Tag: 2020

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Leslie West – 12/2020

Leslie West 12/2020 – (75) West was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City on October 22, 1945, to Jewish parents. He grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, and in East Meadow, Forest Hills, and Lawrence, New York. His mother was a hair model, his father the vice president of a rug shampoo company. He grew up in the suburbs. When Leslie was 8, his mother bought him his first instrument, a ukulele, but he became entranced with the guitar after seeing Elvis Presley play one on television. He bought his first guitar with the money given to him for his bar mitzvah. After his parents divorced, he changed his surname to West. 

His professional career began in a band he formed in the mid-1960s with his brother Larry, who played bass. The band, the Vagrants, was a blue-eyed soul group inspired by a hit act from Long Island, the Rascals, one of the few teenage garage rock acts to come out of the New York metropolitan area itself (as opposed to the Bohemian Greenwich Village scene of artists, poets, and affiliates of the Beat Generation, which produced bands like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground) The two bands played the same local clubs, as did Billy Joel’s early group, the Hassles.

Improbably, Vanguard Records, better known for folk, jazz and classical artists, signed the Vagrants. Their first single, “I Can’t Make a Friend,” a garage rocker, became a minor hit in 1966. Felix Pappalardi, who produced some of the Vagrants’ songs, helped them obtain a new contract with Atco Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic, for which they cut a cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” that earned East Coast airplay in 1967.  Continue reading Leslie West – 12/2020

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Ken Hensley – 11-2020

Ken Hensley, Uriah Heep, was born on August 24, 1945 in South-east London. He learned how to play guitar at the age of 12 from a Bert Weedon manual. His first gig was at The Mentmore Pen Factory, in Stevenage (September 1960). After that, he played with The Blue Notes, Ken and the Cousins and Kit and the Saracens (1962). In 1963, this band evolved into The Jimmy Brown Sound, and they recorded some now lost songs. At this time, Hensley’s first “professional” opportunity almost came about: they were to back Ben E. King on a British visit, but it never happened.

In early 1965, Hensley formed a band called The Gods, with the young guitarist Mick Taylor, well known later for his work with John Mayall and The Rolling Stones. Hensley wrote most of the material, sang and played the Hammond B3 organ as the band already had Taylor on guitar. The Gods’ line-up included, at one time or another, vocalist and guitar/bass player Greg Lake (later of King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer), bass player Paul Newton (later the first Uriah Heep bassist), drummer Lee Kerslake (later also of Heep), bassist John Glascock (later of Jethro Tull), and guitarist Joe Konas. In early 1968, they signed with Columbia Records and recorded two LPs and several singles.

Hensley also then played on a one-album side project of The Gods initially planned to become their third album, but was recorded and eventually released in 1969/1970 under the moniker Head Machine’s Orgasm. The album was produced by David Paramor (producer of “The Gods”) and both Hensley and Kerslake featured, along with John Glascock on bass, Brian Glascock on drums, and David Paramor on vocals, all under pseudonyms. Hensley played mostly guitar again, as in the beginning of his career. Although Paramor was credited as composer, the songs bear many of Hensley’s influences. The album was released before Hensley joined Toe Fat, and might almost be considered a prototype for the harder side of his future work in Uriah Heep.

The band eventually split but Cliff Bennett, from the Rebel Rousers, decided to move in a more “progressive” direction and asked The Gods to join him. Under the name Toe Fat they released two LPs, but only the first featured Hensley.

Paul Newton asked Hensley (Christmas 1969) to join forces in Spice, as they were looking for a keyboard player to make their sound less bluesy and more progressive, in keeping with the current trend. In January 1970, Spice changed its name into Uriah Heep.  Also in the line-up were guitarist Mick Box and vocalist David Byron. With Uriah Heep, Hensley found a place to develop and showcase his songwriting and lyrical abilities as well as his keyboard and guitar playing. 

The band’s “classic” line-up featured Hensley, Byron, Box, Kerslake and bassist Gary Thain. During his time with Heep (1970–1980), they recorded 13 studio albums, and the live album Uriah Heep Live – January 1973 along with many compilations and singles. Hensley also recorded his first two solo albums, Proud Words on a Dusty Shelf (1973) and Eager To Please (1975) during this time. He was supported mainly by Mark Clarke and Bugs Pemberton.

After the departure of bassist Gary Thain (who died in 1975) and vocalist David Byron, (who died in 1985) other musicians were brought into the Heep family: John Wetton (Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, later of U.K. and Asia), Trevor Bolder (from Spiders From Mars, later of Wishbone Ash) and John Lawton (Lucifer’s Friend), among others.

In 1980 Hensley left the band, unhappy with the musical direction they had chosen. After trying to put a new band together in the UK (Shotgun), he later moved to the US and played a few gigs in North America as The Ken Hensley Band. Around this time he released his third solo LP, Free Spirit (1980).

In 1982, Hensley joined Blackfoot, a hard rock Jacksonville, Florida-based band. With them, he recorded two albums (1983’s Siogo and 1984’s Vertical Smiles). Although the group had achieved some success, Hensley left after he was informed him of Heep vocalist David Byron’s death in 1985.

After 1985, Hensley lived in semi-retirement in St Louis, Missouri, making a few appearances with W.A.S.P., Cinderella and others. W.A.S.P.’s frontman Blackie Lawless stated that “Ken Hensley wrote the rule book for heavy metal keyboards as far as I’m concerned.” Hensley also owned “The Attic” Recording studio in St. Louis.

In 1994, From Time To Time, a collection of lost recordings, was released featuring rare songs recorded by Hensley between 1971 and 1982, as well as some early versions of Heep’s classic songs, played by Hensley and his roommates at that time, namely guitarist Paul Kossoff and drummer Simon Kirke(both of Free). Other musicians on the songs were bassist Boz Burrell (King Crimson and Bad Company), guitarist Mick Ralphs (Mott the Hoople, Bad Company), drummers Ian Paice (Deep Purple, Whitesnake) and Kenney Jones(The Small Faces, The Faces, The Who), amongst others.

IIn 1997 Ken established The Upper Room Studios in St. Louis, Missouri where Ken was involved with several projects including A Glimpse of Glory, together with his band Visible Faith produced by Ken and engineered by chief engineer Bud Martin. In 1999, Hensley’s musical activities began to increase, besides his work with St Louis Music.

During the fourth Uriah Heep Annual Convention in London, May 2000, plans were made for a one-off concert by the so-called “Hensley/Lawton Band”. Hensley was joined by former Uriah Heep singer John Lawton, their first public collaboration since the latter’s departure from Uriah Heep in 1979. With them were Paul Newton (the band’s original bassist) and two members of Lawton’s band, Reuben Kane on lead guitar and Justin Shefford on drums. They played a set of old Uriah Heep classics and some of Hensley’s solo songs, and the concert was recorded for a CD release, followed by an extensive tour of Europe during Spring and Summer of 2001 culminating with a concert on 12 May in Hamburg, Germany, featuring a full orchestra and a new rendition of Heep’s old classic song “Salisbury”. After the tour, both Ken and John returned to their respective solo careers. 

On 7 December 2001, both John Lawton and Ken Hensley appeared on stage with Uriah Heep during the annual Magician’s Birthday Party at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. This concert was recorded and released as a CD/DVD.

Running Blind, his first studio effort in 21 years, was released worldwide in 2002 and followed by a world tour with his band called “Free Spirit”, that included Dave Kilminster (guitar), Andy Pyle (bass) and Pete Riley (drums).

After moving to Spain, Hensley released The Last Dance (with new songs), The Wizard’s Diary (Uriah Heep classics re-recorded in 2004) and Cold Autumn Sunday (Hensley’s solo songs re-recorded in 2005).

Featuring a number of special guests, the rock opera Blood on the Highway was released in May 2007. The story portrays the rise and fall of a rock’n’roll star. Lead vocals role were split between Hensley and Glenn Hughes (ex-Deep Purple, Trapeze, Black Sabbath), Jørn Lande (ex-The Snakes, Masterplan), John Lawton and Eve Gallagher.

In September 2008, Hensley went on stage again with former Heep bandmates Lawton, Kerslake and Newton along with ex-Focus guitarist Jan Dumée, for the “Heepvention 2008” fans meeting.

Hensley continued to write and record a series of new albums, beginning with a collection of songs under the title of Love & Other Mysteries, recorded near his home in Spain and followed in 2011 by Faster, his first studio recording of new songs with his live band, Live Fire. A CD of one of his solo concerts was released by Cherry Red Records in 2013, shortly followed by a live CD recorded with Live Fire during a September/October tour. Trouble, an album of 10 new songs recorded with a revised Live Fire line-up, was released, again by Cherry Red, in September the same year.

In later years, Hensley and his wife Monica lived in the village of Agost near Alicante in Spain.

Hensley died on 4 November 2020, at the age of 75 following a short illness. He had finished an album titled My Book of Answers before his death, that was released on 5 March 2021.Ken  Hensley wrote many of the Uriah Heep songs during his tenure from 1970 to 1980, performing guitar and lead vocals on a number of occasions.

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Eddie van Halen 10/2020

Tapping virtuoso Eddie van HalenEddie van Halen 10/2020 (65) Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on January 26, 1955 Eddie van Halen was the son of Jan van Halen and Eugenia (née van Beers). Jan was a Dutch jazz pianist, clarinetist and saxophonist and Eugenia was born Indonesian from Indonesian and Italian parents in the town of Rangkasbitung on the island of Java in what was then called the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Jan and Eugenie married in August 1950 and re-emigrated on March 4th 1953 on board of the ship “Sibajak” to Holland, where they settled in Amsterdam. Shortly after the birth of Eddie, the family moved to Nijmegen, where they lived at 59 Rozemarijnstraat. On February 22nd 1962 the Van Halen’s moved again, this time by boat across the Atlantic to New York. After which they proceeded on a continent-crossing journey by train to finally settle in California, where they lived in Pasadena at 1881 Las Lunas Street for two decades. It was here that the two Dutch born Indo-Americans started to write music history and the swirling Van Halen story began.

After experiencing mistreatment for their mixed-race relationship in the 1950s, the parents moved the family to the U.S. in 1962. They settled near other family members in Pasadena, California, where Eddie and his brother Alex attended a segregated elementary school. Since the boys did not speak English as a first language, they were considered “minority” students and experienced bullying by white students. 

Eddie and his older brother, Alex Van Halen, later became naturalized U.S. citizens. The brothers learned to play the piano as children starting at the age of six. They commuted weekly between Pasadena and San Pedro to study with an elderly piano teacher, Stasys Kalvaitis. Continue reading Eddie van Halen 10/2020

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Spencer Davis 10/2020

Spencer Davis (81) – Spencer Davis Group – was born in Swansea, South-West Wales, on 17 July 1939.
His father was a paratrooper during World War II. While his father was away, his uncle Herman was a musical influence on Davis, teaching him how to play the harmonica and accordion at age six. Davis lived through The Blitz: “The bombed city center was my playground. I watched the town being absolutely destroyed.” Davis’s mother continued to live in the West Cross area of Swansea until her death. He attended Dynevor Schoolin Swansea and became proficient speaking a few languages.

His early musical influences were skiffle, jazz, and blues. Musical artists who influenced Davis include Big Bill Broonzy, Huddy Ledbetter, Buddy Holly, Davey Graham, John Martyn, Alexis Korner, and Long John Baldry. By the time he was 16, Davis was hooked on the guitar and the American rhythm and blues music making its way across the Atlantic. With few opportunities to hear R&B in South Wales, Davis attended as many local gigs as practical. Continue reading Spencer Davis 10/2020

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Jerry Jeff Walker 10/2020

Jerry Jeff Walker was born  Ronald Clyde Crosby on March 16, 1942, in Oneonta, N.Y.

A native of New York, Walker spent his early career as a folkie in Greenwich Village in NYC. It was there that he wrote and recorded “Mr. Bojangles,” in the mid-1960s after having spent a night in a New Orleans jail where he met a man who “danced a lick across the cell.” Walker released the song as the title track of a 1968 solo album, shortly after he left the New York band Circus Maximus. In 1971, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band took “Mr. Bojangles” to No. 9 on the pop charts. 

This is the tribute to a man who wrote only one true hit, that turned into a folk rock standard like Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”.

Walker was heading to California when he stopped in Austin and ended up staying. Along with Willie Nelson’s move here a couple of years later, Walker’s arrival helped to herald a prosperous time for Austin music, with terms such as “outlaw country” and “cosmic cowboy” used to describe the music Walker and others were making.

In Walker’s words:

“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life. Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art. I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”

Walker found a new adopted home in Austin, Texas, just as the city’s alternative country scene was being formed. He became one of the regular performers at Austin’s iconic Armadillo World Headquarters, playing with his Lost Gonzo Band on backup, and a member of the city’s legendary group of outlaw country stars. Walker sang backing vocals on bandmate Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues,” which became the longtime theme song to the music performance TV show “Austin City Limits.”

Walker’s 1973 live album “Viva Terlingua!” — recorded not in the West Texas town of Terlingua but in the hill country hamlet of Luckenbach — became a touchstone for that era. His influence looms large even today, as dozens of Texas country roadhouse bands and troubadours are essentially still following the same path that Walker blazed in the ’70s.

“Other than Willie, Jerry Jeff is the most important musician to happen to Austin, Texas, I would have to say,” Asleep at the Wheel leader Ray Benson. “He really brought that folksinger/songwriter form to its height in Texas. And for that, he’ll be eternal, because there’s all these kids today who write songs in that mode.

“But also, a la Willie, he wrote really giant hit songs. ‘Mr. Bojangles’ is a standard. His other songs are wonderful, but to write a standard, that’s something that’s very difficult in today’s day and age to do.” 100 other artists also recorded the song, including Bob Dylan, Sammy Davis Jr., Nina Simone and Neil Diamond.

Among Walker’s other better-known songs are “Little Bird,” “Sangria Wine,” “Charlie Dunn,” “Hill Country Rain” and “Pissin’ in the Wind,” which he wrote after doing just that on a roadside stop en route to Dallas for a Willie Nelson concert in the 1970s.

But Walker was equally known as an interpreter and champion of other writers’ songs. It was Walker who first brought Guy Clark to national attention when he recorded Clark’s “L.A. Freeway” for his 1972 self-titled album on major label Decca Records. “I remember telling him that I was going to record ‘L.A. Freeway’ and that he was on the verge of being a great songwriter,” Walker recalled after Clark’s death in 2016.

Walker cast a spotlight on a young Gary P. Nunn by not only including Nunn’s song “London Homesick Blues” on the “Viva Terlingua!” album, but having Nunn sing it.

“To him, it came down to the song, whether he wrote it or somebody else wrote it,” said Ray Wylie Hubbard, whose iconic song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” also appears on “Viva Terlingua!”

Walker’s recording of the song “gave me a career,” Hubbard says, but also a middle name. He was performing as Ray Hubbard until Walker’s Lost Gonzo Band member Bob Livingston identified him as Ray Wylie Hubbard in a spoken introduction to “Redneck Mother” that appears on the album.

Hubbard says Walker’s record label wanted to edit out that intro to avoid any confusion. “But Jerry Jeff said, ‘Nah, leave it on there.’ So because of him, I got a middle name. He was willing to acknowledge other songwriters; that was just such a gracious trait about him.”

In 2018, shortly after Walker donated a lifetime of artifacts to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the collections’ exhibit space in the university’s Alkek Library featured an exhibit titled “Viva Jerry Jeff: The Origins and Wild Times of a Texas Icon.” It provided much detail about Walker’s pre-Texas years, including audio of early songs, rare photos and letters to family.

“I wanted to tell the story of the young man who had those dreams and that determination,” said Hector Saldana, Texas Music Curator for the Wittliff. “When you’re looking at the letters he was writing to his grandmother, thanking her for the few dollars she had sent him and mentioning just casually that he’d written this song called ‘Mr. Bojangles’ that he thought was good, you just can’t believe it.”

The exhibit also shed light on how Ronald Clyde Crosby became Jerry Jeff Walker. He’d been using an ID card from a friend he made in the New York Army National Guard named Jerry Ferris, and he had become a fan of Harlem jazz pianist Kirby Walker. He combined them to rename himself. (He added the middle name later; on the first Circus Maximus album in 1967, he was credited as Jerry Walker.)

Singer-songwriter Todd Snider, a longtime friend of Walker’s, has often told the story of walking through Santa Fe, N.M., with Walker one night when they happened upon an apparently homeless musician performing “Mr. Bojangles” on the street. 

In Snider’s 2014 book “I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like,” he revisited the encounter:

“I was asking myself, ’Should I tell this guy that he’s playing Jerry Jeff’s song, and that Jerry Jeff is standing right here? But, no, I figured that if Jerry Jeff wanted to let this guy know who he was, he’d tell him. When the song was over, (Walker) said, ‘That sounded great,’ and then he put a (expletive)-load of cash — every bit of cash he had on him — into that guy’s hat.”

Austin keyboardist Chris Gage, who has been playing in Walker’s band since 2008, was among many who posted thoughts about Walker to social media Saturday. “I have my memories of countless plane, bus, train and van rides, green rooms with pizza and Arnold Palmers, packed theaters and showrooms, sunrise meals in Belize, scary car rides (if he was driving), passionate studio sessions and so much more,” Gage wrote.

Walker’s last appearance onstage in Austin was Feb. 22, 2020, to accept a Hall of Fame award from the Texas Heritage Songwriters Association. A star-studded cast — including Rodney Crowell, Michael Martin Murphey, Emmylou Harris, Joe Ely and the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna — performed Walker’s songs in his honor. Walker appeared at the end, with help from his wife and others to get on and offstage.

Jerry Jeff Walker ended his story on this planet on October 25, 2020. He was 79 years old.

Every couple of years Jerry Jeff Walker took a breather in the US Virgin Island of St. Thomas in the 1980s and played several venues. My time down in the islands co-existed with his for a couple of years and I had the pleasure of backing him up on several occasions. He was a man without air. A pure pleasure of a human being.

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Tommy DeVito 9-2020

Gaetano “Tommy” DeVito (The Four Seasons) was born on June 19, 1928, in Belleville,  New Jersey, the youngest of nine children. When he was still too small to hold a guitar, he borrowed an older brother’s and tried playing it while it was lying on the floor. His brother discovered him, he told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2005, and gave him first a beating and then a counterintuitive warning. “Now that I’ve seen you doing it,” he recalled his brother saying, “every time I come home and I don’t see you practicing, that’s a beating.”  At eight years old, he taught himself to play his brother’s guitar by listening to country music on the radio. By the time he was 12, he was playing for tips in neighborhood taverns. He quit school after the eighth grade. (Belleville High made him an honorary graduate in 2007.) By 16, he had his own R&B band and was making $20 or $25 a night, getting into scrapes with the law from time to time.

The large DeVito family shared a flat with an uncle during the Depression, a difficult time. “You did anything to survive. You’d steal milk off of porches.”

Growing up in difficult circumstances in his native New Jersey, DeVito was, in his own words, “a hell-raiser” as a youth, but he found a purpose with music. He formed a band called the Variety Trio with one of his brothers and Nick Massi, who would become the fourth member of the Four Seasons when that group coalesced in about 1960. Massi died in 2000 at 73.

DeVito became a founding member, lead guitarist and vocalist with the Four Seasons, growing the close-harmony quartet that rocketed to fame  with “Sherry”, Rag Doll” and many other hits that earned new generations of rock and roll fans. The key component with the Four Seasons though, was Frankie Valli, with his falsetto vocals. In a 2008 interview with the music publication Goldmine, DeVito recalled that in the late 1940s his trio performed regularly at a bar in Belleville, N.J., when Frankie, a teenager six years younger than him, would sneak in to watch them play. He and the other band members knew Valli from the neighborhood and knew that he had magnificent pipes.

“I’d call him up to the stage and let him sing,” DeVito recalled. “He’d get off right away, because he wasn’t really supposed to be in there; he was underage.” Before long Frankie Valli was part of the group, which went through name and lineup changes before becoming the Four Seasons. “Sherry,” the group’s breakout hit, topped the charts in 1962, and a stream of hits followed, (27 top 40 hits and number-one hits “Sherry” (1962), “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (1962), “Walk Like a Man” (1963), “Rag Doll” (1964).

DeVito didn’t entirely shed his hell-raiser past; he ran up debts, for one thing, and caused tensions within the group. In 1970 he was either forced out, as some accounts say, or left because the pressures of touring had disagreed with him, as he explained it.

He quickly burned through whatever money he had from the group’s heyday and took jobs working in casinos and cleaning houses to get by.

The actor Joe Pesci, a friend since childhood (whose character in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” is named for Mr. DeVito), had lived with Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including “Casino” (1995), also directed by Mr. Scorsese. DeVito also had some success as a record producer and recorded an album of Italian folk songs.

Seeing a version of himself portrayed in “Jersey Boys” was startling, he said. But he was comfortable with the show, which he described as “about 85 percent true to life.”

“When you first see yourself being played, you look at the actor, who is Christian Hoff, and say: ‘Do I look like that? Did I talk like that? Was I really a bad guy?’” he told Goldmine. “And I was. I was pretty bad when I was a kid. There’s a lot of things I’d never do today that I did back then as a kid.”

“Jersey Boys” implies that he was somehow connected to organized crime, but that was an exaggeration, he said, done for the sake of the story.

“I was never part of the mob,” he said. “They might have asked me to play a private party or something, but they paid me for it. Mostly they asked me to do benefits.”

“Jersey Boys” opened on Broadway in November 2005 and ran until January 2017, one of the longest runs in Broadway history. (Clint Eastwood directed a film version in 2014.) The show won four Tony Awards, including best musical and best featured actor (Mr. Hoff).

If the musical massaged the truth a bit, Mr. DeVito generally complained about only one thing in the script: a crack about the cleanliness of his underwear. “I was the most cleanest guy in the whole group,” he said. “I’m clean. I’m very clean.”

Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the two surviving original members of the group, announced Tommy DeVito’s death on Sept. 21, 2020. A spokeswoman for Valli said the cause was the Covid 19 coronavirus. 

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Steve Holland 8-2020

Steve Holland (Molly Hatchett) was born Feb. 22, 1954, in Dothan, Alabama. He began playing guitar at the age of 8, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida in the early 70’s.

He met Dave Hlubek, who had started the band in 1971 at a local record store in Jacksonville, FL. Holland joined in 1974 as the band was forming its classic six-piece lineup. The rest of the principal members of the original band were in place by 1976, eventually signing to Epic Records. But the band didn’t rise to national prominence until 1978, when the place crash involving fellow Jacksonville-based Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd left a void in the Southern rock space. Molly Hatchet stepped up with the release of their self-titled record and then in 1979 with the album Flirtin’ With Disaster is what put them on the national map. Steve played on the band’s first five albums, leaving after the release of 1983’s “No Guts … No Glory.” He is credited as a co-writer on some of the band’s biggest hits, including “Bounty Hunter,” “Whiskey Man” and “Gator Country.

The band released six studio albums on Epic Records between 1978 and 1984, including the platinum-selling hit records Molly Hatchet (1978), Flirtin’ with Disaster (1979) and Beatin’ the Odds (1980). They also had charting singles on the US Billboard charts, including “Flirtin’ with Disaster“.

Steve Holland recorded on 6 Molly Hatchet records and performed with the band through their heyday, leaving in 1983 after the band released the album No Guts…No Glory as the band was adopting a more hard rock sound. Holland chose to leave Molly Hatchet when it became more of a business than a band. “He decided he had enough of the cutthroat atmosphere and it wasn’t fun any more, so he retired,” long time friend John Pappas said. He was replaced by keyboardist John Gavin, reportedly telling John Galvin, the keyboardist in Danny Joe Brown’s solo band, “Wanna be in the band? You can take my place, I’ve had enough” during a show with Sammy Hagar in Detroit. Galvin accepted,
Holland never returned to Molly Hatchet, but there was a reunion of five of the original members — Roland was the exception — at a 1999 benefit after Brown had a stroke.

He later led the Steve Holland Band and played on and off with the Southern Rock Allstars. Holland later formed the band Gator Country in 2005 with former members of Molly Hatchet.

Molly Hatchet, named after a passionate female axe murderer, featured a triple-guitar lineup, with Holland sharing duties with Hlubek and Duane Roland. The classic lineup of the band also included singer Danny Joe Brown, bass player Banner Thomas and drummer Bruce Crump. All of them have now crossed the rainbow into Rock and Roll Paradise. Singer Danny Joe Brown passed away in 2005, guitarist Duane Roland died in 2006, drummer Bruce Crump passed in 2015, and guitarist Dave Hlubeck and bassist Banner Thomas died in 2017.

 He made his home on St. Simons Island, where he found sobriety in 2009 and became an every-Sunday church goer. He passed away on August 2, 2020 after a long illness at age 66.

Holland posted a video to fans several months earlier in which he said: “Hey, y’all. Thanks for all your wishes and prayers and stuff. Love you. Thanks for putting up with me all these years. Turn it up!”

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Peter Green – 7/2020

Peter Green – July 25, 2020.  Born Peter Allen Greenbaum, Peter was born into a Jewish family, the youngest of Joe and Ann Greenbaum’s four children, on Oct. 29, 1946, in Bethnal Green, London’s East End. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine. Fascism and anti-Semitism were on the rise in England as well as Germany in the years before WWII — thugs threw bricks and bottles through the windows of Jewish homes in London’s East End. After the war, Peter’s father officially changed the family name to Green.
The gift of a cheap guitar by his older brother Len, who had lost interest in learning how to play, put the 10-year-old Green on a musical path.
His other brother, Michael, taught him his first guitar chords and by the age of 11 Green was teaching himself. He began playing professionally by the age of 15, while working for a number of east London shipping companies. He first played bass guitar in a band called Bobby Dennis and the Dominoes, which performed pop chart covers and rock ‘n’ roll standards, including instrumentals from the Shadows (Cliff Richards’ backing band at the time). He later stated that Hank Marvin, lead guitarist for the Shadows was one of his guitar heroes and he played the Shadows’ song “Midnight” on the 1996 tribute album Twang.

He went on to join a rhythm and blues outfit, the Muskrats, then a band called the Tridents in which he also played bass. His reputation as a genuine blues guitarist grew rapidly and it was right around his 20th birthday when he got his first big exposure break, replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers — initially for just 4 gigs in October 1965, after Clapton abruptly took off for a Greek holiday. Continue reading Peter Green – 7/2020

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Moon Martin 5/20

May 11, 2020 – John David “Moon” Martin was born on October 31, 1945 (some report 1950 but not true) in Altus, Oklahoma.

If you go to Moon’s Wikipedia page, it says he was born in 1950. But if you read some of the obits, he was born in 1945. Which makes complete sense. If for no other reason than his hair was prematurely gray nearly instantly. And there’s no way he could have played with Hendrix and Joplin if he was only 20, they died in 1970. But Martin did.

His first band, The Disciples, later renamed Southwind, formed in Norman while he was a student at the University of Oklahoma and then relocated to Los Angeles where they attained some success and even toured with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix before calling it quits in 1972. After a brief stint playing with Linda Rondstadt, John focused on session work and songwriting, penning the hit track “Cadillac Walk” which was recorded by Mink DeVille on his debut album.

And then came “Bad Case of Loving You.”

By this time we’d already moved on to the second album, “Escape From Domination,” “Rolene” was heard on KROQ, back when that was a free form station, before the ROQ of the 80s, before the death of rock and the decimation of the station this year. But at this point, Moon Martin was not famous for the Robert Palmer cover, but the Willy DeVille covers.

By 1978 he was recording under the moniker “Moon” Martin due to his multiple song lyrics referring to the moon. He began his solo career with his Victim of Romance EP that included his most successful song “Bad Case of Loving You.” Robert Palmer – Singer would later cover the song, making it a Top 20 hit a year later. Moon’s first solo album, Shots From a Cold Nightmare, remains a Power Pop classic.

Moon Martin sold his soul to rock and roll. He followed the music to the very last note. He died with his guitar strap on, coming out of the studio after a full day’s work on a new album. It wasn’t a fling, something Moon did before law school. He had no desire to work at the bank. (Although let’s not forget Harry Nilsson was a teller!) It was all music, all the time.

It is said they he had lived comfortably off his song royalties, until the day he died. A true exception i rock-n-roll.

He was 74 years old, and he had become a little frail over the last few years…He went to sleep in a big easy chair in his living room with a book in his hand, a blanket in his lap, and a little glass of Coke on the nightstand next to him. He left this world as peacefully as anybody could ever hope to

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Little Richard 5/2020

Little Richard in performance at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York in 2007. “He was crucial,” one historian said, “in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”

Little Richard, was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932. At an early age he already delved deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, and screaming as if for his very life, he created something new, thrilling and dangerous, called rock and roll. Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard, who combined the sacred shouts of the black church and the profane sounds of the blues to create some of the world’s first and most influential rock ’n’ roll records.

Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss — in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.

But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”

Art Rupe of Specialty Records, the label for which he recorded his biggest hits, called Little Richard “dynamic, completely uninhibited, unpredictable, wild.”

“Tutti Frutti” rocketed up the charts and was quickly followed by “Long Tall Sally” and other records now acknowledged as classics. His live performances were electrifying.

“He’d just burst onto the stage from anywhere, and you wouldn’t be able to hear anything but the roar of the audience,” the record producer and arranger H.B. Barnum, who played saxophone with Little Richard early in his career, recalled in “The Life and Times of Little Richard” (1984), an authorized biography by Charles White. “He’d be on the stage, he’d be off the stage, he’d be jumping and yelling, screaming, whipping the audience on.”

An Immeasurable Influence

Rock ’n’ roll was an unabashedly macho music in its early days, but Little Richard, who had performed in drag as a teenager, presented a very different picture onstage: gaudily dressed, his hair piled six inches high, his face aglow with cinematic makeup. He was fond of saying in later years that if Elvis was the king of rock ’n’ roll, he was the queen. Offstage, he characterized himself variously as gay, bisexual and “omnisexual.”

His influence as a performer was immeasurable. It could be seen and heard in the flamboyant showmanship of James Brown, who idolized him (and used some of his musicians when Little Richard began a long hiatus from performing in 1957), and of Prince, whose ambisexual image owed a major debt to his.

Presley recorded his songs. The Beatles adopted his trademark sound, an octave-leaping exultation: “Woooo!” (Paul McCartney said that the first song he ever sang in public was “Long Tall Sally,” which he later recorded with the Beatles.) Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was “to join Little Richard.”

Little Richard’s impact was social as well.

Little Richard in the mid-1950s, around the time his first hit record, “Tutti Frutti,” was released.
Little Richard in the mid-1950s, around the time his first hit record, “Tutti Frutti,” was released.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

“I’ve always thought that rock ’n’ roll brought the races together,” Mr. White quoted him as saying. “Especially being from the South, where you see the barriers, having all these people who we thought hated us showing all this love.”

Mr. Barnum told Mr. White that “they still had the audiences segregated” at concerts in the South in those days, but that when Little Richard performed, “most times, before the end of the night, they would all be mixed together.”

If uniting black and white audiences was a point of pride for Little Richard, it was a cause of concern for others, especially in the South. The White Citizens Council of North Alabama issued a denunciation of rock ’n’ roll largely because it brought “people of both races together.” And with many radio stations under pressure to keep black music off the air, Pat Boone’s cleaned-up, toned-down version of “Tutti Frutti” was a bigger hit than Little Richard’s original. (He also had a hit with “Long Tall Sally.”)

Still, it seemed that nothing could stop Little Richard’s drive to the top — until he stopped it himself.

He was at the height of his fame when he left the United States in late September 1957 to begin a tour in Australia. As he told the story, he was exhausted, under intense pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and furious at the low royalty rate he was receiving from Specialty. Without anyone to advise him, he had signed a contract that gave him half a cent for every record he sold. “Tutti Frutti” had sold half a million copies but had netted him only $25,000.

One night in early October, before 40,000 fans at an outdoor arena in Sydney, he had an epiphany.

“That night Russia sent off that very first Sputnik,” he told Mr. White, referring to the first satellite sent into space. “It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It shook my mind. It really shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’”

He had one last Top 10 hit: “Good Golly Miss Molly,” recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. By then, he had left rock ’n’ roll behind.

He became a traveling evangelist. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music.

For the rest of his life, he would be torn between the gravity of the pulpit and the pull of the stage.

“Although I sing rock ’n’ roll, God still loves me,” he said in 2009. “I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer, but I’m still a Christian.”

He was lured back to the stage in 1962, and over the next two years he played to wild acclaim in England, Germany and France. Among his opening acts were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, then at the start of their careers.

He went on to tour relentlessly in the United States, with a band that at one time included Jimi Hendrix on guitar. By the end of the 1960s, sold-out performances in Las Vegas and triumphant appearances at rock festivals in Atlantic City and Toronto were sending a clear message: Little Richard was back to stay. But he wasn’t.

‘I Lost My Reasoning’

By his own account, alcohol and cocaine began to sap his soul (“I lost my reasoning,” he would later say), and in 1977, he once again turned from rock ’n’ roll to God. He became a Bible salesman, began recording religious songs again and, for the second time, disappeared from the spotlight.

He did not stay away forever. The publication of his biography in 1984 signaled his return to the public eye, and he began performing again.

By now, he was as much a personality as a musician. In 1986 he played a prominent role as a record producer in Paul Mazursky’s hit movie “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” On television, he appeared on talk, variety, comedy and awards shows. He officiated at celebrity weddings and preached at celebrity funerals.

He could still raise the roof in concert. In December 1992, he stole the show at a rock ’n’ roll revival concert at Wembley Arena in London. “I’m 60 years old today,” he told the audience, “and I still look remarkable.”

He continued to look remarkable — with the help of wigs and thick pancake makeup — as he toured intermittently into the 21st century. But age eventually took its toll.

By 2007, he was walking onstage with the aid of two canes. In 2012, he abruptly ended a performance at the Howard Theater in Washington, telling the crowd, “I can’t hardly breathe.” A year later, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he was retiring.

“I am done, in a sense,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing anything right now.”

Little Richard onstage at Wembley Stadium in London in 1972, on a bill that also included his fellow rock ’n’ roll pioneers Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry

Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Ga., on Dec. 5, 1932, the third of 12 children born to Charles and Leva Mae (Stewart) Penniman. His father was a brick mason who sold moonshine on the side. An uncle, a cousin and a grandfather were preachers, and as a boy he attended Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist and Holiness churches and aspired to be a singing evangelist. An early influence was the gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the first performers to combine a religious message with the urgency of R&B.

By the time he was in his teens, Richard’s ambition had taken a detour. He left home and began performing with traveling medicine and minstrel shows, part of a 19th-century tradition that was dying out. By 1948, billed as Little Richard — the name was a reference to his youth and not his physical stature — he was a cross-dressing performer with a minstrel troupe called Sugarfoot Sam From Alabam, which had been touring for decades.

In 1951, while singing alongside strippers, comics and drag queens on the Decataur Street strip in Atlanta, he recorded his first songs. The records were generic R&B, with no distinct style, and attracted almost no attention.

Around this time, he met two performers whose look and sound would have a profound impact on his own: Billy Wright and S.Q. Reeder, who performed and recorded as Esquerita. They were both accomplished pianists, flashy dressers, flamboyant entertainers and as openly gay as it was possible to be in the South in the 1950s.

Little Richard acknowledged his debt to Esquerita, who he said gave him some piano-playing tips, and Mr. Wright, whom he once called “the most fantastic entertainer I had ever seen.” But however much he borrowed from either man, the music and persona that emerged were his own.

His break came in 1955, when Mr. Rupe signed him to Specialty and arranged for him to record with local musicians in New Orleans. During a break at that session, he began singing a raucous but obscene song that Mr. Rupe thought had the potential to capture the nascent teenage record-buying audience. Mr. Rupe enlisted a New Orleans songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to clean up the lyrics; the song became “Tutti Frutti”; and a rock ’n’ roll star was born.

By the time he stopped performing, Little Richard was in both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (he was inducted in the Hall’s first year) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. “Tutti Frutti” was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2010.

If Little Richard ever doubted that he deserved all the honors he received, he never admitted it. “A lot of people call me the architect of rock ’n’ roll,” he once said. “I don’t call myself that, but I believe it’s true.”

Little Richard died on Saturday morning May 9, 2020 in Tullahoma, Tennessee. He was 87. The cause was bone cancer. 

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John Prine 4/2020

John Prine (73) was born on October 10, 1946 and raised in Maywood, Illinois. Prine was the son of William Mason Prine, a tool-and-die maker, and Verna Valentine (Hamm), a homemaker, both originally from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. In summers, they would go back to visit family near Paradise, Kentucky. Prine started playing guitar at age 14, taught by his brother, David. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and graduated from Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois.

He was drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War, serving as a vehicle mechanic in West Germany, before becoming a U.S. Postal Service mailman for five years leading up to  beginning his musical career in Chicago.

“I likened the mail route to being in a library without any books. You just had time to be quiet and think, and that’s where I would come up with a lot of songs,” Prine said later.

While Prine was delivering mail, he began to sing his songs (often first written in his head on the mail route) at open mic nights at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue in Chicago. The bar was a gathering spot for nearby Old Town School of Folk Music teachers and students. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a “You think you can do better?” comment made to him by another performer. After his first open mic, he was offered paying gigs. In 1970, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert heard Prine by chance at the Fifth Peg and wrote his first printed review, “Singing Mailman Who Delivers A Powerful Message In A Few Words”

Roger Ebert Review:

Through no wisdom of my own but out of sheer blind luck, I walked into the Fifth Peg, a folk club on West Armitage, one night in 1970 and heard a mailman from Westchester singing. This was John Prine.  He sang his own songs. That night I heard “Sam Stone,” one of the great songs of the century. And “Angel from Montgomery.” And others. I wasn’t the music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but I went to the office and wrote an article. And that, as fate decreed, was the first review Prine ever received.

While “digesting Reader’s Digest” in a dirty book store, John Prine tells us in one of his songs, a patriotic citizen came across one of those little American flag decals. He stuck it on his windshield and liked it so much he added flags from the gas station, the bank and the supermarket, until one day he blindly drove off the road and killed himself. St. Peter broke the news: “Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore; It’s already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”

Lyrics like this are earning John Prine one of the hottest underground reputations in Chicago these days. He’s only been performing professionally since July, he sings at the out-of-the-way Fifth Peg, 858 W. Armitage, and country-folk singers aren’t exactly putting rock out of business. But Prine is good.

He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.

He does a song called “The Great Society Conflict Veteran’s Blues,” for example, that says more about the last 20 years in America than any dozen adolescent acid-rock peace dirges. It’s about a guy named Sam Stone who fought in Korea and got some shrapnel in his knee. But the morphine eased the pain, and Sam Stone came home “with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back.” That’s Sam Stone’s story, but the tragedy doesn’t end there. In the chorus, Prine reverses the point of view with an image of stunning power:

“There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm Where all the money goes…”

You hear lyrics like these, perfectly fitted to Priine’s quietly confident style and his ghost of a Kentucky accent, and you wonder how anyone could have so much empathy and still be looking forward to his 24th birthday on Saturday.

So you talk to him, and you find out that Prine has been carrying mail in Westchester since he got out of the Army three years ago. That he was born in Maywood, and that his parents come from Paradise, Ky. That his grandfather was a miner, a part-time preacher, and used to play guitar with Merle Travis and Ike Everly (the Everly brothers’ father). And that his brother Dave plays banjo, guitar and fiddle, and got John started on the guitar about 10 years ago.

Prine’s songs are all original, and he only sings his own. They’re nothing like the work of most young composers these days, who seem to specialize in narcissistic tributes to themselves. He’s closer to Hank Williams than to Roger Williams, closer to Dylan than to Ochs. “In my songs,” he says, “I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.”

That’s what happens in Prine’s “Old folks,” one of the most moving songs I’ve heard. It’s about an elderly retired couple sitting at home alone all day, looking out the screen door on the back porch, marking time until death. They lost a son in Korea: “Don’t know what for; guess it doesn’t matter anymore.” The chorus asks you, the next time you see a pair of “ancient empty eyes,” to say “hello in there…hello.”

Prine’s lyrics work with poetic economy to sketch a character in just a few words. In “Angel from Montgomery,” for example, he tells of a few minutes in the thoughts of a woman who is doing the housework and thinking of her husband: “How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come back in the evening, and have nothing to say?”

Prine can be funny, too, and about half his songs are. He does one about getting up in the morning. A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare him down, and won. But “if you see me tonight with an illegal smile – It don’t cost very much, and it lasts a long while. – Won’t you please tell the Man I didn’t kill anyone – Just trying to have me some fun.

”There’s another insightful one, for example, called “The Great Compromise,” about a girl he once dated who was named America. One night at the drive-in movie, while he was going for popcorn, she jumped into a foreign sports car and he began to suspect his girl was no lady. “I could have beat up that fellow,” he reflects in his song, “but it was her that hopped into his car.”

Roger Ebert’s laudatory review set the stage for this remarkable singer/songwriter. Quirky fact aside: “Ebert was being paid to watch and write a review of a film; but as he tells it the film was so bad that he walked out on it half way through, and went looking for a beer to cut the taste of the popcorn. If the film had been any better, Prine’s career might have been entirely different or started a little later”.

Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson heard Prine at Steve Goodman’s (City of New Orleans) insistence, and Kristofferson invited Prine to be his opening act. Prine released his eponymous debut album in 1971, featuring such songs as “Paradise”, “Sam Stone” and “Angel from Montgomery“, giving bittersweet tragic-comic snapshots of American society and also fed into the anti-war movement. The album has been hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time.

The acclaim Prine earned from his debut led to three more albums for Atlantic Records. Common Sense (1975) was his first to chart on the Billboard U.S. Top 100. He then recorded three albums with Asylum Records. In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent label which released all of his music up until his death. His final album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, debuted at #5 on the Billboard 200, his highest ranking on the charts.

Indeed, Prine was a rare songwriter with a gift for both melodic and lyrical incisiveness. He didn’t need to pull any verbal sorcery to make you gasp and think “Did he just do that?” The magic was all in how profoundly and bluntly he observed the most mundane details of life and death, even for characters living on the fringe. His melancholic tales were economical and precise in their gut-punches.

Prine’s lyrics work with poetic economy to sketch a character in just a few words. In “Angel from Montgomery,” for example, he tells of a few minutes in the thoughts of a woman who is doing the housework and thinking of her husband: “How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come back in the evening, and have nothing to say?”

Prine can be funny, too, and about half his songs are. He does one about getting up in the morning. A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare him down, and won. But “if you see me tonight with an illegal smile – It don’t cost very much, and it lasts a long while. – Won’t you please tell the Man I didn’t kill anyone – Just trying to have me some fun.”

At the time John Prine was all over the magazines, but he was nowhere on the radio. But without a radio hit, Prine remained a cult item. Actually, he remained a cult item for his entire career. But it’s funny, cult can supersede major success if you hang in there and do it right.

But after the debut, Prine’s notoriety, his “fame,” the attention he got, seemed to go in the wrong direction, you knew who he was, but most people did not. He had fans who purchased his records, but only fans purchased his records and went to see him live.

Eventually Prine switched labels from Atlantic to Asylum, he worked with his old cohort Steve Goodman, but “Bruised Orange” did not live up to its commercial expectations. It was everywhere in print, I purchased it, but after its initial launch, that’s the last you heard of it. Eventually, after three LPs with the definitive singer-songwriter label, Prine took off on his own, with his Oh Boy Records, partnering with his manager Al Bunetta and their buddy Dan Einstein. It worked. His fans, supporting the project, sent him enough money to cover the costs, in advance, of his next album. Prine continued writing and recording albums throughout the 1980s. His songs continued to be covered by other artists; the country supergroup The Highwaymen recorded “The 20th Century Is Almost Over”, written by Prine and Goodman. Steve Goodman died of leukemia in 1984 and Prine contributed four tracks to A Tribute to Steve Goodman, including a cover version of Goodman’s “My Old Man”.

“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, And come home in the evening and have nothing to say”

Everybody knew “Angel From Montgomery.” It was never a single, never a radio hit. They knew John Prine had written “Angel From Montgomery.” And the great thing about famous songs is they carry their writers along. So when Bonnie Raitt entered the music scene full force with a number of Grammy Awards in the 1990s, the original recorded version from “Streetlights” was superseded by her live performances, if the song got any airplay, it ended up being the live take from her 1995 double album “Road Tested.”

And as a result of this, suddenly the winds were at John Prine’s back, he was a known quantity, his impact increased, his career rose, and it was all because of this one song.

Of course Prine had songs covered by other famous artists, some of them you could even call hits, but I’m not sure fans of David Allan Coe really cared who’d written his numbers. And it wasn’t only Bonnie Raitt. Over the years other people had covered “Angel From Montgomery,” and Raitt’s success lifted all boats, suddenly “Angel From Montgomery” was part of the American fabric. And this is strange. This is akin to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” a song everybody knows that was not featured on the hit parade, but contains the essence of America more than the tracks that are.

Now “Angel From Montgomery” reaches you on the very first listen.

“If dreams were thunder, and lightning were desire

This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”

That kernel, that inner mounting flame, if it goes out, you die.

“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”

But you wake up one day and you discover this is your life, that you’re trapped, that your dreams didn’t come true, and you’re not only frustrated, you’re angry.

So then there’s someone like John Prine, telling your story. That’s what you resonate with, you’re looking for understanding, someone who gets you. And America discovered this singer/songwriter en masse.

In 1991, Prine released the Grammy-winning The Missing Years, his first collaboration with producer and Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein. The title song records Prine’s humorous take on what Jesus did in the unrecorded years between his childhood and ministry. In 1995, Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings was released, another collaboration with Epstein. On this album is the long track “Lake Marie”, a partly spoken word song interweaving tales over decades centered on themes of “goodbye”. Bob Dylan later cited it as perhaps his favorite Prine song. Prine followed it up in 1999 with In Spite of Ourselves, which was unusual for him in that it contained only one original song (the title track); the rest were covers of classic country songs. All of the tracks are duets with well-known female country vocalists, including Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Dolores Keane, Trisha Yearwood, and Iris DeMent.

In 2001 Prine appeared in a supporting role in the Billy Bob Thornton movie Daddy & Them. “In Spite of Ourselves” is played during the end credits.

Prine recorded a version of Stephen Foster‘s “My Old Kentucky Home” in 2004 for the compilation album Beautiful Dreamer, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

In 2005, Prine released his first all-new offering since Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, the album Fair & Square, which tended toward a more laid-back, acoustic approach. The album contains songs such as “Safety Joe”, about a man who has never taken any risks in his life, and also “Some Humans Ain’t Human”, Prine’s protest piece on the album, which talks about the ugly side of human nature and includes a quick shot at President George W. Bush. Fair & Squarewon the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

On June 22, 2010, Oh Boy Records released a tribute album titled Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine.

In 2016, Prine was named winner of the PEN/Song Lyrics Award, given to two songwriters every other year by the PENNew England chapter. Prine also released For Better, or Worse, a follow-up to In Spite of Ourselves. The album features country music covers spotlighting some of the most prominent female voices in the genre, including; Alison Krauss, Kacey Musgraves, and Lee Ann Womack, as well as Iris DeMent, the only guest artist to appear on both compilation albums

On February 8, 2018, Prine announced his first new album of original material in 13 years, titled The Tree of Forgiveness. The album features guest artists Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Dan Auerbach, and Brandi Carlile. Alongside the announcement, Prine released the track “Summer’s End”. The album became Prine’s highest-charting album on the Billboard 200.

In 2019, he recorded several tracks including “Please Let Me Go ‘Round Again”—a song which warmly confronts the end of life—with longtime friend and compatriot Swamp Dogg in his final recording session.

Most of today’s music doesn’t even have any melody, they’re based on beats. And pop numbers are cotton candy, they could be written by school kids, they’ve got no depth, despite the industry hyping them. And then there’s someone like John Prine. Who was always about the songs, who never wavered, who grew by being small, by nailing the experience of the average person, struggling to get by, at least emotionally, if not monetarily. And isn’t it funny how Prine’s music survives. Will it be heard forty or fifty years from now? I don’t know, but the odds are greater than those of the songs on the hit parade.

Prine never sold out, he was the genuine article. And he might not have been in the mainstream, but he was always in the landscape. He even survived cancer. He seemed unkillable. And now he’s gone.

Prine underwent cancer surgery on his throat in 2008 – and on his lungs in 2013 – but joked that it had actually improved his singing voice. Grammy-winning singer/songwriter John Prine died on March, 2020, aged 73, due to Covid-19 complications.

Tributes:

Throughout his five-decade career, Prine was often labeled the “songwriter’s songwriter,” not just because his only chart-toppers were scored by other great writers recording his music, but because few songwriters were as universally beloved, admired, and envied by their peers as Prine was.

• Speaking to the Huffington Post in 2009, Dylan – who performed with Prine – described his music as “pure Proustian existentialism”.

• “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”

• Robbie Robertson, from The Band – who used to back Dylan – described Prine as “a genius”.

• “His work… a beacon of clear white light cutting through the dark days,” added former Led Zeppelin frontman and solo star Robert Plant. “His charm, humour and irony we shall miss greatly.”

• He won his first of four Grammy Awards in 1991, for The Missing Years, which bagged best contemporary folk album. It was a category he would top again in 2005 for Fair and Square.

“We join the world in mourning the passing of revered country and folk singer/songwriter John Prine,” the Recording Academy wrote in a statement.

• “Widely lauded as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, John’s impact will continue to inspire musicians for years to come. We send our deepest condolences to his loved ones.”

• “If I can make myself laugh about something I should be crying about, that’s pretty good,” he said.

• “If God’s got a favorite songwriter, I think it’s John Prine,” Kristofferson said at Prine’s 2003 Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame induction.

• “He’s just one of the greats, and an old, old soul,” his friend Rosanne Cash once said of him. Roger Waters declared in 2008 that he prefers the “extra-ordinarily eloquent music” of Prine to the modern bands influenced by Pink Floyd’s work, like Radiohead. Prine’s music, the Floyd bassist/vocalist said, lives on the same plane as icons like John Lennon and Neil Young.

• And the reigning American bard-in-chief Bob Dylan was effusive in one 2009 interview, naming Prine as among his favorite writers, adding: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs… Nobody but Prine could write like that.”

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Bill Withers 3/2020

Bill Withers was born in 1938 in a West Virginia coal miner’s town, the youngest of six children. His father died when he was a child and he was raised by his mother and grandmother.
His entry to the music world came late – at the age of 29 – after a nine-year stint in the Navy.
He taught himself to play guitar between shifts at his job making toilet seats for the Boeing aircraft company, and used his wages to pay for studio sessions in LA.
“I figured out that you didn’t need to be a virtuoso to accompany yourself,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2015.
He recorded his first album, Just As I Am, with Booker T Jones in 1970. It included the mournful ballad Ain’t No Sunshine, which earned him his first Grammy award the subsequent year. Continue reading Bill Withers 3/2020

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Bo Winberg 1/2020

Bo Winberg – The Spotnicks – was born 27 March 1939 in, Göthenborg, Sweden.
The Spotnicks originated from a duo, “The Rebels” (1956), formed by Bo Starander (later known as Bob Lander) and bassist Björn Thelin. Winberg was soon invited to join the group, and became “Rock-Teddy and the Blue Caps” in 1957. In 1958 they added Ove Johansson on drums, and changed their name to “The Frazers”. They signed a recording contract in 1961, and changed their name to “The Spotnicks”, a play on the Russian satellite Sputnik as suggested by their manager, Roland Ferneborg.

They became the first Swedish group to have international success with their czar sharp Bo Winberg inspired instrumentals. Like the Shadows in the UK and the Ventures in the US, the Spotnicks were instrument driven rockers.
One of their early records, “Orange Blossom Special”, became their first big international hit, making the Top 30 in the UK Singles Chart in 1962 and reaching No. 1 in Australia. Around this time they began wearing their trademark space suits on stage. They recorded their first album, The Spotnicks in London, Out-a Space, in 1962.

Further hits included “Rocket Man” (based on the Soviet/Russian folk march “Polyushko-polye”), and “Hava Nagila”.

This group of outstanding musicians faced the upcoming changes in musical flavors with the Beatles and Stones, The British Invasion, the later sixties Psychedelic rock and classic rock with many personnel changes, but split up in 1970 after releasing their fifteenth album: The Spotnicks Back in the Race; an album with a live feeling, lacking the perfection of their previous works, but still very good!

In spite of their breakup, the band was still popular in Japan, and they soon reformed under Winberg’s control in 1971 at the request of a Japanese record label. Bo Winberg takes part in the band for the Swedish production of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
Winberg continued to lead versions of The Spotnicks, occasionally including Lander and/or Björn Thelin, on tour and in recordings. They kept producing albums year after year and found an audience for their work and toured Germany and Japan numerous times.

In 2013, Winberg and Lander announced that they would be undertaking a final tour, finishing in May 2014.

Bo Winberg died in Sweden on 3 January 2020 aged 80.