Short Stories for the Night Stand by Debra Wattes

“We had problems on the plane before that last flight,” Elson says. Had he been older and wiser, he says, he never would have climbed those rickety steel stairs. I don’t think I’m going to make it.’”Įlson was also on that rented twin-engine plane the day it fell out of the Mississippi sky. They were like, ‘I have this funny feeling about this. “I think it was because he lived hard every day and anyone who does that – like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix – is gone by the time they’re 28 or 29. “Ronnie told me often that he didn’t expect to live past 30,” remembers Kevin Elson, Skynyrd’s soundman, who went on to produce Journey, Mr. As he leaned over to spit the bug-coloured juice from his Red Man chewing tobacco into an empty plastic milk carton, he looked me straight in the eye to see if I believed him. The bearded octogenarian was slumping heavily in his La-Z-Boy Recliner. “Ronnie was the only one of my children who had second sight,” recalled his late father Lacy Van Zant in 1995. “I said, ‘Bullshit man.’ But he said, ‘No, no, I want to go out with my boots on.’” Ronnie told me, ‘I am never going to live to see 30’,” recalls Pyle. “We were in Tokyo at some bar and we were drinking lots of sake. “He told me so many times that I realised that he really knew what he was talking about.”įormer Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle was often nearby when Van Zant foretold his own demise. 'When I heard that there had been a plane crash, I just knew Ronnie was one of the ones that didn’t make it,” Judy Van Zant Jenness recalls. Was this litany of woe what Van Zant had in mind when he insisted matter-of-factly to his wife, bandmates, family members, audiences – and this journalist – that he just wasn’t long for this world? The tale boasts all the elements of a southern gothic soap opera. He died 87 days before that pivotal date.

No one who survived that day can forget that Van Zant, then 29, had repeatedly proclaimed that he would not live to see his 30th birthday.

Short Stories for the Night Stand by Debra Wattes