October 20, 1977: Lynyrd Skynyrd, a "Southern rock" band, give a concert at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina. Afterward, they board a chartered Convair CV-240, to fly to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for their concert the next night at Louisiana State University.
The plane crashes into a forest outside Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines (Steve's sister), assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray.
An engine malfunction caused the pilots to dump the plane's extra fuel, instead of transferring it to another engine like they intended. That's right: The plane crashed because it ran out of gas. It wasn't negligence, or even an error: It was just something that happened.
Also on board, surviving but badly hurt, were guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington, bass guitarist Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell, drummer Artimus Pyle, backing vocalist Leslie Hawkins, band security manager Gene Odom, and road crew members Steve Lawler, Ken Peden and Marc Frank. Collins was paralyzed. Odom was badly burned.
To make matters worse, in a case of "Timing is everything," just 3 days earlier, Skynyrd had released a new album, titled Street Survivors. The cover, as shown above, shows them standing in the middle of a fire. One of the more familiar tracks on the album is titled "That Smell." The lyrics include the words, "Tomorrow might not be here for you," and, "The smell of death surrounds you."
The album would be repackaged, showing the band in front of a black background, and the original cover, much like the "Butcher Sleeve" of the 1966 Beatles compilation album Yesterday and Today, and the original cover of Electric Ladyland showing Jimi Hendrix surrounded by naked women, has become a collector's item.
The band would regroup, with Ronnie's brother Johnny Van Zant singing lead. He had previously led the unimaginatively-titled Johnny Van Zant Band. Another brother, Donnie Van Zant, was the lead singer of another "Southern rock" band, .38 Special.
Collins was in another crash, of his car, in 1986, never fully recovered, and died in 1990. Wilkeson died in 2001, from lung and liver diseases. Powell died of natural causes in 2009. With some irony, Leonard Skinner, the high school gym teacher and basketball coach whose no-long-hair policy convinced Van Zant, Rossington and Burns to sort-of name the band after him, outlived some of them, dying in 2010.
Rossington, Pyle, Hawkins, Odom, Peden, Frank and Lawler are still alive, and all attended a 40th Anniversary memorial service at the crash site in 2017.
UPDATE: Rossington died in 2023. And it took me until 2024 to think of this, but the 1970s were Schrödinger's Decade. There was too much overwrought music, and, at the same time, not enough of it.
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October 20, 1977 was a Thursday. So while it was during the NFL season, there were no games played that day. The baseball season had ended 2 days earlier, when 3 home runs by Reggie Jackson gave the New York Yankees an 8-4 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 6 of the World Series, clinching the World Championship.
One game was played in the NBA that night, and it was in the NBA city closest to the crash site. The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the New Orleans Jazz, 107-104 at the Louisiana Superdome. Pete Maravich scored 29 for the Jazz, and Truck Robinson 28, but the Cavs still won, with Campy Russell leading them with 23. Robinson and Russell would both later play for the New York Knicks. Former Knick Walt Frazier scored 19 for the Cavs.
No games were scheduled for the World Hockey Association on that day, but 4 games were played in the NHL. The New York Rangers and the New York Islanders were not in any of them, but the team that would become the New Jersey Devils was:
* The Colorado Rockies, who became the Devils in 1982, lost to the Buffalo Sabres, 7-5 at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium.
* The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 11-0 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. No, that's not a typo: The Fly Guys beat the Pens eleven to nothing. The Pens did not have Mario Lemieux, nor Jaromir Jagr, nor Sidney Crosby.
* The Montreal Canadiens and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 2-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.
* And the Cleveland Barons beat the Minnesota North Stars, 7-4 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Both teams were in dire financial straits, so the NHL approved their agreement for a merger at the end of the season, under the North Stars name. In the "big four" North American sports leagues, the Barons, who had been the Oakland Seals from 1967 to 1970 and the California Golden Seals from then until 1976, remain the last team to outright fail and go out of business.
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