But I’ll never forget that day at Knebworth – backstage I met Paul and Linda McCartney, Rod Stewart, Billy Preston… you name them. Roger Daltrey’s voice wasn’t up to par, so our whole attitude was to just take ’em out. It was the same when we played with The Who. They made the audience wait for three hours, and when they did play they were too Quaaluded out. “To me that’s exactly what we did to the Stones at Knebworth. “Whenever this band goes on stage our only goal is to blow everyone else’s doors off,” says piano player Billy Powell. An estimated crowd of half a million people had gathered to see the Stones play what was rumoured at the time to be a farewell show, along with Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Hot Tuna, but it was Skynyrd’s 90-minute ‘special guest’ spot that was the best-received on the day. But there were many more gigs ahead, the most glamorous of which was an opening slot for the Rolling Stones at Knebworth Park. When Gaines appeared on One More From The Road (recorded live at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in ’77) he had played just three gigs with the band. Right after that show we told him to quit the band he was with, he was coming with us.

He had a slide in his pocket, and when he pulled that out he really impressed Allen and I. But he tore it up like you wouldn’t believe. “We told him to jam with us on Call Me The Breeze, because that was just a progression, he couldn’t screw that up too much. “Cassie kept saying we should hear her brother, but nobody thought he’d be good enough,” Rossington recalls fondly.

Sound engineer Kevin Elson was told: “Just turn him off if he’s bad.” Amid the kind of surreal circumstances that could only have occurred in the 70s, the 26-year-old was invited to audition for the band on stage in front of an audience in Kansas City. Finally, with minimal expectations, they were persuaded to listen to what Steve Gaines could do. Her little brother Steve, she’d been telling them, was a natural and they really should check him out. The new guitarist was eventually hired at the recommendation of backing vocalist Cassie Gaines. Leslie was a little too egotistical and wild for us, and I don’t think it would’ve worked.” “He’d wanted to call the band Lynyrd Skynyrd & Leslie West – to be half-and-half. “We did try Leslie but we didn’t get along,” Rossington explains. In fact West had deputised for Rossington at a New York gig after the latter broke his hand in a fist fight. Mountain’s Leslie West was among those considered for the job. The combination of three guitarists – Rossington, Allen Collins and the now absent King – had long been a Skynyrd trademark, and the band appreciated the urgency in finding a replacement.

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