This Week in Rock History: October 19 to 25, 2026

Picture a band on a Thursday evening in October 1977. Their new album has been in record stores for three days. The tour is rolling. A chartered plane is waiting in Greenville, South Carolina, to carry them to Baton Rouge. Nobody climbing aboard knows they are about to become the cautionary tale we still tell forty-nine years later.

On October 17, 1977, MCA released Street Survivors. On October 20, that plane went down in the woods near Gillsburg, Mississippi. Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and his sister, backing singer Cassie Gaines, were among those killed, along with the band’s assistant road manager and the pilot and co-pilot. Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Leon Wilkeson, Billy Powell and Artimus Pyle survived with serious injuries, according to the band’s history.

Here is my argument: we have let the crash write the review. Street Survivors gets filed as a tombstone, when it should be filed as a band record. It is the only studio album Steve Gaines made with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and you can hear a three-guitar band that had just found a new gear. Put on “What’s Your Name” and tell me that sounds like a group on its way out. It sounds like a group on its way up, which is exactly what makes the ending so brutal.

Even the cover became part of the fight. The original sleeve showed the band standing in a street with flames all around them. After the crash, MCA reissued the album with the band against a plain black background, and the flames art came back with the deluxe edition. So which one is the real Street Survivors? The record people bought in 1977 or the one the label could live with?

Then there is what came next. The band broke up. By Wikipedia’s account, its only reunion before 1987 was an instrumental “Free Bird” at Charlie Daniels’ Volunteer Jam V in January 1979. In 1987 the survivors went back out with Ronnie’s younger brother Johnny Van Zant on vocals, and the whole thing was pitched as a one-time tribute to the original lineup. A tribute is a funeral with better lighting. When does a tribute become a band again?

The rest of the week in rock

October 19, 1993: Pearl Jam’s Vs. arrived in the US and went on to spend five weeks at No. 1. Three years earlier, on October 22, 1990, the band played its first show at the Off Ramp Cafe in Seattle, still calling itself Mookie Blaylock.

October 20, 1980: U2’s debut Boy hit UK shelves, produced by Steve Lillywhite and powered by “I Will Follow.”

October 21, 1976: Keith Moon played his last show with The Who, at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. He died in September 1978.

October 22, 1969: Led Zeppelin II landed in American record stores.

October 25, 2014: Cream bassist and singer Jack Bruce died at 71.

Last time we looked at a week that refused to apologize, in our Sept. 14 to 20 edition. This one asks something harder.

So settle it in the comments: if the band on stage doesn’t have Ronnie Van Zant, is it still Lynyrd Skynyrd, or a tribute that never ended?