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Gimme Three Steps is a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd which is based on a true story. As Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington tells it, lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, who was about 18 at the time, used a fake ID to get in a bar while his younger band mates Rossington and Allen Collins waited for him in a truck. Van Zant danced with a girl named Linda, whose boyfriend, who was not too happy about it, came up to Ronnie and reached for something in his boot. Figuring he was going for a gun, Van Zant told him: "If you're going to shoot me it's going to be in the ass or the elbows... just gimme a few steps and I'll be gone." He ran to the truck, and he, Rossington, and Collins wrote this song that night.
According to the Freebird Foundation, which is run by Van Zant's widow Judy Van Zant Jenness, the events of the song took place at a bar called The Little Brown Jug, which was located on Edison Avenue in Jacksonville, Florida, where the band is from. Thus, the lyrics, "I was cuttin' the rug, down a place called The Jug," which is where Ronnie ran into an angry local man with a gun.
The pace of the chorus is fast, to signify Van Zant running away from the guy he thought was going to shoot him.
This made the cut for Skynyrd's first album. Their producer, Al Kooper, had them play all their original songs, and out of the 14 they had, picked 9 to record for the album.
This was one of the few songs Skynyrd released as a single. It was their first major-label release, and it didn't chart.
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