Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke is tired of hearing they’re just a tribute band now that there are no original members in the lineup.
In an interview with Real Music With Gary Stuckey he says, “They even said that when [the last original member, guitarist] Gary [Rossington] was still alive. But here’s the way I look at it. You’ve got the original singer’s (Ronnie Van Zant) youngest brother [Johnny Van Zant] that has been in there almost 37 years. You’ve got me. That’s my second go-round with the band, and I was in the original group, the formidable group. And you had Gary, an original founding member. Well, to us, us three guys standing upfront, we were, like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no.’
“A tribute band is a band of all strangers that love to play cover songs and decide one day they’re gonna be a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band. There’s a ton of ’em on YouTube. When you come to see Lynyrd Skynyrd it’s full-on tilt original-sounding, as close as you could ever possibly get. So the people sitting there behind their little computer keyboards and talking [crap], they can talk that [crap] all they want to. My word is if you can do better than me, step up. You know what I mean? Come on… Because Johnny and I right now promised Gary — Gary made us promise that we would never, ever let the integrity of the band and the music history of the band, never let it be forgotten…”
Medlocke was a member of Skynyrd in 1971 and ’72 before they were signed to a record deal. He does play drums and sings background vocals on “One More Time” on 1977’s Street Survivors, and he plays drums and sings lead and background vocals on 1978’s Skynyrd’s First…And Last, a collection of songs recorded during his time in the band.
Another Rock & Roll Hall of Fame act on the road from the ’70s without an original member is Foreigner, whose founder and guitarist Mick Jones is sidelined with Parkinson’s disease.
Singer Kelly Hansen, who’s been in the band since 2004, shares a similar view to that of Medlocke’s.
And despite no original members, both Skynyrd and Foreigner continue to tour and fill amphitheaters in major markets — Skynyrd with ZZ Top, and Foreigner with Styx and John Waite — leading one to surmise that it’s the music that’s the star of the show and not necessarily the musicians performing them.
