Gary Rossington said emotional documentary finally told Lynyrd Skynyrd's true story: 'I cried a few times'

Many films have been made about beleaguered Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, but band founder Gary Rossington — who was the final surviving original member, and died March 5 at the age of 71 — hadn’t been too thrilled with the results. He and frontman Johnny Van Zant (younger brother of late original singer Ronnie) disavowed Jake Tapper’s 2002 VH1 special Uncivil War, which focused on the group’s infighting, and in 2017 they even sued one ex-bandmate, Artimus Pyle, over his plans to make a Skynyrd biopic that would focus on the tragic 1977 plane crash that killed several Skynyrd members. But during a Yahoo Entertainmemt interview that took place at 2018's South by Southwest festival, they said the CMT documentary If I Leave Here Tomorrow finally got their story right.

“All the other documentaries were negative, and they really didn’t show how when we started, we were brothers,” Rossington told Yahoo Entertainment. “We’d die for each other. We grew up together, you know? We were so happy, and it was a family. [Other films] made it sound like we were all mad at each other. It wasn’t like that at all.”

Watching If I Leave Here Tomorrow’s depiction of the band members’ onetime tight bond was an emotional roller coaster for Rossington, who served as the primary narrator of the film. “There’s a part at the beginning when [on/off Skynyrd bassist and guitarist] Ed King is talking about our song ‘Need All My Friends.’ Then it shows us, me and Ronnie looking right at each other, and it was like, all my friends are dead and gone. I just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ It’s just real sentimental to me,” he confessed.

“I see all the memories and they’re alive; they’re like jumping beans in my brain. It’s weird,” Rossington continued. “I won’t be shy to say I cried a few times — you can’t not, if you were part of it, you know? My daughters were all crying. They made me cry: ‘You never told us about this stuff, Daddy!’”

The documentary’s director, Stephen Kijak (We Are X, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Stones in Exile), made sure to focus on the good times as well as the bad, telling Skynyrd’s colorful origin story through rare interviews and never-before-seen archival footage. “Actually, this is something, funnily enough, that came from Artimus,” Kijak said. “One of the things he asked me to do when we told the story is, ‘Make sure everyone knows how goddamn funny they were.’ The happier times, the wilder times — they were just funny as hell.” Kijak noted that drummer Bob Burns, who died in a 2015 car accident, “practically runs away with the whole movie.”

“Bob was funny. Man, I loved him so much,” Rossington said wistfully.

Burns was obviously not the only loss that Lynyrd Skynyrd suffered. Band members Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, and Ronnie Van Zant all died in the above-mentioned plane crash that took place in Gillsburg, Miss., on Oct. 20, 1977, just three days after Skynyrd released their fifth album, Street Survivors. There was no way for If I Leave Here Tomorrow to avoid that major, if horrific, chapter of the band’s saga. “Hey, that’s part of it, man,” Rossington shrugged.

“We don’t turn our back on it,” Kijak explained. “You kind of start out [the film] knowing it happened, and in the middle of the movie we actually visit the crash with a guy that was there to help with the rescue effort.”

The Skynyrd members, however, made it clear that they — understandably — had zero interest in taking part in that specific scene. “No. I’m never going to go there,” Johnny Van Zant, who took over lead vocal duties for Skynyrd in 1987, said of the site crash.