Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, who died Sunday at 71, survived the band’s 1977 plane crash. Here’s the story of one of rock’s most legendary tragedies
in 2016. “He told me so many times that I realized that he really knew what he was talking about.” Even his father, the late Lacy Van Zant, boasted of Ronnie’s “second sight.”track “That Smell.” Written as a stern warning after Rossington wrapped his brand new Ford Torino around a tree during a substance-fueled joyride, the foreboding “smell of death surrounds you” refrain provides a glimpse into Van Zant’s unsettled psyche.
In the back of the plane, a fiercely competitive game of poker was becoming heated. “I remember getting really upset when one of the players ripped the table out of the cabin wall,”Roy Eckerman. Ordinarily Van Zant would have joined them, but back pain forced him to sprawl out on the floor with Honkettes member Leslie Hawkins acting as a temporary masseuse.
Attempts to maneuver a soft landing in a field or stretch of highway proved fruitless as the craft sank lower and lower into the remote forest a short distance from the Mississippi/Louisiana border. “The trees kept getting closer, they kept getting bigger,” Powell toldin 1977. “Then there was a sound like someone hitting the outside of the plane with hundreds of baseball bats.
In the distance they could make out lights from a home belonging to dairy farmer named Johnny Mote. The 22-year-old had been outside bailing hay in the twilight when he heard the crash in the distance, which he assumed was “a car skidding in gravel.” But sight of helicopter searchlights circling overhead began to make him nervous.
Most of the 20 survivors survivors were taken to Southwest Regional Medical Center in McComb, where the lobby had been transformed into a makeshift emergency treatment center. Thewas extensive. Gary Rossington suffered two broken arms, a broken leg, a punctured stomach and liver. Allen Collins cracked two vertebrae, and a cut to his right arm was so severe that it almost required amputation. Billy Powell received extensive facial lacerations and a broken right knee.
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