked to sing it a cappella. The Dandy Warhols play a 
> slowed-down take singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor describes as 
> sung "like 
> T. Rex would if he were on a lot of pills." And Dash Rip Rock has 
> performed the real song in order to surprise fans expecting 
> the parody.
> 
>   For his part, Doughty suggests that musicians make a pact: Whenever 
> anyone calls for "Freebird," play it in its entirety ? and if someone 
> calls for it again, play it again.
> 
>   "That would put a stop to 'Freebird,' I think," he says. 
> "It would be 
> a bad couple of years, but it might be worth it."
> 
>   So what do the members of Skynyrd think of the tradition? 
> Johnny Van 
> Zant, Ronnie's brother and the band's singer since 1987, says 
> "it's not 
> an insult at all ? I think it's kind of cool. It's fun, and 
> people are 
> doing it in a fun way. That's what music's supposed to be about."
> 
>   Besides, Van Zant has a confession: His wife persuaded him 
> to see Cher 
> in Jacksonville a couple of years ago, and he couldn't resist yelling 
> "Freebird!" himself. "My wife is going, 'Stop! Stop!' " he recalls, 
> laughing. "I embarrassed the hell out of her."
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> End of atlantaprog Digest V2 #39
> ********************************
>

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