With a new solo track, the charity single “Never Run Out of Road,” just out, Rickey Medlocke says there may be some new music from Lynyrd Skynyrd on the horizon as well.
“We’re talking about doing a Skynyrd record,” the guitarist tells UCR. “Johnny [Van Zant] and I have been on the phone the last couple of days, and we have found music that, along with Gary [Rossington] and maybe some other people, we wrote over the past 12, 15 years, maybe even earlier than that. So maybe we’ll invite different people on the record to come in and play and lend their services to us, kind of like an all-star Skynyrd record. We’ll see what happens.”
If that pans out it will be Skynyrd’s first album of original material since Last of a Dyin’ Breed in 2012. It would also be the group’s first without co-founder Rossington, who passed away 11 months ago — a loss Medlocke says is “still a very raw spot in my heart. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary, and I still haven’t settled with it yet. We do a tribute every night to Gary, to the song ‘Tuesday’s Gone,’ and I can’t even look at the video.”
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Medlocke, who was part of Skynyrd during 1971-72 before rejoining in 1996, and Van Zant, who’s fronted the group since its return in 1987, will take the latest incarnation of the Southern Rock outfit back on the road March 8 in Savannah, Georgia, for a new leg of its Sharp Dressed Simple Man Tour with ZZ Top. The trek has dates booked into September.
Medlocke’s New Music
Meanwhile Medlocke is thumping the drum for “Never Run Out of Road,” which was released last month with Rock the Cause Records, with proceeds going to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, which works to end the trafficking of Native American Women, as well as the International Wolf Center and the Dreamcatchers Charitable Fund in Canada. (Medlocke himself is of Lakota, Sioux and Cherokee descent.) The song was co-written by Medlocke and Mark Woerpel, a member of the latter-day version of Medlocke’s Blackfoot, and includes piano by Skynyrd’s Peter Keys and backing vocals by Medlocke’s wife Stacy Michelle, who’s also part of Skynyrd now.
Listen to Rickey Medlocke’s ‘Never Run Out of Road’
“This [music] business has been good to me in my life and the fans have been incredible and I just feel like this is a very good way to give back in some form, so that’s why I did it,” Medlocke says. The song itself, he adds, offers a perspective on that life and career that’s spanned nearly 55 years.
“I will never run out of road,” Medlocke explains. “I used to complain at the end of a [Skynyrd] tour, ‘Oh, gosh, I don’t want to go home. I never want to go home.’ I had a wild thought one time of getting my own bus and just staying out [Laughs]. I just want to still make music. I want to play music. I want to record music. I want to make music the rest of my life, however much longer I’ve got here, which I hope is a very long time. At some point I’m sure Johnny and I are gonna look at each other and say, ‘OK, maybe the time has come’ but who knows — we might reach 80 years old and it still won’t come to that. We’ll see.”
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Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
