Motorcycles — there must have been 200 or 300 of them — filled the drive in front of the AVA at Casino del Sol Saturday night.
If you didn't know better you would have sworn there was a big Harley and Honda sale going on.
Until you saw the sea of folks wearing leather vests and jackets, most with Harley Davidson emblazoned on the backs, and underneath, many were sporting T-shirts reading "Lynyrd Skynyrd."
Inside the amphitheater it seemed as if every other fan squeeze into the AVA to see Skynyrd had gotten the same wardrobe memo: Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts — some from long-gone tours of years past, others picked up from vendors at the AVA earlier in the night — were everywhere you turned.
The universal fan wardrobe is to be expected when a band's been around as long as Skynyrd: 40 years, three generations of fans by longtime lead singer Johnny Van Zant's estimation. Singers of songs woven so deeply into the American fabric of our musical and pop culture that you instantly recognize them with just a few plucked chords.
Van Zant, 56, and his bandmates, all in their mid-50s to mid-60s, who have been pounding this Southern fried road together for most of their adult lives didn't need to prompt anyone in Saturday's audience to sing along. From the first strains of "Saturday Night Special" through the final chorus of their power ballad "Freebird" that closed the night, the band had a chorus of thousands singing along.
"We've been around 40 years," Van Zant told the crowd as he raised a red plastic cup to toast the fans. "Three generations. Now we're working on our fourth, and thank you so much."
The audience leaned more toward the first rung of Van Zant's generational ladder, men who may not walk with as much energy as they did in their younger days. Their once dark hair has since turned white and many of them wore it long and straight like Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke.
But once Skynyrd started performing, the years seemed to fade in the gentle breeze that swept through the AVA as the crowd danced and sang along, pumping fists in the air or waving their arms during the ballads.
Saturday's concert, a stop on the band's "One More for the Fans" tour, was an evening of greatest hits that dipped deep into the band's 40-year catalogue: "The Needle and the Spoon," "Simple Man," "Gimme Three Steps," "Call Me the Breeze," "Tuesday's Gone," "What's Your Name."
The highlight of the night arguably was the ubiquitous "Sweet Home Alabama," a song that is omnipresent at every country concert you go to from the current Nashville crop of hip-hopping young guns to artists who've been around the country block a time or ten. But hearing it performed by the band that originated it 40 years ago brings "Alabama" into a focus that is often taken for granted when others cover it.
The concert's water cooler moment — the highlight most people will be recounting Monday morning — came about a minute into "Call Me the Breeze," when Van Zant unceremoniously stopped the music. Apparently a man in the front row named Bo collapsed and Van Zant called for the AVA medical staff to help the man to his feet.
"He's part of Skynyrd nation," the singer told the audience, asking for their patience while a pair of AVA employees helped the man. "It's like family and we've got to take care of our family first."
Then to ease the man's pain — or perhaps dull his predicament of being the reason the music was stopped — Van Zant gave him a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt.
It wouldn't be a stretch to think that Bo will hang that shirt in his closet alongside the others from Skynyrd concerts past.
The Brodie Stewart Band from outside San Francisco opened the show with a 30-minutes set that opened with Southern rock and fused into more neo-traditional/rocking country including the title song off their debut album "Born American" and "Fine Lookin' Country Girl."
