Skynyrd's Street Survivors Gets "Deluxe Edition" Treatment

[Jahfin]

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/articl...t_id=1003708240

Geffen/Ume will re-release Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Street Survivors" as a deluxe edition on March 4. The double-disc collection contains a number of unreleased gems associated with the eight-song original album.

The second disc contains demo and alternate mix versions of "What's Your Name," "That Smell," "You Got That Right" and "I Never Dreamed." The reissued "Street Survivors" also includes five previously unreleased live recordings from August 1977.

Lynyrd Skynyrd's sixth and final album, "Street Survivors" was first released in Oct. 17, 1977, three days before Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines died in a plane crash.

-- Katie Hasty, N.Y.

[dragster]

'Twas about time in my rock book!!!!!! LONG LIVE SKYNYRD!!!!

[Swede]

I have the remastered, expanded version, which includes a couple of bonus tracks, such as Jacksonville Kid and Sweet Little Missy. I wonder what unreleased songs that will be on the new edition though.. Anyway, it's a great album.

[Deezer]

My mom had tickets to a show that was but a few days after their crash. She said she was heartbroken. Gotta love this album. Personal favorite: Honky Tonk Night Time Man.

[King of the Hill People]

Probably the saddest story of what could have been. There's no doubt in my mind had the crash not happened Skynyrd would have gone on to new heights and gotten more respect then they do now.

[Deezer]

I agree. They were amazing. They were just find themselves. Which is amazing, considering their body of work is just so outstanding, but it's remarkable that wasn't even their peak probably. So much potential.

Planes and helicopters suck! Otis Redding, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Skynyrd....heck, if I was as supremely talented as those guys....I'd just stay on the bus. Maybe Willie's got the right idea. Damn.

[dragster]

I agree. They were amazing. They were just find themselves. Which is amazing, considering their body of work is just so outstanding, but it's remarkable that wasn't even their peak probably. So much potential.

Planes and helicopters suck! Otis Redding, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Skynyrd....heck, if I was as supremely talented as those guys....I'd just stay on the bus. Maybe Willie's got the right idea. Damn.

.....................and Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, etc. :(

[Jahfin]

Probably the saddest story of what could have been. There's no doubt in my mind had the crash not happened Skynyrd would have gone on to new heights and gotten more respect then they do now.

I agree they didn't use to get a whole lot of respect (same for "Southern Rock" in general) but all of that has changed in recent years, what with Skynyrd being inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame and all. Even has half-hearted as it was, the Grammys even did a "salute" to Southern Rock a few years ago. It was yet another sign of them trying to make up for past oversights but at least they made the effort.

I have all of the original Skynyrd stuff on vinyl but haven't picked up that much on CD other than the box set, the Freebird movie soundtrack, Skynyrd's First: The Complete Muscle Shoals Album and the deluxe editions of One More from the Road and Gimme Back My Bullets. Glad I haven't picked up the other "expanded" editions, especially if they're all going to get the "deluxe" treatment eventually.

Oh, and for those that haven't heard it yet, I highly recommend the Drive-By Truckers' retelling of Skynyrd's tragic tale, Southern Rock Opera:

[dragster]

I agree they didn't use to get a whole lot of respect (same for "Southern Rock" in general) but all of that has changed in recent years, what with Skynyrd being inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame and all. Even has half-hearted as it was, the Grammys even did a "salute" to Southern Rock a few years ago. It was yet another sign of them trying to make up for past oversights but at least they made the effort.

I have all of the original Skynyrd stuff on vinyl but haven't picked up that much on CD other than the box set, the Freebird movie soundtrack, Skynyrd's First: The Complete Muscle Shoals Album and the deluxe editions of One More from the Road and Gimme Back My Bullets. Glad I haven't picked up the other "expanded" editions, especially if they're all going to get the "deluxe" treatment eventually.

Oh, and for those that haven't heard it yet, I highly recommend the Drive-By Truckers' retelling of Skynyrd's tragic tale, Southern Rock Opera:

Thanx man....need to check 'em out one of these daaaze

[Jahfin]

From NoDepression.net:

LYNYRD SKYNYRD

Street Survivors (Deluxe Edition)

(Geffen)

by GRANT ALDEN

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- But for the passionate arguments of Patterson Hood, Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably be remembered here only as the music blaring from the bondo camaros the rough smoking guys stood around with their high school girls, who probably did put out. Or as the flames LP, recalled and redesigned after the plane went down, a lower case butcher album on the collector market.

Or, and this is the most inexact fate, for its principal single: "What's Your Name," a cavalier -- wonderful word, that, for both meanings fit: its archaic sense as a gentleman, and its present connotation of disrespect -- ode to the rock star life of the 1970s. It is the kind of song which would have kept me from listening to the band, much less the album, for that kind of hedonism has always seemed both below and beyond me.

And yet.

And yet it is a finely drawn, carefully rendered song, or so it plays today. (So it played then, but I couldn't hear it, too much a fan of Peter Green and Keith Emerson.) Effortless in its simplicity, and deceptive for all that. It's a nasty guitar riff, a nasty, predatory song. And it's not. In 1977 that opening line about a limo driver smelled of debauchery, but now it seems quite self-evident that musicians should not drive themselves around strange towns, particularly when they're achieved a certain iconic status. And "little girl"; man, that plays differently now than I think it was meant when written. "I've done made some plans" and "I've found a little queen/and I know I can treat her right" roots the singer's class, there's been a fight in the hotel bar, and yet the closing line for the one night stand is this: "shouldn't you stay/little girl/though there ain't no shame." Shame. In the end, of course, the singer offers cab fare home, same time next year. A gentleman, despite himself. In addition to himself.

The temptation, then, is to let that song frame Street Survivors as an album celebrating the wretched excess of '70s rockstardom, only this simple eight-song LP is far more complex than that. Remember that it was built during the era of rock operas and concept albums, and remember that albums were conceived of as comprehensive statements, as suites. That sequencing was important.

Except the second track is "That Smell," Ronnie Van Zant's voyage through the same territory Neil Young explored with "The Needle And The Damage Done," with more preaching and less fury, if that makes any sense. The juxtaposition here cannot have been accidental. And, in passing, I wonder if some of the street jargon -- "'ludes", in particular -- is as impenetrable to most of today's listeners as Billy Joe Shaver's dominecker hen was until I realized it was a specific kind of barnyard animal, and nothing less...nor more).

Point being, the balance of the album seems like a meditation on the singer's transition from roving hotel cavalier to family man ("One More Time," "I Never Dreamed," etc.). The second side, of course, opens with "You Got That Right," another one of those feral, fighting songs for which the band was justly famous. But it closes with "Ain't No Good Life," which almost certainly has to be a nod to Willie Nelson's "Night Life," doesn't it? Only it feels more like Haggard: "I want to know/Tell me why is it so?/Well, just 'cause I don't pray/Lord that don't mean I ain't forgiven/Just because I'm alive/that don't mean I'm making a living." (There's a song begging to be recast as southern gospel, should, say, Mike Farris happen by needing material.)

And on those terms, as a self-conceived work of art, not simply as an ode to the sybaritic excesses of the road, this is one hell of an album. And, of course, it rocks.

This deluxe edition reissue appends the original eight tracks with a second disc, which you will listen to once. It includes the first version of the album, produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, known (apparently) as the Criteria Studios Album. The same eight songs, only they sound as if they were played by a really competent cover band who had learned them note by note from careful tablature. Dowd has a great reputation, though I confess to not really knowing his work. This, too, is a fascinating reminder (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is another) that musicians aren't simply being petulant artists when they reject all that work because it comes off wrong. Somehow Dowd neutered a band, neutered these songs. It's bizarre to listen to, but no fun at all.

And then there are five live tracks from August, 1977, just before the crash. But the sound quality's not much, and I can't make it through them. So you're on your own there.

Some of us will always wonder what Jimi Hendrix might have become had he struck up a working relationship with Miles Davis. What Buddy Holly might have made of Sgt. Peppers and Phil Spector, or whether he'd have gotten their first, somehow. (But not, somehow, what Kurdt Cobain might have come up with; he wasn't going to pull through, not that burning ember, though I wasn't clever enough to see that.) I don't often put Ronnie Van Zant and Skynyrd in that same dream world, the one in which he steals Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets about 1998 and...oh, that's just silly.

And this is a serious album, conflicted, complex, and a whole lot of fun. And sad, for there was no next year.

[alwizard03]

I will have to have it.I need new material any kind is good at this point. Skynyrd Rocks.

[Jahfin]

I will have to have it.I need new material any kind is good at this point. Skynyrd Rocks.

By all means get it. Even though it was mostly favorable I wouldn't let that review deter you one little bit. I greatly admire No Depression magazine and will miss it dearly (the last issue arrived in my mailbox yesterday) but they have a way of frowning upon "Southern Rock" and some other very deserving pioneers of the alt.country genre (or "subgenre") such as the Grateful Dead and their off-shoot country band The New Riders of the Purple Sage who were just as important as Gram Parsons to the development of "country rock" (as it was called then) during it's formative years. I can also attest to the greatness of the reissue myself. Yes, the original recording of Street Survivors may only be a curio at best and the quality of the live tracks may leave a lot to be desired but at least they put them out there. Some of the arrangements of a few of the Street Survivors songs are a bit different and the live versions of some of those songs are hard to come by so that's worth the investment right there, not to mention the improved sound quality of the finished album itself.

What I don't like is how they keep putting previously unreleased songs on Skynyrd compilations just to get you to buy the same shit most of us already have just for those one or two songs we may not own. In a new low, they're even using the same tactic on the upcoming new Skynryd album by including the previously unreleased Cottonmouth Country just to get folks to buy it. I'd much rather they gathered all of those songs up and put them on one album or a new box set, not making them available scattershot across a bunch of compilation albums.

In case you missed it, here's a thread with some more info on the new record:

Vintage Tune May Grace New Skynyrd Album