This was the real future of rock 'n' roll, destined not for Hollywood fame but for blood, tragedy, redemption and, ultimately, survival on its own terms. The band was derailed by the infamous 1977 plane crash that killed Van Zant, Steve Gaines, the guitarist who replaced Ed King, and his sister, vocalist Cassie Gaines. A decade later, the remaining members reassembled for a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd, with Ronnie's youngest brother Johnny singing. That band, after a few more changes, is still going strong. Twenty-five years after that memorable debut, Lynyrd Skynyrd played a pair of shows at New York's Beacon Theater that bristled with the energy of a new band trying to prove itself.

The following interview took place after the first night, with all nine members offering their observations on Skynyrd history; vocalist Johnny Van Zant, guitarists Gary Rossington, Rickey Medlocke and Hughie Thomasson, keyboardist Billy Powell, bassist Leon Wilkeson, drummer Jeff McAllister and background vocalists Dale Krantz-Rossington
and Carol Chase.

You guys were obviously having a lot of fun out there last night.

Johnny Van Zant:
We've been having a real good time. We've been at this over 11 years now.
I've been in the band longer than Ronnie was.

Gary, you used to talk about how you first got together through playing baseball.

Gary Rossington:
Me and Bob Burns had a little band, and Ronnie was in a band called Us, and Allen was in a band called the Mods.
Our band was called Me You And Him. Larry Junstrom played with us. Me and Bob went to watch Ronnie play baseball one time; he was on one team, and we were on a team called the Mustangs. We were right on the third-base line, and Ronnie hit a line drive and wham it hit Bob Burns right in the head and knocked him out.
Ronnie thought he'd killed him, so he came runnin' over.

Then we went back and talked, and we went over to Bob's house. Ronnie just lived down the street. He saw the drums and the guitar, and we just started playing "Last Time" by the Stones and "Gloria." We got a band up that day, and we went and got Allen Collins. He was riding his bike down the street. Ronnie was the badass of the town, and he had this big old redMustang. Me and Bob were in it going down the road, and we saw Allen, and Bob went, "Hey, that guy's got a guitar, and he's pretty good, Ronnie." We were looking for anybody with equipment. So we pulled up and yelled "Hey Allen!," and he saw Ronnie, and Bob was pretty bad at the time too, so he took off, riding his bike out in the woods, threw his bike down and climbed up a big old oak tree. The rest of us are saying, "Come on down, we only want you to play with us," but he thought Ronnie was gonna beat him up. So we started to play music together 'cause we liked the Beatles and the Stones, the Yardbirds, and we started to dream, and the dream came true.

Ronnie Van Zant

Billy Powell:
I played guitar in Leon's band, the Little Black Eggs. I had been taking classical piano lessons for years, then one day I decided to pick up the guitar, and we started this band the next day. We only knew one song.
Allen Collins later taught me how to play "Light My Fire."

Leon Wilkeson:
Little did we know that we were gonna end up with a band as famous as Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Johnny, you watched these guys at rehearsals as a kid, right? What was that like?

Johnny Van Zant

Van Zant: I just thought it looked like fun, y'know. It was kind of like any other family, except around our house it was just music. I guess it's like a family of lawyers or doctors, they're always talkin' medicine or whatever. Our family was always talking music. Was there a point where, as a kid, you said, "I gotta get in on this"? Van Zant: I started out playing drums; that's what I wanted to do, because I always loved being around the bands and jumping on the drum set; every kid loves doing it. After a while, people would tell me, "You can sing, go on and sing." I think I was too shy, that's why I liked to hang out in the back by the drums. That all changed. They rehearsed in the house, then in a trailer behind the house. So you would watch them.

Van Zant:
Yeah. I was still young, I don't know how old I was. I don't think any of us has a lot of formal schooling, but we've had the street schooling. Sometimes, I think that might be better. I was so young then, and they would always say, "Don't curse around Johnny, don't talk about chicks around Johnny," all that stuff. Gary seemed real shy, he's always been kind of reserved and shy; back then, if you look at pictures of them, he's always got the hair down in front of his face. They called him Prince Charming; he was popular with the girls.

Gary, one of the defining characteristics of Lynyrd Skynyrd is the three-guitar interlace.
How did you develop that distinct sound?

Rossington:
There was only one other group that did that in a way we loved; Buffalo Springfield had three guitars,
but they didn't all play at the same time. We would just sit there for hours and play counter parts.
For instance, in "Sweet Home Alabama," there's two or three different guitar parts that lock in together, and if you just play one at a time it doesn't sound right. You've got to hear them all together. We'd sit there, one guy's playing one part, another guy's pickin,' and they fit it in. They call it counter parts, parts that interlock. We'd sit around all day doing that, hoping to get it better and better. In the studio, we would go in and put down a basic track, then everybody would put their parts on, and then it would become a song. It was a lot of work, and it still is today.

I remember the feeling of watching the band live back then was like watching chaos;
there was a tremendous, pent-up anger that came flying off the stage.

Rossington: [laughing]
It was chaos, all right. Back before the crash, with the original band we were just kinda like kids still, in our early 20s; we were just learning. We fought a lot though and argued like brothers and sisters. Lives are hard to get along with sometime, and we didn't get along with some people. Now we're getting along real good. We even go fishing on time off and go hang out. It's still chaos on stage, though. There's a lot of chaos, and the energy is still there too. Now there's a little less chaos. We were newer then. We're a little more organized now, but, it is still chaotic.

Rickey Medlocke:
I go back to 1970 to '73, when I played with them, and I remember how everything was put together, and I remember watching them. Even though I was the drummer then, I was always able to watch Allen and Gary, how they put things together. So, when I was forming ideas for the band, I just said, "If it were Allen sitting in the room, how would Allen have approached it?" and do it that way. But it's always gonna come out Rickey Medlocke too. Basically, that's how I approached it with this band. You've got to have some insight into the people who were there before, who gave it that essence; put yourself in that position and write to that.

Hughie Thomasson:
I've known the Skynyrd boys since 1972. I started the Outlaws in 1968. Our managers knew each other; we opened
for them at Mother's in Nashville. We've been good friends ever since. The Outlaws ended up doing several tours with
Skynyrd after that. The band would always invite me up to jam on "...the Breeze" and a couple of songs, so we've known each other since then. It wasn't like walking into a band full of strangers for me, it was more like joining up
with old friends.

Dale Krantz-Rossington:
I was from Detroit, so I don't think I really understood, even though I was singing with 38 Special. We toured with Skynyrd early in 1977. I really learned to appreciate them when I stood at the side of the stage in '77, and in about
20 seconds I got it when I saw Ronnie just kind of cruise that stage, walking against the beat, just totally in control.
I'll never forget the impact they had on me that night. They were the most magical, frighteningly powerful band I
had ever seen.

Powell:
I was a roadie for the band for a year and had been taking classical piano lessons since I was six years old.
I wired amplifiers for the band back then. One night, after a high school prom in Jacksonville, there was this old piano up there on stage, and after the gig I sat down and played my version of "Free Bird," and Ronnie's jaw dropped.
"You play piano like that, and you didn't tell us?" he asked. I hadn't mentioned it before. Ronnie said, "You wanna join the band?" It was my first dream come true.We were going good, then the tragedy, Oct. 20, 1977, just took the rug right out from underneath all of us.

Wilkeson:
For me, the plane crash was total instant amnesia, which I count as a blessing.

Powell: I guess I'm the one who's cursed with remembering every detail. I wasn't knocked unconscious. It was terrifying, it was unbelievably, indescribably, don't-wanna-know terrifying. You don't wanna know. When you know you're fixin' to die in 15 minutes, gliding over the palm trees and swamps, fixin' to die, it is terrifying. There's nothing you can do about it. It felt like being hit with 150 baseball bats while rolling down a hill in a garbage can. I was getting hit all over the place. On impact, every seat belt broke. The nose cone was all the way off, a steel rod went right through my arm. Leon was out cold, all his organs were shoved up into his chest, his teeth were knocked out. Here I am, trying to hold my nose on my face over here. That's as far as I'll tell you about it. For three years, all we could do was ask why God did this at the peak of our career. The ones up front were the most critically injured and killed. The ones in the back, some of us just got out and walked around in a daze, in one or two feet of swamp mud with the sun going down and alligators and snakes everywhere.

Rossington:
I have to think about it sometimes. People do ask me. This is October, the reunion month and all that.
You do think about it. When something that dramatic happens, you always think about it. You remember when your parents die, when your first dog dies. My father died when I was 10, that was the only big thing that ever happened to me until then. You learn to live with it, you have to in order to survive and not let it drive you crazy. It did drive us to drinking and drugs for a while, but now we're back. I don't really like to talk about it just because all that stuff happens and everybody has a different story of what they saw; there's a lot of freaky things that happened from that. When you fall out of the sky and people die all around you and you're in the swamp, it's like Viet Nam or something, seeing all your friends and family dead and screaming and metal and flames, it's a heavy thing to lay there for hours waiting for help. It's real weird, but God gives you the power to forget all the bad things and the real bad hurts, physical and emotional. You just learn to live with it. I have. All the guys in the band now, they lived it through us.

Jeff McAllister:
The band is a story of survival. The older members have gone through so much in their lives; Hughie, Johnny, Rickey, everyone has had the things they survived. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a band about survival; we started over here and came out the other end.

Van Zant:
Before I was ever asked to be a part of this, I was a fan and, looking at it from a fan point of view, you have to say it is a survival story.

Medlocke:
One night during the first tour, after I rejoined the group, Gary looked over to me and said, "I wanted to ask you this ever since you got back in the band. Where were you that night? You were supposed to be with us that week. Ronnie had invited you to go out and ride with us. Where were you?" I was right down the road, playing a club in Columbia, S.C. They were in Greenville, I was in Columbia. When it happened, some guy came running into the club, yelling about it. I quit and immediately went back to the hotel room and got on the phone. Momma picked it up, and she was in hysterics. I went through a period for a while feeling guilty, that maybe if I had been there something would have changed, I could have made the difference somehow. Maybe it was my destiny.
Gary said, "You were meant to be here now."
I'm so glad to be back with Gary anyway, because he's like a long-lost brother.

Powell:
Then we formed the Rossington Collins Band with Dale singing the lead vocals.

Rossington:
We did that to kind of try to get away from being compared to Lynyrd Skynyrd right off the bat.
Me, Allen and Ronnie were so close, we didn't want people to think we were just gonna come right back out with
another singer; we had Paul Rodgers was gonna sing with us, Ronnie Hammond, we talked with Gregg Allman,
but we went with Dale, a female; she was the perfect choice.

Van Zant:
I was happy about that because Ronnie was my brother and I couldn't see anybody taking his place.
But a woman singer was a whole different direction.

Dale Krantz-Rossington: It was an amazing time. I was a little background vocalist from Indiana. I had to sing from my toes because I was scared to death of them, and that's the truth. I was so scared of Gary and Allen. I had led a band, but I had never written lyrics. When they said, "Write a song," you did because they told you to. We opened the show for them in the spring of '77 with 38 Special, Donnie's band. I was singing background vocals with my younger sister at the time. Two years after the crash, I was still working with .38. They were throwing around some heavy names, Paul Rodgers, Gregg Allman, but they were so worried about falling into the comparison. They burst through the door one night and said, "Would you like to work with us?" I said, "Yeah." They said, "Do you write lyrics?" I said, "Yeah," even though I hadn't before, but it worked out.

Rossington:
That was a great band, and we would have gone on except there were so many other things. Allen's wife died, pregnant; that drove him to drugs and drinking, just terrible, and I was his best friend, so we were in it together, and, boy, it was terrible. That had to end. I get upset about Allen Collins; he kind of gets forgotten about. You read more about Steve and Cassie than Allen because he didn't die in the crash, but he was as big a part of the band as Ronnie and me. We wrote all those songs together.

Powell:
All we did was fight, fight, fight, because everybody was so upset over the plane crash.
The band broke up, and Leon and I began playing with Mark Farner in a Christian band.

Wilkeson:
I got out of the band I was playing in with Billy, because I sensed something was fixing to happen with the 10-year anniversary of the tragedy. And it did.

Powell:
In 1986, the Rossington band was playing in Atlanta, and we jammed with them at the Fox Theater at the end
of their set. We did "Sweet Home Alabama" and "...Three Steps," and the place went nuts. We brought the house down. So we talked to Charlie Brusco about doing a tribute. Gary didn't want to do it at first, Johnny didn't want to do it,
but we said it's 10 years on; we need to have a tribute. Charlie agreed and talked to Gary; that's how we got the
wheels turning in 1987. It was going to be a short tour, a six-week tour, but the magnitude of the tour was so great
that here we are.

How hard was the decision to start over?

Powell:
Anybody's entitled to change their mind after 10 years; we weren't on pain medication anymore, we weren't bitter.

Krantz-Rossington:
I knew that Gary had a really rough time with this [the new Lynyrd Skynyrd] from '87 on.
He took this project on, assuming it was gonna last for literally one week. We were going to do a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Nobody at that time thought we'd do 100 shows, let alone come to grips with writing new material under
that name. Every step of the way, this has been a big step for Gary to take. But just in the last two years with
Hughie and Rickey coming in, it has really worked. The spark for Gary really was the guitar army, and I'm not sure
he had found that and the camaraderie with the other gentlemen that he did with Rickey and Hughie.
Man, they brought some life into this thing.
Gary was a big package to take on. I thought Skynyrd, with all the ghosts and the emotional baggage, was only going to be heartache for him. I wanna tell you I fought it for a long time. I was afraid it was gonna somehow be bigger than us, then it dawned on me about five years into it that it definitely is bigger than all of us. Skynyrd is huge, and once you kind of give up to it and support it you can ride that wave. It's so huge, it's bigger than the band, it's bigger than Gary and I. We couldn't have fought this. It's got an energy of its own.

Van Zant: I never dreamt I would be playing with these guys. Never wanted to really; that thought never crossed my mind. Even 10 years after the plane crash, it never crossed my mind, until Gary actually came up to me and said, "We wanna do something besides it being the last thing Lynyrd Skynyrd did was to have an airplane crash." The more I thought about that, the more I realized that Ronnie put his life and soul into this band, and he wouldn't have wanted that to be the last thing that the band ever did. It gives me great pleasure to go out and sing songs he wrote. He was a great writer, great singer, he was a stylist. It's pretty amazing that his songs still live on. After we're all dead and gone, his songs will live on.