Watch the Wheels Come Off the Wagon of Southern Rock

The Outlaw.You’ve been an on-again, off-again working band for a decade.  During that period, there have been numerous breakups and seemingly endless lineup changes.  After years of grinding and uncertainty, you finally hit it big in 1975.  You get signed to a major label.  Your eponymous, debut album goes gold.  You’ve been assigned to a niche, what people are now calling Southern Rock, a genre that your band pre-dates.  You have a single that does okay.  You have a nickname; the lineup changes that somehow led you to a trio of guitarists has now been dubbed the “Florida Guitar Army.”  And you have an opus.  The last song on your album is worthy of your niche predecessors, the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.  It’s over 9 minutes of kick ass, balls to the wall rock n roll.

Then it all starts to wobble.  You have trouble writing even passable hits for successive albums.  In 1977, the patrons who helped get you signed to a major label, Lynyrd Skynyrd, blow up in a plane crash.  The Allmans have broken up.  Corporate America’s starting dukes of hazzardto milk the redneck thing as it enters its pop culture death throes.  Soon Hollywood will vomit forth The Dukes of Hazzard.  Southern Rock seems to have run its course, increasingly it feels like you have nowhere to turn, and now you find yourself in . . . New Jersey.

Watch the wheels come off the wagon of Southern Rock in November, 1978 as The Outlaws spend 23 minutes playing “Green Grass and High Tides Forever” in Passaic.

Pros

  • Song is a 23 minute jam
  • Those two chicks up front clapping their hands.  You know, if you’re the guitar player, that is.
  • Better than the neo-emo music that kid you work with is into
  • Jim Beam + road food + How did I end up in NJ + cheap beer = inspired lethargy
  • These guys can actually play
  • The vaguely Chinese shirt that one guitarist is wearing
  • Mime guitar
  • That one guy in the front wearing a cowboy and hat and jumping up and down
  • Wait, it gets better

Cons

  • Song is a 23 minute jam
  • That bandanna can’t hide your male pattern balding
  • Disengaged talk-singing
  • Leather pants
  • The Allman Brothers?  You’re not even The Dead.  Do you really need 2 drummers?
  • Holy shit, is the bass player half-Japanesse?  Maybe he gave the guitarist that shirt
  • Profuse perspiration from cocaine and hot stage lights
  • Shit, did they just start over again?
  • Aaaand, we’re done.  Nope.  Here’s a drum solo
  • Wait, it gets better

 

https://youtu.be/hIaS_vYIQ_A

If, for some reason, you want the entire 90 minute concert, it’s here.

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