“When we got together, the scene in Jacksonville was pretty bad. Rossington, Burns, Van Zant, and guitarist Allen Collins gathered that afternoon at Burns’ Jacksonville home to jam the Rolling Stone’s “Time Is on My Side.” An early version of Lynyrd Skynyrd was born. During a fateful Little League game, Ronnie Van Zant hit a line drive into the shoulder blades of opposing player Burns and met his future bandmates. Upon meeting drummer Bob Burns and bassist Larry Junstrom, Rossington and his new friends formed a band, which they tried to juggle amid their love of baseball. Rossington was born December 4th, 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised by his mother after his father died. It’s just really hard traveling and getting by with that stuff.” It’s so hard on me, especially when you got heart trouble. “I don’t get enough oxygen in my blood to keep up and keep going like normal,” Rossington told Rolling Stone in November 2022.
#LYNYRD SKYNYRD GUITARIST FULL#
At recent shows, Rossington would perform portions of the concert and sometimes sat out full gigs. In later years, Rossington navigated a barrage of heart problems: he underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, suffered a heart attack in 2015, and had numerous subsequent heart surgeries, most recently leaving Lynyrd Skynyrd in July 2021 to recover from another procedure.
He survived a brutal car accident in 1976 in which he drove his Ford Torino into a tree, inspiring the band’s cautionary song “That Smell.” A year later, he emerged from the infamous 1977 plane crash that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver. Rossington was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s last surviving original member, a stoic figure who preferred to let his guitar do the talking and who cheated death more than once.
Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family’s privacy at this difficult time.”
“Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. “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 Facebook. Gary Rossington, a founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd whose ethereal slide guitar helped make the Southern rock band’s song “Free Bird” an indelible anthem, died Sunday at the age of 71.
0 kommentar(er)
