![]() He was, as ever, happy to look back at the band’s career from the perspective of a successful elder. I last spoke to Gary last year for my upcoming book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and the Album That Defined the ’70s, which includes a fair amount about Lynyrd Skynyrd and the birth of Southern rock. ![]() “After all these years of being married and having kids and grandkids, it brought us back together and thinking about those early days in really nice ways.” “We kept getting requests from fans to do something like this again, and it was really touching that people liked Rossington Collins so much, so we really wanted to do it for them,” Rossington told me. It was his first work outside of Lynyrd Skynyrd in 30 years. In 2016, Gary and Dale released Keep It on Faith, a stripped-down, bluesy album under the name Rossington. “I think having the different sounds keeps things interesting – especially live, when you never know who’s doing what.” One thing that always held them together and kept them out of each other’s way was Rossington’s sturdy, crunchy, rooted playing and his ability to not over play and to stay out of everyone else’s way. But we learned to play hard and mean Gary RossingtonĬollins and Rossington had distinctly different styles, as did King and Steve Gaines, who joined the band in 1977, and every other picker who served in the band since their reunion. ![]() “Ronnie was really a country singer in a rock ’n’ roll band,” Skynyrd guitarist Ed King said. The underlying key to their sound was filtering that British blues rock sound through their own Jacksonville, Florida, sensibilities and marrying it all with Van Zant’s country-tinged songwriting and singing. “We were influenced by Cream, the Yardbirds, Free, the Animals, the Stones and the Beatles,” Rossington said. And although seeing Gregg and Duane Allman, as well as Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley’s pre-Allman Brothers group Second Coming, had a profound impact on the young musicians, British blues-based riff rockers remained their guiding lights. The group’s three core founding members – Van Zant, Rossington and guitarist Allen Collins – abandoned baseball and turned to music in eighth grade after seeing the Rolling Stones on The Ed Sullivan Show.
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