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Sometimes Artimus Pyle wonders, “What would Ronnie Van Zant think about cellphones? Or computers?” After telling me this over the phone, Pyle chuckles. There’s a hint of blue in there. Still, it’s clear the classic-era Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer’s laughter is mostly from warm thoughts of his departed friend and bandmate.
The Rescue Attempt That Had Heros And Looters Alike
Johnny Mote and his ragtag team were first on the crash site. Mote recalls the first thing he saw was a bloody hand sticking out from the wreckage. He could hear the people moaning, pleading for help. The whole scene tore him apart. His only help at that moment was his neighbor, Dwain Easley. The two men, for a while, were the only able-bodied persons present to help pull people from the wreckage. But soon, the helicopters that were heard and seen previously were on the scene. The choppers belonged to the Coast Guard, National Guard and Forrest County General Hospital, who were doing their best to ferry people in, and illuminate the crash site.
October 20th, 1977. That is a day that Artimus Pyle will never forget.
“Everything was great, we were on top of the world,” Pyle, the drummer for Lynyrd Skynyrd at the time, said.
Lynyrd Skynyrd had just released their album “Street Survivors” three days prior, and the band and crew were on their way to Louisiana for a show on their 95 city tour when there was a problem with their plane.
EXCLUSIVE: Cleopatra Films, the upstart pic division of Cleopatra Records, has set a movie on seminal Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. The film will be powered by the recollections of the band’s drummer, Artimus Pyle, who survived the 1977 plane crash that killed three members of the band, including lead singer, songwriter and front man Ronnie Van Zant.
In the intervening years, Pyle has played with a re-formed version of the band and still plays Skynyrd tunes in his own band. But Skynyrd never came close to reaching the heights it did before the tragic crash of a chartered Convair CV-240 aircraft, when Skynyrd was establishing itself as a preeminent American band.
Thousands of people will visit the Tomb of King David and the Mount Zion neighborhood of Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Shavuot, starting this Tuesday afternoon.
A tidbit of local lore that many visitors may not know is that Artimus Pyle, drummer of the celebrated American rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, moved to Jerusalem to live and study in the neighborhood for about three years in the 1980s.
On October 20, 1977, a Convair CV-300 carrying the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed in a heavily-wooded swamp just outside Gillsburg, Mississippi. The band was on tour, making their way from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, when the aircraft ran out of fuel and took a nosedive into the darkness of the forest below.