Steve Hinrichs saw Lynyrd Skynyrd play a few times when he was in college.
But those concerts couldn't compare in meaning to the Lynyrd Skynyrd concert Steve and his family attended Thursday night.
Steve, his wife, Deb, and the rest of the rural Fairfield family went to the concert because that's what their son, Matt, would have wanted. It was a way to remember Matt, and a way to keep his spirit alive.
Matt died Aug. 29, 1999, after falling more than 100 feet off the Tugalo Dam in Tallulah Falls, Ga. He was 20.
Matt wouldn't have missed the Lynyrd Skynyrd concert for the world.
And nothing would have made him happier than to hear the band play "Freebird."
Matt once told a friend that if anything should happen to him, he wanted "Freebird" played at his funeral. But with a church funeral, there wasn't much chance of that happening.
When Steve and Deb's other son, Ryan, came home with the news that Lynyrd Skynyrd was coming to Hastings, Deb started e-mailing the band.
She couldn't imagine a better tribute to Matt than for the band to dedicate "Freebird" to him. She also contacted fairgrounds manager Sandy Himmelberg.
"I told her about Matt and what a beautiful tribute that would be to him," Deb said.
Shortly before the concert, however, Himmelberg told the Hinrichs the band doesn't do dedications as a part of their policy. They won't even dedicate songs for their own band members, they said, because dedications could get out of hand.
But the band did invite the family backstage. So as concert-goers were taking their seats Thursday night, the Hinrichs family and a few friends were shaking hands with band members and telling them about Matt.
Deb said meeting the band was an emotional event.
"It was great and it was really sad because Matt's the one who would have wanted to meet the band," she said.
The band signed a picture for Matt, which Deb plans to laminate and take to Matt's grave.
The Hinrichs family was calling Thursday "Matt's Day," in honor of his 21st birthday July 17. Along with other friends and family members, they filled 16 seats at the grandstand and thought of Matt.
The highlight came when the band played "Freebird" for its encore performance.
"It's going to be tough to control the crying," Steve predicted before the concert.
He was right. The song brought a flood of emotion. And even though the band didn't dedicate the song to Matt, Matt's friends and family knew the song was meant for him.
"It was all for Matt," Deb said. "He would have loved it. He would have just loved it."
There were other things Matt loved, too. He loved nature and finding arrowheads with his dad after the Little Blue River flooded. He loved small towns and slow-paced life.
After he graduated from Sandy Creek High School in 1998, he let his hair grow out to a beautiful, curly mop.
Matt moved from Fairfield to Smyrna, Ga., in January 1999 where he lived in a house with a few friends and did construction work.
His parents had wanted to see that house, and Matt planned to take them to a list of beautiful places he had scouted out, like Stone Mountain. But they never got the chance.
Matt and three friends were camping that last weekend in August when Matt spotted the most beautiful spot he'd ever seen. It was atop a dam, and he told his friends he wanted to see the scene under moonlight.
Around midnight, Matt apparently walked to the dam while his friends slept. It was there that he slipped from his perch and fell to the bottom of the dam more than 100 feet below.
Two canoers found Matt's body the next morning.
It was the worst news Deb and Steve could have gotten. But the tragedy didn't end there.
Eight months later, as Deb was preparing to go through Mother's Day without Matt, daughter Kailey was in a nearly fatal car accident May 12.
The 16-year-old was on her way to pick up her cousin when her vehicle and another car collided head-on at the crest of a hill.
Steve and Deb heard about an accident near their home and drove out to take a look. They couldn't imagine it was Kailey -- lightning doesn't strike twice.
A rescue worker stopped them before they got to the scene.
"Is it a black car?" Deb asked.
"Yes."
"It is Kailey?"
"Yes."
Deb and Steve ran to the mangled car, and Deb's legs gave out. Steve pounded his fists on the car.
"I won't go through this again!" he shouted.
The first EMT on the scene was a friend of the family and knew Kailey's situation was grave. The EMT's own son was killed three years earlier on another gravel road in Clay County.
The woman climbed into the car and gave Kailey mouth-to-mouth. It was Kailey's saving grace.
The vehicle's air bag protected Kailey's face, but the rest of her body was in a shambles.
During the 10 seconds Deb and Steve got to see Kailey before she was flown to Lincoln, Kailey asked her dad if she was going to die.
He assured her she wouldn't.
When a nurse finally took off Kailey's ventilator and allowed her to talk, she didn't know she had been in an accident. But she remembered one thing.
"I saw Matt!" she blurted out.
She said she saw Matt several more times as she drifted in and out in the next few days.
The road to recovery was a long one. After an eight-hour surgery immediately after the accident, Kailey spent weeks at different hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
She learned to walk again but has come to accept that she never again will play sports.
A week ago she finally came home. It was just in time for her to see Lynyrd Skynyrd, too, and to remember Matt.
"We don't ever want to forget him," Steve said. "We want to remember him and talk about him, and we want others to remember him and talk about him."
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