1977 · BEHIND THE SONGS
A cautionary tale about excess — released days before the unthinkable.
“That Smell” (1977) is the darkest song Lynyrd Skynyrd ever recorded, and it arrived under the darkest circumstances. Written by Ronnie Van Zant and Allen Collins for Street Survivors, it was a direct warning to bandmates whose drinking and drug use had spiraled out of control. The “smell” of the title, Van Zant made clear, was the smell of death. Days after the album’s release, on October 20, 1977, the band’s plane crashed, killing Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines.
The song is unflinching. Van Zant doesn’t moralize from a distance; he sings as someone watching people he loves destroy themselves. The music is heavy and foreboding, the guitars slashing rather than soaring. It was meant as an intervention. In retrospect, it sounds like a premonition.
What to listen for: Van Zant’s vocal — urgent, almost desperate — and the way the band plays with a grim determination, as if trying to musically shake someone awake. “That Smell” is difficult to hear now without thinking of what followed, but it deserves to be heard as what it was: a friend telling the truth, before it was too late.