It was a comeback that many believed impossible.
In 1987, Lynyrd Skynyrd reunited for a tour – 10 years after the plane crash that killed the band’s lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines and three other members of their entourage.
When Skynyrd returned to the stage, it was with Ronnie Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny fronting the band alongside four survivors of the crash – guitarist Gary Rossington, bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboard player Billy Powell and drummer Artimus Pyle.
But while fans were thrilled to see these Southern rock heroes performing again, for the musicians involved this was not the joyous experience it might have seemed.
As Gary Rossington admitted. “That tour was hard, man. Real hard.”
In 2012, Rossington spoke to Classic Rock magazine for the release of the band’s album Last Of A Dyin’ Breed.
He gave an account of the plane crash – and its aftermath – that was as poignant as it was harrowing.
The band's rented light aircraft went down in a wooded area near Gillsburg, Mississippi.
Recalling the scene, Rossington said: “I could see and hear my brothers dying. It was terrible. It was like something you see in a movie.”
He went on to reveal how he rebuilt his life in the years that followed – and how he shared that struggle with Allen Collins, his fellow guitarist and founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who also survived that terrible day in 1977.
“For myself and Allen Collins, it was hard after the crash to want to keep going on,” Rossington said. “We were so down about what had happened to our career and our friends and our band. That whole situation was real hard to live with.”
He added, with hindsight: “It’s been so long now, I can look back on it without it freaking me out or without wanting to do some drugs or drinking or something. But at the time, it’s so hard to get through all that.”
In 1979 the two guitarists formed The Rossington Collins Band, which also featured Leon Wilkeson and Billy Powell, plus – significantly – a female lead singer, Dale Krantz, who later became Rossington’s wife.
Rossington said of this band: “We were kind of pushed into it by friends and family saying, ‘Y’all need to start something back up.’ Because we were just sitting around doing nothing – and unfortunately doing a lot of pills and drinking and drugs, as we were almost hooked by then on all the pain medicine from the plane crash.
“We decided to get Dale to sing for us. We’d have a female vocalist so it wouldn’t be the same as Skynyrd. We tried to change a little bit. And we made two albums. But a lot more tragedies happened.”
The Rossington Collins Band’s debut album Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere was released in 1980 and included their best-loved song, Don’t Misunderstand Me. But in the same year, Allen Collins’ wife Kathy died during the miscarriage of their third child.
“Allen Collins lost his wife who was pregnant at the time, and it was real hard for him to get through that,” Rossington said.
The Rossington Collins Band broke up after the release of a second album, This Is The Way, in 1981.
“We were all kind of drugged out at the time,” Rossington confessed. “We were doing too much of bad things and just not living right. So we decided to stop playing for a while. And myself, I went out to Wyoming and just recuperated for eight or nine years until the Skynyrd reunion.”
For Skynyrd’s comeback tour, the band’s traditional three-guitar line-up saw Rossington joined by Ed King and Randall Hall.
King had been Skynyrd’s bassist and then guitarist from 1972 to 1975. Hall took the place of Allen Collins, who had suffered another disaster in his personal life in 1986. In Jacksonville, Florida – the city where Lynyrd Skynyrd had formed – Collins had been driving under the influence of alcohol when he crashed his car, killing his passenger, girlfriend Debra Jean Watts, and leaving himself paralysed from the waist down.
Unable to perform with the group, Collins served as musical director for the 1987 tour. He chose Randall Hall as his replacement after they had played together in the Allen Collins Band.
Rossington admitted that it was a difficult decision to reunite Lynyrd Skynyrd without the talismanic Ronnie Van Zant.
“At first we didn’t wanna go back out cause we didn’t have Ronnie,” he said. “But Johnny was around, and I knew he could sing like Ronnie. So in the end we said we could go out and do a tribute to Ronnie with Johnny.”
According to Rossington, there was a strong sense of camaraderie during the rehearsals for the tour. But after some time out on the road, relationships deteriorated.
“It was fun to start playing again,” he said. “We had Allen with us, and Leon and Billy Powell. We got everybody that was left that was alive. And we had our old crew. It was fun to see everybody again.
“But then it got hard after we got out on tour. Everybody had grown apart and separate and kind of grown up.
“We were only in our early twenties when the plane crashed, so after ten more years you kind of grow up a little more and mature. Things change. So it was harder then. There was a lot of hard feelings and stuff.”
For Rossington, the toughest thing of all was seeing his old friend Allen Collins confined to a wheelchair, from which he would address the audience each night with a speech about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
“Oh, it was very hard to see him like that,” Rossington said. “Allen gave us the OK to do the tour. He wanted the name and the music to be heard and us to go about our business. He travelled with us until he just couldn’t anymore. But that was really hard on the band.”
Less than three years after Lynyrd Skynyrd made their comeback, Allen Collins died on 23 January 1990 from chronic pneumonia.
Back in the ’70s, a number of Skynyrd’s greatest songs were written by Collins with Ronnie Van Zant – among the funky Double Trouble, the Metallica favourite Tuesday’s Gone, the grimly prescient anti-drug song That Smell, and the all-time classic rock anthem Free Bird.
When Gary Rossington talked about Collins in 2012, he expressed regret that his old friend never knew just how highly rated he was as a player.
“Allen was great,” Rossington said. “He was so funny, so happy-go-lucky and crazy. He didn't really care about the future, he was living for the present.
“But after his wife died, he became real bitter, even with me. It’s sad, because he should have known that so many people were influenced by him. People are still trying to learn Free Bird and how to play like him. But he never got to hear all the praise about his playing.”
