Robben Ford Discussion

[Danny]

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do this in David's thread but...

Veteran, comedian, game show host Ed McMahon - June 23

Actor David Carradine - June 3

Famous salesman Billy Mays - June 28
_________________
"Music is the only thing that you can share with a million million people and you don't lose, you gain. It helps you to get energy and to live long, because when your soul is very happy then you don't want to die." - Ali Akbar Khan

[Bluelobster]

[frank0936]

Karl Malden
Harve Presnell

[Danny]

[Daved]

Les Paul : A major music and entertainment pioneer/inventor/performer/innovator/talent is gone. He is often credited as being the 'father of modern music'. A true legend.

Les Paul, age 94, died today (August 13, 2009) of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, NY. His family and friends were by his side.

In February 2006 he won two Grammys for an album he released after his 90th birthday, "Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played."
Les Paul has since become the only individual to share membership in the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

Les was a huge fan of Robben's and was thrilled to meet Robben a couple of years ago when I got Robben to go to the Iridium Jazz Club on a nite off in New York city. Robben now owns Les's first acoustic mail-order guitar, the one upon which Les taught himself to play and given to Robben by Les personally.

Les created and pioneered so many important innovations in recording and guitar technique that one can go on for hours. His life story is fascinating. (Example: He had his house wired to the extent that he could and would occasionally record and overdub his wife's, Mary Ford, vocal tracks in his basement studio while she was upstairs at the kitchen sink doing dishes!)
An amazing individual and a wonderful human being with a very warm, genuine, out-going personality and a delightful sense of humor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Paul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Les_Paul

I saw him perform several times in recent years, always making it a point to get to the Iridium on Broadway whenever I was in NYC with a free Monday night, where he would perform two shows every week.
http://iridiumjazzclub.com/talent.php?talent=1

If you are a guitar player (indeed, a musician of ANY kind) and are not familiar with his huge body of work, you owe it to yourself to check him out... the guitar and the recording studio/industry would probably not be what it is today if this man had not graced our world during the time that he did.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[JohnnyZ]

Pretty cool that you got to know him, Daved.
_________________
Soul on Eleven

[FatTeleTom]

Thanks for sharing the info about Les Paul. It's really neat to hear that he and Robben knew each other and that Les was (like us) an admirer of Robben's. I'm sure the admiration there went both ways.

As I said to someone else, Les was a 3-time legend: as a musician, as a guitar-building innovator, and as a recording innovator.

Although sad to hear of his passing, I think any of us would consider Les' life to be a heck of a run.

[Daved]

I highly reccomend picking up the 4-disc Les Paul CD boxset, The Legend & The Legacy.

A delightful musical excursion through all aspects of his career (including some recordings from the Les Paul & Mary Ford Radio Show featuring the incredible Les Paulverizer), it includes a thick and highly detailed book with lots of photos and fascinating stories of his life and each song included in the set. A real insight into the man and his music.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[ltkojak]

The man was a genius and music as we know it today wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for him.

Him, and him alone conceived and realised the very concept of multitracking recording.

He was a genius as a guitar player as well.

He was very lucky to have lived to 94 years old. Most musicians dead in 2008 barely made it to sixty!

Requiem In Peace, mr. Polfus. You'll be sorely missed by all of us musicians.
_________________
Pepe aka Lt. Kojak
Milano, Italy

[Daved]

Missed this one... Bob Bogle, original lead guitarist for the Ventures, died two months ago at age 75 on June 14, 2009 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Vancouver, Washington.

Bob, along with Don Wilson, founded the Ventures and had an enduring impact on the development of music worldwide and are to date the best-selling instrumental band of all time.

With over 110 million albums sold worldwide, 38 Ventures albums charted in the US, and six of fourteen chart singles made it into the Top 40, with three making it into the Top 10.

The group remains revered in Japan to this day.

Their music has been cited by many famed guitarists as an influence; indeed, their virtuosity, experimentation with guitar effects, and unique sound laid the groundwork for innumerable groups, earning them the moniker "The Band that Launched a Thousand Bands".

The Ventures pioneered the use of special effects on such songs as "2000 Pound Bee", recorded in late 1962, which employed a fuzz distortion pedal.
This unique effect predated the 1963 hit "Zipadee-Do-Dah" by Bob B. Soxx, which featured a 'fuzz' guitar instrumental break. Use of 'fuzz tone' also predated the "King of Fuzz Guitar", Davie Allan (The Arrows), by at least three years.
In addition, the Ventures were among the first to use the twelve string guitar in rock.
The 1964 The Ventures In Space album was a primer in the use of special guitar effects, and made pioneering use of 'reverse-tracking', a technique used very effectively by The Beatles in the later 1960s.

FOOTNOTE:
Venture model Mosrite guitars were the first 'real' guitars I ever became involved with back in the late 60's ...even meeting Semie Moseley in Bakersfield, where my future wife lived at the time, and being shown around his Mosrite factory by Semie personally.

Coincidently, at almost the same time as Bob's passing recently, I finally purchased a vintage '65 Ventures model Mosrite Mark V guitar... something I have been wanting to own again for nearly 40 years.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[bluespapst]

Jim Dickinson died

JACKSON, Miss. – Jim Dickinson, a musician and producer who helped shape the Memphis sound in a career that spanned more than four decades, died on August 15 in a Memphis, Tenn. hospital. He was 67.

His wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, said he died after three months of heart and intestinal bleeding problems. The couple lived in Hernando, Miss., but Dickinson recently had bypass surgery and was undergoing rehabilitation at Methodist University Hospital.

Jim Dickinson, perhaps best known as the father of Luther and Cody Dickinson, two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars, managed an outsider's career in an insider's industry. He recorded with and produced greats like Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Big Star, the Rolling Stones, The Replacements and Sam & Dave.

His work in the 1960s and '70s is still influential as young artists rediscover the classic sound of Memphis from that era — a melting pot of rock, pop, blues, country, and rhythm and blues.

"I think he was an incredibly influential individual," Big Star drummer Jody Stephens said Saturday. "I think he defined independent spirit in music, and I think that touched a lot of people."

Dickinson's music was informed by his eclectic and encyclopedic record collection — sold off and rebuilt a few times over the years, usually around Christmas — and his wide array of friends.

"As a producer, it really is all about taste," Jim Dickinson said in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "And I'm not the greatest piano player in the world, but I've got damn good taste. I'll sit down and go taste with anybody."

A dabbler in music while in college and later in shows at the famed Overton Park Shell in Memphis, Dickinson was on his way to becoming "a miserable history teacher." But his wife insisted he focus on his music after watching him play shows with the blues legends of Memphis.

"They were rediscovering Furry Lewis and Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Robert Wilkins, these talents that were like gods," Mary Lindsay Dickinson said in 2008. "They were street sweepers. They were yard men. They had no money, no fame, even though they'd invented this style, this musical style that was changing the world. When I saw what he could do with them — he thought he was gonna be a history teacher — I said, 'No, no, no, no, let's try music and see what happens."

Jim Dickinson moved around, traveling with both his own projects and as a sideman until his sons were born. He gave up the road and the lifestyle, built a home studio and settled in to the hard-scrabble life of the independent producer that he jokingly compared to hustling.

His sense of humor, gift for storytelling and open door kept musicians filing through his studio and kitchen as his sons grew up. He took an interest in the boys' music as another father might his sons' baseball career, even drawing Luther and Cody into his own bands. They last released an album together as Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger in 2006.

"Growing up he would play piano and electric guitar and it just always fascinated me, and I always had a little toy guitar of some sort around," Luther Dickinson said in 2008. "And I've really been blessed because I always knew what I wanted to do and it was totally because of my dad and his friends."

Dickinson's career touched on some of the most important music made in the '60s and '70s. He recorded the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" in Muscle Shoals, Ala.; formed the Atlantic Records house band The Dixie Flyers to record with Franklin and other R&B legends in Miami; inspired a legion of indie rock bands through his work with Big Star; collaborated with Ry Cooder on a number of movie scores, including "Paris, Texas;" and played with Dylan on his Grammy-winning return to prominence, "Time Out of Mind."

He credited his work with Big Star on "Third/Sister Lovers" with keeping his tape reels turning over the years, and Stephens found Dickinson's fingerprints all over the album when he listened to it recently.

"There's so many contributions from people that Jim either brought in or helped steer," Stephens said. "And sometimes a brilliant decision is to do nothing, allow space and that sort of thing. His keyboard part in 'Kizza Me' is this great fractured piano that kind of cascades, like the piano's falling down a flight of steps. I think it was all about the spirit and the emotion."

Dickinson's later work as a producer veered wildly across genres, skipping from Mudhoney to T Model Ford to Lucero and Amy Lavere.

"I'm not really a success-oriented person," Dickinson said. "If you look back at my records that I've made as a producer, they're pretty left-wing. It's some pretty off-the-wall stuff. Especially in the punk rock days. I literally took clients because I thought it would impress my children. I did work in the '70s and '80s where that was definitely my main motive."

[bbpgtr]

Just saw on David Sanborn's website that both Hank Crawford and David 'Fathead' Newman had died in January 2009. I literally had no idea at all until just now.


BTW, Sanborn's name is misspelled as Sandborn on Robben's site in the bio section.

[Daved]

Mary Travers :
The group Peter, Paul and Mary was formed in 1961, and they were an immediate success.

The group's first album came out in 1962 and immediately scored hits with their versions of If I Had a Hammer and Lemon Tree. The former won them Grammys for best folk recording and best performance by a vocal group.

Their next album, Moving, included the hit tale of innocence lost, Puff (The Magic Dragon), which reached No. 2 on the charts and generated since-discounted reports that it was an ode to marijuana.

The trio's third album, In the Wind, featured three songs by the 22-year-old Bob Dylan. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and Blowin' in the Wind reached the top 10, bringing Dylan's material to a massive audience; the latter shipped 300,000 copies during one two-week period.

At one point in 1963, three of their albums were in the top six Billboard best-selling LPs as they became the biggest stars of the folk revival movement.

In 2005, Travers was diagnosed with leukemia. Although a bone-marrow transplant was apparently successful in beating the disease, Travers died on September 16, 2009, at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, from complications arising from chemotherapy. She was 72 years old.

Henry Gibson :
On September 14, 2009, Gibson died of cancer in Malibu, California, a week before his 74th birthday.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[Daved]

Dickie Peterson : was the bassist and lead singer for Blue Cheer.

Named after a strain of Owsley LSD, San Francisco's Blue Cheer (Peterson, guitarist Leigh Stephens and drummer Paul Whaley) blazed a trail through the Summer Of Love with their cauterising meld of super-charged rock 'n' roll and psychedelic blues - a sound that would reverberate through the years eventually influencing a generation of bands including all the key players in Seattle's grunge scene.

Blue Cheer have been considered pioneering in many genres, however Peterson denied that they belong to any of these genres saying, "People keep trying to say that we’re heavy metal or grunge or punk, or we’re this or that. The reality is, we’re just a power trio, and we play ultra blues, and it’s rock ‘n roll. It’s really simple what we do.".

On October 12, 2009, Peterson died at 05:00 in Germany at the age of 61 from liver cancer.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[telefunk1]

"Ultra blues" - well said. The loudest band in the land, too.