While the Allman Brothers took Southern rock and twisted and stretched it into hour-long jams that either mesmerized or bored the audience held captive, Lynyrd Skynyrd preached greater economy and a stronger root in country music. The band recorded demos in Sheffield, Alabama in 1970 that already exhibit their strengths in full force (they take up much of the first disc of the boxed set). Singer Ronnie Van Zant had an unnerving sense of pathos and was able to train his voice on the note only to let it fall in futile rejection. The triple-guitar attack was anything but excess, leading the songs through each simple-yet-complex schematic. "Freebird" dates from this period, and while it became one of the more painful elongated classic rock FM staples, in demo form the song shows off its magnificence in four packed minutes.

Allen Collins, Gary Rossington and Ed King (replaced by Steve Gaines) were a formidable guitar attack, but they understood when to shut up--and the first couple of Skynyrd albums strike a poised balance between their intricate jamming and the homey simplicity of Ronnie Van Zant's songs. A track such as "Tuesday's Gone" begins simply, but eventually escalates to anthemic heights. By the third album, Nuthin' Fancy, the band's rhythm section was unparalleled. The special whipcrack of "Saturday Night Special" is a virtual "Honky Tonk Women," with its promise of violence and sexuality instilled in the beat.

Skynyrd recorded their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, and then tragedy struck. A plane crash took the lives of Ronnie Van Zant, and Steve and Cassy Gaines. The Rossington-Collins Band formed afterwards--and eventually, in 1987, they reconvened under the Skynyrd name. By 1991 they were recording anew, but times were different and there was no escaping just how much of Van Zant's band they really were.

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