Lee Geiger

“If I leave here tomorrow

Would you still remember me?”

Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird” (1973)

I recently found myself watching a film on the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the legendary southern rock band that tragically lost several members in a plane crash in 1977. The final scene of the one-hour and thirty-five-minute documentary, titled “If I Leave Here Tomorrow,” is shot in a blaze of sunshine at an outdoor stadium as the band plays its finale. Imagine my surprise when, in a sea of humanity, I looked over the crowd and saw myself onscreen. Check out the video if you don’t believe me. I’m the short guy standing next to the girl in the tank top.

And now, the rest of the story.

July 2, 1977 — That’s the day I heard “Free Bird” for the very first time.

I awoke that Saturday morning at 4am. I was 17, and I was sharing a bedroom with my brother Nelson. My parents and I had recently relocated from the quaint confines of our lovely Carmel townhouse to a dark and dilapidated two-bedroom apartment clinging to the side of a dusty highway in Salinas, a low-income farming community twenty-five miles due east from the nearest beach and referred to by locals as the Lettuce Capital of the World. A family financial tragedy caused by our father losing his small business in Chicago had necessitated the sudden dislocation, and Nelson being asked (more like “strongly encouraged” in Geiger dialect) to transpose himself from Chicago to California to help bailout the family shipwreck was part of the collateral damage.

Nelson and I piled into my parent’s blue Chevy Laguna and headed toward a parking lot in nearby Monterey, where at the appointed hour of 5:00am we gathered three of my high school friends. Then we beelined a hundred miles north to Oakland, where we had tickets to Day on the Green #4, a recurring series of concerts at the Oakland Coliseum crafted by legendary promoter Bill Graham. By 7:00am we were standing in line under an already blazing hot sun outside the stadium with thousands of other concertgoers to witness a piece of ,rock ‘n roll history, a musical smorgasbord featuring The Outlaws, Santana, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the day’s headliner, Peter Frampton. It was a rock and roll version of Murderer’s Row.

By virtue of being the Super Cool Older Brother, Nelson introduced me to the sinful pleasures of true 70’s rock, the mystical,  musical potion that mixed heavy metal with a healthy dose of the blues. Prior to his arrival from Chicago, my knowledge of rock ‘n roll didn’t get much beyond Elton John and Three Dog Night. The collection of albums Nelson brought from Chicago was not only comprised of contemporary rock staples from the likes of the Rolling Stones and The Who, but also included original vinyl classics from Bob Segar, Leon Russell, and Jethro Tull, just to name a few. I fell in love with those artists, and I’ve forgotten how often Nelson and I sat around in our dreary bedroom that summer trying to forget the story state of the family’s finances. I frequently thanked God for inventing the live three-record set from George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. Staring at the red lava lamp that sat on Nelson’s nightstand was cool, too.

Nelson had convinced me to part ways with some of my hard-earned pay from my gig scooping Baskin-Robbins ice cream to splurge on tickets. Plus, his 26^thbirthday was coming up and he needed a sucker. I had heard of Santana, of course. The Latin band was local, and Carlos Santana was considered by many to be the coolest cat on the planet. And you’d have to have lived under a rock not to have heard of Peter Frampton, who only two weeks earlier was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. But I had no clue who The Outlaws were, and the only song I recognized from Lynyrd Skynyrd was “Sweet Home Alabama.” I hadn’t paid much attention to the musical genre of Southern/country rock, mainly because the girls I wanted to date in high school liked to dance to anything from the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever.

But there I was, sitting on a blanket somewhere in the outfield grass, a cramped position fifty feet from the Mt. Rushmore-ish stage that we reached by sprinting like gazelles once the stadium gates were opened. It was technically still morning, and the concerts wasn’t set to begin for another few hours. But the sun was already baking my skin and I had brought plenty of attitude but not a lick of sunscreen. I suppose I could have asked any of the 50,000 other roasting (and in many cases, toking) rock heads if they could spare some of theirs, but I didn’t. Ah, the stupidity of youth.

The Outlaws lead off, and in no time the stadium was rockin’. Thanks to the cassette tape Nelson had brought along, I listened to the studio versions of “There Goes Another Love Song” and “Green Grass and High Tides” on the drive up. But that didn’t come close to hearing them live, which practically bordered on a religious experience.

Next was Santana, and the Latin vibe made everybody feel just oh so cool. I knew many of their songs by heart, and I’d put my rendition of “Oye Como Va” next to anyone’s. And I barely knew enough Spanish to order from a Taco Bell.

Lynyrd Skynard followed. A huge Confederate flag was unfurled as a backdrop, and I assumed it was because the band members were from Alabama (they’re actually from Jacksonville, FL). I mean, I’m from Northern California, and I last saw a Confederate flag on the back window of a Chevy pickup when I was visiting my relatives in Mississippi back in 1969. Anyway, the band began to play, and in less time that you can say “Roll Tide” the standing room only throng was rocking to not only “Sweet Home Alabama,” but “What’s Your Name,” “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Saturday Night Special. They followed those classics with “That Smell,” “Call Me the Breeze,” “Saturday Night Special” and “Simple Man.” It turned out I had heard all of these songs before, except I was too dumb to square them with a band that refused to insert a vowel their name.

And then it was time for the band’s finale, a song I had never heard before.

Free Bird, the textbook example of a tyrannical power-rock anthem, starts slowly with an elegant piano solo. Authored by keyboardist Billy Powell, a one-time Skynyrd roadie, Powell informed the band members that he had written an introduction for the song, and after performing it in a rehearsal was immediately offered a spot in the band. Brilliant.

Then came the lyrics, sung in a soft ballad by lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, wearing a black hat and a t-shirt that might have had a few beer stains. It took Van Zant two years of listening to the chords of Free Bird to come up with the lyrics, but once he did, he penned them down on a piece of paper in about four minutes. Genius.

Now it’s time for the second half of the song, best described by Van Zant as “grease in the frying pan.” What followed for the next six minutes was an earsplitting arrangement of electric guitars, a quaking choreograph of musical mayhem. Legend suggests that lead guitarist Alex Collins, a slim drink of water all dressed in white on this day, first came up with the chords to Free Bird when he was seventeen years old. I didn’t know that at the time, and I doubt I would have cared. All I could do was stand up and scream and dance and wave my arms in the air like the crazed teenager I was. So, I did.

The song was over. My adrenaline rush now complete, I laid down on the grass, my chest heaving from shock. What in the name of Eric Clapton was that? Twenty minutes later, Peter Frampton, who just two weeks earlier was on the cover of Time magazine, took the stage and begin wailing his latest hit, some mushy spin called “I’m in You.” Within seconds, my gang decided we weren’t into him. We left.

My memory of the car ride home is of extreme pain, brought on by the worst sunburn of my life. I rode in the back seat, sizzling like a cheap piece of Oscar Meyer bacon. Little did I know that my Day on the Green experience would one day be immortalized in a documentary about a band whose name I couldn’t spell, and a song I couldn’t forget.

Two months later, on October 20, 1977, a plane carrying the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd ran out of gas and crashed into a wooded area near Gillsburg, Mississippi.

I still remember them.