Every now and then we still see some new, not seen  or heard stuff come out on the internet. I ran across this audio from Skynyrd in 1973 and thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it’s been out there for awhile, I don’t know, but I wasn’t hip to it until just recently.

Their debut major label album, (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd), had just been released in mid-August of ’73 and the couple years or so before that they had bouncing around some clubs in Atlanta mostly. And the “Pronounced…” tour, their first major concert tour, ran from early October through the end of the year. For 11 shows of this tour, Nov 20 through Dec 6, Skynyrd was the opening act for The Who, who was out on their “Quadrophenia” tour.

This audio is purportedly from the second of two nights at The Forum in Inglewood, CA

The audio is lousy and sounds like it was just recorded on a portable cassette deck. But it is still pretty fun and interesting to hear. Of course this is the original line up and there is an energy and freshness to it probably because they weren’t burnt out and broke down from being on the road too long yet.

Wikipedia has the dates from that tour (check out the insane schedule bands used to do back then!) and the typical set list. Opening for a major world-wide act, you usually only get about 35 – 40 minutes. So this is pretty short.

There’s video of the band  from years after this, 1974 even. But this is the earliest I have heard and gives us a good sample of what it was like when they had just broken out and started doing the major tours and venues.