Lynryd Skynyrd, ‘Gimme Three Steps’ – Butch’s Way Back Wednesday

As a music fan there is always something new and great, but there really is something special about the songs you grew up listening to. For me, that was 70′s and 80′s classic rock. If I am in a shi**y mood, I throw in a little Zeppelin or Rush and take a trip back to rolling in my mom’s T-Bird. Now every Wednesday you get to take that trip with me. It’s Way Back Wednesday with Butch, and today’s feature is a song we first heard 40 years ago and can hear live this Saturday (June 29th) at the Greeley Stampede… Lynyrd Synyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps.”

A few weeks back for Way Back Wednesday we did "Sweet Home Alabama," to celebrate us giving away tickets to the Skynryd show in Greeley. Now that the show is only a few days away I felt it only right to do a another Skynyrd song. Now it would have been easy to choose "Free Bird," and I love that song, it was my class song for high school graduation a s a matter of fact, but it is overplayed and has become a jokey request among drunken concertgoers. I felt like going a bit deeper, not a lot, but a bit.

"Gimme Three Steps" was released on Skynyrd's 1973 debut album. The album became the band's first hit, driven by the success of the single "Free Bird", but "Gimme Three Steps" never charted.

This is one of their most playful cuts -- Van Zant's swipe at masculine pride. After he's caught "cuttin' the rug" with some other dude's girl, he dashes for the door instead of fighting for his, and the girl's, honor. It's a brave move in a genre stuffed with songs about not backing down under any circumstance.

The song is memorable for its opening riff and story of how the speaker was dancing with a girl named Linda Lou at a bar called The Jug when a man, probably the girl's boyfriend or husband, enters with a gun (described as a .44) and catches them, angrily believing her to be cheating. The song's title refers to the chorus, "Won't you give me three steps/Gimme three steps mister/Gimme three steps towards the door?/Gimme three steps/Gimme three steps mister/And you'll never see me no more." essentially asking for three steps head start to flee. The song is also based on a real-life experience Ronnie Van Zant had at a biker bar in Jacksonville known as The Pastime, including having a gun pulled on him, and thus inspiring him to write the lyrics on his way home. In some later live versions after the plane crash and the band reformed with Ronnie's brother, Johnny, Johnny would often change the line "Wait a minute, mister, I didn't even kiss her!" to "Wait a minute, mister, I didn't STICK her!", emphasizing on the word "stick" and proclaiming the narrator's innocence. Ronnie would also sometimes comment in concert, most famously at the Knebworth Festival in 1976, that he (the narrator) didn't want to "fight him over that cunt anyway"; Johnny would also later on make the same statement in some live versions or say to the audience that they knew why the narrator would not fight the man.

Now take a trip back 40 years with us to 1973...