Subtitles by explosiveskull
There's a whole new generation of people
that they don't know
what the breadth and width of Skynyrd is,
and I say, "Have you heard Lynyrd Skynyrd?"
and they said, "Yeah, yeah, 'Free Bird,'
'Sweet Home Alabama.'"
And I said, "No, I mean anything else?"
"No."
And I'd sit them down, and I'd play them stuff,
and they'd go, "Wow, that's great,"
like that.
One, two, three.
♪ Well, I'll tell you plainly baby ♪
♪ What I plan to do ♪
♪ Because I may be crazy woman ♪
♪ But I ain't no fool ♪
♪ Your daddy's rich, mama ♪
♪ You're overdue ♪
♪ Now I ain't the one, baby ♪
♪ Been messing with you ♪
♪ Got bells in your mind, lady ♪
♪ Ain't it easy to see? ♪
♪ I think it's time for me to move along ♪
♪ I do believe ♪
♪ I must be in the middle of some kind of conspiracy ♪
♪ Oh, no ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
Three members of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band
were among the six persons who died in the crash
of that twin-engine plane near McComb last night.
The plane apparently was running low on fuel
and tried to make an emergency landing,
clipped some treetops and crashed into a swamp.
I just want to straighten out
that there's not a person by the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd,
for those who are not so informed,
and therefore that person cannot die.
Ronnie Van Zant was the leader
and the vocals you usually heard from Lynyrd Skynyrd,
and he was one of the six killed in the wreck,
and that's about the latest we have on it right now.
Ronnie, he called himself the Mississippi Kid.
I never understood that 'cause I'm from Mississippi,
and I asked him about that one time.
I said, "Ronnie, you know, wh..."
and he said, "I don't know,"
but he died in Mississippi.
See? His songs were really prophetic.
Everything he ever wrote was true.
It was a true story, or it came true later.
Ronnie Van Zant, he's a prophet.
Man, a lot of this I haven't been to.
Well, it's all changed in this area.
- You ever miss living here? - I miss the moss.
There's no moss in Jackson or Atlanta.
I never see it, anyway.
I love moss.
It's crazy, man, how long it's been.
I know.
The stories from the original band was 52 years ago.
Most people can't remember that far back,
let alone rock-and-rollers.
So we came down to a baseball game here to watch Ronnie.
He was on a baseball team called the Green Pigs.
Ronnie got up and went bam and hit a line drive
right to Bob Burns' temple. Boom, it hit him.
Looked like a aspirin coming straight to me,
and I wheeled around to... to turn, try to miss it,
and it caught me right behind the shoulder blades
and took every breath I ever had in my whole life,
and I think Gary said it hit me in the head,
but I... maybe it should have.
So everybody running over.
"Oh, you killed this guy. It's go..."
you know, we thought he was dead.
And Ronnie walked up and looks down there.
He got this Mona Lisa type grin, you know?
Like, a, "Well, I'm trying to act serious,
but actually, I think it's funny as hell,"
kind of look, you know? And he went, "Sorry, kid."
It came up that I had a guitar,
and Bob played drums,
and we said, "Ronnie, we know you sing.
Why don't you come sing a song with us?"
and he went, "Yeah, let's go,"
and we went down to Bob Burns' carport and played, I think,
"Time Is On My Side" that day after the ballgame.
We went, "Wow, this is great. Let's start a band," you know?
♪ Like to tell you all a story ♪
♪ About a friend of mine ♪
And I was just still learning the chords and stuff.
We said, "Let's get somebody that's got a guitar."
It didn't matter who, just that they owned the equipment,
and Allen Collins was in a band called the Mods.
He had a amp and guitar, so we went looking for him,
and he was riding his bike, and he saw Ronnie in the car
and went riding his bike through the woods
and climbed a tree way up tall so we couldn't get him.
He thought we were gonna beat him up, or Ronnie was,
and Bob had a little bit of a reputation too, you know?
And we said, "No, no, Allen. Come down.
We want you to play in a band," you know?
Ronnie kind of raised Gary and Allen.
Their fathers was gone.
So we kind of were a family, and I mean,
Ronnie kind of taught me and Allen how to drive.
He was three years older, so he taught us all that stuff
you learn when you're 14, 15, 16,
driving and girls.
He took care of the band
just like a father would a family, you know?
And I wasn't real athletic,
and I ended up playing in the school band, clarinet
and then later saxophone,
and I got tired of marching around all football fields,
and one Friday night I decided I'd rather play teen dances,
and that's when I got with Ronnie and the boys.
Besides Bob Burns, Allen was the next-craziest person
on the face of the earth.
We all wanted Allen's bellbottoms.
His sister made them. He was so tall and skinny,
they looked good on him. If we would have tried them,
they'd have been way too big and looked goofy on us.
Allen was really loud, and when he came in the room,
you knew it. He'd knock stuff over.
He used to sniff glue when we first met him.
We could put a model airplane together with his breath.
Everybody took speed back then, little uppers.
It was hard keeping a girlfriend or going to school
or anything, learning stuff,
'cause we just wanted to play guitar all night.
Allen and I used to talk.
We wished we could get thrown in jail with a guitar
so that's all we could do, is play.
Seventh, eighth grade, and we were just playing
to teen dens and garages for people at school.
They'd throw weekend parties, you know?
And I quit sports, and we quit baseball,
and just music, music, guitar, guitar, guitar,
that's all we thought, you know?
We used to be called The 1%. Here's our first band card.
It says the 1%.
That's... was made in '64 or '65.
That was our home phone number.
Most everybody went to the high school here.
- I just went to tenth grade. - Tenth grade?
Then Leonard Skinner kicked me out.
After gym every day you'd be getting dressed,
and he'd walk through the dressing room
checking your hair.
If it touched your eyebrow
or touched the top of your ear, it was too long.
That was the rules, and he'd see that,
and he'd kick you out to go get a haircut,
and finally one day I just said,
"I ain't coming back."
There was a song called "Camp Grenada."
♪ Hello muddah, hello faddah ♪
♪ Here I am at Camp Granada ♪
♪ Camp Granada ♪
♪ You remember Leonard Skinnerd ♪
♪ He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner ♪
That's where I heard the name from; it's in there.
I laughed my ass off.
A door would blow open.
Nobody's there. "What the hell is..."
"That's Leonard Skinnerd." They'd start laughing.
They picked up on it a little bit,
and they'd use it. Somebody's on the phone.
Nobody's talking, see? Leonard Skinnerd.
A noise over there, and there ain't nothing over there,
it's Leonard Skinnerd.
The dangedest thing happened.
A year and a half later
Gary got Leonard Skinner as a gym coach,
and he was making them cut their hair,
and here we were trying to be rock legends, see?
Ronnie decided it was time to change the name
'cause some of the people were saying 1% talent,
and it pissed him off, so when we were thinking of names,
I said, "Leonard Skinnerd." They said, "Where?"
I said, "No, Leonard Skinnerd."
They said, "Well, where, Bob?"
"Name of the band!"
and they... everybody just busted out laughing,
and Ronnie said, "By God, that's it.
You know, that is it."
I was in this band,
the Strawberry Alarm Clock, west coast band.
We had a number-one record in the fall of '67.
I had been to the South before with the Beach Boys,
but you don't really see much
when you're just going from hotel to gig,
and I really liked what was going on down there.
It was a lot more real than L. A. was.
It just seemed, like, really down to earth,
and I figured if there was any
real good rock music happening,
it probably had to be down there.
When I saw Skynyrd play the first time,
and I really liked them,
particularly the lead singer, Ronnie.
He was just so charismatic,
and music just seemed to flow out of him,
and I said, "Well, you guys got to keep on writing,"
you know, and a couple weeks later
he called me at my hotel room, and he said,
"I want you to come down to this club
"called the Comic Book. We're rehearsing down there.
We wrote a new song, want you to hear it."
So I went right down, and they played me this song
called "Need All My Friends," and a chill went down my back.
It just... I was seeing it, you know?
♪ It's been so long since I've been gone ♪
♪ Lord, I'm tired, and I want to go home ♪
♪ My throat is raw from singing the blues ♪
♪ Need all my friends to talk to ♪
♪ Now, yes, I do ♪
♪ Need all my friends to talk to ♪
I said, "I know you got a full lineup,
"but if you ever need another guitar player or bass player,
please give me a call 'cause I'd love to play with you."
This pictures, this is my mother
and my father and my sister and Ronnie
in my mother's house up in Georgia.
After I graduated from high school, I left home
and ended up down here,
and I was ready to get out of Waycross, Georgia,
and I met Ronnie, and we were together,
like, nine years.
When I met Ronnie,
he was working at Morris Auto Supplies as his day job.
As you can see in the picture, he has on a wig
'cause you couldn't go to work with long hair.
Dean Kilpatrick was my roommate,
and I went over to the Comic Book Club with Dean.
I met Gary first and then hung out with Gary and Dean,
and then I met Ronnie, and, you know,
after that was it, you know?
♪ Woman of mine ♪
♪ Can't let her go ♪
I know they were good,
and I knew that they were passionate,
and, you know, that's kind of
why I told Ronnie to quit his job,
and I worked, and he got to do what he needed to do.
Musicians are a rare breed.
It's, like, you know, it gets in their blood.
They have to just go after it.
That's Dean in drag.
Dean was a character.
I guess so.
Dean actually dressed better in... like, in the band,
and he looked like the rock star.
He took... personally took care of everybody.
Dean was the personal assistant.
I guess that's a good title for him.
He was from New York City and kind of wild
and knew all the ins and outs of city life
that we didn't know.
He was, like, a bartender roadie
where he took care of us really good, you know?
Anybody who was sick or needed a little more attention,
you know, he was just there for you.
He was like the big brother and sister and your mama
and everything.
I got a picture of him I keep out over there.
I put it away recently
'cause some... certain times I start missing people,
and it's hard to see them every day without crying,
and he was just a real great guy.
As far as Ronnie, I go back
before Gary and Allen and Bob and... you know?
We used to play a lot of sandlot
and hang out at the racetrack.
I mean, what's better for 12-year-old kids
than having a racetrack in your neighborhood, you know?
And we were what you called west side.
We called it shantytown.
It was woods and swamps.
People were blue collar,
and a lot of people didn't get out of high school.
There was a lot of people we grew up with
didn't probably get out of junior high school.
♪ Have you ever lived down in the ghetto? ♪
♪ Have you felt the cold wind blow? ♪
♪ If you don't know what I mean ♪
♪ Won't you stand up and scream ♪
♪ 'Cause there's things going on that you don't know ♪
Look down here. The damn buzzards
are in the road.
Look there. Look at them.
This is Johnny's
- and Ronnie's old house. - Yeah.
Y'all need to lock your cars out here.
- Ha ha! - Wow, it freaks me out, Gary.
- I know. It's weird, ain't it? - I know.
I ain't been over here in I don't know when.
- It just don't seem the same. - Yeah, I know.
This is the old trophy room where daddy had
all the gold records, and everything was in here.
Daddy loved the music stuff,
but my mom didn't care two bits about it. She was like,
"Oh, them damn boys. When you gonna get a real job?"
"They'll just play that music for a while. They'll grow up."
Growing up in the west side, it was a bad area of town.
There was a lot of rednecks, and, you know,
being in a band and having long hair,
people didn't like us, and they would come to fight
and see who could beat each other.
Ronnie was quite the choice before he got into music.
Basically, Ronnie was into kicking ass.
He wasn't scared of situations, you know?
If there was ten guys coming at you with clubs,
he just walked right to them.
Jacksonville's got, like, five or six different navy bases,
so we'd play a lot for sailors.
Now, what does a sailor want to do besides be with a chick?
Fight. So we had to fight our way out every night,
and Ronnie would always win. Yeah, he was a great boxer.
You know, it's not manly. When you went to school,
you know, the athlete guys and stuff didn't do poetry,
but Ronnie started making up poems about sports.
He used to put them in a three-ring binder.
He used to have that under his bed.
I remember spending the night under there,
and he'd have his poetry in there.
I can't say I knew another guy that was writing poetry
when I was in high school, you know? I mean.
We tried to write common songs,
well, com... for common people, for the street people,
and all the guys in Lynyrd Skynyrd are nothing
but street people, stay off the streets,
Skid Row, the whole works,
and it's very easy for us,
you know, to relate to that, you know?
We relate to that much more than anything else.
Lynyrd Skynyrd's home, of course, was not Alabama.
It was Jacksonville,
and the group did not become a success overnight.
In the beginning, back in the early 1960s,
there were no fancy recording studios or gold albums.
The group did a lot of their rehearsing right here
in this field in Green Cove Springs.
You ever come out to the Hell House much?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember it was a piece of crap.
Yeah, it was horrible.
Well, see, I don't see the slab.
It should have been right arou... about here.
- Right here. - Yeah.
Right in here.
Our road manager, Dean Kilpatrick,
he knew of a cabin on the creek that was for rent,
and he said we could rehearse there.
We asked permission to rehearse,
so that started the whole thing right here.
Hey, we wrote "Free Bird' here, you know,
and all the so-called hits.
People used to come up in boats
and come in and steal mikes
or... not big things but little things.
And then one day we came in, and a window was knocked out,
and there was a whole amp gone,
so we started staying out here with guns
to protect our equipment every night,
and whoever had to stay, you know, it was, like,
their day in the barrel or something.
It was terrible 'cause the mosquitoes
would bite you all night.
Roaches were everywhere, and gators,
and there was rattlesnakes, water moccasins,
anything you could find, you know?
We didn't have any money or food or drinks or nothing,
so it was hell,
and we called it the Hell House.
I bet you still catch fish down here easy.
Oh, hell, yeah, you can. You can have a little...
Well, something just turned right there.
Barry walks in and plays me this tape,
and I listened to it... you know, just a little bit of it,
and I just immediately,
the second I got the opportunity, I said,
"I want to work with this band."
This band was so extraordinary.
We taught them how to count off the song, you know,
so they..."Count off the song." They said, "What?"
They didn't know... have a clue on how to do that,
but they were so good and so disciplined
and so rehearsed
that I've never seen the likes of them since.
We'd go back and forth all year,
record, like, two songs and leave
and come back a few months later.
We'd have to go tour to get the money up, you know?
'Cause we were paying for it. Everything was new to us.
I mean, we'd never been out of Jacksonville ever,
you know, never.
Maybe to go camping out in the woods somewhere,
but that wasn't out of town.
We took our tapes, and we shopped it every way we could,
ev... to every record company.
Believe it or not, Lynyrd Skynyrd was turned down,
and this is after hearing "Free Bird,"
now, turned down by nine major record companies, flat.
They were like, "No.
We don't want them, period."
So we were traveling around, riding on amps,
having no money, having empty bellies,
just trying to make it, man. It was just hard times.
Everybody was young and stupid back then.
I was struggling. I didn't have a job.
I was hurting, so I packed up and left.
Leon was in a band called the King James Version.
It was a Christian band,
but they weren't really doing Christian songs.
The first time I saw them, they were just real,
you know, sort of a born losers type image,
you know, the underdogs.
Well, Leon could just play any bass part;
you'd never have to show him anything.
Any song you could start playing he'd play,
and he was funny and goofy,
and he was just a great addition.
Noted musician and producer Al Kooper remembers
the night he first discovered
Lynyrd Skynyrd playing in a sweaty bar,
what else, in Atlanta.
The thing that caught me first was Ronnie.
I hated him, and I liked him at the same time.
I said, "This guy is weird, you know?"
He got me into it first before anything else.
I just couldn't take my eyes off him.
He was a very weird front man.
We loved Al Kooper's music, and he had just played
with Hendrix on "Electric Ladyland."
He did all the organ, you know, and would sit
and tell us all the stories about how they recorded
and what Jimi Hendrix did,
and he had one of his black Strats.
We'd just sit there and hold it, me and Allen,
and just say, "Wow." It was mind-blowing, you know?
I made a deal with MCA records,
a label deal, and I called my label
Sounds of the South, and I signed Skynyrd,
and we set to work.
That right there is an example
of the people... you know, The Beatles.
They're... they are the first people
that really changed my style of music
from a technical knowhow to a little bit of feel
and a little bit of boogie-woogie.
Billy Powell, our piano player,
he used to be our roadie,
and we didn't know he play... he'd said,
"Oh, I play piano," but we didn't care, you know?
We were guitars.
He liked Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer,
and we didn't at the time, but one night Billy said,
"If I ever played 'Free Bird,' this is how I'd play it,"
and we weren't even paying attention,
and he started out with his... everybody
in the room kind of went, and he played it all,
and we were just going, "Oh, my God, Billy.
We didn't know you were that good,"
so we fired him as roadie and hired him as keyboard.
I was playing a nightclub in Greenville,
North Carolina, with just a bar band.
We didn't do any originals, but we really did
some great cover tunes.
Well, one night out of the blue
I got a call from Ronnie at the bar.
He said, "Look, you said you wanted to join up.
You know, can you come down?"
I said, "No, I don't have a car.
Can you come up and get me?" He said, "I'll be right up."
So yeah, they came up and picked me up,
and I think we started rehearsal the next day.
It was a real pleasant setting
out in the middle of a pasture,
but my either induction or punishment
for joining the band
was to spend a whole week out there at night by myself.
I mean, for me growing up in L. A.
and you say touring with the Beach Boys
and some of the people I had access to
is a completely different environment.
I wasn't sure if I was gonna... going
to survive in this environment,
but I was willing to give it a shot,
and everything was real strange to me.
What can I say? I just felt so out of place.
I think I felt out of place the whole time,
but that first day I really felt out of place.
You know, there was all those cows at the Hell House,
so every morning we would go out
and get psilocybin mushrooms
from all the cow patties and make tea,
so we had a big pot of tea on the stove all day,
mushroom tea, and if you'd take a few sips,
and you'd be tripping, you know?
The keyboard would be floating,
or I watched the notes coming out of my amp.
We would just talk and feel each other's stuff come out,
you know?
Well, when I joined the band, the music is the thing
that really threw me more than the people.
They had really come up with such original tunes.
I didn't expect them to have progressed that much.
♪ I was cutting the rug down at a place called the Jug ♪
♪ With a girl named Linda Lou ♪
♪ Well, in walked a man with a gun in his hand ♪
♪ And he was looking for you know who ♪
The day rehearsal would be pretty much like this.
Everybody shows up, puts on a guitar,
and Ronnie'd go, "Well, you have any ideas?
Anything come to you last night?"
The chances were real good that one of us
had something on any day.
That was the one advantage
to having three guitar players.
We'd just keep playing till we found something he liked.
Once he'd write a lyric, well, there you go.
Our work's cut out for us for the day.
Each line of each song we knew,
and we'd break them down at the Hell House,
and me and Leon would just play it, then me and Bob,
then Leon and Bob, then me and Allen.
We'd play all day the same song
over and over and over and over.
I mean, what musicians do you know would get up
at 7:30 in the morning and be out there by 8:30?
Nobody, but we would, you know, and that was the thing
that Ronnie was able to pull together,
was guys that just really wanted to work.
It was really productive.
It was the most fun part about being in that band,
was going out there in the heat in Hell House
and writing these tunes, 'cause you never knew
what you were gonna write.
I mean, for the musician that just loves to play
it was a dream job, even with the heat
and everything, sweating all over your guitar.
It was perfect.
Hell House was the reward, really, yeah.
Patrol's at the crash site now trying to determine
why a plane carrying the Lynyrd Skynyrd entourage
crashed near McComb last night.
At 7:47 Eastern Daylight Time,
the aircraft disappeared from the radar scope,
and they lost radio contact.
The FAA's Jack Barker says the thick woods
made the crash site difficult to both find and get to.
If you dig around right here right now in this general area,
you're gonna find something, I promise you,
just scrap pieces that have been here, and it's aluminum.
It won't rust, so it's lasted forever, you know?
Holy smokes, look at there. Look what I found, boys.
Mm, here we go. Now... good lord.
That's a piece of the plane. Look at that. That's it.
- Yeah, that's it. - It's got the rivet hole.
It's gotten a little corroded. Man, look at that.
Somebody, we don't know who, put a marker here for... just
last... on the 20th, I understand.
It just happens to be that is the spot
where the plane... the nose of the plane hit right there.
Most people don't know where the plane crashed.
- Right. - Very few can tell you.
They just come this way and start asking.
We're 40 years past it now,
and I was 11 years old and three hours north of here,
but I knew what had happened, you know?
Well, I just always wanted to find the story, the plane,
the site, the whatever, and the next thing I know
I've talked to 20, 30 people and gotten all their stories
that were here that night.
You just don't forget it.
I mean, it's something, you know,
tragic that's gonna be in your mind always.
See, by the time they got to the... right in here,
this point, they didn't have any wings anymore.
They broke them off back there.
It was just fuselage, and that was it.
Big split came down like a... and went across this way,
and when I pulled it up like that,
you know, just a big space, and then somebody on the ground
gave me a big, long stick to prop it up.
I shined my flashlight up in there,
and my first thought's, you know,
"What's a bunch of hippies doing on an airplane?"
'cause back in those days hippies
usually didn't have any money.
You know, they were broke.
But the playing cards
was just... covered everything, you know?
And people were moaning, you know, "Get me out of here,"
and, you know, we was just farm boys.
We didn't know what we were doing, really,
but we just got them out. I mean, it's just that simple.
Dwayne's sister, one thing she told me,
that all up in the trees... she said,
"From their suitcases busting open
and all that stuff, there were socks."
She said, "Just socks went everywhere," you know?
It was like Christmas, like tinsel.
The boys walked up to me and told me,
they said, you know, "You know who this is?"
I said, "No, hmm-mm."
He said, "It's the Lynyrd Skynyrd band."
I thought he was lying.
They did a pretty dang good job.
It's the best thing you can ever say
for just a group of come-together farmers
and loggers and ranchers and stuff like that
and then a little volunteer fire department.
They saved 20 lives.
Let's give them full credit for that.
You know, the band wouldn't have still be going on today
had they not done what they did.
It's just an old memory now, you know?
♪ Train roll on ♪
♪ On down the line ♪
♪ Won't you please take me far away? ♪
♪ Now, I feel the wind blow ♪
♪ Outside my door ♪
♪ I'm leaving my woman at home ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ Tuesday's gone with the wind ♪
Do people literally knock on your door?
- Oh, yes. - "Hey, I heard Skynyrd
- recorded here?" - Yup, they do.
A couple times a year they'll come in, and we'll show them
and just walk them over to the warehouse and,
like, "This is where it was."
Can't do that now, but you kind of came through here
and just opened up the door to the control room,
and you walked up these steps, and you were there in the room.
Besides Al Kooper, I was kind of the main engineer
for that first album.
We really got lucky on sound 'cause when we started
utilizing the acoustics of the room,
it was really a great space to record guitars
because where it was the sound like a live room.
Any studio, to us, was cool as hell
because it was a recording studio.
We were really loose in there.
It was real laid back, and we'd all sit in
and listen to every part of every song of every mix
'cause where was the cooler place to be,
the hotel sitting or at the studio?
♪ Daddy was a Cajun, baby ♪
♪ Raised on Southern land ♪
♪ And so my kinfolks tell me ♪
♪ Was a street fighting man ♪
Over the course of the album,
I learned how they worked.
They had an amazing methodology.
They had that rehearsal place out in the swamp,
and there was no improvisation whatsoever
once they left the swamp.
Now, as a producer, that's a godsend.
All the guitar solos and keyboard solos
were always played exactly the same.
I never heard of such a thing, and they were great solos.
I remember back to doing solos
with Allen Collins, and when he got through
I cried, it just was so emotional.
I mean, the way he performed,
you know, his whole body was into it and everything.
We all kind of helped Billy.
He wasn't no rock and roll piano player.
He was trained classical, so we had to say,
"Don't play all that there.
Just go dink-dink-dink-dink-dink."
He'd go, "What? I can't just do that the whole song,"
but that would be great, really fit.
Really, it was a piano record
much as it is a three-guitar army record.
That's what made them Skynyrd,
was them having different styles in the band.
The first album cover shows me standing there
all by myself on the far right-hand side,
and that was the last shot of a all-day photo shoot,
and there's a lightning bolt going right through my head.
♪ Drank ole poison whiskey ♪
And right after that,
Gary got up and threw up on the curb.
♪ Don't you drink it, boy ♪
♪ Play guitar ♪
We are about to take an interview
of Ronnie Van Zant, singer, songwriter,
and lead redneck of the pride
of Jacksonville, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
We play exactly what we like to play, and personally,
we did like to play country and blues, stuff like that,
but Lynyrd Skynyrd's a rock
and roll band and boogie-woogie.
That's what we get paid to do, and this... we like that too.
Ronnie, his writing has seeped
into my sad blues guy kind of voice.
When I first picked up guitar when I was 14,
I would go up into my dad's music room.
I'd play guitar to a bunch of Allman Brothers records,
and that's kind of how I fell into that, like,
'70s Southern rock world.
♪ Mama told me ♪
♪ When I was young ♪
♪ "Come sit beside me ♪
♪ My only son" ♪
I was hanging out with a buddy of mine,
and he was like, "Yo, man,
"if you like the Allman Brothers,
you've got to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd."
He showed me a video of Gary just ripping a slide solo
as he had, like, a cigarette in his hand.
I'm just like, "What is this dude? What is this?"
♪ And be a simple ♪
♪ Kind of man ♪
♪ Oh, be something you love and understand ♪
♪ Baby, be a simple ♪
♪ Kind of man ♪
♪ Oh, won't you do this for me, son, if you can ♪
♪ Oh, yes, I will ♪
We played "Simple Man" and Al Kooper,
he didn't like the song.
He said, "That's boring, man.
It doesn't mean nothing,"
but Kooper, we'd call him a Yankee slicker.
He was totally different than us.
We were all from simple Southern home-cooking
mamas, you know?
And so we thought it was a great song.
And so Ronnie takes Al out to the car,
and he opened up the door to the... Al's Bentley
and put him in the car and shut the door,
and Ronnie stuck his head into the window, and he says,
"When we're done cutting it, we'll call you,"
and that's the way it was.
He was the boss.
I feared him.
I've tended to write about places
I've seen and things that I've done, normal things,
things that you've done, really.
I think if you write it really simple,
then you can reach more people that way
because more people's gonna understand
what you're talking about and what I mean.
I guess I showed up to rehearsal a little bit
after everybody else, 'cause when I got there
Gary was playing a riff sort of like this.
It went...
You know?
And I walked in and picked up my Strat
and just bounced that... mine off of his.
And Ronnie's sitting over in his... on the couch
where he always sat, and he kept going like this.
That means don't stop. Just keep running it,
running it, running it, you know?
So within about 15 minutes he started writing the chorus,
so we had a verse and a chorus.
Then he says, "Well, I'll see you later.
I'm going down to go fishing."
"Okay." So we stayed up there,
and we're working on the music.
He's listening down there 'cause the music traveled down
the creek really well, and he comes back, I guess,
in about an hour and a half and grabs a mike,
and he sings all the verses.
He always wrote in his head, he never wrote anything down,
so we were able to kind of arrange it.
The week that first album
was being pressed
Ronnie called me up,
and he said, "We have a new song.
"I love it the way it is right now.
"I'm scared it's gonna change
by the time we do the second album."
They hadn't even toured the first album.
It wasn't even on the street yet.
He said, "I want to come up and record it now,"
and they drove up and played me
"Sweet Home Alabama."
I said, "I'll see you in the studio tomorrow.
This is a hit record."
♪ Big wheels keep on turning ♪
♪ Carry me home to see my kin ♪
♪ Singing songs about the Southland ♪
♪ I miss ol' 'bamy once again, and I think it's a sin ♪
We used to do clubs and teen dens
and stuff all around Alabama,
and driving through the country,
it was beautiful and great people,
and if you had trouble, they'd come out to help you.
♪ Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her ♪
♪ Well, I heard ol' Neil put her down ♪
♪ Well, I hope Neil Young will remember ♪
♪ A Southern man don't need him around anyhow ♪
We just love the South attitude and the people.
That was our first experience,
is playing all the Southern states
'cause we weren't known anywhere else.
We couldn't afford to drive it,
and we really weren't booked anywhere else,
and then Neil Young had wrote "Southern Man" and "Alabama."
♪ Southern man better keep your head ♪
♪ Don't forget what your good book said ♪
♪ Southern man ♪
We didn't like him cutting down
Southern guys, you know?
♪ In Birmingham they love the governor ♪
♪ Boo, boo, boo ♪
♪ Now, we all did what we could do ♪
♪ Now, Watergate does not bother me ♪
♪ Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth ♪
It was right at the time that the Wallaces were out,
and there was all this race riots and stuff,
and a lot of people believed in segregation and all that.
We didn't, so we put the "boo, boo, boo"
there so it was saying we don't like Wallace,
but I don't know.
There's a lot of different interpretations.
I'm sure if you ask the other guys
who are not with us anymore up in rock and roll heaven,
they have their story of how it came about.
♪ Alabama ♪
"Sweet Home Alabama,"
probably one of the strongest
and most controversial musical statements
ever about the South, was really the first
sweet taste of success for Lynyrd Skynyrd.
We knew that by doing that song
and writing those lyrics, we knew in the beginning
that we'd get a lot of heat from it, you know?
And, you know, I did attack Neil Young in that song.
He says, "What are you talking about, you know?
From what I'm told, you was born in Canada," you know?
Before the first album came out,
I bumped into Pete Townsend.
I knew him quite well.
I'd played on some Who things.
I said, "What are you doing?"
and he said, "Well, we're going out on a big tour."
He said, "Do you know a great act
we could use for an opener?"
I said, "You know, it's funny you say that."
Let's pick it up!
The first night we played with the Who,
we were used to playing clubs and dances
at maybe 100, 200 people at the most,
so we were opening at the Cow Palace
the first night for 18,000 people,
and we looked out and we were freaked out.
We had to have a drink before we could go out and play.
We was so nervous.
They only gave us some nights 20 minutes and others 30.
So we'd do "I Ain't the One," "Poison Whiskey,"
and another song and then "Free Bird."
That was it, you know?
♪ Oh, help me, I can't change ♪
♪ Lord, I can't change ♪
"Free Bird," it's just a simple little love song
about leaving a girl.
Allen came up with that riff in high school.
We wrote it as a slow song,
and we didn't have the end lead early in our career,
but we were playing clubs. We'd play "Free Bird,"
and we would jam on it so Ronnie,
we could rest his voice, so the first time was,
like, a minute, and then it'd be four minutes.
Then it would be six minutes or eight.
Then it got to be 20 minutes at the end.
I mean, Allen did that solo at the end of "Free Bird,"
when he was 17, 18.
People just weren't playing like that then, you know?
Clapton was maybe.
We played an audience, and they'd flip out,
go wild, you know?
Just gives you chills all over, you know?
Something magical about that song
'cause when it gets to the peak,
it's sort of almost becomes like a force of nature.
Even playing it, you can feel the force in that.
One night we got better reviews than The Who.
We didn't like that.
We thought they were the guys, not us.
We hit it every night. We had a job to do,
and we knew it. We weren't gonna lay back.
Our job was really to blow off stage the band following us.
Ronnie made that clear.
It's a competition, and whoever we're playing with,
we're gonna blow that band away.
The Who tour did a lot, and "Free Bird,"
although it was not a hit single,
it was better
'cause it sold albums, not singles.
To me there's nothing freer than a... than a bird, you know?
Just flying wherever it wants to go,
and I don't know, that's what this country's
all about, you know? Being free,
and I think everybody wants to be a free bird.
We did The Who tour,
played in front of tens of thousands of people, man.
Then we still went back to clubs and 100 people here
and 50 people there, and oh, my God.
Well, we'd stay at Days Inn and get two rooms.
I mean, just we had basically four people in a double bed,
and trying and sleep with Ed King
with four people in a double bed, 'kay?
♪ Oh, seven years of hard luck ♪
♪ Coming down on me ♪
♪ From the Florida border ♪
♪ Yes, up in Nashville, Tennessee ♪
♪ I worked in every joint you can name ♪
♪ And for every honky-tonk ♪
♪ Along comes a Yankee slicker saying ♪
♪ Maybe you're what I want ♪
♪ Want you to sign your contract ♪
♪ Want you to sign today ♪
♪ Gonna give you lots of money working for MCA ♪
When we did the second album, I wanted to do it
in Los Angeles.
They were not happy about that.
♪ They're gonna take me out to California ♪
♪ Gonna make me a superstar ♪
♪ Just pay me all my money so maybe you won't get a scar ♪
We didn't have much money.
Everything we got we had to spend,
so we were playing the Whisky a Go Go at night,
and then we'd go record all day
and then sleep where we could here and there, you know?
We were all in hotels, and it was a new thing.
The surroundings were even more evil
'cause it was Hollywood, you know?
There's just too much going on here, you know?
It took them out of their comfort zone, and, you know,
they wanted to just go into a room and just record.
You know, it was a record plant.
You walk out the door, and, you know,
there's Joe Walsh and Jackson Brown
playing pinball, you know, a big room
that Stevie Wonder was in,
and then one day we're sitting there,
and John Lennon and May Pang walk in.
We couldn't play the rest of the day.
It was work.
It was really work pulling that record together.
One night we went into the studio to record,
and they had power trouble,
and we went down and saw "The Exorcist."
Bob Burns just had, like, a mental breakdown.
It freaked him out, man.
Really, it... he thought his wife was the devil,
and he thought this cat was the devil.
There were a lot of things going on.
A wife would get pregnant, or somebody'd break up,
or there was, you know,
all those complications and being away from home,
and we were still in your early 20s.
You don't know what's happening, really.
Didn't really take time off much at all, you know?
♪ Well, it's true I love the money ♪
♪ And I love my brand-new car ♪
♪ I like drinking the best of whiskey ♪
♪ And playing in a honky-tonk bar ♪
♪ But when I come off the road ♪
♪ well, I just got to have my time ♪
♪ 'Cause I got to find a break in this action ♪
♪ Else I'm gonna lose my mind ♪
♪ So don't ask me no questions ♪
♪ And I won't tell you no lies, that's right ♪
When I joined the band that first time,
I was the drummer.
We spent a lot of time
in Muscle Shoals going back and forth,
but I said, "The drums are just really not for me," you know?
I missed playing guitar, and I left the guys.
Less than a year later, in '73, "Pronounced"
came out, and they were off and running.
It really wasn't meant for me to be there then.
It was meant for me to be here now.
I was raised by a great musician, my grandfather,
Shorty Medlocke.
He pretty well much was a delta blues bluegrass player
and a solid foundation in music around this town anyway.
Ronnie would come over here and sit on the porch
watching my old man play his Dobro.
My old man would sometimes be out here at 2:00 a. m.
in the morning playing.
Me and him both would stay out here for hours.
Ronnie had taken the influence of my old man
doing that coupled with the fact that he loved
Son House, the blues guy,
and out of it was born "Curtis Loew."
♪ Play me a song, Curtis Loew, hey, Curtis Loew ♪
♪ I wish that you was here so everyone would know ♪
♪ People said you were useless ♪
♪ But then people all were fools ♪
♪ 'Cause Curtis, you're the finest picker ♪
♪ To ever play the blues ♪
We heard about this band
called the Lynyrd Skynyrd band.
They were kicking it up and tearing it down,
and we were booked together
on a string of dates, and I played with them.
That's the first time I remember meeting them.
With this guys, it was like working with family,
which it was not always like working with family
with a lot of other people.
Southern boys played blues.
There's no two ways about it,
but Ronnie Van Zant,
he was a master at doing redneck, working men's lyrics.
I figured you'd have some moonshine laying around, Coop.
What is that,
some of no... northeast Georgia mountain water, is all that is.
I've listened to Skynyrd ever since
they actually started, pretty much.
This is where I really got broke in on Skynyrd, I'd say.
He had a old tape that he used to put in there.
An old cassette tape was one.
And it stayed on, I mean, nonstop.
I gave that... that cassette to Brantley.
I said, "Here, you need to learn these songs,"
and it wasn't two days he was back over here.
He had, like, two or three of them nailed.
Like, "Damn, I hear ya, brother."
I have a line in one of my songs that says,
"There's always some drunk guy in the back
screaming out 'Free Bird!'"
Every show you play, somebody wants you to play "Free Bird,"
but I always felt like that was a song you ought not touch.
- Yeah. - You know, I fell in love
with guitars, with big sound,
and you know what the songs were about, you know?
It's about the South. I could relate to it.
Who was Ronnie speaking to?
Me.
Me and all my friends.
You know, that was our music.
- It puts you out here, you know? - Yeah, kind of like
- a hometown band to us. - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Georgia peach. - I think it's good.
- You want to try it? - I did.
- Anybody else? - Welcome to drink.
- Sir? - All right.
Put the camera down!
He said, "Fuck it."
One, two, one, two, three.
"Saturday Night Special" is a song that deals
with a very real and dangerous subject in today's America.
Our interview of Lynyrd Skynyrd focuses on this now.
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
"Saturday Night Special," we'd just known some friends
that a friend shot another fiend
'cause they were drunk playing poker.
♪ Handguns are made for killing ♪
♪ They ain't no good for nothing else ♪
♪ So why don't we don't we dump them, people ♪
♪ To the bottom of a sea ♪
♪ Before some old fools come around here ♪
♪ Want to shoot either you or me? ♪
Really.
I have a old gun, a 1874 Springfield,
but it's old flintlock gun. It hangs over the fireplace.
- Oh. - I've been shot myself,
and I don't want to get into that,
but that happens, you know, every day.
I mean, if you watch, where I come from, the 6:00 news
every night, just look at homicides
every night because of that.
I don't... I really don't like them.
I love people. I love talking to all people.
I love black people.
I love Chinese people, Japanese people, German people.
I love gay people. Do I live in fear?
No. Do I have a gun?
There's not a gun in this house.
I hate guns. I'm trained marine.
You know, they call us trained killers.
I've never had to kill anybody. I never want to.
I am a left-wing liberal hippie.
I always will be.
I love this picture of Ronnie. He's got his Shoco shirt on,
and there he is kind of looking down from heaven,
saying, "Keep it real, Artimus,"
and... and just this little space here is,
if nothing else, it's real.
I was living in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
We called it Sparkle City,
and Bob was having some medical problems.
So Ronnie calls me up, and he goes,
"I just want to know if you can play.
Everybody says you can."
Artimus was badass.
He was a tough ex-marine, you know?
He was the only one that could actually throw Ronnie
around a little bit,
but he was different than us too.
He was from the Carolinas. He was a vegetarian.
That was way different than us.
We were barbecue boys, you know? He liked vegetables.
What I do for Lynyrd Skynyrd is purely physical,
so having my health is very important.
Usually on the road I live on yogurt and nuts,
and the people that come up to me
and say, "How do you do it?"
It's just something that I do every day,
and if you do something every day,
you're bound to get good at it.
Artimus could play on the stuff he wrote
with the band very well. It's one of those things,
but he had trouble picking up Bob's feel,
so that's when you had to go to Europe,
and we had to take Bob to Europe,
and things didn't go well.
Every damn country we went to,
about the size of Georgia. Nobody spoke English.
I was in France, ordered a ham sandwich.
They brought me back a Marlboros.
Bob had a nervous breakdown about two weeks into the tour.
And we were at a hotel, he went nuts, so they all said,
"Hey, go in there and talk to Bob."
They were scared to go in.
Even Ronnie was, you know, behind the curtain going,
"You go in there," and I went in.
He had... all the stuff was rearranged
and changed and weird,
and he was talking in this weird voice.
He was really kind of going through a devil possession
type trip, and it was not fun.
I don't remember ever being fired from Lynyrd Skynyrd,
and I never quit.
I just got taken over with some illnesses that I had.
They just kind of broke reality for me,
but, you know, when I think of Lynyrd Skynyrd,
I just think about some outrageously fun times,
you know?
by 1975 the world
was paying lots of attention to Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Their powerful three-guitar attack,
Ronnie Van Zant's blatantly honest lyrics,
and the band's reputation for increasingly nasty behavior
had endeared them to millions.
When I came to town to record the third album,
they weren't ready at all.
We only had a few songs written,
and then some of them we had to write right in the studio.
We'd wake up and go, "What are we gonna do?
Somebody come up with an idea, and we'll work on it."
♪ I dropped off a boxcar down around Tennessee ♪
There was girls and just problems
coming around, and my teeth were all hurting,
and I had four wisdom teeth taken out.
There's a lot about that record I don't even remember
'cause of the pain pills and the drinking we did.
They didn't all know the songs,
so I was very upset.
The key ingredient was missing from that album,
which was the rehearsing at the swamp.
We had to do a rush job on that.
Why couldn't you buy them more time?
Because there was none.
They were going back on the road again.
♪ I'm headed down a highway ♪
♪ Got my suitcase by my side ♪
♪ A blue sky's hanging over my head ♪
♪ I got 500 miles to ride ♪
♪ I'm going down to Memphis town ♪
♪ To play a late-night show ♪
♪ I hope the people are ready there ♪
♪ 'Cause the boys are all ready to go ♪
♪ Well, I'm a whiskey rock-a-roller ♪
♪ That's what I am ♪
♪ Women, whiskey and miles of traveling ♪
♪ Is all I understand ♪
All you did was rehearse, write new stuff,
and then go tour. We were always working,
but that's all we knew and wanted.
We finally made it, and people were coming,
so we wanted to play.
We just never quit. It was torture.
You've just completed a European tour.
You're about to set out again to conquer the United States,
and you're really a touring band.
Does it get to you after a while?
We get a lot of publicity about busting up a place
and being really mean or something like that,
but you just get really tired.
You're about to just flip out and go over the deep end
and just say, "To hell with it. I quit."
Well, instead of doing that, we just liable to knock
a hole in the wall or anything... any way
to let... to let energy off, you know?
It's also a tax write-off.
Nobody, no band or no human thing lived on this earth
partied like Lynyrd Skynyrd partied, okay?
Nobody did.
Let's just admit it. I mean, it was the '70s,
and there was lots of cocaine, pills, alcohol.
Promoters would always backstage provide
cases of scotch and whiskey and beer and cartons
of Winstons and Marlboros and, you know, a big food spread.
But my boys, I think they felt they were supposed to smoke
every cigarette and drink everything provided and eat
what they wanted and throw the rest against the wall.
♪ Women, whiskey and miles of traveling ♪
♪ Is all I understand ♪
Whoo!
That was our road manager's duty,
to carry a briefcase with probably $250,000 cash
to buy the band members out of jail,
to pay off really mad hotel owners
that were upset over destruction.
But the road with Skynyrd was always
just a absolute clusterfuck.
Billy and Leon used to put cigarette butts
into each other's hair and...
Billy had very curly hair,
and Leon would call it his briar patch,
so Leon would take these huge drags off a cigarette
and then waft it into Billy's briar patch,
so it looked like Billy's head was on fire.
They'd put lipstick on each other while they were asleep,
and if you do that on a commercial flight,
they wouldn't like that.
In Europe you leave your shoes in the hallway.
Leon thought that it would be a really good idea
to take a number two in some guy's shoes
that were outside of his door.
I don't even know want to know how he did it.
Anyway, this man starts to slip on his shoes.
He's goose-stepping up and down the doggone hallway
screaming at the top of his lungs,
and now, of course, everybody in the hallway
is looking out their doors,
and so it's not obvious to this man
which long-haired hippie nutcase did it.
Of course, later, you know, Leon,
"Heh-heh-heh. I did it."
I think the whole demolishing of the hotel room
is so childish.
If life was bad enough on the road where you
couldn't get any sleep, at least like to have
a nice bed to sleep in once in a while.
Ed King has a total different mindset
than Southern country dropouts
who weren't very literate, and he was college educated.
He didn't really fit in as your brother on the road.
He would stop and buy $100 worth of Slim Jims,
you know, and have them in his briefcase,
and then you're driving for an hour or two and hungry,
so he'd sell them to us,
but he'd double or triple the price.
"I'll give you this Slim Jim for $1.50 instead of 25¢."
You know? A lot of times he was stingy with his drugs.
We were in New York City,
and I was doing LSD.
I was tripping.
I didn't trip a lot, but every once in a while
I'd get my hands on some windowpane,
some owsleys, you know, lysergic diethylamide,
and we were having a photo session.
This monkey roller-skates in across the dance floor.
He jumps up on the table.
Allen hands the monkey the bottle of Jack Daniels,
and the monkey just turns it up and starts drinking,
and Allen's looking at me with this big smile like,
you know, and I'm going,
"There's a monkey drinking jack Daniels
"that just roller-skated into the room.
Okay, okay, I'm good."
There was one place in Waterbury, Connecticut,
I'll never forget it, and we had our first bus.
Somebody had left the brake off,
and the bus had careened through the parking lot,
over a sports car, through the gas station,
and lodged into the bank,
and I thought that was hilarious,
and that was, I'm sure, on purpose.
Okay, so I'm a hypocrite.
So I thought some of the destruction was funny.
We went to England.
They acted like we were the Beatles...
Thank you!
And we couldn't believe it.
We were looking at each other
like, "God, can you believe this?"
They'd never heard of a Southern music
or Southern bands.
Over there, anybody from America's a Yankee.
They call you Yankees,
but we said, "No, we're from Southern America."
"Yeah, you're a Yankee."
We didn't like it
'cause it was like California was a different scene,
and New York was a different scene, and the South,
and that's where the flag came from.
♪ Sweet home Alabama ♪
It was a gimmick for us at first, you know?
A Southern band, and MCA made that a gimmick, a hype thing,
and then Southern band, you know, and hard rock
and rebels and drunken fighters and all this stuff,
and then they put out that publicity and hype.
That's what it is, nothing but hype.
Yes, it was the record company
pushing a Southern band.
No, it didn't bother me to play in front of a rebel flag
because I know how I feel.
I didn't think about it that deeply then.
I have since, and look what they've done.
They've taken the flag down on a lot of things
because it does represent hatred.
It's like the flag got kidnapped by the KKK.
They carried it, and all these evil people
use the Confederate flag as a hate thing.
It's them against the world kind of.
We never, ever one time meant the Confederate flag
to offend anyone,
but I know it's naive to say that, too,
'cause it does hurt people,
and 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.
♪ Sweet home Alabama ♪
♪ Where the skies are so blue ♪
♪ Sweet home Alabama ♪
♪ Lord, I'm coming home to you ♪
The Southern culture, it means community.
Yeah, it means unity, but it's also ever-growing,
and it's always changing.
Cheers, Ronnie, cheers.
Well, good evening, everybody.
I'm Jim Ladden. Tonight "Interview"
goes to Dixie for a shot of that good ol' boy
brand of rock and roll,
so I hope you're in the mood to get drunk,
get loud, get dirty, and get into Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Everybody thinks we're a bunch of
Ronnie was short in stature,
and you would think he'd wear stacked heels
or cowboy boots on stage, but he wore nothing.
He was barefoot. I loved the fact
that he doesn't hoochie-coo around on stage.
He stood there and held that mike and planted himself
out on the front of that stage.
What you saw was what you got.
You know? Here I am.
People always ask me what was Ronnie really like,
and I always tell them,
"Just go listen to any six songs he ever wrote.
And that'll tell you. Doesn't matter which six."
♪ 11 times I've been busted ♪
♪ 11 times I've been to jail ♪
♪ Some of the times I been there ♪
♪ Nobody could go my bail ♪
♪ Well, it seems to me, lord ♪
♪ That this old boy just don't fit ♪
♪ Well, I can jump in a rosebush ♪
♪ And come out smelling like sh... ♪
When he would get a certain level of drunk, he'd get mean.
It was like a Jekyll and Hyde.
He was a badass, and he would attack you with all he had
and try to hurt you if he could.
I'd see him do interviews
where he'd start out real nice,
but we'd be drinking,
and by the end of the interview he'd slam and go,
"Let me ask you a question.
How the fuck you think you're gonna get out that door?"
♪ Double trouble ♪
♪ That's what my friends all call me ♪
♪ Double trouble, double trouble ♪
♪ I said double trouble ♪
♪ T-R-O-U-B-L-E ♪
♪ Double trouble ♪
Wow!
Ronnie's hands were not big,
but when they made a fist,
it was, like, a big fist, and it was flat.
He hit me a lot of times, Ronnie.
We would fight. He was terrible.
We were in Hamburg, Germany. He got real drunk on schnapps.
We'd never heard of schnapps.
Ronnie got in one of his bad moods
and hit one guy in the head with a bottle.
Of course, it broke. Then he came over to me,
and he took that bottle, and he went,
"You're never gonna play guitar again,"
and he cut my hands here and there,
so the next day we played,
and I had these Band-Aids all on my hands,
and they would bleed, and the headline said,
"Bloodbath in Hamburg."
Ronnie throws me up against the wall,
gets the lamp from the corner table and breaks it,
and holds it up against my throat with all this
jagged glass coming out. After he's done with me,
he picked Allen up by the hair and threw him across the room.
When Ronnie was drunk, he was a strong one, man.
♪ T-R-O-U-B-L-E ♪
I'm the hippie from Southern California, man.
I'm... you know, I'm not digging the violence part.
There was one night in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Ronnie was thrown in jail along with my guitar roadie,
changed my strings.
I don't know what they did to these cops,
but the cops threw them in jail.
Anyway, my roadie and Ronnie
didn't arrive to the Pittsburgh show
until, like, ten minutes before we went on.
I had to play on old strings.
That night I broke two strings during "Free Bird,"
which I never do, and after the show Ronnie
was just on my ass all the way, you know?
"You don't amount to a pimple on Allen's ass."
Well, I said, "You might be right there."
He was just riding me, and I just said to myself...
like, a light went off in my head,
and I said, "That's it," you know?
So I went back to my room that night,
and I packed up all my stuff,
and I left,
and I didn't look back.
We were right in the middle of a tour,
and all of a sudden we woke up, and he was gone,
and we had to play that night,
so me and Allen had to get together
and work out his parts and who started what,
and we were pretty mad. All of a sudden he walks out,
"Fuck you. I'm just leaving."
We'd been up in the circuit
playing with all the big boys for a year or two.
It's hard to get to the top, but it's harder to stay.
♪ Life is so strange when it's changing, yes, indeed ♪
♪ Well, I've seen the hard times ♪
♪ And the pressure's been on me ♪
♪ But I keep on working like a working man do ♪
♪ And I've got my act together ♪
♪ Gonna walk all over you ♪
♪ Gimme back, gimme back my bullets ♪
That's Lynyrd Skynyrd from their cuckoo current album,
and all the giggling is Gary and Ronnie,
and they've just grown in popularity.
Do you still live in the South now?
- Yes, yes, we do. - And your lifestyle's
the same? Nothing's changed?
Well, our houses are a little bit better.
- You live a little better? - Yes.
We got a better boat, fishing boat. That's about it.
The lure of the big city doesn't turn you on?
We're just country boys.
Never forget the first time I met Ronnie Van Zant.
He had his feet propped up on the table.
Yeah, I walked through the door, and he said,
"She'll do just fine."
He hired me on the spot. I never had to sing for him.
He treated us like gold. He really did.
He was awesome. He was such a gentleman.
Ronnie wanted background vocalists.
To have girls on stage was kind of cool, you know?
There wasn't too many bands that had that yet.
Ronnie, he called us Honkettes,
'cause he'd always call me Honky for some reason.
I never understood that.
JoJo was the whiskey voice, you know,
"Hey, baby," you know?
Leslie Hawkins was Ronnie's songbird.
He had his soprano with Leslie,
and Cassie, she had that Broadway voice.
She looked like a German milkmaid,
the way she did her hair.
Cassie Gaines was real spiritual and cosmic
and listening to new Zen music and far-out stuff.
We get to our hotel, and, you know,
we'd always go down to Cassie's
and smoke a big, fat doobie.
With a few scarves and maybe a shawl,
she'd make the room into her own, you know?
It was like being home.
Cassie was involved in I-Ching and meditation
and things like that, and see, I'd never seen
anything like that before in my life,
and over here I'd be grabbing the Gideon bible,
you know, shooting shotgun prayers up there,
you know, hoping something would stick.
Cass and I were close.
Jo was a little younger,
you know, a little wilder than Cass and I were.
Jo had a hard time, I think, dealing with the fame.
Actually, toward the end Jo got
a little too far out of hand
and left the band in August before the crash,
which was lucky for her, you know?
I mean, it was great to be in the band,
but, you know, if you had a crystal ball,
you'd be happy that it happened.
Me and Allen, for a year or two
we would just play alone with no third guitar.
Cassie kept talking about her little brother.
"Oh, he's a great guitar player,"
but everybody used to tell us, "Oh, man,
you should hear this guy," or, "My cousin, you'd love him.
He's great," and we'd go, "Yeah, yeah."
So finally we were playing in a town
where he had a band called Crawdaddy,
so he came to our show that night,
and he brought his guitar 'cause he was going to a gig.
We said, "Why don't you come play on 'Mr. Breeze' with us?"
♪ Change in the weather ♪
And he was great.
He played the shit out of it.
He was so tremendous that I just told Ronnie and Gary
that night, you know, "Hey, he's the one."
Steve Gaines was gonna fit back there.
The first week or two, all's we'd do all day
and night was show him stuff,
and we worked him into all the songs
so he could go play the live album in a couple weeks.
Live from the Fox Theater, Lynyrd Skynyrd!
Uhh, let me tell you about this gentleman
that's playing with us tonight.
It's a new member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
His name's Steve Gaines over here,
and he's from Oklahoma, and he's a Okie.
Watch out. I'm gonna sic a Okie on you.
Well, this might sound egotistical,
but I think right now
I have a guitar player with me named Steve Gaines.
- This man. - Who is probably
the most underestimated guitar player
on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.
Steve had all these songs that he'd already written
and he brought in,
and then we would Skynyrd-ize it
and make one of his songs ours.
Me and Allen weren't offering
probably as much as we could have at the time.
We were so burnt, we kind of got uninspired.
We knew something was missing, and Steve was it.
It was like he found us,
brought a spark back to everything.
He made us get serious again,
and we would rehearse more and work up guitar parts more.
Steve could grow excellent, like, tomatoes.
I wouldn't call him a farm boy,
but he could grow some bud.
When I get on the stage and a Skynyrd crowd are there,
it just means everything to me.
It's all I've wanted to do up till now.
Now I'm trying to figure out
what I can do from here, you know?
Well, we were doing great in Europe.
Skynyrd was as big there as America,
but we couldn't believe
we were gonna open for the Stones.
Nothing could be bigger.
It was the biggest show we ever did, you know?
Just people everywhere.
And we were way early to make sure
you could get to the stage through all the people,
so we started drinking a little,
and Cassie had a little pot, I think, but we looked up,
and walking through the door is Jack Nicholson.
"I smell something in here. Can... may I join you?"
So it got crazy, and we were getting feisty and drunk,
and we went out and had a great set.
I don't know, when you're young and adrenaline hits you,
you kind of shake off stuff.
We started "Free Bird,"
and the whole crowd was really rocking.
You could see they were all into it.
When we started the end, Ronnie directed Allen
to go out front, and Allen was kind of hesitant
'cause there was a rule not to go out on the tongue
'cause the tongue was the Stones... you know,
that was gonna be their whole look,
so Ronnie walked us all the way down
just to defy that order.
Allen went out all the way till his cord stopped,
and Leon, he went till his cord jerked him back around,
and Mick Jagger was mad.
It took their breath away to see how well we went over
and how we broke their only rule,
don't go out on the tongue.
I tell you what, it's a dream.
Everybody's still living the dream.
It's still amazing to see how the people out there
just go crazy, you know?
Nine years of hard work,
rehearsing, recording, touring.
That's what it took to become Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Now their finest achievement, "Street Survivors."
♪ What's your name, little girl ♪
♪ What's your name? ♪
♪ Oh ♪
This is, like, the sixth album.
I don't know what the "Rolling Stone" will say about it.
I don't know what "Creem" will say about it.
I know for a fact it's the best album we've ever done.
I'll slap leather with anyone.
Where do you see Lynyrd Skynyrd going from here?
Well, we'll go to hell if we don't change our ways.
There was a saying back in the day,
"There's the smell of death around him."
It was like a smell around whatever was gonna die.
♪ Whiskey bottles and brand-new cars ♪
♪ Oak tree, you're in my way ♪
♪ There's too much coke and too much smoke ♪
♪ Look what's going on inside you ♪
♪ Ooh, that smell ♪
♪ Can't you smell that smell? ♪
I'm just going to a club somewhere with a girl.
I think her name was Sandy.
I think we ate a Quaalude or something,
so I was out of it, and we were going back home,
and I kind of sped around a curve and lost control
and hit a oak tree.
I busted all my teeth out.
I just came up with those lyrics about me stupid,
drunk, and crazy.
I made a bad mistake,
but we got a good song out of it.
♪ Now, they call you Prince Charming ♪
♪ Can't speak a word when you're full of 'Ludes ♪
♪ Say, you'll be all right come tomorrow ♪
♪ But tomorrow might not be here for you ♪
♪ Yeah, you ♪
Everybody was trying to clean up
their act some, you know? It just got too wild,
and Ronnie had decided he was gonna clean up his act
because he and Judy had just had Melody,
and, you know, he realized that he wasn't gonna live long
if they didn't straighten it out.
♪ Seems so long ♪
♪ I been out on my own ♪
♪ Travel light ♪ and I'm always alone ♪
♪ Guess I was born with a traveling bone ♪
♪ When my time's up, I'll hold my own ♪
♪ You won't find me in a old folks home ♪
♪ You got that right ♪
After all those years, 12 years Gary and I
and Allen have been together,
it finally paid off in just
something that you believed in,
that you could do it, you know?
That fact that we proved it, you know,
that really makes me happy, and you know, just everything
seems to be going pretty good for me right now.
I'm probably happier than I ever have been before.
I mean, it could end tomorrow, you know?
I mean, Lynyrd Skynyrd could be gone tomorrow.
The one thing that I want
the world to know about my band
is how bravely my band met their death.
We spiraled in 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, and they did.
Things were going wrong with the plane a little bit,
nothing serious but enough to notice
it wasn't flying top-notch, you know?
We were about to get maintenance on it
and put it in the shop
because a engine was sputtering.
It needed a tune-up, I guess.
I wasn't really worried about it myself,
but I'll 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 want to fly,
and Ronnie was the one who said,
"When it's our time to go,
you can kiss my ass good-bye," you know?
But he didn't know, and he said,
"We got a plane here to take us to our hotel
"and to do a show tonight.
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.
Everybody was playing poker.
I remember Ronnie did have a little hangover,
so he just threw a pillow down and was laying on the floor,
and all of a sudden you could really feel
a little sputtering and spitting.
I was in the cockpit in the navigator jump seat
in between the pilot and the copilot.
I looked at Walter McCreary, and I said,
"We can fly on one engine, right?"
He looked at me with fear in his eyes, and I saw it.
His eyes were bugging out.
He said, "Artimus, you better go back
and strap yourself in."
The pilot sent the copilot back to say,
"Hey, we're gonna make a landing
"and try to see what's happening here,
"so it might be a little rough,
so put your heads between your legs,"
like back in the Cold War when the schools said,
"There's a nuclear bomb coming. Just get under your desk.
You'll be fine."
Ronnie walked to the rear of the plane,
and I thought to myself, "Good idea,"
and then he came up the aisle and 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 the smile that he gave me,
that beautiful Ronnie Van Zant smile.
We started hitting the treetops real...
you could hear them, and it got louder and louder
and...
until it just got so overwhelming, loud,
and bumping that that's when I, I guess, got knocked out.
It felt like a thousand 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 was on me
'cause I couldn't move and get up.
In reality, I was so broken, all my bones and legs
and everything, I just couldn't get up.
And I said, "Dean, get this door off me.
Dean, come here,"
and I swear to God, to me,
he came over and pushed the door off me.
Later on, one of the doctors said that he couldn't have
done that, the way they brought him in.
He was too far gone, you know?
But I saw him do it.
My friends were bleeding to death.
I knew that 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 injuries,
so I'm walking through the briars and the brambles,
and it was getting darker and darker.
I remember waking up to the helicopters that were hovering,
you know, and they were shining lights down into the swamp.
It was like Vietnam in my head.
I only seen it on TV,
but the helicopters and your buddies screaming
and yelling in pain and dying around you.
Last night in woods near McComb, Mississippi,
a chartered airplane crashed,
and with it went the rising hopes of a popular rock band,
Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Survivors said the plane was so rundown,
they'd been considering not flying in it again.
The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital,
and both arms were broken and both legs,
and this leg got cut off except for a little bit of skin,
and they put it back on, and I had some ribs broken,
my pelvic and all... everything, man.
The band was traveling from a concert in South Carolina
to another one in Louisiana,
part of a four-month tour that just started.
As victims and survivors were brought to hospitals,
no one could say for sure
how many people were aboard the plane,
but by dawn six passengers were known dead.
20 others, many of them technicians
and friend of the band,
were listed as injured, many critically.
It was... had to be the next day
'cause my mother had gotten there, and I asked her,
"Did anyone die?" and she wouldn't tell me
for... it seemed to me for a long time.
I said, "Please tell me,"
and she started right off with Ronnie,
and that really freaked me out 'cause he was the tough guy.
I thought if he died, everybody else did.
Those dead are Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer
Ronnie Van Zant,
guitarist Steve Gaines,
and his sister Cassie, a backup vocalist,
assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick,
the plane's pilot Walter McCreary,
and copilot William Gray.
There was two benches in the front of the plane.
Ronnie was here, and I was between him and Dean,
and Allen was right across
on that little bench in front of me,
and he was between Cassie and Steve,
so all those people died, and Allen and me didn't,
and after it we freaked out a bit.
Why did we live and didn't die?
♪ Just the other day ♪
♪ I heard my friend say ♪
♪ Life was oh so bad ♪
♪ And love was all they had ♪
♪ You know, all day long ♪
♪ I sing sad songs ♪
♪ Got the blues feel ♪
♪ Things no doctor can heal ♪
♪ You know, that's okay ♪
♪ I'll never change my ways ♪
♪ And maybe I am wrong ♪
♪ But I'll soon be gone ♪
Guitarist Gary Rossington is in stable condition
after surgery this morning at Baptist Hospital.
Pianist Billy Powell is in stable condition at Baptist.
Guitarist Allen Collins is undergoing surgery
at the University Medical Center now.
Bass player Leon Wilkeson is in critical condition
in Southwest Medical Center in McComb,
and drummer Artimus Pyle
is in good condition at a hospital in Magnolia.
This is Randy Bell, ZZQ News.
A lot of flowers came in,
and they set them all around the room.
For days I remember the faces of Ronnie
and everybody who died.
I could see their faces like a shadow in those plants.
I could look up at them.
I even said, "Don't you see them up there, mama?
Don't..." and it was just me, I guess.
I think they were there helping, you know,
in those flowers for about a week.
Then they went away. The spirits went away.
Mama was the first one buried here,
and then whenever they tried to break
into Ronnie's grave and Steve, moved out...
- Just all out of here. - We brought him out here.
This is where Daddy wanted him at in the beginning.
Yeah, I know. I must be over here.
You're gonna be right there.
I'll be spitting range from you.
My wife and I just bought that right over there.
- It's all marked out too. - Yeah, I know.
It's all marked out. Let's walk over there,
- or do you want... - I don't really want to.
I don't want to yet.
Too sacred ground.
Hey, look, there's money on it,
on top of his tombstone there.
You know, people put things out here.
They come and have a drink,
a lot of beer cans and.
- Yeah. - It's an honor, really.
Yeah, it is. It is. They loved the music, and,
"Hey, I'm gonna have a beer, what the hell?"
I'm sure Ronnie don't mind.
- No. - You know, he don't mind.
You go, "Why did it have to happen?"
But I always say I kept a lot of questions I have to ask,
you know, when I go on.
When I go on, so I hope I can get some answers.
I think if we're gonna get them, that's when.
Yeah, exactly.
♪ If I leave here tomorrow ♪
♪ Would you still remember me ♪
♪ For I must be traveling on now ♪
♪ 'Cause there's too many places I've got to see ♪
♪ And if I stayed here with you, girl ♪
♪ Well, things just couldn't be the same ♪
♪ 'Cause I'm as free as a bird now ♪
♪ I swear I am ♪
♪ And the bird you'll never change ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ The bird you cannot change ♪
In '87 we did a tribute tour,
and then after that tour everybody,
they wanted us to come to their town too,
and so we said, "Yeah, let's do it again,"
and we kept catching on, and we kept touring.
Being in a band, that's all we know.
I can't do anything but play guitar and fish,
and I couldn't do anything else.
Now we got Ricky Medlocke playing his guitar.
Johnny didn't think he could fill his brother's shoes.
Of course, Ronnie never wore shoes.
You ain't got to fill his shoes.
You're not gonna.
I used to say he was spanked by the same daddy
and ate the same food just like Ronnie.
It's 30 years later,
and it's still going, and people come,
and the younger generation learns.
It's not about us.
It's about the feelings of that music
and the stories they tell.
That's what I feel I'm here to do now,
is speak for the band Lynyrd Skynyrd
from the beginning till the very end, you know?
It's the music that lives on.
♪ Lord help me, I can't change ♪
♪ No, I can't change ♪
♪ Won't you fly, fly ♪
♪ A free bird ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
One of the great ones, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Let's hear it for them.
Subtitles by explosiveskull