They were the first Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Band.
They’ve enjoyed the friendship and support of original Skynyrd members over the years like Ed King.
Chris McCallister is the founding member of this group called “ Second Helping”.
He has quite a story to tell and we were only too happy to listen.
Q – Chris, who are you in “ Second Helping”? Who do you portray? And, do you guys dress the part as well?
A – In ‘Second Helping’ the reason why we do not portray individuals is because we focus on the music. Many of the members in ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ were our personal friends.
So, when ‘Second Helping’ started back in 1988 because of our relationship with those guys we have always focused on playing the parts accurately.
So, I will play a lot of Steve Gaines and Allen Collins parts . I actually play most of the Ed King parts.
We have one guy who plays a lot of Gary’s ( Gary Rossington) parts and then we have another guy on the side of the stage who plays a lot of the Steve Gaines parts and Allen Collins parts.
So, we go with who’s the best and most comfortable playing that part. And all 3 guitar players are exceptional players.
We don’t dress the part ‘cause we would never hear the end of it if we did that. Our buddies in Skynyrd would have just teased us to no end.
We see tribute bands out there that do it , that wear the wigs and all of that. There’s a couple of ‘em that are really good buddies of ours- ‘Lonestar Skynyrd’ in Texas and ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ in North Carolina and our good buddies out in Washington – ‘Whiskey River’.
None of us really dress the parts. We play the music because that’s what ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ fans want. They want to hear those familiar strains. They want to hear those parts.
They want to hear ‘Free Bird’ played just like the record – ‘live’. So, that is our main focus.
Q – Sounds to me like you’re almost saying there’s no Skynyrd tribute bands out there that can do both – play the music and look the part.
I’ve heard it said that in some bands if the guy portaying Ronnie VanZant doesn’t come onstage barefoot the audience will walk out.
A – That’s fine. I know there are ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ tribute bands out there that try to do that and they’re horrible.
For example, they have components missing which ’Second Helping’ does not nor does a couple of others.
And those components can be they have no girls.
I mean are you not listening to the ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ music?
Or, they’ll have two guitar players, not three guitar players, but they play dress up really well or they’re ad-libbing their solo parts.
‘Second Helping just doesn’t do it. The bands that I mentioned are the elite.
I think ‘Lonestar ‘out of Texas do try to mimic the look , but brother I can tell you ‘Second Helping’ never had an attendance problem.
We sell tickets and that’s another way of looking at how well you cut the mustard. Can you sell tickets?
Anybody can go to a festival where there’s a couple of thousand people built into it every year, but, ‘Second Helping’ does well and the reason why is ‘cause we’ve been around a long time.
People know who we are.
We really focus on the music.
Now, we do have a good look. We’ve heard that.
I know John, our lead singer does his best to cover Ronnie. He covers Ronnie vocally just perfect and we all have that good look, the Rock’n’Roll long hair . That is true.
And John will play barefooted.
He has the t-shirt on that says ‘One More From The Road’. So, we do that.
I don’t think anybody to be honest with you that I’ve heard of attending one of our shows has said, ‘ Hey, you don’t look like Allen. Hey, you don’t look like Gary ( Rossington)’
They don’t because I think that Skynyrd didn’t have a straight on look other than blue jeans and t-shirts.
There used to be a band in California ‘Nuthin’ Fancy’ that did that. They were also good . They don’t exist anymore.
But some of these bands like ‘Killer Queen’ where the singer looks like Freddie Mercury. I can see that.
The Elton Johns. These are fellas that were absolutely iconic. Beatles tributes. We see that.
Z.Z. Top. Dear friends of ours.
Billy Gibbons has a straight look. Those guys have two beards. We see that.
With the Skynyrd thing we’ve not really run into that. It’s not really crossed our minds.
Q -You mentioned you were friends with some of the guys in Skynyrd. They were out of Florida. You’re out of North Carolina. So, somewhere along the way you got to be friends with who in the band?
A – Quite a bit of ‘em and the ones that are still alive I still am.
When I was in college I used to live in Florida, down in the Tampa area.
When I was working on my degree you had to take psychology classes. When I was taking these classes we were give an assignment to focus on something we had studied that semester.
It was our final paper and it carried a lot of weight.
I’m like man,I really don’t like psychology.
So, I wanted to do something interesting. I thought post traumatic syndrome looks pretty interesting.
Most people do it on war veterans. I’m thinking I don’t want to do that.
So, I was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. You had the plane crash at that time. It had only been 5 or 6 years.
I thought I’ll do my research and so I did that.
As anybody doing research for an academic paper knows you’re going to want to get primary sources.
So, I put feelers out there being a musician and especially in Florida.
Little by little I found out some of the contacts of their management and that led to me talking to Allen Collins, the lead guitar player. I think he was the first person I talked to.
I told him what I was doing. He loved it and then he gave me phone numbers to ( Leon) Wilkeson, the bass player and Billy Powell the piano player.
Then I got to know Ronnie Van Zant’s family pretty well.
I was very good friends with Ronnie’s dad Lacey.
So, I talked to ‘em and I don’t know if it was Allen who said, ‘You need to talk to Ed King’ and I said, ‘Ed, why? He wasn’t on the plane .’
‘Well, he’ll give you good historical background on the band.’ And that’s the only reason I got with Ed. Nothing to do with PTSD.
I called Ed and talked to him. We were friends for 35 years after that. Just simply meeting somebody and hitting it off.
He was always gracious and kind. I’m still friends with his wife to this day, his widow.
That’s how we got to know’em.
Once I got to know these guys and I wrote the papers and told their story of what it was like to survive a plane crash of all things and listening to the details, they knew who I was.
When they got back together in 1987 Ed invited me to their rehearsal.
Right out of that rehearsal ‘Second Helping’ was born.
They worked with us on the parts. And we would just call ‘em on the phone many times and say, ‘O.K. I hear what you’re doing here but your part is way down in the mix. Can you tell me what you’re doing? Or, ‘What is the chord you’re using here? It sounds like an E but you’re adding notes or something. I don’t understand the lead. Can you tell me what you’re doing here?’
This is back when there were no cell phones.
We had to have ‘em on speaker phone. They would be on the other end with a guitar.
‘Well, it’s this. It’s that.’
That was in ’88, ’89 during that time. They’ve always been super gracious.
Randall Hall was a great source of help . When the band got back together he was with Lynyrd Skynyrd and is still out there playing.
He would explain, ‘O.K. It goes this way. It goes that way.’
So, we had that access to those guys that most tributes in any musical genre’ of tribute just don’t have.
To have access to the actual artist and ask them this and that? That was really good and Ed when Skynyrd went out and played they would give ‘Second Helping’ backstage passes and great seats.
When I say great seats a lot of us who go to concerts would disagree ‘cause the seats they gave us were right up front.
That’s not a good seat( laughs) because you get blown out by the monitors in front of you.
You’re getting blown out by the amps right in your face.
They gave us those seats for a specific reason.
The best seats are in the back where the soundboard is ‘cause you get the best mix.
So, the reason they gave us that is because our guys especially our bass player at the time would stand in front and watch how Leon would play those bass parts and our guitarists would watch how they played the guitar parts. Afterwards we went backstage and we could ask questions .
‘O.K. I notice you did this. I notice you did that.’
That kind of detail was really, really cool. Eventually when we got it learned we started sitting out in the back. (laughs).
Q – You could have worn earplugs at those concerts. That’s what I did after a Grand Funk concert in 1972. My ears rang for 3 days after that.
A – Man,I remember concerts like that. You’re right. You know what? That never dawned on me. (laughs).
Q – I probably should have done an interview with you years ago!
A – That’s right.
Q – Why when the guys in Skynyrd announced they were going to retire and you suggested someone should put a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band together, why did they all laugh at that idea?
A – What happened was Ed King called me up and said, ‘We’re going to rehearse. Would you like to come up to rehearsal?’ I said ‘Yes’.
They had just come off the road and Ed and I were pretty good friends at that point.
In ’87 they decided to get back together. I do remember that.
I remember Ed and I talked about it and he had a hard time making that decision ‘cause he was heavily involved in his church.
This was a big move to go back out on tour and as a musician you see a lot of things and you’re offered a lot of things and a lot of those things can really conflict with your faith.
Ed and I talked about that quite a bit. He was having a hard time with it.
He eventually made the decision to go out and go back out on tour with Skynyrd.
I mean it’s Ed King. His guitar parts are just iconic and the guys wanted him.
But, if you look at the ’87 tour there’s some video footage out there you see on the song ’Needle and the Spoon’ where Ed gets up and talks about drugs and how bad they are.
So, that was his way of speaking a little about his faith to an audience.
From what Ed had mentioned right before they got back together and this right before they got back together, ‘We’re only going to go out and do a handful of shows as a tribute to our fans ‘cause it’s 10 years after the crash and they agreed.
There was a lot of internal conversation among themselves and there were many people that really wanted us and they left a lot of cities out.
They didn’t go out of the United States. I don’t think they did.
There were a lot of cities that wanted Skynyrd. They went out there and found out they were huge.
They were selling out 30,000 seat venues. I don’t think they saw that coming.
When they first formed they were all pretty much doing different things. They decided this will be temporary in ’87.
So, when they came off tour I remember Ed saying ‘ I think the band wants to extend the ’87 tour, the tribute tour, the Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute tour.
It was a tribute to their fans. The wanted to extend the dates.
When I got there later in ’88 the conversation leads to what you were asking me: they were saying we’re only going to extend it for this amount of shows and I think it was something like 15 more shows.
I could really be wrong on the number. I can’t remember exactly.
But I know it elicited a response from me where I said, ‘Are you kidding?
They literally said that’s going to be it. Then we’re going to go on our way.
Gary Rossington just formed a band called the Rossington Band and was trying to get that up and going. He wanted to see how that would do.
They said we want to continue to do it as a tribute to our fans ‘cause a lot of them didn’t get to hear us or come to see the band in ’87. So, we’re going to extend is so that makes sense.
That comment of mine was based on sitting there listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd.
It was me and three other people at that rehearsal.
I didn’t find out until about a year ago that Skynyrd had closed rehearsals.
I never knew that.
Ed invited me.
They rehearsed on Jacobs Road in Jacksonville at Larkin Collin’s office.
In that office was Larkin and Craig Reed, their head roadie and Joe Osborne who worked on our amps and electronics. I believe he had a room in there. I’m not sure.
I spent the day with Ed and listened to the band.
I’m sitting there listening to them going ‘Oh, My God! These guys are good and I had heard the old Skynyrd. This is the best I ever heard them sound.
Just insanely great musicians. And so, I’m blown away already.
So, when the said we’re going to end it after doing this other leg in ’88, my response was ,’You got to be kidding me!’
I said, Somebody should do a tribute to you guys’.
What I had in mind was , they did this with The Beatles and they’ve done it with Elvis and they’ve done it with the Doors and Neil Diamond.
They started laughing.
Gary Rossington started laughing at me and teasing me and that made me mad. (laughs)
But, I just kept it to myself. I didn’t say anything out loud ‘cause I was outnumbered and Gary said, Beatlemania? What are you gonna call it Skynyrdmania?’ They were laughing.
Reflecting back , there was no such thing as a tribute band genre’. There wasn’t a lot of ‘em out there. Everybody knew Beatlemania .
‘Whiskey River’ out in Washington did something as a local band. I don’t think they ever got going nationally until the 90’s when they started going out of state.
Well, ‘Second Helping’ went national real quick.
When Gary made fun of me and embarrassed me literally out of spite I went back to Tampa and put this thing together.
We went into concert clubs and bars.
We said, ‘Here’s what we do: We do nothing but Lynyrd Skynyrd and we’re only going to do it for 2 hours’.
They looked at us and said, ‘Well, that’s stupid. Wait a minute. That’s pretty good We’ll see how it goes’ and they start selling tickets and we start selling out.
The next thing I know is we’re really popular throughout mid – Florida and Southern Florida.
An agent calls us, Richard Lustig of Lustig Entertainment, Richard has passed now, and said, ‘We want to represent you guys.We want to put you out there.’
We didn’t know what an agent was.
We’ve got a band named ‘Savatage’ which was a very well-known metal band based out of Tampa.
Their road manager called us up and said, ‘Concerts Show wants to know if you need any help.’ That was Gary Muchmore.
Gary got in there and with our agent Richard Lustig, we went from a garage to playing bars to national stages to playing with heroes of ours like Toto.
And we were out on the road with now our dear, dear friends Kentucky Headhunters, Molly Hatchet and Starship.
Whoa! We didn’t know what hit us.
There were tributes out there.
We would tour the United States and across Canada and people would show up with Skynyrd albums.
We didn’t know what to do. We said, ‘Are we allowed to sign these?’
We did but we told people, ‘No, no, no. We’re not them.’
I know .
People would get mad if we didn’t sign ‘em.
So, it was just the weirdest thing for us.
Then Criss Oliva, the lead guitar player for Savatage died in a car accident.
Out manager was also their road manager.
They did a benefit for him at a place called the Boat Yard Village in Tampa. It’s a big concert place.
I don’t know if it’s there anymore .
Since Gary was our manager and Savatage’s road manager he got us on the bill and we get there and Gary tells us, ‘Be on your best behavior. It’s gonna be tight and tv is there.’
When you’re doing tv it’s just another world.
You’ve gotta watch for the green light and the red light.
We get there and we knew we were going to be televised and there were some other bands there, Savatage of course.
We find out the day before this was for MTV !!! ( laughs)
We come out and we worked that stage.
We see these huge cameras. I never forgot it. They looked like the ones you see at football games. They have the MTV logo on ‘em.
We just got up there and played our show.
Q – That was in ’93 was it?
A – I’m not really sure. It could’ve been. The thing that really freaked us out is Gary calls up probably a couple of days after the show and he goes, ‘Kurt Loder ( who used to do the News on MTV) just mentioned the name of your band and they showed a little bit of the clips on it.
We tried for years to find that clip, to find anything and have never been able to do it.
We never got to see it but, we’ve tried over the years to find it.
After that ‘Second Helping’ just took off like a skyrocket.
Q – You kind of touched on the answer to this question earlier in the interview, but you’re saying ‘Second Helping’ was the first Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band? How do you know that? Is that because you’re the first group to tour nationally?
A – There’s a couple of things: The reason that we know for sure is ‘cause we didn’t know what a tribute was. Nobody did. The Skynyrd people themselves weren’t even aware. They thought it was funny. There’s that part of it. And then we started looking into it the best we could and we found out there’s nobody else out there that was doing it in ’88 and if there was we weren’t aware of it.
So, we just assumed right then and there based on research, looking into it, that we were the very first ones.
Now, we later found out , later just being a couple of months ago that ‘Whiskey River’ was doing a tribute.
In other words they would do a whole set of Skynyrd or two sets of Skynyrd and that’s how they started getting into it. Then they leaned into we’re just going to do Skynyrd but it was very localized in the Seattle area.
‘Whiskey River’ has no original members. The oldest, longest running guy is Bill Majkut, the bass player.
And so one of the things we don’t do and won’t do is lie.
When I was talking with Bill I said, ‘Bill, I gotta be clean here.’
He said, ‘No, don’t change what you’re saying because the reality of it is you guys were unaware.’ Of course we were.
Who thinks of ‘Whiskey River being a tribute band? Nobody.
And so Bill and I agreed you keep saying what you are. ‘The fact is you guys were the very first ones to go national and known all over the country.
So, they totally support us using that moniker, ‘The Original Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Band.’
So, that’s how we do it.
We have a strong kinship with ‘Whiskey River’ , the Lynyrd Skynyrd guys and what we say is thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. We would be nothing without those guys helping us way back in ’88 and they have been nothing but friendly to us and are to this day.
Unfortunately all of ‘em are dead except Artimus ( Pyle). He’s still out there.
We’ve gone to venues and said this is who we are. We’d like to play your venue.’
They’ll say, ‘Well, we’re also talking to Artimus.’
We stop. We respectfully step out of the way because he’s the last original Lynyrd Skynyrd member out there and we encourage Skynyrd fans to go out and see him. He’s got a great band.
©Gary James
Official Website: second-helping.com
