Warning: Undefined array key "post_type_share_twitter_account" in /var/www/vhosts/casinonewsblogger.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/cryptocurrency/vslmd/share/share.php on line 24
On Oct. 20, 1977, Craig Reed was on top of the world. Sitting in the back of a private airplane occupied by one of rock’s biggest bands, the 26-year-old Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie played poker as the plane flew 6,000 feet above the Piney Woods of Mississippi. Holding a joint and nursing a hangover from the night before, Reed was up around $1,700 in what he later called a “pretty heavy game” of cards.
Four years working with Lynyrd Skynyrd made Ohio’s Reed the most senior member of the band’s road crew. The southern rock band was at the height of its career, coasting on the success of all-time rock anthems like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird.” Three days earlier, Lynyrd Skynyrd released its fifth album Street Survivors. If life could get better, Reed didn’t know it.
The album title would soon take on an ominous meaning. Reed looked up from his cards when he heard someone yell that the plane’s engines had given out. He’d soon be put in a coma for 12 days before awaking with a concussion, an array of broken bones and a tube sticking out of his chest. His poker winnings were gone, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band he’d spent four years with, was done.
Reed, along with 19 others, is a survivor of one of the most infamous tragedies in rock history, a plane crash that claimed the lives of three members of a band in their prime, including 29-year-old band leader Ronnie Van Zant. It would take years for those who lived through the crash to recover, and even longer for the beloved southern rock band to take the stage again.
“As soon as I found out that Ronnie had died, I said, ‘Man, it’s over,'” Reed told PokerNews in an interview.
Now, nearly 50 years later, survivors of the 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash reflect on what may have been the most dangerous poker game ever played. PokerNews spoke with three crash survivors — Craig Reed, Gene Odom and Mark Howard — as well as current Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke.
Setting the Stage
The band that would later be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame began as a group of teenagers from the rough neighborhoods of Jacksonville, Florida. Rickey Medlocke, who had a brief stint as drummer in 1971 and would later rejoin in 1996 as a guitarist, told PokerNews that the Van Zant family would attend dances hosted by his grandfather, blues musician Shorty Medlocke. That is where Medlocke first met Ronnie Van Zant, the future leader of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“We all grew up on the westside together,” said Medlocke, who wasn’t in the band at the time of the crash. “And being in teen clubs, playing in teen clubs with our own teenage bands and all that stuff. That’s kind of how we congregated and got to know each other.”
Craig Reed met the band not in Northeast Florida but outside a Holiday Inn in Kent, Ohio, as they pulled up in a U-Haul while touring their massively successful 1973 debut album that included the hits “Free Bird,” “Simple Man,” and “Tuesday’s Gone.” He helped them haul gear on a snowy December night for a show at the Smiling Dog Saloon in Cleveland, which led the band to hire him as a drum roadie.
Lynyrd Skynyrd saw even more success with its next album featuring “Sweet Home Alabama” and were soon packing arenas and touring with the likes of The Who and REO Speedwagon. By 1977, the same year poker godfather Doyle Brunson won his second World Series of Poker Main Event title, they were touring around the country in the comfort of private planes.
Poker became a fixture in the air, the perfect pastime on flights from Springfield to Chicago or Anaheim to Las Vegas, where the band performed less than a month before the crash.
“We played multiple games,” said Reed, one of the more skilled players of the group. “We didn’t just stay on one game … We played Five Card Stud, Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, Acey-Deucey, No Peek. It was just Dealer’s Choice.”
Reed said pots got big during the poker games, which played with $5 or $10 antes. “It would go from $200 to $400 and then someone would get a good hand and they’d go ‘POT!’ And it would go from $400 to $800. So it got quite hefty.”
Another shark in the game was Gene Odom, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s security manager and a childhood friend of Van Zant who played on the plane with the singer the night before their final flight.
While Reed remembered Van Zant and guitarist Gary Rossington being “good poker player(s),” Odom said the band members “really more liked it on the plane just to kill time.”
“The band members, they didn’t understand the aspects of poker and what hands were what hands, you know?” Odom said in an interview with PokerNews. “They didn’t know what hands you was trying to go for and what other hands the other person might have. But we just played poker. It wasn’t professional, nothin’ like that. But understanding the game? I doubt very seriously they really understood the aspects of playing poker.”
“Yeah, it was a pastime on the plane,” agreed lighting technician Mark Howard. “The plane (had) a little area in the back with poker going on, the mid-plane was (where) you could watch movies … and then the front was the lounge. And the band usually hung out in the front so they could get together and go over the music and what have you.”
Howard, a Houston, Texas, native who was 25 at the time of the crash, said he played poker “simply out of convenience because I didn’t want to watch a movie.”
“I mean, there was nothing else to do but play poker,” Howard told PokerNews.
But poker was more than a pastime for Odom, who cut his teeth with cheats and sharps in backroom games back home in Jacksonville.
“Gene was a real good poker player,” attested Reed. “Although Gene never smoked pot or never drank or nothin’, (and) we were always smoking … during the time we were playing cards. And he was always b****ing because he would get a contact high and then he couldn’t think.”
“(Van Zant) and Gene played a lot together. They were best friends.”
The Smell of Death
In the fall of 1977, as the band began to tour its new album Street Survivors, concerns circulated over the state of the Convair CV-240 that they had leased. The 30-year-old plane had accumulated more than 29,000 flight hours, according to a National Transportation Safety Board accident report, and another band, Aerosmith, had considered using the plane before ultimately deeming it unsafe.
Just days before the fatal crash, Howard played poker in the back of the plane during a flight to Greenville, South Carolina, when he saw “a six-foot flame shoot out of the right engine right as we took off.”
“I mean, it was just unbelievable,” Howard said. “It scared everybody to death.”
They landed safely and played at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, but several band and crew members protested boarding the next flight to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. One of the most concerned about the plane was backing singer Cassie Gaines, who would die in the crash.
It was Van Zant’s call, and he chose to gamble.
Though he wasn’t in the band at the time, Medlocke nearly joined the tour after an invitation Van Zant extended during a listening session in Jacksonville for the band’s newest song, “That Smell,” on which the singer belts, “the smell of death surrounds you” and “tomorrow might not be here for you.”
“(Ronnie) looked at me and he said ‘Rickey, we have our own plane. Why don’t you come ride with us for a couple of days? Maybe get up on stage, jam with us or whatever you want.’ And I said ‘Well that sounds great.’ … Well a couple of days before, (Medlocke’s band) Blackfoot ended up getting gigs booked for a two-week run. And I had to bow out and I called Ronnie and told him. And he said, ‘Well bro, I understand, I’ll see you further down the road’ … And that was it.”
The Final Poker Game
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s final flight began at 4:02 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Oct. 20. Band members rested throughout the plane as most of the crew hung out in the middle cabin. A few played poker in their normal spot: a fold-out table between a set of seats facing each other on the back right side of the plane.
There are conflicting details about the final poker game. Reed remembers it being four-handed between himself, Howard, lighting crew member Steve Lawler and road manager Ron Eckerman, while Howard can only say for certain he and Lawler were there. Odom contests he was also in the game: “We were playing poker right up to the time when we started having the problems.”
In a 2024 video, Lawler remembered Odom and fellow lighting technician Mark Frank also playing. Eckerman, who passed away in 2014, recalled being a part of the final poker game in his 2011 autobiography.
They usually played with cash but used chips on this occasion. Right before the crash, they were dealing an orbit of Three Card Guts, a game where each players tries to make the best three-card hand.
“And the pots get kind of heavy when you’re playing that game,” said Reed. “I was winning about $1,700 in that game.”
Count Howard as another who remembers being up. “I had a lot of chips in front of me … I was winning, and I don’t care who says they were winning, I’m telling you I was winning.”
At 6:45 p.m., the pilots alerted air traffic controllers that they had run out of fuel due to engine inefficiencies. Drummer Artimus Pyle ran back and announced that the left and right engines had quit. Realizing they had to end the poker game, Reed, not yet grasping the magnitude of the situation, asked how they were going to divide the chips.
“I stood up and grabbed my chips, not all of them, I just grabbed a whole handful of them, and I said ‘f*** these chips!’ and I threw them across the airplane towards the tail end,” Howard remembered. “And the next thing you know, I’m sitting there ready to die. The last thing I did was the sign of the cross because I’m Catholic.”
As Odom started “running back and forth … strapping everybody in and telling everybody to get ready, we were going to make a belly landing,” Reed, who initially “was laughing” and “wasn’t scared at all,” finally realized how serious things were. He ripped the poker table from the wall and threw it to the back of the plane. “I knew we were going to crash and I didn’t want that table right there.”
The last thing Reed heard before being sent into a coma was the sound of the plane swishing against tree tops, followed by loud bangs as the plane connected with the tree bases.
“It sounds like a million baseball bats hitting the airplane,” offered Howard. “It was just horrifying.”
Street Survivors
Shortly after the pilot’s last communication to air traffic controllers at 6:45 p.m., the plane “crashed in heavily wooded terrain” near the town of Gillsburg, Mississippi, according to the accident report. The plane had hit trees as tall as 80 feet, causing both wings to be torn and launched a hundred feet from the main fuselage. Van Zant, backup singer Cassie Gaines, guitarist Steve Gaines and road manager Dean Kilpatrick were all killed, as were pilots Walter McCreary and William John Gray.
It would be nearly two weeks before Reed knew any of this. He woke up disoriented in a hospital bed with a body of broken bones and a head reeling not from a hangover but a concussion.
“They said, ‘You were in a plane crash.’ And I had no idea,” Reed said. “Because I was in shock.”
Howard, who had “fractured the whole right side of my skull,” was conscious and remembers crew and band members being carried on stretchers and loaded onto pickup trucks before being driven to the Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. The dense woods the plane crashed in were unreachable by ambulance.
How did anyone survive this fall from the sky? Investigators determined that “the accident was survivable for passengers in the cabin because there was no fire and some sections of the fuselage retained their integrity during impact.” And there was no fire because “there was no fuel in the wing tanks when wing sections separated from the main structure.”
As it turns out, the poker game was one of the safest spots on the plane.
“Anywhere … behind the wing was the safest place,” Reed said. “Yeah, the front of the plane got all mangled. That’s where Ronnie, and Steve and Cassie and Dean (were).”
But nobody got out unscathed. Odom, who had been “thrown out of the plane trying to get back to my seat where the poker table was at,” was blinded in his left eye when phosphorus from a de-icing device “burnt a big hole in my face and my neck, and burnt me on my arms.” He also broke his neck and back, requiring major surgeries that took three years to heal from.
Odom’s bad run of cards continued after the crash, at the time of which he was just 80 hours short of earning retirement benefits. Odom, who wrote two books about his time with Lynyrd Skynyrd, went on to work as a union ironworker until a 1990 accident while working on a Jacksonville brewery where he “got broke all up again.”
Fly High, Free Bird
The surviving Lynyrd Skynyrd members, led by guitarist Gary Rossington, reformed in 1986 with Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s younger brother, taking over singing duties. Medlocke, who nearly boarded the plane that killed his friends, rejoined the band in 1996 and continues to play in Lynyrd Skynyrd today.
“I always thought to myself all those years, maybe if I hadn’t have left the band, and maybe if I had been there … I could’ve said something or done something to change the course of what would happen,” Medlocke said.
A conversation with Rossington — whose retirement in 2021 and death two years later made Medlocke the last current member of the band who was around in the early years — put Medlocke’s mind at ease.
“I said, ‘You know Gary, I’ve always thought that had I have been there I maybe could’ve said something to change the course that you guys (were on) and change Ronnie’s mind about getting on that plane.’ And he goes, ‘Rickey, let me tell you something. Once Ronnie had his mind made up, there was no changing.’ He goes, ‘Honestly, it was meant for you to be here now, it wasn’t meant for you to be there then.’ And that’s always stuck with me.”
Lynyrd Skynyrd is currently on a North American tour and in August played in Las Vegas in front of a crowd of thousands of rock fans of all ages inside the Pearl Theater at Palms Casino Resort.
“We’ve got incredible attendances,” Medlocke told PokerNews during a September phone interview while on the road. “Right now in Canada, we’re just packing arenas.”
The surviving crew members also carry on. During his interview with PokerNews in October, Howard, who now runs the True Backstage and Road Stories YouTube channel, was preparing to head to Mississippi to meet up with other survivors for a 48th anniversary reunion near the crash site featuring live music, open-mic jamming and a candlelight vigil.
“We sit around, we drink beer, have fun, laugh, talk to people, introduce ourself to people, and people come up and introduce themselves to us and want to take pictures of us and stuff, because we’re the survivors,” Howard said. “And it’s just a whole lot of fun.”
Reed’s time in Lynyrd Skynyrd began and ended with a U-Haul. After being released from the hospital, Reed, who four years earlier had met the band in a hotel parking lot, closed this chapter of his life by driving a rental van hundreds of miles from Jacksonville back home to Ohio.
“I drove back to Ohio with all my ribs broken and my arm was broken,” he said. “I was a mess. My mom thought we were going to die. I was out of it.”
Reed would go on to work as a roadie for American bands including Journey, Foreigner and The Marshall Tucker Band, the latter of which he played poker on the road with. He put poker behind him since retiring from the road in 2006 — “I haven’t really played since then” — but still plays card games like Blackjack on his computer. He also hosts The Stoned Roadie Show on YouTube, where he shares stories from a life on the road with American rock bands.
And despite being a survivor of one of rock’s most tragic airplane crashes, Reed, now in his 70s and with frizzy grey hair reaching his shoulders, enjoys running a flight simulator and even shared plans to fly four hours to Mississippi in a friend’s twin-engine Beechcraft Baron.
“He’ll let me fly a little bit down there. But not a bunch. I’m not a pilot. Flying on the simulator just gives you the basics,” Reed said in a deep drawl. “When I first started flying on the simulator, it was very hard to do landings. And now it’s a piece of cake.”
*Photos courtesy Craig Reed, Mark Howard, Gene Odom & WikiMedia Commons
Senior Editor U.S.
