Lynyrd Skynyrd are one of the great American rock ’n’ roll bands and the epitome of Southern rock, but as guitarist and founding member Gary Rossington stated in 2012, many of the band’s biggest influences came from the other side of the Atlantic.
In an interview with Classic Rock for the release of Skynyrd’s album Last Of A Dyin’ Breed, Rossington talked about the band’s early years in their hometown of Jacksonville, Florida – and how they were mainly inspired by British music.
It was in 1964 that Rossington got together with singer Ronnie Van Zant, bassist Larry Junstrom, drummer Bob Burns and another guitar player, Allen Collins, to form a band under the original name of My Backyard.
Rossington recalled to Classic Rock: “We all had the same hopes and dreams. We were playing little league baseball when we all first met, and The Beatles came out and the Stones and all these British groups.
“We always said we were British influenced. The British thing came to America and we went, ‘Wow, we wanna do that!’”
They dropped the name My Backyard and tried a few other names – including Conquer The Worm and The Noble Five – before settling on The One Percent around 1967.
Then, in 1968, Rossington decided to have some fun at the expense of a teacher at his old school who had always given him a hard time.
“Leonard Skinner was our gym coach,” Rossington said, “and it was actually just me who was taught by him. The other guys in the band weren’t in his class but they knew of him because he always kicked guys out of school for having their hair too long – if touched your eyebrows or your ears.
"He kicked us out a lot. I say ‘us’ – it was really just me.
“Back in the day we had little bangs like Beatle cuts. The band was playing school dances and parties and stuff, so we tried to have a little long hair.
“I’d put Vaseline in my hair and comb it back like a greaser. And then when we got out of school we’d comb it down into bangs and try to look hip!
“And then finally we were playing a little teen dance and all the people there were from the same school, so we said, ‘We’re not gonna be The One Percent anymore, we’re calling the band Leonard Skinner! And everybody laughed and clapped and thought it was cool. So we kept it. Just spelled it differently.”
Rossington remembered one gig in Jacksonville by a visiting British band that had a huge impact on the nascent Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“We saw the band Free,” he said. “They played in Jacksonville at a skating rink.
“We wanted to see this great band from England that we’d heard about. But we didn’t even know their songs.
“Me and Ronnie and Allen, we watched them set up with their beat-up old Marshalls, and we thought they were cool ’cause they had long hair. And boy, when they played all the cool songs off that first Free album, we were just floored!
“It freaked us out, really. We went back to Ronnie’s apartment and sat up all night talking about being in a band like that. So they were the first guys that made us really get serious. After we saw Free we started rehearsing a lot harder.”
Famously, Skynyrd would rehearse in a tin-roofed shack with Ronnie Van Zant working them hard.
“It was just a cabin in the woods on 55 acres," Rossington said. "This guy had a farm with pigs and cows and a river out back, and by the river was this little bitty one-room cabin with a stove that didn’t work and a bathroom that didn’t work.
“We called it the Hellhouse! We rented that so we could rehearse because we were too loud to play around houses.”
The finest example of Free's influence on Skynyrd is the song Cheatin' Woman, a slow blues track from Skynyrd's 1975 album Nuthin' Fancy.
In the Classic Rock interview, Rossington also named the guitar players who had the biggest influence on him.
“Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff, Hendrix and Jeff Beck. Those guys are my all-time favourites forever and ever,” he said.
“And Duane Allman. We were around when the Allmans were coming up. They were three or four years older than us, so we would watch them too, and we’d learn licks from Duane. We thought they were so great.”
As Rossington put it, making music was a kind of salvation for the guys in Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“We made it out of a poor part of town in Jacksonville, Florida,” he said. “There’s not much around there. Playing music was one way to get out of town and that’s what we were trying to do.
“We learned to be good enough to get out of there! And our dream came true.”
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