Classic LS Drummer Discusses His Movie and Skynyrd
Oct 12, 2020 21:36:40 GMT -5
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Post by JerseyGirl on Oct 12, 2020 21:36:40 GMT -5
Classic Lynyrd Skynyrd Drummer Says Current 'Phony-Baloney' Lineup Is 'Milking the Fans' & Taking Advantage of Gary Rossington
Artimus Pyle explains the main reason why he left the band.
Posted 10/12/20
During an appearance on The Eddie Trunk Podcast, classic Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle talked about his time in the band, the group's current state, his new movie "Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash," and more.
The "Street Survivors" movie is out now, you can check it out via Amazon.
Pyle was a member of the band from 1975 to 1977, and then again between 1987 and 1991. The drummer said about releasing the film (transcribed by UG):
"I'm 72, I still play drums like I'm 30, my band plays Lynyrd Skynyrd better than any band in the world - so that being said, I just really felt that the story should be pulled to our fans, and so we did it."
It's clear the current Skynyrd camp didn't want you to do this film, but my question is - why? Why were they so adamant against this film coming out?
"[Singer Ronnie Van Zant's widow] Judy Van Zant did not want the truth to come out, and the truth was that Ronnie was gonna divorce her. The divorce papers were in the briefcase of our road manager on the airplane when we crashed.
"The papers were never filed, so when Ronnie was killed, Judy hit the jackpot, and she's used the money all these years to facilitate power, greed, and control.
"As far as [guitarist] Gary Rossington [the only classic Skynyrd member still in the band], he's surrounded by some very sinister people - he kind of sticks his head in the sand.
"I love Gary with all of my heart, but Gary is very weak when it comes to that; he's surrounded by people that only care about Gary because of the money he can make them, he is their cash cow.
"I left the band because of their greed and their unethical business practices. Ronnie Van Zant never stood their antics for one minute, and so I left the band because of their greed and their band's business practices.
"And I've never held back on how I feel about that. I was the drummer of the real Lynyrd Skynyrd, not this phony-baloney band that's out now milking the fans and playing the least they can, and taking the money and running.
"My band plays for the music, I play it for the music. Of course, I like to get paid like anybody else, but we don't try to fleece the fans like they have with their Forever Farewell Tour.
"The only thing that COVID-19 - the positive, silver lining for me... It's a horrible thing, we have over 2,000 people that have died, and the only thing that I can see where there is a little silver lining is that Gary Rossington is allowed to go home and rest without being made to feel guilty because he's not out there making money for this phony-baloney fake Lynyrd Skynyrd.
"I love Gary, and he's able to go home to his mansion outside of Atlanta and rest without being pressed out on the road. Every time he's had a heart attack in the last many years, they bragged about getting him out there in two weeks.
"Any doctor will tell you to take six months or a year if you have a heart attack or a heart procedure, but they are so greedy and they just pushed Gary back out there.
"To me, it's stupid because if they push Gary to the point where he can't play anymore for not having any rest, then where's their money now? Where's the money?...
"Gary is able to go home and rest without being guilty - and he's a trooper, he'll go out, he'll work when he feels, that's evident of the last six years, but they didn't want the movie to come out because they weren't in control of it.
"Judy wants all the money, all the say, and everything, and I got tired of waiting for the story to be told. There's plenty of fine documentaries about Lynyrd Skynyrd, and our movie was with Cleopatra Films, who did an incredible job of hanging in there.
"A lot of film companies would've thrown in the towel when Judy came in with the blood-sucking $1,000-an-hour New York City attorneys; they would've given up, but Cleopatra hung in there."
Discussing reactions to the movie and some of the negative remarks, Pyle said:
"There's gonna be haters, there's gonna be people that say, 'Oh, I didn't like it because they didn't do this or they didn't do that...' For those people, I just say, 'Walk a mile in our shoes and try to make a film under the pressure that we did.'
"And you're right, we didn't have the budget to have Nicole Kidman play one of our backup singers, we had to go with unknown actors and actresses, and I met all of them, all of their families at the red carpet in Los Angeles just before COVID-19 hit.
"February 16th, we did a thing in LA at the film festival, and you know, I know that we've gotten a lot of positive feedback.
"I'm very happy that we were able to finish the film and get done with it. Now, Judy spent a couple of million dollars trying to stop it, and I asked her to come to the film, come to the table, and that $2,000,000 that Judy spent on the lawsuit would've gone a long way to make our budget.
"We could've done some more locations, we could've used the exact airplane that we crashed, but we had to use C-17 instead of the Convair that we crashed, but the plane's got a great look, it's got a good nose that looks very much like our Convair.
"You know that I'm a pilot, and I've been in three airplane crashes - my father was killed in a plane crash, all my friends were killed in a plane crash, and I'm a pilot, so I figured that I was qualified to tell the story.
"And rather than Judy and Gary coming to me and sitting down at the table, they just threw mud and lied to the rest of the families.
"Judy was at the head of this, and she lied to all of the other entities involved, Gary, she lied to [the late Skynyrd keyboardist] Billy Powell's estate and his family, [the late Skynyrd bassist] Leon Wilkinson, the [late Skynyrd guitarist] Allen Collins' estate, she lied to all of them.
"And said that I was planning on making a horrible movie that was gonna basically be filmed on a telephone and that it was gonna be horrible, without knowing.
"She was making statements that weren't true, with no facts, and I feel bad for all of the people that I love. I love Gary, I love the family of Skynyrd and all of my friends, but Judy has alienated all of us because of her greed and power hunger.
"I do appreciate the feedback from all of the fans, and it [the movie] is intense - in some places it is pretty hard to watch, and of course we could only use 'Call Me the Breeze' because that's a J.J. Cale song [covered by Lynyrd Skynyrd on 1974's "Second Helping'].
"Had we used another Skynyrd song, there would be another stack of lawsuits coming from Judy and her scumbag lawyers - because lawyers live to say horrible stuff and send nasty letters.
"And Judy's lawyers are the worst, and that is why I used one song. The soundtrack of the movie - I wrote the music, my sons wrote the music, my band wrote music - and I'm glad that we did.
"There's 50 movies out there that got Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in it, and I love them - look at 'Forest Gump,' 'Sweet Home Alabama' and 'Free Bird,' Ronnie must be so proud looking out of the clouds on that one.
"We used one song, 'Call Me the Breeze,' J.J. Cale, paid the license like anybody else does, and then my friends and my family wrote a soundtrack that I think is a Grammy-award-winning soundtrack."
We all know these biopics get embellished or something happens that isn't exactly what happened, but while you guys were dealing with the plane malfunction, Ronnie gets up and gets a bottle of Jack Daniel's - did that really happen?
"[When the plane started crashing,] Ronnie comes back by me and he's coming down the aisle, and I thought to myself, 'Good idea - he's going to the back of the plane where I think it would be a better chance of surviving a plane crash, any pilot knows that.'
"Then just minutes before we actually went into the trees, Ronnie came back up the aisle and stopped right by my seat, and I looked up at Ronnie, and we gave each other to old hippie handshake, not a regular handshake, the old' thumb-around-thumb hippie handshake, and so Ronnie smiled, this incredible smile, he had a beautiful smile...
"I could see, the man knew his destiny - he already told me. When I saw him going back forward, I didn't think immediately that he wasn't going to survive, and in his arms, he was carrying a pillow.
"There was a crimson, kind of a velvet red pillow that we had onboard the plane - and we shook hands, and it was that Butch Cassidy moment when they jumped off the cliff and said, 'Oh shit.'
"And he walked back to the front of the plane, and to be very honest and answer your question honestly - Ronnie did not have a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand.
"They may have gotten the story from somebody else because he was at the front of the plane, I was over the last lane of the aisle, I don't know, he may have gotten himself a drink, it's very probable that he could've taken a swig.
"We had on board limitless alcohol, beer, Jack Daniel's... I did not see a bottle of Jack Daniel's, so Hollywood did a little thing, but it is not out of the purview of truth."
You being a pilot, the circumstances surrounding the crash, the pilot error, the fuel issue... Aerosmith actually looked at that plane and they passed on it. Being a pilot, did you have reservations about getting on it that day - did you have concerns? And whenever you hear about a plane crash, they always talk about recovering the black box. Did that plane have one, was that recovered?
"Well, your first question in there was concerning Aerosmith, and yes, that is true, they passed on the plane, but what happened was, Falcon Airways out of Dallas, Texas, that's where we went to pick up the plane.
"I was there on the maiden flight of our airplane, and they switched planes on us. We had Jerry Lee Lewis's old 5-60 Convair Rolls Royce-powered jet - it had a turbo-prop, and I flew it, and it was very fast, very maneuverable, and responded well.
"And you look out the window and you see Rolls Royce on those engines, and you know they're gonna run and keep running. They switched planes on us and then painted their name on the nose, and it was a Convair 2-40 with Pratt & Whitney engines.
"It didn't have a turbo-prop, it was slower and more sluggish in turns, and not as responsive. So when they moved that plane up before the crash, five days before the crash when they rolled that up, we were on a 95-city world tour, we were going back to England, Europe, we were going back to Japan, and we were going to Australia for the first time
"We had gigs in Sydney and other places on the continent, so we were gonna drop our private plane at some point and fly commercial, but we had a bunch of shows in America that we were gonna use, in the business we call them 'puddle jumpers,' just going from one city to another.
"Aerosmith did pass on the plane that we eventually crashed, but we thought that we were getting our own plane back that belonged to Jerry Lee Lewis, and we had Jerry Lee Lewis's pilot, a man named Les - and there was never a problem, you would trust him.
"Jerry Lee Lewis's pilot, you can imagine, with Jerry Lee Lewis he'd seen it all, he'd seen the young girls, the drugs, the drinking, nothing we had offered was any surprise after Jerry Lee Lewis. I would've trusted him to fly me upside down in the Lincoln Tunnel, this guy is amazing.
"Then he quit being our pilot to go with Flying Tiger - the big freight company Flying Tiger, he made really good money flying freight - and so you know, the Peter Rudge management company, they always tried to cheap-shot everybody and not pay what they were worth.
"Peter Rudge would stick the money in his pocket and then tell us it went somewhere. Ronnie didn't trust Peter Rudge; Ronnie was gonna move everything to Jacksonville and build facilities and apartments for people that lived out of States and loading docks and a studio - everything in Florida because Peter Rudge was stealing millions of dollars from us."
When I watched this film I was really shaken by how very realistic it is and how accurately it felt when that plane was going down. For you, having been on that plane that day and having lost those people - was it really difficult for you to watch that scene?
"Yeah, absolutely. I've watched the film probably a dozen times, and it gets me every single time. And the film is accurate. As you say, the budget and everything.
"Ian Shultis, the actor that played me and Taylor Clift - like Taylor Swift, but Taylor Clift with a 'C' - that played Ronnie, and all of the actors and actresses that portrayed the people, I thought they did an incredible job and put the emotion that I feel every time I watch the movie.
"I think about that plane crash every single day - every single day it comes to mind.
"Look at 9/11, people have to face that every single day thinking about that and every year it's very difficult to go through that period of time knowing the days leading up to where I was, what was I doing, what am I doing this day...
"Gary and Judy decided that money was more important than my friendship, so I know I share it with all the people that get to see the movie. The movie is accurate.
"Johnny Mote [the 21-year-old farmer Artimus encountered after the plane crash] said he didn't shoot me, but that he had a gun out and he said it was a ricochet [from a warning shot]...
"He pointed it at me, he pulled the trigger, and he says it was a ricochet... Well, I don't give a damn what it was - if something cuts through my shoulder, and it knocked me to the ground.
"In the Marine Corps, they teach you when you're fired on, you get close to the ground to make a small target, and I fell to the ground and yelled 'plane crash' as loud as I could, and Johnny ran over and said, 'Oh my god, I'm so sorry!'
"He doesn't want to be the guy that shot the survivor from the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash, he doesn't want to be that guy, but the truth is - he did. And I survived it, and I'm able to tell the story after all these years.
"I tried to bring Gary and Judy management to the table so we can make a broader movie and everything, and have a bigger budget, but they turned on me, and they left me for dead years ago because of their greed.
"They left me for dead, and they've been milkin' it. I'm an important member of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band - all the 15 drummers that they had since I left, they're good drummers, but they can't play the Lynyrd Skynyrd songs the way they're supposed to be played.
"They have to cut my parts in half because they can't play them, and if you can't play the parts, don't be in the band. So, they needed me for years, and I'm not gonna beg them.
"They wanted me to go on the tribute tour, but I'm not a party clown where I walk out of the stage after the last performance of 'Free Bird' and wave to the crowd like a monkey. I told them, 'The only way I'll come out on tour with you guys is if I play at least seven or eight songs, and then I'll do it.'
"[Original Skynyrd drummer] Bob Burns used to call me every morning at 4 o'clock in the morning, and Bob and I would talk for an hour, and Bob was in my band, he was in APB, and my band was tickled to death to have two real drummers of the real Lynyrd Skynyrd, both inducted in the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame the same night.
"In New York City, I played 'Free Bird' and Bob played 'Sweet Home Alabama.' I looked over and saw Bob playing that song right in the pocket, and tears came to my eyes. I love Bob, but we lost him about four years ago [on April 3, 2015] around Easter, in a damn car wreck.
"He was 64 years old, and Bob would come and play three-four songs with us, he couldn't play the whole two hours because of his physical limitations. I'm in good shape for a 72-year - three airplane crashes, shot, stabbed, and all that, I'm very healthy, and that's kept me alive."
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