In 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd was flying high on the heels of their Top 10, certified gold album Nuthin’ Fancy. But the title track to the follow-up album Gimme Back My Bullets, written by Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington, caused the Southern rock band some trouble.
After previously releasing the anti-gun-violence song “Saturday Night Special” on Nuthin’ Fancy, some listeners mistakenly assumed the title track to Gimme Back My Bullets was a conflicting anti-gun control statement.
When the band first started playing “Gimme Back My Bullets Live,” the crowd had an unexpected reaction. According to Songfacts, fans started throwing bullets onstage, so the band took it out of their set list out of fear that someone would get hurt.
Producer Tom Dowd claimed it was more than just bullets that fans brought to the shows. In a post on the official Lynyrd Skynyrd Facebook page, he claimed some concertgoers actually pulled out guns when the band played the song live.
“They’d sing ‘Gimme’ and here’d come .22s, .22 longs, .38s, .45s, coming up on stage like an arsenal…They stopped doing the song. They feared for their lives,” Dowd alleged.
Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke once explained that the song “Gimme Back My Bullets” was misunderstood.
“This isn’t about guns, as you might expect,” he told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s about the band wanting their bullet back on the charts. They wanted to have more success, and the bullet is all about moving up the chart again. I’d rate this alongside ‘Saturday Night Special.’ Again, that might seem like it’s all about guns, but there’s a lot more going on if you read the lyrics carefully.”
Indeed, “Saturday Night Special” was written in protest of the cheap, illegal handguns that were easily available on the black market in 1970s America.
Rossington once told Classic Rock, “It was a strong message that Ronnie was conveying. Those cheap handguns were no good for hunting or anything else – they were just made to kill people. And those guns were easy to find. We came from a rough part of town, the west side of Jacksonville. There were a lot of bad people there, and every week you’d hear that somebody got shot or killed.”
Fifty years later, both “Gimme Back My Bullets” and “Saturday Night Special” remain an important part of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s catalog, two misunderstood songs that fans still talk about today.
Related: At 18, Ronnie Van Zant Was Chased Out of a Bar by a Man With a Gun — 7 Years Later, Lynyrd Skynyrd Turned the Scary Encounter Into a Southern Rock Classic
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