On Thursday, October 20 at 6:42 pm, the Convair 240 carrying the band Lynyrd Skynryrd crashes in Mississippi.
Following another rollicking performance, this time at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, the band boarded a chartered Convair 240 to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where they were scheduled to appear at LSU on Friday night.
At 6:42 PM, the pilot of Lynyrd Skynyrd's chartered Convair 240 radioed that the craft was dangerously low on fuel. They were diverted to the McComb-Pike County Airport but, less than ten minutes later, after running out of fuel the plane crashed in a densely wooded thicket in the middle of a swamp five miles northeast of Gillsburg, Mississippi. Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray were killed on impact; the other band members, Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Leon Wilkeson, Billy Powell, Artimus Pyle, and Leslie Hawkins, tour manager Ron Eckerman, and members of their road crew suffered serious injuries.
The often hard drinking, occasional brawling band were a favorite with biker crowds from Oakland, California to Nashua, New Hampshire, not to mention in their beloved Southland were they were everyman's brother.
Skynyrd's past and present members have owned motorcycles themselves such as Harley-Davidson's (ironhead Sportster, Shovelheads, Evo's), Honda's and a Kawasaki.
There are two officially registered motorcycle clubs - Freebird MC and Freebyrd MC.
I have been in bike-friendly bars in Rhode Island called "Gimme Three Steps" and another dubbed "The Breeze" whose sign has a Dave Man-esque biker on a knucklehead with the Skynyrd Confederate flag logo on the side of it's tank. In 1992, I walked into a biker pub, "Barnstormers", in Dublin, Ireland at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday and "Gimme Back My Bullets" was cranking. 4,000 miles from Jacksonville.
When was the last time you went to a swap meet or a bike show and didn't see a bike named "Free Bird" or hear a Skynyrd song?
23 motorcycles in the US have license plates that read, "FREBRD".
The new version (Johnny Van Zandt and Ricky Medlocke) played at Sturgis.
Today in motorcycle history proudly supports the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD). www.nabd.org.uk
Today in motorcycle history proudly supports the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD). www.nabd.org.uk
