There were a lot of bad people there, and every week you’d hear that somebody got shot or killed.” We came from a rough part of town, the west side of Jacksonville. “Those cheap handguns were no good for hunting or anything else – they were just made to kill people. “It was a strong message that Ronnie was conveying,” Rossington says. Ronnie wrote a lyric to match, featuring chilling vignettes in which sexual betrayal and drunken gambling led to fatal shootings. It sounded, in Rossington’s words, “real mean and ominous”. Ed King had a heavy, staccato riff that he played for Ronnie one day. Saturday Night Special was written in the summer of 1974, while Skynyrd were on tour in the US. And what he said in this song, his foresight was right on.” “God gave him a gift to preach to people. “Ronnie was a poet for common people,” Johnny says. For Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s kid brother, who became Skynyrd’s singer when the band reunited in 1987, it’s a song both prophetic and poetic. For Rossington, Saturday Night Special is one of the definitive Skynyrd songs.
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