Wednesday 1 July 2020

Special Guest Blogger: Ronnie van Zant

When guitarist Allen Collins first saw me he hid up a tree to avoid me, i was only going to ask him to join a band i was getting together but such was my reputation for giving atomic wedgies and chinese burns, that he crapped himself.
Our first band we called My Backyard and then we changed it to The One Percent but after the millionth taunt of '1% talent' we changed it to Lynyrd Skynyrd after our gym teacher Leonard Skinner who kept on at us to get our haircut.
We got our big break as the starting act for the Who but my being an idiot kid carried on to being an idiot adult and i bullied our first drummer so much that he had a nervous breakdown and threw the hotel cat out the fourth floor window of the place we were staying.
I was regularly drunk and getting into brawls but the boys in the rest of the band were just as bad, two of them were in hospital at the same time while we were recording our second album after both having drunken car accidents but it was the plane accident which really got us noted.
I always said i would die before i was 30, i even told the crowd in Scotland that i was 29 and they won't see me again but that wasn't anything to do with my premonition, i just hated Scotland, too bloody cold and they eat Haggis and you don't want to know what goes into that. 
We were promoting our album, Street Survivors at the time, and in a classic piece of timing the album cover was the band standing amidst a massive ball of flames. 
Our plane was carrying us from South Carolina to Louisiana but it ran out of fuel and the pilot told us to brace for a crash because holding your head in your hands when you fall a couple of thousand feet out the sky is really going to help so i took the last few seconds shaking the hands of my bandmates before the plane hit a tree and killed three of the band and both pilots and our manager in a perfect depiction of our album cover.
My brother is now lead singer in what's left of the band, seems most of them are up here with me but i can't find Allen Collins but i bet he wished he stayed up that tree that morning.

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