Lynyrd Skynyrd is bringing its farewell tour to Orange Beach, with the Southern rock institution set to headline The Wharf Amphitheater on Saturday, Sept. 28, at 6 p.m. Nashville singer-songwriter Cody Jinks will open the show at the waterfront venue, located at 23325 Wharf Lane. Tickets range from $34 to $341 and are available through Ticketmaster.
The stop is part of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Last of the Street Survivors Farewell Tour, a multi-year run billed as the band’s goodbye to large-scale touring after more than five decades on the road. For fans across the Gulf Coast, the Orange Beach date offers one of the final chances to hear the band’s catalog — some of classic rock’s most enduring songs — performed by the group that made them famous. Among the staples: “Freebird,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “What’s Your Name,” “That Smell” and, fittingly for an Alabama crowd, “Sweet Home Alabama.”
The band’s connection to the state runs deeper than one anthem. Formed in Jacksonville, Florida, and named after Leonard Skinner, a strict gym teacher the original members delighted in mocking, Lynyrd Skynyrd grew into the defining voice of Southern rock, blending blues, country and hard rock into a sound that found its most devoted audiences across the South. “Sweet Home Alabama,” written as a response to Neil Young, became so entwined with the state’s identity that it has rung out at countless Alabama sporting events, weddings and barrooms in the half-century since its release.
Guitarist Rickey Medlocke, who has spent 24 years in his current stint with the band after an earlier run as its drummer in the 1970s and a stretch fronting Blackfoot, said the tour has been an emotional victory lap rather than a somber send-off. “It’s not like we’re saying goodbye,” Medlocke said, echoing bandmate Johnny Van Zant’s framing of the tour. “It’s like saying, ‘So long until the next time.'”
Why the Farewell Now
The decision to scale back came after guitarist Gary Rossington faced a series of serious health issues over the past decade, making it difficult for him to keep up with the band’s historic touring pace of 80 to 100 shows a year. Rossington, the last remaining original member still with the group, had anchored the band through every era of its history — from the early 1970s club circuit to the crash that killed frontman Ronnie Van Zant and others in 1977, through breakups, reunions and decades of summer amphitheater tours.
Medlocke said the band wanted the farewell tour to reach every market it could, not just cities in the United States, given that Lynyrd Skynyrd has played more than 600 venues worldwide over its history. The tour is expected to continue into 2020, giving fans in smaller markets the same chance at a proper goodbye that audiences in major arenas have had.
Life After the Road
Rossington, Van Zant and Medlocke have also launched a side project called Three Southern Gents, already producing at least one song together, and Medlocke said other band members are pursuing outside projects as the group winds down its full-scale touring schedule. He said he hopes to collaborate musically with his partner, Stacy Michelle, who performs with Kid Rock, once the tour wraps.
For Medlocke personally, the farewell represents a bookend to a career spent almost entirely on Southern stages. His history with the band stretches back to the early 1970s, when he drummed and sang on early recordings before leaving to front Blackfoot, the hard-driving Southern rock band behind a string of hit albums. He returned to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the 1990s as a guitarist and has remained a fixture of the band’s sound ever since — a two-decade-plus tenure that has made him, alongside Rossington and Van Zant, one of the keepers of the band’s legacy.
Cody Jinks, the night’s opening act, brings his own following to the bill. The former thrash-metal frontman turned country traditionalist has built one of independent music’s most loyal audiences through relentless touring and self-released albums, making the pairing with Skynyrd a natural fit for a Gulf Coast crowd that spans generations. Shows at The Wharf routinely draw fans from Mobile, Pensacola and the beach communities of Baldwin County, and a farewell-tour Saturday night is expected to be no different.
The economics of a farewell tour explain its unusual length. Rather than a short victory lap ending in a single hometown show, the band has structured the run as a rolling celebration that can absorb rescheduled dates, festival appearances and second nights in strong markets. That approach suits a catalog with this kind of staying power: radio formats have come and gone, but the band’s songs remain fixtures on classic rock stations across the country, and each tour stop draws a mix of fans who grew up with the records and younger listeners discovering them live for the first time.
A Setlist That Changes Night to Night
Medlocke said the setlists for the farewell tour have evolved show to show, with the band digging into songs it hasn’t performed live in years. He said the Orange Beach set list could look markedly different from other stops on the tour, as Rossington, Van Zant and Medlocke continue tweaking the show night to night.
That unpredictability has become one of the tour’s selling points. Longtime fans who have seen the band a dozen times are finding deep cuts and rarities tucked between the radio staples, while first-timers still get the full arc of the catalog, from the early blues-rock workouts to the extended, multi-guitar finale of “Freebird.” The band has treated each night as a celebration rather than a eulogy, stretching songs out, trading solos and giving the road crew’s work one more run through its paces.
He described the response from fans, young and old, as overwhelming, with many thanking the band for decades of music as word spreads that the touring chapter is coming to a close. “If you haven’t seen Skynyrd before, then you need to come see us,” Medlocke said. “Just like a lot of the other classic bands, they’re not going to be around here always. Get out and go see it.”
The Wharf on a Saturday Night
The Wharf Amphitheater, part of The Wharf entertainment and retail complex in Orange Beach, has hosted a steady lineup of national touring acts this year. The open-air venue sits at the heart of the 237-acre development along the Intracoastal Waterway, where the giant Ferris wheel visible from the highway has become one of the most recognizable landmarks on Alabama’s coast. On concert nights, the complex fills with fans dining at its restaurants, browsing its shops and gathering along the marina before walking to the amphitheater gates.
For Orange Beach, the venue has been an economic engine as well as an entertainment anchor. Visitors who come for a show fill hotels, condominium rentals and restaurants across the beach communities, extending the tourist season well beyond the summer months. A Saturday-night date with a band of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s stature is exactly the kind of booking local tourism officials point to when describing the coast’s draw as a year-round destination.
Practical details matter for a sold-out fall show. Doors and gate times are typically posted ahead of showtime at alwharf.com, where fans can also find parking and venue policy details ahead of the Sept. 28 concert. Visitors coming from outside the area are advised to arrive early — the complex’s lots and shuttles handle large crowds, but traffic along the Canal Road corridor and the Perdido Pass bridge can back up on big event nights.
One More Time for the Home Crowd
There is a certain symmetry in the farewell tour stopping in Alabama. “Sweet Home Alabama” may be the band’s signature, but its audiences across the state have treated the group like a hometown act for five decades, packing fairgrounds, coliseums and amphitheaters from Huntsville to Mobile. The Wharf show falls in the heart of that territory, and the band’s members have long acknowledged that Southern crowds bring a particular energy to the catalog — singing every word, whether the song is a hit or a deep cut.
For the band, the night is another stop in a long goodbye that has stretched across continents and calendars. For the fans filing through the gates at 23325 Wharf Lane, it is something simpler: one more chance to hear the songs that have scored their summers, their road trips and their memories, played by the people who created them. Either way, when the final chords of “Freebird” ring out over the Intracoastal Waterway, the farewell tour will have delivered exactly what it promises — not a funeral, but a celebration, “so long until the next time.”