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“All the guests got to pick a Lynyrd Skynyrd song,” says Rossington. It’ll be released later this summer as a DVD and CD called One More for the Fans! featuring a slew of guests including Gregg Allman, Peter Frampton, Robert Randolph, Warren Haynes, Blackberry Smoke, Charlie Daniels, Jason Isbell and John Hiatt.
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Like the original, it was staged at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre and recorded. He understandably prefers to dwell on the positive stuff, including the concert the current version of Skynyrd-featuring him, Blackfoot frontman Rickey Medlocke and Mark Matejka on guitars-played on November 12, 2014, celebrating One More from the Road. He rarely mentions it directly, preferring to complete relevant sentences with terms like, “until, well, you know…” or simply pausing to skip a beat. The accident understandably hangs over Rossington’s conversations about the band like a ghost. The group’s decade-long hiatus began with a nightmarish post-concert plane crash on October 20, 1977, near Gillsburg, Mississippi, that killed Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray just three days after the release of Street Survivors. Rossington is the sole survivor of the original incarnation of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which lasted for 11 years. It’s a lot better than being fucked up all the time, and I thank God I made it through those days.” I’ve had some heart problems and I’m on the straight and narrow. “Eventually I learned that drugs are just horrible for you,” he continues, “but that’s the way it was in rock and roll in our time. My guitar sound was hot…with the feedback. “I still remember the day we cut that in the studio.
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“I did get in a car wreck, but we got a good song out of it,” says Rossington.
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The first half of that title is pulled from the opening lines of “That Smell,” a song original Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant wrote for Street Survivors after Rossington smashed his new Ford Torino into an oak tree and a house while on a bender. The original Lynyrd Skynyrd were a hard-partying bunch, inclined to an excessive amount of excess-booze, drugs, groupies and fights that sometimes sent its members to the hospital, all chronicled in Mark Ribowsky’s new book Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars: The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Today, Rossington, who’s 63, says he’s also made peace with his demons. “Sure, we were from the South and we grew up on blues and country, but we really loved the blues and rock that was coming from England, and that’s what we wanted to play.” Like the Allman Brothers’ Dickey Betts, who thought of his band with Duane and Gregg Allman as progressive rock, Rossington made peace with the brand over time. “We just wanted to be a rock band,” says Rossington today, via phone from his mansion in Georgia.
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