Thursday 17 March 2005

Freebird Etiquette

This may explain some things for my Austrian friends...
But he bemoans the decline of "Freebird" etiquette. "It was never meant to be yelled at a cool concert -- it was meant to be yelled at someone really lame," he says. "If you're going to yell 'Freebird,' yell 'Freebird' at a Jim Nabors concert."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Golllllllllly! Does Jim Nabors still tour?

Anonymous said...

I highly recommend a book of rock essays called Kill Your Idols which takes apart 30 of the best selling and much beloved albums of all time. There are two good explanations of why Free Bird and Stairway to Heaven ruined the lives of so many young people by trying to disguise themselves as slow dance songs.

Yes,you should yell 'Free Bird' at Jim Neighbors or Wayne Newton just because doing something for the eye-arching irony of it all is what makes life worth living.

Saw you page under the comments section of Steve Gilliard's blog where you said you get about 6 visitors a day. Frankly the pages that get 6 people a day are vastly more interesting than the ones who don't.

Be seeing you.

Paul said...

Thanks pops,

Kill Your Idols seems my sort of book.

As for the Freebird thing, I first came across it in a bootleg of a Bill Hick concert where he just lost it with most of the audience, but one in particular who was shouting "Freebird" all night. Bill called him "everything that's wrong with America" and you know what he means.

I have shouted it at bad cover bands, but never anywhere else.

A fun recent(ish) reference is on The Drive By Truckers song Days Of Graduation, a song about a grisly car crash, which ends:

"Everyone said that when the ambulance came
The paramedics could hear "Free Bird" still playing on the stereo.

You know it's a very long song."