“We were going for a completely different sound, and it didn’t work. We decided to make a clean album”: Ronnie Van Zant hated it. But this Lynyrd Skynyrd album is an unsung Southern Rock classic

Lynyrd Skynyrd posing for a photograph in 1975.

Of all the albums that Lynyrd Skynyrd made in the 1970s, Gimme Back My Bullets is their most underrated. And its harshest critic was Ronnie Van Zant himself.

After the album failed to match the success of 1975’s Nuthin’ Fancy, Van Zant complained: “We were going for a completely different sound, and it didn’t work. We had always been so heavy and muddy, we decided to make a clean Lynyrd Skynyrd album. The material was good. It was just too… refined.”