A Southern-rock bandleader wrote a bunch of death songs shortly before he died.
Lynyrd SkynyrdStreet Survivors: Deluxe Edition
In October 20, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd were flying on a chartered tour plane when it developed mechanical trouble and crashed in remote Mississippi. Six people died, including singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines; everyone else on board was critically injured. Drummer Artimus Pyle struggled through swampy woods until he came upon a farmer—who greeted him with warning rounds of buckshot. How many other people can reasonably claim that almost dying in a plane crash was only the second-worst thing to happen to him that day?
If that
Deliverance-ish moment sounds like something out of a haggard Southern-rock anthem, well, it pretty much was. Three days before the crash, Skynyrd released their fifth and biggest album,
Street Survivors. On the cover, the seven members stand stoically inside a waist-high ring of fire. Van Zant, who’d written the eternal transcendence epic “Free Bird,” sang about the high life as a game of chicken with the Great Beyond: “You won’t find me in an old folks home,” he growled proudly on the deceptively bright “You Got That Right.” On the spooky “That Smell,” he imagined driving his “brand new car” into an oak tree.
Without the plane crash,
Street Survivors might have been just a great record about the tour bus as traveling catacomb. Without
Street Survivors, the crash might just have been epic bad luck. (Months earlier, Aerosmith had turned down an offer to use the same plane.) Together, they gave the band a cosmic kind of martyrdom. It doesn’t have Skynyrd’s biggest flag-waving hits, but a creepy, death-drunk clairvoyance makes this their defining record—Van Zant had always been obsessed with hard living, cursed history and the notion that nothing ahead was going to come easy.
He fixated on the hard wages of experience more than was natural for a rock star in his 20s. Where most Southern-rock acts worshipped the Allman Brothers Band’s escapist jams, Skynyrd stayed closer to the common dirt of the everyday, rooting their music in blues, soul and outlaw country and composing every note of their three guitarists’ solos with blue-collar labor. Dixie pride didn’t mean taking a holiday from history: “Sweet Home Alabama” spent more time parrying with Neil Young, mulling over Watergate and decrying ’Bama’s segregationist governor George C. Wallace than it did celebrating Van Zant’s adopted state.
Earthy realism is all over
Street Survivors (expanded here with demos and a semi-hot concert from the summer of ’77). Against soul horns and a cutting riff on “What’s Your Name,” Van Zant catalogues the obstacles he faces (the cops, ornery hotel managers) just to get a groupie up to his room. On “That Smell,” he snarls out the side of his mouth at the walking corpses drugging themselves to death backstage. By the album-closing blues “Ain’t No Good Life,” fame has faded and he’s down to couch change and lonely regrets: “The more I fight the sadness, yeah/It only seems the more that I grieve.”
Van Zant’s afterlife would be just as haunted—
play “Free Bird”! is the universal mating call of concert-ruining doofs. An ever-touring ghost Skynyrd, with surviving members and Ronnie’s overmatched brother Johnny on vocals, has duly obliged. But this scary, existential mess of a record shows that Skynyrd deserves better than being turned into a bronze statue draped in Stars and Bars.
Download: "What's Your Name," "That Smell," "You Got That Right"