Stuff.co.nz: Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow found dead from unknown causes at his home in Las Vegas. He was 52.

Bugger it. I'm saddened.

Best known and loved for their 1983 cover of Slade's Cum On Feel The Noize, Quiet Riot were pretty huuuuuuuuge for me there for awhile.

Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper (2.92 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

I wish these rockstars and musicians would stop dropping dead. Here's the video for Cum On Feel The Noize.

Labels: eulogies, music, youtube

Dirk had cancer. He also had one of the best mp3 blogs around, Cities on Flame with Rock'n'Roll. Somehow, in between bouts of chemotherapy and getting one of legs amputated, he found the time to post album after album of the best, most obscure, most rare and sought-after and utterly desirable oddities in the history of rock music -- in particular Japanese weirdstuff.

Dirk had the best attitude towards his health problems too. Nothing much seemed to faze him -- not losing a limb, not any of the other tedious and debilitating effects of his treatments -- just as long as he got to keep rocking the weird music on his blog. Just the other day he mentioned that he was heading into hospital for his seventh (and hopefully) last round of chemo, after which he said he "didn't want to see the inside of a hospital for a very long time".

The next post was from his mother, saying that the doctors had found a huge tumour in his lungs. A few days later there was another post from her, to tell us that Dirk was dead.

If you feel like it, please leave a message on his blog to support his family and friends.

They really can use some friends now.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

He's popped off to the planet Tralfamadore for the last time and I will miss him. Not that I ever knew him personally, dig, but I will feel an absence, a void in the fabric of the universe -- the space which he previously inhabited. Perhaps not so much actually on a personal level, for the resonance of his work lingers on and on and on and on and so on... but more the idea that if the human race could produce such a fine fellow -- as a humanist, the ultimate collision of sadness and magnanimity -- will it ever bother to do so again? Could it, even?

And I think the world will be a poorer place -- and we will probably struggle for some time to examine ourselves as effectively -- without his intelligent, forthright sagacity.

My favourite Kurt Vonnegut moment? Encountering his drawing of an anus while reading his novel Breakfast of Champions for the first time at about age 14. It looked something like this:

Some possible reading:

Custodians of Chaos: an excerpt from his memoirs A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut's Blues For America

Salon interview and profile from 1999

Wikipedia entry

Labels: eulogies, freedom-hating, heroes

Gah! Dewey Redman, one of my favourite saxophonists, has passed away. Details are sketchy at this point, but apparently it was sudden, and related to liver-failure.

Redman was a life-long friend of Ornette Coleman, having attended school together, and in the 60s eventually followed him into the tempestuous world of post-bop and avante-garde jazz. Redman led his own band in recording some amazing and classic albums (Look for the Black Star, 1966; The Ear of the Behearer, 1973; The Struggle Continues, 1982; and Living on the Edge, 1989) as well as contributing to some of the greatest and most adventurous records cut by other musicians - among them Ornette Coleman's Crisis, Science Fiction, Skies of America, and Broken Shadows (all 1969-72); Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra (1969); and Keith Jarrett's The Survivor's Suite (1976). More recently he made a great album called Momentum Space (1998) with two other of jazz's giant figures, Elvin Jones (long-serving drummer for John Coltrane; Coltrane's Wikipedia entry here) and Cecil Taylor ("still the most adventurous musician in jazz after - at that point - 45 years" - allmusic.com).

I wanted to present a short track featuring Redman in order to somehow eulogise and pay tribute to him. It was virtually impossible to settle on just one that was suitable to use; having said that, though, here's the duet with Elvin Jones from Momentum Space.

Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones - Spoonin' [from Momentum Space] (4.61 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

And here is the closing track from the same album; a short Redman solo entitled Dew.

Dewey Redman - Dew [from Momentum Space] (0.7 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

A rather-useless, database-generated page is here at Impulse!, although it does have pretty album covers down the right side-bar. Somewhat more interesting is Phil Brodie's tribute page to Dewey Redman.

R.I.P.


NP: Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor and Elvin Jones - Momentum Space (allmusic) of course

Labels: eulogies, music

Scottish rock legend Nikki Sudden, guitarist for Swell Maps (1977-1980), one of my favourite bands - and one of the greatest and most fun and original punk outfits - has died.

R.I.P. Nikki Sudden.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

Polish author Stanislaw Lem, one of the greatest ever writers in the science-fiction genre, has died.

R.I.P. Stanislaw Lem.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

No one's going to be doing an obit on him on the late news. He's not going to be inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. He's not going to be awarded a post-humous Grammy, or a post-humous Lifetime Award for Services to Music, and the anonymous remaining members of The Red Krayola aren't going to accept it on his behalf.

But he's arguably - demonstrably, even - a greater musician than any of say Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, Zappa and the Mothers, Beefheart, Klaus Dinger or Michael Rother, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison or Mo Tucker, Conny Plank or Conrad Schnitzler, Roky Erikson, Ralf und Florian, Van Dyke Parks, Eno, Mobius or Rodelius, Uwe Nettlebeck and Faust, David Bowie; anyone who set out at roughly the same time and who did something significantly weird; something outside of the pantheon, of the expected, of the projected trajectory of rock music.

I realise that this is a very big call, but I stand behind it 100%. And the good thing is, he's not even dead; I couldn't imagine a greater opportunity to laud the man and his work. So yeah. Mayo Thompson and Red Krayola = good. Bloody good, in fact. As Ritchie Unterberger puts it (on allmusic.com), Thompson "seems as concerned with deconstructing the language of 'rock' music as with actually expressing himself within it. This makes Red Krayola's catalog challenging, often difficult listening. Its saving grace is the quirky charm of Thompson's songs and vocals, with a whimsical humor and open-mindedness rather atypical of avant-rock."

Over the course of nearly forty years, Thompson has created a legacy of wonderful music in a series of superb recordings. He has also recruited a diverse succession of excellent musicians to play with him - a few being Gina Birch (the Raincoats), Epic Soundtracks (Swell Maps), Lora Logic (X-Ray Spex) and latterly, the perennially multi-faceted Jim O'Rourke. He has himself played in the legendary Pere Ubu for a time, in the 80s.

Apparently you wanna know where to start. I wouldn't go past God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It (1968, highlight Victory Garden, surely the only love song penned in the voice of Eva Braun and sung to Adolf Hitler); Kangaroo (1981, highlights Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock Pts. 1 & 2 and Born to Win (Transactional Analysis With Gestalt Experiments)); Black Snakes (1983, highlight The Sloths); and the Blues Hollers and Hellos EP (2000, highlight Container of Drudgery).

Also check out the internet to find out lots of information about new releases of old, unreleased Red Krayola material, including the astonishing 1977 album Corrected Slogans. You'll also be able to read all about how the company that makes Crayola crayons forced Thompson to change the band's name from The Red Crayola.

photo by James Welling.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

A guy I affectionately refer to as Ass-Computer, a pal in Finland, paged me earlier in soulseek saying "have you seen this?" and passed me a link which ended with "obit_thompson.html".

My heart sank and a heavy grief overwhelmed me.

"Fuck!" shouts I. "Mayo Thompson is dead".

Of course, it quickly turned out that it was Hunter S. Thompson, erstwhile Doctor of Journalism, a.k.a. Raoul Duke, who was in fact deceased.

A weird mixture of relief and frustration and fulfillment replaced the grief. In a sense I'd been expecting it. I mean, the guy's been dicing it; lining up to bite the big one for a well over forty years. It's not exactly unexpected, that he would go on a crazed acid binge after gnawing for several hours on the pineal glands of kidnapped Amazonian tribesmen, and shoot hisself in the head as he battled to fight off the giant man-eating reptiles.

Or something.

So I guess the bats finally caught up with him in this world; now he's barrelling down the highways of the next, in the midst of a depraved ether and qualude bender, furiously shooting off his six-gun while they're screeching overhead, dive-bombing the car and snatching at his aviators. Probably with the devil riding shotgun, "as your Lord of Darkness, I advise you to use the flame-thrower." etc.

R.I.P. Duke, and take care, you mad mother-fucker.

Short tribute. HST has had arguably the greatest influence on my life in terms of how I view the world, how I think about states of existence, the managed consumption and abuse of intoxicants and narcotics and the beauty and potential of the written word. For that I'm incalculably grateful.

PS. Oh yeah, and if you're the bastard that's got my copy of Songs of the Doomed (yeah, I know I lent it to ya but I've forgotten who you are) get it back to me, would ya?

PPS: Non-deceased Musical maverick Mayo Thompson has recorded and released an astonishing amount of incredible music under the project name The Red [CK]rayola since approximately 1966.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

John Peel is dead, so I spent some hours in the middle of the night listening to all the Peel Session LPs I could lay me hands on - distressingly only the Damned and the Syd Barret were able to be located - and the CD reissue of the Siren albums on Peel's label Dandelion.

I've already read several carelessly-hurried obituaries wailing "how will we ever replace him". Fer chrissakes the man's barely cold... what kinduva half-witted thing to say is that? I think I'm gonna start issuing contracts for hits on the offenders...

Peel's motto regarding the music he presented on his legendary radio show was "A balance between things that you know people will like and things that you think people will like". Reading it now it may seem a little obvious but it's a hard balance to find; it's also one I've always strived for in my modest efforts on the radio.

Courtesy of the BBC:

• John Peel's bullet point biog.
• If you would like to remember John, or to offer your words of condolence click here.
• For advice on how to cope with bereavement go to One Life's help pages.

Jen-Smacked-Face met the man - more than once - and she stole his taxi. Here she eulogises eloquently about him.

3PM Edit: Lord-only knows why I put "Sir Robert Peel" in the title of this entry. Please accept humble apologies. It was the middle of the night - perhaps I was google-fatigued. Title adjusted accordingly.

Labels: eulogies, heroes