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A lament for the condition of the Vietnam veteran, many people vapidly thought this was nothing more than jingoistic flag-waving because apparently listening to anything other than the chorus is a wee bit complicated for some.
one of the great myths in rock n roll is the premise that Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd had some sort of feud playing out in these songs, in truth, there was a lot of mutual admiration between them.
Mr. Young and Mr. Van Zant have a conversation...
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ol' Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
from wiki -- In his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, Young commented on his role in the song's creation, writing "My own song 'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don't like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue"
The "feud myth" was further fueled with the Drive-By Truckers 2002 album "Southern Rock Opera" (one of the only truly genuine masterpiece albums released in the early 21st century) song "Ronnie and Neil":
And out in California, a rock star from Canada writes a couple of great songs
about the bad s**t that went down
"Southern Man" and "Alabama" certainly told some truth
But there were a lot of good folks down here and Neil Young wasn't around
Now Ronnie and Neil became good friends
their feud was just in song
Skynyrd was a bunch of Neil Young fans and Neil he loved that song
So He wrote "Powderfinger" for Skynyrd to record
But Ronnie ended up singing "Sweet Home Alabama" to the lord
^from... "I grew up in north Alabama back in the 1970s when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. I'm speaking, of course, of the three great Alabama icons: George Wallace, Bear Bryant, and Ronnie Van Zant. Now, Ronnie Van Zant wasn't from Alabama, he was from Florida, he was a huge Neil Young fan but in the tradition of Merle Haggard writing Okie From Muskogee to tell his dad's point of view on the hippies in Vietnam, Ronnie felt that the other side of the story should be told. Neil Young always claimed that Sweet Home Alabama was one of his favorite songs and legend has it that he was an honorary pallbearer at Ronnie's funeral, such as the duality of the southern thing."
A lament for the condition of the Vietnam veteran, many people vapidly thought this was nothing more than jingoistic flag-waving because apparently listening to anything other than the chorus is a wee bit complicated for some.
There are two other songs I always group with "Born in the USA" that also can be considered to have jingoistic titles but are actually critiques of jingoism and shallow-minded thinking:
Phil Ochs committed suicide by hanging. He was an alcoholic and he was crazy. He took on another identity. His brother tried to commit him.
He had a beautiful voice though and he wasn't bad looking. I had a few of his albums. Pleasures of the Harbor was my favorite. I also have a book about him called, Death of a Rebel.
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