Warren Zevon’s song about the Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd feud: “Grandpa p***ed his pants again”
Feuds have always been part and parcel of the music industry, with opposing artists – or, occasionally, artists in the same band – in constant competition and at each other’s throats. Aside from anything else, feuds are a great way of shifting a few more records. Sometimes, though, those arguments spill out into the wider music world, as Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd found out back in the 1970s.
Neil Young has always been a fairly confrontational songwriter, going right back to his early origins within Buffalo Springfield. It is no surprise, then, that the Canadian cultural stalwart has spent much of his discography surrounded by conflict; whether it was the endless ego battles of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash years, or the farcical record label lawsuit which ensued after 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’. One of the more highly-publicised spats, though, saw Young pitched against Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The crux of that particular conflict seemed to be Young’s 1970 effort ‘Southern Man’, over the course of which he takes a few swings at the southern states for their tendency to foster intense and horrific levels of racism, both in the present day and throughout American history. The south was, after all, the prevailing stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and also formed the setting of countless historic civil rights struggles.
In response, the Floridian outfit Lynyrd Skynyrd – who were, at that time, proudly flying the Confederate flag at any given opportunity – wrote their defining track, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, which directly called out Young for overgeneralising the people of the south. “Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her,” Ronnie Van Zant sang. “I heard ol’ Neil put her down. Well, I hope Neil Young will remember a southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.”
“We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two,” the vocalist later shared in an interview. “We’re southern rebels, but more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong.” That argument might have proved more convincing had the band chosen not to perform in front of a flag that fought for the preservation of slavery, mind you.
Both Young and Van Zant were eventually able to bury the hatchet before the Lynyrd Skynyrd vocalist tragically died in a 1977 plane crash. However, the feud didn’t stop there. A few years later, Chicago songwriter Warren Zevon released ‘Play It All Night Long’, directly inspired by the Young versus Skynyrd debacle.
Arriving with a fairly nuanced take on the whole thing, Zevon criticised both Young’s sweeping generalisation of thousands of southern inhabitants and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s romanticisation of a part of the United States which has historically been responsible for some of the worst hate crimes humanity has ever witnessed.
“Grandpa pissed his pants again, he don’t give a damn. Brother Billy has both guns drawn, he ain’t been right since Vietnam,” Zevon sung, parodying the southern drawl of Skynyrd, before directly referencing their track: “‘Sweet home Alabama’, play that dead band’s song. Turn those speakers up full blast. Play it all night long.”
It is fair to say, all things considered, that Zevon had the last word on the matter when it came to the unlikely feud between Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and it just goes to show that sometimes the best way to end a fight is to have a third person wade in to sort both parties out.
