| Lynyrd Skynyrd |
|
| Background information |
| Origin |
Jacksonville, Florida, USA |
| Genre(s) |
Southern rock, Hard rock, Blues-rock, Arena rock |
| Years active |
1970–1977, 1987–present |
| Label(s) |
MCA Records, Atlantic Records, Capricorn
Records, SPV Records, CMC International, Sanctuary
Records, Universal Records |
| Website |
Lynyrd Skynyrd.com |
| Members |
Johnny Van Zant
Gary Rossington
Billy Powell
Ean Evans
Rickey Medlocke
Michael Cartellone
Mark Matejka
Dale Krantz Rossington
Carol Chase |
| Former members |
Ronnie Van Zant (deceased)
Allen Collins (deceased)
Steve Gaines (deceased)
Leon Wilkeson (deceased)
Cassie Gaines (deceased)
Hughie Thomasson (deceased)
Ed King
Artimus Pyle
Bob Burns
Randall Hall |
Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd)
(or IPA pronunciation: [lɛ'nɝd skɪ'nɝd]) is an iconic U.S. Southern
rock band. The band reached prominence during the 1970s under the leadership of vocalist and primary songwriter
Ronnie Van Zant until he died, along with several other members of the band, in a
plane crash in 1977 in McComb,
Mississippi.
The band was named after Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher/basketball coach for some of the
members at Robert E. Lee High School in
Jacksonville, Florida.[1][2] Lynyrd Skynyrd was one of the most critically acclaimed Southern Rock groups (although the term
did not exist at the time they formed) of the 1970s and was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame as of March 13, 2006. Their
distinctive triple-lead guitar sound made their songs "Free Bird", and "Sweet Home Alabama" American anthems and staples of FM radio. Members inducted include: singer
Ronnie Van Zant, guitarists Gary Rossington,
Allen Collins, Ed King, and Steve Gaines, bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboard player
Billy Powell, and drummers Bob Burns and
Artimus Pyle.
Background
The band, originally called My Backyard, was formed in Jacksonville,
Florida in the summer of 1964 by teenage friends Ronnie Van Zant (vocals),
Allen Collins (guitar), Gary Rossington (guitar),
Larry Junstrom (bass) and Bob Burns (drums).
Their early influences included British Invasion bands such as
Free, The Yardbirds, Rolling Stones and
The Beatles, as well as Southern blues and country & western music.
During the 1960s, the band changed names several times (most notable among their names was the "Noble Five" and the "One
Percent") while playing local dances and clubs in Jacksonville. In 1968 they won a local Battle of the Bands contest, using the
prize money to record the songs "Need All My Friends" and "Michelle", the former released as their debut single on
Jacksonville-based Shade Tree Records. They also won the opening slot on several Southeast shows for California-based
psychedelic rock band Strawberry Alarm
Clock.
Early years (1970–1972)
In 1970, the band began rehearsing at the "Hell House", an isolated farm in Green Cove Springs, a small city in Clay
County on the outskirts of Jacksonville. Roadie Billy Powell joined as keyboardist
around this time. The original name of the band was to be "One Percent". The band became "Lynard Skynard" as a mocking tribute to
Rossington's and Burns' gym coach at Robert E. Lee High
School, Leonard Skinner.[2] Skinner
would strictly enforce the school's dress code, which did not allow boys to have long hair touching the collar or sideburns below
the ears. Despite their high school acrimony, the band developed a friendlier relationship with Skinner in later years; they
invited Skinner to introduce them at a concert at the Jacksonville Memorial
Coliseum,[3] and Skinner attended a celebration
concert for the band at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[4]
The band continued to perform throughout the South in the early 1970s, further developing their hard-driving, blues-rock sound
and image. In 1972, Leon Wilkeson replaced Larry Junstrom on bass. But Wilkeson surprised
his bandmates and left just before they were to record the first album. (Wilkeson was to rejoin the band shortly thereafter at
Van Zant's invitation.) Strawberry Alarm Clock guitarist Ed King was asked to fill in as bass
player. After the album was completed, Van Zant informed King that he was "the worst bass player he'd ever played with". He
suggested King move to guitar so they could reproduce the studio album's three-guitar mix. Van Zant married girlfriend Judy
Seymour in 1972.
Peak years (1973–1977)
In 1973, they changed the spelling of the band name from Lynard Skynard to Lynyrd Skynyrd [5]. Musician, songwriter, and producer Al Kooper
of Blood, Sweat, and Tears was impressed with the band during a performance at
an Atlanta club called Funocchio's in 1972, and signed them to MCA Records. He produced their first album, 1973's (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd), which featured the song "Free Bird". "Free Bird" began to receive national airplay, eventually reaching #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. The song has also become the subject of a Rock and Roll cliché, which is the shouting of a
request to hear the song at almost any live concert, regardless of the performer. This practice has become so commonplace at live
concerts that it has largely evolved into a parody of itself.
Lynyrd Skynyrd's fan base continued to grow rapidly during 1973, due in large part to their opening slot on The Who's Quadrophenia tour in the U.S. Their second album, 1974's
Second Helping, was the band's breakthrough hit. It featured their most popular
single "Sweet Home Alabama" (#8 on the charts in August 1974), a tongue in
cheek answer song to Neil Young's "Alabama" and "Southern
Man". Today, Young claims that he and Van Zant were not rivals, that they were actually fans of each other's music and
good friends, and that they had talked of collaborations together. Neil Young was going to give his song "Powderfinger" to Lynyrd
Skynyrd to perform, a fact which Young has never denied. Unfortunately, the Skynyrd plane crash happened just months after that
song was penned, leaving Neil Young to perform the song himself on his 1979 album Rust
Never Sleeps. Young has occasionally included the chorus from "Sweet Home Alabama" as a tribute to Skynyrd at his own
live concerts, including at Young's first live performance following Van Zant's death. Finally, one of the last photos of Ronnie
Van Zant prior to his passing features the frontman wearing a Neil Young t-shirt.[1]
Second Helping reached #12 in 1974, eventually going multi-platinum. In July 1974. Lynyrd Skynyrd was one of the
headline acts at The Ozark Music Festival, at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in
Sedalia Missouri. Some estimates have put the crowd count at 350,000 people which would make this one of the largest music events in history. The band also
toured the UK in 1975 with Golden Earring and in 1976 with The Rolling Stones.
In 1975, Burns left the band and was replaced by North Carolina drummer Artimus Pyle.
The new lineup's first album, Nuthin' Fancy, was released, becoming their first Top
Ten album. It features the hit song "Saturday Night Special" (#27 on the Billboard Hot
100 chart). Guitarist Ed King left the band midway throughout the Nuthin' Fancy tour. The band decided to continue on as a
6-piece, with only two guitarists.
Gimme Back My Bullets followed in 1976, but didn't reach the same
success as the previous two albums. In December 1975, backup singers Leslie Hawkins,
Cassie Gaines and JoJo Billingsley (collectively known as the Honkettes) were added to the band. Guitarist Steve Gaines,
brother of backup singer Cassie Gaines, replaced King in 1976, just in time to record the
double-live album One More from the Road, the band's second Top Ten hit.
At its peak, the band's unique triple guitar style included one slide and a rocking Gibson
Firebird. Adding to the wall of sound was the melodic bass playing, the wild yet
rhythmic percussion section, Van Zant's strong vocals, and the furious keyboard/piano playing of Powell.
Lynyrd Skynyrd's sixth album, Street Survivors, was released in October of
1977. It would be the final album released by the "classic" line-up.
Plane crash (1977)
Several members of the band died in a plane crash that occurred on October 20,
1977, three days after the release of Street Survivors. A chartered Convair 240 carrying the band between shows from Greenville,
South Carolina to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana crashed near a forest in McComb,
Mississippi. The crash killed singer/songwriter Ronnie Van Zant,
guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, vocalist Cassie
Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray. Other band members were
injured, some seriously.
Drummer Artimus Pyle crawled out of the plane wreckage with several broken ribs, but was
ambulatory, as were road crew members Kenneth Peden Jr. and Mark Frank. The three injured men hiked some distance from the crash
site, through swampy woods, and finally flagged down farmer Johnny Mote, who had come to investigate. Varying accounts have Mote
either firing a warning shot into the air or actually shooting Pyle in the shoulder — no report is completely reliable. Pyle
claimed in a February 2007 appearance on Howard Stern's Sirius radio program that Mote had shot him; Mote has always denied shooting the drummer. Video
of a barechested Pyle at the 1979 Volunteer Jam does not show evidence of a gunshot wound.
Medical personnel arrived and began to ferry out the injured and the dead. Allen
Collins suffered two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and both Collins and Leon
Wilkeson nearly had arms amputated as a result of crash injuries. Wilkeson suffered severe internal injuries, including a
punctured lung, and had most of his teeth knocked out. Gary Rossington broke both his
arms and both his legs in the crash, and took many months to recuperate. Leslie Hawkins
sustained a concussion, broke her neck in three places and had severe facial lacerations. Security manager Gene Odom was
seriously burned on his arm and face and lost the sight in one eye as a result of an emergency flare on board the plane that was
activated during the crash. Victims were taken to the hospital in McComb, Mississippi by ambulances and other vehicles. Road crew
member Steve Lawler, who suffered severe contusions and facial lacerations, was taken to the hospital in a pickup with a camper
top.
Pianist Billy Powell survived but his nose was nearly torn off and he suffered severe
facial lacerations. He later caused a controversy by giving a lurid account of Cassie Gaines' final moments on a VH1 Behind The Music special about the band, claiming that the
backing singer's throat was cut from ear to ear and that she bled to death in his arms. Powell also claimed that Ronnie Van
Zant's head had been smashed. Powell's version of events has been discounted by both Artimus
Pyle and Judy Van Zant Jenness, who posted the autopsy reports on the band's
website in early 1998 in order to set the record straight. Despite this faux pas, Powell has been on good terms with the
remaining band members since the incident. Pyle did confirm (from Pyle's interview on the The Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio,
February 12, 2007) that Van Zant's cause of death was trauma to the head caused by equipment, such as Betamax tapes and Trinitrons, flying forward in the plane's cabin.
Original cover for
Street Survivors, 1977
Notably, the third member of The Honkettes, JoJo Billingsley, was not on the plane and
in fact was home tending to a family member's illness. She was planning to join the tour in Little Rock on October 23, three days
after the crash. According to an interview in the book Freebirds, Billingsley had dreamed of the plane crash and begged
Allen Collins by telephone not to continue using the Convair. On hearing of the accident, Billingsley was so shaken that some of
her hair fell out.
The Convair 240 itself had been inspected by members of Aerosmith's flight crew for
possible use in the early summer of 1977, but was rejected because it was felt that neither the plane nor the crew were up to
standards. In an interview in the book Walk This Way, Aerosmith's assistant chief of flight operations Zunk Buker tells of
seeing pilots McCreary and Gray trading a bottle of Jack Daniels back and forth while Buker
and his father were inspecting the plane. Aerosmith's touring family was also relieved because the band, specifically
Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, had been trying
to pressure their management into renting that specific plane.
Updated cover after plane crash, 1977
The official NTSB
accident report reads, "The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of this accident was fuel
exhaustion and total loss of power from both engines due to crew inattention to fuel supply. Contributing to the fuel exhaustion
were inadequate flight planning and an engine malfunction of undetermined nature in the right engine which resulted in
higher-than-normal fuel consumption." It was known that the right engine's magneto — a small
power generator that provides spark and timing for the engine — had been malfunctioning (Powell, among others, spoke of seeing
flames shooting out of the right engine on a trip just prior to the accident), and that pilots McCreary and Gray had intended to
repair the damaged part when the travelling party arrived in Baton Rouge. It is possible that the damaged magneto fooled the
pilots into creating an exceptionally rich fuel mixture, causing the Convair to run out of fuel. It was suggested on the
VH-1 Behind The Music profile on Skynyrd that this
was the case, or that the pilots, panicking when the right engine failed, accidentally dumped the remaining fuel. Pyle maintains
in the Howard Stern interview that the fuel gauge in the older model plane malfunctioned and the pilots had failed to manually
check the tanks before taking off.
Street Survivors became the band's second platinum album, and was the #5 top selling album on the U.S. album chart. The
single "What's Your Name" reached #13 on the single airplay charts in January of 1978. Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded after the
airplane tragedy. On the original pressing of the cover of Street Survivors was a photograph of the band engulfed in
flames. MCA Records withdrew the sleeve and replaced it with a cover of the band striking a similar pose against a plain black
background.
Hiatus (1977–1987)
Rossington and Collins formed The Rossington-Collins Band between 1980
and 1982, releasing two albums. Pyle formed The Artimus Pyle Band in 1982. Collins formed The Allen Collins Band in 1983. Tragedy
struck the band again in 1986 when Collins crashed his car while driving drunk near his home in Jacksonville, killing his
girlfriend and leaving him permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Reunion years (1987–present)
In 1987, Lynyrd Skynyrd reunited for a full-scale tour with crash survivors Gary Rossington, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson and
Artimus Pyle and former guitarist Ed King. Ronnie Van Zant's younger brother, Johnny,
took over as the new lead singer and primary songwriter. Due to Collins' paralysis, he was only able to participate as the
musical director, choosing Randall Hall, his former bandmate in the Allen Collins Band, as his stand-in. Collins was stricken
with pneumonia in 1989 and died on January 23,
1990.
The reunited band was meant to be a one-time tribute to the original lineup, captured on the double-live album Southern By
The Grace Of God/Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Tour - 1987, but because of an overwhelmingly positive reaction by fans, the band
decided to stay together and record new material.
The reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd has gone through several lineup changes and continues to record and tour today.
Leon Wilkeson, Skynyrd's bassist since 1972, was found dead in his hotel room due to liver
/ lung disease on July 27, 2001. The remaining members released a
double album called Thyrty which had songs from the original line up to the present. Lynyrd Skynyrd also released a live DVD of
their Vicious Cycle Tour and on June 22, 2004 Lynyrd Skynyrd released the album Lyve: The Vicious Cycle Tour. On December 10,
2004 Lynyrd Skynyrd did a show for CMT, Crossroads, a concert featuring
country duo Montgomery Gentry and others genres of music.
In the beginning of 2005 Hughie Thomasson left the band to pursue other musical
opportunites. On February 5, 2005 Lynyrd Skynyrd did a Super Bowl party with special guests 3
Doors Down, Jo Dee Messina, Charlie
Daniels and Ronnie and Johnny Van Zant's brother Donnie Van Zant of
.38 Special. On February 13 of that year Lynyrd Skynyrd did a tribute to Southern Rock
on the Grammy Awards with Gretchen Wilson, Tim
McGraw and Keith Urban. On May 10, 2005 Johnny and Donnie Van Zant released a country album called Get Right With The
Man which featured the hit single "Help Somebody". In the summer of 2005, lead singer Johnny Van Zant had to have surgery on his vocal chord to have a polyp removed. He was told not to sing
for 3 months. On September 10, 2005 Lynyrd Skynyrd performed without Johnny Van Zant at the Music Relief Concert for the victims
of Hurricane Katrina, with Kid Rock standing in for
Johnny. In December of 2005, Johnny Van Zant returned to sing for Lynyrd Skynyrd.
In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked the group #95 on their list of the 100 Greatest
Artists of All Time.[6]
Ronnie Van Zant's widow, Judy Van Zant Jenness, operates a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute web-site for the educational purpose of
sharing the original Lynyrd Skynyrd band's history - (http://www.lynyrdskynyrdhistory.com/index.html) as well as Freebird Live, (http://www.freebirdlive.com), a live music venue in Jacksonville Beach,
Florida.
The band performed live at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky as part of their 2007 tour. That night was recorded in high
definition for broadcast on HDNet (premiering December 1, 2007 at 9pm).
On September 9, 2007, former Skynyrd guitarist Hughie Thomasson died of a heart attack at his home in Florida.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
On November 28, 2005, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that Lynyrd Skynyrd would be inducted alongside
Black Sabbath, Blondie, Miles Davis, and the Sex Pistols. They were inducted in the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel in Manhattan on March 13, 2006. Lynyrd Skynyrd had
been nominated 7 times.
On March 13, 2006: Lynyrd Skynyrd was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 21st annual induction ceremony. The
inductees included Ronnie Van Zant (Lead Singer/Song Writer), Allen Collins (Songwriter/Lead and Rhythm Guitar), Steve Gaines
(Singer, Song Writer, Lead and Rhythm Guitar), Ed King (Backup Vocals, Songwriter, Lead and
Rhythm Guitar), Gary Rossington (Songwriter, Lead and Rhythm Guitar;), Billy Powell (Keyboards), Leon Wilkeson (Songwriter, Bass Guitar),
Bob Burns (Drums), and Artimus Pyle (Drums).
Freebird... The Movie
In 1996, Freebird... The Movie was released [2], consisting of backstage and home footage of the band, live concert performances of the original line-up,
including their Knebworth festival performance. The film also includes footage from the cockpit of their plane, as it takes off
and in the air.
Band members
-
Discography
Studio albums
Original lineup
Post-Crash lineups
Compilations
