![\"Street](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Street-Survivors-The-tragic-irony-of-Lynyrd-Skynyrds-classic-1977-album-cover-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x.jpeg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Album Cover)<\/p>\n
Fri 13 February 2026 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
\u201cRonnie sober was an incredible southern gentleman,\u201d former Lynyrd Skynyrd<\/a> drummer Artimus Pyle declared in 1987, speaking of his late bandmate and Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe\u2019d had a long talk in my room for about four hours,\u201d he recalled, \u201c[Ronnie] said, \u2018I\u2019ll never live to see 30\u2019. And, of course, I blew it off. I said, \u2018Man, don\u2019t talk like that\u2019. But he said, \u2018I\u2019m going out with my boots on, and I won\u2019t live to see 30\u2019.\u201d He died at 29.<\/p>\n Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell couldn\u2019t shake the lyrics Van Zant had sung on one of the last songs he recorded, \u2018That Smell\u2019, 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: \u201cThe smell of death surrounds you\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like Ronnie anticipated something was fixing to happen when he wrote that song,\u201d Powell said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u2018That Smell\u2019 wasn\u2019t really intended to be an analysis of Ronnie Van Zant<\/a>\u2019s personal mortality. It was, if anything, more of an admonishment of another member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, guitarist Gary Rossington, who\u2019d recently crashed his new Ford Torino into a tree during a drunken blitz, forcing the band to postpone the start of a tour.<\/p>\n 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. \u2018That Smell\u2019, then, was really a brutally delivered warning rather than a premonition of impending doom. \u201cWhiskey bottles and brand new cars,\u201d Van Zant sings, \u201cOak tree, you\u2019re in my way \/ There\u2019s too much coke and too much smoke \/ Look what\u2019s going on inside you\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of Ronnie\u2019s songs were low-key statements,\u201d Pyle said, \u201cHe wasn\u2019t one to shove something down your throat. \u2018That Smell\u2019 is a comment on alcohol and drug abuse. \u2018Saturday Night Special\u2019 is a comment on gun control. Ronnie definitely tuned into things, but he wasn\u2019t being an angel.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, it\u2019s possible that Van Zant\u2019s 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\u2019s why he saw his life on a razor\u2019s edge, and Gary Rossington certainly understood that, but he never thought Van Zant wanted to die young<\/a>; it was more about not wanting to get old.<\/p>\n \u201cRonnie had a saying,\u201d Rossington said, \u201cHe 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\u201d.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Album Cover) Fri 13 February 2026 22:00, UK \u201cRonnie sober was an incredible southern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,84886,216,217319],"class_list":["post-467294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-lynyrd-skynyrd","tag-music","tag-ronnie-van-zant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}