Lynyrd Skynyrd

Live At Knebworth ’76 EAGLE ROCK

Unnecessary history-rewriting tweak renders the extraordinary ordinary.

If ever there was a live performance that had no need of restrospective revisionism, it was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s show-stealing support slot (third on the bill beneath 10cc) to the Rolling Stones at the tail end of the summer of ’76. I was there, and it was one of the greatest sets I’ve ever witnessed. The way that it went down was cinematic, you couldn’t have written it better (Cameron Crowe’s Roadies devoted an entire episode to Knebworth’s climactic Free Bird alone), and the way it went down was not like this.

So how do you change history? Suck the intrinsic magic out of a unique moment in time? In this case you simply change the audience track. Obviously that doesn’t sound like much, but in the case of it’s pivotal. For it was how Skynyrd (on the up, but to most of the 200,000 Stones fans in attendance, an