Skynyrd was indeed a team of all the talents, with Van Zant handling all lead vocals while lead guitar duties were shared almost equally between Rossington and Collins. The band brought an extremely multi-talented songwriting base to those initial sessions, with credits on the album for Gary Rossington, Ronnie Van Zant, Allen Collins, Bob Burns, and Al King – the whole band, in fact, with the exception of keyboard player Billy Powell. Kooper would produce their first LP, and indeed the next two. They were playing mainly things off the first album, and then to find that they weren’t signed to anybody was marvellous.” “Skynyrd were playing, and they just blew me out of my seat. “It was one of those really dangerous type bars where everybody carries guns and there’s about three shootings a night,” he recalled in Disc. Kooper had seen the band, at some personal risk, in a night spot in Atlanta. Famed as the founder of Blood, Sweat and Tears, a Dylan insider and a prolific producer and session man, Kooper signed the rock hopefuls to his Sounds of the South label, which had a distribution deal with MCA. Skynyrd were a hot local attraction in their home town of Jacksonville, Florida by the turn of the 1970s, but it was their “discovery” by producer Al Kooper in 1972 that proved to be pivotal. We’ve seen him since and he doesn’t seem to mind. When we picked the group name, we thought of the teacher and just changed the spelling. “He always made Allen, Bob and Gary get haircuts. “We had this gym teacher named Leonard Skinner,” Ed King explained to Zoo World.

They were formed as My Backyard in the days of the British invasion, in 1964, and toured around with various names and line-ups until they adopted the handle we would never forget in 1969.

Students of Lynyrd Skynyrd know that the origins of the band went back almost a decade before that momentous day.

It was called (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd). But when their first album landed in the record racks on August 13, 1973, its title introduced a group who would take music by the scruff of the neck and earn their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s strange to think there was ever a time when we weren’t sure how to say the name of the band who brought authentic, undiluted Southern rock to countless millions of fans.

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