Wild Eyed Southern Boys

Hey Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew is cranking "Wild Eyed Southern Boys" by .38 Special off that 1981 album of the same name, and man, this one still hits like a long ride down a back road with the windows down. It is pure rock and roll energy from a band of Jacksonville boys who grew up right in the middle of that Southern rock explosion, and the song itself is a full-on celebration of those wild nights at the juke joint where the band is pumping rhythm and blues and somebody is about to spill a little rock and roll blood. Jim Peterik of Survivor wrote the whole thing by himself, and he has said it was one of his favorites he ever did for these guys. He demoed it up in Illinois with some of his Survivor crew, sent it down to the band's manager, and they went in and cut the hell out of it. Turns out he had first tried it on Molly Hatchet, but they passed, so it landed with .38 Special and became the title track that helped push the album to platinum. That is the kind of story that sticks with you when you are spinning records for the Zoo Freaks out there listening in on THE ZOO.

Don Barnes, the guitarist and singer who has been with the band since the beginning, called the whole album title kind of a send-up of that whole Southern rock thing. Their manager was telling them it was tough to sell a band that people still just lumped in as another Southern rock outfit, even though they always felt they were more than that. They were ready to get a little more contemporary if that is what it took to get on the radio and fill the arenas. You cannot sing about whiskey and alligators forever, Barnes has said, and they used to get looked at as bad boys, bikers with guitars, but they had sensitivities too. The title track keeps that homespun Southern flavor alive while the rest of the record leans into those tighter, more radio-ready grooves. Jeff Carlisi has talked about how the album cover alone, that famous shot with the girl in the hot pants and the band lined up outside the joint, might have moved a quarter million copies just from kids thinking it looked so cool they had to grab it. It is still one of those covers that jumps out at you from the record bin.

These cats got started the way a lot of great rock and roll bands do, grinding it out in their hometown. Donnie Van Zant, Ronnie Van Zant's younger brother, and Don Barnes were neighborhood friends in Jacksonville, Florida, and they put the band together back in 1974 with Jeff Carlisi on guitar, Ken Lyons on bass, and a couple of drummers in Steve Brookins and Jack Grondin. Jacksonville was a Navy town with four bases, so they spent a lot of nights playing sailors clubs, learning the hits of the day from Santana to Three Dog Night while the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd were coming up right around them. Ronnie himself mentored the younger guys, told Donnie to stick with the music when he was close to taking a regular railroad job because it was in his blood. They rehearsed in an abandoned auto parts warehouse out in the woods, boarded up the windows and doors so thick it was like a vault because they had to leave their gear out there. One night the law showed up thinking something shady was going on, and when the band could not get out because the key was lost, one of the cops said something about his .38 Special doing the talking if they did not come out. They had been calling themselves something else for a minute, but that story was too good, so they went with .38 Special for their first club gig in Gainesville and never bothered to change it.

It took a few albums and a lot of one-nighters across the South and Midwest before things really clicked. Ronnie helped get them hooked up with Skynyrd's manager Peter Rudge, they signed to A&M, and Dan Hartman produced the first record in 1977, but the early stuff did not set the world on fire. By the time they got to Wild-Eyed Southern Boys, they had brought in Jim Peterik to write with Barnes and Carlisi, and that collaboration gave them the hits like Hold On Loosely and Fantasy Girl that finally broke them through. Carlisi has said the first couple of albums were them trying too hard to sound like the other Southern bands, and it was hearing the Cars and those simple eighth-note grooves that helped them find their own lane of melody and muscle. The band has kept rolling for more than fifty years now, still out there doing a hundred shows a year with that same spirit. You can check out everything they are up to on the 38 Special official website, follow along on their official Facebook, catch the latest on Instagram and X, or join the family of fans over in the Official .38 Special Family Facebook group where people still trade stories about those classic nights. Keep it rock and roll, Zoo Freaks.