LYNYRD SKYNYRD One More From the Road (MCA)

As if certain rock writers didn't have enough to worry about already, lying awake nights, wondering whether Lynyrd Skynyrd are going to declare for Lester Maddox on the eve of the election, thereby tarnishing the writers' earlier praise of the L.S. aesthetic, lead singer Ronnie Van Zant has dropped another bomb in the new live set, where he intros "Whiskey Rock-a-Roller" with "Had an' ol' stupid writer ask me one time:

What are you, man?"'

What indeed, man? Lynyrd Skynyrd continue to befuddle Yankee interviewers with a caginess which is not so much calculated equivocation as it is genuine confusion over what role they're expected to play for those nosy Northerners. Capricorn Records, with its foundation of pious WEA liberalism, always made the task easy: "We're good ol' boys who lahk to lay back an' get drunk, in between our grateful cultivation of our indigenous cullud bluesmen." Johnny Rebbing it for patronizing Northerners, gratifying the visitors' own provincialism.

For Lynyrd Skynyrd, toughness is more than a pose: there are still guys around who will deck you if you laugh at the wrong moment. Not that that's so admirable, of course, but it is real. Our long participation in the Rolling Stones' Mnythology has inclined us to dismiss any self-professed toughness as one more hustle, but with Lynyrd Skynyrd, toughness is intimately involved with their fierce (if necessarily defensive) pride in their origins.

Yet the ironies continue to multiply: Lynyrd Skynyrd's most militant statement of their redneck patriotism, "Sweet Home Alabama," is also their most popular song with Northern audiences (guilty masochism, perhaps?). Although One More From the Road was recorded in Atlanta, surely the capital of the Lynyrd Skynyrd heartland, Van Zant betrays his acquired ambivalence over "Sweet Home Alabama" with his constant changes of tone within the song: a half-hearted, bored opening; embarrassed gruffness in the lines about Neil Young; and a final, menacing snarl in the "Does your conscience bother you?" line (a punchline that has always seemed to me to negate the supposed liberal salvation of the "Boo-boo-boo" chorus). Van Zant seems equally embarrassed in having to repeat the group's other obligatory number, "Free Bird," teasing the audience about their continual requests for the song, finally launching it with a weary, rather perfunctory reading of the lyrics, and at last abandoning the song to the guitarists and their furiously cooking, attack.

For Lynyrd Skynyrd, the South (and therefore the world) is a vision of unrelieved bleakness, as untouched by the funky-balm Christian (or at least gospelized carnal) redemption of, say, Wet Willie, as it is by the trivialities of orthodox goodold-boyism. This stuff recalls the No Exit Allman Bros, of the early albums, ages before they drifted into their current soap opera denouement. I can't get no satisfaction, 'cause the word ain't even in my vocabulary. "All l ean do is write about it," as Van Zant said on Gimme Back My Bullets, quoting an existential credo that hints that Ronnie may be more of a "stupid ol' writer" than he can admit to himself.

One More From, the Road is, needless to say, excellent rock 'n' roll music, one of the most energetically-sustained live albums since Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! or Leon Russell's amazing sixsided, one-night opus. You know most of the songs from the studio albums already, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's addition of Steve Gaines on third guitar has only reinforced Allen Collins' and Gary Rossington's chopping frontal assault. Boogie with a feeling.

Who can tell? Lynyrd Skynyrd may be poised on the brink of a popularity so enormous as to someday make "Neil Young" as esoteric a lyrical reference as "Dwight Frye" or "Delmore Schwartz." Well, we all did what we could do.