When most popular musicians face a major death in their band, many times it’s best if they just break up and go their separate ways, especially when the leader of the group has just had every bone crushed in an airplane disaster, like, for example, Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
That rock ’n’ roll fuck-up of Oct. 20, 1977, is finally portrayed in the nail-biting Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash. The incident killed lead singer Van Zant and a few others, and the movie is told through the eyes of drummer Artimus Pyle and his well-worn vegetarian T-shirt.
A replacement drummer who’s thrown into Skynyrd’s lifestyle of booze and broads on the road, Pyle (Ian Shultis) is the band’s moral conscience, often telling wasted bandmates they need to “slow it down.” It doesn’t help, because soon enough, their ramshackle plane is out of gas and going down over a Louisiana swamp.
But that’s just the beginning of Pyle’s problems, because after single-handedly rescuing all the survivors of the wreck and then running some 20 miles through the marshlands, he has a near fistfight with a deadly snake and is subsequently shot for trespassing on some dude’s land.
If it sounds like Pyle is the hero of the story, it’s because he is; interspersed throughout the movie is an interview with the real-life Pyle, giving himself well-earned props for being the man who saved (most of) Skynyrd, although with plenty of tortured screaming at God along the way.
The band should have broken up for good after this accident, but, of course, embarrassingly kept going on down that road, forgoing any possible legendary status for the ticket sales of state fair shows. Regardless, you can still hear “Free Bird” on the radio 10 or so times a day. Can your band say that? —Louis Fowler
