It was more or less done live, with just a few overdubs for the lead guitars and vocals. And we sure as hell didn’t waste any time cutting that song. “That was exciting,” Rossington says, “to have this new blood in the band. It was their first recording with drummer Artimus Pyle, who had recently joined the group in place of Bob Burns. The track was recorded in a single day, between gigs, at Studio 1 in Doraville, Georgia, where Skynyrd had made their first two albums. Saturday Night Special was recorded quickly so it could be included in the soundtrack to the 1974 film The Longest Yard, a comedy about a prison football team, starring Burt Reynolds. That summer, Skynyrd had notched up a Top 10 hit with Sweet Home Alabama, and label execs were keen to cash in on that success. Once the song was written, the band recorded it immediately at the behest of their record company MCA. There were a lot of bad people there, and every week you’d hear that somebody got shot or killed.” We came from a rough part of town, the west side of Jacksonville. “Those cheap handguns were no good for hunting or anything else – they were just made to kill people. “It was a strong message that Ronnie was conveying,” Rossington says. Ronnie wrote a lyric to match, featuring chilling vignettes in which sexual betrayal and drunken gambling led to fatal shootings. It sounded, in Rossington’s words, “real mean and ominous”. Ed King had a heavy, staccato riff that he played for Ronnie one day. Saturday Night Special was written in the summer of 1974, while Skynyrd were on tour in the US. And what he said in this song, his foresight was right on.” “God gave him a gift to preach to people. “Ronnie was a poet for common people,” Johnny says.

For Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s kid brother, who became Skynyrd’s singer when the band reunited in 1987, it’s a song both prophetic and poetic. For Rossington, Saturday Night Special is one of the definitive Skynyrd songs.

Saturday Night Special by Mari Carr