“I had a creepy feeling things were going against us,” said Lynyrd Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant in the summer of 1977. Street Survivors, the album released just three days before the plane crash in October that year, always seems irreversibly bound up in that tragedy. But while there may have been strange vibes and bad juju brewing, the band had been rejuvenated.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s newest recruit, 28-year-old Oklahoman guitarist and songwriter Steve Gaines, was an inspired choice, and ended up co-writing the lion’s share of the album. But making Street Survivors was anything but easy.
