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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