Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s final surviving authentic member who additionally helped to discovered the group, died Sunday on the age of 71. No explanation for dying was given.
“It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today,” the band wrote on Fb. “Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family’s privacy at this difficult time.”
Rossington cheated dying greater than as soon as, Rolling Stone reported. He survived a automotive accident in 1976 during which he drove his Ford Torino right into a tree, inspiring the band’s cautionary tune “That Smell.” A yr later, he emerged from the 1977 aircraft crash that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, with two damaged arms, a damaged leg, and a punctured abdomen and liver.
“It was a devastating thing,” he instructed Rolling Stone in 2006. “You can’t just talk about it real casual and not have feelings about it.”
In later years, Rossington underwent quintuple bypass surgical procedure in 2003, suffered a coronary heart assault in 2015, and had quite a few subsequent coronary heart surgical procedures, most lately leaving Lynyrd Skynyrd in July 2021 to get well from one other process. At current reveals, Rossington would carry out parts of the live performance and generally sat out full gigs.
Rossington was born Dec. 4, 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised by his mom after his father died. Upon assembly drummer Bob Burns and bassist Larry Junstrom, Rossington and his new buddies fashioned a band, which they tried to juggle amid their love of baseball.
In response to Rolling Stone, it was throughout a fateful Little League sport, Ronnie Van Zant hit a line drive into the shoulder blades of opposing participant Bob Burns and met his future bandmates. Rossington, Burns, Van Zant, and guitarist Allen Collins gathered that afternoon at Burns’ Jacksonville house to jam the Rolling Stone’s “Time Is on My Side.”
Adopting Lynyrd Skynyrd because the group’s identify — each a reference to a equally named sports activities coach at Rossington’s highschool and to a personality within the 1963 novelty hit “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” — the band launched their debut album (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ’Pores and skin-’nérd) in 1973. A set of country-tinged blues-rock and Southern soul, the album included now-classics like “Tuesday’s Gone,” “Simple Man” and “Gimme Three Steps,” but it surely was the closing observe, the practically 10-minute “Free Bird,” that grew to become the group’s calling card, due in no small half to Rossington’s evocative slide enjoying on his Gibson SG.
Rossington instructed Rolling Stone that he by no means thought-about Skynyrd to be a tragic band, regardless of all of the band’s drama and dying. “I don’t think of it as tragedy — I think of it as life,” he mentioned upon the group’s Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame induction in 2006. “I think the good outweighs the bad.”
The Related Press contributed to this text
Learn the complete article here
