UPDATE:
ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons has paid tribute to Gary Rossington, the Lynyrd Skynyrd co-founder and guitarist who died Sunday at age 71.
“Gary Rossington’s loss is especially profound for us as we’ve spent countless hours in his company on tour and all points in between. We facilitated getting Lynyrd Skynyrd on the bill with ZZ Top at a South Carolina date way back during the start of the band’s rise in ’73, which started an enduring friendship...
“Gary’s extraordinary ability as a guitarist was nothing less than inspirational. It’s an old cliché about somebody who has paid their dues to call them a ‘survivor,’ and it this case it is literally true. Gary was the last of the breed and will be missed.”
ZZ and Skynyrd are scheduled to tour together this summer, and all indications are that it will go forward as Skynyrd have done many shows without Rossington, who had numerous health issues. The Sharp Dressed Simple Man tour is scheduled to visit 22 cities starting on July 21st in West Palm Beach, Florida as well as, July 29th at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth
Skynyrd are due back on the road this Sunday in Plant City, Florida.
Others who have paid tribute include:
The last surviving founder of Lynyrd Skynyrd is gone. Gary Rossington died yesterday at 71. He had suffered from numerous heart problems in recent years, undergoing quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, then suffering a heart attack in 2015. At recent shows, Rossington would only play for part of the concert and occasionally sat out entire shows.
Rossington was a survivor; he made it through a major car accident in 1976 when he drove his car into a tree…an accident that inspired the band’s hit “That Smell.” A year later, he made it through the crash of Skynyrd’s plane in Pike County, Mississippi with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver.
At the band’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, Rossington told the press, “I don’t think of it as tragedy, I think of it as life,” before adding, “I think the good outweighs the bad.”
Source: Rolling Stone