GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

[RocDoc]

i sure as fuck WAY prefer it to yours, i tell ya.

[maarts]

RIP Jim 'Motorhead' Sherwood....one of the original Mothers Of Invention, Zappa's trusty sax-man.

[RocDoc]

i think motorhead was one of perhaps 3 true childhood buddies zappa actually knew pretty much through to the end of his life....if i'm correctly remembering the zappa biography i read several months back.
weird dude that he was, he'd still treat people, even those who went THAT far back pretty shabbily, fired them outright as bandmembers, berate their abilities and still he'd 'win' them back as friends....usually when he had a 'need' for them.
god, zappa was weird.
tho i guess even being fired by someone like zappa made for a pretty good 'ride' in life, just having been there.
lots of compatriots to empathize with, also going through the same thing.

rest in peace, motorhead.

[RocDoc]

and another VERY important guy also with connection to THE Grand Wazoo died the 18th of December -

Vaclav Havel was one of the initiators (if not 'the' initiator) of the crumbling of the soviet sphere, if JUST for being a guy who's timing and talents were perfect for saying what needed to be said...and who, it's been shown, even had a sense of fun while doing his day to day duties.

<sub>...

Younger than most of them, having missed the immediate postwar moment of naive but genuine enthusiasm for communism, Havel seemed always at a slightly sceptical tangent to that enterprise. His defining time had been 1956, the clarifying moment of what he once called "the pseudo-dialectical tension between dictatorship and the thaw". But after the collapse of all their hopes, in the grey years when, as one of his fellow writers put it, "there was a silence like a swamp" across the land, it was Havel who proved best able to rally them, to judge when the moment had come to go public with a petition or a project such as Charter 77 – and also when to go to prison and not into exile, as he was offered the choice of doing. And when the evident disintegration of the Soviet empire – in Poland, in East Germany, in Moscow itself – made Czechs and Slovaks bold enough to come out en masse into the streets at last, it was Havel, and not the former reform communists, whom they chose to lead them back to democracy.

Installed in the castle, the man who had succeeded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the minds of western intellectuals as the very type and pattern of literary dissident, became now the most admired of leaders of the newly democratising states. There were times when there was some truth in the jibe that he was a president more popular abroad than at home, but his international standing helped him to lay the foundations of a rapprochement between the Czechs and Germany which would eventually overcome the scars of Munich, the Nazi protectorate and the harshly responsive expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945-46. It also helped to establish his country's place at the head of the queue for entry to Nato and the EU, and to give weight to his wider advocacy of central Europe's special place at the heart, not the edge of Europe, and the Czech lands, once "the spiritual crossroads of Europe", as the place where that heart beat strongest.

More important to him even than this was the attempt to carry the moral clarity and authenticity of the politics of dissidence into the hurly burly of late 20th-century market democracy politics. Nor was this effort directed only at a domestic audience. "Experience of a totalitarian system of the communist type," he once said, "makes emphatically clear one thing which I hope has universal validity: that the prerequisite for everything political is moral. Politics really should be ethics put into practice ... This means taking a moral stand not for practical purposes, in the hope that it will bring political results, but as a matter of principle."

The Masarykian note was struck in his very first address as president, on New Year's Day, 1990: "Let us teach ourselves that politics can be not just the art of the possible, especially if that means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals and pragmatic manoeuvring, but that it can even be the art of the impossible, namely the art of improving ourselves and the world." Increasingly, he brought together his aspirations for a more humane politics – capitalism with a human face, at least – with hopes for what Europe might be. With the desperately polluted wastelands of industrial north Bohemia to hand and at heart, he challenged the dangerous – and further west, then politically unchallengeable – myth of eternal growth, reminding the west of the dangers of a Europe that continued to be divided, not now by the iron curtain, but between a closed camp jealously guarding its vulnerable prosperity and a group of poor, disunited and less stable countries outside the gates: "One half of a room cannot remain forever warm while the other half is cold."

...

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/18/vaclav-havel</sub>

a wonderful overview by WL Webb in this obit he did...

Havel WAS a giant.

[maarts]

Indeed he was Doc, and that piece was very well put. Havel was the introduction of the kind of leader Europe had never seen before, a savant with the noble art of expressing the needs of his people in clear, rational thought rather than detracting from it through ruthless regimental order and thought.

[maarts]

Also sad that Cesaria Evora passed away....

[RocDoc]

Bob Weston - ex Fleetwood Mac
decent player who came in after Danny Kirwan went willingly to the children of god loony bin.

Sean Bonniwell - founder of the Music Machine and composer of one of THE most radical mid 60s 'punk' singles, the insane (for the time certainly) 'talk talk'.

Rest In Peace and Rock On...

[RocDoc]

...and after i did an afternoon of listening to Cesaria on youtube off of the link you posted on FB, maarts - i found a dl of a 2009 concert recorded somewhere in deutschland and i could scarcely believe it was still her singing....NOT the girlish purity she was putting out on the 2001 and 2004 shows i listened to that sunday afternoon on youtube.
it must've been whatever damned disease she had, had taken her easily down an octave.
it was sad to listen to.

but then again maybe she just had a cold...but the retrospect is still that the end was coming and she was far from the same.

[RocDoc]

rest in peace, don cornelius...

interesting serendipity - his ex-wife (or one of them, i'll guess) was one of my regular patients at the clinic i did my residency at...1993-ish.
and she had GOOD stories, my oh my!
she saw i was interested, so we'd talk....

[maarts]

Whitney Houston dead at 48. Jesus.

[skvorecky]

RIP Davy Jones of the Monkees. I loved that band.

[Ayinger]

He gave what is STILL imo the hard rock album template for the 70's!

AND, he was still kicking ass even in the past year. [/size]



Methinks, a boxset would be a perfect tribute.....

[RocDoc]

rest in peace mister montrose...

or as we sould say:
'yeaaaaaaaah! it's MUTHA-FUCKIN MONTROSE, Ma-a-an!' when we'd hear...'if you get lonely on your daddy's farm, just remember I dont live too far....'

....and with the utmost reverence mind you.
shit, we'd flip out.
totally a legend.

saw him tour the first disc, third-billed to spooky tooth and the headliner, frampton's camel - 4th row center at the Auditorium Theatre - best seats i'd EVER had to that point in time.

and i remember montrose blasting a chord over his intro by some dj there....'BRAAAAP!'
NObody even knew whotf he was yet. absolutely blew our little minds.

good times, oh what VERY good times...thank you ronnie.

[RocDoc]

<sub>MONTROSE
"The Fire”
The Live Anthology
1973-1975

Disc 1:
1973-04-21
The Record Plant
Sausalito, CA

01. Intro/ Good Rockin’ Tonight
02. Rock Candy
03. Bad Motor Scooter
04. Roll Me Nice
05. One Thing On My Mind
06. Rock The Nation
07. Make It Last
08. You’re Out Of Time
09. Roll Over Beethoven
10. I Don’t Want It/ Outro.

Disc 2:

1974-12-26
The Record Plant
Sausalito, CA

01. Roll Over Beethoven
02. Evil
03. Space Station #5
04. I Got The Fire
05. Rock Candy
06. Bad Motor Scooter
07. Space Age Sacrifice
08. This Beautiful Martin (Instrumental)

Disc 3:

1974
The Agora Theatre
Cleveland, OH

01. Good Rockin’ Tonight
02. Bad Motor Scooter
03. Make It Last
04. How Many More Years
05. Rock The Nation
06. Space Station #5
07. Roll Over Beethoven
08. Rock Candy

Disc 4:

1975
Paris, France

01. I Got The Fire
02. Rock Candy
03. Bad Motor Scooter
04. The Dreamer
05. Spaceage Sacrifice
06. Guitar Solo/ Rock The Nation
07. Bass Solo/ Drum Solo/ Space Station #5
08. Good Rockin’ Tonight
09. Roll Over Beethoven</sub>

...found at purveyors of fine bootleggery around the 'Net.

the guy had 4 filesonic links loisted but being as that's gone belly-up (along w/several others), looking through tramfile or fileslace would probably find it if anyone's interested.

[Ayinger]

aw FUCK!!!!! I don't know how true this is but supposidly it's from Guitar Player magazine. dammmmiiittt!



[size=8
]Ronnie Montrose Death Ruled a Suicide[/size]


It wasn’t prostate cancer that killed guitar legend Ronnie Montrose. He beat that gremlin into the dirt, as he did so many obstacles to his career and musical expression. But Montrose, who was immensely proud of being a “survivor,” simply couldn’t vanquish the clinical depression that plagued him since he was a toddler.On March 3, 2012, he sought inner peace by taking his own life. A report by the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office, released on April 6, confirms the guitarist died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Anticipating the coroner’s findings would soon be made public, the Montrose family asked me to write this article. I was a long-time friend and colleague, and the family wanted the painful story to be told by a member of the Bay Area media that Montrose himself knew and trusted.The family also posted the following statement on ronniemontrose.com:“By now, the devastating truth of Ronnie’s death is public knowledge. We hope you can understand why we wanted to keep this news a private family matter for as long as possible. We can only hope that you will choose to celebrate Ronnie’s life, and what his music meant to you, rather than mourn his passing. Ronnie would have wanted it that way. He loved being a guitarist, a composer, a producer, and a creator of magic. He fully understood his gifts, and yet he constantly pushed himself to evolve, improve, and make better music. He did this for himself, and he did this for you, because he adored and appreciated his fans. Please keep his energy, his joy, and his love in your hearts.”Montrose did not leave a suicide note, but his wife/manager Leighsa Montrose feels he was probably always planning for an exit.“Ronnie had a very difficult childhood, which caused him to have extremely deep and damaging feelings of inadequacy,” said Leighsa. “This is why he always drove himself so hard. He never thought he was good enough. He always feared he’d be exposed as a fraud. So he was exacting in his self criticism, and the expectations he put upon himself were tremendous. Now I see that perhaps he didn’t want to carry these burdens for very much longer.”The torment of self-doubt likely contributed to Montrose’s long-term alcoholism. The toxicology report showed his blood-alcohol level at 0.31% when he died—almost four times the legal limit in California. No evidence of other drugs was found in his system.“I knew I had married an alcoholic, but Ronnie was never anything but loving,” said Leighsa. “He could be curmudgeonly and cranky, but he was never angry or abusive to me in any way. He definitely had a reputation for his bad temper and controlling personality when he was younger, but he’d always say that I got the best version of himself, and we were nearly inseparable. We ate every meal together. I went to every show he played.”Famously mercurial, Montrose always seemed to tank a project just when things were getting good. Factor out the depression, and Montrose’s frequent conceptual and stylistic shifts seem like the actions of a true artist following his creative muse no matter what the business ramifications might be. But, knowing what Montrose was suffering through every day of his life, a different perspective arises—one of a man in constant evolution and reevaluation because he always felt he had to do much, much better.And yet, Montrose was thrilled that 2012 was starting off on an “exponential curve.” The two-year break from the guitar he took between 2007 and 2009 in order to heal from the daily, painful effects of cancer—when his loyal bulldog, Lola, was constantly at his side, dropping him “down to a good sleep vibe”—did not permanently effect his technique. He had been touring regularly since late 2009, performing solo compositions, acoustic pieces, Montrose songs, and some Gamma material. By 2011, he was truly on fire as a player. Happily, he was captured on video just this past January 27, and the release of his one-and-only DVD, Ronnie Montrose Live at the Uptown, was one of the many joys he was anticipating in 2012. There were also more tour dates stacking up, and a Montrose reunion—celebrating Sammy Hagar’s birthday—slated for October.“He was so looking forward to all the possibilities before him,” said Leighsa.But the deaths of his uncle and his beloved bulldog within three weeks of each other in January 2012 (the week before, and the week after the filming of his live DVD), put Montrose in a reflective state, and likely exacerbated his ongoing depression.On March 2, Montrose had been drinking heavily, but he got up the next day at 8 am and made breakfast for Leighsa and her mother (who resided at the Montrose home), which was his typical routine. At 10:03 am, Montrose texted Leighsa, asking if she wanted him to bring lunch down to her design studio. As she was on a deadline, and had already arranged to meet him at home for lunch, she declined his “sweet” offer.The mood abruptly changed when Montrose texted he was glad Leighsa had “figured it out, found the hooch, and stopped him from going down the dark path.” At 11:01 am, he added, “I have the .38 in my hand and am ready to go.”“Ronnie always had a dark and bizarre sense of humor,” said Leighsa. “And, at this point, I truly thought he was speaking in metaphors.”But the next text—“I’m so sorry. Still have the gun in my hand. I’m going on that voyage. I love you beyond measure”—worried her, and she immediately called him and asked that he come to her studio. He agreed, saying he would be right down.“After about four minutes, he wasn’t here, and I told my mother, ‘We’ve got to go home—something is wrong,’” said Leighsa. “When I turned to look at my phone, I saw the last text from him. I didn’t hear it come in. It said, ‘I can’t. I’ve got the gun to my head.’”They rushed home, but it was too late. Montrose was sitting in his favorite recliner in his living room, an unregistered Smith & Wesson Model 38 Special CTG Airweight revolver in his hand, and his cell phone at his feet.“I looked at his peaceful and calm face, and I said to him, ‘You’ve shown me I have no choice in this matter,’” said Leighsa. “I told him I loved him. I accepted what had happened. And then I sat calmly on the couch and called the Brisbane Police Department.” Ronnie Montrose was pronounced dead by medics from Brisbane Fire Engine #81 at noon.“My sense of Ronnie as the persistent and decisive adventurer—as well as all his music about space, flight, and travel—speaks volumes about his choice and his action,” reflected Leighsa. “Seeing beyond was always what he did best. He was always breaking new ground, following his heart, his intuition, his star. And for reasons we may never fully understand, he made a choice to ‘lift off.’“If you were observant enough, you could catch him at every show noodling a bit of the melody to Led Zeppelin’s ‘In My Time of Dying.’ The song contained the lyrics, ‘Well, well, well, so I can die easy. ‘Well, well, well, so I can die easy.’”