RIP To A Simple Man: Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington
A tribute to a fine guitarist, who saw some things in his 71 years. I didn't know I signed up to be an obituary writer!
So I never signed up to be an obituary writer, but here I am. The hits keep coming.
Guitarist Gary Rossington, who died yesterday, March 5, was the last surviving member of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, which gives his passing particular resonance. It feels like the end of an era.
As a kid, Lynyrd Skynyrd made a giant impression on me, along with the Allman Brothers Band. They were just as important to some of my early passion for music and Southern rock, a term I’ve largely quit using because the ABB disliked it so much, but which was very much a part of my musical conception as a teenager. It took me years to start figuring out who played what in Skynyrd, but Gary’s work on his trusty Les Paul was crunchy and grounded, rooted in his love of British players, particularly Free’s Paul Kossoff.
I started working at Guitar World in February 1991 and Lynyrd Skynyrd controversially reunited around the same time. I’m sure the good money would have been on them doing a few tours and disbanding again. They were contractually obligated to use the name LYNYRD SKYNYRD 1991, which I know well because I did a big story with them and was told this by their publicist about 1,000 times. The first time I interviewed any of them I was just four or five months into my job, when I was sent down to Jacksonville to interview Gary, bassist Leon Wilkeson, new member Randall Hall and Ed King in a Holiday Inn conference room. Ed didn’t want to do it with them, so we spoke separately - an early indication of the issues that would soon lead him to leave the band.
I didn’t feel driven to go see this band in concert much over the years, but I never stopped enjoying speaking with Gary, who I interviewed many times over the years. He was always gracious, open and good natured.
In about 1996, we did a phone interview that was really great. We spoke at length about his sobriety, which was quite new at the time, and about a mutual friend who was the butcher at the market in Jackson Hole, where he was living. (He had been the caretaker of Camp Davis, the U-Michigan geologic field camp where I studied.) Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang again.
“Alan, it’s Gary. I need to talk to you again.”
“Ok, Gary, what’s up?”
”I told you a mistruth and it’s really bugging me.”
He corrected himself and apologized. The “lie” he had told me was minor and inconsequential, but he couldn’t live with it. He was making amends, and following the 12 step commitment to honesty: “Those people who are trying to rebuild their life after an addiction need to pay particular attention to honesty. They need to not only be truthful with other people, but more importantly with themselves. Failure to establish honesty as a personal quality may mean that the individual will be more at risk of relapse.”
I last spoke to Gary just about six months ago, on the phone, for my upcoming book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, which includes a fair amount about Lynyrd Skynyrd. I learned some new things from him. Here’s an exclusive preview.
Alan Walden left Capricorn in April 1970 to start Hustlers Inc., a publishing and management company with his partner, singer Eddie Floyd (“Knock on Wood”). Wanting to enter the rock world and aware of the strength of the Jacksonville music scene, Alan Walden sent a local contact to observe a battle of the bands and pick the best ones to audition for him. Skynyrd was the obvious best in class. They signed a management and publishing deal with Hustlers, which took a 30 percent cut of their gross income, twice the industry standard, as well as all the publishing rights. It was a very unfriendly deal even for the time, and the one person who realized this was Rossington’s mother, who had to sign for him since he was a minor, like most of his bandmates.
“She actually read the contract carefully and wouldn’t sign it,” said Rossington. “She said we were giving all our rights away and Alan would own everything we do. She didn’t think that any of us should sign, but we just wanted to get out of Jacksonville and get more and better gigs, and this felt like our only shot. We didn’t even know what publishing was. I begged her to sign and cried and whined for a few days until she did. A few years later when we realized he owned ‘Free Bird’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and were hating on Alan, she did say, ‘I told you so.’”
In this 1993 Guitar World interview, we just talked about songs and songwriting, focusing on some of his and the band’s greatest tunes. It was cleverly headlined “GIMME THREE CHORDS.”
“FREE BIRD” – pronounced leh-nerd skin-nerd (MCA, 1973)
“I don’t remember that one. Could you sing it for me? Oh, okay. Allen had the chords for the beginning, pretty part for two full years. We were just beginning to write—that was actually one of the first songs we ever completed—and Ronnie kept saying that there were too many chords so he couldn’t find a melody for it. He thought that he had to change with every chord change. We kept asking him to write something to these chords and he kept telling us to forget about it!
“Then one day we were at rehearsal and Allen started playing those chords, and Ronnie said, ‘Those are pretty. Play them again.’ Allen played it again, and Ronnie said, ‘Okay, I got it.’ And he wrote the lyrics in three or four minutes—the whole damned thing! He came up with a lot of stuff that way, and he never wrote anything down. His motto was if you can’t remember it, it’s not worth remembering.
“So we started playing it in clubs, but it was just the slow part. Then Ronnie said, ‘Why don’t you do something at the end of that so I can take a break for a few minutes.’ So I came up with those three chords at the end and Allen played over them, then I soloed and then he soloed. It all evolved out of a jam one night. So we started playing it that way, but Ronnie kept saying, ‘It’s not long enough. Make it longer.’ Because we were playing three or four sets a night, and he was looking to fill it up. Then one of our roadies told us we should check out this piano part that another roadie, Billy Powell, had come up with as an intro for the song. We did–and he went from being a roadie to a member right then.
“Everybody told us that we were crazy to put the song on our first album, because it was too long. Our record company begged us not to include it. And when it first came out, they did all kind of awful edits until it got big enough where it didn’t matter any more. It humbles us to think that it’s been played so much—and it’s still played. But it’s not magic—it’s still just a song to us.”
“GIMME THREE STEPS” – pronounced leh-nerd skin-nerd (MCA, 1973)
“This is another true story. Ronnie went into a bar to look for someone and me and Allen were too young to get in so were waiting for him outside, and we were waiting and waiting, then he came running out with a big ol’ guy chasing him, yelling.
“He had started dancing with this chick and this guy came in and was going to beat him up and Ronnie said, ‘Just give me three steps and I’m gone.’ The guy had a gun and he was a redneck and he was drunk—a nasty combination of things—and Ronnie said, ‘If you’re going to shoot me, it’s going to be in the ass or the in the elbow.’ And he took off like a bat out of hell.
“We got in the car and split and he told us what happened and we were laughing and we kind of wrote the song right there, drove over to Allen’s house, got his guitar and finished it.
“The more wild experiences you have the better songs you can write. I’m not necessarily proud of everything we ever did, but that’s just true. We always just considered ourselves a working-man’s band and thought every song should tell a story that people could relate to. When we finish a song, you know what it’s about, whereas some groups have songs you may dig but not understand. I think that’s why our songs have lasted as long as they have.”
“SWEET HOME ALABAMA” – Second Helping (MCA, 1974)
“I came up with the banjo/steel guitar part—it’s just a fingerpicked D,C,G progression—and the little opening riff , which I kept playing over and over again. Ronnie started writing lyrics at rehearsal one day and saying, ‘Play that again. Play that again.’ And after about an hour he had all the words. Then Ed [King] took it home and put in all the little fills and licks and arranged it.
“It was basically a joke song. We used to travel through Alabama a lot and get onto back roads and just marvel at how pretty it was and how nice the people were. And Neil Young was, and still is, one our favorite artists, so when he came out with ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama,’ criticizing the South, we said, ‘Well what does he know? He’s from Canada!’ So we threw that line about him in there. We were told by some people to take out the parts about Neil Young and [former Alabama governor] George Wallace, but we said, ‘Hey it’s just a song. And we’re going to record it the way we wrote it.’
“Most of our songs come through us. It either happens real quick or it doesn’t happen at all. Actually, Ronnie wrote most of his lyrics either driving around Jacksonville checking out different neighborhoods—especially poor ones, black and white—or in the shower. You know how people sing in the shower? Well, Ronnie did that, but he made up songs—melody, verse, chorus, bridge and all. Many times when we were on the road, he’d end up running into my room with a towel around his waist, dripping wet, saying, ‘Check this out. Write some music to that real quick.’ So I’d try to write a few chords to get a rough idea of where the song was going, then either Allen or Ed or I would go back and finish the song.”
“WEREWOLVES OF LONDON” – (Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy, Elektra, 1978)
HEY, I COULDN’T RESIST ASKING HIM ABOUT THIS!
“This guy (Warren Zevon) used the same exact chord progression as ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ I mean, you could sing ‘Alabama’ to his song. It doesn’t bother me at all. I can’t think of any examples, but I’m sure we did the same thing to somebody at some time. I think it’s fine.”
“CALL ME THE BREEZE” – Second Helping (MCA, 1974)
“We always liked J.J. Cale and we heard ‘Breeze’ one night sitting around the house and Ronnie said, ‘Let’s do that!’ But it didn’t worked the way he did it—a real straight shuffle—so I wrote the arrangement, which was completely different. If we had changed the lyrics, it would have been a completely different song. We did the same thing to Merle Haggard’s ‘Honky Tonk Night Man.’”
“CROSSROADS” – One More For The Road (MCA, 1976)
“We did that as a tribute to Cream, one of our all-time favorite bands. We saw them on their Farewell tour and they completely blew our minds, so we made this a regular part of our set. In fact, it was our encore for years, until ‘Freebird’ became so big that we basically had to do that last. By the time we recorded the live album, it had been such a part of our set for so long that we felt we had to include it. Also, our producer, Tom Dowd, engineered the Cream version and he told us the story about how it came together, and that really inspired us to want to re-record it.“
“I KNOW A LITTLE” and “YOU GOT THAT RIGHT” – Street Survivors (MCA, 1977)
“I think these two songs sum up what Steve Gaines meant to the band. He wrote both of them and sang ‘You Got That Right’ as a duet with Ronnie. He was a great songwriter and singer–and an incredible guitarist. I’ve never heard anybody, including any of us, play the picking he did on ‘I Know A Little’ quite right. Steve had a lot to do with the writing and arrangements throughout this album and his playing was so good it really inspired us. When he joined, we were kind of an in a lull. We were still doing well—selling a lot of tickets and records—but the music was getting a little boring to us. We needed a little spark of inspiration, and Steve provided it. We started getting together and jamming at night. It put us back in the frame of mind we had had at the beginning.
“Steve was so good, he was a freak of nature. He used to piss us off because he could do so many things that me and Allen couldn’t. Every time I ever went to his house or his hotel room, he had his black Les Paul on. He’d order room service and eat with his guitar on. He’d sit around and talk and not play it for an hour, but it would be strapped on. He’d watch TV with it on, play it during commercials, then stop. It was like his third arm.”
“HONKY TONK NIGHT TIME MAN” – Street Survivors (MCA, 1977)
“This is a Merle Haggard song, which we did to show our love for him and for country music in general. Steve played an incredible solo here also, and it was a live first take. We only knew that it was a G progression and he went out and played a mind-boggling solo. He didn’t even hardly know the song, but he played the shit out of it. We were standing in the control room with our jaws dropped, and he strolled in and said, ‘How’d I do?’ We told him to go home and call it a day, because we knew it couldn’t get any better.”
Alan Paul’s fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. His last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band – debuted in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.
I just had such a nice compliment from a very good friend of Gary's - "when I read your article, I heard his voice." Happy I could capture him for others.
Great article as always, Alan. Interesting that in your conversation, Gary took credit for the opening riff of SWA. It's pretty well documented that Gary had the underlying part, but Ed King came up with the opening riff which he always played in concert as well. He saw a lot of things in his life and held together the reformed band till the end, (sometimes under heavy criticism). I'll tell you what, I saw the reformed band several times and one of those times it was one of the best shows I've ever seen. The vibe was ELECTRIC! Kudos to Gary - he lived his life on his terms always! How many of us can say that?