Shane’s Music Challenge: LYNYRD SKYNYRD – 1974 – Second Helping

Shane | 2 May 2014 | Reply

Shane’s Music Challenge: LYNYRD SKYNYRD – 1974 – Second Helping
7/10

The southern rockers’ second album (hence the zippy title, and stained glass window cover playing on the second coming theme), Second Helping featured Skynyrd’s trademark triple guitar frontline for the first time, with the addition of Leon Wilkeson on bass, allowing Ed King to sidestep onto the six string alongside Gary Rossington and Allen Collins.

Having the legendary Al Kooper in the producer’s chair can’t have hurt matters, but Skynyrd were set apart from the start by the killer songwriting – excellent southern rock care of King, Rossington and or Collins, and gritty down-home poetic lyrics care of singer Ronnie Van Zant.

Opening with their biggest hit Sweet Home Alabama – a middle finger salute to Neil Young in response to his derogatory-of-The-South songs Alabama and Southern Man – the album was assured to be a hit, such is the immediacy and evocativeness of the song.

Don’t Ask Me No Questions and Working For MCA shows Van Zant to have a similar knack with words as AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, and The Ballad Of Curtis Loew is not only perfect Southern blues, but also an evocative memory of childhood and formative influences.

The Needle And The Spoon demonises heroin quite rightly, and the album finishes – yep, 8 tracks made an album in those days, where it would only be called an EP nowadays! – with a dry and raunchy take on J J Cale’s Call Me The Breeze.

By Shane Pinnegar