Oh my gosh!
Can you imagine? Yeah, can you imagine Skynyrd? Oh no, that would be, uh…
Sacrilege? (Laughs) Oh, that would be awful. It would cause a disruptive crowd. They would tear the place up! And I’ve been out there with Skynyrd, I ac- tually played with them three weeks and I know what that does to a crowd, you know, first hand.
Yeah. Drives ‘em crazy! And you know, it’s amazing. Most people these days I don’t know, most people are not “musicologists” or what- ever, they just know that they like the song and it doesn’t matter. They don’t know all the changes that Skynyrd’s been through, and that Gary’s like the sole survivor of the original
band.They don’t know any of that. They just know the song is a classic. Right.
They just know that hey, it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd and it’s “Freebird” and I think that’s something really cool because me, I worry too much about who’s up there playing, you know, “Wonder when did that guy come into the band?” and “Was he in the band before?” Blah, blah, blah, blah and all, analyzing everything. You know, I can’t just lay back and enjoy it. (Laugh) Well, I have a sneaky suspicion that we really don’t write these songs. I think these songs are just hovering above us, and the lucky ones are the receptors that have the fate to grab them out of the air and bring ‘em in you know?
Yeah.
You know there’s music, the old Rosetta Thorpe song “There’s Music Above Me in the Air,” I believe this song. There’s another channel up there, a spiritual channel, and they’re there, man. These songs, they just… when they come fast and you don’t think about ‘em too hard, Michael…you know what I mean.
It’s coming so fast that you can barely write it down. I know. That’s it. “Stairway to Heaven,” “Freebird,” and on a smaller lever, “Dumas Walker,” you know. I have to say that gave the guys and myself a career and I’m very lucky for it.
Which one of y’all wrote that? Which one of you wrote the “Dumas” song? The whole band! Believe it or not, the whole band wrote that. It was done in a jam session and I remember years ago, this was back in the seventies, Fred and I were talking on the phone one time and we were just talking about how a person should write about things that you grew up around. And I swear, I mean I’m not taking credit for it, because the guys all wrote it, but I had this line, “slawburgers, fries and a bottle of ‘skey,” and everybody just, we just come up with this shuffle and we put it together. It was just one of those little
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