Originally published at: Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington dead at 71 | Boing Boing
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Another bit of my childhood gone. IMHO, RCB was the better of the his bands, and Dale Krantz’s voice is the Southern Rock standard that all others reach for.
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Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth 
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I sort of agree with the spirit of what that line was trying to say, that the Southern Man didn’t have a monopoly on bad behavior, but that line never made a lot of sense to me. As a southerner myself, Watergate bothered me a lot. As did the behavior of the South during the Civil Rights movement. The South has never had a monopoly on racism and bigotry, but I think a different lyric could have communicated that idea better. Plus…Neil Young is Canadian, so what the hell did he have to do with Watergate?
I still love Skynyrd and I’m sad the original members are all now gone.
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I do a lot of work training K-12 social studies teachers, and public outreach history in general. The number of people who I’ve heard say either “Nixon was framed,” “Nixon got a bad rap,” or “Nixon was just doing what everyone else did” beggars belief. I think that line was meant as a call-out to conservatives in general, who felt Nixon got/gets a bad rap.
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Not making that gang of criminals feel real consequences for their extraordinary law breaking led to the state of the current Repub party and how democracy itself is under severe threat.
It is not normal to do what Nixon and the ratfuck gang did. Not anywhere.
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Sad news. My husband looked an awful lot like Gary Rossington, always did. He died 19 years ago (would have been 68 now), and I followed Rossington, imagining that my husband would look still look like him as he aged.
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It was a call out directly to Neil Young, who is decidedly not a conservative. The song was literally a response to Young’s Southern Man. It could also be argued that it was a call out to northern liberals who acted like they didn’t have dirty hands. Again, the lyric itself doesn’t make a ton of sense in that context.
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I know the overall purpose of the song, yes. It’s framework is a callout. But individual bits of content seem to me like they are statements of conservative pride.
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I really think they were more calling out northern liberals who were judging southerners and painting them all as a conservative monolith. And yes, of course, there is expression of southern pride in the song, but not conservative pride (definitely not that … they campaigned for Carter in 1976), and I don’t think they’re calling out conservatives, either.
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Was that before or after he listened to the bagpipe lady?
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Technically-not-an-original-member Rickey Medlocke is still alive AFAIK
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