If You Ask Chase Rice To Play Free Bird He Will Tell You To Fuck Off And He's Right
Now this is a movement I can get behind. Chase Rice is at the grand opening of his new bar with Dante in Cleveland called The Farm and just wants to hit the crowd with a few of his tunes. Girls from all over northeast Ohio came out to get moist over those sweet six-string serenades. Hell, even guys who aren’t Chase Rice fans are feeling it because they know their chick is Gonna Wanna Tonight after drooling over him on stage for an hour.
Then there’s this wet blanket that wants to ruin the night with Free Bird. Fuck off is right.
Sure, Free Bird is a fine enough song and it certainly has a time and a place. It’s one pretty much all of us sing along to after a few too many summer evening High Life’s in our neighbor’s garage. But what is the obsession with asking artists to play this boring ass 9 minute lyrical Iliad? If you want to hear it so bad then turn on your local classic rock station, they play it every 15 minutes.
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Even Lightning McQueen thinks your joke blows.
And I know the old timers are going to come at me with the argument that it’s one of the greatest songs ever made. False.
Rolling Stone had it at #407 on their top 500 songs of all-time list. One spot behind Run-DMC “Sucker MC’s” and 300 spots behind Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” And this isn’t a rap vs country vs southern rock thing. It’s a “good music to hear with an upbeat vibe” vs “soundtrack to old men crying at the local dive bar” kind of thing.
Genres and boundaries are a thing of the past anyway. You have country artists collabing with hip-hop artists, EDM DJ’s making country music, and Jimmy Butler passing out shots at a country bar during NBA All-Star Weekend. Up is down and left is right.
The one thing I do know is that no one should ever request Free Bird at a concert again unless they are seeing those walking corpses Lynyrd Skynyrd live. Which certainly isn’t a bad idea. In fact I would recommend it before more of them kick the bucket.
I did ecstasy for the first time at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and I too sang along and wept tears of joy while Rickey Medlocke shredded Allen Collins’ guitar solo.
So I get it. Let’s just keep that shit where it belongs, opening up for Kid Rock at County Rib Burn-Offs around this beautiful country of ours.