“I had a creepy feeling things were going against us,” said Lynyrd Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant in the summer of 1977. Street Survivors, the album released just three days before the plane crash in October that year, always seems irreversibly bound up in that tragedy. But while there may have been strange vibes and bad juju brewing, the band had been rejuvenated.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s newest recruit, 28-year-old Oklahoman guitarist and songwriter Steve Gaines, was an inspired choice, and ended up co-writing the lion’s share of the album. But making Street Survivors was anything but easy.
The band started work with producer Tom Dowd at Miami’s Criteria Studios in December ’76, only to be told by management that the recordings weren’t good enough. After the inevitable bust-up, Ronnie agreed. A second version was cut at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia, the following summer, the final album pieced together from both sessions.
Van Zant’s “creepy feeling” stemmed from a run of dangerous mishaps prior to recording. Ronnie had just become a father, and was trying to curb his excessive lifestyle. In the meantime, Gary Rossington, drunkenly passed out at the wheel of his car, ploughed into an oak tree and a telegraph pole and wound up in hospital.
When fellow guitarist Allen Collins and keyboard player Billy Powell were involved in similar car accidents, Van Zant came up with That Smell: a warning message to his hell-raising bandmates – ‘Too much smoke and too much coke… The smell of death surrounds you’. It was an omen of worse to co
Joining That Smell were two more instantly defining Skynyrd tracks: What’s Your Name and You Got That Right were brawny Southern rockers in the grand tradition of Saturday Night Special. What’s Your Name was a risqué tale of a one-night stand and barroom punch-up, played out to blaring horns; You Got That Right included another prophetic lyric (‘You won’t find me in an old folks home’) and Steve Gaines serving up one of the album’s sweetest solos.
Despite its bad omens, Street Survivors is also an album full of upbeat moments that hint at what Skynyrd might have done next. There’s a cover of Van Zant’s favourite songwriter Merle Haggard’s Honky Tonk Night Time Man, which shows off Skynyrd’s country rock credentials. (Ronnie also cut an alternative version, titled Jacksonville Kid, featured on the album’s 2008 reissue.) Gaines’ I Know A Little was the kind of spicy jazz-blues you could imagine Stevie Ray Vaughan covering.
The original cover infamously showed the group enveloped in flames, quickly reissued with an alternative cover shot. But on both you can still relish Leon Wilkeson’s majestic top hat and ‘My Grass Is Blue’ T-shirt, and the band looking like the last gang in town. Inside, the music is prime Skynyrd: raw, sweet, angry and fun. Separated from the terrible circumstances that surrounded it, Street Survivors sounds like a band reborn.
Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Lynyrd Skynyrd
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