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Van Zant was the undisputed leader of the band. But there was a dark side to his presidency. “Ronnie would give the shirt off his back for anyone,” recalls Powell. “But he could also get pretty damn mean when he was drinking – the Jekyll & Hyde syndrome. I remember arguing with him once, after a few whiskeys, about Allen Collins’ volume and tuning up onstage. Next thing I know, I got my teeth knocked out. That’s how he led the band. But at the same time, if there was trouble from outside, he’d fight for us. He went to jail for us a few times. And when it came down to business, he was always right. We could always trust him.”
Rossington learnt to roll with the punches, too. Touring Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn, they got drunk on Schnapps. “Somehow, a bottle got broke and I ended up with slashes across my hands and wrists. But the next day, we were the best of friends again. That’s how it was, like a family.”
Kin or not, by ’75 the touring was too much for some. Ed King slipped away in the dead of a Pittsburgh night. “It became violent,” he admits. “Pretty much every day was traumatic. But I just had a bad premonition and felt I should obey the urge to get out when I did.”
By ’77, though, with four studio albums and a live double under their belts, Skynyrd had hooked up with young guitarist Steve Gaines and recorded the blistering Street Survivors. “Steve brought a whole new style of guitar playing,” says Powell. “And he was an extremely gifted songwriter, who brought a multitude of new ideas. But just as he was getting started, he had the rug pulled from under him in the rudest way imaginable.”
And so to October 20, 1977. A fatal miscalculation of fuel, allied to an already spasmodic right engine, led to Skynyrd’s Convair 240 plummeting into a wooded Mississippi swamp. Van Zant, Gaines, road manager Dean Kilpatrick and Gaines’ sister Cassie were all killed instantly, as were both pilots. The horror was graphic. Terrified drummer Artimus Pyle, clambering through the shredded roof, recalled seeing the co-pilot decapitated in a tree and Kilpatrick face down with the fuselage wedged in his back.
“I remember coming round and hearing people screaming,” recalls Rossington today. “There were helicopters up there with searchlights and I was hurting real bad, screaming. I had a lot of broken bones. Then, of course, it broke our hearts and freaked us all out when we found out some of us were dead.”
“We were approaching the peak of our career,” says Powell. “Then all of a sudden, due to gross negligence and pilot error, we were down to nothing. We were very bitter about what happened. I dove into a bottle for a while. I didn’t find any answers, but it numbed the pain. It had a major psychological effect on all of us.”
Indeed, the disaster has haunted the survivors down the decades. In January 1986, Allen Collins crashed his car in Jacksonville, killing his girlfriend and paralysing himself from the waist down. He pled no contest to a drink-drive manslaughter charge. Four years later, after prolonged alcohol abuse, he died of pneumonia. Bassist Leon Wilkeson was jailed for beating up his girlfriend in 1993. He died in a Florida hotel room in 2001, after years of toxic indulgence. In 1992, Pyle was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a four-year-old girl, although he was later cleared. The following year, however, he was given eight years’ probation for molesting two sisters after pleading guilty to attempted capital battery and lewd and lascivious assault. In September ’96, Powell was charged with domestic violence after allegedly attacking his wife at their Jacksonville home. He, too, was cleared.
With death, illness, lawsuits and disagreements stalking their post-crash history, some have suggested Lynyrd Skynyrd are hexed. But the band – reformed in 1987 after much soul-searching, with Rossington, Powell and Van Zant’s brother Johnny at its heart – seem imbued with an indomitable spirit. And in March 2006, Skynyrd were finally inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in New York.
“It would have been a sin not to carry the music on,” says Powell. “We’re gonna go as long as we can.”
Rossington is in no doubt, either: “After all we’ve been through, we’ve gotten stronger over the years. To have Johnny there now is like having part of Ronnie there. You feel his spirit is onstage with us every night.”