The Songs - Green Grass & High Tides
This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you!
Green Grass & High Tides - The Outlaws
Green grass and high tides forever
Castles of stone souls and glory
Lost faces say we adore you
As kings and queens bow and play for you
This song out-Free Birds Free Bird, and everybody yells at me when I remind them of this, like it’s some sort of sacrilege. Free Bird is perfectly fine, but it’s been annoying for more than 50 years and you know it. You’d think after all this time people would agree how to SPELL it first of all, but whether it’s “Freebird” or “Free Bird”, ever since Ronnie Van Zant asked “what song is it you want to hear?” and everybody below the Mason Dixon line yelled back at him, bar bands have been dealing with obnoxious turds screaming for it in between every song. It quickly became more annoying the Brown-Eyed Girl and Mustang Sally combined, and is currently only rivaled by “Wagon Wheel”, another song that’s either one word or two depending on where you’re looking. And Free Bird got this way despite hardly EVER being covered by ANYBODY, because nobody could really be arsed to learn the 3 guitar solo, which like Comfortably Numb has to be played note for note or it would just sound like garbage. Just once I wish that a band would actually honor the inevitable request, and play the song so badly that it would be left gasping for breath on the cruddy barroom floor. That might have nipped this thing in the bud right at the start.
Free Bird truly DOES NOT DESERVE its social significance. But yet here we are.
By the way nobody covers “Comfortably Numb” either.