Gary Rossington’s epic guitar on Free Bird helped create a legend

Lynyrd Skynyrd stalwart outlived all his original band members and was planning to tour again with the band later in the year.

Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd performs in New York in June 2018. Picture: Getty Images.

Gary Rossington, a founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd who has died aged 71, dreamt of being a professional baseball player, and showed ability, but he deemed himself too small and fat.

In any case, having seen The Beatles and Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show he bought a ­guitar. No lessons, he just tried to learn from others and records. He quickly improved and started bands with other baseball kids, including future Lynyrd Skynyrd members Allen Collins and ­Ronnie Van Zant.

School gym teacher Leonard Skinner insisted Rossington cut his hair – so Rossington dropped out of Robert E Lee High School. In 1969 his band changed their name to playfully match ­Skinner’s.

By then the line-up had, by that band’s standards, settled as they gigged across America’s south from their base in Jacksonville, but they didn’t record until 1973. That year’s debut album – Pronounced ‘Lĕh-’nérd ‘Skin-’nérd (they knew fans would struggle with it) – included the nine-minute Collins-Van Zant ballad Free Bird that had come ­together over two years building on contributions from them and piano player Billy Powell. The long instrumental coda was added to give Van Zant some breathing space between songs in an era when they played several sets a night. All three guitarists soloed during it, but Rossington puts it to bed with the crying slide guitar notes that pick up the gentle melody, doubles its speed and forges it into the unforgettable musical exclamation mark we all know.

Played on stage before a Confederate flag, Free Bird was soon adopted as a southern anthem but was released as a single – edited to half the running time – only after Sweet Home Alabama, from their follow-up album, Second Helping, scored on Billboard.

After touring to support The Who, the band recorded an 11 minute 30 second version of Free Bird, the centrepiece of the best-selling live set One More From The Road, establishing the band as one of America’s biggest. By then, gifted recruit Steve Gaines had joined as the third guitarist and the band’s sound peaked. The next studio album, Street Survivors, was to be the international breakthrough.

On it was the song That Smell. Rossington did not write it, but it was about him. Bandmates were concerned about his drinking and drug-taking and turned the tale of a near fatal car accident into a storming rock classic.

“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

The smell of death surrounds you.”

Street Survivors’ original cover pictured the band enveloped in flames. They began the Survivors Tour on October 15, 1977. Two days later the album was issued. Three days on the band’s Convair CV-240 ran out of fuel on the 1000km flight from en route to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, coming down in a swamp near Gillsburg, Mississippi.

Killed were both pilots, a tour manager and singer Van Zant, the brilliant Gaines and his older sister Cassie, a backing singer. (Drummer Artimus Pyle, a former marine, was badly injured and had ribs poking through his skin. Bloodied and covered in mud he crawled to a field where farmer Johnny Mote was bailing hay. Mote’s first thought was that Pyle looked like crazed killer Charles Manson so he shot at him.)

The accident was another in the tragic series of deadly aviation incidents punctuating the story of rock music: Buddy Holly, Otis Redding and his band, and Jim Croce had all been lost to dodgy planes and pilots. Aerosmith had inspected that 30-year-old Convair with a view to leasing it but thought neither the aircraft nor crew up to scratch. But the fates had not finished with Lynyrd Skynyrd. That smell hung about. Eighteen months after the Gaineses’ deaths, their mother was killed in a car accident just outside the cemetery where her children and Van Zant were buried.

Collins broke his neck in the plane crash and they considered amputating an arm. He recovered to link up with his mate in the Rossington-Collins Band in 1980, but days in to its first tour his wife died suddenly and it was abandoned. Six years later while drunk he crashed a car, killing his girlfriend. He spent the next four years in a wheelchair before succumbing to pneumonia aged 37.

Bass player Wilkeson also joined Rossington-Collins, as did Powell, and both were part of the reformed Lynyrd Skynyrd with Van Zant’s brother Johnny. Wilkeson was found dead in his Florida hotel room in 2001 aged 49 where he had travelled to face drink driving charges. In 2009, Powell, 56, having missed a doctor’s appointment, died of a heart attack, leaving Rossington, whose dangerous lifestyle inspired That Smell, the band’s sole original member.