2005 — 2019 | Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports

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Everyone wants to be free. That’s what this country’s all about.

—Ronnie Van Zant

It started as a joke, because “Free Bird” was the Song rednecks loved to play when doing super redneck things, things you hoped weren’t contagious but wanted to try anyway. It is the song played in the documentary The Dancing Outlaw, while Jessco White and his friends party and drunkenly tear up someone’s front yard in a car doing donuts until the engine smokes and the back axle almost falls off the car. It is the song I associate with the relatives and neighbors who’d inevitably fall out of trees they’d climb as adults on a dare, kill rattlesnakes in their driveways with shotguns while kids rode bikes around the cul-de-sac, and show up to family events with new wives without warning.

It started as a joke, all of it. “Free Bird” is not the song anyone alive at any point in the 1980s would have liked in order to be cool. “Free Bird” is the song of the kinds of people a kid growing up in Tennessee desperately hoped to avoid. “Free Bird” people bought Trans Ams and Fieros and drove them until the sound insulation fell out of them and the mufflers started to rust. They thought it was cool because it just made the car louder, and the volume on “Free Bird” on the radio would just have to be twice as loud. They smoked, all of them, all the time.

“Free Bird” never had to happen. No one ever had to take the trouble to play it because it just got played, it came on like an assumption, like the weather. It could be cited in Almanacs, like the phases of the moon or the next neap tide.

February 18th: 2:40 p.m. at moderate volume from a passing Silverado on I-40

April 7th: 8:18 p.m. Blasting during preshow for Alabama at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium

July 3rd: 10:38 a.m. from your uncle’s Nissan Z as he pulls up late to your seventh birthday party

September 11th: 10:39 a.m. from tailgate at football game. Blistering volume.

It was so deeply uncool, and in so many ways. It was uncool enough to become a joke at concerts for bands that would never play “Free Bird,” or play music for those who loved it. It was huge, anthemic, sincere, and beloved by hippie-compatible country types who wore t-shirts with serious-looking totem animals screen-printed on them.

In what was a serious error of bad taste for some, it had what could only be called a cartoonish number of Guitar solos. Worst of all: It was achingly sincere, the kind of song to play at tailgates after eight tallboys too many, and at the funerals of guys who died helmetless in rural highway motorcycle accidents.

***

You are reading this because I flunked out of the CIA. When I started EDSBS, I was underemployed in a terrible uninsulated apartment, fresh out of grad school with next to no plan, and not entirely able to think rationally about my situation.

The computer I typed all this into was a gigantic CPU block Dell with a fan so loud it could be heard on phone calls at a distance. The apartment sat in a stretch of intown Atlanta still wild enough that COPS filmed there. This happened often enough that the camera crew following the lady running out of Green’s Liquor on Ponce, who proved to be shockingly fast sprinting uphill in heels, and the huffing policemen in pursuit didn’t seem out of place at the time.

I was interviewing for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, because I was a delusional idiot. A good solid dead patch in life drove me there: begging for internships no one else wanted and still getting rejected, running my joints ragged on blistering Georgia blacktop, developing an eating disorder out of boredom and despair. I did things so out of character I don’t even fully recognize them as my own actions today. I went to church once, talked to military recruiters, and thought about law school out loud.

I was considering the CIA not out of patriotism, but because a career promising formal obliteration of my existing life was exactly what I wanted anyway. In my desperation, I convinced myself that the only job I could take was one that would erase myself completely by spending the rest of my life trying to sell a multi-level marketing scheme called “deeply underpaid government intelligence asset,” with the added bonus of a regular paycheck and a built-in excuse to barely talk to anyone I knew ever again.

I waited tables and waited by the mailbox and got an invite for the second round of interviews, to be held in a dismal brick office park warren in Reston, Virginia. They dole out a battery of written tests, do a few role-play scenarios with potential candidates, and ask applicants to be discreet about the reason for the visit to the not-at-all obvious building with the car bomb barriers and the lady carrying a combat shotgun standing out in front of it.

They pay out per diems in the cleanest cash I have ever held in my hands.

The money lasted a day or two after I got back to Atlanta. The letter from “McLatter and Associates” I got two months later let me know that my career as a spy was done before it ever took me any farther from home. I walked around Piedmont Park for a few hours and then I came home, sat down, and fired up NCAA Football to abuse a defense with Kliff Kingsbury and Texas Tech.

I probably threw eight TDs that day. It wasn’t all bad.

***

The centerpiece of Free Bird is the massive three-pronged guitar solo, four minutes and change long.

Al Kooper’s organ intro starts the song in church mode. The piano part — written and played by a roadie who had to become a member of the band later, because shit, that’s the Free Bird piano dude now, isn’t it — walks Nashville sound piano and Floyd Cramer right into the room. The slide guitar line carrying the melody is twin-tracked for an echo effect. It could be a dobro, or a fiddle, or anything rubbery enough to slide around a melody but mournful enough to be confused for a human voice.

Against all that warm 70s guitar, that line will always sound the way sunlight on a lake looks to me. It’s shimmery, sad, gorgeous, a little faded but still bright enough to remind the eye that there’s real fire behind it. It is the reflection of something so intense it can’t be looked straight at without damaging the observer. It sounds like the sun disappearing behind the lip of a stadium on a brutal September day feels: warm, gone from the eye, but still blasting away at something just out of sight.

The lyrics are a matter of interpretation. Ronnie Van Zant’s reading was poetical. Birds were the freest thing of all, and freedom was what this country was all about. Those are his words, not mine, from an interview Van Zant conducted while fishing in a trucker hat, because this was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there was going to be an interview on a boat talking about America at one point.

My translation is less sunny. It sounds like a breakup song attempt to “free” the singer, which is already bad, but gets worse when he drops a very literal “it’s not you, it’s me” in the middle of the second verse. Because if he stayed, you see, well, he wouldn’t change. (See: previous assertion of Free Bird-ness and immutable status as same.) You could totally read “Free Bird” as being an asshole’s anthem, if you wanted to, and be completely justified in that read.

There’s a lot there: that Nashville sound piano, the vanishing organ, the trailer park player letdown lyrics, the bombastic drums with the toms echoing to the rafters, the spectral guitar yanked out of a bluegrass funeral tune. It holds together, at one end, because of one guitar line. It soars on the other because of a three-part bar brawl between the band’s guitarists.

***

I didn’t know what I was doing here. I still don’t, really. There was a spot on the screen. Type words into it and they appeared on the internet. It just kept going. No one had to use their real names, even. That worked for me just fine. I didn’t want to be me anyway.

Being someone else and talking about this sport all day, put me somewhat at home and closer to all these things: to writing, to a sport I never played, to places that meant everything to me that would never reciprocate the same feeling. I could laugh about it and nothing hurt, because it wasn’t me sending or receiving.

It became a hobby, then an obsession, and then a job. Sometimes it could be all three at once. On the worst days, there was a freedom in that, too. It could be pure distraction: A game played in the weird in-between parts of the country, sincere and crooked and sincerely crooked, an earnest scam bought into and perpetuated by the need to keep some piece of home, youth, family, or a friend alive, or to simply belong. To see something loud and spectacular and fleeting that went on too long, and that never really ended, just fading out into a pause until the season returned.

For the longest time, it was the best way to be free I knew.

***

I. THESIS. The opening little reel that forms the backbone of the whole piece, thrown around hard for a minute or so by Allen Collins. It’s almost a bluegrass fiddle line, if a bluegrass fiddle line stole a car and peeled out in front of the police station. This is the part that starts playing in my head the minute Chris Davis catches the ball in the Kick Six, or if you like the initial stages of Nic Cage’s run from the cops in Raising Arizona.

II. REBUTTAL. The point where the solos begin to play over and against each other. In concert, Skynyrd’s three guitarists took turns here, but on the album version these are all just Collins. Allen Collins was baaaaaaad. This is the soundtrack to Joe Adams’ punt return against Tennessee, or what the box score of Baylor/West Virginia 2012 would sound like.

III. HOEDOWN. There’s really no other word for this: This is a hoedown thrown into a blender, with the snare doubling up and Leon Wilkeson trying to flay the strings off his bass. It’s amazing how much heat Collins gets out of two note toggles here. Think of the moment a ballcarrier gets completely loose from a scrum, or the instant a hole opens in the defense and the quarterback pinpoints a ball thirty yards downfield to a place no one but this one receiver can get at it. It’s Eric Crouch versus the entire Mizzou defense, or Cam Newton trampling all of LSU.

IV. DOWNHILL. The point in any good barfight when it spills out into the street. Off the peak of Hoedown 1, and now gathering momentum and rolling brakeless into the Barry Sanders section. Can’t really decide whether this is someone being chased in open grass by Roquan Smith or Roquan Smith hightailing it through a forest of blockers to get to a running back, but he’s in there somewhere.

V. BARRY SANDERS/HOEDOWN 2.

Back to some serious guitar hero shit. If it’s shredding in a country-type milieu, that’s Barry Sanders, the rare college football player who started out dazzling and only got better after he left for the pros. Sanders could juke the wings off a dragonfly. If there is a bottle made of theater glass somewhere within reach when this comes on, smash it over someone’s head immediately.

VI. #3. Here is Dale Earnhardt saving his car at the 1987 Winston. Part V almost loses control of the song altogether, and Part VI is Lynyrd Skynyrd making an impossible save and pulling it back onto the track. It begins playing when the ball hits Quincy Adeboyejo’s hands off the tip against Alabama in 2015.

VII. FADE. The best part about “Free Bird” is that it doesn’t end, it just fades out over at least two more sprawling guitar solos. In theory, “Free Bird” might be infinite. Returning to its masters thousands of years from now, turning the knob back up on the mixing board will reveal the band still playing, Allen Collins still soloing into the void.

It’s a reliable herald for the end of a show.

***

Freedom backfired, because freedom would mean being alone, but there were you people to contend with. Freedom would have meant doing EDSBS all myself, and that was impossible from the start because a.) people better at this than me just showed up, and b.) I couldn’t tie my shoes on the internet without them.

You showed up for some reason and read, and talked back, and kept this alive much longer than I ever imagined I could. A community formed, thrived, and became its own bumptious thing. Some of y’all have kids with each other now. I can’t really process that EDSBS might be responsible for the existence of select actual humans.

My family was there too, from the start, and has shared me with the internet in deeply unfair measures. I can give you my gratitude for tolerating it. I can only ask, though, for you to forgive me for all the times I can’t ever give back to you. I have regrets. Most of them are seconds spent looking at the phone when I could have been in the moment with y’all. Nothing is free.

***

There are four people I have to thank in particular.

The soul of this site is Holly Anderson. Neither of us remember how she took up residence as my left brain; I am left to assume she was a ghost in the machine from the start, who assumed form to yell at Phil Fulmer. The coaching tree starts with her. The site’s voice and sense of humor would never have attained even the medium-fancy level without her. My last shred of sanity resides firmly in her hands at all times. She wrote my favorite things here, and kept me from writing some of the worst. She rewrote half this story, and will never tell you which half.

I have never worked with a more talented human, or known someone better at making everyone around her better. I don’t know if I can say that enough, but I know I haven’t ever said it enough before, so let’s fix that. I have never worked with a more talented human, or known someone better at making everyone around her better. Thank you, Porch Cat.

Ryan Nanni kept me from quitting. More than once. I can’t decide whether to blame him for that or to thank him. We did keep each other from being lawyers, so thanks are probably the move. There is not a quicker one-line assassin in the world, or anyone else so seamlessly good at everything they try here. I hate him for this. I love him for everything else. Thank you, Ryan.

Jane Coaston never wrote here, and we would never suggest otherwise. To have germinated her writing career here would be bad for her professional reputation, and her professional reputation is sterling. I would like to keep it that way. I have never heard of her, but would like to thank her regardless. Thank you, Jane, in advance of our eventual meeting.

Action Cookbook, a.k.a. Scott, has kept y’all company by himself for the better part of three years now. He’s done this while juggling multiple children, a respectable-type job, and one of the worst stretches in Cincinnati football history. Thank you, Scott, for holding this line, for your continued brilliance, and for making sure people know Cincinnati invented gumbo.

You. If you are reading this: Thank you.

***

The lesson is that freedom backfires. I wanted to be distracted from not having a job, and ended up carving an accidental living, and a path for what I hope will be the rest of my life. I wanted to be someone else, and ended up writing under my own name, the one I still don’t like hearing out loud, even now at the age of 43.

I wanted to write about nothing. That backfired, too. There is no separating the politics from the sport, or you from the politics. There is no way to not eventually meet someone who will disappoint you in the worst way imaginable. I thought Art Briles was one of the best interviews I ever had, and coached what I thought football should look like. He turned out to be Art Briles. There will always be more of him.

I interviewed Danny Wuerffel once, for an essay I never wrote about Florida football. Wuerffel had a flawless college career, throwing for 39 TDs in his senior season and leading Florida to its first national title over Florida State. His pro highlights included wearing his helmet sideways over his face in New Orleans and backing up Brett Favre for a minute.

In 2004, he left pro football for good. In 2005, he lost his house in New Orleans to Katrina. He watched it on tv. Like, he spotted it on the television screen via a news camera, saw the water rushing over it, and realized it was gone. He lost his nonprofit, Desire Street Ministries, too, and had to relocate it to Atlanta.

in 2011, he came down with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Guillain-Barré forces the immune system to attack the nervous system. It causes muscle weakness at first, but can progress to near-total paralysis. Some patients end up on ventilators before recovering completely over the course of what might take weeks, or what might take years. A little over seven percent of all cases never recover at all.

Wuerffel’s case never reached the paralysis stage. He experienced a constant, powerful fatigue, for the most part, sometimes having to spend whole days sitting in his parents’ backyard. One day he said he just watched a turtle cross the yard, one achingly slow step at a time, until it crossed the whole lawn.

I told him I thought that sounded like agony. He made a different choice. He thought of it as a gift.

***

If you’ve read this far, you’ve reached the end of EDSBS. It’s a change, and to say you can’t change is a lie in multiple directions. One lie assumes that you won’t have incentive to change, that you can’t. That might be true. It also assumes what is definitely a bigger lie: That life will give anyone a choice in the matter.

This has been a gift, all of it. It will stay that way, right here, preserved in internet amber. It will appear locked, but there will probably be places you can crowbar open if you want to trespass around a bit.

I will be somewhere else. (Not leaving the company! But not here at EDSBS, which is now closed.) I would say come visit us, but that’s not accurate. Come visit me, because “us” stopped the minute I started this site and set my feed on a very long road of becoming an “I”. Whether I wanted it to happen or not, “I” eventually showed up to the party. So come visit me. I won’t be far.

“Free Bird” is the anthem of the end. It’s pretty much everything I love about a lot of things, including college football. It is big, bombastic. It has an accent, goes on too long, and might be sorta full of shit when it’s not busy being completely sincere. It gets completely and raucously out of control. It contains stretches of stunning beauty made in places and by people who had no right to make anything this gorgeous.

It has its own troubled history, and attendant disasters. Falling in love with it means passing through layer after layer of apprehension: irony, then insecurity, then cynicism, and finally into a molten core of genuine, unabashed love. Everything else is the noise playing over that. It is deafening, and will always be worth the silence that follows.