When we did "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd for the Cultish Creative Music Club (pitched by Brandon Duncan, with Joseph Moore on the other mic), I was more moved than I expected to be. The song got passed down from their moms and grandmoms. Skynyrd said as much - they just recorded it. That cross-generational transfer of simple, and what simple means, became the core of our episode.
Here's the song itself:
I got plenty of good wisdom from the two generations above me. Mine just didn't come in the same stretch of physical time. This is Joseph Moore's "inflation explains art" idea at work. My 80s/90s years were not their 50s/60s years. So seeing as my wisdom pass-down arrived a generation or so later, and when I think about that musical throughline, one band and one song show up right away: "Let There Be Rock" by Drive-By Truckers.
I know, I know. Them and Jason Isbell are the poster children of this whole series. I can't help it.
"Let There Be Rock" opens the second disc of Southern Rock Opera (2001). It's mostly a Patterson Hood song, written to sound like the breakout '70s hit from a fake band, and Mike Cooley has described it as a “mostly fictional” story that captures a certain time in your life.
"Simple Man" holds onto a nostalgic world that was already changing in 1973, in the middle of America's whole global-looking-local crisis.
"Let There Be Rock" is about the kid who just missed all of that, knows it, and is trying to make sense of it within their own lived experiences.
The lyrics are the story here. The main character opines that he never got to see Skynyrd, but he sure saw Molly Hatchet, and Ozzy with Randy Rhoads, and AC/DC with Bon Scott. You see the setup, especially when you write it out, right? Stand-ins and coping strategies everywhere. Art a generation removed from when the icons became icons, cemented in the attempt to hold onto legacy.
He almost did see them, too, which is a key part of it. The main character had a ticket for a Skynyrd show in the spring of '77, but it got cancelled and rescheduled for the Street Survivors tour, which is the tour that ended with the plane crash. "Never saw Skynyrd" turns out to be real literal. You feel the teenage awareness of it.
The rest of the song is, candidly, really funny. To me. Teenage brain damage is on center display between the acid, the cops, and the vodka. It's also about how art helps keep us together, within ourselves and with our people, even when we didn't witness the starting point, which always does feel a generation out of reach, and has its own way of binding a next generation to each other.
Objectively, "Let There Be Rock" is far less simple of a song. It's a lot more complex, but I’d argue that each perspective is the perfection of each song shining through in its own presentation. "Simple Man" nails the sentiment of grandmotherly advice, with all the labored efficiency to producing it. "Let There Be Rock" nails the complexity of our own lives and experience, with the teenage mishmash of stammering it out through a modest hangover. It puts the mess of details on display, organized under a thread of how some of the best acts of our day more deeply represented communities who were coping with loss, and the simple truths of songs and stories that made for their ability to pull through.
One last note on the two. I got lightly into the music theory of "Simple Man" and the sobering minor resolution of every line. There's a somber weight to it. "Let There Be Rock" semi inverts that. At the end of the song, Bon Scott is singing "Let there be rock” and it’s pretty uplifting.
You think of the Bible line, and light, and all that. You think of the bands and the reinterpretation where it doesn’t just end in tragedy. You think about the modified bands, and how it goes on and on, again and again, and you remember that all there is are the stories we pass forward. They give us peace, and they let us discover the simplicity of something that leaves us feeling good.
Let there be rock.
