On April 24, 1977, a young shaggy-haired, bearded man sat on a bed in a Dayton, Ohio, hotel room, strumming his guitar, oblivious to the raucous caused by his bandmates, roadies, groupies, and other hangers-on that sun-dappled afternoon. A visitor approached him and inquired about his guitar, a beat-up Fender Stratocaster. No response. The guitarist just kept his head down and continued to strum while softly singing a familiar song. The visitor persisted, asking how did one of his band’s songs replicate the guitar tone that sounded like the one used on Eric Clapton’s classic “Let it Rain”.
The guitarist abruptly stopped playing, slowly turned his head, smiled, and his eyes widened like a kid tearing through presents on Christmas morning. He told the visitor: “Sure, man, I love how Clapton plays. I’ll show you how he gets that tone.” After a quick demonstration, the guitarist and the visitor chatted for a while, even shared a few jokes about the hedonistic craziness in the crowded hotel room. Then a voice called out: “Hey, man, we gotta go. Soundcheck.”
The guitarist quickly stood up and said, “See you later, man. Good talking with you. Maybe, we’ll meet again sometime.”
Never happened. Six months later, the guitarist was dead.
His name was Steve Gaines, a Missouri-raised rocker who rose to fame as one of the guitarists for Southern-rock sensation Lynyrd Skynyrd. Forty-three years ago today (October 20th) marks the day when the tall, lanky guitarist perished in a plane crash, along with the band’s lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, his sister and one of the band’s back-up singers Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, the plane’s pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray. Twenty others survived the crash of the Covair CV-240, en-route to a gig at a Louisiana college before it ran out of fuel and shattered into pieces as it plowed through trees in a heavily-wooded Mississippi swamp. Gary Rossington, one of the band’s guitarists, recalled that it sounded as though “hundreds of baseball bats” were striking the plane’s fuselage.
One of the biggest rock acts on the planet, Lynyrd Skynyrd was riding the crest of the latest wave in ’70s rock ‘n roll: Southern rock. At that time, rock bands who had a mailing address south of the Mason-Dixie line were creating a special blend of rock music that, unfortunately, no longer appears on today’s popular music charts. It was heavily guitar-driven rock with some country flavor added. Bands like the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels, The Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, Wet Willie, Dixie Dregs, Blackfoot and others gleefully assaulted the FM airwaves in the ’70s. But it was Lynyrd Skynyrd who truly captured the true essence of Southern rock: hard-driving, boozing, brawling and just having a good ol’ time playing music in a country still licking its wounds from the Vietnam conflict and Watergate.
Lynyrd Skynyrd had finished its latest album “Street Survivor” (released about a week before the crash) which yielded hits like “I Know a Little”, “That Smell”, and “You Got That Right”. Prior to that album, Lynyrd Skynyrd had a string of hits ( the air-guitar epic “Freebird”, “Sweet Home Alabama” (the band’s middle-finger retort to Neil Young’s “Southern Man”), “Gimme Three-Steps”, and the J.J. Cale-penned “Call Me The Breeze”) that cemented their standing as major global rock artists. The band’s sound comprised a three-guitar attack, boogie-woogie piano, driving bass and drum section, and Van Zant’s distinctive vocals that ranged from a rebel yell to soulful, down-home blues.
Today, it’s hard to tell if the band’s current lineup is a rock band or a country band. Some would be as so kind to say that Lynyrd Skynyrd is presently a cross-over band. Perhaps they are leaning that way because Southern rock’s popularity went, well, south as the ’70s came to a close. Even when Southern rock reached its zenith, many of the bands stuck to a comfortable but tired formula of a crescendo of trading guitar licks. There were attempts to expand this genre’s sound, such as .38 Special, but was eventually left in the dust by new wave/punk, and emerging hair bands and synth-pop artists. In fact, the endless Southern-fried guitar jams gave rise to the formation of new wavish Rockpile. According to lead singer/bassist Nick Lowe, who played in an early ’70s country-rock band and is Johnny Cash’s ex-son-in-law, the band was formed because it felt that it was the time that the rock scene needed a break from the bloated excess of Southern rock.
But on that spring day in 1977, Gaines proudly told the visitor that Lynyrd Skynyrd was one helluva of a rock bank and that he was anxiously looking forward to making music that he and his bandmates loved. The band still plays the music that the late guitarist raved about. But former bandmate Artimus Pyle has claimed that there was only one Lynyrd Skynyrd, the one which ceased to exist after the doomed flight.
Southern rock bands, of course, still do exist, and some are quite good at what they do (Widespread Panic, Blackberry Smoke, to name a few). But they dwell outside the margins of today’s music scene, dominated by many artists who probably were too young or not yet born to see the first wave of Southern rock bands kick out those booze-soaked jams.
While Gaines, Van Zant and many of their ’70s Southern rock contemporaries have departed this life a long time ago or have called it quits, perhaps one day we’ll see another Southern rock uprising, or as the late Charlie Daniels once sang: “The South is going to do it again.”
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