Rock’s Oldest Joke: Yelling ‘Freebird!’ In a Crowded Theater provides an apocryphal origin to the phenomenon:
How did this strange ritual begin? “Freebird” is hardly obscure — it’s a radio staple consistently voted one of rock’s greatest songs. One version — and an important piece of the explanation — anchors Skynyrd’s 1976 live album “One More From the Road.” On the record, singer Ronnie Van Zant, who was killed along with two other bandmates in a 1977 plane crash, asks the crowd, “What song is it you want to hear?” That unleashes a deafening call for “Freebird,” and Skynyrd obliges with a 14-minute rendition.To understand the phenomenon, it also helps to be from Chicago. When asked why they continue to request “Freebird,” Mr. Hicks’s tormentors yell out “Kevin Matthews!”
Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his fans — the KevHeads — to yell “Freebird” for years, and claims to have originated the tradition in the late 1980s, when he says he hit upon it as a way to torment Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame, who was giving a concert. He figured somebody should yell something at her “to break up the monotony.” The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on “Freebird,” saying the epic song “just popped into my head.”
Mr. Matthews says the call was heeded, inspiring him to go down the listings of coming area shows, looking for entertainers who deserved a “Freebird” and encouraging the KevHeads to make it happen.
But he bemoans the decline of “Freebird” etiquette. “It was never meant to be yelled at a cool concert — it was meant to be yelled at someone really lame,” he says. “If you’re going to yell ‘Freebird,’ yell ‘Freebird’ at a Jim Nabors concert.”
[...]
But did “Freebird” truly start with the KevHeads? Longtime Chicago Tribune music writer Greg Kot says he remembers the cry from the early 1980s. He suggests it originated as an in-joke among indie-rock fans “having their sneer at mainstream classic rock.”Other music veterans think it dates back to 1970s audiences’ shouts for it and other guitar sagas, such as “Whipping Post,” by the Allman Brothers Band, and “Smoke on the Water,” by Deep Purple.
They may all be right: It’s possible “Freebird” began as a rallying cry for Skynyrd Nation and a sincere request from guitar lovers, was made famous by the live cut, taken up by ironic clubgoers, given new life by Mr. Matthews, and eventually lost all meaning and became something people holler when there’s a band onstage.