Artumus Pyle, monster drummer. Hard to emulate live.
It’s interesting how many great musicians died tragically and especially in plane crashes.
I was at the Hollywood Sportatorium to see their last concert....and to us locals then it was no secret what happened
Stalled due to fuel exhaustion, destroyed on impact during emergency landing attempt.
Story has it the Convair 330 was having fuel problems earlier dumping fuel in flight.
This revives a strange memory for me.
I had a good friend back then, Duke Baugher, who I had recently introduced to aviation. He went all in, and decided to get his commercial pilot’s license and become an airline pilot. This entailed accumulating a lot of air hours, so he would fly anything, anywhere to further his quest. He called me late one night from Greenville, SC airport, as he sometimes checked in randomly. He said, “You’re not going to believe this.I just walked around the tour plane for Lynyrd Skynyrd while they were refueling my plane! It’s parked right next to me on the ramp!”
We agreed that it was about the coolest thing in the world, talked some more, and said goodbye. I drifted off to sleep with WMMR-FM on my radio in the Philly suburbs. Good to hear from my buddy!
I awoke to a loud version of Free Bird playing on the radio in the wee hours, with the DJ sadly announcing the fatal crash of that same plane just hours after my buddy had called me about it. How sad and weird was that? I remember it like it was last week.
My kinda music. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band, Outlaws, ZZ Top, Charlie Daniels, Yee Hah.
Johnny endorsing Mitt *almost* makes up for wimping out to the PC crowd and dropping the Confederate flag.
Almost.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2012/08/lynyrd-skynyrd-frontman-backs-romney-132352.html
I’ve got the original “Street Survivors” album.
[before they changed the cover]
Never played it.
Still in the plastic.
When they came on people were talking, until they started playing, then the crowd let out a big roar of approval. We almost didn't even want to see The Who by the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd's performance. Of course The Who put on a great performance as well. All in all an awesome concert.
I went to the record store the next morning to get their album. The guy at the store had no clue who I was talking about, and he was no slouch when it came to music. I think it took him about a week to get the album to me.
Yesterday a local (Houston) radio guy talked about this anniversary and played their music all day. MichaelBerry@Iheartradio.com.
The Busy season was picking up, pre-Christmas and Weddings. It was a Sad day, all the kitchen guys were blue-collar football types listening to "WCCC" on 1st gen boom boxes if you will, we were all bumbing, they were all pretty lively but man they all were quiet...
I recently heard Artimus Pyle call into a radio show, he said he ran to get help after the crash and the farmer whose place he stumbled upon actually shot him in the shoulder. He said he was covered in blood, and looked like a member of the Manson family, and didn’t blame the young kid too much. The person who shot him was a young man who was a fan, and worried that if his neighbors found out he shot Skynard’s drummer after the band’s plane went down he would be lynched.
I had never heard that part of it before.
Freegards