DISGRACELAND - Lynyrd Skynyrd: Busted Teeth, Saturday Night Specials, and the Smell of Death

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant, was a violent bully from the mean streets of Jacksonville, Florida. He tried to maim one of his guitar player’s hands with a broken bottle. He knocked out his piano player’s teeth not once…but twice. He held a gun to his drummer’s head during rehearsal. And when his bandmates followed suit with their own debauched antics, Ronnie turned their drug-and-alcohol flirtations with death into hit songs. Lynyrd Skynyrd even wrote their own eulogy. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter)  Facebook Fan Group TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Stories about Leonard Skinnerd are insane. Their singer Ronnie Van Zan was a violent bully from the mean streets of Jacksonville, Florida. He tried to maim one of his guitar player's hands with a broken bottle. He knocked out his piano player's front teeth not once, but twice. He held a gun to his drummer's head during rehearsal.

And when his bandmates followed suit with their own debauched antics, Ronnie turned their drug and alcohol flirtations with death to hit songs. Great songs. Some of the best and most enduring American rock and roll songs of all time. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called You Can Call Me Betty, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone.

And why would I play you that specific slice of pining by the window cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on October 20, 1977. And that was the day that Leonard Skinner's plane dropped from the sky and crashed into a Mississippi swamp, killing six passengers, including Ronnie Van Zand. On this episode, busted teeth, broken bottles, pining by the window cheese, and Leonard Skinnerd. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Leonard Skinner's drummer, Artemis Pyle, was covered in blood. He dragged his battered body through the swamp.

His ribs felt like they were shattered. Just like that Conver CV-240 was shattered into God-Nose how many pieces when it dropped out of the sky and crashed landed here. Wherever here was. South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, the plane wasn't in the air too long before it all went to shit. Now that two-bit death trap was smoldering on the swamp floor. The members of Leonard Skinnered and their entourage were dying or already dead. When Pyle managed to pull himself out of the destruction,

He saw the pilot and the co-pilot still strapped into their cockpit seats, hanging upside down from a tree. You didn't have to look twice to know they were no longer of this earth. But what about everybody else? Pyle had no idea. Ronnie Van Zan, Leonard Skinner's lead singer and resident ass kicker, hated flying. How's that for a bad woman?

There were others, too. The convare was 30 years old. It looked like something the fucking clampets would tool around in. Arrowsmith straight up refused when they were offered to fly in it. And just yesterday, flying from Miami to Greenville, South Carolina, a 10-foot fireball shot out of the engine at 12,000 feet in the air. Burned for a minute, easy. They all saw it.

That was textbook fucking biblical guidance. You get through this flight, you touch down, you kiss the ground, you thank the Lord, and you do not get back on that plane. Why was Leonard Skinnered in this position in the first place? They were huge. like, blow the Rolling Stones off the stage at Nebworth Huge, about to headline Madison Square Garden huge, and as such they should enjoy the luxuries that a huge band can afford,

like their manager. Netfucker was sitting in first class right now on some commercial flight, while his boys sweated it out in this hunk of junk. What's their name? Everybody knew their name. This wasn't the early 70s anymore. It was October 20th, 1977. Just three days earlier, Leonard Skinnered released their name. fourth studio album, Street Survivors. The critics even liked it. The fans liked it, too. They were a big

deal. The pilots, on the other hand, had acted like yesterday's 10-foot fireball wasn't a big deal. Ronnie followed suit. That was probably just his confrontational machismo trumping his aviation phobia. A dude was born Fiss first. That's what they said at least. He fought anyone and anything, even his bandmates. Ronnie Van Zant wasn't going to let some puddle jumpers scare the bejesis out of him. Besides, the plan was to have the plane serviced when they reached their next destination, Baton Rouge. But they never made it to Baton Rouge. Up in the air, the right engine sputtered, and then it just... The pilots were surprised to notice that they were dangerously low on gas, since they had just fueled up in Greenville.

They decided to find the closest airport for an emergency landing. They began a slow descent. Landing with one working engine probably would have worked, if that is, the left end. engine didn't give out too, which it did. The pilot walked back to the cabin and made the announcement. We're out of gas. Put your heads between your legs and buckle up tight. Artemis Pyle replayed that moment through his head as he continued to drag his ass through the swamp. The sun had gone down. The sound of cicadas had gone down with it. And in their place, all Pyle could hear so rush a rush of wind after the convair's second engine failed. Then the sound of the wind was replaced

by the violent sound of trees hitting the undercarriage as the plane sank lowered to the ground. First, one tree, then another and another, and suddenly 10, 15, 20 tree tops, all smacking the plane at once, and then ripping it apart like beast disemboweling their prey. Pyle shook the sounds from his head and moved through the swamp. He hadn't always been a drummer. He was ex-Marine. Once a leatherneck, always a leatherneck. Marines didn't give up, and they didn't leave anyone behind. The swamp, on the other hand, had different ideas. The swamp was a sunken tableau of mud and vines and grass and twigs, the dead limbs of mighty oak trees abandoned and forgotten. The low croak of bullfrogs sang their ancient forest ballad. Pyle looked up. Helicopters.

That was nice and all, but he didn't have time to wait for the search party to land. He crossed over a creek, snakes hissed in the muck. At long last, he saw a barbed wire fence up in the distance, and just beyond it, a herd of cattle, civilization. Pyle hoped to God that someone was home. He slid under the fence and approached the farmhouse. The cows standing in the field gave him blank stairs. Not so much for the farmer who had emerged from his homestead with a shotgun in his hand. He looked at Pyle like he was a blood-soaked, long-haired hippie swamp thing. He saw the copters circling above. He knew there was a prison camp nearby. He put two and two together. He cocked his firearm, raised it, and then he pulled the trigger. It was supposed to be a warning shot.

But Artemis Pyle felt the buckshot tear into his shoulder. That sealed it. Pyle knew he wasn't in South Carolina or Mississippi or Louisiana. He didn't need no bullfrog croak in its primordial folktale to tell him where he was. He caught a whiff first of gumpowder and then of hot metal charring his flesh. Can you smell that smell? Destruction. Death. In 1972, five years before their blossoming superstardom was cut short by a fatal plane crash.

Leonard Skinnerd were big fish in a little pond. The pond was Jacksonville, Florida, a town that wasn't big enough for two shit-hot local bands. Lucky for Skinner, Dwayne, and Greg had taken the almonds over to Macon. Skinnerdard stuck around. They made an impression. Whether they were calling themselves Conqueror Worm or the Noble Five, the 1% or Sons of Satan, the name they eventually settled on and dared them to a particular subset of Jacksonville denizens. those long-haired hippie types whose very appearance made the old-school rednecks nervous.

Leonard Skinner was a real person, a high school gym teacher at, yes, Robert E. Lee High School. He got soon-to-be Skinner guitarist Gary Rossington suspended because Gary's hair touched his shirt collar and fell within two fingers of his eyebrows, thus violating the high and tight dress code. But it wasn't just their long hair and fuck the man's sense of humor that got Skinnered notice. They could fucking play. They played so damn well that Alan Walden, formerly of Capricorn Records, picked them over the 186 other bands he auditioned in the course of one year and signed them to a management contract.

They played so well that Al Cooper, Bob Dylan's rock and roll Zellig, signed them to his brand-new MCA records in Prick called Sounds of the South after witnessing them kill at a small club. But if they ever wanted to make it outside the Greater Jacksonville area, they needed more original songs. So they rented a one-room shack, some 30 miles outside of town, to write and rehearse. No AC. And if the heat didn't kill you, then maybe the gaiters and cotton miles would.

They called it Hell House. It wasn't just the heat that made the cabin feel like purgatory. Ronnie Van Zant was a take-no-shit taskmaster. Practice was 9 a.m. to dusk, every day. No entourage, no girls. You played the song, and then he played it again. He fucked up the intro. Stop. Do it again.

You played the solo different than last time? Stop. Do it again. Leon Wilkerson's bass had to be married to Bob Burns' kick drum, and the guitar onslaught of Gary Rossington, Alan Collins, and Ed King, the triple threat they dubbed the guitar army. That had to be assassin-level precise. Leave the shroom shit to the almonds.

Jammin' wasn't Skinnard's across the bear. Skinnerd was tight. Skinnered live sounded just like Skinnerd on record. Even their show-stopping ballad turned Barnburn or Freebird, the stairway to Heaven of the South. That song was mathematically precise every time they played it. He could cut glass with that tune.

And that was all because Ronnie Van Zant held Skinner's feet to the Hell House fire. Now after hours, after hours was when Ronnie switched gears and lived what he called the rock gut life. The rock gut life was bottomless bottles of scotch, broken noses, and busted fists. It was when the booze did the talking for you.

It did the fighting too. Ronnie Van Zant wasn't just a street survivor from a poor neighborhood. He was a street fighter. There didn't have to be a reason why he fought. Maybe a guy looked at him the wrong way on the sidewalk. Maybe a guy didn't look at him at all. It didn't fucking matter. You wanted to exit the room with all your teeth, right?

So first you had to figure out how you were going to get past Ronnie Van Zan. Ronnie's own mother thought he was the mean of some bitch in town, but, you know, moms are biased like that. And though Ronnie Van Zant may have been, as his heroes of Rolling Stones sang about a street fighting man, He was not, to paraphrase a Skinnerd song, a simple kind of man. Ronnie was complicated. Ronnie could write a song like The Needle and the Spoon,

a cautionary tale about heroin, while still dabbling and stuff that was way harder than Chimis Regal. Ronnie could write a song like Sweet Home Alabama, a Southern man's proud battle cry, shit-talking Canadian liberals be damned, and do it while not only claiming that the divisive Confederate flag hoisted at Skinner shows in the mid-70s was not his idea but merely a marketing gimmick by MCA records, but also by loving the hell out of a certain Canadian liberal, Mr. Neil Young, the one who had diss Southern men

not once but twice in his own songs. Ronnie did, as it turns out, need Mr. Young around, but I digress and more on that age-old beef later. Ronnie Van Zank could even champion gun control in a song like Saturday Night Special, while simultaneously putting the fear of God into his bandmates with a loaded Pistol. Bob Burns, Leonard Skinner's original drummer, was burning up inside Hellhouse. Ronnie was cracking the whip again. Bob just wanted to be done. Ronnie didn't care what Bob did or didn't want. Leonard Skinnerd weren't going to grab that big brass ring by quitting when they were tired. As bassist, Leon Wilkerson once said, Ronnie ran Skinner like Stalin ran Russia. The Saturday Night's special came out fast, Barrow blue and cold. Ronnie stuck it against Bob's temple, play the mother

fucking song, Ronnie said, or I'm going to blow your brains all over this room. Bob and the rest of the band feared Ronnie even more than they loved and respected him. They did what Ronnie said. That was the only path. It was a path of destruction. At first, Skinner destroyed the bands they opened up for. They could fuck up the competition just by showing up. Asked the band that was playing at Greenfield Stables when Skinner's van arrived on site. Fans screamed and cheered so loudly for Skinner that they drowned out the music being played on stage. Do you know who that band was? Neither do I.

No one remembers them, but everyone remembered Leonard Skinnerd, for better or for worse. 1973. Daily City, California. Keith Moon was drunk. Or maybe it was the Pils, the ones meant to knock out a horse

or put an elephant on its ass. Either way, Keith was sprawled out backstage at the Cowell Palace. He could barely sit up straight, let alone play. And the other members of the Who quickly came to a solution. The drummer for the old, opening band could fill in. That was easier said than done. Playing or partying, Leonard Skidard went toe to toe. There were also quick studies. Touring with The Who would prove to be their big break,

a serious promotion from playing to audience of a thousand on a good night to 19,000 every night. But it also proved to be the moment where Ronnie Van Zanz's rock gut life bled over into band life. Replaying or fighting. It was hard to tell the difference while you're busy setting a new pace. The Who plays loud, you play louder. Keith Moon gets drunk, you get drunker. Which explains why Skinner's drummer, Bob Burns, did not fill in for Mooney that evening because, just like his British counterpart, Bob Burns was plastered. Instead, some 19-year-old got the dream gig of a lifetime when he was hauled from the crowd

to sit in with one of the biggest bands on the planet. Skinner could relate to the luck of the 19-year-old kid. Thanks to the connections of their producer, Al Cooper, they were opening for The Who. and thanks to The Who, they now had the attention of audiences beyond Jacksonville. This, coming on the heels of a hit debut album, pronounced Leonard Skinnerd, which peaked at number 27 on the Billboard album chart. It felt like the beginning of a new chapter. For Bob Burns, however, it was the beginning of the end.

The next year, 1974, on tour in England, Bob Burns saw the devil. It stared at him from behind the eyes of a hotel owner's cat. The thing was possessed and it had to die. Bob grabbed the cat, made his way to the top floor of the hotel, tossed it out a window. They say a cat always lands on its feet. This is not true. This cat died on impact. The devil, on the other hand, wouldn't be killed off so easily.

Pretty soon he was back, this time in the eyes of Skinner's road manager. Bob knew it. He looked into those eyes and trembled. Once again, he knew what he had to do. He had to cast out Satan with extreme prejudice and Ronnie Van Zan caliber violence. But although Bob Burns tanked up on codeine-laced whiskey and chased the guy down the street with a pickaxe, he never caught up with him. Life on the road, on the other hand. Life with Ronnie.

The rock gut life. That caught up with Bob real fucking quick. And so Bob Burns spiraled out of control and right out of Leonard Skinnered. Fast. Not Ronnie Van Zand. Ronnie was going to take his time, go down slow at first and then pick up speed, like a Conver CV-240 with two busted engines dropping from the sky, and he was going to take the whole band down with him.

We'll be right back after this world, word, word. Years before, became drunken shorthand for hecklers at concerts. Freebird was a cathartic finale at Leonard Skinner's live shows. It had everything. The sensitive part that he swayed to while holding. your lighter in the air, and the double-time guitar army climax that left your face melted. And though it ran nine minutes long, Freebird was a staple of 1970s rock radio, thanks to the AOR or album-oriented rock radio format, where DJs on the FM dial were keen to play any and all

album tracks they deemed worthy. MCA, however, wouldn't release Freebird as a single. And why would they? The song single-handedly made Skinnard's debut album a massive commercial success. It wasn't until November of 1974, more than a year after the album was released, the Freebird was finally released as a single. By that time, Skinner's sophomore album's second-helping was already on shelves, and one of that album's singles was making ways for entirely different reasons. Ronnie Van Zant and Skinner guitarist Ed King and Gary Rosington wrote Sweet Home Alabama, in response to the song Southern Man in Alabama, both by Neil Young,

both unflinching portraits of deep-seated racism in the deep south. Ronnie was proud of a Southern heritage. He wasn't a dumb redneck. He didn't think it was fair for Neil to lump all Southerners together as bigots. So he called out Neil Young by name and what would become Skinner's highest-charting single. But it was the song's other call-out that attracted moral controversy. George Wallace, the Alabama governor, who championed at Jim Crow South, in the middle of the civil rights movement.

The guy known for lines like segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. He got his own moment in Sweet Home Alabama. But was it Skinner's saluting or lampooning the infamous politician? Ronnie gave an interview in the mid-70s where he called the song A Joke, but then went on to call Wallace a gentleman with a lot of nerve and balls. Ed King was less coy when it came to the band's politics. Ronnie was a big fan of George Wallace, he later said. He totally supported him. We all did. We respected the way Wallace stood up for the South.

Anybody who tells you differently is lying. Ronnie's supposed beef with Neil Young wasn't a lie exactly. It was an opportunity to rally Skinner's base. It was good for business. But off the record, even after the sweet home Alabama dust up, Ronnie regularly wore Neil Young T-shirts in concert. He even wore one on the cover of the street Survivor's album. And Neil passed on his home demos to Skinner. He wanted them to record his song. powder finger on an upcoming record. They never got around to it. Which meant the existing narrative, the one that lived and breathed on the airwaves,

carried on their fictionalized rift for decades. It still does today. But this is the real story. Neil Young loved Ronnie Van Zant and Ronnie Van Zant loved Neil Young. Ed King, on the other hand, didn't feel Ronnie Van Zan's love. All Ed King felt was Ronnie Van Zan's wrath. Ronnie bitched and moaned about Ed's playing. Over and over. Ed was Garage Rock royalty, former member of the Strawberry Alarm Clock,

co-writer of the number one hit incense and peppermints. That was a nugget if he dug it, but Ed never got that respect. There was a pecking order in Skinner. Ronnie Van Zant was on top. Everyone else was down below. The abuse was verbal. The abuse was physical. Ed King couldn't take it. He didn't see the devil like Bob Burns did, but he saw the writing on the wall all the same. In 1975, a year in which Ronnie was arrested no less than five times for being shit-faced, Skinner embarked on a 90-day 61 show tour to support their third album, Nothing Fancy. They called it the Torture Tour. The tour was aptly named.

Ronnie berated Ed backstage after a show in Pittsburgh. Ed bounced, back to his hotel room where he packed a shit and left in the middle of the night. He never came back. He didn't know it then, but Ed King got out while the getting was good. Not so much for Billy Powell, the band's piano player. Billy made the unfortunate decision of arguing with Skinner's road manager in a hallway directly outside Ronnie's hotel room. Ronnie opened the door and told him to cut the shit.

Billy told Ronnie to mind his own fucking business. Ronnie punched Billy square in the mouth. Billy stumbled back. He tasted blood as it rushed from his lip, and then he felt his two front teeth bouncing around in his mouth. Just a week later at the tour's closing date in Jacksonville, it was Ronnie's turn to taste blood. He started coughing just a few songs into the set and tasted warm iron in his mouth. All that's singing from the throat and not from the gut.

They cut the show short. The audience rioted. They tossed bottles. They fucked up Skinner's gear. Police drew their revolvers. Kids got their arms chewed up by canines. Sixteen people were arrested. Ronnie's street-fighting rock-gut life manifested itself by osmosis.

Backstage, Ronnie needed something for the riot in his throat, something to make the pain go away. Pills, coat, booze, something stronger, something, anything. The peppermin schnapps tasted good on ice. It wasn't like bourbon or scotch. It went down real easy. The boys and Leonard Skinner had ordered another round, and then another. Conversation turned. What the hell even was schnapps?

And how did you say that word? Schnapps, schnapps, schnops, schnops. "'Schnops, right? Shnops.' Ronnie Van Zandt wasn't amused. The more he drank, the more he wasn't the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the world anymore. He was the neighborhood bully. You pronounce it schnapps, you dumb fuck, like shut up and stop,

smooched together, fucking idiot saying words all wrong and shit. That's Ronnie, by the way, not me. So the band got back to their hotel room, and they were pissed off, and Ronnie was still pissed too. So he did what he always did when he was pissed. He started swinging his fists around. The guy's told him to cool it, and that just made him angry.

Rear. Ronnie grabbed a bottle and smashed it. Then he waved around a jagged piece of glass clutches in his fist. Someone was going to get fucked up tonight. Gary Rosington would do. I'm going to cut your hands, Ronnie said to Gary. You're not going to play guitar again. Ronnie slashed. The glass cut open Gary's hand. Ronnie slashed again and again. Slice Gary's other hand. Again and again and again, slash, slice, slash, slash, slice. Until Gary's hands were chopped to hell and the blood was everywhere. Skinnerd's road manager took care of the whole thing like he always did. He had a briefcase stocked with $250,000 in cash just for shit like this. Bail money, hush money, blood and glass on hotel room, carpet floor money.

But although money mended Gary's hands, throwing money at a problem didn't always fix it. And the problems kept coming. Not just Ronnie's problems. The crew got into it with some asshole who wouldn't stop running his mouth at the bar one night. Words turned to elbows in the face, which then turned into Skinner getting. tossed out on the street. That incident was immortalized in the Leonard Skinner's song, What's Your Name? The lead off track to the album's Street Survivors, released in October of 1977. That album also featured the song, That Smell, partly inspired by Gary,

fucked up on Quiludes and Booze when he drove his brand new Ford Torino at high speed through a telephone pole, then a parked car, an oak tree, and finally into a house. No wait, it wasn't Gary who hit the park car. That was another Skinner guitarist Alan Collins when he got into it in his own automobile wreck. Ronnie used Gary and Allen's car accidents as inspiration for the cautionary tale that was that smell. You know, do his skinnered boy say, not as we do. Still, can you imagine the guy who gets so fucked up that he carves up your hands with a broken

bottle, hands that you use to make your living in his band, or he knocks out your teeth in a hotel hallway, which, for the record, was not the last time Ronnie punched out to piano player's teeth. That's the same guy who comes to your hospital where he gives you a guilt trip for crashing your car and then writes a fucking song about it. I got a word for a guy like that. Asshole. Leonard Skinner had a song for everything, though, it seemed.

Bar fights, car crashes, guns, drugs. They even wrote their own eulogy. They just didn't know it yet. Artemis Pyle's shoulder burned from where the buckshot had hit him. He held up his hands in the air as the farmer reloaded. Don't shoot, he yelled. And then he desperately told the farmer who he was and what had happened. By the time rescue crews arrived on the evening of October 20th, 1977,

at the site of Leonard Skinner's plane crash near Gillsburg, Mississippi, a stretch of tree-line swamp called Slaughterhouse Road. The bone pickers were already picking up on that smell, not just the smell of death, but of morbid opportunity. They picked up wallets, purses, cash, jewelry. All of it stolen while 20 survivors lay there bleeding. Like Guy Rawzington, one leg in both arms broken, his stomach and liver punctured. In Billy Powell, whose facial lacerations were so severe, his nose was hanging off his face.

And the band's security chief, Gene Odom, blind in one eye with a broken neck, whose final words to the pilots before the crash were, I hope you two sons of bitches live through this so I can kill you both. Gene Odom didn't get to carry out his threat. The pilot and co-pilot were both dead, hanging from their cockpit seat upside down in a tree. Steve Gaines, the guitarist who had replaced Ed King just the year before, and his sister Casey, one of Skinner's new backup singers,

were also among the dead, as was Skinnerd's tour manager, and Ronnie Van Zand, who was not in his seat at the time of the crash, but was passed out on the cabin floor, either from a stiff drink, a sedative, or both. He died from blunt-forced trauma to his forehead, most likely from a tree limb that thrust through a window

during that harrowing descent into the Mississippi tree line. Other details of the crash were as ambiguous as Ronnie's lyrics. The National Travel Safety Bureau's official report ruled the crash was caused by, quote, fuel exhaustion and total loss of power from both engines due to crew in attention to fuel supply, unquote. In other words, the plane burned through gas at an abnormally high rate and the pilots failed to notice it until it was too late. Still, to some, it sure was convenient that Peter Rudge, Skinner's manager since Alan Walden left in 1974, chose to ride first class on a commercial plane instead of in the least Corvair with the rest of the boys.

Others grasped for clues on the cover of street survivors. Skinner's final album with Ronnie Van Zan in their original lineup, released just days before the crash. The cover showed the band standing on a street surrounded by flames, as if they were making a defiant stand in hell itself. The photograph was said to be prophetic, that the members touched by flames in the photo were the ones to perish in the crash. Closer inspection of the cover showed that actually all members of the band were touched by the flames in one way or another. Nevertheless, MCA pulled the original cover and replaced it with a similar shot of the band standing in utter darkness, illuminated only by a spotlight. And in that darkness, they remained.

Leonard Skinner disbanded, but the crash wasn't the end of their suffering. The swamp, the darkness, the devil, hell, none of that was through with them yet. In the aftermath of the tragedy, one rowdy took his own life. Another was institutionalized. Guitarist Alan Collins lost his wife and childbirth,

and then, years later, lost his girlfriend when he crashed his Ford Thunderbird into a ditch. The accident left Alan paralyzed from the chest down. Surviving band members argued and sued each other, largely over Leonard Skinner's legacy. Many of them had it out for their manager, Peter Rudge, who wanted to lease the plane but refused to ride in it. As a result, Rudge nearly killed himself with cocaine and alcohol. And after a 10-year hiatus, Linnard Skinnerd returned, but they were never the same.

Linnard Skiner 2.0 has been around for decades now. longer than the original lineup ever was. Ronnie's younger brother Johnny is the band's lead vocalist, not to be confused with the third Van Zamp brother, Donnie, former lead singer for 38 special. Gary Rossington remains the band's only original member. If you're seeing Leonard Skinner these days, you're watching a glorified tribute band.

All the things that made Leonard Skinnered for better or worse, the mystery, the danger, the violence. All of that either got left at the bottom of a Mississippi swamp or was put six feet in a hole. June 29, 2000, Jacksonville Memory Garden Cemetery, 3 a.m. Clay County Sheriff's deputies responding to a disturbance were shocked at what they found. Someone had robbed the graves of Steve Gaines and Ronnie Van Zant. Near the smashed marble mausoleums, a plastic bag containing Steve Gaines' ashes was on the ground.

Next to it was Ronnie's casket, which had been wrestled from its tomb. The vandals either weren't able to pry open the casket. or they got spooked and ran off before they could do further damage. The cops didn't have any leads. For more than 22 years, the final resting place of Steve Gaines and Ronnie Van Zant had been a mecca for Skinner fans to pay their respects. Not just to the memory of those two men, but to the memory of Leonard Skinner, which for all intents and purposes died in that Mississippi swamp back in 1977.

And for more than 22 years, visitors treated the grounds with respect, but not on this night. The families were horrified. They moved the remains of Steve Gaines and Ronnie Van Zandt to an undisclosed private location where they could carry out eternity and peace. And why would someone do such a thing? Dig up a grave. Did they do it for no other reason than to just do it?

Just like Ronnie Van Zant didn't need a reason to fight. Or was it something else? Were the vandals hoping to confirm one final long-standing rumor? Was Ronnie Van Zan really buried wearing a? is Neil Young t-shirt. Can't you smell that smell? Destruction. Death. Disgrace. Disgraceland was created by yours truly

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