Valley of the Dinosaur Rockers

A heady mix of raw sexual energy and whiskey marketing

In retrospect, the mistake was going to a concert in Concord on a Thursday evening. We live in Redwood City and the 50 mile rush-hour drive to Concord took us two and a half crawling hours. But we’d bought the tickets six or eight months before, when the prospect of the drive was remote, and my son was excited to see a double bill of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Yes, this was my 16 year-old son’s choice. He may be a half-Asian zoomer, but he has the musical tastes of a white boomer from Little Rock. His playlist is a mix of 70’s prog, southern rock and classic country. 

I didn’t do this to him! If my influence won, he would be playing non-stop Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. I went to the University of California Santa Cruz in the 1980s and they wouldn’t give you a diploma until you could recite the discographies of both bands and debate the merits of their various eras. Was it all downhill after Syd Barrett left Floyd? These are the questions one grapples with in the ivory towers of the academy. Often as one also grapples with a four foot tall bong.

I went to a lot of concerts when I was in college and grad school. I was playing bass guitar and hanging out with band buddies, and it was cheaper in those days. After moving to Asia in the mid nineties I pretty much stopped for twenty-five years, which is probably why I can still hear. (I wear concert earplugs now.) 

In 2021, my son, then thirteen, pleaded to go to see the Eagles in San Francisco. $700 for three tickets later, I was back in the concert attending business. During the show, an older woman seated behind us leaned over and asked my son, “Did your parents drag you to this?” 

“No,” he replied. “I dragged them!” 

Since then, he has continued to set the musical agenda. We’ve been to see Kansas (his favorite), Steve Miller and a Styx-Foreigner double-header. We also went to Duran Duran, but that was me. Child of the ‘80s and all.

Mugging for a selfie as we melt in the heat at the Styx-Foreigner concert in late June.

The fun thing about going to see Skynyrd and ZZ Top with my kid is that I, the goateed fifty-something with a shaved head, look exactly like the average attendee. But my son is the one able to have deeply literate conversations with the other fans. He knows all the songs, lore and band members. I just smile and nod and jam the earplugs in a little harder.

It’s a weird scene. A sea of boomers gently buzzed on tall Modelos with a sprinkling of younger representatives of the pickup truck + southern rock demographic. I was in the bathroom between a guy in a Sig Sauer sweatshirt (a handgun brand) and another in stars-and-stripes overalls. But it was congenial. If you’re at that concert, you’re in the club by definition.

The drunk man sitting behind my son and me definitely welcomed us into the club. He was the kind of guy who in a movie theater loudly tells his companion, “Watch this. The science officer is actually a killer android!” During ZZ Top’s set he exulted, “It’s the furry guitars! Here comes ‘Legs!’” From a boozy monologue we learned that he was from Canada but had lived in Texas before moving to Concord 20 years ago; that Rush and ZZ Top were the two greatest bands of all time (with an inventory of all the times he had seen them); that Jimi Hendrix thought Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was the best guitar player he had ever seen; and that the Toyota Pavilion in Concord was an awesome venue.

That last bit was something only a Concord resident could believe. Until this summer, the last time I’d been in the Pavilion was in 1988 for Aerosmith and Guns’n’Roses. I don’t think there has been any meaningful renovation since. The bathrooms are like something built for a national wilderness area by the Work Progress Administration and subsequently ravaged by bears. When we were in Concord in June, for Styx and Foreigner, it was 100 degrees out and several elderly attendees had to be ambulanced out with heat exhaustion after the long trudge up the hill from the parking lots. Then the power went out, forcing us to return for a sweaty do-over the next night.

I last saw ZZ Top play in 1986, at the Cow Palace in Daly City for the “Afterburner” tour. I saw Skynyrd play at Shoreline in Mountain View in the early nineties. Even back then I thought of both bands as being “late stage.” After all, ZZ Top had started in 1971 as a straight blues trio and by 1986 were in their peak 1980s drum-machine and sampled orchestra hit era. Skynyrd famously lost half the band in a plane crash in the seventies and had been reassembled from spare parts twice by the time I first saw them.

But here was 74 year-old Billy Gibbons, putting on his sequined pants and coming out to jam, fur-lined guitars and all. Original ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill died three years ago, but his replacement, Elwood Francis, held down the parts. Francis also rocked a look like Santa Claus just back from a three-day ayahuasca trip, which I would absolutely adopt if I had the hair for it. Ultimately, with two of the three original members, ZZ Top is demonstrably still ZZ Top.

ZZ Top last Thursday. Elwood Francis, left, rocking his Ayahuasca Santa look, and Billy Gibbons, right. Frank Beard is on the drums.

But what even is Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2024? There are exactly zero members of the original lineup still alive, let alone in the band. The last original member, Gary Rossington, died in 2023. The band didn’t exist from 1978 to 1988, when it was reconstituted ostensibly for a one-off “tribute” tour. Its continued existence after that sparked legal tawdriness.

There are some connections. The lead singer, Johnny Van Zant, is the original singer’s younger brother. A couple of current members, especially guitarist Rickey Medlocke, have long histories with the band. And they’re good! Talented and tight.

But is that enough? Do bands work as dynastic projects? 2024 Lynyrd Skynyrd is literally the ship of Theseus in band form. Over the years they have replaced all the planks. Is it the same ship? Discuss! Where does the soul of the band live? 

I’ve long thought that all those Pink Floyd shows I went to in the ‘80s, after Roger Waters left, were really David Gilmour solo shows. Sure, three of the four original band members were there. But Waters was the creative engine of peak-era Floyd songwriting. David Gilmour is my favorite guitar player, and an indelible part of Pink Floyd’s sound. But the equation is simple: Waters+Gilmour=Floyd. Anything less is something else, sonically and creatively.

My father, owner of a low-key epic vinyl collection, summed this situation up succinctly. “They’re brands,” he said of the bands. As long as the brand is powerful, and can generate revenue, there is an incentive to keep it going.

Lynyrd Skynyrd wrestled with this tension during their set. Much of the visual material shown during the gig was meant to tie the current version of the band to the hallowed original. There was a long (and appropriate) memorial to Rossington. There were lots of black and white photos and videos of the original band. There was a weird segment where they projected candles and names for all the sixteen (so far) deceased band members and slowly winked out the candles. Imagine doing this every night.

The most explicit sentiment engineering was during the final encore, which was, of course, Freebird. Singer Johnny Van Zant left the stage, and the band synced its playing with an old video of long-dead founding singer Ronnie Van Zant. I get the intent, but I was left feeling this was a band chasing ghosts to assert its legitimacy.

Also, the piety was undercut by Skynyrd using their set to aggressively market their “Hell House” branded whiskey. It was promoted before the show and a huge bottle was projected on the screen behind the band during part of the set. Even the name of the whiskey is a throwback to the original band, invoking the house where they did their songwriting. Remember our glorious dead! And buy our whiskey, available wherever fine spirits are sold.

My son, a zoomer puritan who wrinkles his nose at his parents whenever we have a drink, thought it was gross. But bands are brands. The wavefront of popular culture moves ever forward, but with sufficient power you can freeze parts of it in amber. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a marketing firm trading on southern rock nostalgia so you can spend $50 a bottle on white-label whiskey. If Bob Dylan can do it, why not them? 

Rock and roll will never die! Buy our whiskey!

We had a great time at the show. The music was excellent. The venue was full. Rickey Medlocke shreds. And god bless Billy Gibbons for still cranking it up at 74. I hope he’s up there playing “La Grange” and singing about bordellos and transgression and youthful lust when he’s ninety. There was a folding walker propped against the column near where we were sitting, so why not on stage? Turn the crank until the last fan is dust.

The climax of Freebird is a legendarily long and incandescent three-guitar jam. As the band transitioned from the video of Ronnie Van Zant singing and into the instrumental, it unleashed full smoke-and-light sensory and psychedelic overload. At that moment, the glorious climax of the evening for which we’d paid $200 a seat, the boomer couple sitting to my right made their move to beat the crowd out. 

I had to admire this. It was the least rock and roll maneuver I had ever seen. But, I thought, they’re going to be warm in bed while we’re still fighting our way out of the parking lot for the long drive home.

The next day I watched the classic video for the ZZ Top song “Legs,” which was released in 1984, exactly 40 years ago. In it, the band gives a nebbishy-but-hot girl a slutty makeover so she can take revenge on a bunch of bullies and win the heart of a hunky fry cook. It is absolutely peak eighties culture.

Watching it, I thought, damn, that girl is, like, sixty now! But, then, so am I. That’s how time works. We get older. But the bands are forever.