It was sad to see that Gary Rossington, the last surviving member of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd band, passed away on Sunday at 71.
On the band's Facebook page, this message: "It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today. Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family's privacy at this difficult time."
No cause of death was given, but Rossington had cheated the cemetery several times before. If you remember the Skynyrd song "That Smell" from the 1977 "Street Survivors" album, well, that was about his car accident the year before, when his Ford Torino collided with a tree ("Oak tree, you're in my way!") Then came the plane crash later in '77 which killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, and left Rossington with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver.
More recently, Rossington had quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, had a heart attack in 2015, and had several other heart surgeries. For the past several years, his participation with the band had been limited due to his health concerns.
Stop me if you've heard this before, but the band's name did not come from the mention of a Leonard Skinner, who "got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner" at Camp Grenada, in a 1963 song by comedian Allan Sherman.
It wasn't until a decade later, 1973, that the band released their first album, "Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd" in 1973. If you fell in love with the country-blues-rock sound of LS (I did!), well, that slide guitar on the classic rock classic "Free Bird" was by Gary Rossington, who had been a student at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida.
(For those of you not born and raised in the USA, it was, inexplicably, for several centuries a matter of pride to the side that lost the Civil War to name schools, armories, ships, and shopping malls for the leaders of the losers that fought with the rest of the United States over their right to own human beings.)
The physical education teacher at good old Robert E. Lee was a man named Leonard Skinner. If you sent out to Central Casting for a bullet-headed unreconstructed good-ole'-boy Confederate-style gym teacher, you couldn't find a more ne plus ultra example anywhere.
So conservative was he that he regularly upbraided the boys he instructed in the arts of pole vaulting, basketball, and cross-country running, reserving particular venom for guys with long hair, such as Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns and Gary Rossington. These three were regularly sent to the principal's office for the infraction of having hair that covered their ears and neck.
Van Zant was a singer, Burns a drummer, and Rossington played a pretty mean guitar, so when they got together and added a few other locals, they formed a band that became you-know-who.
And they took the name from the despotic gym teacher who proudly had the name LEONARD SKINNER tooled on a leather key fob he toted around.
Mr. Skinner never cottoned to the music or the hairstyles of the band, but in later years he allowed that they were good, hard-working boys. He retired from teaching and got into into real estate, telling an interviewer later that he had no idea there was a band using that name until he heard a radio DJ introduce a song "by Lynyrd Skynyrd."
At his death in 2010, the New York Times called him "arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture."
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