Lynyrd Skynyrd History 4

In the 25 years since Lynyrd Skynyrd released its first album, the collective members of the band have endured several lifetimes' worth of high times, bitter tragedies and ultimate redemptions. The band may well be enjoying the greatest popularity of its fabled career in its current incarnation. But every single member of this group, and those who've known them over the years, agrees that Lynyrd Skynyrd as an entity is much greater than any sum of its individual parts.

Ronnie Van Zant

The spirit of the late Ronnie Van Zant, one of the most charismatic figures in rock history, walks
with the band today. Van Zant, the oldest of three musical brothers, wrote a series of song lyrics
that went far beyond the realm of the genre that grew up around them, Southern Rock, to define
the identity of young working-class American rockers in the 1970s as surely as Hank Williams Sr.
or Bob Dylan defined their generations. Ronnie's writing has taken on the added stature that history lavishes upon genius, and it speaks in some ways even more eloquently today as so many of its themes continue to resonate.

Ronnie's youngest brother, Johnny, has gradually grown into the role of Skynyrd's frontman, bringing his own joyful personality to the savage yet sage intent of Ronnie's songs.

What Johnny knows, and what Ronnie knew before him, is that Lynyrd Skynyrd is only as strong as the bond that holds the band members together.
When Ronnie and his high-school buddies Gary Rossington and Allen Collins set out on their great adventure back in the 1960s, they played baseball together.
The camaraderie of sports teammates was easily translated into the all-for-one intensity of a fledgling rock band awed by the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds.

Johnny Van Zant

The boys' hometown of Jacksonville, Fla., was a source point of Southern rock, a blue-collar city whose roughneck bars produced an army of rockers. Skynyrd took the high-energy sonics for their in-your-face approach from British groups,
but their basic song structures and Ronnie's lyrical content came from American roots-music sources. Like his younger brothers Donnie and Johnny, Ronnie was brought up on the working-class values instilled by his father, Lacy, an independent trucker. Lacy raised Ronnie on country music, his favorite songwriter was Merle Haggard, and the band's first attempts to record were supervised at one of the wellsprings of Southern Rock, Alabama's Muscle Shoals Sound Studios.

"Merle Haggard was Ronnie's favorite writer," recalls Lacy, who's recently published a memoir about the family, "Southern Music Scrapbook." "They got to be great friends later on, and Ronnie would go out to his birthday parties. Ronnie loved Merle Haggard and country music, but when the rock came around he decided to go in that direction.
He named it Southern Rock, and, by golly, it paid off.

Ronnie "Barefootin´"

"Raisin' up three sons in the rock 'n' roll music hasn't been a bed of roses.
It takes money, time, a lot of energy, sweat and tears, y'know. A band has to love one another like real brothers. They've got to pull together, and Ronnie
was a real leader. Donnie followed suit with .38 Special, and Johnny was
leading his own band when it became more or less public demand for him to front the regrouped Lynyrd Skynyrd."
Ronnie's leadership helped a group of local friends endure the hardships and rejection that a struggling young band must overcome to learn the trade.
By the time the band released its official debut, ("Pronounced..."), such classics as "Free Bird," "I Ain't The One," "Poison Whiskey" and "Gimme Three Steps" had been hammered into classic-rock gems.
"Sweet Home Alabama" from "Second Helping" and "Saturday Night Special" from "Nuthin' Fancy" kept the band in the charts, while a non-stop touring schedule built Lynyrd Skynyrd into one of America's most popular live acts,
a status confirmed by "One More For The Road," which featured new guitarist Steve Gaines, who replaced King in the lineup.

Steve Gaines

The glory days of Southern Rock ended with the 1977 plane crash that apparently also ended the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Rossington and Collins continued on with a new group fronted by the extraordinary vocals of Dale Krantz, who would eventually marry Gary. Allen Collins survived the crash but could not overcome the subsequent tragedy of his wife's death. Collins was in failing health, confined to a wheelchair, when the surviving members of the band reconvened for the 1988 Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute tour.

Johnny

Johnny Van Zant was only 15 when he started playing professionally. Though his two brothers were among the most famous names in Jacksonville, Johnny refused to trade on their reputation and called the group the Austin Nickels Band. Ronnie took special interest in his youngest brother's group, offering advice and checking the band out whenever he was off the road. Ronnie often told people about his youngest brother, who he claimed had the best voice in the family and would someday eclipse them all. Little did he realize how ironic that prediction was. But Johnny was only trying to live up to his big brother's own abilities. "I never thought of myself as a better singer than Ronnie," he swears. "Ronnie was a stylistic genius. The way he phrased things was unique and influenced me as well as a whole lot of other people." Johnny didn't realize he was prepping for his greatest role, fronting the band his big brother led, when he got his first glimpse of rock 'n' roll. After filling in on the reunion tour, singing everything except "Free Bird," which was performed as an instrumental tribute to Ronnie, Johnny became a full-fledged band member in the group's 1990s revival, writing and singing the first new Skynyrd material since Ronnie's death.

NEW LINEUP AND A NEW LIFE

Under the shrewd direction of Legend Management and with detailed support from Ronnie's wife, Judy, Lynyrd Skynyrd began a new life, starting with the release of
the spectacular film "Free Bird," filled with riveting live performances from the band's heyday. A new Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup was formed, recruiting the guitarist leaders of two of Southern Rock's most enduring institutions:
Hughie Thomasson from the Outlaws and Rickey Medlocke of Blackfoot.
Thomasson had toured and jammed with the band in the old days and was a trusted friend; Medlocke was a charter member of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band that first went
into Muscle Shoals to record. Now he was returning to the fold.

Guitar Army On The March.

The new lineup released a powerful album, "Twenty," in 1997, highlighted by the band's new set-opening number,
"We Ain't Much Different." A buzz began to be generated by the band's awesome live shows and a VH1 documentary
that introduced Skynyrd to a new audience. Catalog sales have jumped dramatically in the last year, prompting the
release of a new "Hits" package and a reissue of the Muscle Shoals recordings made before the band's official debut.
Right now, Lynyrd Skynyrd is as exciting a live act as ever in the band's history, a fact attested to by the 1998 live release "Lyve From Steeltown." The band appears poised to scale new heights of popularity as it roars into the next millennium. Ronnie would indeed be proud.