Nuthin' Fancy

by

Lynyrd Skynyrd

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When I first started purchasing music back in the mid to late 80s, I bought my share of what Brian Henneman of The Bottle Rockets calls "welfare music". I never had much spending money as a teenager so to get as much music at a time as possible, I'd go to the K-Mart across town and root through the bargain cassette bin. The bin was a large metal basket filled with tapes piled several feet high, consisting mostly of country, southern rock, and oldies if I recall correctly. My southern rock collection benefited greatly from these trips to the bargain bin and I soon had my share of 4-dollar cassettes by the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band.

One of the tapes I rescued from that bargain bin at K-Mart was Lynyrd Skynyrd's often overlooked classic, Nuthin' Fancy. With the exception of the opening cut, "Saturday Night Special", which made a bold stance against handguns and still gets played on classic rock radio today, Nuthin' Fancy is devoid of the hits that made Skynyrd popular outside the South. Instead, what you get is great music that refreshingly doesn't sound like it was created just to get played on the radio like the songs on many other 70s rock albums.

Stylistically, Nuthin' Fancy is all over the place. After the hard southern rock crunch of "Saturday Night Special", Ronnie gives one of his blues-iest vocal performances on "Cheatin' Woman". "Railroad Song" and "Made in the Shade" are fine slices of traditional American music, though they are probably my least favorite tunes on the album. "I'm a Country Boy" is a southern rock kiss-off to big city life, a common theme in Ronnie's lyrics over the years. "Am I Losin'" is a catchy mid-tempo song chronicling how Ronnie's relationships with some of his friends became strained once he started making lots of money. "Whiskey Rock-A-Roller" is a barroom classic in which Ronnie boasts like a rapper about the female company awaiting him in every town including one special Memphis "queenie with long brown curly hair". Yes, lyrically it might put off some listeners, but "Whiskey Rock-A-Roller" is still a damn catchy song. Probably my favorite song on "Nuthin Fancy", though, is "On the Hunt", the hardest song Skynyrd ever recorded. This song, which describes Ronnie's empathy for a groupie who regularly hangs out near his hotel, sounds metal enough that it wouldn't feel that out of place on Corrosion of Confomity's Deliverance album.

If Nuthin' Fancy was Skynyrd's only album, I'd give it 5 stars and move on, but since they set the standard so high with their previous albums, Nuthin Fancy rates `only' a very strong 4 stars. Still, if you enjoy their classic earlier albums, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd and Second Helping, you're almost surely going to like Nuthin Fancy too. It is damn sure impressive for an album that K-Mart considers 'welfare music'.

The original Skynyrd line-up only recorded five studio albums and one live, so it's no surprise that each one of them has someone calling it Lynyrd Skynyrd's best album. Including this one.

"Nuthin' Fancy" isn't, though. It's good, but it's not great, at least not compared to, say, "Pronounced 'l'h-'nérd 'skin-'nérd". There are a couple of generic run-of-the-mill songs here, and too few of the really classy ones, but "Nuthin' Fancy" doesn't suck. The original Skynyrd line-up never made a bad album, and this one has a lot going for it.

It's somewhat more low-key than its two predecessors, but there is some rockin' and rollin' as well. The gritty "Saturday Night Special" is here, as is the stop-and-go riff-rocker "Whiskey Rock-a-Roller" and the mellow country-rock of "Am I Losin'", and the folkish acoustic "Made In The Shade" is certainly enjoyable as well. The slow, bluesy "Cheatin' Woman" sounds more like morose early "Free" than Skynyrd. It's not bad, nor is it terrific.

Songs like "Saturday Night Special" and "Whiskey Rock-a-Roller" admittedly sound better and more powerful on the live "One More From The Road", but the 1999 addition of two bonus tracks earns "Nuthin' Special" another half star...these live recodings of the otherwise relatively unremarkable "Railroad Song" and the riff-driven "On The Hunt" in particular are much grittier and more enjoyable than the studio versions.

All in all, "Nuthin' Fancy" isn't the way to start your Skynyrd collection, but it's one you'll want to pick up once you are hooked for sure. It's not fantastic, but it's enjoyable, and certainly good enough for some 3 1/2 stars.