Kelley Looney, longtime bassist with Steve Earle & the Dukes

We just saw Steve Earle a few weeks ago. Not sure what the story is but Steve's sister Stacey posted about Kelley just a bit ago...

 miamizsun wrote:
 

so unexpectedly. 

eli cummings has died

Jessye Norman was a diva whose voice could not be denied

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

That was a great song; I haven't heard it in years.  They were a good band - "power pop" before it was called that.

Don't recall this being covered last week when he passed...

April Fools’ Day, 1986. I had just turned seventeen and was on the floor of the Providence Civic Center. The Grateful Dead. I’d worked my way up to a spot about twenty feet from the lip of the stage and found myself within winking distance of Jerry Garcia, an immensity in a red T-shirt that hung halfway to his knees. (“Trouble ahead, Jerry in red,” the Deadheads liked to say.) I’d never stood so close. I could see the pearl inlay in the frets of his guitar neck and the ghostly pallor of his skin. Three months later, ravaged by opiates and ill health, he would fall into a diabetic coma, an experience that he’d later recall as being “one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presences.” But on this night, despite the power of his guitar, and of his growling tenor and still palpable charisma, it seemed that he might die any minute.

He was playing a song called “Black Peter,” a bluesy dirge from the band’s 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead.” It is a first-person account of a hard-luck pauper on his deathbed: “One more day I find myself alive / Tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground.” Garcia, though only forty-three, had deteriorated into the title role, so that a song that had once seemed evocative, almost actorly—an imagined character conveyed by a man of prodigious gifts—now seemed downright real. Jerry was Peter. The song ends by shifting into the point of view of people thronging to watch him die. In Providence, Garcia sang, with some gruff delicacy, in my apparent direction: “Take a look at poor Peter / He’s lying in pain / Now let’s go run and see.” After moaning the words “run and see” a few times, he turned away from the microphone with something like disgust. So this is what we were doing, all of us who’d crammed into that arena, antic with chemicals and adulation: we’d run to see poor Peter, to gawk at the pain. This may seem melodramatic to you now, but the moment was more than a callow teen-ager, mostly unacquainted with death or real pain, could bear. I was transfixed, and ashamed.

The song’s lyrics, like those to most of the band’s original songs (and certainly the best ones), had been written by Robert Hunter, who died last week, at the age of seventy-eight. He never performed with the band but provided it with the universe of images, ideas, and tales—and all the one-liners, couplets, anthems, and puzzlers—that gave some quicksilver conceptual coherence and old-timey cred to the Dead’s shambling psychedelic Dixieland. He grounded it, if you can say that, in a phantasmagoric reiteration of American folk legend: drifters, thieves, rounders, jailbirds, horndogs, vigilantes, and roustabouts. “Truckin’,” “Ripple,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Stella Blue,” “Uncle John’s Band”—all written by Hunter. There were very few conventional, charting hits but lots of home runs.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/robert-hunter-gave-the-grateful-dead-its-voice

Barrie Masters, Eddie and the Hot Rods

"It may be difficult to hear (or believe) now, but Eddie and the Hot Rods played a crucial role in the birth of English new wave. If the Rods, sons of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, hadn't been out there playing wild and fast rock'n'roll in the clubs at a time when superstar pomposity was the currency of pop music, bands like the Sex Pistols would never have had the opportunity to join, intensify and broaden that rebellious spirit into a national — and international — musical upheaval." Trouser Press, Ira Robbins

 GeneP59 wrote:
 

Dang. He deserved a special reward for enduring that makeup

Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died

 Antigone wrote: 
Indeed.

I know Eddie Money is not a "typical" RP artist, but how about a one time rendition of 2 tickets to Paradise in honour of Ric Ocasek and Eddie

 miamizsun wrote:
 

There was a lot of stuff being burned that day; very little of it was your run-of-the-barrow pit weed. 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 

i've been there

a burning spliff touching your lips

and you had to breathe right?

universe was in alignment

it's moments like these...

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
Who always reminded me of Ocasek.  Strange synchronicity.  Candy O always made my booty shake.

 oldviolin wrote:
 

Yep. At one time I had at least one solo LP from 4 out of 5. The Greg Hawkes record was pretty far out there, experimental synth stuff. Ben's record was tame but with the Cars you can see he was a huge part of their success. Elliot's Change No Change was very good, and there's a solo Elliot track here at RP, not from that album tho it's on later releases so maybe I'll go get that. Drummer David Robinson was with Jonathan Richman in the early days.

 miamizsun wrote:
 

Yes 

I never had the opportunity to see The Cars but man that gift Ric had was rich with
artistry. The whole band in fact. He and Ben meeting was meant to be for the music...

rip eddie and ric  

 Proclivities wrote:
 

Indeed. I always thought of corn popping.