(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Fri 13 February 2026 22:00, UK
“Ronnie sober was an incredible southern gentleman,” former Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle declared in 1987, speaking of his late bandmate and Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant.
Pyle, who survived the 1977 plane crash that killed Van Zant and five others, remembered having deep conversations with the singer in the years prior, including one that particularly stuck with him. “We’d had a long talk in my room for about four hours,” he recalled, “[Ronnie] said, ‘I’ll never live to see 30’. And, of course, I blew it off. I said, ‘Man, don’t talk like that’. But he said, ‘I’m going out with my boots on, and I won’t live to see 30’.” He died at 29.
Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell couldn’t shake the lyrics Van Zant had sung on one of the last songs he recorded, ‘That Smell’, from the album released just days before the fatal crash, ironically titled Street Survivors. One of the key lines of the song, and one that Skynyrd fans shuddered at when they heard the record in the wake of the disaster, was: “The smell of death surrounds you”.
“It’s like Ronnie anticipated something was fixing to happen when he wrote that song,” Powell said.
It’s strange how tragedy can cloud the memory and recontextualise things. As Pyle and Powell would have likely known during the recording of Street Survivors, the song ‘That Smell’ wasn’t really intended to be an analysis of Ronnie Van Zant’s personal mortality. It was, if anything, more of an admonishment of another member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, guitarist Gary Rossington, who’d recently crashed his new Ford Torino into a tree during a drunken blitz, forcing the band to postpone the start of a tour.
Van Zant was greatly displeased, fining Rossington $5,000 and pushing a policy that the next Skynyrd tour would be a clean one: free of drugs and alcohol. ‘That Smell’, then, was really a brutally delivered warning rather than a premonition of impending doom. “Whiskey bottles and brand new cars,” Van Zant sings, “Oak tree, you’re in my way / There’s too much coke and too much smoke / Look what’s going on inside you”.
“A lot of Ronnie’s songs were low-key statements,” Pyle said, “He wasn’t one to shove something down your throat. ‘That Smell’ is a comment on alcohol and drug abuse. ‘Saturday Night Special’ is a comment on gun control. Ronnie definitely tuned into things, but he wasn’t being an angel.”
In other words, it’s possible that Van Zant’s warning might have been aimed not just at Rossington, but at himself, at all of his bandmates, and his listeners, for that matter. His own battles with addiction were no secret, and it’s why he saw his life on a razor’s edge, and Gary Rossington certainly understood that, but he never thought Van Zant wanted to die young; it was more about not wanting to get old.
“Ronnie had a saying,” Rossington said, “He wanted to be killed by a jealous husband, or just doing something exciting, not just being old and dying. But that was just the way he talked”.