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For the first time since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Lynyrd Skynyrd have a hit single. Rock radio stations across the country -- not just in the South -- have been playing the band's "Red White and Blue," an anti-protest protest song that builds up to the line "If they don't like it, they can just get the hell out."
"As soon as I heard 'Red White and Blue,' I knew it was going to connect with our listeners," says Terrie Carr, program director for Northern New Jersey's WDHA, which plays Skynyrd alongside Staind, the Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "The first time we aired it we got fifty-six requests in about two and half hours. If we get five or ten requests in a week, we consider that a heavily requested song."
Skynyrd singer Johnny Van Zant co-wrote the song and does not back off its "love it or leave it" sentiment. "It's a shot at anybody that wants to be against the United States and our troops," he says. "It just really makes me angry whenever I see people going out of their way to cause us trouble. Say stuff about our president later or don't vote for him, but right now stick behind him."
The song's radio success is prompting the thirty-eight-year-old band, which counts guitarist Gary Rossington as its lone founding member, to rush out its new album Vicious Cycle on May 20th. The album has also been padded with a bonus track, a reworking of the band's 1976 song, "Gimme Back My Bullets" (a reference to the Billboard charts, rather than ammunition) featuring Kid Rock. Then Skynyrd plan to take "Red White and Blue" across America. Though Rossington underwent quintuple bypass surgery in February, he has been given the green light to tour starting in June.
"There used to be a lot of rebel flags at our shows," Van Zant says. "After 9/11, I seen all American flags, and I thought, 'You know something, we're not just a southern band . . . we're an American band."
BILL CRANDALL
(April 18, 2003)