The name of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s new God & Guns is missing one of the disc’s most important “G’s” — guitars. But they’re only absent in that title, because track-for-track it’s dozen songs feature some of the biggest, brawniest tones in the legendary southern rock band’s 30-plus-years career.
“We were going for our signature style and concentrating on writing stories and creating arrangements that people could relate to, that would keep the music modern,” band co-founder Gary Rossington explains by phone on tour with the band in Springfield, Illinois.
Mission accomplished. The disc, which hits stores on September 29, boasts all the guitar signatures of classic Skynyrd — melody-ripe solos, crunchy chords that swell like shockwaves, and Rossington’s unmistakable slide playing — but with a little extra beef thanks to an exacting writing, recording, and mixing process that took two years.
With catchy choruses and the kinds of themes that drive modern country hits — plainly advertised in the titles “Simple Life,” “Gods & Guns,” and “That Ain’t My America” — Lynyrd Skynyrd may indeed be heading to the charts for the first time since their reformation in 1987.
Commercial considerations aside, there’s simply some beautiful songs on God & Guns, like the weepy country ballad “Unwrite That Song” and the band autobiography “Southern Ways.” And then there’s textural marvels like the nasty “Floyd,” a portrait of a badass swamp rat with layers of electric and acoustic guitars and keyboards that perfectly reflect the modernity Rossington says the band sought.
“I played a lot of this album with my ’59 reissue Les Paul and my SG,” the 57-year-old string wrangler offers. “The Les Paul is a reissue of the original ’59 sunburst, Bernice, which is on display at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I just love the sound and the feel of the reissue. It’s just like Bernice.”
The disc has plenty of Rossington’s slide playing, and he reveals one of the secrets to his unique sound. “I use my SG on ‘Free Bird’ because I love how high you can get with the double cutaway, and I tune both the G string and B string next to it to G, so I have two G strings. That gives the guitar a really crying sound, and I like it when those strings are slightly out of tune because it make a kind of ‘wobbly’ effect.”
Rossington plays mostly in standard tuning or dropped D. Check out the monster, low-bellied chords on the intro to “Still Unbroken,” the opening tune and a tribute to the group’s and to Rossington’s resilience, to appreciate the roar he gets with the latter.
Rossington uses a resonator guitar in open E on “Floyd,” and employs that tuning on “Simple Life” and “Skynyrd Nation.” The guitar hero also frequently uses one of his patented slide moves on the album: starting on a sustained note, moving up two frets, and then dropping below the first note by a fret before resolving on that starting note. The wavering melody that lick — which appears prominently in the intro to “Free Bird” — creates says “Lynyrd Skynyrd” like nothing else in the band’s lexicon.
“I learned to play slide in the ’60s by listening to Duane Allman, Ry Cooder, and Canned Heat’s Al Wilson,” he continues. “Then it was all about developing my own style.”
In the band’s early days Rossington used a screwdriver to raise the action on his strings for playing slide. “But that was eating up my guitar’s neck, so I got a wire that I could slide under the strings to raise them up, so it plays more like a steel. I still use that on my SG,” he relates.
Rossington says he’s a devout Gibson player. “Nothing sounds like a Gibson. When I first started to play in the ’60s, I used Telecasters, but when I saw that Duane Allman, Keith Richards, and Eric Clapton were all playing SGs, I had to get one, too.” These days he runs his SGs, Les Pauls, and vintage Explorer through a Signature Peavey Penta amplifier and the same Peavey Mace he’s had for 30 years.
Another reason the band’s album took two years was the deaths of keyboardist Billy Powell and bassist Ean Evans in 2009, which followed the passing of guitarist Huey Thomasson — who led the Outlaws before joining Skynyrd — in 2007.
“I never thought I’d be alive this long,” Rossington adds. “But I’m thankful. When we started Lynyrd Skynyrd our dream was to be able to play our own music and have a big band some day, and we were lucky enough to have our dream come true.”