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The Heart And Soul Of Lynyrd Skynyrd
Band members, friends recall band’s fast rise and fall
Few bands have been as poorly served by the jukebox as Lynyrd Skynyrd. Reduced to a series of sing-a-long choruses by inebriated bar patrons, one of rock & roll’s most pure practitioners has received some positive revisionist treatment over the past year. First, the Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a left-field success that revels in the Skynyrd mythology from a narrative that uses the legendary band as a touchstone, all the way down to a reverent co-opting of Skynyrd’s three-guitar attack. And more recently, a pair of books released this month, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the plane crash that killed frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and background singer Cassie Gaines, furthers Skynyrd’s overdue, reconstructed myth.
