Lynyrd Skynyrd Tour Resumes

LA (AP) - Lynyrd Skynyrd hits the road tonight (August 11) at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, its first concert since the death of bassist Leon Wilkeson at age 49 on July 29.

AP asked lead singer Johnny Van Zant how he's going to feel when he steps out on that stage without his old friend.
"Probably sad. Probably like the first night that I played with Lynyrd Skynyrd, you know? Because, I mean, hell - we've been playing together all these years. You know, there's little things that you do on stage that I'll miss," he said. "Those kinds of things, I'm sure, you know, that will be going through my mind. But you know what also will be going through my mind is that we're gonna go tear some ass up, and that we're gonna do the best thing that we can do, and that's play. We want to go out, we wanna pay tribute to our brothers who have already fallen, and to Leon. [If] Leon woulda survived and I woulda been gone, Leon woulda said, 'Man, we need to go play!', you know, 'cause that's what we do, you know, and damn if we ain't gonna finish what we started."