‘Street Survivors’: The tragic irony of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s classic 1977 album cover
A good album cover is one that makes a grand statement. One that serves as an extension of the art, a storytelling device that draws you in before you’ve even heard a word. Some, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors, run deeper, its message shifting after a tragic accident that no one saw coming.
Well, not no one. In fact, there’s a prophetic haze around the entirety of Street Survivors that feels a bit eerie whenever you find yourself digging a little deeper. Because the story of their tragic plane crash just days after its release might be well known, but the intricacies of the record, right down to its sleeve, feel a little too coincidental to be something that merely came from the basis of creative expression alone.
It’s not like the accident served as a punctuating factor across the entire project, either. Throughout its creation, several happenings made it clear that something strange was afoot, from Gary Rossington and Allen Collins suffering a car crash that caused significant delays during recording to Ronnie Van Zant’s general hunch that something wicked this way comes.
Skynyrd’s story wasn’t too dissimilar to many rock groups up until that point. But the drug-induced craziness of rock ‘n’ roll made Van Zant feel a little out of sorts, and not in a way he could simply brush off. “I had a creepy feeling things were going against us, so I thought I’d write a morbid song,” Van Zant said, discussing how he wrote ‘That Smell’ as a cautionary tale against drug and alcohol abuse, aimed at his band members who were letting it get away from them to the detriment of the entire project.
The lyrics were pretty on the nose, too. “Say you’ll be alright come tomorrow / But tomorrow might not be here for you,” Van Zant wrote, not knowing just how much his words would become entrenched in meaning more significant than he could have imagined, when his suspicions about things “going against us” inevitably manifested themselves in a far more harrowing odour.
Just three days after release, aboard a plane heading for Louisiana, the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed during an attempted emergency landing, killing Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, their road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and both pilots. Not only did this occur a few dates into their most successful tour yet, but it also clouded much of the work they’d done on the record, giving it a new meaning that made the music feel oddly haunting and the album cover feel newly controversial.
The original one depicted a picture of the band standing in a street with the buildings around them on fire – the title itself, Street Survivors, also suddenly had this quality of distaste about it, the kind that you might find captioned with something along the lines of, ‘Well, this didn’t age well, did it?’ Controversies around album covers aren’t new – people have been finding issues with everything across music history, from The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request to the more recent Man’s Best Friend by Sabrina Carpenter.
But Street Survivors felt especially sinister, so much so that MCA put out an alternative cover without the flames, though it left the title the same. No one knows if there’s such a thing as ‘cursed’ music. Countless musicians have claimed to have a sixth sense during previous projects with a sense of foreboding that has actually turned out to be legitimate. But it’s hard not to be a little haunted by this particular image, especially since the feeling was so strong it ended up prophesying the album’s subsequent success, too.
