Tag Archive for: red beard

The tale of Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Street Survivors"  seems to have been hatched in the vivid imagination of Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, or William Faulkner, but the characters are so colorful, the childhood bonds so strong, the struggles so personal, the victories so inspiring, and the heartbreak so deep that there is simply no need for hyperbole in telling it. The dearly beloved late co-founder Gary Rossington was my guest In the Studio.

Warren Zevon, the gambler's son who wrote and sang "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead", presumably is indeed resting in peace, having passed away far too soon in 2003...Here is my rare interview with Warren Zevon for “Excitable Boy".

Melissa Etheridge:"And I got to lie still, and I stopped being a rock star. I stopped working, I stopped striving, I stopped everything. And I was completely still . And being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. I mean it. We just don't do enough of it in our lives , and it is so important. And I just laid still, and I finally got to the point where my brain stopped chattering. It stopped waking up and wandering, and I started dreaming again. I started dreaming of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like ." RB: "With the diagnosis of breast cancer, you still could make plans for the future even before you completed chemotherapy and radiation ?" ME:" Oh my gosh , I want the rest of my life ! No no no, I'm not done at all, I'm just beginning . And with that new excitement, I started looking at what I had created , what I'm creating now, and what I wanted to create. I started reading like crazy , I started reading everything from cosmology to quantum physics , string theory, agnostic gospels, Buddhism, everything ! And everybody is saying the same thing , this simple thing : that we're all here to create, to be happy, and to love. You know, give me the peace signs and all the gooey stuff, but that's really what I started feeling.And when I started thinking ,'Oh my gosh , I want to write a new album ' , I had this joy behind it . I had this great desire to put my experience down and to ignite people and light 'em up and say , 'Look , you can do this too . We don't have to do it this way '. " RB: What attitudes and behaviors should we all look at ? ME: Today , right now, we have a choice .We have marketed ourselves into a little bitty corner of sound bites and fast food , and we think we can sustain ourselves on this . We think we can go to McDonald's every day , eat in our car , and be fine . We can just download that one little song that sounds just like that other song . They're little pieces . If you want to live your life on just little pieces of life , okay , that's your choice . But I think that there's a large bunch of us who really want more , who really do believe that the best food comes from the earth ; that it grows up out of the dirt ; and then you eat it and it nourishes you . And that music is made channeled through an artist . They craft it , they put it down in a certain place , and you can enjoy it for three minutes , or an hour , or you can even go to a live concert and enjoy it for three hours . Imagine giving yourself that time ! But I think our society needs to take a breath and step back , and get off this wheel that we're on of faster , faster , faster . I do ."