“I love playing drums. I have eight children and grandchildren and we all play drums together. We get pretty tribal and that makes my life happy,” Artimus Pyle says with a laugh. Considering that his life has been filled with enough drama that would break any human being’s spirit, the Kentucky-born drummer is still standing like a sturdy oak. Known for his time in Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Artimus Pyle Band, he contentedly embraces his existence as a happy hippie with strong opinions. That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily made a lot of best friends in the crazy music business but he’ll have his say and live with the fallout.
At the moment though, Pyle is enjoying a cloudless sky with the release of his hard-fought-for new album, Anthems: Honoring The Music Of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which dropped last month on Groundhog’s Day. Featuring his APB bandmates and a host of incredible singers like Dolly Parton, Warren Haynes, and Sammy Hagar, the songs of the southern rock band are shined up and given new crisp interpretations. Canadian singer Lindsey Ell does a knockout vocal on “The Needle & The Spoon” while Haynes conjures up chill bumps from the get-go on “Saturday Night Special.” But it is Parton who brings angel wings to “Freebird.” As only Dolly can, she sends the words of Ronnie Van Zant heavenward and the tears well up in even the hardest of souls. “I cried like a baby,” Pyle told me during our interview recently.
Although the album was a project near and dear to Pyle’s heart, he had to fight the powers that be in Nashville and the Skynyrd organization to get it done. It’s no secret the man has had his run-ins with music authorities but once Parton and her producer Kent Wells were on board, that was basically all she wrote. It even broke the longtime ice between Pyle and Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, who passed last year on March 5th, and he added his iconic guitar solo just for Dolly, and she included it on her Rockstar album to resounding praise. If you didn’t feel misty-eyed before Anthems came to its last track, you were overflowing with tears by the time Dolly was through with you.
Arriving at this moment has given Pyle some peace. Honoring his bandmates who fell to the earth with him on October 20, 1977, but did not survive, he feels he is giving back to their children and grandchildren, and to ours, the songs that will probably go on forever.
I had a long conversation with Pyle about making Anthems, recording his first song with Skynyrd, fighting with Nashville and the plane crash near Gillsburg, Mississippi.
Artimus, for you personally, which song, lyric-wise, on Anthems touches you or speaks to you the most and why?
Well, that is a great question. I’ve never had that question exactly. It’s always been, What’s your favorite Skynyrd song? You know, after the plane crash and everything and losing everybody and being the last living member of the band, which is not a good feeling, every single song is sentimental and dear to my heart. But the way you put the question, I would have to say when Dolly Parton played “Freebird” for me. I was extremely emotional. When I’m playing with my band in front of sold-out crowds, I get emotional in the midst of the songs. But when Dolly played me “Freebird,” took me into the control room and sat me down, and played her vocal on the track we had recorded for her, I cried like a baby. Now, it’s more poignant than ever and more pertinent: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me; because I must be traveling on now, there’s too many places I have to see.” That was Ronnie’s words and hearing Dolly’s little gigantic voice singing those words, it broke me down. She put her arm around me and said, “I understand.” That was before we lost Gary.
So getting Gary on there with Dolly was the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It meant so much to me and it brought Gary and I close. I cherish the texts that went back and forth between Gary and I, him saying, “Hey man, Ronnie would love this song, the way you did it. Dolly is amazing. I get such amazing feelings of nostalgia.” I mean, Gary waxed poetic on me in his texts.
But getting this album from conception to realization was not easy, I understand.
It was not easy navigating the ins and outs of Nashville, Tennessee. That whole music business side of it, I don’t like. I love the music but the music business has definitely disappointed me. Navigating all that and getting it done and getting Gary Rossington on “Freebird” with Dolly Parton, and it’s the last thing Gary ever recorded and it brought Gary and I together closer than we had been able to be for years because the management company wanted to keep Gary and I apart. The management company lied to Gary and said that Dolly had pulled out of the project. I had to get Kent Wells, who has been Dolly Parton’s friend and producer for thirty-five years and is highly respected in Nashville, on the phone and I said, “Kent, they’ve lied to Gary and said that Dolly’s pulling out of the project.” Five minutes later, I got an answer from Gary saying, “Don’t worry, Artimus, Kent Wells called me. I know that Dolly didn’t pull out of the project. I’m laying my track down. I was lied to.”
In my new book that I’m coming out with, and the book is finished really but I’m going to add a couple of chapters because some things happened since I finished the book and I will tell about this process of trying to do this tribute album. I can only do one major project at a time. The movie that came out [Street Survivors: The True Story Of The Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash, 2020], that was a major process and the book was finished even before the movie was. So the book is sitting on the back-burner and I got to write a couple new chapters for it because things have happened that I want people to know what happened, why it happened and how it happened. That will be done in due time.
But all of the men that wrote these songs, their children and grandchildren, will benefit financially because the royalties will be paid. All the T’s were crossed, all the I’s were dotted. There’s a lot of shenanigans up there in Nashville, Tennessee, Leslie, and we navigated it and I can’t believe it but on February 2nd, Groundhog Day, which is my daughter Misty’s birthday, our album dropped against all odds. I had been threatened with lawsuits, holding my album hostage, wanting me to sign all these papers saying I would never say that I was from Lynyrd Skynyrd, that I would never use Ronnie Van Zant’s name; just ridiculous stuff. It was all a big fat bluff.
When I did my movie, they sued me with a bunch of thousand dollar an hour New York City blood-sucking weasel attorneys that would sue their mothers and they’d do anything for money. And we beat them in the Court Of Appeals. They said I couldn’t do a movie, I couldn’t tell a story about my life and we beat them. And their side ended up having to pay two-million dollars or so, maybe more, in legal fees for being stupid and bringing a frivolous lawsuit when I asked all of them to come to the table with me to make this movie. Instead, they decided to attack me.
So I wanted to call the album Against All Odds (laughs) but our management and record company came up with Anthems, which I love, because Ronnie didn’t write just hit songs and hit albums. He wrote anthems with his band and that’s what this album is,it’s honoring the music of Ronnie Van Zant and his band, which I am very happy to be included. I was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2006 because of Ronnie Van Zant, because of his prolific songwriting and his vision. I never dreamed I’d be in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. I just loved playing drums. So I’m glad we got this album done against all odds.
Your band plays on this album with you. Tell us a little about them.
We’ve been together fifteen years and they are all successful businessmen, they have beautiful wives and children and homes and businesses. I’m seventy-five and they’re all like sixty. They don’t need this band to make money. They play this music cause they grew up with Lynyrd Skynyrd music and they love it as much as I do and we play it with respect and honor and accuracy. So it’s Jerry Lyda on vocals and lead guitar, Scott Raines on lead vocals and guitar, then our lead singer Brad Durden, he was in a lot of southern rock bands and worked with the great Tom Dowd. Brad, Scott, Jerry and I put this band together. And on bass is Dave Fowler, who introduced us to Dolly Parton. We do stuff to raise money for breast cancer awareness with Dolly and we’re so proud about that.
Dave has brought so many good things to our band. He lives up in Nashville and he got us on the Grand Ole Opry on October 20th, which was the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash. Dave talked to his good friend who he had played with, Lorrie Morgan, and Lorrie called the country music people there at Opryland – it’s not the Ryman, it’s the new place they built, which is humongous. We had been in San Antonio, Texas, playing for the Veterans, we raised a couple hundred thousand dollars for Veterans, got on our bus, came back east to Nashville and played the Grand Ole Opry and did a bunch of television shows to promote our new album, we dropped a single, “Sweet Home Alabama” with Ronnie Dunn from Brooks & Dunn singing it – he did such a great job, every one of the vocalists did amazing jobs – and we dropped that single in Nashville that day and then the next day, the 20th, on the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash, we were on the Grand Ole Opry. We did “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Swamp Music.” The place was packed.
Vince Gill was on the show with us and he sang a song for us that he had written for his brother when his brother passed away. It was a beautiful song and there wasn’t a dry eye at Opryland because of the significance of the fact that it was the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash. All I could do, Leslie, was just kind of look heavenward and just think to myself, well, we’ve got this beautiful album that is honoring Ronnie and the band and here we are onstage at the Grand Ole Opry representing, still keeping that music in the public eye. It was a tearful moment for me.
Lindsey Ell does a knock-out version of “Needle & The Spoon” on the album.
Oh yeah, I stayed in the studio with her all day long, my son and I. She’s thirty-three, hotter than a firecracker, sweet as she can be. She’s from Canada, I think Toronto or Montreal, and she’s really great. She’s super sweet, super nice and she killed it. She has a very clear voice like Sheryl Crow. You can actually understand the words that are being sung.
There were a couple African American artists that I wanted to get on this album and they just weren’t available. You know, trying to schedule the different artists on this was not easy but it’s done and maybe we’ll do another one sometime with another batch of Skynyrd songs and bring in Bob Dylan, cause I was listening to the TV from the kitchen and I heard this voice and it was Bob Dylan. I walked in and he’s in this documentary, it was on CNN, and he said, “All you have to know, all you have to do is listen to the words of Ronnie Van Zant and his band Lynyrd Skynyrd on that song ‘Simple Man’ and that tells you everything you need to know.” He was basically saying, Listen to your mom, listen to your grandmother. I knew Ronnie’s mother and he wrote the song for her and his grandmother. And to hear Bob Dylan, I think tears came to my eyes. The Poet Laureate of the world – a lot of people would argue with that and say it’s Merle Haggard – but hearing Bob Dylan say something like that, I thought, maybe we’ll do another album someday and go for some of the deeper tracks, and bring in people like that. Eric Gales is a friend of mine and a monster guitar player. Tab Benoit. I love Tab. And all those Zydeco guys that try to help save the wetlands and the Neville family that works down there. I’d love to do another Skynyrd record and bring Tab and Eric Gales and really show the world that Ronnie wrote songs that cross all the genres.
He spoke to humans
He did, he really did. When I lived in Jerusalem, Israel, in the Castle Of King David on Mount Zion at the school of Diaspora Yeshiva, that’s one thing I realized: we’re all the same. We want to raise our children, feed our children, keep the enemy from our door and live in peace. I’ve got friends over there that are Muslim and Arab, which aren’t necessarily the same thing, Israeli and Jewish, which aren’t necessarily the same thing, and I’m worried about all of them right now because of what’s going on. I saw with my own eyes the Arab people, they’re totally mistreated because they keep them ignorant, pissed off, hungry and these Arab leaders are living in gold-plated palaces and living that kind of life when most of the Arabic people are not enjoying that oil money. They’re kept ignorant, in the dark and downtrodden.
And this country has been divided between the people that don’t like black people and people that like everybody. And I’m one of the people that like everybody. If you’re a good person, I don’t care what your gender, your background, the color of your skin, what religion. If you’re a good person then you’re a good person. If you’re a scumbag then it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, whether you wear a suit, if you’re a scumbag then you’re a scumbag. And that’s what Ronnie was saying to Neil Young in “Sweet Home Alabama”: don’t blame all the men in the south for the actions of some. We’re not all racist.
Warren Haynes does an amazing “Saturday Night Special” on Anthems.
Warren is the best. He’s from Asheville, North Carolina, and he is good friends with my band. They all knew each other growing up, all the different bands that Warren was in. So that’s how that came about that Warren sang on the record, because the guys in the band knew Warren and offered it to him. Also, Warren co-wrote a song for the movie that we did called Street Survivors. He wrote a song that we did in there and it’s the title track and I would put it up against any southern rock song ever written and it was written by Scott Raines, Jerry Lyda and Warren Haynes. So with that going down on the movie, they told Warren we’re going to be doing this album and I believe Warren chose “Saturday Night Special” cause he liked that song. That’s the first song that I ever recorded with Lynyrd Skynyrd in Atlanta for the movie The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds.
What do you remember about recording that song?
I remember that the day I recorded “Saturday Night Special,” that morning at 9:00, I flew from Atlanta, Georgia, to Columbus, Ohio, and signed the papers on my father’s wrongful death. He was hit from above and behind by a B-57 Weather Reconnaissance Bomber in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was in a brand new Cessna 150 with a man that had thirty-six thousand hours of flying time named Robert Stubblefield, and Dad was flying over property that he was going to build on. He was an architect and a builder, developer, and he always liked to see from the air the geographical lay of the land so he would set his homes on the lots and how he would put in his storm drains. Dad had just soloed, gotten his solo pilot’s license, and I was about to solo. I was in the Marines and I was going to go to flight school and fly jets for the Marine Corps after I got my Captain’s bars. That was the dream. Then when Dad was killed, everything changed and I became the drummer of a Southern rock band called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Life throws you some curves.
But that morning I flew up there, signed the papers to Dad’s wrongful death, met with my mother at the attorney’s office, gave the money to my mother and I had a dollar in my pocket and I flew, they had bought me a ticket, and I took my round-trip back to Atlanta. I didn’t have six dollars to pay to get out of the parking lot. Back then it was six dollars in 1973/1974. Nowadays they’ve got huge fences and electronics and cameras but I was able to walk my Volkswagon Microbus over the eight inch curb that prevented you from getting out of the parking lot and not paying. I didn’t pay the six bucks. I went directly to a gas station, put one dollar’s worth of gas in my Volkswagon Microbus, drove across Atlanta, went into the studio, Studio One, with Al Kooper [producer] and I’m behind my drums and we’re playing “Saturday Night Special” for this movie.
I had tears, I was upset, and Al came out and said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Well, I just signed the wrongful death papers to my father and I’m upset.” And Al Kooper said, “I don’t mean to be insensitive but use that emotion.” So you can hear by the way I played “Saturday Night Special,” I’m full-on. My pedal is to the metal. When I start playing my snare drum in the beginning of that and I’m pounding, and I play it live that way to this day and I think about my father to this day and I think about that moment with Al Kooper when he said that, “I’m not trying to be insensitive but use that emotion, use whatever you’ve got.” And I did. And that was a huge hit for Lynyrd Skynyrd and the first song that I ever recorded. So “Saturday Night Special” is a very deep cut to me considering what happened to my father and what Al told me. So when you bring up “Saturday Night Special,” it goes very deep to me, and Warren did an incredible job. You can hear the pain in his voice. You can hear the hurt in his voice. And I absolutely love all the performances but especially that one.
You said you were a Marine and you enlisted in the late sixties during Vietnam. Did you have any concerns about that?
I joined the Marines to go to Vietnam. I went to every school. I was an expert on firing every weapon. I flew backseat in our trainer jets that we had in my squadron. I was an Aviation Electronics Electrician. I worked on fire control, missile control, navigation communication aboard Skyhawks and I flew backseat. That’s why they said my physiology was good, because I could take seven G’s in a dive, that’s seven times your body weight pulling against your own body. I could take +7 G’s without passing out. Also, I never threw up. You know, when you went up in one of those trainers flying backseat, a lot of the pilots would have what is known as a barf bag. Like, if you’re doing 4-point snap rolls or you’re in a dive dropping bombs out in the desert of Arizona practicing for Vietnam. But I never once threw up and that’s why they said that I was perfect for the flight program.
But you never went over there, did you?
I did not. I had my orders in my hand to go to Vietnam when my father was killed in a mid-air collision in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They canceled my orders and sent me home to be with my mom. I had a short time on my enlistment left, cause I was going to ship over and become a pilot and an officer in the Marine Corps. It was all in place. Then after Dad was killed, my life completely changed.
Do you think your time as a Marine helped you when the Skynyrd plane crashed?
Oh absolutely. Before I left the crash site, I did some triage, you know, some tourniquets, pressure bands. “Here, take this shirt and hold it on that wound.” Definitely my Marine Corps training saved lives and then putting one foot in front of the other and going to the farmhouse and bringing help back to the crash site, which is what I was trained to do. So absolutely. There were twenty-six of us on board, six people were killed on impact and myself and nineteen other people lived. In most plane crashes, that doesn’t happen. I was able to stop the bleeding. That’s the first thing you learn in combat training and I was in extensive combat training, although I didn’t go to Vietnam. Then right after my orders were cancelled, we basically pulled out of Vietnam. If I would have gone over there, I would have had to turn around basically and come right back. And I’ll tell you, Leslie, I did not want to kill anybody and I didn’t want to get killed, and I was trained how to kill people. Marines are trained how to kill people and I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to get killed, so I’m glad I didn’t have to see that. But I had a lot of friends that went over there and came back different and I had a lot of friends that went over there and didn’t come back.
You said you didn’t pass out as a pilot so did you stay awake through the plane crash?
Of course. That was my third airplane crash. One when I was eleven with my uncle, one in the Marine Corps on a search & rescue mission for a downed pilot on the coast of North Carolina in the swamps. Then of course the Skynyrd plane crash. I have never been knocked unconscious. I’ve been hit in the head really hard a lot of times and I’ve got a lot of scar tissue on my head and hair will not grow (laughs).
That’s why you keep it so long
(laughs) Yeah, I still am a hippie, you know, so I still have long hair. But the thing about the Skynyrd crash, I was never knocked unconscious and really, honestly, never in my life, and I’ve been in a lot of situations where I’ve had car wrecks and motorcycle wrecks where I could have been knocked unconscious very easily.
But in that plane crash, I got out of the wreckage, I went back in the wreckage to help a friend of mine get his legs out, the whole time thinking the plane was going to burst into flames. It didn’t occur to me that we had no fuel. We took on 400 gallons in Greenville, South Carolina.
Of course after the plane crash, I was my own investigator and I went back and talked to people. Our pilots did not put a wooden stick into the wing tank and check the gas, which every pilot knows you do not trust gages on old airplanes; you look at what the gasoline level is with a wooden stick, that’s widely known, and our pilots failed to do that. They made a crucial mistake. We were sixty miles away from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we spiraled in from nine thousand feet, we hit the ground about two-hundred miles an hour, and the Mississippi pine trees tore our plane completely apart. And no, I was never knocked unconscious.
The immediate thing that I knew after the period of time where we were actually crashing through the trees, when everything stopped and it was suddenly silence, and I listened to that silence and I can hear that silence right now, the first thing a man does, only as a man I can tell you, the first thing a man does after an unbelievably violent plane crash, is to check and make sure that he’s still a man. And that’s exactly what I did. The second thing was to push through the jagged metal and get out of the piece of wreckage I was in. Once I got out, I heard Don Kretzschmar yelling that he was trapped, he was pinned. So I’m thinking the plane is going to burst into flames and I went back through the hole that I had pushed through the jagged metal, cut myself up, and I went back in there and threaded Don out of that wreckage through the hole and dropped out under the plane on the ground.
Had he been sitting by you?
He was next to me. I was on the aisle over the left wing on the left side of the plane and he was sitting next to me by the window. Cassie Gaines was directly in front of me in her seat and she was killed on impact. Billy Powell for years said that Cassie had lived through the impact and Billy was wrong. He wasn’t lying, he was just wrong. She was killed on impact. I know that for a fact. If you ask ten people that see a car wreck what happened in the car wreck, you’ll probably get ten different versions. I forgave Billy for that. He said on an interview one time, “I don’t know why Artimus is so mad at me. I took back all that stuff that I said about Cassie.” I said, well good, it’s about time you take it back cause it wasn’t true.
Have you been out to the Memorial in Mississippi?
Sure, yeah. I stopped by there one time. We were on our way to Texas and we went over to the memorial and my entire band and crew spent about an hour there. Nobody said anything, a couple of quiet questions to me about the memorial itself from members of our crew and I answered. But it was a very quiet time. Where the memorial is, it’s close to where we crashed and it’s out in the country and it’s very quiet, away from the interstate. And it’s beautiful, the memorial is beautiful.
Of all the albums that you recorded with Skynyrd, as a drummer, in your opinion, which one top to bottom do you feel you were the most locked in at your highest potential as a drummer?
Well, I didn’t like any of the sounds that they got me back in the days. It was thin. Bob Burns before me got a beautiful, warm fuzzy sound. When I came along on Nuthin’ Fancy, my tracks sounded thin against the tracks. I was very disappointed. Then later on when they digitally remastered everything and made my drums sound like the thunder that it is at the point of origin, tears came to my eyes the day I was driving down the road and heard it come on the radio. The DJ goes, “Here’s a brand new cut from Lynyrd Skynyrd that has been digitally remastered,” and they played it and it was unbelievable how good my drums sounded up against the track.
There is no one song or one album that I can say is the height of my performing. Each album, each song, has places that I said I would change. I would have been told, “We’ll fix it in the mix,” and they don’t fix it in the mix. But when everything in our entire catalog was rebooted and recalibrated and digitally remastered with the modern technology, that’s when I had a smile on my face because I thought, now my catalog is going to stand. The remaster made a huge difference.
And Anthems sounds very crisp
It’s crisp, thank you for that. That’s why we did it, because Ronnie Van Zant deserves it. We picked these songs up, shined them up, polished them off, dusted them off. And you know, they’re still played all over the world every day on radio stations. These songs are a part of the fabric of this planet. With all of these great new vocalists, it just couldn’t be better. Thank you, Leslie, for letting me talk about this. I’ve done interviews all over the world and everybody loves the record. It’s a very special record and what made it special is people like Dolly Parton and her producer Kent Wells and all of the people that were involved. Getting Gary Rossington on there and Judy Van Zant [Ronnie’s widow] signed off on us using the wordage, Ronnie’s name and the name Lynyrd Skynyrd. Judy was fine with it because she knew the album is beautiful and she was the one who called me the night that Gary passed away. Judy called me, and we haven’t spoken that much over the years and there’s been some contention at times, but I love Judy and she called me that night and said, “Artimus, I wanted to let you know that Gary’s gone …” She didn’t want me to hear it on the television or the radio. So I thanked her. But getting Gary on there with Dolly and having those texts between Gary and I, I wouldn’t take a million dollars for that.
What, to you, was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s greatest gift to music?
Ronnie Van Zant was the impetus. It was his vision. He had the songs, he wrote those words that people could relate to. He had that gift. His little brothers don’t have it. The rest of the band were able to write some things but the words are what made the connection to everybody with that music. So I have to give it to the visionary, which is Ronnie Van Zant. The gift to music that the entire band gave us being a band going through being on the road, traveling thousands of miles all over the planet, going to Japan and all over Europe a dozen times. When we crashed, we were on a ninety-five-city world tour on our way to Australia. But Ronnie could turn a phrase and the one song that I wrote with Ronnie that I’ll give myself credit, cause I never asked for credit and said, “Hey, I came up with an idea on that” or “I wrote my own drum part” – because Ronnie let me write my own drum parts. They used to drive Bob Burns crazy telling him what to play but my deal with Ronnie when he hired me, and I was hired by Ronnie Van Zant, nobody else, I said, “My deal is I write my own drum parts. If they suck, we’ll change them.” And he said, “Deal.”
The one song that I know in my heart that I wrote with Ronnie is the song called “That Smell.” It’s basically like a cautionary tale: be careful drinking and drugs because you might end up wrapped around a tree and you might not wake up. That was a warning from Ronnie. A lot of his songs, like “Saturday Night Special” was about gun control. Ronnie said it in many interviews, “I hate guns.” I’m the same way, I hate guns. I wish I could blink my eye and every weapon and bullet and bomb in the world would disappear. I could get on a soapbox at this point, but I won’t (laughs)
But yeah, our little album is an incredible album. The package looks great and they got a picture of me on the back and I look like I’m from Yellowstone or something (laughs). This one lady in the parking lot at Lowe’s, I was getting some bird seed for all my bird feeders, and she goes, “Does this have something to do with Yellowstone?” (laughs) And I’m going, “No ma’am, that’s not Kevin Costner, that’s me” (laughs). I’d like to be in Yellowstone. I can ride horses. I’ve been on horseback my entire life (laughs).
But Leslie, I’ve done interviews in the last month or so in Sydney, Australia; Athens, Greece; Paris, France; London, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; Montreal, Toronto, everywhere in America; and the consensus is that we have a beautiful album. And it is truly a tribute album. And when you think about the fact that we did this on purpose, by design, that the children and grandchildren of all of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd who are now in rock & roll heaven – I’m the only one still here – the royalties and the licensing fees and all the things we had to do, that money will go to the men that wrote those songs, which are the men of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which are the men in rock & roll heaven; along with our back-up singers – JoJo Billingsley, Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins, who is still living in Florida and an amazing woman and singer. I got her on my last album that I did, a solo album that I did called Artimus Venomus. I wrote a song about forgiveness and Leslie is wailing on that song in perfect voice. I listened to it the other day and it’s been out for years, since 2006, when we were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.
And life is good
I’m in beautiful North Carolina in the foothills of the mountains. We’re surrounded by mountains. I’ve been married and I’ve got great memories and the girls that I was married to were incredible people but nobody can live with me, I’m an idiot (laughs). So I clean my own house, I wash my own clothes, I wash my own dishes and I’m pretty good at it (laughs). But I love playing drums. I have eight children and grandchildren and we all play drums together. We get pretty tribal and that makes my life happy.
Photographs courtesy of 2911 Media/Artimus Pyle; monument photo by Leslie Michele Derrough
