Lynyrd Skynyrd, when they exploded onto the American music scene in the 1970s, were the poster children for Southern rock. They had it all – the long hair, the Jacksonville drawls, the infectious riffs and the perfect, simple, working-class poetic lyrics of frontman Ronnie van Zant. They personified rock’n’roll offstage, as well, starting fights, trashing hotel rooms and generally wreaking havoc on the road.
Hits like Sweet Home Alabama and Freebird became beloved American anthems, and their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, released on October 17, 1977 – its cover defiantly depicting the members in flames – looked set to be equally hot.
Just days later, however, the band came to personify not an up-by-the-boot-straps success story but an American tragedy. Their plane, ferrying them to a Louisiana tour date, plummeted from the sky, killing three band members, their road manager and the two pilots – and injuring 20 more.
The horror crash gave an eerily prophetic quality to some of the band’s earlier hits, with lyrics about death, and to van Zant’s own declaration that he’d never make it to 30 years old.
Now, 40 years later, a new documentary is telling the story of the hell-raising band, its remarkable work ethic, and how members picked themselves up ten years after the tragedy to reassemble and tour again. Fronted by van Zant’s brother, Johnny, Lynyrd Skynyrd has been playing to admiring crowds for 30 years – and they’re about to embark on their farewell tour.
Lynyrd Skynyrd – which originated in Jacksonville, Florida – pose in California in October 1976; (left to right, back row Artimus Pyle, Gary Rossington, Ronnie van Zant, Allen Collins and Steve Gaines, front row Leon Wilkeson and Billy Powell)
Gary Rossington, right, and van Zant, left, grew up together in Jacksonville; Gary laughs about playing baseball together as kids in a new documentary about the band
The group expanded to include female backup singers Cassie Gaines, left, Leslie Hawkins, center, and Jo Jo Billingsley, right
The band was known for its passion for Southern rock, releasing American ballads such as Freebird, Simple Man and Sweet Home Alabama – which remain classics to this day
Director Stephen Kijak had always liked the band’s music but never paid Lynyrd Skynyrd much attention, though he was hounded for years by his friend – a Georgia man – to work on a project about the incredible story behind Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kijak was eventually approached by CMT to make a documentary, and If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd, premieres next week at the South By Southwest film festival in Texas. (The title takes its name from the first line of one of Skynyrd’s most famous songs, Freebird.)
He found himself captivated by the story and worked hard to do the band justice –especially to give viewers a new understanding of Lynyrd Skynyrd, particularly people who enjoy the music but are unaware of the history. That was a reality he observed firsthand while filming footage of one of the band’s recent concerts.
‘It’s not in the movie, but we filmed a lot in the parking lot, like the tailgaters,’ Kijak tells DailyMail.com. ‘We were in Raleigh, North Carolina, and there were a whole bunch of younger fans that had no clue. They didn’t know who Ronnie van Zant was, they didn’t know anything about a plane crash – and they’re going to see Skynyrd and they don’t know anything about them!’
He adds: ‘There truly was no one quite like them. They were our Rolling Stones in a lot of ways – but in a way that they came from the musical culture that they were inhabiting, as opposed to a lot of the British bands … blues was imported to England; they kind of appropriated it and then sold it back to white America.
‘Skynyrd were poor white kids; they were from the ghetto, they were from the wrong side of the tracks. These guys came from nothing. That music was all around them.’
Hits like Sweet Home Alabama, he says, have been ‘calcified in the culture in a way that’s almost not about the band anymore, people’s awareness is so advanced that it almost has nothing behind it. You know, it’s just everywhere.’
He says the film aims to ‘scrub that off and get way down into the roots of this band … I wanted to make it a real discovery – so how do you take something as set in the culture as Freebird or Sweet Home and shake it up and make people reevaluate and have some kind of shock of the new to it?’
One way to achieve that was interviewing friends, family members and the plane crash survivors; early on in the film, guitarist and survivor Gary Rossington joins van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny – now Skynyrd’s lead singer – as they return to Jacksonville and reminisce. They point out the baseball field where they used to play and laugh about Ronnie hitting a line drive straight at another future Skynyrd member, drummer Bob Burns.
They laugh even more when they explain how another member, Allen Collins, fled when the fledgling band approached him to borrow his amp; Ronnie had a bit of a reputation for knocking heads, so Collins shimmied up a tree to get away from him, convinced Ronnie was there to give him a beating.
As the band developed, they devoted more and more time to music, quitting school, playing teen dances and parties and eventually settling on a name. (A previous moniker had been One Percent, but people joked that stood for ‘one percent talent.’) The name Lynyrd Skynyrd developed as a play on a character mentioned in the lyrics of the popular song Camp Granada and the name of one of the members’ high school gym coach.
To emphasize their Southern roots, Lynyrd Skynyrd often performed against the backdrop of the controversial confederate flag – but guitarist Gary Rossington says in a new documentary: ‘We never one time meant the Confederate flag to offend anyone, but I know it’s naive to say that, too, because it does hurt people. It does remind them of the war and slavery and all that – but we weren’t into it for that … We were just showing where we were from: Southern music.’
The band were known offstage for their pranks and their wild behavior, including starting fights and trashing hotel rooms
Lynyrd Skynyrd released its fifth studio album on October 17, 1977; the cover featured the band engulfed in flames – perhaps eerily prophetic, given that their plane crashed days later. The cover was later replaced at the request of family members
The band’s twin engine Convair CV-240 took off from South Carolina and was on its way to Louisiana, where the band had a show the next day, when it ran out of fuel and crashed in the woods in Mississippi on October 20, 1977
‘Our road manager, Dean Kilpatrick, he knew of a cabin on the creek that was for rent,’ Gary says in the film, standing where the cabin used to be. ‘He said we could rehearse there. So that started the whole thing, right here. We wrote Freebird here, all the so-called hits. People used to come up in boats and come in and steal mics; not big things but little things.’
Until the band arrived at the cabin to find a window broken and an entire amp stolen.
‘We started staying out here with guns to protect our equipment every night,’ he says. ‘Mosquitos biting you all night, roaches everywhere, gators, rattlesnakes, water moccasins … anything you could find. We didn’t have any money for food or drinks or nothing. It was hell; we called it Hell House.’
Kijak describes Ronnie ‘as this kind of rock and roll Napoleon, like driving the troops to rehearse nonstop in the sweat and the heat and, you know, with the snake and the gators … it was really mythic.
‘And then they suddenly emerge, like fully formed, as the greatest Southern rock band.’
Throughout their career, the band did remain unabashedly Southern and true to their roots – and, in an attempt to distinguish themselves from other regional bands or music movements, they controversially performed against the backdrop of the Confederate flag.
‘It’s like the flag got kidnapped by the KKK,’ Gary says in the film. ‘They carried and all these evil people used the confederate flag as a hate thing – it’s them against the world. We never one time meant the Confederate flag to offend anyone, but I know it’s naive to say that, too, because it does hurt people. It does remind them of the war and slavery and all that – but we weren’t into it for that.
‘We were just showing where we were from: Southern music.’
Ronnie, in particular, had an unusual knack for poetry and lyrics; one childhood friend explains how he was the only teenage boy he knew writing poems in a binder kept in his bedroom. And, for all his rockstar antics and appearance, there was something of an air of prophecy about him, many say.
‘His songs were really prophetic,’ says backup singer Jo Jo Billingsley, who died in 2010 but appears in the documentary in archive footage. ‘Everything he ever wrote was a true story or it came true later.
‘Ronnie van Zant … he’s a prophet.’
Director Stephen Kijak interviewed surviving members as well as friends and relatives for his documentary If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd, which premieres next week at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas
As they skyrocketed in popularity, both in the US and abroad, they truly lived the raucous rockstar lifestyle, however. Ronnie, in particular, loved a drunken brawl; band members came and went and Skynyrd’s manger cleaned up their messes.
Guitarist and crash survivor Artimus Pyle, explaining how promoters provided the band with drugs and booze, says the musicians went wild overindulging.
‘I think they felt they were supposed to smoke every cigarette and drink everything provided and eat whatever they wanted and throw the rest against the wall,’ he says in the film. ‘That was our road manager’s duty – to carry a briefcase with probably $250,000 in cash’ to bail people out of jail and placate hotel owners.
Ronnie was sobered, however, by the birth of his daughter Melody and by a horrific car crash Gary survived (which knocked out his teeth). The frontman wrote the prophetic song That Smell, with lyrics including ‘the smell of death surrounds you,’ referring to ‘angel of darkness,’ and warning: ‘Say you’ll be all right come tomorrow/but tomorrow might not be here for you.’
Those tragic lyrics were realized on October 20, 1977, following the band’s performance in Greenville, South Carolina. They were flying to Baton Rouge for a show the next day; by this point the band had grown to include several female backup singers: Jo Jo Billingsley, Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins. Gaines’ brother, Steve, had also joined the band as guitarist, and the full male Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup that boarded the band’s battered old Convair CV-240 were: Ronnie van Zant, Gary Rossington, Artimus Pyle, Billy Powell, Allen Collins, Leon Wilkeson and Steve Gaines.
Some were nervous boarding the plane, which had suffered malfunctions before, and had to be coaxed on. Band members had previously seen flames shooting from the aircraft with their own eyes, and the pilots promised they’d have the aircraft looked at once they got to Baton Rouge, where Lynyrd Skynyrd was scheduled to play the following night at LSU. Further down the road, Skynyrd hoped to trade the ancient plane in for a Learjet. In the meantime, they got on, playing cards and socializing as Ronnie lay on the floor to help his ailing back.
Then disaster struck.
‘Things were going wrong with the plane a little bit, nothing serious – but enough to notice it wasn’t flying top-notch,’ Gary says in the film. ‘We were about to get maintenance on it and put it in the shop, because the engine was sputtering; it needed a tune up, I guess. I wasn’t really worried about it myself, but I only speak for me.
‘I know before we took off and stuff, some of the girls and Allen and some of the guys didn’t wanna fly – and Ronnie was the one who said, “When it’s our time to go, you can kiss my ass goodbye” …
‘He said, “We’ve got a plane here to take us to our hotel and do a show … get on or get your own way there. I was with Ronnie, saying, “Let’s just do it; get it fixed tomorrow.” But it never happened.’
They made it as far as Mississippi before engines sputtered and – despite having refueled in South Carolina – the plane ran out of fuel.
‘Ronnie, he called himself “the Mississippi Kid,”’ Billingsley says in the documentary. ‘I never understood that, because I’m from Mississippi … but he died in Mississippi.’
The band honed their skills practicing in a cabin surrounded by cockroaches and snakes; they had little money for food but were fueled by their passion for the music and emerged nearly ‘fully-formed,’ says director Kijak
Ronnie van Zant, third from left, was a gifted and poetic lyricist and was writing poems as a teenager that he kept in his room; some of his later lyrics proved prophetic in the wake of the plane crash that killed him – especially from the song That Smell, which included the lyrics: ‘the smell of death surrounds you,’ refers to ‘angel of darkness,’ and warns: ‘Say you’ll be all right come tomorrow/but tomorrow might not be here for you’
The band, posing in 1975, chose Lynyrd Skynyrd as a name as a play on a character mentioned in the lyrics of the popular song Camp Granada and the name of one of the members’ high school gym coach
Skynyrd’s aircraft had experience problems before the crash, and several members had been afraid to board before being coaxed on; the planned to have maintenance done on the battered plane once they arrived in Louisiana
Killed in the crash were Steve Gaines, pictured, along with his sister Cassie, van Zant, manager Dean Kilpatrick and the two aircraft pilots; 20 other people were injured
The plane’s pilots made desperate Mayday calls and attempted an emergency landing, but it ultimately crashed in a heavily forested area five miles northeast of Gillsburg, Mississippi.
‘The one thing I want the world to know about my band is how bravely my band met their death,’ a stoic Artimus says in the documentary. ‘We spiralled from 9,000 feet. Everyone knew it was gonna end badly. There was no panic, no chaos; everybody was in prayer, in deep thought.
‘And I admired that about them, that they met their death that way,’ he says, choking back tears.
He says that Ronnie ‘came up the aisle and he stopped right by me; we shook the old hippie handshake. He smiled, and then Ronnie walked back to the front of the plane. I’ll never forget … he gave me that beautiful Ronnie van Zant smile.
‘We started hitting tree tops; you could hear them – and then it got louder and louder until that’s when I guess got knocked out. It felt like 10,000 baseball bats being beaten on the fuselage. So the plane started coming apart, and I’m looking out the window; the left wing comes off.
‘I woke up on the ground; I thought a plane door’s on me, because I couldn’t move and get up,’ Gary says. ‘In reality, I was so broken – all my bones and legs, everything – I just couldn’t get up. I said, “Dean [Kilpatrick], get this door off me! Dean, come here!” I swear to God, he came over, pushed the door off me. Later on, one of the doctors said he couldn’t have done that; the way they brought him in, he was too far gone. But I saw him do it.’
Artimus was injured, his ribs broken, but he set off to get help.
‘My friends were bleeding to death,’ he says in the film. ‘I know the only thing that was gonna help my friends was to get to a farmhouse and bring help back to that crash site. But we stopped so fast my boots had come off, and I couldn’t bend over because of my chest injury – so I’m walking through the briars and the brambles and it was getting darker and darker.’
‘I remember waking up to the helicopters … hovering, shining lights down in the swamp pits like Vietnam in my head,’ Gary says in the documentary. ‘I only seen it on TV, but the helicopters and your buddies screaming and yelling in pain and dying around you … the next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. Both arms were broken, both legs.’
Ronnie, Cassie and Steve Gaines were all killed, along with their road manager, Dean Kilpatrick, and the two pilots. The loss was so catastrophic on both a personal and professional level that Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded.
And airing the stories of the band members who survived the crash, all these decades later, was an essential component of putting together the documentary, Kijak says.
‘These are guys who survived the plane crash and carried that pain and that history with them all their lives … the story’s been told, but I wanted to just sit the two guys down who are still here that survived, who were really in the band, and just hear from their perspective,’ he tells DailyMail.com.
‘Gary hadn’t really ever kind of gone through it in that kind of detail … maybe not in a long time. So I think we got them all at a really good time,’ he says. ‘There was a time, maybe five, 10 years ago, if anybody asked him a lot of these questions, he was like, “F*** you, it’s none of your business.”
Kijak tells DailyMail.com that, in making the documentary, he found ‘There was a kind of particular brand of crazy that I think we captured really well. I really wanted to get that across – the humor and humanity that was there and that endures’
Ten years after the fatal plane crash, Lynyrd Skynyrd reformed and began touring with van Zant’s brother, Johnny, as the lead singer
Lynyrd Skynyrd kicks off its Last of the Street Survivors Farwell Tour in May – fittingly, in Florida
‘He was really ready to tell it and kind of explain the whole thing from his point of view. So yeah, obviously, the crash was sensitive and intense, but otherwise it was really actually just quite a lot of fun.
‘Ronnie was a storyteller. He’s a poet, but it’s more like a troubadour. He’s a great writer – and I wanted to get that kind of casual sort of just storytelling vibe in the movie – where the narrative and the stories are a little rambly … it was an idea of, imagine kicking out on the back porch with a beer and bonfire.’
He tells DailyMail.com: ‘Even talking to Artimus before we did the film, one of the things he really wanted, he was really adamant about us getting across, was just to show the people, how f***ing funny they were. Everything focuses on the tragedy.
‘I think the film’s hilarious … they are funny, like the antics. You could kinda say, “Oh, well, what band didn’t do crazy s**t in the 70s? There was a kind of particular brand of crazy that I think we captured really well. I really wanted to get that across – the humor and humanity that was there and that endures.’
The band regrouped in 1987 with Johnny van Zant as lead singer, and has been touring ever since with various members. They kick off their farewell tour – the Last of the Street Survivors tour, a nod to the band’s 1977 album – in May; the first show, appropriately, is scheduled for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s home state of Florida.
‘To their credit, they have continued to soldier on,’ Kijak says. ‘You know, Johnny van Zant took up the mantle of his brother and led the band and has been singing lead for 30 years – so you can kind of see how the history has sort of taken a bit of a back seat; they carry the legacy.’
The director and his editor, he says, became ‘completely obsessed’ with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band’s music and the legacy.
‘It’s weird how quickly it kind of gets into your DNA,’ he says. ‘Maybe one or two kind of “eh” tracks across six records – that’s amazing. I mean, these are extraordinary albums of just great American rock song craft. It’s such good music, and we really overdid it on the soundtrack. We tried to use a lot of deep cuts and just wall-to-wall tunes to really give you that really kaleidoscopic view into what they’re about musically.
‘We’d do a whiskey shot at the end of every edit day,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘We’d toast the guys watching us from rock’n’roll heaven.’