Of all the albums that Lynyrd Skynyrd made in the 1970s, Gimme Back My Bullets is their most underrated. And its harshest critic was Ronnie Van Zant himself.
After the album failed to match the success of 1975’s Nuthin’ Fancy, Van Zant complained: “We were going for a completely different sound, and it didn’t work. We had always been so heavy and muddy, we decided to make a clean Lynyrd Skynyrd album. The material was good. It was just too… refined.”
But if Gimme Back My Bullets sounded a little slicker than the band’s previous albums, it was still a great rock’n’roll record. And even if Van Zant was unhappy about the way the album turned out, it was telling that his comments attributed no blame to producer Tom Dowd. As guitarist Gary Rossington said: “We loved Tom! He was like a father to us, and he really inspired us.”
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Like Al Kooper, the band’s mentor and producer of their first three albums, Dowd was a perfect fit for Lynyrd Skynyrd. A veteran of the music business since the 1940s, Dowd had recorded legendary soul and jazz artists such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker.
In the rock era, he’d worked on some of Skynyrd’s favourite albums, including Cream’s Wheels Of Fire, Derek And The Dominos’ Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, and The Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East.
And when he was hired by Skynyrd in 1975, Dowd’s reputation as a hit producer had been confirmed by the multi-platinum successes of Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard and Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing.
Featuring a slimmed-down Skynyrd line-up with only Rossington and Allen Collins on guitars (following the departure of Ed King), Gimme Back My Bullets was recorded at The Record Plant in Los Angeles in September 1975, and at Capricorn Studios in Macon, Georgia in November.
And such was the bond between Skynyrd and their highly respected producer was so tight that Rossington recalls, “We joked about calling the album Ain’t No Dowd About It.”
The band’s Southern soul influences and Dowd’s feel for black music dovetailed beautifully on Double Trouble, the best song on the album and the funkiest that Skynyrd ever recorded, with Ronnie recalling the 11 times he’d been jailed for various offences, most of them involving public intoxication.
Elsewhere, there’s an echo of New Orleans funk titans The Meters on I Got The Same Old Blues, Skynyrd’s second brilliant cover of a JJ Cale song (after Call Me The Breeze on Second Helping). There are flavours of country and blues in All I Can Do Is Write About It and Roll Gypsy Roll: the former was an eco-protest song; the latter, more characteristically, including an admission from Ronnie that ‘most of the money I done stuck up my nose’. And contrary to the singer’s view of this album as “too refined”, there are some crunching hard rock songs here, including the menacing title track and the creeping, Free-inspired Cry For The Bad Man.
Few people ever told Ronnie Van Zant to his face that he’d got something wrong. But he misjudged this record. Like Deep Purple’s Come Taste The Band or Aerosmith’s Night In The Ruts, Gimme Back My Bullets is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lost classic.