“That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

"That Smell" is the darkest corner of Street Survivors, Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1977 album on MCA: a finger-wagging sermon from Ronnie Van Zant aimed squarely at his own bandmates. He wrote it with Allen Collins while the band was chewing through booze, pills, powder and worse, and the last straw was the night Gary Rossington, loaded to the gills, wrapped his Ford Torino around an oak tree in Jacksonville. Van Zant dubbed him "Prince Charming" for it.

Tom Dowd produced it with the band, and it's a heavy, lurching thing, with Collins, Rossington and Steve Gaines stacking three guitars into a menacing wall, Billy Powell's keys underneath and the Honkettes wailing like a Greek chorus. Van Zant admitted he'd felt a morbid premonition when he wrote it. Three days after the album came out, a plane crash killed him and several others in the band.

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