As the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd draws ever closer, its members have opened up about their eventual farewell and their infamous plane crash as part of a new interview.
This month marks two years since Florida rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd announced that they would be calling it quits with one last tour. Dubbed the Last of the Street Survivors Farewell Tour, the tour is set to wrap up in May of 2020, and will serve as the final time that fans get a chance to see them live on a wider scale.
While members have claimed that a new album is still on the way, questions remain about how active the group will be once the tour wraps up.
Now though, a new interview with Guitar.com has seen Lynyrd Skynyrd members Gary Rossington and Rickey Medlocke look at a number of topics, including the band’s farewell shows, and the infamous 1977 plane crash that almost destroyed the band altogether.
Casting his mind back at first, Rossington recalled the events of October 1977 when – just days after the release of Street Survivors – the group were involved in an aviation accident en route to a show when the plane ran out of fuel.
Six of the 26 passengers died due to the accident, including frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines.
Ultimately, the band split up following the incident, with only a solitary live performance in 1979 occurring prior to their eventual reformation in 1987.
Love Classic Rock?
Get the latest Classic Rock news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
“I remember most of it, the rapid descent, the screaming, my friends in pain like something out of Vietnam,” Rossington recalled. “Waking up with the plane door on top of me.
“Cassie and Steve died. They were right next to me and Allen, yet we didn’t die, so we had unanswered questions as to why them and not us? We all believe in God because we’ve been through so much and yet we carried on.
“The crash has been brought up every day to us, since then. The main thing is we lost our best friends – that’s the hardest part. Our motto when we started was ‘If we don’t make it we’ll die trying.’ And we made it but at a terrible cost.”
Check out Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’:
“We are so blessed to have all these chances,” he added. “We had a second chance to do this and we continued.
“What else is life about than to live it? You’re a fool to not to live your dream. It’s unbelievable people still love our music and come out for us every night. We’re thankful.”
Looking ahead to the current undertakings of the band, Ricky Medlocke conceded that the group could’ve wrapped things up years earlier.
“After all these years, it’s such a historic group, still playing music. People ask, ‘Why keep going?’,” he noted. “I guess we could’ve stopped. But like Merle Haggard said, ‘This is the only thing I know how to do, so I do it’.
“The farewell tour is to say goodbye to fans, to go out with our boots on,” Rossington added. “We didn’t want to finish up by playing casinos and fairs, bringing our name down.
“But I have to slow down a bit as I’ve got heart problems. Rickey’s only got half a lung, yet he’s a wild one on stage…”
While noting they didn’t “want to do 80 shows a year anymore”, Rossington noted that the group would still continue with an occasional live show from time to time.
“I don’t know how to do anything else play. So we’ll still play occasional dates,” he explained. “Since Ronnie and Steve didn’t live to see the new songs get massive, they’d never know how big this got and that 40 years later we’d still persevere.
“We call the stage a miracle zone where all your problems go away up there. Physical pain, your heartache all goes.The professionalism comes out and we blaze away. That’s when music speaks a powerful language.”
Lynyrd Skynyrd made their first-ever appearances in Australia back in 2014. By the looks of it, this is shaping up to be the one and only time that Aussie fans will have had to see the band perform on local shores.
Check out ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd:
