It's an unimaginative title and not quite as good as the first helping, but Second Helping is probably the quintessential Lynyrd Skynyrd album. Any album that starts off with "Sweet Home Alabama" has a natural advantage over its contemporaries. It's a little bit squandered after that point, with songs that don't quite match up to their peers from the first album, until we reach the end of the album, with the dark "Needle and the Spoon" and the jaunty "Call Me the Breeze".
Nevertheless this is one of only two albums with the "three guitar" trademark sound. Some last minute lineup flutters resulted in Ed King (ex-Strawberry Alarm Clock!) playing bass on most of the first album and when the original bassist returned he switched back to guitar. King would leave after the album after this one, Nuthin' Fancy, and the Skynyrd would become just another two guitar band.
For some reason I never felt motivated to collect anything beyond this album. There's a few good songs after this one, but I feel about 75% complete with just these two. The band capitalized off the decline of their Georgian counterparts, the Allmans, tapping into a growing American appetite for straight-ahead rock, but they in turn started to get a little aimless in their later years. From this album onward what little "progressive" elements the band had were largely stripped out. Thanks to that plane crash though who knows how long that trend may have lasted. The band is inherently full of contradictions, with one album condemned gun violence in "Saturday Night Special" and then on the next album demanding their bullets back. The whole "Confederate flag" symbolism that crept up in the reunion years seems a little disingenuous as there is still plenty of progressive lyrics on Second Helping to go around, a little on "Sweet Home Alabama" (enough to nix it as the state song) and more overtly on "The Balled of Curtis Loew".
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